Good Luck, Yukikaze

“The guest of honor will be Lieutenant General Gibril Laitume, commander of the Tactical Combat Air Corps of Faery Base,” Major Booker replied. “The man who is technically our boss. Also with him will be the de facto top man of the FAF intelligence forces, Colonel Ansel Rombert. And rounding things out will be Brigadier General Cooley, the actual head of the SAF.”

General Laitume was officially the commander of the Special Air Force, with General Cooley serving as his deputy, but in reality General Cooley ran the SAF by herself.

“A real power lunch, eh?” said Captain Foss. “I wonder if some major business is going to be discussed here.”

“Who’s the chef?” asked Rei. “I haven’t seen him before.”

“Because he doesn’t fly a fighter,” replied Major Booker. “A chef’s battlefield is the kitchen. Allow me to introduce you. This is Chef Murulle, head chef of the SAF’s dining hall.”

“Just call me Murulle. Gallee Murulle.”

Unlike the other air corps, which often had two or more facilities, the SAF dining hall was unusual in that it only had one. Having multiple dining facilities wasn’t simply a matter of the number of personnel needing to be fed, they also served to divide the field officers from the lower ranks. The SAF made no such distinctions.

Rei knew the chef had to be a soldier. Major Booker wouldn’t have appointed him to this position unless he had the major’s trust, Rei thought. Other corps had very skilled chefs in their employ, some of them civilian contractors invited from Earth. Very prideful, these contractors considered themselves better than the regular soldiers and had a tendency to look down on the legitimate members of the FAF. After all, many of the soldiers here were actually criminals who’d been sent here for their crimes. However, the SAF had no contractors working for it. Everyone in it was a soldier, and this chef should be no exception. He’d probably committed some antisocial act or crime back on Earth and been sent to the SAF as a result.

Rei didn’t particularly care what circumstances brought the man here. It was just that thinking of the food he always ate and knowing that this man was in charge of providing it gave him a feeling of intimacy. He’d never particularly thought about food before, but he’d never eaten anything bad on Faery either. That was probably a source of happiness for both himself and the chef.

Gallee Murulle gave him a quick nod and then went back to the task of examining the ingredients laid out on a large push wagon.

“I’m glad you made it in time,” said Major Booker as he spied a group of figures emerging from the control tower’s ground-level exit. “If you two had gotten here after the guests of honor, my career would have been over.”

General Cooley led the group, followed by the two men. They had no escorts.

The large, dark-skinned man was Gibril Laitume, the general of the Combat Air Corps. Well, lieutenant general, anyway. Rei knew the man’s name, although this was the first time he’d ever been in his presence. He looks exactly like the sort of general who’ll die a ridiculous death, Rei thought. The other thing about this man he’d never met that had made an impression was his name, Gibril, because Major Booker had explained that it was an alternate pronunciation of the name of the angel Gabriel.

Leaving aside the matter of whether the name of this lucky angel was appropriate for him, when Major Booker had told Rei that the general was a devout believer in one all-powerful god, Rei’d replied that he was glad he wasn’t. He had no contract with any such omnipotent being and didn’t ask for any favors from him. On the other hand, he wasn’t liable to get punished for betraying him either. Major Booker had wearily replied that God himself didn’t directly hand out the punishments, and that he shouldn’t say things like that to devout followers of a religion. At worst, he might get killed by one. At the very least, all he’d be doing is buying their antipathy.

