Good Luck, Yukikaze

wasn’t the layout of a Super Sylph’s cockpit, but it wasn’t unfamiliar to him either. The control and display layout was essentially the same.

This was Yukikaze. He was aboard Yukikaze.

Rei’s left hand shot back to the throttle, needing to confirm through thought what he was doing by instinct. In his helmet, a warning alarm like a scream from Yukikaze was resounding: Wake up! it seemed to shriek at him. Wake up! Wake up! It seemed real to him.

Yukikaze needed Rei. A situation had arisen that was beyond her normal functions, and she was screaming for him to switch the combat maneuvering system to manual.

The words MANUAL CONTROL flashed urgently on the main display panel. It was the first time he’d ever seen that warning. It was as though Yukikaze were saying “Save me,” or perhaps even “I need you.” It was a bitter call; she was telling Rei that if he didn’t wake up completely, she couldn’t handle the situation and the JAM were going to shoot her down.

This wasn’t a hallucination or a dream. She was going to be destroyed. Rei could feel that the threat was real. The JAM were coming. They were after him. Rei quickly toggled the automaneuver switch off, telling Yukikaze that he would handle this. The display reading MANUAL CONTROL stopped blinking and stayed steadily lit.

Rei was awake, but what was he doing here? What had happened to Yukikaze? Dreams and reality were hard to separate in the past from which he had come, where he’d had no sense of time passing. It was as if he’d awakened with somebody else’s memories. He had to find some way to separate out the dreams and the fantasies in these memories that were not his own, to link the past to the reality he found himself in at this moment. He had to take these fragments of memory and reassemble them like a jigsaw puzzle.

But he wouldn’t need time or effort to assemble the puzzle. He was sure that, if he just got hold of the thread of his consciousness, which had awakened in this ocean called reality, his self would instantly crystallize into existence. Into the ambiguous dream space through which he’d drifted, fading, coming to the brink of extinction, had plunged Yukikaze’s shout to awaken. That alarm was the nucleus around which his self would reform.

“It’s the same as Lieutenant Mayle’s plane,” said the flight officer sitting behind him. It was like that other time, and Rei knew that these half-awake memories of the past were reality. And so, his thoughts now affirming that his complete self was properly crystallizing, he heard the voice from the rear.

“Hey, Jack,” Rei called out to the flight officer sitting behind him. “Calm down. Even with the engine output restricted, with a little skill, we can’t lose. I’ll show you how it’s done.”

“Rei... it is you, isn’t it?”

“Of course it is! I’m no JAM. Quit talking like you’re half-asleep!”

“You’re one to talk,” Booker shot back, “seeing how you’re finally awake! Christ almighty...”

“Shut your mouth! I don’t want you puking back there!” Rei yelled.

“Don’t try any extreme maneuvers. Your body won’t take it in your condition. Just get after Unit 13. Do what it takes. Yukikaze’s been contaminated by the JAM.”

There were three JAM in pursuit. When he dodged the two missiles they fired with some high-speed maneuvers, Rei could feel exactly what Major Booker had meant. He didn’t have the strength for a dogfight. Rei could feel that the FRX00 was a terrific dogfighter, and he hadn’t even used it at 100 percent of its capabilities yet. If he unleashed all of its potential, it might kill him. Rei realized that Yukikaze hadn’t summoned him to guide her through a dogfight. What was necessary right now was to shake off the JAM at maximum speed and get after SAF Unit 13 flying ahead of him.

But he couldn’t get the engines up to full thrust. Just like Lieutenant Mayle’s plane. The cause was the AICS. Yeah, just like the tactical computer back at SAF control had said. No doubt about it.

“THE AICS?” REI recalled Major Booker asking from his personal terminal booth in the SAF command center that he used to talk to the tactical computer.

Correct.

Rei had looked with vacant eyes at the response printed out by the tactical computer on the display. General Cooley was in the booth too. Nobody else was in the huge control center outside of the booth. The lights had been set low.

To these three humans alone in the SAF, the tactical computer in SAF headquarters had presented the information Yukikaze had gathered about the abnormalities in the planes of the 505th Tactical Fighter Squadron: General Cooley, Major Booker, and the still vaguely conscious and wheelchair-bound Lieutenant Fukai.

The tactical computer had strongly urged Major Booker that Rei be there with them. Rei had regained the ability to talk for the first time in ninety-three days, but he still wasn’t able to access his own memories. Major Booker had wanted to immediately send Rei to the central FAF medical facility, but the tactical computer had rightly pointed out that there was a possibility that the information in Rei’s memories was crucial and should be accessed immediately. Since it proposed that it would be best to stimulate him and retrieve those memories in secret from other corps in the FAF and others in the SAF, the major had reconsidered.

The proposal made by the combat intelligence within the tactical computer was half suggestion and half direct order. It had a strong interest in whatever information Rei and Yukikaze had gathered. If the CI had any emotions, Major Booker sensed that its concern was tinged with fear, dread, and tension, and so he’d agreed with its proposal. The computer proceeded to question Rei.

The incident ninety-three days earlier. Who shot you in the stomach? What happened?

Rei answered mechanically. It felt like he wasn’t accessing his memories by his own will, but rather was giving words in response to an external stimuli by accessing the part of his memory devoted to answering questions. While Rei himself knew that he was talking, he seemed to do so in somebody else’s voice, showing no interest in what he was talking about or in his surroundings.

He had been shot by another Rei Fukai, he said. A human copy created by the JAM. Some sort of antihuman weapon the JAM created from the mirror images of the molecules that make up humans, he went on. He didn’t know how long he had been at their base, but when they saw that he couldn’t digest food made from the same optical isomer material, they had ended up feeding him meat from the body of his dead flight officer, Lieutenant Burgadish.

Major Booker and General Cooley remained silent, listening to the mechanical exchange between Rei and the CI. They couldn’t interrupt. The questions the CI asked were precise, unswayed by emotion, fear, or unease.

Had the major opened his mouth, he figured he would have said, “Impossible!” or “I don’t believe it!” or some such meaningless nonsense, and so he remained silent and let the sentiments swirl in his heart. Rei has no such whirlpool in his heart, the major thought. As he listened to Rei’s disinterested speech, he found himself fighting a growing urge to shake him or punch him in the mouth.

After the tactical computer had extracted the information from Rei, it was silent for a while. Then it displayed, I predict that the cause of the thrust fault in the 505th TFS is in the AICS on the monitor. Major Booker objected to the sudden shift in topic, insisting that Rei was not yet fully conscious and that he needed further stimulation. However, the tactical computer ignored the major, playing back the information gathered by Yukikaze on the main display of the command center. Its explanation was clear.

During her combat maneuvers with Mayle’s plane, Yukikaze had gotten a clear optical scan of its air intake port. The ramps in the intake port controlled by the AICS were essentially movable planks that directed the flow of air into the engines. The major could see that they were not in their normal position. It was the shock waves up in the intake port that had limited the maneuverability of Mayle’s plane. The violently disrupted airflow had drastically reduced the engine’s combustion efficiency. The unfavorable conditions from the resulting superheating added to that had destroyed the engines.

The plane never would have reached the edge of the performance envelope except during combat. The Sylphid’s engines had blades that could maintain an even airflow even during extreme turbulence. However, in air combat, a pilot will push the engine output and rev them past their design limits — Mayle’s plane being a typical example of this. Flying at maximum speed to escape the JAM, the AICS units in the planes of the 505th had operated abnormally. With the air intake flow so disrupted, afterburner flames and black smoke streaming from the rear, it was only inevitable for the engines to either stall or for their output to fall. The pilot, probably half-panicked,