YUKIKAZE (19 page)
“Of course,” Rei whispered. “Of course you’re human.” He had died with a faint smile on his face, as though he had finally received the reassurance he sought. As though saying that his life hadn’t been so bad after all.
Banshee’s symbol blinked out on the radar.
YUKIKAZE LANDED BACK at Faery Base.
Rei taxied to Boomerang Squadron’s area. After raising the right engine output to 80 percent for fifteen seconds, he cut it off. He then did the same for the left engine.
After he’d killed the engines, he just sat there in the cockpit, looking up at the cloudless sky.
Major Booker turned the exterior canopy control handle and peered inside the cockpit.
“You all right, Rei? Where’s Tom? What happened to—”
“Jack…Could you check my environmental control system?” Rei raised his helmet visor and swiped at the tears on his cheeks with his gloved fist. “Something’s stinging my eyes.”
He had to protect Yukikaze. He had to eliminate anything that stood in her way—even if it was his fellow man. That was what he believed. And then he learned that the computers, the machines built by men, were working to the same end.
SNOW WAS FALLING on Faery.
Winter was always the busiest season for the Maintenance Corps. They ran the snow removal equipment on twenty-fourhour rotation while the finely driven flakes numbed the skin on their faces and froze their hair, eyelashes, and beards into crystalline spikes. They always prayed for the weather to let up, but the snow always continued to fall, heedless of the desires of the humans caught in it.
Second Lieutenant Mamoru Amata (FAF Maintenance Corps, Faery Base 110th Airfield Maintenance Division, 3rd Mechanized Snow Removal Unit) sat in the cab of a motor grader, waiting for his turn to go out and growing increasingly pissed off that the grader’s door didn’t shut properly.
Visibility was low thanks to the howling blizzard outside. The storm was blowing with such force that it was less like it was snowing than like the air itself had partially solidified into ice. To Lieutenant Amata, it looked as if there was more snow than air out there right now.
He sighed and listened to the rhythmic thump of the windshield wipers, the crackling static of snow beating against the grader, and the whistle of cold air blowing through a gap in the door frame. Needles of snow were driving through the gap, gradually forming a soft pile at Amata’s feet. He took off his gloves and bent over to try and fix the door. A thick layer of ice had crusted over its bottom edge, and he clicked his tongue in annoyance when he saw the problem: some of the insulation had been improperly installed. The cold outside air was causing moisture to condense inside of the door panel, drip down, and then freeze at the bottom. Amata scraped at the ice with his fingernails, wondering if the warmth of his hands might be enough to melt it. His fingers turned red, then began to go purplish from the cold. He finally gave up, tried blowing on his now numb hands to warm them, and held them over the windshield defroster. They were stiff and senseless. He couldn’t even tell if they were cold anymore.
The lieutenant tried to remember when the door had been bent and knocked his legs together to make sure that all feeling hadn’t been completely lost from his seemingly frozen lower extremities. He sourly eyed the little stream of snow as it came in through the gap. So, when had the door been bent? Oh, yeah. The day before yesterday, during a furious snowstorm, he’d lightly bumped the machine driven by his coworker. At least the storm today was better than the one a couple of days ago. Visibility wasn’t zero: he could actually see five or six meters ahead.
His hands gradually regained sensation. His skin hurt as though it’d been flayed off. He put his hands back into the gloves he’d warmed on the defroster. The windshield had now fogged up and was pure white. He wiped at it with the shell of his glove. It didn’t change the view much. Just white. If he stared at it for long, it almost became mesmerizing. The snow danced and whirled before him, seeming to invite him out into the storm.
God, it’s cold.
Amata wrapped his arms around his chest and rubbed his sides. If he didn’t keep moving, he’d probably freeze.
Suddenly, the grader’s engine rumbled to life; its automatic ignition system had activated.
Even the truck’s scared of the cold,
he thought with a bitter smile. He wondered why they even bothered to build an energy conservation system into it. Two seconds of flight in a jet fighter probably used up more fuel than idling a snowplow on standby for an hour. He wished they’d let him just run the damn thing while he was waiting so he could get some heat out of the defroster.
