Good Luck, Yukikaze

Rei remembered Lieutenant Yagashira saying that in the hospital. That wasn’t a dream. In that case, it must have meant that he didn’t know that he’d been created by the JAM. He didn’t know that the original Yagashira was dead, his memories transferred into an exact duplicate.

“Yeah,” Rei said. “Lieutenant Yagashira came to the hospital. Said he wanted to be my friend. How long has it been since then?”

“Nine days,” the major replied. “If you don’t complete this mission successfully, I’m thinking of sending you back to Earth. I don’t want you connected to FAF weaponry and computers anymore. It was like you weren’t human.”

The thing was, Lieutenant Yagashira had seemed extremely human. Rei kept Yagashira’s Unit 13 in sight, still not entirely convinced that the man was a JAM weapon. Then Yagashira and the JAM fighter turned toward Yukikaze, assuming an intercept formation.

“He’s engaging,” Rei said.

“He’s panicking,” the major replied. “We didn’t tell him about Yukikaze’s current mission activities. None of the other FAF branches know either. If Yukikaze hadn’t come, he probably would have flown to a JAM base with his information and then flown back to the FAF. He’s a JAM tactical intelligence-gathering weapon. A JAM, not a human. Now that his cover’s been blown, he can’t let us get back to base alive. He’s desperate now. Either we kill him, or he kills us.”

“A JAM... weapon? Him?”

“Rei, don’t space out on me again. You’ve already met a JAM like him. You and that copy they made of you. Have you forgotten what you told us? This whole mission was designed to confirm that.”

Yeah, right. He had a feeling he’d heard something about that before takeoff. When the official announcement had come to send Unit 13 out unmanned to run the same mission the old Yukikaze had, Lieutenant Yagashira had suggested that he fly it. Major Booker had half-expected this, but overcame the dread striking him so squarely to approve the mission. He wouldn’t need a flight officer, Yagashira had said. He could do this alone.

“He might have been planning to desert,” the major said. “Like a JAM version of us recovering our recon pods. He probably thought he wasn’t in any danger.”

“Yeah,” Rei replied.

He’d said he admired Rei and Yukikaze so much that he wanted to fly the same mission. Rei remembered that. He’d seemed a little arrogant, but that was human too, wasn’t it? Much more so than the Boomerang pilots usually were, Rei thought.

“Rei, they’re going to get us!”

The other planes were still in range.

Unit 13 was armed with short-range missiles and a gun. With Yukikaze’s AICS still not running normally, she’d be at a disadvantage in a dogfight. If he was going to attack, now was the time. Rei selected his medium-range missiles for launch. He hesitated for an instant before firing them, but he had almost no margin left for any hesitation. Kill or be killed. He launched four shots simultaneously: two of the new variable-speed medium-range missiles and two hyper-velocity medium-range missiles.

He didn’t know how Lieutenant Yagashira saw all this, whether he saw himself as a JAM or, to the end, thought of himself as human. But right now, there was no doubt that his actions were those of a JAM.

The human part of him was already dead, Rei thought as he watched the display count down to the missiles’ reaching their target. But he was troubled by why he was still even worrying about that.

It was because he looked human. He wouldn’t have hesitated to fire at a JAM fighter plane, would he? Even though the JAM might even be planes themselves, he’d have no problem shooting them, right? The JAM might have counted on Rei’s reluctance to fire at something that looked human, but no matter what the weapon looked like, if he was facing a JAM there was no reason to hesitate. It was clear that Lieutenant Yagashira was a JAM. There was no doubt that was true, even without Major Booker telling him that. So then, why did he feel this way?

He wished they could have talked more. Rei realized that this emotion welling up within him had been the source of his hesitation. He had a feeling that he and this man could have understood each other.

“Everyone hates me,” Yagashira had said. “Even I can see that. They don’t care how other people feel. My old commander, Lieutenant Mayle, once told me that I was like a machine. They treated me like a machine, never talking to me. But in so doing, they became the real machines.”

In piloting his plane, he too felt himself growing closer to this machine he called Yukikaze. Perhaps that was why he could understand the feelings of a man who had been created by the JAM. The reasons didn’t matter; Rei had simply wanted to talk to Yagashira some more. If he was a weapon, if he was conscious of himself as a weapon, then he must know how a weapon feels. Did he understand Yukikaze’s feelings as well?

The JAM might have been able to understand the details of Yukikaze’s combat intelligence better than he could. Even so, the JAM were attacking. It was out of desperation, Rei thought. What is their objective? he wondered.

He saw the missiles hit with his naked eye. The JAM fighter exploded, followed by Yagashira’s plane.

He hadn’t seen the pilot bail out. The man who could have understood him was dead.

Was this sadness? Was this regret? It was complicated to deal with feelings bursting forth that he’d thought he’d lost a long time ago. He was the first person who had ever made him feel this way, and he’d been a JAM, Rei thought.

Banking Yukikaze sharply, Rei released control back to her and looked up at the sky. It was blue, and aside from the twin suns, it looked like the skies of Earth.

I want to go home, Rei thought. But where?

When he’d first come to the FAF, Rei had been aware of his desire to return to Earth.

“I feel like I’m finally awake,” he said, closing his eyes, thinking that if this was a dream too, it wouldn’t be so bad.

II A SOLDIER’S LEAVE

REI FUKAI WANTED a trip back to Earth, and he was going to do something about it.

From the time he was rescued in his immobile vegetative state till the moment he was awakened aboard Yukikaze, he had been trapped in a nightmare space, consumed at the thought of meeting those human copies created by the JAM. What he obsessed over in particular was the taste of the chicken broth he’d been forced to eat. It held the taste of Yukikaze’s flight officer, Lieutenant Burgadish.

Waiting for Rei upon awakening was a detailed debriefing to collect all of the information he’d gathered on his mission. This wasn’t just conducted by the SAF. Rei had to tell the same story over and over and over to the other air corps and even the FAF Intelligence Forces.

Of most vital concern to the FAF was Rei’s claim that the JAM were able to produce copies of human beings. SAF analysis had concluded that there was at least a possibility that the JAM had perfected the creation of human duplicates with which they had successfully infiltrated the FAF.

The top levels of the FAF had to investigate the possibility that Rei and the SAF itself were now contaminated by the JAM. They also had to consider the possibility that the JAM were manipulating Rei and the SAF in order to lead the Faery Air Force down the wrong strategic path.

Rei didn’t particularly care if the others accepted his personal experiences. Even though he knew well the threat posed by the mysterious alien JAM, he couldn’t recall feeling fear during his encounter with them. In that way, he was similar to the combat intelligences which existed within the FAF’s countless computers, but it was only after the experience that Rei’s true feelings began to make themselves known. What he was feeling and the changes he was seeing in himself became a matter of serious concern.

He was faced with questions: What he was doing on Faery in the first place? Did Yukikaze’s abandonment of him mean that he had no value or worth? Rei wondered if maybe he’d lingered in his coma for so long in order to avoid returning to reality and facing the questions his experiences had raised. He’d dealt with one of them while