Good Luck, Yukikaze

Cross attack. Firing time: 0.5 seconds. An instant later, the targets were behind him. Rei craned his neck around to confirm his hit.

The Rafe flew through the smoke of their explosions and rejoined Yukikaze as the fragments of the two JAM planes fell to the ground. The Rafe had shot one of them down, apparently having imitated Yukikaze’s tactics.

Rei confirmed their fuel stores. They could stay here a while longer. There were probably more JAM buried under the desert sands, searching for the SAF. Perhaps they were testing out using the recon pod to talk to us and only attacked when we rejected their overture, he thought. Suddenly, Rei was roused from this fantasy.

In all the commotion moments before, he’d completely forgotten about Captain Foss. Noticing that her breathing sounded far weaker than it should have, Rei looked back and saw that she’d taken her mask off. She’d vomited inside of it. He quickly brought Yukikaze down to a lower altitude and told Foss how to clean out the blockage and reset the mask.

He wondered what she had made of the battle just now. Despite having seen them, maybe she still thought the JAM were imaginary. Still, whatever she thought, what she now felt in her body was real. There was no way she could deny that. That goes for me as well, Rei thought.

For now, this was good enough. A lot of information had been gathered for analysis, for both the SAF and Captain Foss.

“Mission complete,” Rei said to her. “Returning to base.”

IV COMBAT AWARENESS

1

YUKIKAZE’S CENTRAL COMPUTER never slept, even when she was resting her wings in the hangar bay. Cables running from the floor provided her with electrical power as she waited on standby. The cables attached to her underside also contained circuits that linked Yukikaze to the SAF’s tactical computer, allowing her to read all of the data available to it.

She could even access the missions and operational actions of SAF fighters currently in flight, although she couldn’t receive the intelligence they were gathering in real time. Fighters on sortie generally wouldn’t access headquarters except in cases of emergency. The information they gathered would be downloaded to the tactical computer in headquarters once they’d returned to base and been linked up to the cables in the hangar.

The data would then be analyzed by the SAF in order to develop new strategies, and the raw, unfiltered data would be stored as well, accessible at any time. Flight crews back from their missions would use it to write up their sortie reports. They’d check it over, both to see if there were differences between their own memories and the data their planes had recorded, as well as to check if the decisions they’d made in flight were the right ones. This was done especially in cases where the JAM had attacked them unexpectedly, so as to determine from where the JAM had appeared and if it would have been possible to detect them sooner. It was useful after missions for the pilots to replay the past mission via onboard simulation in order to create more efficient hazard avoidance maneuvers. Since every sortie was a matter of life and death, pilots needed to draw on the knowledge gained from past experiences to help them survive. Many flight crews could be found in planes’ cockpits even when they weren’t writing their sortie reports.

Rei, naturally, was no exception. He’d always spent more time in his cockpit than the other pilots, but lately he could be found in Yukikaze’s cockpit more frequently than ever. Since she’d shed her old body in favor of this new one, he’d grown eager to learn more about her. He sensed that the changes in her went beyond surface appearance. Wanting to know exactly what these changes were, he used any free time he could find during his rehabilitation to see Yukikaze directly.

What does she think about when she is on standby? he wondered. What kind of conversations did she have with the tactical computer in HQ? He’d always wondered about that, and he’d spent a lot of time on board Yukikaze in the hangar trying to work that out.

That was when Rei had a thought.

Just how exactly did Yukikaze, the SAF’s computers, and the combat intelligence they contained feel about the JAM?

To him, in the old days, Yukikaze was simply the plane he flew, but now he didn’t feel that way. Her central computer was now a discrete combat consciousness independent of him. It might not have been a consciousness identical to that of a human, but Yukikaze must have had some cognizance of the world she occupied. He wanted to know what that was. It was possible that the JAM understood Yukikaze and Earth’s machine intelligences better than he did. He knew for certain that the JAM considered machine intelligence to be real, while the state of humans was more ambiguous. If he could understand how Yukikaze and the computers she was connected to saw the JAM, then maybe he could get a clue as to exactly what this enemy humans called the JAM really were. This sort of work was better done on standby than while on a sortie. This was another battlefield, one where Yukikaze’s central computer could talk to the SAF combat intelligences. Rei felt ready to get back in the fight. There was no need for any more rehabilitation.

Rei hadn’t been told by Major Booker that he was cleared for combat after his mission. He’d simply said that the merit of his sortie would be evaluated, and Booker ordered Rei to remain on standby until the evaluation was complete. Essentially, the major had told him to take it easy. The evaluation would take two days at most. Of course, he needed to file a sortie report as well, so he couldn’t just spend those two days sleeping.

What the hell could they be taking two days to figure out? Rei asked himself. His physical strength wasn’t in question now. Even if he didn’t stick with the rehab schedule they’d set up for him, he’d be fine training on his own. He’d flown a combat sortie for the first time in a while and had passed with flying colors. The fact that Rei had returned to base still in one piece was proof of that. Or had he done something wrong? Was Major Booker telling him that he should take some time and take a hard look at the actions he’d taken in his first combat flight in a long time? That had to be it. Otherwise, “Remain on standby” was just his way of saying, “I’m giving you two days off.”

And so Rei passed the days in Yukikaze’s cockpit. After looking back over his actions on his mission with Yukikaze’s central computer, with it agreeing that he’d done nothing wrong, he now turned to monitoring the link between Yukikaze and the SAF’s computers. He took his time doing so.

By switching on the main display in her cockpit and watching the feed, he could see each occasion when Yukikaze would access the SAF’s tactical computer. Code numbers would suddenly scroll across the screen. He couldn’t tell the exact specifics of the data, but his eyes could follow and grasp the general type of data she was requesting and the arrangement of the data sent in reply.

Yukikaze was gathering past data from the other planes through the data link circuit. That much he knew, but what was Yukikaze thinking and what was she discussing with the tactical computer? That, he could only imagine. The display didn’t show the data exchange at that level, since Yukikaze wasn’t equipped with that sort of interface. Of course, if he used a tactical computer terminal in headquarters, it would have been able to display the exchange in a human-readable form.

Rei had already gone there to check it out.

The tactical computer in SAF HQ told him by voice that Yukikaze was requesting records of the actions and gathered information of Unit 13, the Rafe. But in answer to why she was requesting the data, the computer could only guess that she was possibly running a combat simulation on her own.

As far as what Yukikaze’s central computer was thinking and what judgments it was making, the tactical computer in the SAF headquarters was as much in the dark as he.

Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem at all. The instinct to defeat the JAM was built in at the time of Yukikaze’s manufacture. The existence of that impulse meant that there was nothing at all strange about her researching tactics and strategies to use against the JAM while she was on standby. If one wanted to know what she’d learned, all they’d have to do is see how she reacted the next time she was in battle. Words weren’t necessary. Not in combat. There was no time then to ask what she was up to and then wait for an answer. That