Good Luck, Yukikaze

by Chohei Kambayashi

  The letter I received from Major Booker a few days ago dealt with an even more potent subject—for the first time ever, Major Booker lost a plane.

  Since I can learn of the FAF’s war situation from regular official reports faster than extradimensional letters can arrive in my mailbox, I knew of the SAF’s loss even without Major Booker telling me. The fighter the JAM destroyed was Unit 3, personal name: Yukikaze. Her pilot was gravely injured, and the flight officer who normally flew in the rear seat was missing in action.

  An SAF plane, a group whose pride in its perfect return record had given it the nickname Boomerang squadron, had been lost.

  Yukikaze. Her pilot was Lieutenant Rei Fukai. Major Booker’s friend. The name I’d read on that casualty list wasn’t that of a stranger.

  I’d seen the SAF fighter called Yukikaze up close. She’d landed on a Japanese naval aircraft carrier to refuel. That huge, graceful plane looked like a swan landing amidst a flock of ducks. Major Booker was the one riding in the rear seat at the time, and we’d spoken then. The pilot was Lieutenant Rei Fukai. He never came down out of the cockpit, so I didn’t have a chance to talk to the lieutenant, but even if he had, I think I’d have had as much luck having a conversation with him as I would with Yukikaze. That pilot was part of the systems installed into his beloved plane; he had a function to serve. I figured that he’d regard some stranger who was unrelated to a combat role as just so much static.

  Yukikaze was the only thing in which he believed. That was what Major Booker told me as he stood looking at his friend and subordinate aboard the plane. A man who now trusted a machine more than other humans, and who was becoming increasingly machinelike himself. It seemed terrifying and sad to me.

  I knew that the official report listed Lieutenant Fukai as having been gravely injured, so I sent off a letter to Major Booker to inquire about the pilot’s condition. Not as a journalist gathering information for a story, but as an individual. The major wrote me a polite reply and said that he appreciated my concern. That was the letter that arrived a few days ago.

  The contents of that letter were beyond anything I had expected.

  First of all, he apologized for the delay in replying to me, as he’d suffered a neck injury. He then went on to say that Yukikaze herself had made it back unharmed.

  This opening paragraph perplexed me, but as I continued reading and Major Booker described exactly what had happened in the incident, I was able to understand.

  Yukikaze had been shot down by the JAM during a mission and had made an emergency landing. Lieutenant Fukai, the pilot, ejected, and Yukikaze self-destructed. At that moment, Major Booker was riding in the rear seat of the FRX00 flying nearby, engaged in a combat assessment test flight of the SAF’s next-generation manned fighter plane.

  The FRX00 was also attacked by the JAM, but the new fighter blew them decisively out of the sky. Its air combat maneuvers were so violent that the pilot who’d been flying the plane was killed instantly, unable to take the acceleration, while Major Booker in the rear seat injured his neck and lost consciousness. According to the letter, the FRX00 flew back to base on its own, carrying its dead and unconscious passengers, and then identified itself as Yukikaze.

  The only explanation that makes sense is that the Yukikaze that was shot down by the JAM transferred herself into the newer fighter as it approached. Immediately after that, the FRX00 was out of the pilot’s hands. It was the decision of the plane’s central computer to initiate air combat maneuvers, not the pilot. In short, Major Booker wrote, having gotten herself a new body after being shot down by the JAM, Yukikaze decided to take revenge on the nearby JAM.

  Yukikaze’s pilot, Lieutenant Fukai, was rescued, but he’d suffered a gunshot wound in the right side of his abdomen. In addition, his flight officer, Second Lieutenant Burgadish, wasn’t on board. Only Lieutenant Fukai’s ejection seat had been jettisoned in the emergency landing, which means that Yukikaze had landed sometime during its mission and Lieutenant Burgadish had deplaned.

