YUKIKAZE (7 page)

Once the meeting was over, it was time to complete the preflight preparations on Yukikaze. Wearing his G-suit and accompanied by his new EWO, he inspected Yukikaze’s fuselage. They boarded and checked the ejection seats and the interior systems, then went down the rest of the seemingly endless checklist.

After ascending the elevator to the surface they carried out the final check of authority. Canopy, down. Engine master switch, ON. Engine start. The engine revs climbed. Throttle open. Ignition. More checks to do as they idled. Adjustments made. Outside, it was raining.

“Good luck.” Major Booker disconnected the comm jack from the plane’s fuselage.

Parking break, off. Rei taxied out onto the runway. As he released the brake, the oleo strut extended. In an instant, the engines hit MAX afterburner and Yukikaze shot forward like a bullet. Nozzles, full open. Takeoff. Up above was clear, as always. The Bloody Road was bleached of color by the dawn light as Yukikaze rendezvoused with 1st Squadron.

When the AWACS plane informed them of the enemy fighter position, 1st Squadron lit their afterburners and streaked off after their quarry. Yukikaze flew in a large circle at the edge of the combat airspace.

“Enemy units,” the EWO warned. “Bearing ten o’clock. Low altitude, high speed and closing.”

Rei set the radar to downlook mode and searched for them. There were eight blips on the display. A formation of eight planes. The computer scrolled out the enemy target data: speed, altitude, acceleration, approach vector, threat level—

“They don’t have any long-range missiles,” said Rei.

“Should we attack?”

“Prepare for air-to-air combat.”

The EWO looked for signs of any electronic countermeasures or any counter-ECM activity while Rei checked the stores control panel.
RDY GUN, RDY AAMIII-4, RDY AAMV-4, RDY
AAMVII-6.
All antiaircraft ordnance was loaded.

“Enemy units are starting to climb,” came the word from the backseat.

An H-shaped mark appeared on the HUD. “Type-1s in firing range. Bandits number eight, range two-five-zero, head-on and closing.”

The pulse Doppler radar acquired the fast-moving JAM. Rei looked outside. The planes weren’t in visual range yet. He pushed the missile release button on the side stick, signaling the fire control computer that it was free to attack. The FCC made its judgment and released all six long-range missiles at once. A vibration shuddered through the airframe, and then thin vapor trails stretched out toward the enemy Rei could not see.
A fairy can see them though
, he thought suddenly.

The numbers on the HUD were rapidly running down. Missiles would arrive in…three…two…one…zero.

“Direct hits: four. Unclear: two. Three enemy units closing at high speed. They’re breaking into two groups and preparing to attack.”

Sensing the radar waves of enemy missile guidance, the warning receiver trilled an alert. Yukikaze jettisoned its external fuel tanks.

II

NEVER QUESTION
THE VALUE OF A KNIGHT

He didn’t believe Earth was something worth risking his life to protect. When others, especially those who felt passionate about its defense, would discover this, they would usually accuse him of possessing exactly the kind of negative attitude that would lead to the planet’s destruction. To which he would simply reply, “So what?”

EARTH HAD BEEN fighting the JAM for thirty long years. Rei Fukai couldn’t imagine a reality without them. The war had already begun by the time he was born, and he had been raised in a world where the existence of the Earth Defense Force was a mundane fact of life. So much so, in fact, that back then he never seriously thought about the war itself, nor wondered about its origins or its significance. Since the battle was being fought not on Earth, but on the planet Faery, the staging ground for the JAM’s attempted invasion, and since the JAM’s military might was not far superior to that of humanity’s, it hadn’t affected his day-to-day life in any significant manner. And so he’d had no reason to consider it.

Now, Rei was a soldier. He had passed through the enormous, white, spindle-shaped cloud at the South Pole that enveloped the hyperspace corridor connecting Earth to Faery and had arrived at the front lines of battle. But despite this, despite having experienced the war with the JAM firsthand, and despite having access to reams of uncensored information about it, the news reports he’d see piped back from Earth somehow still didn’t seem real to him.

The JAM existed; therefore, they were at war with the JAM. He had never once asked himself about the necessity of the fight. The enemy didn’t allow the luxury of such questions.

