Good Luck, Yukikaze

bewildered as to why he’d been spoken to like that. Red-faced, he saluted silently and left the command center.

6

ONE INCIDENT YOU could write off as seeing it wrong, but Lieutenant Mayle had twice seen Yukikaze, at close visual range, open fire at the ground.

“It’s killed someone,” he yelled. As he tore toward TAB-15 with the throttle maxed, he heard a voice from the base on an open-air channel say that Second Lieutenant Lancome had apparently been killed.

He couldn’t confirm with anyone from the base. Lots of information poured in during the battle. It wasn’t unusual for someone not to hear someone else clearly, leaving you to rely on your own judgment. Of course, two- way real-time communication was possible using advanced circuits, with the transmitter’s code automatically sent to show up on a plane’s main display to identify the sender. However, in battle, there was no time to verify the facts. To the contrary, in battle, your ability to think deteriorates. The guy who stops to think winds up dead. You had to fly your plane with the same sort of instincts that jerk your hand back when it touches a hot stove.

So, with the high G forces and sheer terror making his mental faculties undependable, a fighter pilot has to not only evade threats but also counterattack. That was just part of the job description, which was why Lieutenant Mayle pursued Yukikaze and locked weapons on her without a second thought. He told his flight officer behind him that they were engaging.

“That’s an SAF plane. It’s one of ours!” he shouted back.

“Fuck it. That thing killed Jonathan. You heard, didn’t you?”

Second Lieutenant Jonathan Lancome was one of Lieutenant Mayle’s subordinates. He was a pilot. He was one of them. The JAM had shot him down once, but he’d made it back. And now he’d been killed by friendly fire?

As a general rule, the plane you flew was assigned specifically to you. In an emergency you might fly someone else’s plane or a reserve fighter, but the 505th had lost its reserve planes. Consequently, a great many flight personnel weren’t operating with the squadron. Until a new plane was assigned to them, they were mixed into ad hoc teams to fly sorties, some were given leave, others moved into other squadrons, and some were even given non-pilot duties. Lieutenant Yagashira had been promoted, but that hadn’t been the case for Lieutenant Lancome. The FAF hadn’t approved leave for anyone, so he’d been put on maintenance duty. Lancome had said once that he no longer had the confidence to be a pilot. For Lieutenant Mayle’s part, he wanted to keep Lieutenant Lancome as flight personnel and just relax the normally rigid system of plane assignment, but he’d lost the desire to push for this new policy when Lancome had admitted his fears. It wasn’t easy to shake the fear instilled by having the JAM shoot your plane out from under you.

Poor Jonathan, Mayle thought. He died on the ground, killed by a friendly plane.

Without hesitation, Lieutenant Mayle maneuvered to shoot Yukikaze down. Gripping the flight stick in his right hand and the throttle in his left, he banked steeply at her. As Yukikaze flew away from TAB-15, she responded to Mayle’s combat maneuvers. She turned, as though inviting him to follow.

“It wants to fight,” the flight officer said. “What do you think?”

Lieutenant Mayle kept his mouth shut and ignited the afterburners. But then the plane began to vibrate again, a combustion status abnormality warning sounding. Yukikaze banked sharply and Lieutenant Mayle lost sight of her.

As he banked hard to follow, a shivering shock wave struck them. Unbelievably, Yukikaze had turned around and flown past them, almost close enough to touch. As the shock wave and the air currents it stirred up assaulted the left wing, it suddenly lost lift, sending Lieutenant Mayle’s plane into a quick left roll. At the same time, it apparently ripped the main wing’s forward flaps right off. The flight officer craned his neck around and confirmed that a fragment of them had damaged their vertical stabilizers.

Despite this, the plane’s flight computers instantly began working every control surface, dutifully stabilizing the plane as Lieutenant Mayle desired.