  Why he did or what happened, Major Booker doesn’t know. Yukikaze’s action record had been copied exactly onto the FRX00’s memory, which supports the theory that she copied herself into the new plane, and the data do seem to indicate that Yukikaze set down somewhere once before finally being shot down. However, they don’t know any details beyond that. Lieutenant Fukai is alive, but in a coma, so he cannot be interrogated. The bullet found in Lieutenant Fukai was from an FAF-issued sidearm, but nobody knows who would have tried to kill him. It seems doubtful that Lieutenant Burgadish would have shot his own crewmate, but the major doesn’t know the details. Lieutenant Burgadish’s whereabouts are unknown.

  The answers to all of these questions are probably inside of Lieutenant Fukai’s head, and so long as he remains unconscious, they have no way to retrieve those memories.

  It may be—Major Booker then went on to relate the most shocking revelation of the letter—that Lieutenant Fukai was shot by one of the JAM, a creature with which we have yet to make direct contact. It’s possible that Yukikaze and her crew were captured by the JAM and that Lieutenant Fukai was the only one who managed to escape. This is merely conjecture based on the intelligence Yukikaze gathered in combat, but if true, Yukikaze’s crew may have carried out some sort of exchange with the JAM.

  “The JAM aren’t resting,” the major continued.

  They may instead be changing their strategy, and Lieutenant Fukai probably knows what they are planning. I hope that he wakes up as soon as possible, both as his friend and as a member of the SAF. I’d like you to pray for his recovery as well, if only so that the people of Earth don’t lose this war to the JAM.

  The revelation of a possibility that Yukikaze’s crew, Lieutenant Fukai and Lieutenant Burgadish, made direct contact with the JAM came as a shock to me. Yukikaze and her crew may have gotten a clue as to the true nature of the JAM, a species that have until now been a total mystery to us. Moreover, the letter claimed that the JAM may be changing their methods of combat.

  My reporter’s soul was stirred by the revelation. If the JAM were beginning to change their strategy, then all of their attacks up till now may have been just the preliminaries. The real battle is about to begin.

  The major’s letter is a warning to all the people of Earth, and this is a story that has to be covered. I have to write a sequel to The Invader, because living my life while ignoring the JAM is no longer an option.

  I

  SHOCK WAVE

  HE LINGERED IN his sleep, not alive and yet not dead. Occasionally, his eyelids would open, his eyes moving wildly.

  To the people around him, it seemed as though he were following the flight of some invisible fairy, his eyes now windows open to illuminate the darkness within his head, as if desperately hoping to light the way out from the blackness that had swallowed him up. He personally wasn’t conscious of this movement. Indeed, he had no feeling of anything in his entire body. When his eyes moved, the image in his mind was of the moment he was ejected from his beloved plane and left behind. His beloved plane, Yukikaze. As she flew out of sight, leaving him with nothing but empty sky, he felt his existence contracting to a point before finally winking out. Only then did his eyes cease their wild motion, and his consciousness fell back, once again, into the gap between life and death.

  He was concerned with neither life nor death, simply letting time drift past, and even time itself no longer held any meaning for him.

  Until, at last, a voice called for him to awaken.

  1

  MAJOR JAMES BOOKER, the man responsible for sortie management and mission control for the Special Air Force 5th Squadron (FAF, Faery base, Tactical Combat Air Corps), had a lot of problems on his mind, all of which were giving him a splitting headache.

  First of all, his neck still gave him a twinge from time to time. Then there was the fact that he still didn’t have a complete understanding of the incident that had hurt his neck in the first place. Finally, there was the matter o
f Lieutenant Rei Fukai, pilot of Yukikaze (SAF Unit 3) and how he remained unconscious in a vegetative state. Ever since the incident, the major had a vague sense that the JAM had subtly altered their strategy in a way that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Sylphids, the same model of plane that had been enhanced to create Yukikaze, deployed at front-line bases, had suddenly been taking much higher rates of damage than previously.

  The major recalled that Dr. Balume, the SAF flight surgeon, had suggested a nerve block if the pain persisted. When he’d refused, telling the doctor that a nerve block performed by a drunk like Balume would likely kill him, the doctor then suggested that he might try some counseling, saying that ridding himself of his anxiety might also relieve the pain.

