YUKIKAZE (12 page)

He couldn’t confirm the existence of the wall with the standard radar system either. It reflected no electromagnetic radiation. What the hell was this?

The passive airspace radar was a detection system that had been developed to counter the various methods JAM fighters used to mask themselves while attacking. Because it utilized a type of cryogenically cooled visual sensor with an ultra-high receptivity, it had been nicknamed “Frozen Eye.” No matter how an enemy craft might hide itself electromagnetically or optically, as long as it displaced air it could be detected. The system gave the SAF pilots an ability to find and kill the enemy that was so accurate it seemed almost instinctive. And now that same system was telling Rei that something monstrous was before him.

Was it a JAM force? It seemed way too big to be that. It was almost like a massive disturbance of the airspace. The bright horizontal line on the display was drawing closer fast.

The
AVOID
cue appeared on his HUD. If he did nothing, Yukikaze would automatically maneuver to evade the obstacle when they got too close to it. But Rei didn’t wait for that. He pulled the plane back into a high-G Immelman loop, reversing their direction.

The line on the display bowed inward, seeming to wrap around Yukikaze. Rei didn’t know what was going on, but he understood that they’d fallen into some sort of trap. The line on the display was now closing into a circle. Aiming for the rapidly disappearing gap, Yukikaze accelerated.

She didn’t make it. The circle closed and its diameter began to quickly contract. It fell inward upon Yukikaze, as though intent on swallowing her.

“Brace for impact!” Rei yelled automatically, although the scene outside the cockpit still betrayed nothing out of the ordinary.

The impact, when it came, was like flying into a wall of iron. His ears were ringing. He couldn’t see. A gray haze was obscuring his vision.
Must have messed up my eyes,
he thought, disoriented from the shock.

He reflexively checked his instruments. Both engines had stalled. The turbine intake temperature read 560°C, only a little below normal. The auto-restart system should have activated after ten seconds, but it didn’t. Rei pushed the airstart button. No response. Had he accidentally pulled the throttle back during the impact? No, he hadn’t. Then had the engines themselves been damaged? He checked the tachometer. It was dropping precipitously. If it fell to 8 percent RPM, the engines wouldn’t be able to supply power or hydraulic pressure. He had to raise his airspeed and force the turbines to spin faster.

Confirm rate of descent and airspeed. confirm sufficient altitude. Canopy defogger switch, ON. He thought maybe the canopy had become clouded, but as they fell, the haze cleared a bit. The sky had been cloudless just moments before.
What the hell is going on here?
Rei wondered.

A strange panorama spread out before his eyes. The world looked colorless, like a black-and-white photo. The terrain swirled below them as though it were the surface of Jupiter. He could see parts that looked like trees, and others that looked like deserts or the ocean.
Where the hell are we?

Lander was stirring in the backseat. “What… We were just flying, weren’t we, Lieutenant?” He had apparently lost consciousness. “My ears… They hurt.”

“It’s Flier’s Ear.”

“What?”

“Otitic barotrauma. Inner ear damage caused by a sudden change in air pressure.”

“You did that on purpose! Why—” Lander suddenly paused. “Hey, am I wrong, or are the engines stopped?”

“I can’t restart them.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t have time to figure that out.”

Rei began searching for terrain that would allow for an emergency landing. He switched the radar to ground mode, real beam ground mapping, but the only thing that came on the display was a strangely fixed image. It looked like the transmitter was off-line.

Then, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted something that looked manmade. He banked into a slow turn to get a better look. It was a long and narrow construction without any crosscuts. A runway. It had to be. Even if it wasn’t, he was going to use it as one, because otherwise he would have to abandon Yukikaze, and he didn’t want to even think about that.

All he could get over the comm system was static. He set the radar altimeter but didn’t think he could trust it. If these weren’t the skies of Faery, he couldn’t be sure of his barometric altimeter, either.

“Mister Lander, do you think you can measure our altitude with that video camera’s range finder?”

“Huh?”

“Quickly.”

“No good, it’s broken. Wait a minute, I’ve got some digital binoculars with me. Let me try it with those.”

Rei inverted Yukikaze.