The driver’s seat shook with the vibration of the engine. It didn’t warm things up much. Amata reached into his back pocket and pulled out his own fuel: a pocket flask of whiskey. Just a little nip to warm himself up. Through the limited space cleared by the windshield wipers, he could faintly make out the machines of his coworkers, the rotating lights on their rooftops visible as hazy amber globes in the white.
The whiskey burned his throat. Cheap stuff. The heat of the alcohol in his stomach began to spread to his limbs. It was the only thing that kept him warm, that made the duty out here bearable. He’d be damned if he was going to give it up because of some idiotic regulation.
How long did they expect him to wait? As he hitched himself forward and returned the whiskey to his back pocket, he pressed his face to the window and peered outside. The last plane of the 167th Tactical Fighter Squadron had not yet returned. Probably flying somewhere above the storm and taking his sweet time. Lieutenant Amata pounded his fists together, trying to return some feeling to them. Obviously command was fine with them all just freezing to death waiting for that last plane to come in.
He could see a figure on runway 03R, the one used exclusively for landing aircraft. Probably a hook runner, poor bastard. In wintertime, because of the icy runway conditions, the fighters would land using arresting hooks, as they would on an aircraft carrier. The arresting cable and its support gear were laid out over the runway now, waiting for the last 167th plane, which meant that Amata and his unit couldn’t plow over it. While they sat there watching, the snow continued to pile up. If they left it for very much longer, the arresting cable wouldn’t be able to lift up because of the weight of the accumulated snow.
In general, though, clearing snow from landing runways was an easy job. Even if a grader broke one of the huge landing lights on the sides of the runway, it wasn’t a big deal. Takeoff runways, however, were a pain, since even in weather like this
takeoffs were done the usual way, not by catapult launch. To ensure they went smoothly, with no resistance from the snow, the maintenance units had to plow the runways if the snow accumulation exceeded three centimeters. They couldn’t use ice melt compound or sand, since the substances could get sucked into the fighters’ air intakes and damage the engines.
Lieutenant Amata scraped up the snow on the cabin floor with his boots and tramped it into the gap in the door. Then, as though mocking him, as though it were the funniest thing in the world, a sudden squall popped the clod of snow out of the gap, and a fresh blast of icy wind gusted in and danced around the driver’s seat. The tiny particles of ice melted in the relative warmth of the cabin air, and soon the lieutenant’s upper body was soaked with cold mist.
“Shit! Shit! Shit! Just land already, you piece of crap plane! Are you trying to make me freeze to death here?!”
Some of the mist condensed on the interior of the cab roof and dripped onto the back of his neck and down his back. It was so cold it almost felt like it was scalding him. Another icy blast blew in from the gap in the door. Amata rubbed at his side. It was aching so badly he could cry. It had been for a while now. His liver was probably wrecked. Or maybe it was his gall bladder. The military doctor hadn’t told him anything except that if he didn’t give up the booze, he’d die.
Maybe it’s cancer,
Amata thought. He’d ignored the doctor’s advice to skip hospitalization and treatment on Faery and just return to Earth. The only thing waiting for him there was either prison or a detox facility. For an offender like him, no place else on Earth offered the freedom that Faery did. The FAF command knew that well and used him and all the others like him for as long as their bodies held out. A man’s body was just one more expendable resource. They could always get more human garbage from Earth.
The fact that sitting here shivering in the freezing cold was better than whatever awaited him on Earth was so pathetic it forced a bark of a laugh from Amata. His life was a four-part litany of booze, women, brawls, and lock-ups. Even he could see how he was going to die. He knew the alcohol had taken over his life, but he was still honest enough with himself to know that he couldn’t blame it for everything. Other people always said that when sympathizing with him, but his life still would’ve been royally screwed up even without the alcohol. And what the hell was a non-screwed up life, anyway? Was there even such a thing?
I didn’t have any other choices than the ones that I made,
he thought. When you’re trapped on all sides with no other options, you walk the only path that’s open to you.
