“Okay, that’s got it. I’ve got painkillers in the first aid kit back at the plane. Keep your arm elevated.”
He picked up the survival gun and helped Lander get unsteadily to his feet. Sweat beaded on Lander’s forehead, his pale face contorted with the pain, but he didn’t pass out.
Rei wanted to get back to Yukikaze as soon as possible, but he couldn’t hurry the other man. Progress was slow. Lander’s huge shoulders heaved with each breath, step by painful step, but he refused Rei’s offers of help. Neither man spoke. The atmosphere was oppressive.
The space between the trees grew narrower. Their distribution seemed irregular, with denser areas coming in undulating waves. From above, Rei thought, it would look just like an energy distribution chart.
The straight-line distance they’d walked before must have been around 700 meters, half of which was in the forest, so there shouldn’t have been more than 500 meters to go. But there was no sign that the forest was ending. They may have been lost. Lander leaned against a thick tree to rest.
“Go on without me, Lieutenant.”
“We’re nearly there. I can’t leave you. We have no idea what could happen.”
Rei examined the wound. It wasn’t bleeding too badly now, but it needed proper treatment quickly.
Lander croaked out a hoarse laugh. “I just had a hand and now it’s gone. Kinda funny, don’t you think?”
“Listen up. The only way you’re going to get back to the plane is on your own two legs, and there’s nothing wrong with them, right? So move!”
“Right... Thing is, it’s the shock more than the pain that’s doing a number on me. Feels like it’s stabbing through my heart. Never noticed how much walking can take it out of you.”
“I’ll help you.”
“No, you need to keep your hands on that machine gun. I’m okay. Let’s go.”
Rei nodded. Lander walked forward unsteadily.
The spaces between the trees were widening again. It couldn’t be much further now. Their field of vision suddenly opened up, and Rei guessed that they must have accidentally — and luckily — taken a shortcut. They emerged at a point about 200 meters away from Yukikaze.
Lander stopped. “Lieutenant, wait.”
Rei saw it in the same instant: a strange object hovering directly over Yukikaze at a height of four or five meters. It was an absolute black, like a hole in the sky. There was no sense of it being a solid object. It was a bit smaller than Yukikaze and shaped like a boomerang.
“JAM...”
“Dammit, I wish I had a camera.” Lander sounded like he’d forgotten all about the pain.
Rei clenched his fist, a cold sweat breaking out across his back. They wanted to capture Yukikaze intact.
“What do you think it’s doing?”
“It’s trying to decode Yukikaze’s IFF and other electronic systems. I may have to self-destruct her.”
“How? It’s not touching the plane.”
“I don’t know how, but I’m sure of it. The JAM have always seemed more interested in our planes than in us.”
Rei walked out of the forest and onto the runway, placing himself clearly in the enemy’s line of sight.
“Lieutenant, what’re you doing? Come back!”
“They’ll take Yukikaze over my dead body.”
Rei recklessly approached Yukikaze. About one plane length away, he raised the gun and took aim at the object. It made no reaction. He fired. Short.
Confirming the gun was set to full auto, he emptied the clip at it. Empty cartridges scattered around him. The last cartridge flew from the firing chamber and bounced onto the ground. As the echo of the gunfire faded away, he knew he was going to need more than small-caliber fire to take that thing out. He threw the machine gun down, frustrated at his own powerlessness.
He walked toward Yukikaze. As he did so, there was a sudden movement overhead. The black shadow rotated with a jerk and withdrew from Yukikaze, moving in an irregular manner. It seemed to be out of control. Suddenly, the black camouflage peeled away. It was a silver, forward-swept–wing aircraft. A JAM combat reconnaissance plane. It fell toward the forest. The sound of an explosion followed.
“Lander! Get over here, fast!”
Pale blue sparks were spattering from an electrical discharge line on Yukikaze’s wing. As Rei secured it, Lander reached the plane. Black smoke was rising from the forest.
“They’ll send reinforcements, won’t they?”
“We’ll deal with that when it happens. At least they don’t seem to be interested in us.”
“Maybe they’ll change their minds.”
Rei grabbed the first aid kit from Yukikaze, along with the other survival gun that was stowed in the rear seat. He removed the makeshift tourniquet from Lander’s arm, sprayed the wound with a sealing agent to stop the bleeding, doused it with disinfectant, wrapped the stump with sterile film, and bandaged it.
“There’re painkillers if you need them. I don’t know if you can fire this gun one-handed, but I’m giving it to you anyway.”
“What about you?”
“Well, if I don’t get the engines started, you won’t get that real flight experience you’re here for, right?”
Rei settled into the cockpit, toggled the Jet Fuel Starter switch to ON, and pulled the starter handle. Nothing. He tried again, and then again. In the past, Rei had found this process amusingly similar to starting a motor bike or a lawn mower. In a way, that was exactly what he was doing: the JFS was a small combustion engine that moved the onboard fuel but didn’t have an advanced control system. Now, though, the humor of the situation escaped him.
It started on the fourth try. Engine master switch to ON. Throttle control to BOOST.
Rei got up and climbed along the canopy sill to slide into the rear seat.
Armament control system, ON. The ECM display flickered on momentarily, then faded out.
Rei wasn’t well versed in using the electronic armaments. His work in the front seat had little to do with what went on in the backseat, which was devoted entirely to data acquisition and electronic warfare. His EWOs took care of all that. He flew the plane.
But even with his lack of specialized knowledge, he knew enough to reason that the enemy must be using some specific force external to Yukikaze to arrest the plane’s systems. And if that force could jam Yukikaze’s systems, then chances were it could be jammed in return.
He assumed manual control to operate the dispersion jammer and began noise jamming as well. After a bit, symbols marking the enemy positions appeared on the display screen. The system immediately switched over to auto-jamming mode and the symbols on the display began to change wildly. The computer immediately deciphered the radar waves coded as “enemy” and activated countermeasures. The locations of the targets were determined and displayed.
What was impossible for a human, Yukikaze’s electronic armaments did with ease. With those now on the job, there was nothing left for Rei to do. He got back into the front seat.
He didn’t know if it would help get the engines started, but he threw the switch connecting the JFS to the right engine hydraulic motor and slid the throttle over. The tachometer sprang to life. The power supply to the electronic armaments was dropping because of the extra load that feeding the engine was placing on the JFS, but there was nothing Rei could do about that.
How were the JAM succeeding in keeping Yukikaze’s electronics off-line? Were they analyzing the timing impulses of all the systems and then sending in false data? If that were the case, how was Yukikaze resisting it now? Rei knew this was a battle beyond his level of comprehension, a battle of forces humans couldn’t perceive. He could only watch from the sidelines.
When the tachometer reached 13 percent RPM the autoignition system switched on. Ignition, activated.
Turbine intake temperature and hydraulic pressure, rising. Fuel flow rate, increasing. The noise from the exhaust was rising to ear-piercing levels.
