Good Luck, Yukikaze Read online

  He wished they could have talked more. Rei realized that this emotion welling up within him had been the source of his hesitation. He had a feeling that he and this man could have understood each other.

  “Everyone hates me,” Yagashira had said. “Even I can see that. They don’t care how other people feel. My old commander, Lieutenant Mayle, once told me that I was like a machine. They treated me like a machine, never talking to me. But in so doing, they became the real machines.”

  In piloting his plane, he too felt himself growing closer to this machine he called Yukikaze. Perhaps that was why he could understand the feelings of a man who had been created by the JAM. The reasons didn’t matter; Rei had simply wanted to talk to Yagashira some more. If he was a weapon, if he was conscious of himself as a weapon, then he must know how a weapon feels. Did he understand Yukikaze’s feelings as well?

  The JAM might have been able to understand the details of Yukikaze’s combat intelligence better than he could. Even so, the JAM were attacking. It was out of desperation, Rei thought. What is their objective? he wondered.

  He saw the missiles hit with his naked eye. The JAM fighter exploded, followed by Yagashira’s plane.

  He hadn’t seen the pilot bail out. The man who could have understood him was dead.

  Was this sadness? Was this regret? It was complicated to deal with feelings bursting forth that he’d thought he’d lost a long time ago. He was the first person who had ever made him feel this way, and he’d been a JAM, Rei thought.

  Banking Yukikaze sharply, Rei released control back to her and looked up at the sky. It was blue, and aside from the twin suns, it looked like the skies of Earth.

  I want to go home, Rei thought. But where?

  When he’d first come to the FAF, Rei had been aware of his desire to return to Earth.

  “I feel like I’m finally awake,” he said, closing his eyes, thinking that if this was a dream too, it wouldn’t be so bad.

  II

  A SOLDIER’S LEAVE

  REI FUKAI WANTED a trip back to Earth, and he was going to do something about it.

  From the time he was rescued in his immobile vegetative state till the moment he was awakened aboard Yukikaze, he had been trapped in a nightmare space, consumed at the thought of meeting those human copies created by the JAM. What he obsessed over in particular was the taste of the chicken broth he’d been forced to eat. It held the taste of Yukikaze’s flight officer, Lieutenant Burgadish.

  Waiting for Rei upon awakening was a detailed debriefing to collect all of the information he’d gathered on his mission. This wasn’t just conducted by the SAF. Rei had to tell the same story over and over and over to the other air corps and even the FAF Intelligence Forces.

  Of most vital concern to the FAF was Rei’s claim that the JAM were able to produce copies of human beings. SAF analysis had concluded that there was at least a possibility that the JAM had perfected the creation of human duplicates with which they had successfully infiltrated the FAF.

  The top levels of the FAF had to investigate the possibility that Rei and the SAF itself were now contaminated by the JAM. They also had to consider the possibility that the JAM were manipulating Rei and the SAF in order to lead the Faery Air Force down the wrong strategic path.

  Rei didn’t particularly care if the others accepted his personal experiences. Even though he knew well the threat posed by the mysterious alien JAM, he couldn’t recall feeling fear during his encounter with them. In that way, he was similar to the combat intelligences which existed within the FAF’s countless computers, but it was only after the experience that Rei’s true feelings began to make themselves known. What he was feeling and the changes he was seeing in himself became a matter of serious concern.

  He was faced with questions: What he was doing on Faery in the first place? Did Yukikaze’s abandonment of him mean that he had no value or worth? Rei wondered if maybe he’d lingered in his coma for so long in order to avoid returning to reality and facing the questions his experiences had raised. He’d dealt with one of them while confronting the threat to Yukikaze in her new body, the power of that moment stimulating him back to consciousness. In that instant, he knew for certain that Yukikaze needed him.

  Awakened by his experiences, he didn’t want to go back to the way he’d been. Rei had begun to feel closer to the JAM.

