Good Luck, Yukikaze

by Chohei Kambayashi

  Not understanding and then being abandoned. He hated that. No, there was a perfectly straightforward way he could express it.

  “I…” Rei had stopped again. He turned his head to look back and murmured, “I’m afraid of Yukikaze.”

  That was how he really felt, the true feelings he felt toward her that he hadn’t wanted to admit. Actually saying the words made him shiver.

  He was being warned of a coming separation from the companion with whom he thought he’d shared a deep relationship. And Rei knew that the cause of his estrangement from Yukikaze was from some internal trait or deficiency of his.

  Just as Captain Foss had pointed out, he didn’t know how to get along with other people. Even though it was so simple. Strangers are other people, and he and other people were all beings who lived in different worlds, internal worlds. Rei would have been better off if he’d just acknowledged the truth. Real relationships started from there. Whether between enemies or lovers, it didn’t matter. In short, up till then, he’d never actually had a relationship with anybody. Not even with Yukikaze.

  Major Booker had told him the same thing, but he hadn’t been able to acknowledge his true feelings before. He hadn’t been able to admit that he was afraid of Yukikaze now. I’ve never really feared others, and so no one has ever feared me. That’s why others tell me, “I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”

  The thing he needed to fear now was Yukikaze. After that, the JAM. Rei realized that he’d never really feared the enemy before. Talking with Captain Foss had allowed him to see that.

  “It’s okay, Captain Fukai,” Captain Foss said, turning to face him. “You’ll be able to get control of Yukikaze. And even if you don’t, no one will blame you for it. You know Yukikaze better than anyone else.”

  “I can’t even have an argument with her.”

  “So keep close watch on those meters. Use her gauges to have your arguments. That’d suit you better, anyway.”

  Rei considered her words.

  “You’re right,” he said at last. “You’re absolutely right. You’re a hell of a doctor, Captain Foss.”

  There was no need to do away with his fear. The effort to eliminate his fear would be immense, because the problem here wasn’t that he shouldn’t fly Yukikaze if he was afraid.

  What he wanted to do was convey the truth of his fear of her to Yukikaze, and the only way to do that would be to read her gauges—and also read the data they didn’t reveal—and then act in accordance. If it worked, then Yukikaze might fear him the way he feared her. Or Yukikaze might possibly take action to indicate that she didn’t want him to fear her. At any rate, he could guess that she was going to fight him. If he could prevent her from resisting his attempts to communicate, she would refuse to accept his control. They would, in effect, be arguing. And any opponent you could argue with, you can negotiate with as well. He’d never taken his relationship with Yukikaze this far before. He didn’t know if it would work. He didn’t even know if any of this was a good idea, but that was how these things went.

  “Thank you, Captain Fukai,” said Captain Foss in response to Rei’s compliment about her skill as a doctor. The words were cold, and her expression didn’t look very thankful.

  Well, what else could he expect? He’d said he didn’t like her without really understanding what it was he was saying. He doubted she’d be genuinely happy for his breakthrough. Still, to him, this doctor was like bitter medicine. Even if he didn’t like her, she was still necessary.

  Thinking that, Rei said nothing else and headed off for the meeting. Major Booker, looking royally pissed, waved for them to hurry up.

  4

  “WHAT THE HELL are those two doing?” wondered Major Booker aloud. They were just standing there talking as though they’d forgotten how important this thing he’d called them out for was. Maybe Rei was talking about what had happened with Yukikaze. Even so, it was rare to see him so engrossed in a conversation. Captain Foss looked angry, like they were having a fight. Since when had those two gotten close enough to start having arguments with each other?

  Well, I can find out what they’re talking about later, he thought. As the two of them began walking again, he looked to their rear.

  There sat Llanfabon, her nose pointed directly at them. He’d ordered that all conversation at this meeting be collected and recorded with the plane’s super directional microphones. Behind her sat Yukikaze, whom he hadn’t ordered to be there.