Upon returning from a mission and going off duty, Rei would usually go by himself to a bar in the red-light district and drink. He spoke to nobody and nobody spoke to him. He would silently tilt his glass of beer and think about the next mission and about Yukikaze. No one had ever asked him why he fought. He fought because the enemy was there. Even if the question went unasked, that was the answer. But one day Rei met a man who said that that wasn’t the answer. A man who said, “What we need to fight the JAM isn’t humans. It’s machines.”

“HUMANS AREN’T NECESSARY,” said the man next to him. Rei had been standing alone at the bar, drinking a dark beer. The place was packed with off-duty officers.

“Right?” the man continued, looking for agreement. “You’re a fighter pilot, aren’t you? You’ve got that look to you.”

“Tactical Air Group, Faery Base Tactical Airwing, Special Air Force 5th Squadron.”

“A Super Sylph driver, huh? A member of the famed Boomerang Squadron. Those are some top-of-the-line planes you boys have there.”

The man introduced himself as Colonel Karl Guneau from the Systems Corps’ Technology Development Center. He held out his hand, then withdrew it after a few moments when Rei made no move to take it.

“I see Boomerang pilots are as sociable as the rumors say,” Colonel Guneau laughed. “I guess you win, Lieutenant…?”

“Rei Fukai.”

“Lieutenant Fukai, what I’m referring to is the Flip Knight, a new air-superiority dogfight RPV—a remotely piloted vehicle— that my team has developed. As advanced as it is, even the SAF’s Super Sylph can never achieve its full potential as long as it’s carrying a human pilot who’s as fragile as an egg. A Sylph could never beat a Knight.”

“Meaning your Knights would kill our queens?”

“Well, I was just thinking how I’d like to take it up for an operations flight test… It could be quite something.” The colonel held a glass in his left hand and gestured with the cigar in his right as he cheerfully went on. “Maybe you’d be interested?”

“The Systems Corps has its own flight test center. If that’s not enough for you, you can try and get the Tactical Air Group’s training wing to cooperate. The 5th is a combat fighter squadron. It would make no sense for us to be involved.”

“It makes perfect sense,” said the colonel with a smile. “The knight has thrown down his glove. It’s a challenge to duel.”

Rei drained his beer mug and then, ignoring the colonel, left the bar. Guneau’s loud laughter followed him out into the busy street.

The residential and pleasure districts of Faery Base sprawled across the bottom of the vast underground space that contained them. They constituted a small city unto themselves, one that offered everything its inhabitants might want, from bars to banks to houses of worship of every denomination. A city where one could turn a corner and find oneself in what appeared to be an entirely foreign culture.

Rei did not avail himself of anything the city had to offer, and instead climbed into a small common-use electric vehicle and returned to his quarters in the TCG 1666th barracks #303. The tumult of the city did not reach him here.
A duel
, he thought.
Ridiculous
.

WHEN REI AWOKE the next morning, he’d forgotten all about the colonel. He wasn’t scheduled for any sorties and the thought of a solid day of nothing but deskwork had put him in a bad mood.

Exiting the barracks, he headed in the opposite direction from the city center, toward the rocky cavern walls at its periphery. He soon entered a tunnel that opened up into a large hall three hundred meters further in. The combat base was a solid underground maze. The path cut left, then right, rose and descended. Rei boarded an elevator in a junction hall, got off, and walked through a gradually narrowing corridor—presenting his ID to the guards at the entrance to each block—until he finally reached his room in Boomerang Squadron’s offices. The whole procedure was vaguely irritating. Once he fed his ID card into a terminal of the personnel management system and confirmed he had arrived for work, he was in the clear.

Deskwork was tedious, but neglecting it could get him disqualified from flight time. Sitting down at his desk, Rei wondered what he’d do if they ever took his beloved Yukikaze away from him. Thinking about soaring through the sky was the one thing that made the mind-numbing paperwork bearable.

