Yukikaze flew her figure-eight course, descending as she did.
Rei approached the runway, flying at low altitude as though he intended to land. That was when it appeared. A JAM plane. Just one. A relatively large high-speed fighter of the type used for hit-and-away combat. It was out on the runway now, accelerating. All the FAF planes in the air banked around, getting into formation to intercept it.
What happened next was about what Rei had expected, although not entirely as he had imagined. JAM defenses launched from the white sand. Two types. One type was anti-aircraft missiles. They popped up from the sand and ignited their rocket engines in midair, then seemed to self-destruct as they accelerated upwards, scattering smaller pieces in every direction. They hadn’t destroyed themselves, however. The missiles had split into countless micro-missiles, which now sped toward the FAF planes that were still getting ready for their attack. The other type were small fighter planes. Short range interceptors. Too many to count, not that there was any time to count them.
In an instant, Yukikaze had passed over the JAM fighter on the runway. There was no time to target it. Instantly, Rei began coming back around to engage. At roughly the same moment, he saw the JAM attack slam into the FAF formation, wiping it out. The JAM planes already in the air took up a protective formation around the one taking off and flew after Yukikaze. Rei snapped her into a turn and then saw the disaster that had struck the ground below. The planes, probably taking off from the center of the base at supersonic speeds, had produced a shock wave that had left a round hole in the desert sand, which began to cave in. The rumble and roar was loud enough to be heard aboard Yukikaze. Cookie base was turning into an enormous crater right before his eyes.
All to let that one plane escape, Rei thought. They must have been preserving the fire power they needed to escape, waiting for the FAF attack to let up. And then they’d abandoned the base. It didn’t look as though they planned to repair it, as they had in the past. But why? Why now?
“Multiple bogeys. JAM, closing in!” Lieutenant Katsuragi called out, his voice tense. Setting his fire control radar range to super search mode, Rei calmly confirmed the countless JAM contacts flying at them.
“Support fighters won’t make it here in time,” Lieutenant Katsuragi said. “The nearest one’s—”
“Don’t expect any support.”
Rei knew that slipping away from the enemy on his own wasn’t going to be easy. The swarm of JAM planes began to surround Yukikaze.
“The one they’re trying to protect is the plane that took off from the runway.” The other, smaller planes couldn’t fly for long. They were like disposable interceptors. “Lieutenant, find that plane. We’re taking it down. Get me a heading. Engaging!” he demanded, declaring his intention to attack to Lieutenant Katsuragi.
“Roger!” He paused a moment. “Two bandits, on our six! Get ready to break to starboard…now!”
Rei changed direction as he’d been told.
“Target sighted, closing fast,” said Lieutenant Katsuragi. “Locked on.”
It had been picked up on Yukikaze’s antiaircraft fire control radar, which was able to track multiple enemies simultaneously. The ant queen. No, not an ant. A wasp. And Rei could tell that Yukikaze had no intention of letting it get away alive.
She turned to evade the smaller JAM flying up from low in front of her.
It was here that Rei realized that the enemy planes were behaving strangely. They weren’t attacking. And not a single missile that had launched from the desert sands below had flown after Yukikaze.
“Any time you’re ready, Captain Fukai. All loaded missiles are reading green.”
“Understood.”
Leveling off—though by all rights he shouldn’t have had time to do this, he realized—Rei looked outside of the cockpit. He searched for the target with his naked eye. It was heading toward them from the skies to their upper right.
“It’s going to get us!” shouted Lieutenant Katsuragi. “What are you doing?”
“I’m not picking up a target lock beam,” Rei replied. “What is that thing? Look at it. It’s—”
“It’s a JAM! What else do you need to know! Hurry up and fire—”
Just then, Lieutenant Katsuragi choked in shock. Yukikaze was displaying a message that he couldn’t believe.
Don’t touch me…FO/I will try to communicate with BOGEY/do NOT attack…Capt.
