Good Luck, Yukikaze

When you don’t have to worry about a human occupant, you can create a plane that can carry out maneuvers to its full technical potential. Sending the plane into a controlled flat spin would be child’s play. When you had such perfect control, what would once have been a useless maneuver in actual combat could prove advantageous, giving your assault forces a high degree of flexibility in battle.

The FRX99 had been created to be such a plane, with vertical canard wings and two-dimensional vectored thrust engine nozzles. With direct side force control, it had the ability to rotate like a boomerang. The airframe even had direct lift force control as well, and could nimbly move up or down while maintaining level flight. To maintain the efficiency of the air intake system during such violent maneuvers, the intake ports extended above and below the main wing. At first glance, this made the twin-engine plane appear to have four.

Major Booker would never forget Lieutenant Rei Fukai’s impression of the prototype when it was delivered to the SAF.

“It looks powerful, but clumsy,” Rei had said.

As his neck ached, the major recalled Rei’s words over and over. The FRX99 had been designed with the idea that humans weren’t necessary and that they should stay the hell away from it. Perhaps Rei had sensed that. It was a combat machine built without any regard for human beings. Its very design showed that it wasn’t meant for humans to fly. Rei had probably sensed that with a single glance.

Even so, the manned FRX00 version could be said to be the most powerful plane in the FAF’s current arsenal. Rather than saying it possessed a lethal level of maneuverability, you could just as easily say that it demonstrated just how powerful the plane really was. After all, no fighter plane could honestly be considered safe. The important point was whether or not a human pilot could control it.

Yukikaze had been the one controlling the plane. There was no doubt about that. The problem was that she’d completely disregarded the FRX00’s human crew and had not hesitated to maneuver in a way that injured, or even killed, them.

Checking the data file of the FRX00’s central computer after they’d returned to base and realizing that it showed no concern for the humans aboard, the major had become afraid.

What the hell was going on? There was no way the plane’s central systems didn’t know that there were people aboard. If that were true, then the central computer itself had ignored the crew and simply deleted any data it received about the occupants of its cockpit.

Why?

In that moment, the FRX00 wasn’t just a prototype anymore. It had literally become Yukikaze. She’d already ejected Rei from the burning remains of her old body. So perhaps, as far as Yukikaze was concerned, there weren’t any humans aboard her. Or rather, she assumed there weren’t any. That probably would have led her to treat any data about the crew aboard the FRX00 as an error. It was a plausible explanation, but they couldn’t determine that for certain from Yukikaze’s memory data. And since she couldn’t understand ambiguous human language, it wasn’t as though they could just ask her, “What the hell was going through your mind before?” The data hinted at the answer, but if it didn’t contain what the humans wanted to know, the best they could do was to guess at what Yukikaze’s intentions had been.

Once she’d transferred herself to the FRX00, Yukikaze had wanted to eliminate the surrounding enemy JAM as quickly as possible. That much was certain. In the investigation conducted after they’d returned to base, it was learned that the FRX00 had cut out all of its maneuvering limiters. Or to be more accurate, it had never engaged them in the first place. He could imagine that the crew safeguards had been working just fine, but that from Yukikaze’s point of view, they were just malfunctions. In order for Yukikaze to release all of the limiters, she would have had to send false data to all the sensor systems that there were no crewmen aboard and then deactivate the safeguards. As far as she was concerned, it wasn’t false data. Since Rei had been ejected, the data from the safeguards telling her that there were humans aboard must have been in error, and Yukikaze had simply corrected it. The problem with this explanation was that, normally, it should have been impossible. So the only explanation possible was that Yukikaze had made a mistake. And that was what Major Booker just couldn’t understand.