“What’s the point of these sortie reports, anyway?” he groused to himself. Then he abruptly stopped jabbing at the keyboard, flashing back to Colonel Guneau’s statement about humans being unnecessary. He wondered if Yukikaze considered him unnecessary, then immediately rejected the notion. Yukikaze was the one thing that Rei trusted, and he didn’t want to even entertain the possibility that she could betray him. It might have been absurd to think that she wouldn’t abandon him just because he needed her, but that was what he chose to believe.

He quickly finished up the multitude of reports and went to see his plane. Checking the airframe was a routine daily task, yet he found it anything but tedious.

The underground hangar was quiet. Units 5 and 7 were out. Rei began his inspection of Unit 3’s airframe, starting on the forward left side and moving aft. He circled back to the nose from the right side, checking the exterior for oil leaks and surface damage. There were over a hundred items on the inspection checklist, and although some of them were not mandatory on a daily basis, Rei checked them all.

Once the visual inspection was done, he climbed into the cockpit to perform the onboard tests. Thick cables dangled from Yukikaze’s underside, connecting her to the external power supply and the SAF computers. He set the master test selector to onboard test mode. Then, after confirming that the throttle was disengaged and the master arm switch was set to SAFE, he initiated the programmable electronics self-test and began ticking off the items on the checklist. As test signals were sent to all of the avionics and navigation sensors, simulation checks were run on the air inlet control programmer, the automatic flight control set, the central air data computer, the throttle control auto-mode, and a host of other systems.

After that, there were the communications systems to check, the fuel transfer control system, the operations of all the displays, the cockpit opening and closing function… And by that point, it seemed almost a half-measure to not simply go ahead and run the engines, too. Still, it couldn’t be helped. Rei climbed down from Yukikaze, feeling like he was being separated from his lover.

“Figured you’d be here, Rei.” Major James Booker’s voice echoed through the hangar. “So, what was so important that you had to consult Yukikaze after leaving the office without permission?”

Rei had forgot to log his airframe inspection into the personnel control system that Major Booker used to manage Boomerang Squadron. He was Rei’s friend, but they were on duty and Booker had not come down there on personal business. The major’s tone indicated he was in full superior officer mode.

“What’s my punishment, Major?”

“You’ve got a lot of nerve talking like that after what you pulled.”

“What’s up? Something happen, Jack?”

The major told Rei to come with him. Rei did as he was told and followed his CO out of the hangar.

“Jesus, Rei. Don’t I have enough to do around here without you dumping this crap on my plate, too?”

“What’re you talking about?”

“This thing with Colonel Guneau. And yes, I know it’s not your fault. I know that without even asking. A Boomerang pilot would never go looking for a fight like this. And you in particular. You meet flattery with a blank look, insults with indifference, tears with a cold heart, and threats with a cool head. You’d just say ‘Not my problem’ and leave it at that. But General Cooley isn’t a Boomerang pilot.”

“You mean Colonel Guneau talked Super Granny into it?”

“He said it would be ‘the perfect test of aerial combat technique.’ He came to see me, too. That bloke’s a smooth talker. Seemed more like a salesman than an engineer. Anyway, as much as I’d like to tell the higher-ups to back off, I’m being forced to do this. And you’re the pilot who’s going to handle it for me.”

“I don’t want to have anything to do with this flight test.”

“And I don’t want to completely cock up the sortie schedule I’ve already put together. This is classified, but…there’s a big attack operation coming down. Believe me, I have no desire to be playing these games right before that.”

As he walked shoulder to shoulder with the major, Rei realized that the rumors he’d heard were true: they were probably going to hit the JAM’s largest forward base. In fact, it had practically been an open secret, so if the JAM had any spies in here, they probably already knew about it.

“We’ll be launching all of our squadron’s planes for that operation,” the major said as he opened his office door and stepped inside. “I finally get a schedule drawn up for the overhaul rotation for all our planes, and they hit me with this operations flight test. Now it’s all gone to hell.”

“So just refuse,” said Rei as he closed the door.

“Why don’t you go to the general’s office and refuse for me?” Booker gathered up a sheaf of papers from his desktop and handed it to Rei. “You can hit her with these.”

It was an operations manual for the Flip Knight system.

“I don’t think that would persuade her.”

As far as Rei was concerned, fighting a mechanical knight was a whole lot more appealing than having General Cooley snarling at him.