What Rei saw was that the enemy plane had lowered its landing gear, and unless it was experiencing some sort of mechanical breakdown, that was a signal that it didn’t intend to attack. It had been waiting for them, Rei realized. It had waited, enduring the intense attack, for Yukikaze to appear in the skies over Cookie base. Hoping that she would arrive so that they could talk to each other.
4
YUKIKAZE’S MESSAGE LEFT Lieutenant Katsuragi in a state of shock. Here was something to indicate that he might have been wrong about Rei’s “delusions.” He stared at the display for several moments, his breath ragged, then shouted.
“What the hell is this? What’s Yukikaze saying?”
Rei shifted his eyes back to the display and read the message as well. She was going to try communicating with the enemy plane and didn’t want Lieutenant Katsuragi to interfere or Rei to attack the target.
“This is impossible,” Lieutenant Katsuragi said. “Captain, you brought that message onto the display, didn’t you?”
“And how would I do that?”
It was utterly ridiculous, of course. He hadn’t had time to do any such thing. If anyone on this plane could, it would be Lieutenant Katsuragi. If this is a trap, then he’s a JAM, Rei thought. He quickly extended the air brake, letting the target plane slip past, then nimbly accelerated to close range and took up the optimal position to fire his gun. The target plane, however, made no moves to shake them off. Rei flew Yukikaze onto its starboard side. It responded by turning in a wide leftward arc.
As though beckoning Rei to follow. Yukikaze was flying faster, but since she was turning in a wider arc, the two planes ended up flying roughly next to each other. Despite the fact that the JAM was in the midst of a turn, it wasn’t banking at all.
Lieutenant Katsuragi could clearly see that it had lowered its landing gear. Its fuselage was as black as a shadow. Even bathed in the light of Faery’s twin suns, you couldn’t tell the surface of the plane from the shadows cast upon it. Even though it was flying close enough that Rei felt he could reach out his hand and touch it, it was difficult to make out what its actual shape was. It almost looked like a section of the background scenery had been clipped out and replaced with a black shape, and it was impossible to tell at a glance what sort of three-dimensional shape this fighter had.
The smaller JAM planes reestablished their escort formation around the main one, splitting into three groups and moving to intercept the approaching FAF planes. Lieutenant Katsuragi touched the control panel, preparing to contact them, when a warning chimed and Yukikaze again flashed a message onto the display.
Do NOT touch me.
She was telling him not to interfere with her communications system. Even Lieutenant Katsuragi would have to admit that, although Rei himself would say that she didn’t need to possess consciousness in order to do that.
Whether this was a simple programmed response or possibly caused by the unexplainable “something” in Yukikaze really didn’t matter in an emergency like this. The truth was that she was making high-level judgments. The question was, should they just sit there and do as she told them to?
Rei could imagine how confused Lieutenant Katsuragi was at this point. As a flight officer, he wouldn’t be able to stand just sitting there doing nothing and was probably wondering whose fault this was.
“Do what Yukikaze says.”
“But, Captain!”
“It’s my call, Lieutenant. Pilot’s orders. Do what she says. It’d be dangerous to disobey her.”
If he wasn’t careful, Yukikaze could quite easily eject th
e rear seat from the plane. The front seat too. Rei didn’t consider that some wild delusion. Yukikaze could do that if she wanted to.
Inside his flight gloves, Rei’s palms were growing moist from tension. He wasn’t just concerned about Lieutenant Katsuragi doing what he was told. There was also the matter of his not being able to predict what would happen next. Besides that, Rei was desperate to keep Yukikaze away from the target plane. While it hadn’t appeared to change its flight attitude, the radius of its turns was slowly decreasing.
Don’t lose track of BOGEY…Capt.
She was telling Rei not to shake the plane off, but to follow and maintain distance.
G forces were increasing with each revolution. Soon he wouldn’t be able to move his arms freely. Yet the target plane continued to turn serenely through the air. Yukikaze began to drift slightly away from it.