Considering that Yukikaze had never experienced transfer of herself into a new airframe, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to suppose that the transfer could cause her to make some sort of mistake. If it wasn’t a mistake, there were much simpler ways she could have cut out the limiters, assuming that cutting them had been her true intention. Yukikaze could have just activated the FRX00’s ejection seats. In both the old Yukikaze and the FRX00, the central computer was capable of activating the seat escape system if it determined that the crew were unconscious and unable to activate it themselves. The crew safeguards that controlled all of the maneuver limiters, G-suit controller, and the active headrests that protected the crews’ necks were designed to deactivate if the plane were unmanned. If she’d simply ejected their seats, she could have performed the most lethal air combat maneuvers possible without any problem.

But Yukikaze hadn’t done that. So, had it been a mistake caused by her transferring herself, or was it that Yukikaze had decided she didn’t have to waste time ejecting any human other than Rei? There was no way to tell what her true feelings were. Hell, it was even possible that Yukikaze’s actions had nothing to do with what had happened, and that there was a fault in the FRX00’s safeguard system.

The true reason remained a mystery.

Because these questions remained unanswered, they’d been forced to suspend their plan to mass produce the FRX00 and establish a new SAF. When Dr. Balume suggested that the pain in his neck wasn’t fading because of that, Major Booker grew depressed. Did that mean he’d be stuck with it unless he found an answer? Shit, he thought, if Rei’d just wake up, that’d take care of my anxiety. If Lieutenant Rei Fukai, Yukikaze’s partner, told him, “Yukikaze just decided she should kill any crew on board that wasn’t me,” he might not like to hear it, but he had a feeling he could probably understand it. Even so, it didn’t look like Rei would be regaining full consciousness any time soon.

The Systems Corps had said that if the SAF couldn’t explain the cause of the FRX00’s (Yukikaze’s) dangerous maneuvers, then they would investigate it themselves. When Major Booker objected, they’d demanded that he hand it over to them.

Major Booker had fought back against the demand, saying that he wouldn’t give the data to the Systems Corps under any circumstances. The reason being that the FRX00 was now Yukikaze herself, a battle-tested SAF fighter plane. No other corps would be permitted to read the contents of her central data file. Besides that, if anyone apart from the SAF attempted to check out Yukikaze’s central computer, she would self-destruct. The Systems Corps had dropped the tough-guy routine when he’d pointed this out to them. They knew very well how dangerous an SAF fighter’s central computer could be, mainly because they were the ones who’d designed it.

He’d had to point out the FRX00’s telecommunication log from when she’d returned to base in order to prove that it was now Yukikaze.

At the time, she’d called herself that, identifying herself as Yukikaze.

DE YUKIKAZE ETA2146.AR

“This is Yukikaze. Estimated time of arrival at base 21:46 hours. That is all.”

She hadn’t transmitted Unit B-3, her mission sortie code number, but had identified herself as “Yukikaze.” For the first and only time.

Perhaps Yukikaze was cognizant of the fact that she was no longer in the same body and therefore technically no longer Unit B-3. In that case, the only way she could identify herself was as Yukikaze. That was probably it, Major Booker thought. Or, he had gone on, she might have identified herself solely as Yukikaze as a way to try and find Rei, the one who had given her that name. He’d told Systems Corps that she might have been pretty shaken by the whole experience as well.

Systems Corps pointed out that, if this were true, it would be dangerous to have a combat machine acting in such a human way. Fighter planes didn’t need individual personalities, they’d said. Major Booker decided that Systems Corps was using the situation to claim that the SAF (and by extension, Booker himself) agreed with their theory that the FAF no longer needed manned fighters so that they could steal Yukikaze away from him. That was when he lost his temper, shouting that he’d let an active-duty fighter get taken apart by friendly hands over his dead body. The argument got pretty heated, but in the end, Systems Corps gave up. They got in a parting shot though, pointing out that if Yukikaze had actually transferred herself into the FRX00, she’d used a wireless transmission that could have been intercepted by the JAM, which might have been the cause for the rising damage rates seen in the Sylphids nearly identical to the old Yukikaze. So long as they would not hand her