out.
Touchdown. Auto-brake. Speed brakes extended to full.
A SKY FAIRY, a sylph, was flying. It soared on glittering, translucent wings, scattering golden particles of light as it went, flaxen hair fluttering behind it. White skin, almond-shaped silver eyes, red lips engraved with an odd smile. Gently curving breasts without nipples, taut thighs, long, slender legs.
A sylph, a fairy of the wind. It flew freely through the skies, rising upon gentle breezes, churning up fierce gales.
The sylph bent both knees at right angles, its lower legs quickly tapering off to knifelike vertical points. It reached its arms back and grasped its wings, which angled back and turned opaque. Its head elongated and darkened to gray.
Large thrust engines ignited. A Sylphid. Twin vertical stabilizers. Clipped delta wings. Underneath the canopy sill was its name. Small, written in kanji characters. Yukikaze.
It flew at supersonic speed, its shock wave mowing down the forests of Faery.
It was Yukikaze. Rei was watching Yukikaze fly. He was in the cockpit. But then, who was he now watching this? Yukikaze turned and approached him. Rei looked at the cockpit. There was nobody in it.
Yukikaze flew away faster than the speed of sound and vanished into the empty sky.
“YUKIKAZE...”
“Are you awake?”
Rei opened his eyes. He was covered in sweat. The pain of reality. A bandage was wound around his head. From his right eye, he saw only blackness.
“My eye... My right eye!”
“Calm down.”
The Faery Base military doctor held down Rei’s shoulders as he tried to get up.
“It’s not that bad a wound, but it’s a miracle you didn’t lose your sight in that eye. Some fragments of your helmet visor were embedded in your right temple. If it’d been a little worse, you probably never would have flown again. You’re a lucky man.”
“What about Yukikaze? How damaged is she?”
“Your beloved plane? Well, I don’t treat fighters, so I wouldn’t know about that. Just get some rest, and then you can get out of bed and go check yourself. The vice-commander of the SAF is calling for you, by the way. She wants you to report to her.”
“General Cooley? That old bitch. If I was dead, she’d probably have me dug up out of my grave to report to her.”
“They’re thinking of court-martialing you.”
“For what?”
“Do you need a sedative?”
“Of course not. You can’t fly when you’re fucked up.”
The doctor gave him a look full of doubt, and then shrugged.
“Well, you were sent to Faery because you’re guilty of something. But I’m not going to pass judgment on you. Just keep quiet and do what you’re told, and in two or three years your tour of duty will be up. If you want to get back to Earth faster, don’t go causing trouble.”
“Look. First of all, to me Earth’s just a big ball of water filled with a lot of bitter memories. Second, what do you mean if I want to get back sooner I should keep quiet? You saying I should just shut up and let the JAM kill me? Screw that. You either kill or get killed out there.”
Now the doctor’s expression shifted to one of active disdain.
“Is that how you lived back on Earth?”
“My past is none of your goddamned business.”
“I figure a normal person would want to get away from the battlefield as soon as possible. But there seem to be more and more of your kind lately. The soldiers of the Special Air Force really are ‘special,’ aren’t they? Have you ever read
“‘The Space Heavenly Body Treaty’? Is there even such a thing?”
“It was around long before we ever discovered Faery. ‘The general principles limiting national activities regarding the exploration and exploitation of the Moon and any other heavenly bodies comprising space.’ In the end, the United Nations established the Earth Defense Force as an independent entity, which led to the establishment of the Faery Air Force. Members don’t advocate any one-sided ideologies and it has none. It just requires you to be human. The FAF is now a truly supranational group. Its reputation is good, but the truth is that the quality of its members has been gradually dropping as nations use it as a dumping ground to get rid of their criminals and malcontents. The FAF is like humanity’s garbage dump. A prison annex. I figured it out before that you weren’t just a normal criminal. I can tell just by looking at you. That there must be some other reason why you’re such a coldhearted, inhuman killer. You’re like a machine.”
Rei had begun to tune out during the doctor’s lecture, distracted by the throbbing pain in his head, but a surge of irritation brought him back.
“You’re the same, aren’t you? You were sent to Faery too.”
“I chose to come here for research. I’m not like you. I didn’t choose to join the FAF because I’d committed a crime and didn’t want to go to prison. Let me ask you: you were trained to be a fighter pilot using conditioned response through a direct neural interface, weren’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“I wish I could have seen what your personality data was like before they did it. I’d like to know if your current personality was caused by the training destroying your previous one or not.”
Anger was now burning in the pit of Rei’s stomach.
“And what would you do if you knew? Claim that I’m inhuman? Humanity has nothing to do with fighting the JAM, because
“That’s true. But I wasn’t saying it was a question of one’s humanity.”
“Didn’t you go through the training, too?”
“No. I don’t fly a fighter.”
“But you’re a lot like me, aren’t you? You only value what you’re interested in and couldn’t care less about anything else. This isn’t some aftereffect of my training. I haven’t changed at all. I hate anything that can’t do the job, whether it’s a human or a machine. And I’ve had enough of you. Let me see my data from the medical computer. My chart. I’ll let the computer decide if I can leave or not. I’m done with you. Get out. You’re pissing me off.”
Rei got up off the bed and undid the bandage around his head. He touched the wound. Just as the doctor had said, it didn’t seem very deep. He tried to open his right eye, then squeezed it shut when the bright light hit it. The wound opened up and began oozing blood. The doctor left the room without a word. Rei did not rewind the bandage and instead just pressed the wadded-up mass to the wound.
A nurse arrived and made a fuss over his undone bandage. As she was getting ready to rewind it, Rei brushed her off and demanded that she just put an adhesive over the wound. She did what he told her to do.
PEOPLE WERE ALWAYS asking him, “What were you thinking?” or “Why did you do that?” And that was what the uniformed military court-martial judge asked him too.
“Why did you shoot down an ally aircraft, Lieutenant Fukai?”
“It was a JAM.”
“Your gun camera took pictures of a Sylphid.”
“It was a JAM. It wasn’t responding to me. The IFF read it as an unknown, and I made a decision.”