  She probably didn’t care what the humans thought of her ignoring them and coming out here on her own. But whatever her reasons for coming, it’s not worth getting too worried about, Major Booker decided.

  Yukikaze had used the SAF’s command system while her pilot, Rei, was aboard her and then come out. That would have been impossible had he not been there. Her operational objectives were simple and clear: seek out and destroy the JAM.

  It was really very easy to understand. If Yukikaze possessed emotions, then she feared the JAM. That was manifesting in Yukikaze’s behavior.

  Her behavior was consistent. The question to be considered was this: would her fear of the JAM become a threat to humans? But there was no need to make her understand their situation. Having her think about the humans’ circumstances and then take action accordingly would practically make Yukikaze human herself. Demands like that would just degrade her abilities in combat. She was an emotionless combat machine. That was what made her effective against the JAM. If there were any demands to be made of Yukikaze, they would be to protect herself and her crew, and nothing more. That would be enough.

  The two of them finally arrived. Captain Foss saluted. Rei followed her lead, although his salute was a bit more casual.

  “You’re late,” said Major Booker.

  “Stuff happened,” said Rei. “It doesn’t look like the guests of honor have arrived yet. Don’t tell me the three of us are out here for an office barbecue. Who else is coming? Some VIP from Earth?”

  On the short purplish Faery grass of a small clearing to the side of the control tower, a barbecue grill had been set up. A folding table and six chairs were set for a picnic. Where had all of this stuff come from? Rei wondered. It felt more like a garden party with a chef than a picnic on a lawn. There was even a man wearing chef’s whites standing at the grill, checking the burners.

  “The guest of honor will be Lieutenant General Gibril Laitume, commander of the Tactical Combat Air Corps of Faery Base,” Major Booker replied. “The man who is technically our boss. Also with him will be the de facto top man of the FAF intelligence forces, Colonel Ansel Rombert. And rounding things out will be Brigadier General Cooley, the actual head of the SAF.”

  General Laitume was officially the commander of the Special Air Force, with General Cooley serving as his deputy, but in reality General Cooley ran the SAF by herself.

  “A real power lunch, eh?” said Captain Foss. “I wonder if some major business is going to be discussed here.”

  “Who’s the chef?” asked Rei. “I haven’t seen him before.”

  “Because he doesn’t fly a fighter,” replied Major Booker. “A chef’s battlefield is the kitchen. Allow me to introduce you. This is Chef Murullé, head chef of the SAF’s dining hall.”

  “Just call me Murullé. Galleé Murullé.”

  Unlike the other air corps, which often had two or more facilities, the SAF dining hall was unusual in that it only had one. Having multiple dining facilities wasn’t simply a matter of the number of personnel needing to be fed, they also served to divide the field officers from the lower ranks. The SAF made no such distinctions.

  Rei knew the chef had to be a soldier. Major Booker wouldn’t have appointed him to this position unless he had the major’s trust, Rei thought. Other corps had very skilled chefs in their employ, some of them civilian contractors invited from Earth. Very prideful, these contractors considered themselves better than the regular soldiers and had a tendency to look down on the legitimate members of the FAF. After all, many
of the soldiers here were actually criminals who’d been sent here for their crimes. However, the SAF had no contractors working for it. Everyone in it was a soldier, and this chef should be no exception. He’d probably committed some antisocial act or crime back on Earth and been sent to the SAF as a result.

  Rei didn’t particularly care what circumstances brought the man here. It was just that thinking of the food he always ate and knowing that this man was in charge of providing it gave him a feeling of intimacy. He’d never particularly thought about food before, but he’d never eaten anything bad on Faery either. That was probably a source of happiness for both himself and the chef.

  Galleé Murullé gave him a quick nod and then went back to the task of examining the ingredients laid out on a large push wagon.

  “I’m glad you made it in time,” said Major Booker as he spied a group of figures emerging from the control tower’s ground-level exit. “If you two had gotten here after the guests of honor, my career would have been over.”