  What were the JAM? How did the JAM view him? He used to be able to forget those questions when he flew with Yukikaze, but after encountering JAM weapons that looked human, and having a taste of Lieutenant Burgadish, he couldn’t just ignore his questions anymore.

  The JAM’s human duplicates are not a new strategy they adopted suddenly or recently, Rei thought. They’ve been preparing this for a long, long time, perhaps starting work on it immediately after their initial attack on Earth.

  Human existence must have seemed a strange thing to them. Doubtless, the JAM perceived it as something they couldn’t understand, wondering why these things called “humans” were always riding around in the Faery Air Force’s planes. As far as the JAM were concerned, their enemy was the planes of the FAF, not the humans. They recognized the combat machines of Earth as their opponents, not the blobs of organic matter inside them. If the combat machines and computers of Earth were the main adversaries, then the humans were weapons they were equipped with, like computers or missiles.

  He could see them now, the JAM desperately analyzing their data, searching for the reason for why the enemy planes were always equipped with organic human matter. It had taken them some time, but it was possible that they now saw the humans as some sort of organic computer that supported the actions of the combat intelligence. At any rate, having realized they could no longer ignore these things, the JAM had likely been devising a countermeasure for them since early in the war. They’d undoubtedly concluded that, since these weapons called humans could move around autonomously, they would create a weapon just like it. Perhaps they’d been deployed for some unimaginable purpose or strategy, but the simple fact was that the JAM were making human copies.

  They might have been indistinguishable from humans, possessing will and even emotions, but in the end they were weapons. There could be no other purpose for the JAM to make them, that much was certain. They were organic weapons created by an inorganic alien intelligence that might not even be properly termed a life-form. It was exactly the same idea as when humans created their combat machines.

  He wondered how these human copies felt, these men and, possibly, women. An SAF investigation had concluded that there was an extremely high probability that the man called Lieutenant Yagashira, who had taken up a post in the SAF, had been a weapon created by the JAM. The original Lieutenant Yagashira had been killed in action during a mission with his previous squadron, and the JAM had created a weapon based on his body and then deployed it to infiltrate SAF forces. The same went for Lieutenant Lancome, who had been killed at TAB-15 by Yukikaze’s gun. However, the SAF couldn’t prove this conclusively, and so the FAF couldn’t accept their conclusion officially. It was being handled as a top secret matter for their squadron alone.

  Despite his vegetative state, Rei had a hazy memory of Major Booker bringing Lieutenant Yagashira to visit him in the hospital. He’d said that he wanted to be a top-class Sylphid pilot, just like Rei. He’d said that he wanted to be his friend. He was a JAM weapon, and yet he’d said that.

  Rei had never thought of himself as a consumable weapon in this war. He’d never been particularly concerned with whom or for what he was fighting either. But now, when he thought about the weapons the JAM were making, he couldn’t help but think that he was just like them. A weapon was only concerned with its own effectiveness. If it started to wonder for whom it was being effective, its effectiveness would decrease. Since Rei never thought about things like that as he grew to become the best soldier there was, it meant that when a JAM weapon said, “I want to be like you,” it was telling him that he was more like a weapon than a JAM weapon.
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  No wonder the JAM perceived him as a threat.

  He didn’t know if Lieutenant Yagashira was conscious of having been made by the JAM. It was possible that, even if he did, his sense of identity as a human grew stronger than his identity as a weapon, preventing him from exhibiting his true effectiveness as such. Perhaps Yagashira had said he wanted to be like him because, despite his being human, he recognized Rei as being a far superior weapon. If that were true, it also meant that Yagashira had been a far better human being than Rei was. Far better than a man who didn’t care if he was a human or a weapon. And if he was a perfect human, Rei thought, then I must be a perfect combat machine. That was totally the opposite of the way it should have been.

  When Rei had targeted Yagashira’s plane and fired his missiles from the cockpit of the new Yukikaze, he had hesitated for a moment, even though there was no doubt at all that he was shooting at a JAM. Why was that? Was it because he had sensed in Yagashira someone who could have understood him?

