At 50 percent RPM, the JFS automatically delinked from the starter motor. The right generator caution light went out. All of Yukikaze’s electronic systems came back to life.
Rei connected the JFS to the left engine, reset the throttle, and climbed down from the plane to help Lander in. As he was straining under the weight of the man he was boosting up, Rei was struck with an odd thought: where in this body did Lander keep his ideas?
Ideas were invisible. Humanity had brought into being state organizations, national consciousness, religion... You couldn’t see them with your eyes, yet they were certainly real.
But what about machines? Yukikaze was here, like a monster from a dream materialized in the real world. Machines were the material embodiment of ideas springing from human consciousness. Could humanity continue to control the results of its ideas? Or would it be driven insane by them? Perhaps that was what the JAM were trying to do.
There was no time to reflect on it further. He got Lander’s helmet on, secured his oxygen mask, then connected the anti-G hoses, lap belt, and shoulder harness.
Seizing the handgrip, he hung down off of the plane and folded up the boarding ladder. He pulled himself back up and looked into the cockpit. Once he was sure the ladder caution light had gone out, he got in.
Canopy control set to CLOSE. Fire control power, on. Master arm switch set to ON. Left engine ignition, activated. Jet fuel starter, off.
He called back to Lander. “Whatever you do, don’t touch the ECM panel.”
“Got it.”
“Still think this is a secret Faery Base?”
“No, but I’m not giving up keeping an eye on the FAF.”
“Those painkillers look like they’re working for you.”
“Hey, what’s that beeping sound?”
“It’s a warning that an enemy’s been detected.”
“Where?”
Data appeared on the HUD. Gun mode. A motionless target. Range 2,100 meters, bearing three-nine-L. An aboveground installation? He couldn’t tell for sure without visual contact.
“Looks like it’s in the forest. I’m taking it out before we launch. If they stop our engines after takeoff, we’re screwed.”
He nudged the throttle forward. Parking brake, off. When the engine output reached about 80 percent, Yukikaze began to move. Just a slight motion and he could wring out the thrust. They rotated left, coming to a stop with the target dead ahead.
The target designator box appeared on the HUD, although all Rei could see before them was those weird trees.
The stores control display showed RDY GUN, the letters flashing. That was an abnormal sign for it to display, but Rei didn’t think it was malfunctioning. He got the feeling Yukikaze was urging him to shoot the thing, and fast.
The gun line on the cannon was at slightly above horizontal. If he fired now, he would overshoot the target.
Rei stepped on the toe brake and pushed the throttle forward to MIL. Yukikaze’s nose sank as she knelt forward, her front shock absorbers contracting as they held back the terrific forward thrust to keep her stationary.
The target was moving into the aiming reticule. Without a moment’s hesitation, Rei squeezed the trigger. The Vulcan cannon roared, throwing fifty rounds of ammunition at the target in 0.5-second bursts. He kept firing. Yukikaze shook. Before he’d exhausted his ammunition, the machine cannon drive system began flashing an overheat warning. He ignored it and continued to fire.
Ahead of him, flashes of light ran left and right along the forest edge, their centers forming expanding blue white hemispheres. The explosions merged into an intense ball of light, too bright to look at directly.
Cease fire. Check the displays. The standard radar remained silent, but the passive airspace radar detected something.
A bright point appeared in front of the symbol marking their plane’s position. The point became a disc, and then the disc rapidly expanded.
Outside the plane, it was getting brighter and brighter. A line was moving across the display toward the mark indicating the plane. The shock-wave front was sweeping toward them. There was no way to avoid it.
There was a violent impact. The engines stalled.
Yukikaze was in the air. She was in free fall.
The engines automatically restarted.
“Lieutenant? What’s going on?”
“It looks like I’ll be able to get you back on schedule.”
They were in the skies of Faery. It was near sunset. Rei checked his instruments. The warning tone and the HUD display were telling him to pull up, signaling that if he didn’t the system would automatically do so at four Gs. Air intake temperature had risen to nearly 700°C, but it was still running a little cold. Before exceeding an airspeed of 250 knots, he lifted his leg. No abnormalities. The only indication of the extra time they’d spent was on the onboard clock.
“It really was a fairyland,” Lander muttered. “If it wasn’t for this injury, I’d swear it was just a hallucination. I still can’t believe it.”
Rei felt the same way.
THE FAF SEEMED ready to believe that the incident had been real. As a TAF plane escorted them back, Rei told the authorities what had happened. Upon landing, Yukikaze was washed down with enormous amounts of water to neutralize any possible radioactive contamination while Rei and Lander were isolated for biohazard prevention. Lander’s hand was operated on by a surgeon wearing what looked like a space suit for protection. Rei used the copious time he spent in the tiny isolation room to finish up his written report and answer all sorts of questions.
It was three weeks before the two men were let out of the isolation chambers and released from the tedious examinations. They drank a toast, and true to his word, it was on Rei. Afterward, Lander returned to Earth and Rei returned to normal duty.
Rei was subjected to more psychological tests by Dr. Halevy. They were cognition games designed to produce mock abnormal events to tax his mental processes and then gauge his reactions. It seemed nothing more than child’s play to him. Compared to the actual abnormal events he’d just survived, the doctor’s tests seemed positively innocent by comparison, and so Rei played along as best he could out of a curious sympathy. As a result, the tests proceeded well and he was free of them sooner than he had expected.
About a week later, he was eating in the mess hall and thinking about what the hell that yellow swamp was when Major Booker clapped him on the shoulder and sat down next to him, handing over a magazine as he did.
“‘A Report from the Front Lines of Faery,’ by Mr. Andrew Lander. Read it yet?”
“Does he mention me?”
“Not at all, but he wrote a lot of good things about Yukikaze. Aside from that, it’s his usual stuff.”
“I wonder how his injury’s doing.”
“Fine, I suppose. The doctors here are used to trauma like that. But they were mad that you didn’t bring his hand back with you.”
“There was nothing to bring back. It was weird. Everything past his wrist was just gone, like it had evaporated.”
“Yeah, I saw that in your report. I don’t know if I’d believe it if you didn’t have Yukikaze’s data file to back you up. You know how the ADC dealt with it when they lost track of Yukikaze? You’ll love this. They decided their displays were malfunctioning. Even though a plane had just vanished from this world for thirty seconds.”
The Tactical Air Force was smarter in its reactions than the Aerospace Defense Corps. Their tactical computers had picked up Yukikaze the instant she escaped from hyperspace — Yukikaze’s combat data system automatically linked up with the TAF computers — and had dispatched the nearest interceptor to assist them.
