Rei immediately lowered the landing gear. The plane’s speed suddenly dropped. He manually activated the test mode. Yukikaze quickly understood from the change what Rei was trying to do and canceled the alarm.
“Break, port!” yelled the major.
Banking sharply to the left, he let the JAM slip past. His sudden drop in speed had been fortunate. The JAM had undoubtedly not expected Yukikaze’s maneuver.
Selecting the test signals for supersonic maximum speed, he initiated a test run on the AICS. He jammed the throttle to maximum. Gear, up.
The three JAM had swung around and were coming at him. Rei slipped the plane to the right, dodging the JAM’s cannon fire. He couldn’t keep moving left and right; it would be dangerous, since the plane’s acceleration would zero out in the instant he switched directions. With the enemy using cannons, they could anticipate those moments. What he needed to do now was to evade the JAM attack. He prayed for acceleration.
Yukikaze reached normal maximum acceleration in three seconds. The thrust was tremendous. In an instant, the JAM were far behind him.
Rei desperately gripped the control stick, sending Yukikaze into a climb. If he could reach high altitude, her speed would be greatly increased. There’d be no way that three JAM designed for dogfighting could ever catch him then.
He had no doubts that the JAM recognized Yukikaze as an SAF fighter and believed that the three of them could beat her. There was the proof that the AICS had been contaminated by the JAM. If he hadn’t known beforehand that the malfunction was being caused by the AICS, those three fighters would have shot him down long before he’d gotten the idea of trying to input those test signals.
“You got it back to normal,” the major said. “How’d you do it?”
“Emergency measures. I’m operating it with the test signals. Why wasn’t a new AICS swapped in before takeoff? We knew what the cause was. We should have known this would happen.”
“We didn’t want Yagashira to know that we’d figured out the problem in the AICS. This is top secret,” the major said.
Yukikaze flew in the skies above the pure white desert. This was JAM-controlled airspace. Only the JAM flew here without concern.
Just before Yukikaze took off, Yagashira’s plane had flown out to this desert to drop a reconnaissance pod. The exact same mission the old Yukikaze had had.
Major Booker confirmed that Yagashira’s plane was flying ahead of them in formation with a single JAM plane. “Yagashira’s plane is flying with a JAM.”
“I know,” answered Rei.
“I’m sure he’s a JAM,” the major said. “There’s no excuse for this otherwise.”
“I feel like… like I’ve spoken to him before,” Rei said.
The major answered that he had. He and Lieutenant Yagashira had met in the hospital. “I want to be your friend,” he’d said. Rei remembered that the man standing next to his bed had been very young. “Everyone looks at me like I’m some sort of weirdo,” he’d gone on. “Lieutenant Fukai, I want to talk to you about all kinds of things. The soldiers of Boomerang squadron have such skill. I want to be as good as you guys.”
“Rei thinks that he’s been abandoned by Yukikaze,” Major Booker had said. “If we don’t settle that, he’ll never fly again.” Yagashira went on. “It looks like you had a rough time out there. Actually, I was also shot down by the JAM. I don’t have any memory of what happened till I was rescued.”
Rei remembered Lieutenant Yagashira saying that in the hospital. That wasn’t a dream. In that case, it must have meant that he didn’t know that he’d been created by the JAM. He didn’t know that the original Yagashira was dead, his memories transferred into an exact duplicate.
“Yeah,” Rei said. “Lieutenant Yagashira came to the hospital. Said he wanted to be my friend. How long has it been since then?”
“Nine days,” the major replied. “If you don’t complete this mission successfully, I’m thinking of sending you back to Earth. I don’t want you connected to FAF weaponry and computers anymore. It was like you weren’t human.”
The thing was, Lieutenant Yagashira had seemed extremely human. Rei kept Yagashira’s Unit 13 in sight, still not entirely convinced that the man was a JAM weapon. Then Yagashira and the JAM fighter turned toward Yukikaze, assuming an intercept formation.
“He’s engaging,” Rei said.
“He’s panicking,” the major replied. “We didn’t tell him about Yukikaze’s current mission activities. None of the other FAF branches know either. If Yukikaze hadn’t come, he probably would have flown to a JAM base with his information and then flown back to the FAF. He’s a JAM tactical intelligence-gathering weapon. A JAM, not a human. Now that his cover’s been blown, he can’t let us get back to base alive. He’s desperate now. Either we kill him, or he kills us.”
“A JAM… weapon? Him?”
“Rei, don’t space out on me again. You’ve already met a JAM like him. You and that copy they made of you. Have you forgotten what you told us? This whole mission was designed to confirm that.”
Yeah, right. He had a feeling he’d heard something about that before takeoff. When the official announcement had come to send Unit 13 out unmanned to run the same mission the old Yukikaze had, Lieutenant Yagashira had suggested that he fly it. Major Booker had half-expected this, but overcame the dread striking him so squarely to approve the mission. He wouldn’t need a flight officer, Yagashira had said. He could do this alone.
“He might have been planning to desert,” the major said. “Like a JAM version of us recovering our recon pods. He probably thought he wasn’t in any danger.”
“Yeah,” Rei replied.
He’d said he admired Rei and Yukikaze so much that he wanted to fly the same mission. Rei remembered that. He’d seemed a little arrogant, but that was human too, wasn’t it? Much more so than the Boomerang pilots usually were, Rei thought.
“Rei, they’re going to get us!”
The other planes were still in range.
Unit 13 was armed with short-range missiles and a gun. With Yukikaze’s AICS still not running normally, she’d be at a disadvantage in a dogfight. If he was going to attack, now was the time. Rei selected his medium-range missiles for launch. He hesitated for an instant before firing them, but he had almost no margin left for any hesitation. Kill or be killed. He launched four shots simultaneously: two of the new variable-speed medium-range missiles and two hyper-velocity medium-range missiles.
He didn’t know how Lieutenant Yagashira saw all this, whether he saw himself as a JAM or, to the end, thought of himself as human. But right now, there was no doubt that his actions were those of a JAM.
The human part of him was already dead, Rei thought as he watched the display count down to the missiles’ reaching their target. But he was troubled by why he was still even worrying about that.
It was because he looked human. He wouldn’t have hesitated to fire at a JAM fighter plane, would he? Even though the JAM might even be planes themselves, he’d have no problem shooting them, right? The JAM might have counted on Rei’s reluctance to fire at something that looked human, but no matter what the weapon looked like, if he was facing a JAM there was no reason to hesitate. It was clear that Lieutenant Yagashira was a JAM. There was no doubt that was true, even without Major Booker telling him that. So then, why did he feel this way?