  The thing he didn’t understand, the thing he now feared, wasn’t the JAM. It was himself. He wanted to take a hard look at the changes he was seeing in his heart. He would return to Earth, the planet that had borne him.

  Rei told his only friend and commanding officer Major James Booker exactly how he felt, and the major simply replied that it was a good idea. They were in the SAF hangar bay.

  The thirteen fighters were lined up, with Yukikaze in the space for Unit 1. The old Yukikaze had been Unit 3.

  “It’ll make you more human,” Major Booker said. “You’ve awakened. Yukikaze has been reborn also, into an even more powerful body. She’s Unit 1 in name and reality. The same should go for you as well.”

  Her fighter number had been overwritten with 05031. Yukikaze was now the fourth plane to hold the position of Unit 1.

  “I don’t think I want to be reborn,” Rei answered.

  “You’ve taken a shock to your mind and body,” the major said. “A change of environment will do wonders for you. The SAF’s also replacing its planes. We’re working over the plan we’d suspended before. The plan is to gradually introduce the FRX00, although the Systems Corps is still convinced the FRX99 is better.”

  “Why aren’t you accepting the unmanned planes?”

  “Because humans are necessary in this war,” the major answered. “The pilots of the SAF are effective counters to the JAM’s strategies.”

  “Humans acting as combat machines, you mean.”

  “Not quite. Humans are different from machines. The JAM see that as a threat.”

  “Jack, what I’m trying to say is—”

  “I know, Rei. I know what sort of damage you’ve taken in all this. The way you are now, you can’t fly. You need leave. God knows, you deserve some, even if the authorities won’t authorize a return to Earth for you.”

  “You’re saying I won’t get to go back?”

  “The Faery Air Force doesn’t want you wandering free. You’re a great pilot and they need you, but they’re also terrified that you might be a JAM.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Rei said.

  “The nature of the SAF’s mission means that you constantly see those sorts of contradictory sentiments. That’s always been the case.”

  “If I were a JAM, I wouldn’t tell you that the JAM were making human duplicates, would I?”

  “That’s a good question,” Booker said. “Maybe the JAM’s objective is to drive a wedge between the humans and the machines of the FAF. Maybe they revealed this to you on purpose.”

  “Well, JAM or not, I’ve already done the damage, then.”

  “True, but nonetheless, there’s no evidence that you aren’t a JAM agent. That’s why the authorities want to keep you under close observation. Come on, you know how hard it is to get authorization to return to Earth. Besides that, there’s never been any instance in the SAF’s history of somebody asking for leave. This unit is full of people who have no interest in visiting Earth or their hometowns. The only people who go back are ones who retire or get drummed out of the service.”

  “So if I want to go back to Earth, I have to retire?”

  “Well, good news for you, then,” Booker replied. “Your term of service in the Faery Air Force is almost up. In four days. You can renew your contract instead of retiring, of course. According to the terms of renewal, you can request a promotion to the rank of captain. If you say you’re going to retire, the authorities may try to keep you here by offering you a special two-rank advancement. That’s a typical bargaining tactic they use.”

  “I don’t care about rank. It doesn’t mean anything here, anyway,” Rei said.

  “I don’t know about that,” Booker said. “If you get to be a field officer, you can start meddling with personnel affairs and make yourself a big man in some other squadron.”

  “Yeah, and get buried in a ton of miscellaneous crap.”

  “Being a captain might be the best position for you, but someone with higher rank can still get in your way. The smart move would be to leave when you get the chance.”

  “I have Yukikaze here. I’m not going to retire.”

  “Figured you’d say that,” the major said with a nod. “I’ll talk to the higher-ups and try to negotiate a temporary leave for you. You’re going to come back here, no matter what, because Yukikaze’s here.”

  Rei looked up at Yukikaze, his face expressionless.