Naturally, Rei wasn’t intentionally looking to nitpick any stranger’s beliefs, but hearing someone say, “You’ll be punished by heaven if you don’t believe” just pissed him off. He didn’t want to hear that from anyone, be they a believer or the religion’s founder itself. People come up with all sorts of theories with which to control others who won’t be manipulated as they like, and they tend to shun those who will not be brought into the fold. It wasn’t a question of the existence of a supreme being; if one did exist, then human opinion would likely matter very little in how that being used its power. Divine punishment wasn’t something for humans to declare, and in general it was just presumptuous for any person to judge who deserved it. The will of a supreme being might not match up to the expectations of his adherents. After all, it would be the god’s lack of concern for individual people that made it a suitable object of fear and worship. But if such a being did exist, there’d be little difference between belief and unbelief. Either way, its will would be beyond human means of control, and so it would all boil down to what advantages its adherents gain from their relationship with it on the human plane of existence. If some joined their group and thus gained comfort, then so be it. And if others found the group annoying, they could just stay away from them. That was all there was to it. Personally, Rei didn’t believe in a supreme being of any sort. The only existence he could be absolutely certain of was his own.

Of course, this was all probably taboo when it came to talking to General Laitume.

The other man, Colonel Rombert, Rei had met once before. Thin, with sharp eyes, he could only be a member of the Intelligence Forces. He’d asked him repeatedly about how the JAM had made a copy of his flight officer Lieutenant Burgadish on the last mission Yukikaze flew in her previous airframe. The interrogation had made him feel like he was a spy. Even after the man had driven Rei to exhaustion, Rombert hadn’t let him go. He was a hardcore intel officer. Even so, he hadn’t come off as a heartless machine. Rei recalled that, occasionally, his sense of humor would poke its way to the surface. It showed as part of his interrogation training, though.

For example, at one point the colonel had said, “There have been times when I’ve wished I could just eat up somebody I didn’t like right from the start. I’ve probably thought about it myself, like how my brain would taste and the like. If I could make a copy of myself, I could try it out. The JAM made a copy of you too, right? You blew your big chance to see how you’d taste, don’t you think?”

Basically, he was working under the assumption that Rei had hated Lieutenant Burgadish, took the opportunity to murder him, and then made up the whole story about the copies and everything else. Rather than asking him straight out, Rombert had been trying to tease it out of the suspect in a roundabout way. Rei’s impression was that here was a man he couldn’t eat. When he’d told the colonel that, Rombert had replied in deadly earnest, “I think you and I can talk with each other.” For Rei’s part, he hadn’t particularly wanted to keep talking to the man.

These two men, General Laitume and Colonel Rombert, were both prime examples of humanity. The woman leading them, General Cooley of the SAF, was not.

It was difficult to pin down what she was thinking or where her values lay, and she didn’t really care if that was the impression of her people had. Rei, on the other hand, felt a comforting familiarity about her. Other people, like Captain Foss, might judge the general to be a bit of a strange woman, but not Rei. It wasn’t necessary to think of her as a human. To him, she was just the person who issued his orders, and she caused no problems for him beyond that.

Still, lately Rei had found himself wondering what had brought her to Faery.

Captain Foss told him that General Cooley was a distant relative of hers. She wasn’t just a general; she was somebody’s child and had family too. It had taken Captain Foss’s words to make Rei aware of this very obvious fact.

That was just one more thing he was lately curious about, where once he’d paid no attention to it at all. Rei had once believed that anything unrelated to combat wasn’t worth thinking about. Though he was going through some changes, Rei didn’t believe they were making him weaker.

Major Booker approached the three officers and saluted them. Rei followed his lead.

General Cooley introduced her subordinates, and General Laitume personally greeted the three SAF personnel, a good-natured smile on his lips. First Major Booker, then Rei, and finally Captain Foss. However, when he stopped in front of the woman doctor, he reached his hand out toward her breasts. Captain Foss stiffened, looking startled, which elicited a laugh from the general. “Your lapel pin’s crooked, Captain.” He chuckled as he straightened it with his fingertip.

“It didn’t look crooked to me,” Colonel Rombert said coldly. “You have good eyes, General. And fast hands.”

“And you, Colonel,” the general said with a laugh, “have bad eyes and a nasty mouth.”

“I can see that Captain Foss is a young and attractive woman,” the colonel replied. “But I didn’t see a crooked lapel pin. I’ve heard you don’t have the best reputation with the ladies, General. Oh, forgive me. My ears