“The problem’s in the engine,” Lieutenant Mayle shouted, but even as he said it, the engine alarm warning lamp remained dark. The plane dove then climbed, its speed falling to barely two hundred kilometers per hour. Mayle dove into a turn at full throttle, trying to shake Yukikaze loose.

He ignited the afterburner again, trying to accelerate at full power. He managed to rev it to maximum for about three seconds, but that was followed by a loud bang from the engine on the right that shook the plane. It looked like the turbine blades in the engine had been damaged. At the same time, the compressor in his left engine stalled and flamed out.

Wrestling the plane out of the resulting tailspin took everything Mayle had, leaving him no time to attempt an engine restart. He managed to stabilize it scant moments before augering into the ground, using the speed of the dive to climb higher.

The right engine looked like it wasn’t on fire, at least, but it was completely useless now. He tried and failed to restart the left. Now robbed of any thrust at all, the plane’s climb weakened, then transitioned into a slow descent. The engine noise had ceased, and it was quiet now. Lieutenant Mayle looked to his right and saw Yukikaze flying next to them, so close that he could reach his right hand out and almost touch her. From her position, he got the feeling that she was flying to keep a constant watch over them. It managed to beat me without firing a single shot, Lieutenant Mayle thought numbly. It was possible in a dogfight to stall your opponent’s engines out, assuming you had absolute confidence in your plane’s maneuverability. That thing had just demonstrated the technique on him.

Mayle silently made a fist with his right hand and held it up, signaling his flight officer that they were about to eject. The light of Faery’s twin suns glittered off of Yukikaze’s canopy, her cockpit unmanned. It’s like the plane itself is laughing at us, thought Lieutenant Mayle.

He didn’t want to think about anything anymore. When they reached the right altitude, they ejected.

As he floated down beneath his parachute, Mayle watched Faery’s forests swallow up his plane and Yukikaze. She had lowered her engine output and flown alongside Mayle’s plane. Just as it looked like she was grazing the forest canopy, Yukikaze’s exhaust ports flared brightly. In a second, she was turning away at full power, afterburners lit, and a moment later she was out of sight. Then the roar of her engines reached him, followed a moment later by the explosion of his plane as it self-destructed.

Forget avenging Jonathan’s death, it’s a miracle I’m still alive, Lieutenant Mayle thought with a shiver. That thing, that Yukikaze... It’s a monster. Let it fight the JAM. The JAM aren’t human, so let one inhuman freak fight another. Why did he even have to be here in the first place?

As Lieutenant Mayle fell, looking at the canopy of his flight officer’s parachute a bit below him, he thought about how he never wanted to fly a fighter again. Now he understood how Lieutenant Lancome had felt. The enemy they’d come to fight, the enemy of the FAF, weren’t human. These unknown aliens they called the JAM. These unknowable opponents.

That was the first time Lieutenant Mayle experiened his true feelings in his flesh. The enemy was incomprehensible to humans. Terms like win or lose were completely meaningless as far as the JAM were concerned, so there was no way that humanity could ever win this war, was there? And in a flash, he understood just as well that all you could do was accept that your being alive didn’t matter at all in this world.

It wasn’t even the JAM who taught me that, but an unmanned plane called Yukikaze that had been created by humans, thought Lieutenant Mayle, a strange chill in his heart. As he thought about how the plane that had left him feeling so utterly helpless was of a kind with the JAM, the shock of landing on the surface of Faery’s thick forest was more intense than he’d expected. The sensation of striking the spongelike alien vegetation — it shone with a metallic brilliance like some beautiful illusion — felt pleasant to him.

7

WITHOUT ANY WARNING at all, Rei Fukai found himself aboard a plane.

His right hand grasping a flight stick and his left on the throttle lever. He looked around for the control button. He lifted his left hand and touched it to his head. He could feel a helmet through a flight glove. There was a mask on his mouth.

Outside were the skies of Faery. Rei looked around the interior of the cockpit. He’d never seen it before. This