  Her airframe carried an air of menace. She was a modified FRX99, a plane developed as an unmanned fighter. Compared to the Super Sylphs on either side of her, there was no softness to the design at all. They at least show some touches that reflect human aesthetics, but Yukikaze’s new airframe engenders a sense of complete strangeness, Rei thought. She had that beauty born of the total efficiency an advanced weapon needs, but the airframe looked threatening, and one could sense a sort of spooky atmosphere around her. In the gloomy light of the hangar, Rei suddenly realized why. Yukikaze was black, just like a JAM fighter. It wasn’t just his imagination. She was shaped like one too.

  “She…she looks like a JAM fighter.”

  “Because they borrowed the good points of their planes in the design,” Booker explained. “I realized that too. When you just come out and say it, it sounds awful, huh? The JAM planes don’t have cockpits, but we added that onto this design. It’s built to be piloted by humans, but it was designed to be unmanned. She can pull maneuvers that can kill her crew.”

  Yukikaze was no longer the FRX00 prototype. As their new tactical combat electronic surveillance plane, she’d been given an official name: the FFR41, nicknamed “Maeve” after the goddess who ruled the wind fairies.

  “A pretty wild goddess, this one. It’d be dangerous to piss her off. Even on a Super Sylph, it’s the human pilot who chooses to fly it. This one leaves that all behind. Not just any person can fly her. You’re necessary, Rei. Make sure you come back here, because I don’t want to lose you either.”

  Rei silently stroked Yukikaze’s fuselage. Her body felt warm.

  While Rei had been making the rounds to his various debriefings, Yukikaze had flown a mission unmanned, one determined to be simple as far as SAF operations went and not a problem for a pilotless plane. Major Booker had thought it was dangerous to have Yukikaze fully exhibit her new abilities without Rei in the cockpit. The likelihood was steadily increasing that she could behave in wholly unexpected ways while in flight, and they’d need a crewman aboard to find out why. Moreover, Rei would probably be the only one who could completely understand her, and Rei knew that perfectly well. Even so, he wanted to leave the battlefield, to leave Yukikaze, and try to find himself.

  “Make the arrangements for me to go back to Earth,” Rei said. “I’m counting on you, Jack.”

  “Gotcha,” the major answered, and said nothing more.

  AS MAJOR BOOKER had expected, the Faery Air Force authorities didn’t okay Rei’s leaving. The FAF didn’t want him to retire, the major told Rei, who’d been waiting for Booker’s re
turn in the major’s office. And even if he reenlisted, he went on, they’d probably delay his request for temporary leave with the review process. It’d be a minimum of a month’s wait.

  “And if we spent a month arguing it, they probably still wouldn’t grant my request, would they?” Rei answered.

  “That’s correct, Lieutenant Fukai,” said the man Rei had never seen before.

  “Rei, let me introduce you. This is Mr. Chang Pollack, international attorney. He’s here to help us.”

  “A lawyer,” Rei replied. “So essentially I’m still a criminal. I’d actually forgotten that I agreed to come here instead of serving time in a Japanese prison.”

  “That’s only until you retire from the Faery Air Force,” Pollack said. “You already agreed once before to extend your service here and became a second lieutenant as a result. The moment you did that, you gave up your right to be discharged. That’s why you’re not just being automatically discharged this time around. In order to retire from service, you’ll need to make a formal request. If you choose to extend your contract, your situation won’t change. You were handed down an indefinite sentence, after all.”

  Since Rei had never thought of returning to Earth until now, he’d never considered the difference between discharge and retirement.

  “In this case,” the lawyer continued, “I’d recommend applying for retirement. You haven’t given up that right. Even though the FAF can try and pressure you to abandon the case, they have no right to just quash a request for it. If you do that, you’ll be free of them. As far as the nation of Japan is concerned, you’ll have fulfilled your debt to society. You’ll be a free citizen once again, with all of your rights restored, including the right to receive help from your government.”

  “I think that’s a good deal,” Major Booker said. “When you get back, you can do whatever you want. People who choose to enlist here are automatically given the rank of second lieutenant. In your case, you’d probably make captain.”