Increase power.
The G limiter automatically cut out. No good, Rei thought. My body can’t take this. He manually reset the limiter to tell Yukikaze that he was refusing her request. The limiter automatically cut out again.
They needed to increase power to keep up with the target plane, but they couldn’t keep turning in a smaller radius at the speed they were traveling. The airframe would eventually tear itself apart, though the humans aboard her would be dead before then. It was like they’d been placed in a centrifuge, and even if he could ignore the stress it was placing on him, he couldn’t ignore the loss of maneuverability the tight turns were causing. Even now, the plane threatened to snap out of the turn line it was describing. One mistake in control and this dangerous balance would be upset, and Rei could foresee it sending them into an unrecoverable spin.
He kept setting the G limiter, and Yukikaze kept cutting it out. Holy shit, Rei thought. We’re having an argument! He was fighting out of concern for his own safety, while Yukikaze wanted to keep going just as badly. They repeated the exchange four times, then Yukikaze spoke again.
Maintain stability/increase power right now/you can do it…Capt.
To keep following the JAM, Yukikaze first wanted him to increase her engine output in order to maintain her own stability, Rei realized.
It was certain that, if he tried to carelessly reduce her speed and pitch her nose while they were still turning like this, Yukikaze would be sent into an uncontrollable spin. To avoid that danger, Rei understood that the logical thing he needed to do now was carefully increase power to the engines.
Yukikaze was telling him that, as the pilot, he should understand that. She probably figured that he’d have to go along with her message if she put it in those terms. And he did understand. But what would happen after he did it?
“Yukikaze, are you trying to kill me?” Rei said, his voice straining against the G forces punishing his body. “What’s this JAM trying to do? Answer me, Yukikaze! I can’t do what you want me to unless you tell me what’s going on! Explain it so that I can understand. Yukikaze, do you understand me?”
Increase power immediately/just do it…Capt.
Had Yukikaze judged her pilot useless, she could have requested him to turn over maneuvering control to her by turning her automaneuver switch to ON. She probably could have done it even without sending a message to him. And yet she hadn’t. Deciding that she was saying that she depended on him, Rei answered her request by moving the throttle lever in his left hand slightly forward. Yukikaze continued with a new message:
I have T-FACPro II/use it…Capt.
“Lieutenant! Open the utility warehouse in Yukikaze’s central computer! Run the program called T-FACPro II! Hurry!”
Lieutenant Katsuragi had also read Yukikaze’s message, but he had no idea what sort of utility T-FACPro II was. He couldn’t remember ever being told that Yukikaze had such a program. But there was no time to think about it. Rei was the pilot, and so Katsuragi obeyed. He accessed the utility program memory area called the warehouse and found T-FACPro II there. The startup indicator was shown, then the display changed completely.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” Lieutenant Katsuragi asked.
The running program itself answered him, displaying a message on the screen.
This is a psychological tool designed to predict a target subject’s behavior. Please input target data. Now inputting…
A section of the main display showed Rei what was happening. Data was being entered automatically. He could guess that Yukikaze was inputting the PAX code for the JAM. Was the program going to output a behavior prediction for the target plane?
No, Rei thought. Even without using T-FACPro II, Yukikaze should have been able to predict what the JAM was doing now. No, she was expressly using the program not as a behavior prediction tool, but rather so that she could translate her intentions into a language comprehensible by the humans aboard her. T-FACPro II had a natural language processing engine to speak fluently to humans. It also had an extensive vocabulary dictionary and apparently could use speech input as well. Rei had a hunch that Yukikaze was using that engine in order to communicate with her human crewmen.
Yukikaze was going to be able to speak freely to him, not just in halting baby talk.
“Yukikaze, what is this JAM doing?”
The answer came immediately. And just as he’d expected, it wasn’t a behavior prediction from T-FACPro II. It was clearly communicating thoughts from Yukikaze. Rei would have been deeply moved if there’d been time for him to be.