  General Cooley led the group, followed by the two men. They had no escorts.

  The large, dark-skinned man was Gibril Laitume, the general of the Combat Air Corps. Well, lieutenant general, anyway. Rei knew the man’s name, although this was the first time he’d ever been in his presence. He looks exactly like the sort of general who’ll die a ridiculous death, Rei thought. The other thing about this man he’d never met that had made an impression was his name, Gibril, because Major Booker had explained that it was an alternate pronunciation of the name of the angel Gabriel.

  Leaving aside the matter of whether the name of this lucky angel was appropriate for him, when Major Booker had told Rei that the general was a devout believer in one all-powerful god, Rei’d replied that he was glad he wasn’t. He had no contract with any such omnipotent being and didn’t ask for any favors from him. On the other hand, he wasn’t liable to get punished for betraying him either. Major Booker had wearily replied that God himself didn’t directly hand out the punishments, and that he shouldn’t say things like that to devout followers of a religion. At worst, he might get killed by one. At the very least, all he’d be doing is buying their antipathy.

  Naturally, Rei wasn’t intentionally looking to nitpick any stranger’s beliefs, but hearing someone say, “You’ll be punished by heaven if you don’t believe” just pissed him off. He didn’t want to hear that from anyone, be they a believer or the religion’s founder itself. People come up with all sorts of theories with which to control others who won’t be manipulated as they like, and they tend to shun those who will not be brought into the fold. It wasn’t a question of the existence of a supreme being; if one did exist, then human opinion would likely matter very little in how that being used its power. Divine punishment wasn’t something for humans to declare, and in general it was just presumptuous for any person to judge who deserved it. The will of a supreme being might not match up to the expectations of his adherents. After all, it would be the god’s lack of concern for individual people that made it a suitable object of fear and worship. But if such a being did exist, there’d be little difference between belief and unbelief. Either way, its will would be beyond human means of control, and so it would all boil down to what advantages its adherents gain from their relationship with it on the human plane of existence. If some joined their group and thus gained comfort, then so be it. And if others found the group annoying, they could just stay away from them. That was all there was to it. Personally, Rei didn’t believe in a supreme being of any sort. The only existence he could be absolutely certain of was his own.

  Of course, this was all probably taboo when it came to talking to General Laitume.

  The other man, Colonel Rombert, Rei had met once before. Thin, with sharp eyes, he could only be a member of the Intelligence Forces. He’d asked him repeatedly about how the JAM had made a copy of his flight officer Lieutenant Burgadish on the last mission Yukikaze flew in her previous airframe. The interrogation had made him feel like he was a spy. Even after the man had driven Rei to exhaustion, Rombert hadn’t let him go. He was a hardcore intel officer. Even so, he hadn’t come off as a heartless machine. Rei recalled that, occasionally, his sense of humor would poke its way to the surface. It showed as part of his interrogation training, though.

  For example, at one point the colonel had said, “There have been times when I’ve wished I could just eat up somebody I didn’t like right from the start. I’ve probably thought about it myself, like how my brain would taste and the like. If I could make a copy of myself, I could try it out. The JAM made a copy of you too, right? You blew your big chance to see how you’d taste, don’t you think?”

  Basically, he was working under the assumption that Rei had hated Lieutenant Burgadish, took the opportunity to murder him, and then made up the whole story about the copies and everything else. Rather than asking him straight out, Rombert had been trying to tease it out of the suspect in a roundabout way. Rei’s impression was that here was a man he couldn’t eat. When he’d told the colonel that, Rombert had replied in deadly earnest, “I think you and I can talk with each other.” For Rei’s part, he hadn’t particularly wanted to keep talking to the man.

  These two men, General Laitume and Colonel Rombert, were both prime examples of humanity. The woman leading them, General Cooley of the SAF, was not.

