The Sylph’s silhouette shrinks for a few seconds, and then vanishes from view. Silence returns. In barely fifteen minutes, it is gone from the radar display as well. They’ve returned. To the skies of Faery. To battle.
Perhaps what I had witnessed really was a spirit of the air. If so, what enormous size it had, what awful power it bore.
I take out my favorite notebook and pen from my bag. I begin writing down what Major Booker had said, intermittently looking out at the sea. I wish I’d brought a portable wordcom with me… and then I suddenly remember Major Booker’s warning and shake my head.
If I had written this on a wordcom, the contents probably would have been changed.
VIII
SUPER PHOENIX
The JAM had never attacked humans directly. Yet when they changed their strategy, Yukikaze did not protect him. In that moment he knew the truth. She was a weapon, but one that defended neither him nor humanity. She abandoned her burning body and rose from the flames like a phoenix, reborn and free.
MAJOR BOOKER WAS analyzing the recent state of the JAM’s tactical weaponry development in comparison to the FAF’s, desperately searching for a weakness.
The FAF Systems Corps’ Technology Development Center had been putting in strenuous efforts to create effective counters to the JAM’s various assault aircraft and armaments. For decades now, both sides had been locked in a game of technological one-upmanship, but recently the pace had escalated rapidly.
When the JAM threw high mobility fighters at their defensive lines, the FAF deployed new light fighters with high thrust-toweight ratios. When the JAM developed advanced electronic countermeasures, the FAF created more advanced electronic counter-countermeasures. The JAM responded to that with even more advanced ECCCM, which the FAF then managed to crack using high-powered radar. The power output of this radar was unimaginable, a frightening correction to the common assumption that radar waves didn’t really affect humans. Even at two to three kilometers away, an unprotected person would be in danger. At close range exposure would be like being thrown into a gigantic microwave oven.
Missiles were countered with high-velocity missiles, which were countered by hyper-velocity missiles, which were in turn countered with laser guns, and the lasers guns with baryon guns. As the FAF worked to neutralize the JAM’s weapons, in order to keep their own from being neutralized as well, they had to develop ones that not only met that same level of technological achievement but surpassed it. Obsolescence was simply a matter of time, and the periods they had before their weapons became obsolete were getting steadily shorter.
As Major Booker compared the data from each side he noticed something strange. Although it required a significant amount of time to develop and perfect such advanced technology, the FAF and the JAM seemed to be doing so at roughly the same rate. Depending on the situation, one side may have achieved overwhelming dominance for a few weeks using a new device, but countermeasures would soon appear and the war would grind back to a stalemate again. The main issue was that neither side could give concrete form to new tactical theories in only a few weeks. No matter how far in advance the JAM or the FAF could plan something that would utterly crush their opponent, by the time it was ready for use, it would already be obsolete.
Sometimes it seemed to Booker that the war was nothing more than a practical test of weapons development, with the planet Faery as the test lab. Or maybe the JAM were just matching their countermeasures to the FAF’s level of technology. If that was the case, they were being toyed with. Toyed with by aliens whose true nature was unknown.
There weren’t many people at the FAF’s Technology Development Center these days. A supercomputer sat in a refrigerated room, keeping its head cool as it endlessly analyzed JAM tactics. The analysis data it generated was sent to a development computer equipped with an artificial intelligence that would then propose potential countermeasures. Among these proposals were things a human wouldn’t have thought of, as well as some that were completely novel but also largely incomprehensible and impossible to execute given the current level of technology. An example was a proposal for a transdimensional bomb. The computer had been deadly serious, predicting the JAM would eventually develop one and advising the FAF to implement countermeasures accordingly.
The development computer would pass on its ideas to a lower-level practical implementation computer that would devise plans for the new weapon to be manufactured at the development center. With computer aid, of course. This entire development process wasn’t so much computer-aided as it was computer-driven. New fighter planes were designed based on new tactical theories. Materials were chosen, and new ones created if necessary. Load strengths were calculated, wing shapes determined, and the onboard armament systems were developed all simultaneously. The new fighters had to be utilized according to the new tactical theories they were based on, and so the pilots couldn’t simply fly them according to their own judgment. It wasn’t necessary for the pilots to think at all.
The days of a pilot taking into consideration a plane’s unique qualities and using his creativity and imagination to fly in the way best suited to take advantage of them were long past. The system created the tactics as well as the planes. No matter which pilot flew it, the plane would deliver the same performance. The best pilots for these new fighters were the ones who could quickly adapt to the machines without any questions, without wondering why they were fighting or how best to destroy their opponents. All they needed were the physical strength for the task and faith in the machine. There was no need for thought; the computers would think for them. At the very least, the computers could understand and execute tactics faster and with greater precision than any human could.
Despite the vigorous efforts of the FAF computers, the JAM countered them one by one with seeming ease. As though they were testing the abilities of humanity’s machines, not of humans themselves, just as Major Booker suspected.
However, there was one exception to this dynamic. Even the JAM were at a loss when it came to the Sylphid, the treasure of the Earth Defense Organization’s Faery Air Force. While models with the same name and basic configuration had been released, their parts and designs tweaked to make them more easily producible, the original Sylphid’s maneuverability and reliability still went unmatched.
The Sylphid, originally developed for hit-and-away attacks, boasted a huge thrust-to-weight ratio. Its avionics system was now even more advanced than when it had first been developed, and its wing shape had been subtly modified to give it extreme maneuverability. The original Sylphid was an FAF mainline fighter, but only three air groups—a total of forty-nine planes— were produced.
Of those, thirteen strategic reconnaissance variants were delivered to the SAF. These planes had one section of stabilizing wings removed to make them even faster and more capable than the mainline fighters at evading low-level antiaircraft munitions. These thirteen, the most powerful of the Sylphid variants, were unofficially referred to as “Super Sylphs.”
Although the JAM had managed to hit them on different occasions, they had yet to shoot one down. How these planes, now ancient in terms of production time, still managed to remain the strongest in the war was a riddle that vexed both the computers and the humans at the TDC. They’d developed—and continued to develop—several new fighters that according to their specs should have been superior to the Super Sylphs. But none of them were.
But then, Major Booker thought, they’ve probably never seriously tried to determine what the key factor is in the Super Sylph’s survival rate. The Sylphs of SAF-V, the Boomerang Squadron, had a return-to-base rate of 100 percent. And Booker knew the reason why: it was their exceptional pilots. It was common sense that the SAF would select only the most elite pilots to fly the air force’s best planes. But he knew that the computers probably didn’t want to admit that, since it would gut the entire premise that these fighters would deliver maximum performance no matter who was flying them, or even if they flew unmanned.