YUKIKAZE (18 page)

“We could leave the engines running—”

“We can’t assume the exhaust will be vented out of here. We’ll end up croaking from carbon monoxide poisoning. Major Booker beefed up the auxiliary power, so we should have an hour.”

“Just one hour?”

“Personally, I’d like to get the hell out of here right now.”

Rei adjusted his grip on the machine gun.

The ventilation system in the hangar wasn’t operating. It was quiet. There were no vibrations. It almost seemed like they weren’t even flying. Rei urged Tomahawk onward as they headed for Banshee’s bridge. They didn’t use the elevator, and the sound that echoed as they climbed the gray metal ladders seemed awfully loud.

When they reached the bridge they found it brightly lit, with all the electronic equipment still functioning, which made the absence of any people seem even more eerie. The laser compass, course display, and navigation radar display were all operating. The helm control, which looked exactly like a ship’s wheel, was working automatically, making adjustments to Banshee’s flight. Rei pulled at it with one hand. No response. He tried disengaging the auto-control but was locked out. The helm continued moving on its own, completely ignoring his attempts.

“We need to get to the combat information control room,” Rei called out to Tomahawk.

“I’ll head to avionics control.”

“There’ll be strong security. It’s probably protected by three layers of blast doors.”

“There wouldn’t have been any point in coming here if I’d forgotten to bring the key,” Tomahawk said with a grin. “It’s the same access as what the captain and the avionics officer would have. Just leave it to me. I’ll go debug the computer. You’re seeing JAM where there aren’t any, Lieutenant.”

They left the bridge.

“But you brought a pistol too, right?” Rei said doggedly.

Tomahawk raised an eyebrow. “It’s not a good idea to start shooting when you’re surrounded by precision equipment that’s keeping you in the air. Don’t worry. Even if this is the JAM, they can’t do anything to me in the computer room. It’s the safest place on this ship. Just please keep an eye on Banshee’s course. I don’t want us to crash into the ground while we’re not looking.”

“Okay… But something is still making me nervous here.”

“That’s not like a Boomerang pilot.”

“I have a duty to bring you back in one piece.”

“Nothing’s going to happen. If you think about how gigantic and complex this whole system is, it’s no surprise that maintaining quality control is a hard thing. You aim for perfection when you design it, but unfortunately you can’t guarantee that there will absolutely never be any failures. Even if you get the failure rate down to one in ten quadrillion, you still can’t get it to zero. I think that when that JAM attacked, it caused a fault to appear by chance. The situation that would cause the fault to present itself just hadn’t happened until now.”

“You have fifty minutes, Tom. Don’t even think about trying to hunt down the errors. You just need to gather information. We can take our time to analyze it once we’re back. If you see any people, shoot them. They don’t need to threaten you, just shoot to kill.”

The engineer stopped and raised his hands in a “don’t worry” gesture and nodded.

“I’m serious, Tom. Don’t get careless. I’m on your side, but if you don’t get back in time, I’m leaving without you.”

“I doubt you’d really do that. You’re a good man. I’m starting to see why Major Booker relies on you. Rei, you won’t be in Boomerang Squadron forever. Some day, that icy heart of yours is going to melt.”

“Not just an avionics expert, you’re a psychic too?”

Tomahawk clapped Rei on the shoulder, then walked off through the narrow companionway. Rei watched him go, his machine gun lowered, until the diminutive figure rounded a corner and passed out of sight.

Rei made his way to the CIC. Once there, he sat down in the command chair and looked at the display. The now-unmanned Banshee-IV was continuing to be operated by a host of computerized systems.

On the screen he quickly cycled through the long-range search radar, course monitoring radar, warning radar, fire control radar, beacon, IFF transponder, weather monitoring read-outs, flight computer systems, all sorts of sensor data, an onboard command schematic of the ship, a chart showing the operational mode of the ship’s takeoff and landing guidance systems…

He laid the machine gun down on the console and leaned back in the seat, keeping his eyes on the data and occasionally checking his watch. The minutes crawled by. To help pass the time, he messed around with the fire control radar, thinking how he wouldn’t have been able to do a damned thing if he’d been targeted by it. It was a high-output radar, built to overpower JAM ECM, and its EM waves could cook an unprotected human from two klicks away. Yukikaze’s ECM would be no match for it.