The target plane is carrying out communication by means of modulated ultraviolet light. According to the SSL 1.03 protocol, it keeps repeating the tag [follow me].
Prior research had established that JAM planes would confirm each other’s position within visual range by emitting UV light through a slit located near their noses. It could be thought of as the equivalent of the nighttime running lights FAF planes were equipped with. Right now, the target plane was modulating the intensity and wavelength of the light to try and use it as a means of communication. It was saying “follow me” over and over, although none of this could be discerned with the naked eye.
“Impossible,” Lieutenant Katsuragi said. “You mean the JAM have cracked our SSL encryption?”
Having the JAM just come out and tell them that they’d cracked the SAF’s coded communications system came as a shock to Lieutenant Katsuragi. The tag that Yukikaze had mentioned referred to a prepared reference code set used for such things as identifying a message’s sender or marking the end of a transmission. If you had something very simple to convey, it was possible to just use the code number by itself.
To Rei, however, it hardly mattered. Version 1.03 was the one in use when the old Yukikaze had flown her missions. He wasn’t surprised at all that the JAM had cracked it.
Okay, fine. The target plane was saying “follow me.” By why was it turning in smaller and smaller circles? Were the JAM just trying to see how far Yukikaze would go along with it? The G forces the turns were generating were threatening to exceed the limits of human endurance. Maybe the target plane was trying to see at what point a human body would just break, Rei wondered.
“Do you understand the reason for these turning maneuvers, Yukikaze? Answer me. What is this JAM trying to do?”
T-FACPro II predicts, Yukikaze displayed on the monitor, that the target plane desires direct communication with you. It can also predict, however, that the target plane does not want any other FAF plane to hear the contents of the communication, and so it is in the midst of guiding you to a place where you will not be disturbed. I also judge T-FACPro II’s prediction to be correct.
“And where is this place where we won’t be disturbed?”
MYSTERIOUS BATTLE ZONE.
Rei reflexively choked as he read the message. The G forces were making it hard enough to breathe as it was, but Rei didn’t want to accept the reply Yukikaze had just given him. She might as well have been inviting him back to a hell he hoped he’d never have to return to.
“What’s it mean by ‘mysterious battle zone,�
�� Captain?” Lieutenant Katsuragi asked.
The G-stress on Lieutenant Katsuragi must be even worse than what I’m feeling, Rei thought. That medical exam had been spot on. It was an odd thing to think about, all things considered. The Gs were so bad now that Rei couldn’t even turn his head.
The mysterious battle zone…the place where he’d tasted the flesh of Lieutenant Burgadish. And no, that hadn’t been the first time he’d visited it. He’d been there before, with that journalist Andy Lander, who’d come from Earth to do a story on the FAF. He’d been flying with Rei in Yukikaze to experience it for himself when they were pulled into that bizarre space. They’d found a yellow swamp in a forest that seemed to be made of mechanical devices, and when Lander had reached his hand out to touch it, he’d lost his hand up to his wrist… The entire thing had seemed like a waking dream, but when they’d returned to normal space, Lander’s hand was still gone. They’d never found the zone’s exact location. Indeed, Rei had even written in his report that the zone might not be on Faery at all. That was when he’d named that unknown space the “mysterious battle zone.” It was a unique name, one that Yukikaze knew but Lieutenant Katsuragi did not.
When they’d flown there before, the fuel transfer system had been interfered with, causing Yukikaze’s engines to shut down. They had to defeat the JAM’s intense electronic warfare in order to escape. Yukikaze had been the one who had beaten them. All I’d been able to do was hope that she didn’t lose, Rei thought. This time, the JAM were probably after him, the human component of this partnership.
Even so, there was no way he could run back home after coming so far. This was exactly the situation that Major Booker had hoped would arise, so Rei steeled himself in resignation. Make contact with the JAM, then bring that information back to base. Come back alive, no matter what.
Good Luck, Yukikaze Page 29