“Measure in a straight line below us.”

Their rate of descent was increasing. That was the only data he could determine for sure. Rei didn’t know what the linear proportion was between his barometric altimeter and his actual change in altitude, but he could combine them with Lander’s reading for a rough estimate and then reset his altimeter.

He was over the flat expanse that looked like a runway. He executed a wide turn, correcting his attitude, and once again put them on the virtual approach line.

“We’re landing.”

Gear down. Air brakes opened slightly to regulate their speed. Forty-degree bank angle as they turned and descended. While describing a semicircle, Yukikaze’s altitude dropped by a sixth, then a quarter, then to half of what it was. Their altitude was now 700 meters. He had a good line of sight now.

Final approach. Flaps down. Pitch regulated. Glide slope, three degrees. Rate of descent, twenty-six meters per minute. A little high. Yukikaze’s nose floated up due to the ground effect, which felt a little weaker than normal. Touchdown.

The ground rushing by them at 185 kph was a grayish light brown. Rei stomped on the toe brake, nervous that they might hit a rock and cripple themselves. They were approaching the edge of the runway.

When they finally came to a stop Rei was surprised to see that there was still plenty of runway left. He must have underestimated its size from the air. He was relieved that their landing had still been successful, despite his misjudgment.

They were surrounded by what seemed to be a forest the color of seaweed. So who had cut this runway out of it? He couldn’t see any hangar facilities. Maybe it was for super heavyweight planes to land and take off from. If so, the enormous size of the runway implied that these phantom planes would be similarly huge. Since there was only one runway, did that mean there was little wind here, or that the wind direction didn’t vary? Maybe they used both the length and width of the wide surface? Or maybe this wasn’t a runway at all…

“This is a major scoop!” Lander exclaimed. “Who’d believe there was someplace like this on Faery?”

“I don’t think this is Faery.”

“Very funny. You don’t have to hide it. It’s possible you didn’t even know about it. I’ll bet it’s a top-secret area.”

Arguing with Lander wasn’t going to improve their situation, so Rei dropped it and began testing the electronics.

The master caution light was lit, but aside from that, the other system failure warning indicators remained off. The built-in test system itself was also malfunctioning. Most of the highlevel electrical systems were off-line. The multiply protected flight control system was barely operational. Luckily, it had still worked well enough to allow him to land the plane; if it had failed too, he wouldn’t have been able to maintain controlled flight for even an instant.

He switched the jet fuel starter to ON and pulled the starter handle. It worked.

The connection to the starboard engine’s hydraulic accumulator was intact, and the turbines slowly began to spin. Once the engine got past 8 percent RPM, fuel would flow into it and the autoignition would spark… Negative ignition. Rei killed the JFS.

The fuel wasn’t flowing. There were no abnormalities detected in the fuel boost pump, and even if the emergency boost pump had been destroyed, it would still be possible to do fuel transfer via gravity. But if the electronic engine controller was keeping the fuel shut-off valve closed, then—

“Why don’t we get out and look around?” said Lander.

Rei sighed and checked the altimeter and external thermometer. Even taking Lander’s measurement error into account, the atmospheric pressure altitude variance showed that it wasn’t all that different from Faery’s. The temperature was 13°C.

Steeling himself, Rei moved the canopy control to OPEN. Lander loosened his harness on his own and climbed out of the cockpit onto the boarding step on the right side of the plane.

“Lieutenant, can you extend the ladder?”

Rei shook his head. The boarding ladder could be extended from the plane only by operating the control handle in the ladder door.

Lander bent down, took hold of the handgrip, and swung himself down to the ground.

Rei stayed aboard Yukikaze, searching in vain for the cause of the problem. He had twenty minutes of electricity left from the auxiliary power unit. He couldn’t make contact with the base, either. The twenty minutes were soon up.

Yukikaze fell silent.

In this situation, he needed to start the JFS since its generator system provided power to the self-ignition system and to Yukikaze’s vital electrical systems. The central computer’s backup power supply was working normally, so at least he wouldn’t have to worry about that for another twenty-four hours.