Every so often, Rei was seized by a strange uneasiness and glanced around the abandoned CIC. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being watched. After thirty minutes had passed, he knew he wasn’t just imagining it. He heard something. Coming from the air vent. His limbs tensed, adrenaline coursing through his system even as he doubted his own ears.

Keeping his gaze forward and posture relaxed, he felt for the machine gun. He secured his grip, snatched up the gun, jumped onto the console, and smashed open the vent grill near the ceiling with the shoulder stock.

There was a faint sound. He ripped the flashlight from his life vest and pointed the beam down the duct.

A rat. A normal Earth rat. Feeling half relieved and half disappointed, Rei jumped down from the console.
Maybe Banshee’s been taken over by the rats and not the JAM,
he thought with black humor. Rats were an indispensable part of any ship.

He called Tomahawk on the intercom. No answer. Probably completely engrossed with his work. Rei sat down again and waited patiently.

Forty minutes. Forty-one minutes. Forty-two minutes. Fortythree minutes.

Still no word from the other man.

Forty-five minutes. Forty-six.

He couldn’t wait any longer. Yukikaze was more important to him than Banshee was.

Just as he was about to get up, a warning klaxon began to blare throughout the ship. It was so loud and sudden that it caused Rei to literally jump to his feet.

Gripping the machine gun, he checked the display. Condition red. He sprang at the intercom.

“What is it?! What’s happened?!”

No answer.

This didn’t seem like a malfunction. He ran out of the CIC and through the mazelike interior of the ship toward the central avionics room where Tomahawk was. When he saw signs warning “No entry without authorization of AV officer,” “Area off-limits without captain’s permission,” and “Suspicious individuals will be shot on sight,” he knew he was nearing the right place.

A blast door. Another blast door. And still another.

White, brightly lit. A clean room. A frigid redoubt for the avionics equipment.

“Tom! Tomahawk! Tom John, answer me!”

He ran through the room, searching for Tomahawk between the equipment stacks as the klaxon continued to wail. He finally found the engineer lying face down on the floor. Rei ran up and grabbed him, turned him over, then dropped him in instinctive revulsion. Tomahawk’s chest was covered by a wriggling mass of small, black, insectlike creatures.

JAM?
He brushed them off with his flight-gloved hand. They felt like pieces of metal.

“Hang on, Tom. We’re getting out of here.”

The engineer’s face looked drained of blood. Rei slapped his cheek and he stirred.

“Rei…” Tom groaned. “You were right. They were looking for the control circuitry for my heart… They’ve screwed it up. Get out of here fast, Lieutenant. Banshee’s going to crash soon… I smashed the cooling system for the avionics control. You have to escape before the other systems break down.” Keeping Banshee’s electronics properly cooled consumed 300 kilowatts of power and a half a ton of coolant every minute. It wouldn’t be long before they started to overheat.

“If it’s going down, we can still get you out on Yukikaze.”

Rei shouldered the machine gun and tried to help Tomahawk to his feet, but the other man refused to cooperate.

“I wanted to take out these guys with my own hands… I’m done, Rei. The JAM have wrecked my heart. Even if you got me aboard Yukikaze, I wouldn’t make it back to base… Get out of here now, Lieutenant. That’s an order.”

“This can’t be happening. If I’d just stayed with you, I—” Rei stopped, his eyes widening.

The black things that had been scattered on the floor were coming together, coalescing into a single, large, insectoid shape. A multicellular mechanical life-form. A JAM spy.

“Lieutenant, there’s no time. I don’t think those things will touch a human. If they wanted to kill us, they could have done it easily… They probably thought I was a machine. A machine… Am I a machine?”

“Don’t try to talk. I’m taking you back, no matter what.”

Just as Rei was leveling his machine gun at the JAM, it released a high-density burst of energy. The shock wave hurled Rei back into the panel behind him. Momentarily stunned, he took a few heaving breaths, registered that he still had a grip on the gun, then lifted it and opened up at the JAM. It scattered into its component parts. He scrambled to his feet, feeling a vague surprise that he didn’t seem to be badly injured.

The JAM weren’t after Rei. They wanted Tomahawk. Or, more accurately, Tomahawk’s heart.

“Tom John! Captain!”

