couple of shots at it. He gave the door a sharp kick and it opened onto a stairwell. He started climbing. Upon reaching the uppermost level, he spotted what looked like an exit, a doorway glowing with daylight. He ran through it...
And emerged into a bizarre landscape. It didn’t look like Faery. He was standing at the edge of a flat, smooth plain that stretched out before him like a sheet of blue ice. Thick clouds hung so low it seemed as if he could reach out and touch them. The underground entrance he’d just emerged from was situated in a forest, and around him the trees shimmered in metallic green hues. Looking back through the strange trees he saw a pond. A pond that glowed a sickly yellow. The surface roiled, as if the liquid were boiling.
He shifted his gaze back toward the open space ahead of him. There was a strip of transparent, plastic-like ground that could have been a runway. He followed it with his eyes and found Yukikaze. She was sitting on level ground about 400 meters away. He left the cover of the forest and ran toward her. He concentrated on his objective, blocking out the fact that he was completely out in the open now, an easy target.
He saw two figures approaching Yukikaze. Pilots who were going to steal her from him. JAM.
Panting for breath, Rei screamed at them to stop. One of them turned at the sound. The strength abruptly drained from Rei’s shooting arm. It was Lieutenant Burgadish.
“Lieutenant...”
Rei began to doubt his own senses, wondering if he really was mentally ill. Was this entire bizarre sequence a hallucination?
He took several steps forward, then saw the man standing beside Burgadish and froze in shock.
He was looking at himself.
“JAM!”
He fired, and the other Rei went down. Pain lashed through his right side. He saw Lieutenant Burgadish holding a gun and fired back. Burgadish crumpled and several rapid shots from Rei’s gun ended his life.
Rei put a hand to his side. The familiar, distinct smell of blood wafted up. He was bleeding badly.
He approached the two bodies and looked down at them. He didn’t think they were JAM. These were androids, created by the JAM. The JAM, who had until now ignored humans, were working out a strategy to target them here. They were creating weapons. Organic antipersonnel weapons. Just as humans had made Yukikaze, the JAM were now making humans. The aliens probably had only a tenuous understanding of human existence. To fight humanity, they probably needed to manufacture weapons that could sense a human at the same level as a human. The same way that humans were using computers to analyze the JAM. If so, it was another piece of evidence that the JAM were mechanical life-forms.
And if so, the parameters of the war had shifted from machines made by humans fighting the JAM to humans made by the JAM fighting humans. The insanity of the situation tore at Rei’s mind. Even though the JAM and humanity could barely comprehend the others’ existences, they were being forced to fight for the sake of the weapons they both made. The JAM may have been even more vexed than the humans, wondering why a machine like Yukikaze, who was like one of their own kind, was attacking them.
Rei approached Yukikaze, hauled himself up the boarding ladder, and climbed into the cockpit. He was relieved to see that the ejection seat seemed to have been properly installed. He couldn’t stop the bleeding from the gunshot wound in his side. Pressing his left hand to the wound, he started the engines.
Looking out of the cockpit, Rei saw a yellow mass headed for Yukikaze. It looked like the same substance that had filled the pond in the forest. As it flowed toward them across the flat ground, it morphed and reformed like protoplasm. Shapes would rise from the ooze and melt back into it again as it moved. Human shapes. Human limbs and heads and torsos. Above them swirled a glinting cloud of small black objects, like a giant swarm of bees.
Were those insect-like forms the JAM? He switched Yukikaze’s ECM system on. Her engines roared. Parking brake, off. The canopy lowered and locked.
“Let’s go home, Yukikaze.”
The humanoid mass pressed up against Yukikaze’s body. He slid the throttle to MIL, incinerating the portion behind them. Yukikaze turned, accelerated, and took off. Landing gear, up. FCS, ON. Master arm switch to ARM. They shot into a climbing turn. A cold sweat had broken out on Rei’s brow, and he could feel the blood pooling in his flight suit.
Yukikaze fired her last remaining high-velocity missile into the black swarm of insects. The flare of the detonation, like a miniature sun, temporarily robbed Rei of his sight.
When he opened his eyes, Yukikaze was flying in familiar airspace. She was going slow, almost brushing the canopy of Faery’s forest. Rei looked up at the blue sky. The gunshot wound hurt like hell, but he felt a lot better.
But the threat hadn’t vanished. As they began to accelerate and climb, Yukikaze’s radar picked up three JAM fighters to the rear, practically on top of them. Flying as low and slow as they were, there was no way for them to evade.
There was a burst of cannon fire. Yukikaze’s right vertical stabilizer shattered. Fire spouted from the right engine.
Describing a wide turn, she plunged toward the forest.
Rei lost consciousness. When he came to, he realized that he had miraculously survived. They had made an emergency landing on the spongy surface of forest canopy, which was dozens of yards thick, robust enough to support the fighter’s weight. The JAM hadn’t withdrawn but had ceased their attack.
Rei closed his eyes. He doubted he could pull the eject lever, and he didn’t even feel like trying.
This was the death he’d always imagined.
He heard a beep. Rei slitted his eyes open. He had the fanciful thought that Yukikaze was saying goodbye to him. As he looked at the multidisplay his eyesight grew dim. He slowly reached out and turned the brightness control up. On the screen was the symbol for a single TAF plane flying toward them.
The canopy was now dyed crimson with the light of the flames burning behind him.
However, she then did something he couldn’t have anticipated, a singular action beyond anything he could have imagined. His eyes widened as he read the display.
LINK-FRX00-05003. TRANS-CCIF.
“What?”
TRANSFERRING CORE FUNCTIONS OF SAF-V UNIT 3 TO FRX00.
Rei screamed at her to stop, but no sound came from his throat.
Yukikaze was... She was abandoning this aircraft. She was abandoning him.
Glowing columns of numbers and characters began to flow down the display. Yukikaze was transferring her central combat information file to the FRX. There was nothing Rei could do to stop it.
He became aware that his vision was growing dark. He couldn’t hear anything. He couldn’t see anything... He had the sensation that he was soaring. In skies where fairies danced. Faery airspace.
TRANS-CCIF COMPLETE. blinked on the display. Rei didn’t see it.
Yukikaze had kept him aboard to initiate the self-destruct sequence in case the need for it arose during the transfer. As soon as the transfer was complete, she ejected him. He was thrown clear of Yukikaze and into the air, but he was long past the point of consciousness.
MAJOR JAMES BOOKER sat in the rear seat of FRX00-05003, monitoring the new plane’s electronic warfare armaments.
Just after they acquired the three enemy planes, he noticed an abnormality in the FRX’s central computer. Its learning section was still fairly clean, but the rest of it began to run wild.