But he couldn’t get the JFS to turn over. Lander was gone. Rei scanned their surroundings and saw him at a distance. He was apparently digging a hole in the ground, looking like a child playing by himself.

Rei got down from the plane and inspected the fuselage. He couldn’t see any obvious abnormalities on the outside. Since he had no tools, any problems deeper than that were beyond his ability to fix.

The air pressure here was considerably lower. If this were Faery, he’d estimate their altitude to be around two thousand meters. But he just couldn’t see how this place could be only a few hundred kilometers from Faery Base.

There was no wind. It was quiet.

The sky overhead was cloudy, but it wasn’t dark. The clouds looked white. The gray ground beneath them formed a vast, level plane covered with a blackish green haze.
If I could get the engines started,
Rei thought bitterly,
I could fly above it and see what sort of place this is.
Perhaps they’d stumbled upon some unexplored part of Faery. Was this a JAM base? Or maybe this wasn’t Faery at all but the JAM’s home world. He instantly dismissed the thought. If that were the case, he probably would have been shot down long ago.

Rei recalled the image picked up by the Frozen Eye. It looked like a wall, a bright line that pushed relentlessly forward as though aiming for Yukikaze. He didn’t think it was a natural phenomenon. It looked like they’d been caught by some mechanism that could selectively transport objects through space. But Rei couldn’t even make a guess as to what intelligence was operating it or who had brought them to this place. Maybe it was the result of some as-yet unknown natural phenomenon. If this were a JAM trap, wouldn’t they have done something by now?

Rei sat down on Yukikaze’s front wheel and sighed. Lander had returned. There was no hint of concern on his face. Rei couldn’t decide if this intrepidness was a personality attribute or whether the man was just stupid. Maybe a little bit of both. To Lander, Faery itself was an unknown dimension. Perhaps, from his point of view, their bizarre surroundings—which were completely alien to Rei—were merely an extension of an already strange world. And Lander obviously saw himself as a man who would never be beaten, who couldn’t be defeated, even in death. Rei could just imagine the upbringing, environment, and family history that had made him this way. He probably believed that he was carrying on the pioneer spirit of his forebears.

“Well, why don’t we go and have a look?”

“At what?”

“I won’t let you stop me.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Have a look through these, Lieutenant.” Lander patted the binoculars hanging from his neck. “There’s a cornfield just over yonder.”

“A field?”

“A big yellow one. This is a major discovery, you know.”

At the mention of corn, Rei realized how hungry he was. He checked his chronometer. It would have been early evening on Faery. Lander had no objections to holding off on his exploration for a meal, so Rei climbed Yukikaze’s ladder and retrieved some emergency rations from his survival kit along with a thermos of coffee he had stowed away.

The emergency rats were vacuum-packed crackers with jelly. Lander disappointedly asked if that was supposed to be a full meal as he took them.

“No,” Rei replied. “Technically, one-third of the B-type is intended to be a full meal.” He read from the package: 1 MEAL CONSISTS OF 1 PACK CRACKER (A-TYPE) AND 1/3 PACK JELLY (B-TYPE).

“Got it?”

“Yeah,” Lander replied. “So, these crackers…” He sat down on the main wheel and scrutinized them. “I wonder what kind of wheat they’re made out of.”

“Who knows?”

The jelly was a fluorescent orange and tasted vaguely like apricot. Rei made a face. It was pretty bad.

“I’ll bet it’s grown here,” Lander said as he stretched out his arms. “In complete secrecy.”

“This isn’t Faery. The suns should have set by now, but it’s still light.”

The FAF’s clocks were all set to Greenwich Mean Time. Since the base was underground and the fighting didn’t depend on it being day or night, there was no need to synchronize with Faery’s rotation. So it wasn’t unusual for noon in the base to be during night on the surface. The flight plan called for them to return when the sun was setting, yet there was no indication that it was getting dark.

“If that’s true, it makes me even more suspicious.”

“About what?”

Lander chomped on his cracker, as though satisfied he had come to a conclusion about the origin of the wheat in it. “The FAF buys its food from Earth, right?”

“I know that much,” Rei answered. “Our supplies go through the UN food management program.”