“Stay back!” Tom rasped, his voice barely audible. “You’ll be exposed to the radiation… Rei, just tell me… I am human… aren’t I?”

“Of course you are. You are.”
You’re alive. That’s enough. Or are you telling me that you’re actually a corpse?
“Captain John… Tomahawk!”

Rei watched as the captain’s still form was haloed by the rich red of his blood seeping onto the floor. He turned away, snatched up the system analyzer as a memento, and ran for the exit. As he grasped the blast door handle, he looked back at Tomahawk.

The single imperative order of Boomerang Squadron clawed at his mind: make it back alive, even if you have to let your comrades die.

A corpse is just a thing…
Rei said his farewells to the dead man, then sprinted toward Yukikaze.

He made it to the hangar bay. He vaulted up the boarding ladder, tossing the system analyzer into the cockpit, then sank into his seat. Engine start. He was about to execute the command to raise the elevator when he suddenly realized: this wasn’t the main hangar. The spotting dolly he’d blown up wasn’t there. A shudder convulsed through him, as though he’d been doused with icy water, and he scrambled out of the seat. The engines continued to rev up. No. That wasn’t the sound of the Phoenix Mk-X. It was only just the slightest bit different, but those weren’t Phoenixes.

This wasn’t Yukikaze.

It was identical in appearance, but Rei knew. This wasn’t his beloved plane. It was a copy made by the JAM. He clung onto the edge of the cockpit and switched the engines off. They wouldn’t stop. Were the JAM intending to infiltrate the SAF’s main base with this decoy?

He emptied the machine gun’s entire clip into the plane’s consoles. The engines still didn’t stop. He hurled the gun away and looked around for the firefighting truck that should be present in the hangar. He saw it, ran over and jumped into it, then backed it up to the ghost plane. He opened the fire extinguishing door on the side of the near engine and shoved the extinguisher nozzle from the truck into it. He opened up the retardant and black smoke began gushing from the engine exhaust. The engine revs began to drop. Flame out. Engine stop.

Rei headed toward what he thought was the main hangar. He passed through a blast door, and a massive wave of relief surged through him. He’d guessed correctly. Yukikaze was there, waiting.

He tried to operate the elevator controls manually, but they wouldn’t work. The auxiliary control was a fully electronic system, so it needed an external power supply. He found the power supply unit in a trailer. He ran over and switched it on, then connected an AC cable to the auxiliary control panel. With a terrific racket, the elevator slowly began to rise. The sliding bulkhead above the elevator opened.

Rei climbed into Yukikaze. Canopy, closed. Mask and harness, secured. He suddenly realized that his memento of Tomahawk, the analyzer that may have recorded the true form of the JAM, had been left in the ghost plane. But there was no time to go back for it. Engine, start. The Phoenix on the right came back to life.

They rose onto the deck and Rei grunted in frustration. In front of them, hovering before the bulkhead opening, was what looked like the ghost plane. Its engines were off and its flaps were down, but it was still just floating there casually. It was going to ram Yukikaze. Rei hit the button to release the wire anchors and in a flash explosive bolts sheared them from the fuselage. Flaps, down. Yukikaze floated up from Banshee like the ghost plane. The left engine ignited and started up.

Banshee’s enormous form began to move forward below them. The ghost plane seemed to drift on the wind and approached. Rei rolled Yukikaze over and jammed the throttle forward to MAX, burning into a steep turn. The powerless ghost plane couldn’t keep up with them. It dipped its nose down and plunged toward Banshee. Was it trying to land?

After accelerating to supersonic speed, Rei came about to try a beam attack from a position ninety degrees relative to Banshee’s course. The black hulk of the carrier filled his view. The ghost plane was landing on the elevator. Rei pulled the gun trigger. Rounds from the cannon tore through the ghost plane, and after a couple of seconds it exploded. Yukikaze blew through the black smoke and withdrew from Banshee at maximum thrust.

Yukikaze climbed into the blue sky. Rei didn’t look back.

Altitude, 25,000 meters. The sky grew dark. Stars in the daytime. He could see the great red whirlpool that poured from Faery’s suns. The Bloody Road. For a brief moment, it was overlaid by Tomahawk’s blood, pouring from his slight and broken frame.

Tom John’s last words came back to him.
I am human… aren’t I?