  “And what do you have to be anxious about, anyway?” the doctor had said. “You made it back still breathing, didn’t you? Okay, the FRX00 nearly killed you, but you don’t have to fly in it again.” It was about at that point the major decided that he would have to take care of his anxiety himself, because this doctor certainly wasn’t going to be of any help in that department.

  Major Booker knew that the reason he was feeling so anxious had to do with question number two on his list. In other words, the fact that he still didn’t have a complete grasp of exactly what had happened to the FRX00. Yukikaze lay burning, shot down by the JAM, never to fly again. Somehow, she’d abandoned her old body and transferred herself into the approaching FRX00. Having obtained a new body for herself, Yukikaze had recognized the approaching JAM fighters and initiated combat maneuvers against them. That was when the pilot and he, the acting flight officer in the rear, had blacked out. The man at the controls was Captain George Samia, pilot of SAF Unit 13. Yukikaze’s maneuvers in the FRX00 snapped his neck, killing him instantly.

  And those must have been some outrageous maneuvers, the major thought, rubbing the nape of his own neck. The FRX00 had exceeded its predicted air combat maneuverability. He could practically hear the computers of the Systems Corps snickering at him.

  “The FRX00 is a modified FRX99,” they’d say. “The FRX99 was never designed to be piloted by humans. Did you seriously think you could do it?”

  Major Booker had been riding in the rear seat to observe the real-world performance of the plane that had been manufactured at his insistence, but there was no way he could have predicted that something like this would happen. In truth, the real reason he’d been there was because he’d been worried when Yukikaze hadn’t returned to base from her sortie. He used the FRX00’s combat flight test as an excuse to go out and run a personal search for her. It was clear that they’d provided support for Yukikaze, but being aboard the plane had prevented him from seeing exactly what had happened. Even now, he wasn’t sure.

  Captain Samia had probably leaned closer to the display to confirm that an external data stream was transferring into his plane from somewhere. However, that had been a fatal mistake on his part. The major regretted not warning him, but comforted himself by realizing that there had been no time for it. There was no way he could have known that the data stream was actually Yukikaze’s mind itself being transferred from her crippled body as she lay burning. Aside from that, as a former pilot, Booker had braced himself to prepare for combat maneuvers the moment he realized something was wrong. That was what had saved his neck. All he’d suffered were a few dislocated vertebrae.

  Maybe his ability to sense danger and intuit that he was about to pull some unimaginable Gs was due to a sort of sixth sense he’d cultivated as a pilot. He thought about this for a moment, then decided against it. It had been a long, long time since he’d flown as a combat pilot. Was what he felt at that moment, more than the fear of combat itself, a sense of how dangerous the FRX00 really was? Had he sensed that it was a mistake for humans to fly in such a plane and felt fear at being in one?

  The FRX00 had been modified for manned flight from the FRX99, which had been designed to be unmanned. The addition of flight crew safeguards in manufacturing the manned version had drastically increased the weight of the plane, but even so it was still far more maneuverable than any other manned fighter. It still possessed the same potential as the FRX99, after all.

  In designing manned planes, engineers had to take into account the human body’s frailty in the face of G forces. For that reason, they couldn’t avoid decreasing its air combat capabilities. Human beings are land animals, after all, and their ability to grasp three-dimensional space is limited. They can fly inverted through a cloudbank and never even realize it. However, when designing an unmanned aircraft, all of these weak points can be eliminated. When you don’t have to worry about a human occupant, you can create a plane that can carry out maneuvers to its full technical potential. Sending the plane into a controlled flat spin would be child’s play. When you had such perfect control, what would once have been a useless maneuver in actual combat could prove advantageous, giving your assault forces a high degree of flexibility in battle.

