Lieutenant Burgadish’s whereabouts are unknown.
The answers to all of these questions are probably inside of Lieutenant Fukai’s head, and so long as he remains unconscious, they have no way to retrieve those memories.
It may be — Major Booker then went on to relate the most shocking revelation of the letter — that Lieutenant Fukai was shot by one of the JAM, a creature with which we have yet to make direct contact. It’s possible that Yukikaze and her crew were captured by the JAM and that Lieutenant Fukai was the only one who managed to escape. This is merely conjecture based on the intelligence Yukikaze gathered in combat, but if true, Yukikaze’s crew may have carried out some sort of exchange with the JAM.
“The JAM aren’t resting,” the major continued.
They may instead be changing their strategy, and Lieutenant Fukai probably knows what they are planning. I hope that he wakes up as soon as possible, both as his friend and as a member of the SAF. I’d like you to pray for his recovery as well, if only so that the people of Earth don’t lose this war to the JAM.
The revelation of a possibility that Yukikaze’s crew, Lieutenant Fukai and Lieutenant Burgadish, made direct contact with the JAM came as a shock to me. Yukikaze and her crew may have gotten a clue as to the true nature of the JAM, a species that have until now been a total mystery to us. Moreover, the letter claimed that the JAM may be changing their methods of combat.
My reporter’s soul was stirred by the revelation. If the JAM were beginning to change their strategy, then all of their attacks up till now may have been just the preliminaries. The real battle is about to begin.
The major’s letter is a warning to all the people of Earth, and this is a story that has to be covered. I have to write a sequel to
I
SHOCK WAVE
HE LINGERED IN his sleep, not alive and yet not dead. Occasionally, his eyelids would open, his eyes moving wildly.
To the people around him, it seemed as though he were following the flight of some invisible fairy, his eyes now windows open to illuminate the darkness within his head, as if desperately hoping to light the way out from the blackness that had swallowed him up. He personally wasn’t conscious of this movement. Indeed, he had no feeling of anything in his entire body. When his eyes moved, the image in his mind was of the moment he was ejected from his beloved plane and left behind. His beloved plane, Yukikaze. As she flew out of sight, leaving him with nothing but empty sky, he felt his existence contracting to a point before finally winking out. Only then did his eyes cease their wild motion, and his consciousness fell back, once again, into the gap between life and death.
He was concerned with neither life nor death, simply letting time drift past, and even time itself no longer held any meaning for him.
Until, at last, a voice called for him to awaken.
MAJOR JAMES BOOKER, the man responsible for sortie management and mission control for the Special Air Force 5th Squadron (FAF, Faery base, Tactical Combat Air Corps), had a lot of problems on his mind, all of which were giving him a splitting headache.
First of all, his neck still gave him a twinge from time to time. Then there was the fact that he still didn’t have a complete understanding of the incident that had hurt his neck in the first place. Finally, there was the matter of Lieutenant Rei Fukai, pilot of Yukikaze (SAF Unit 3) and how he remained unconscious in a vegetative state. Ever since the incident, the major had a vague sense that the JAM had subtly altered their strategy in a way that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Sylphids, the same model of plane that had been enhanced to create Yukikaze, deployed at front-line bases, had suddenly been taking much higher rates of damage than previously.
The major recalled that Dr. Balume, the SAF flight surgeon, had suggested a nerve block if the pain persisted. When he’d refused, telling the doctor that a nerve block performed by a drunk like Balume would likely kill him, the doctor then suggested that he might try some counseling, saying that ridding himself of his anxiety might also relieve the pain.
“And what do you have to be anxious about, anyway?” the doctor had said. “You made it back still breathing, didn’t you? Okay, the FRX00 nearly killed you, but you don’t have to fly in it again.” It was about at that point the major decided that he would have to take care of his anxiety himself, because this doctor certainly wasn’t going to be of any help in that department.
Major Booker knew that the reason he was feeling so anxious had to do with question number two on his list. In other words, the fact that he still didn’t have a complete grasp of exactly what had happened to the FRX00. Yukikaze lay burning, shot down by the JAM, never to fly again. Somehow, she’d abandoned her old body and transferred herself into the approaching FRX00. Having obtained a new body for herself, Yukikaze had recognized the approaching JAM fighters and initiated combat maneuvers against them. That was when the pilot and he, the acting flight officer in the rear, had blacked out. The man at the controls was Captain George Samia, pilot of SAF Unit 13. Yukikaze’s maneuvers in the FRX00 snapped his neck, killing him instantly.
“The FRX00 is a modified FRX99,” they’d say. “The FRX99 was never designed to be piloted by humans. Did you seriously think you could do it?”
Major Booker had been riding in the rear seat to observe the real-world performance of the plane that had been manufactured at his insistence, but there was no way he could have predicted that something like this would happen. In truth, the real reason he’d been there was because he’d been worried when Yukikaze hadn’t returned to base from her sortie. He used the FRX00’s combat flight test as an excuse to go out and run a personal search for her. It was clear that they’d provided support for Yukikaze, but being aboard the plane had prevented him from seeing exactly what had happened. Even now, he wasn’t sure.
Captain Samia had probably leaned closer to the display to confirm that an external data stream was transferring into his plane from somewhere. However, that had been a fatal mistake on his part. The major regretted not warning him, but comforted himself by realizing that there had been no time for it. There was no way he could have known that the data stream was actually Yukikaze’s mind itself being transferred from her crippled body as she lay burning. Aside from that, as a former pilot, Booker had braced himself to prepare for combat maneuvers the moment he realized something was wrong. That was what had saved his neck. All he’d suffered were a few dislocated vertebrae.
Maybe his ability to sense danger and intuit that he was about to pull some unimaginable Gs was due to a sort of sixth sense he’d cultivated as a pilot. He thought about this for a moment, then decided against it. It had been a long, long time since he’d flown as a combat pilot. Was what he felt at that moment, more than the fear of combat itself, a sense of how dangerous the FRX00 really was? Had he sensed that it was a mistake for humans to fly in such a plane and felt fear at being in one?
The FRX00 had been modified for manned flight from the FRX99, which had been designed to be unmanned. The addition of flight crew safeguards in manufacturing the manned version had drastically increased the weight of the plane, but even so it was still far more maneuverable than any other manned fighter. It still possessed the same potential as the FRX99, after all.
In designing manned planes, engineers had to take into account the human body’s frailty in the face of G forces. For that reason, they couldn’t avoid decreasing its air combat capabilities. Human beings are land animals, after all, and their ability to grasp three-dimensional space is limited. They can fly inverted through a cloudbank and never even realize it. However, when designing an unmanned aircraft, all of these weak points can be eliminated.
