made its way back no one exchanged a word.
YUKIKAZE FLEW TOWARD Faery Base, supercruising at an altitude of thirty thousand meters. It flew alone.
Second Lieutenant Rei Fukai looked out of the cockpit at the dark blue sky spread out around him. Night was coming on and he could see the first stars. Below him, the planet Faery was ablaze with twilight colors. Soon it would match the color of the sky. Faery’s binary suns glowed crimson above the horizon, their mutual gravitational attraction pulling them into flattened elliptical shapes. A jet of dark red gas could clearly be seen spouting out of one of them. It arced up to the sky’s zenith, looking for all the world like the Milky Way, but instead of a pearly white it was a red suggestive of the color of blood. This enormous whirlpool of erupting gas formed what looked like a bloodstained path, and so it had been named the “Bloody Road.”
Rei set the cockpit illumination to its lowest level and lifted his gaze from the instrumentation. Nothing was out of the ordinary. It was quiet. He thought back to the battle just fought by the 666th TFS.
Delta 4 had broken into a hard-right diving turn but couldn’t shake the JAM fighter.
A pilot who couldn’t control his plane perfectly was a dead man. To Rei, that was the natural order of things. Emotions had no place in battle. A fighter plane feels nothing, and a pilot is a part of the plane. Therefore, a pilot who couldn’t set aside his emotions and become one with his plane was no warrior. And with someone like that piloting it, even a high-performance fighter would be no match for the enemy. And then that fighter would be —
Yukikaze’s wide-area radar warning receiver chimed an alert.
“What’s up?” Rei asked his backseater, the electronic warfare officer. “Verify that.”
“Not sure,” the other man replied. “The passive warning system’s activated, but I can’t track the location. It could be a bogey.”
“A bogey?” asked Rei. “Then... It’s gotta be a JAM. Find it.” Saying that, he switched on the fire control system and set the radar to long-range, moving target auto-search mode. The target was entering radar range.
“Target sighted,” the EWO called out. “It’s small. A fighter. Pretty fast. Speed is two-point-nine and he’s nose-on. We should merge in approximately two minutes.”
Rei checked the moving target indicator. Was the other craft a hostile? A friendly? But the MTI’s display simply showed it as UNKNOWN.
“What is it?” Rei asked.
“Negative on the IFF.” If there was no response on the Identification, Friend or Foe system, then...
“It’s a hostile,” said Rei.
He entered the unknown craft into his tactical computer as an enemy. The system automatically adjusted the radar search pattern, frequency, power output, and pulse width to their optimal efficiency and tracked the target.
“Hey, Boss?” said the EWO. “We should confirm this first. It might be a friendly. Maybe their IFF’s off-line. I doubt any JAM would be flying around here.”
The unknown plane was closing fast, its course unwavering, on a straight line for Yukikaze.
“Lieutenant, take evasive action.”
In response to the rapidly approaching target, the tactical computer switched the radar mode to super search and automatically locked on to the target.
“Okay, let’s reconfirm this. What is that thing? Contact them on the emergency channel.”
“I’m trying, but there’s no response. Looks like their communications equipment is out.”
Yukikaze turned ninety degrees and dived. The unknown plane climbed rapidly, opening from them. However, Rei could still easily track it: Yukikaze was equipped with a powerful, omni-directional pulse Doppler radar that could accurately detect the target and display its location, velocity, and acceleration data on the MTI.
The target banked steeply and began to dive toward Yukikaze at high speed.
“He’s a hostile,” said Rei. “I’m engaging.”
“It’s not a JAM!”
“How do you know that?”
As Yukikaze pulled a sudden high-G evasive turn, from his seat in the rear the EWO caught sight of the unknown craft nipping at their heels. It was just under a kilometer away, a large fighter plane glittering in the light of the setting suns. Via the digital camera in their tactical reconnaissance pod he could make out the distinctive, sharply pointed twin vertical stabilizers on its back.
“You see that, Lieutenant Fukai?” he called out over the com. “That’s a Sylph. A Sylphid.”
“A Sylph? Who’s it attached to?”
“Unknown.”
Rei loosened his turn radius and craned his neck back to look in the direction his partner indicated. The other craft was closing on them. It was definitely the same model of plane as Yukikaze. It was now initiating a high-G turn to try and come around to their twelve o’clock. Rei rechecked the IFF. UNKNOWN was Yukikaze’s reply. Then, detecting the waves of enemy targeting radar, it signaled that the unknown plane was preparing to attack.
Rei set the master arm switch to ARM. The stores control panel displayed his onboard armaments. RDY GUN, RDY AAM III-4. Their antiaircraft gun and four short-range air-to-air missiles. He had no long-range missiles to fire.
“I’m shooting it down,” said Rei as he hit the dogfight switch.
“Stop! It’s not an enemy! That’s a Sylph!”
Before his EWO could finish speaking, Rei banked Yukikaze steeply, then burned into a combat climb to face his target, performing a 180 degree head-on snap-up as he prepared to attack. The radar switched to boresight mode. He squeezed the trigger. The antiaircraft cannon fired a burst. No hit. The unknown plane had evaded him. He turned again, maneuvered to about 900 meters behind it and attacked from the rear. The remaining ammo indicator now read zero. Still no hits.
“Have you lost you mind, Lieutenant Fukai?!”
The unknown dived to the right, with Yukikaze in pursuit. It went into a six-G turn to try and come around to Yukikaze’s rear, but Rei pulled six-and-one-half Gs at the maximum angle of attack and closed to a range of less than 400 meters.
He now could see the unknown clearly with his own eyes. It was a Sylphid. But he didn’t abort his attack. His IFF couldn’t determine if the unknown aircraft was a friendly or not, and as far as Rei was concerned, if it wasn’t a friendly, it was a hostile. Yukikaze’s central computer wasn’t canceling its warning, and the unknown was still preparing to attack. If he had hesitated while wondering if it was friendly or not, Yukikaze would already have been shot down. Although his eyes told him that the other plane was an FAF fighter, it had to be a JAM. He was certain of this. It was a formidable enemy too, as fast and maneuverable as Yukikaze.
Rei pressed the missile release button. There was no launch. The fire control system readout on his head-up display was warning him that the target was too close. The FCS had calculated the relative velocities of the unknown aircraft and Yukikaze, and had used those figures to determine the minimum safety range for the short- range missiles. It had come up with a value of 450 meters; firing a missile any closer than that would endanger the plane that launched it.
Rei pushed the missile release button again and held it down, commanding the central computer to ignore the FCS’s warning and execute an emergency attack. If he missed this chance, they could be killed in the next instant. The central computer issued the order to attack, and the subordinate tactical computer then overrode the FCS and cleared the minimum mode from the missile seeker’s armament control. In that instant, the missile was launched from Yukikaze’s belly.
The range was less than 370 meters. Yukikaze withdrew quickly, but the unknown executed a sudden Split S
