Lieutenant Katsuragi was silent.
“Think about it for yourself, Lieutenant. I’m pretty sure you know how you feel.”
Captain Foss and her therapy must have had an even stronger influence on me than I ever imagined, Rei thought. But nothing pissed him off more than hearing someone talking as pretentiously as Lieutenant Katsuragi was; the lieutenant wasn’t even using his own words. All it did was underline how mentally immature he really was. It was all Rei could do to keep from just telling the guy to fuck off. The foul language he wanted to hurl at him was the same abuse he wanted to hurl at himself.
“Does everyone in the SAF fly for the same reasons you do?” the lieutenant finally asked.
“I couldn’t care less why they do it,” Rei replied.
“So, the SAF is…yeah. That’s fine, isn’t it?”
You draw the most strength when you fight for yourself, Rei thought, as he silently nodded. He looked outside. The scenery hadn’t changed. Maybe the JAM were carrying out a cunning plan just to annoy him. Rei was concerned about their remaining fuel, but then noticed they hadn’t consumed nearly as much as he’d thought.
“It doesn’t matter what motivates your unit’s pilots to fly, as long as they achieve their strategic goals,” Lieutenant Katsuragi said. “If you find out what the JAM think of you and Yukikaze, we can figure out what their strategic objectives are and develop strategies to anticipate their behavior.” He paused a moment. “I was really shocked when you just coolly said ‘yeah’ like that, Captain. I just couldn’t come up with anything to answer that.”
“You would have said the same thing if you’d been in my position. There was nothing shocking about it. You and I are a lot alike.”
“I was shocked because saying something like that in any other unit would have earned you a trip to the firing squad. If the SAF permits conversations like this to happen every day, it’s in real trouble. Well, I suppose I don’t have anything to worry about.”
“Do you have a meeting arranged with Colonel Rombert?” Rei asked.
“No, but I figure the colonel will approach me somehow. Still, even if he does, I don’t plan to tell him about this. Besides, considering the situation, I doubt he’d believe me even if I did.”
“That colonel wouldn’t ignore intelligence like this just because he didn’t believe it himself. He’d probably anticipate how well you can utilize your intelligence network and demand objective data.”
“Hm…”
Right now, Katsuragi is probably doubting what his five senses are telling him about this whole experience, Rei thought. If they made it back in one piece, he was definitely going to need the data Yukikaze had collected in order to process it.
“Don’t keep monitoring the instruments,” Rei ordered. “Keep a visual watch on our surroundings. No matter what happens, don’t look at the instruments. I’ll tell you again if I need you to run the EW systems. Trust your own eyes. Now, repeat what I just told you back to me.”
“Maintain a visual watch on our surroundings, don’t look at the instruments until the pilot tells me otherwise. That is all.”
“You left out the part about trusting your own eyes.”
“That was part of your orders?”
“Yeah.”
“Trust my own eyes. That is all,” Lieutenant Katsuragi said.
“And can you do that?”
“I follow my orders.”
“It’d be hard for me to do,” Rei said. “Flying without looking at my instruments would make me as nervous as hitting full throttle with my eyes shut.”
“You’re a pilot. That’s not surprising.”
“It’s not that sort of anxiety.”
“Are you saying you can’t completely trust Yukikaze—”
As he spoke, an object moving at high speed was detected on the enemy search radar, triggering an air-raid alarm. Lieutenant Katsuragi’s eyes instinctively fell back to his display panel.
“Bogey, single, bearing low to port. Rising fast on a general intercept course. From its size, I’m guessing it’s a fighter plane, not a missile.”
“Lieutenant, carry out your orders!” Rei snapped. “Maintain a visual watch and give me running reports on the actual conditions you see. Do it in a way that anyone would be able to figure out what happened here if we replay it back at base.”
“Roger. By visual observation… I can’t confirm an enemy silhouette in the cloud bank below us, but it’s probably close.”
“Target is crossing to starboard, right next to us, Lieutenant. I’m matching speeds. No IFF response. I can’t confirm if it’s a JAM. Type: unknown.”
“A section of the bogey has appeared through the cloud bank… Looks like the pointed tip of a vertical stabilizer.”
Like a shark fin breaking the surface of the water, thought Lieutenant Katsuragi. It was very close to them now, barely one hundred meters away. It broke through the clouds as it rose toward them. The surroundings were dim, and in the weak light, its wings looked gray instead of the usual black of a JAM plane.
“I can see some sort of darkish marking on the gray wings of the plane. It looks like… like…”
It was a Boomerang mark. With barely a ripple on the surface of the clouds, the unknown plane revealed itself completely.
“The plane is a Sylphid, a high-speed Super Sylph. I can confirm the markings of the Special Air Force 5th Squadron on it.”
Even Rei could now see with his naked eyes the plane emerging on the starboard side.
“It’s Yukikaze,” he said coolly. “A duplicate of Yukikaze’s old airframe, and this isn’t the first time I’ve run into it.”
Setting the fire control radar to pursuit mode, he locked on to the target plane. It was emitting an IFF signal designating it as friendly, but Rei disregarded that and marked it as hostile.
“I see crewmen in the cockpit,” Lieutenant Katsuragi reported. “Their faces are covered with visors and masks… The one in the rear seat is moving his hand… He’s pointing to his mask. It looks like he wants to talk to us.”
This was the first time he’d seen humanoids riding in the gray mystery plane. Wondering if they were duplicates of himself and Lieutenant Burgadish, Rei began manually searching the comm band, but the auto-scanner locked on before he could. A voice came through into his helmet.
“Lieutenant Fukai, you are fighting a useless battle. Do you hear me? I demand that you abandon your fighting spirit and live as I tell you to. Answer me, Lieutenant Fukai. I repeat…”
That wasn’t Lieutenant Burgadish’s voice. Its tone was neutral, as though mechanically synthesized. While the subject of its speech was easy to understand, it used words clumsily. Besides that, Rei was a captain now, but it was referring to him by his former rank. That might have been deliberate though, and Rei decided against correcting its mistake. No point in giving the JAM any more information than he had to.
“Lieutenant Fukai, you are fighting a useless battle. Do you hear me?”
“This is B-1, I read you loud and clear. Please state your name, rank, and unit attachment.”
“Response confirmed. I lack the type of classification and identification codes you inquire about. Lieutenant Fukai, please respond if you accept or deny my request.”
“If you’re going to make a request of someone, it’s only common courtesy to make your social position clear to them,” Rei replied, knowing that wasn’t true at all. “Who are you?”
After a short, almost embarrassed silence, it responded.
“By your conceptualization, I am the whole of what you refer to as the JAM.”