out “Yukikaze” in kanji characters had been the work of the major’s brush. It was so artistically stylized that even Rei had trouble reading them, but it was beautiful. And Rei also knew that Booker’s past was the opposite of what his face implied. After his initial tour of duty ended he had continued to serve by choice and had been on Faery for a long time now. He’d once been a fighter pilot but was now mainly in charge of aircraft maintenance and duty scheduling. Since pissing him off could result in losing leave time, Rei had initially kept a respectful distance from him.
Then one day, out of the blue, this strange major asked him if he believed in God. Rei wasn’t sure if it was a joke, or a test, or if he was just being hazed. When he decided to do the most prudent thing and stay silent, he got punched. There was an unwritten rule acknowledged by everyone in the FAF that ignoring rank was acceptable once you were back on the ground, so the major probably would have let it pass if Rei had punched him back. But Rei hadn’t done that. He didn’t turn the other cheek either, but simply licked the blood away and went back to reading the equipment inspection chart he had been studying. “I see,” said the major. “You’re like me, then.” Rei had hung out with him ever since.
“You said you were my new aide? Dammit, if you don’t learn to get along with the guys at the top, you’re gonna make trouble for us poor sods down below. Did Old Lady Cooley tell you anything about this job? Never mind, let’s head upstairs. We can talk once we’re up there.”
The two men rode a small, human-use elevator to the upper floors and entered the squadron’s private briefing room, the most notable feature of which was a broad expanse of window that looked out over the maintenance bay. No sorties were scheduled, so nobody was in it. It was a narrow room, but with a high ceiling and an open layout designed for a good field of vision. There was a lounge nearby that was nicer and also had a higher than usual ceiling, but the soldiers of Boomerang Squadron preferred this unassuming room. They treated it as their own, and various personal belongings and hobby items were left scattered around it: books on philosophy, trashy magazines, an abstract painting sitting on an easel, a box full of electronic parts, even a basket full of knitting. Major Booker picked up a curved piece of wood that was leaning against the wall and stroked it idly as he sat down.
“So... first lieutenant?”
“It’s not decided yet,” Rei replied as he placed a paper cup under the spout of the coffee maker. “Anyway, it’s not that big of a deal.”
There weren’t any enlisted soldiers on all of Faery: all personnel were commissioned officers. Once they had completed their training on Earth and were deployed to Faery for active duty, they were given the rank of second lieutenant. It may have been a ploy designed to improve the reputation of the FAF on the outside, but the result had been the historically unprecedented creation of an army consisting entirely of officers and not a single rank-and-file soldier. Fully half of them were second lieutenants. Effectively they played the same role as enlisted soldiers, but they had the power of numbers behind them, and it was from this that the dynamic arose for people to treat each other equally when they were on the ground. (Combat time, however, was a separate matter.) It was a convenient system, and there wasn’t a person on Faery who opposed it.
This system applied to everyone, from the command staff on down to the girls working the streets in the red-light districts. Prostitution had been decriminalized on Faery, and so the women had volunteered to come there and work for the military. Like any other segment of the armed forces, they had their own fixed hierarchy of ranks and pay grades. They didn’t wear uniforms and of course bore no insignia on their dresses, but you could generally tell who was higher ranked by the amount of makeup on their faces: the older and more accomplished they were, the less they wore. The women also possessed a strong sense of professional pride.
If one didn’t want to use the services of the military prostitutes there were plenty of other potential partners for romance, since there were about an equal number of women as men in the uniformed ranks. But “romance” perhaps was not the best term to describe these relationships, and the women were a tough lot. At least once a year a man would be shot in the name of “legitimate self-defense.”
“Anyway,” Major Booker continued, “the salary bump is nice. Back when I first got here, I couldn’t even afford to get drunk after the alimony payments to my ex.”
Rei thought the major’s wife might be Japanese but kept that speculation to himself.
“Here,” Rei said, setting down a cup of coffee. “You finished making the perfect boomerang there?”
“Thanks. No. And perfection isn’t necessarily something to be desired. This scar on my cheek is proof of that... Anyway, it doesn’t matter. The truth is, General Cooley drew the short straw in all this.”
The major put down the three-foot-long boomerang and sipped at his coffee.
“The first woman I banged when I came to Faery,” Rei said as he seated himself in a chair opposite, “was just like the general. She was a captain. She’d knock me down whenever I’d salute her. It was pathetic.”
“
“Young, huh? So what did you mean before about her drawing the short straw?”
“You hate having to line up, don’t you?”
“Huh?”
“I hear there’s some big-shot general from the Japanese air force coming to inspect us.”
“So?”
“So there’s your problem.”
“You mean...” Rei tried to imagine the squadron members assembling for review and guessed what the problem was. “You want me to be in an honor guard? Me? The boomerang soldier who fell from the sky? Should I present a boomerang over my shoulder, too? You gotta be kidding.”
“Every other squadron had pretty much the same reaction. So we had a lottery and General Lydia Cooley, deputy commander of the SAF, drew the lucky winner. And since the 5th hasn’t made an appearance at one of these things before, we got handed the collection plate.”
“I don’t want to do it.”
“That’s what everyone else said. It’s a mutiny. I don’t know what else to do. That wrinkled old hag told me to take care of it. Do you want to get me killed?”
“It’s not my fault we don’t have a formal honor guard.”
“That negative attitude isn’t going to get us anywhere. Come on, can’t you give me some useful advice on this?”
“How ’bout you stand out there by yourself, Major?” said Rei as he refilled his coffee cup. “I don’t think they’d shoot you for that.”
“A drop, a raindrop, a mote,” said the major. “Zero. That’s the meaning of your name, Rei.”
“Look, I was born trouble,” Rei replied without turning around, still standing in front of the coffee maker. “My parents split up right after I was born, and I was raised in a home along with plenty of other kids like me. But the truth is, I was happy back then.”
“Sounds depressing. What time is it?”
“Coming up on 1658 hours. Wanna check things out up top, Jack?”
“Sure,” said the major. “I’ll allow it.”
The two men left the briefing room and headed for a huge elevator bank on the opposite side of the hangar. They walked in silence. The major carried his boomerang.
Elevator Three, the closest one, was a hundred meters away, around a tractor and a maintenance ramp. There were no elevators just for people here. Rei grabbed a remote control box hanging on the wall and inserted his ID card into the top to activate it as they stepped onto the elevator floor.
“Shall we go?” said the major.
The thirty-by-twenty-meter-wide platform began to rise. As they ascended Rei kept his head tilted back, looking up the shaft. He’d always found the pattern made by the rings of light panels encircling it beautiful. The platform paused briefly as they waited for an isolation bulkhead above them to open. There were three of these bulkheads between them and the surface, each ensuring that its respective level was kept airtight. The elevator’s power source switched over at these points too; in the event of a failure, power drawn from the previous level would act as a backup system. Between each level there were also emergency bulkheads, each with their own independent power systems, which protected against fire, bombing, and contamination. At the last level, there was also a thick concrete blast wall that merged organically with the deck.
Once the platform stopped moving, the two men exited through an enormous square opening in the wall and were then on the planet’s surface. They were in the receiving hangar, although it was more of a shade port than an