  The FRX99 had been created to be such a plane, with vertical canard wings and two-dimensional vectored thrust engine nozzles. With direct side force control, it had the ability to rotate like a boomerang. The airframe even had direct lift force control as well, and could nimbly move up or down while maintaining level flight. To maintain the efficiency of the air intake system during such violent maneuvers, the intake ports extended above and below the main wing. At first glance, this made the twin-engine plane appear to have four.

  Major Booker would never forget Lieutenant Rei Fukai’s impression of the prototype when it was delivered to the SAF.

  “It looks powerful, but clumsy,” Rei had said.

  As his neck ached, the major recalled Rei’s words over and over. The FRX99 had been designed with the idea that humans weren’t necessary and that they should stay the hell away from it. Perhaps Rei had sensed that. It was a combat machine built without any regard for human beings. Its very design showed that it wasn’t meant for humans to fly. Rei had probably sensed that with a single glance.

  Even so, the manned FRX00 version could be said to be the most powerful plane in the FAF’s current arsenal. Rather than saying it possessed a lethal level of maneuverability, you could just as easily say that it demonstrated just how powerful the plane really was. After all, no fighter plane could honestly be considered safe. The important point was whether or not a human pilot could control it.

  Yukikaze had been the one controlling the plane. There was no doubt about that. The problem was that she’d completely disregarded the FRX00’s human crew and had not hesitated to maneuver in a way that injured, or even killed, them.

  Checking the data file of the FRX00’s central computer after they’d returned to base and realizing that it showed no concern for the humans aboard, the major had become afraid.

  What the hell was going on? There was no way the plane’s central systems didn’t know that there were people aboard. If that were true, then the central computer itself had ignored the crew and simply deleted any data it received about the occupants of its cockpit.

  Why?

  In that moment, the FRX00 wasn’t just a prototype anymore. It had literally become Yukikaze. She’d already ejected Rei from the burning remains of her old body. So perhaps, as far as Yukikaze was concerned, there weren’t any humans aboard her. Or rather, she assumed there weren’t any. That probably would have led her to treat any data about the crew aboard the FRX00 as an error. It was a plausible explanation, but they couldn’t determine that for certain from Yukikaze’s memory data. And since she couldn’t understand ambiguous human language, it wasn’t as though they could just ask her, “What the hell was going through your mind before?” The data hinted at the answer, but if it didn’t contain what the humans wanted to know, the best they could do was to guess at what Yukikaze’s intentions had been.

  Once she’d transferred herself to the FRX00, Yukikaze had wanted to eliminate the surrounding enemy JAM as quickly as possible. That much was certain. In the investigation cond
ucted after they’d returned to base, it was learned that the FRX00 had cut out all of its maneuvering limiters. Or to be more accurate, it had never engaged them in the first place. He could imagine that the crew safeguards had been working just fine, but that from Yukikaze’s point of view, they were just malfunctions. In order for Yukikaze to release all of the limiters, she would have had to send false data to all the sensor systems that there were no crewmen aboard and then deactivate the safeguards. As far as she was concerned, it wasn’t false data. Since Rei had been ejected, the data from the safeguards telling her that there were humans aboard must have been in error, and Yukikaze had simply corrected it. The problem with this explanation was that, normally, it should have been impossible. So the only explanation possible was that Yukikaze had made a mistake. And that was what Major Booker just couldn’t understand.

  Considering that Yukikaze had never experienced transfer of herself into a new airframe, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to suppose that the transfer could cause her to make some sort of mistake. If it wasn’t a mistake, there were much simpler ways she could have cut out the limiters, assuming that cutting them had been her true intention. Yukikaze could have just activated the FRX00’s ejection seats. In both the old Yukikaze and the FRX00, the central computer was capable of activating the seat escape system if it determined that the crew were unconscious and unable to activate it themselves. The crew safeguards that controlled all of the maneuver limiters, G-suit controller, and the active headrests that protected the crews’ necks were designed to deactivate if the plane were unmanned. If she’d simply ejected their seats, she could have performed the most lethal air combat maneuvers possible without any problem.