But why? Why won’t you accept my offer? Why won’t you trust me?
—Because you can’t understand.
And he couldn’t trust anyone who didn’t, much less do what they told him to.
Do you prefer annihilation while you still don’t understand what I am?
—I’d be killed by Yukikaze and not by you. I don’t give a damn about you anymore. I won’t let you come between us, so get the hell out of here! This is the relationship I share with her, and I’ll be damned if I’ll let you get in the way of it. I’m busy here trying to perfect my relationship with Yukikaze. Quit bothering me! My life or death is my own business. I won’t let anyone take that from me!
He felt violent rage. A terrible anger he’d never experienced before. Whether it originated from himself or the owner of the voice, Rei couldn’t say for sure.
The anger became an explosion of energy. Or at least that was what Rei thought. He couldn’t see the main display anymore. The intense light spread. He felt the force of it blast the missile hanging over him away. This being, whatever it was, would not have him.
Rei sensed that he’d won, and joy filled his heart. It became a wave of force, shaking his surroundings as it spread.
He was filled with a terrific sense of euphoria, and the external rage turned to vague resentment, and then to bewilderment. Why was he so confused? he wondered, regretting that the feeling was already fading. Rei realized that the anger and confusion weren’t his own, but the sense of joy he felt was also fading along with them. The light was fading. It grew dark. A powerful fatigue began to take the place of the sense of triumph he’d felt. Discomfort with his own body.
Once more, he had a sense of his own physical form. The beating of his heart, his ragged breathing, the sweat that soaked him from head to toe, the ache in his head. As his sight brought back his sense of reality, the readouts on the display grabbed his attention.
The countdown to impact had been replaced with the word FAIL.
The attack had failed.
The perfection of my ideal relationship with Yukikaze has failed, Rei thought, his mind still drifting in a dreamlike state.
The warning alarm that followed snapped him back to consciousness. The seat ejection sequencer was being activated, setting off a warning strobe. This was happening. He was in danger.
If the pilot in front activated the sequencer, the person in the rear had no choice but to be ejected as well. But the person in the rear could select to eject either both seats or just their own. At the moment, it was set to eject the rear seat only. The ejection call could be executed by pulling on either a handle located next to the crewman’s knees or the ones overhead. Checking his rearview mirror, Rei saw that Lieutenant Katsuragi was grasping the overhead handles.
“Katsuragi, don’t!” Rei yelled. “Get your hands off of those handles!”
Rei wasn’t going to let him eject. He couldn’t afford to lose the plane’s canopy now. It would lose both speed and stability, and they still hadn’t left the mysterious battle zone. Lieutenant Katsuragi had come back to himself. He wanted to say that he hadn’t meant to eject, that his hands had moved unconsciously, but he couldn’t speak. Wasn’t there some way to stop the ejection sequence?
“Lieutenant, relax your grip,” Rei said. “Release the handles slowly. It’s all right, you can still cancel it.”
Rei could hear the man take a deep breath, as though he had finally remembered to breathe. After acknowledging the attack failure indicator and canceling all alarms, Yukikaze flashed a new message onto the display:
You have control… Capt/let’s return home.
Rei quickly flipped both the automaneuver switch and the G limiter off. Gripping the throttle tightly, he pushed it to maximum thrust and lit the afterburners.
Yukikaze’s twin Super Phoenix engines began generating thrust beyond their rated safety limits. Rei’s body was thrown back into his seat with a bang. Having turned over flight control to Rei, Yukikaze immediately assumed control of the electronic warfare duties. All jamming systems were engaged at maximum output.
The way out was dead ahead. It was an aperture, gray now instead of blue. It seemed to have moved there from the missile impact point instantaneously, by the JAM, no doubt.
Lieutenant Katsuragi looked behind him. It was complete blackness now. He got the rough impression that the airspace in which they were flying was somehow spherical, and rapidly shrinking. Looking toward the gray, circular exit ahead of them, he could see it contracting. Like the pupil of an eye, he thought. It was like Yukikaze was flying out of the JAM’s own evil eye.
The rate of the gray circle’s closure seemed to slow. In fact, it hadn’t slowed at all, but as Yukikaze rapidly closed the distance, the relative speed made it appear that way. Lieutenant Katsuragi knew that they were now close enough to get a true sense of distance from it. The aperture conversely seemed to begin growing larger.
“Brace for impact!”
No sooner had Rei said it than the lieutenant inhaled sharply and tensed.
Just before the violent shock hit them, he managed to make a rough eyeball estimate of just how big the exit was—about two hundred meters in diameter, and Yukikaze was thrusting toward just about dead center of it. The crash felt like they’d run into a solid wall.
He could still think, so they obviously hadn’t been smashed to smithereens. Nice. Great job, Lieutenant Katsuragi thought, in appreciation of Rei’s flying skills. Even at this speed, he’d managed to fly through that tiny exit.
There hadn’t been any room to spare. It had felt like being on a train car rushing into a tunnel, except Yukikaze didn’t have a track to follow. One slip up on the controls would have ended in a nasty failure.
“Check for damage.”
His pilot’s voice rang out. Lieutenant Katsuragi switched the plane’s onboard self-monitoring systems on. Their engines had stalled out. There was a hydraulic system malfunction on one of the tail stabilizers. He visually checked each wing. The left primary tail stabilizer was gone, and the plane’s fuselage was pocked with holes near it. He could tell that the force of the blast had come from inside of the plane. The other flight systems seemed to be fine.
“We lost our left primary tail stabilizer. I think we had some kind of major mechanical failure in the left engine. There’s no fire or smoke coming out, but there’re traces of a small explosion. Both engines have flamed out, and fuel transfer to them has been automatically cut. The emergency fuel shut-off valve has been activated.”
Rei checked the flight instruments. They were flying inverted. Righting the plane, he saw that they had altitude to spare. They were flying at 24,100 meters and descending gradually. He could already tell that the left engine was unusable now. Losing the primary tail stabilizer didn’t have much of an effect on them. There were two pairs of them and, as they were in close proximity to the main wings, were referred to as the primary and secondary tail stabilizers. They moved up and down in relation to the fuselage, with the sweep of the angle between them adjusting variably on a moment-by-moment basis according to the plane’s flight attitude. Because of this, there was little meaningful distinction between a horizontal or vertical stabilizer as far as a pilot was concerned, so losing one meant that, aside from advanced air combat maneuvering, flight was completely unaffected. As long as the flight system was still functioning properly, it could probably keep the plane flying stably with only one wing. Their problem was thrust, as in a lack of it coming from the engines.