  It was difficult to pin down what she was thinking or where her values lay, and she didn’t really care if that was the impression of her people had. Rei, on the other hand, felt a comforting familiarity about her. Other people, like Captain Foss, might judge the general to be a bit of a strange woman, but not Rei. It wasn’t necessary to think of her as a human. To him, she was just the person who issued his orders, and she caused no problems for him beyond that.

  Still, lately Rei had found himself wondering what had brought her to Faery.

  Captain Foss told him that General Cooley was a distant relative of hers. She wasn’t just a general; she was somebody’s child and had family too. It had taken Captain Foss’s words to make Rei aware of this very obvious fact.

  That was just one more thing he was lately curious about, where once he’d paid no attention to it at all. Rei had once believed that anything unrelated to combat wasn’t worth thinking about. Though he was going through some changes, Rei didn’t believe they were making him weaker.

  Major Booker approached the three officers and saluted them. Rei followed his lead.

  General Cooley introduced her subordinates, and General Laitume personally greeted the three SAF personnel, a good-natured smile on his lips. First Major Booker, then Rei, and finally Captain Foss. However, when he stopped in front of the woman doctor, he reached his hand out toward her breasts. Captain Foss stiffened, looking startled, which elicited a laugh from the general. “Your lapel pin’s crooked, Captain.” He chuckled as he straightened it with his fingertip.

  “It didn’t look crooked to me,” Colonel Rombert said coldly. “You have good eyes, General. And fast hands.”

  “And you, Colonel,” the general said with a laugh, “have bad eyes and a nasty mouth.”

  “I can see that Captain Foss is a young and attractive woman,” the colonel replied. “But I didn’t see a crooked lapel pin. I’ve heard you don’t have the best reputation with the ladies, General. Oh, forgive me. My ears must not be very good either.”

  “And you’d better not forget that, Colonel Rombert. Captain Foss, be careful with your pin from now on.”

  “Yes…sir,” replied Captain Foss.

  “Is there something you’d like to say to me?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Good. Well, General Cooley, shall we get started?”

  General Laitume moved off. Cooley followed, suggesting that they start with some champagne as she showed him to his seat.

  “I appreciated that, Colonel,” Captain Foss whispered. “The general has a reputation for doing things like that.”

  “Can’t hear you,” Colonel Rombert replied wi
th a smile. “Didn’t you hear me say that my ears were bad? Although I do think my eyesight is quite keen. Well, it doesn’t detract from his skill as a soldier, so that’s a saving grace, at least. Now then, you think I could get a Guinness here?”

  “All ready for you,” said Major Booker. “I made sure to find out what you liked.”

  “You really do prepare well. It’s hard to tell who are the real Intelligence Forces around here. So just what is the SAF up to? No, wait, the whole point of this lunch meeting is to ask about that. Let’s relax and enjoy ourselves first. Captain Foss, would you do me the honor of joining me?”

  Captain Foss looked at Major Booker, wondering what to do. The major gave a tiny nod, and Captain Foss moved off with Colonel Rombert.

  Rei sighed.

  “I know exactly how you feel,” Major Booker said. “It’s such a pain in the ass.”

  “The general and the colonel are a lot alike,” Rei replied.

  “I guess that’s what they call the ‘secret intentions of men.’ The colonel’s a smart one. I think you know just how intelligent that man is. When it comes to relationships between men and women, what goes on in your head isn’t always logical, but people who ignore logic end up hated. On that point, the colonel’s—”

  “Yeah,” Rei said with a nod. “That’s exactly right.”

  “…success rate is pretty high. Wait, what are you agreeing with? Did something happen between you and Edith?”

  “Not between her and me. I meant my relationship with Yukikaze. I thought it wasn’t logical, but that’s absurd. Yukikaze is nothing but a mass of logic. If I ignore that, of course she’d hate me.”

  “Yukikaze isn’t a woman, Rei.”

  “I know that. I know. Captain Foss taught me that a little while ago. I’ll give you a report later.”

  “Please. Oh, and while you might not like it, the two of us are strictly alcohol-free here.”

  “You’re not Colonel Rombert, so quit kidding around, Major.”