Most people thought he was just irresponsible, that he was just drowning himself in the bottle. But given the life that he’d led, if he hadn’t turned to escape through the booze, that would’ve been it. The End. People back on Earth would tell him to straighten up and fly right, but they may as well have been telling him to put a gun in his mouth and pull the trigger. He didn’t want to go back to that. If he was still alive in the spring, when his tour of duty was up, he’d apply to have it extended. Better that than being driven to suicide.
His brooding was interrupted by the sound of distant thunder. He looked up. At long last, it had returned: the last plane of the 167th TFS. As it approached the roar of its engines gradually drowned out the howling of the storm. Suddenly, the shape of a giant bird appeared out of the whiteness, followed by the sound of an arrester hook snagging the cable. The fighter shook the ground as its wheels made contact with the runway. The hook runner ran out to unhook the cable from the arrester. The ground guide signaled the pilot with powerful flashlights, moving them quickly from belly level to chest: Raise hook. He then lifted his left arm and swept it in a large circle to the left: Proceed to taxiway.
Finally, Amata could do his job. He cut off the intermittent starter and stepped on the accelerator, revving the engine as the black fighter taxied right by him. The metallic whine of its jets grew distant, and he readied himself to get to work. But just as he stepped on the grader’s heavy clutch, he saw someone running toward him. He took his foot off the clutch. The figure made a beeline for the cabin, banged once on the door, then opened it without asking. Icy wind blew into the cabin full force.
“What?!” shouted Amata.
“The de-icer on the gear’s broken down,” the man shouted. He was covered with snow and ice from head to foot. “The storage trench is buried in snow, so we can’t get the arresting gear back into it.”
“Hurry up and close my goddamned door!” Lieutenant Amata shouted back.
“Fine,” the man said. “Just take care of it. You know what to do.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Clear the snow without breaking the gear, okay?”
“That’s not my job!”
“Your job’s snow removal. Now get it done fast or we won’t be ready when the next flight returns. And if that happens, it’s on your head!” The man slammed the door shut, which proceeded to bounce back open again, and ran with short steps to a snow truck whose warm windows were steaming up. He climbed in, and the truck soon disappeared into the blizzard.
Amata gritted his teeth. “Fuckers,” he seethed. The ground crews treated him and the men in his unit like slaves, forcing the cold shit-work off on them. He quickly radioed the word to the other drivers. They all bitched but quickly gave in and accepted the situation. They didn’t have the will to argue at that point. Better to just finish the job quickly.
The lieutenant pulled up the hood of his parka, left the grader idling, and got out. He didn’t turn the intermittent starter on. He was being as uncooperative as he could.
He tried to unhook a shovel from the front of the truck, but the detent was caked with ice and wouldn’t move. He got a plastic hammer from his toolbox and smashed at the ice. Tiny ice chips flew up into his face. Remembering there were goggles in the toolbox as well, he returned the hammer to it and then put the goggles on. Then, taking the shovel in hand and feeling for the arresting cable with his foot, he made his way toward the storage trench.
All around him was total whiteness. The snow blew at him mercilessly. It was hard to breathe. He dug into the trench. He began to sweat. His goggles fogged up. Taking them off, he wiped at the insides with his glove, but they soon fogged up again. He threw the shovel aside and furiously starting digging at the snow with his hands. The other members of his unit were probably kicking back with their own stashes of hooch, letting him deal with the task. He knew most of them were alcoholics. They couldn’t fly fighters and they had no advanced skills, so they were almost universally looked down on by the rest of the FAF, and many of them had internalized the same sense of worthlessness.
Conscious of the pain in his side, Lieutenant Amata pulled the collapse lever. The arresting gear went down. However, a bit of ice still jammed in the fulcrum left the gear poking slightly out of the ground. The lieutenant raised the mechanism again, took off his gloves, and began beating the snow off of it. His hands immediately lost all sensation.
At that moment, he was so jealous of the fighter pilots it made his gut burn. They got to fly off of this snow-blasted landscape and rise above the clouds, where the weather was always clear. No way they could ever understand what it was like for the poor slobs below them freezing on the white ground. He had wanted to be a pilot too, but his bad liver washed him out on the hypoxia resistance test. In other words, the only job for him here was this. He’d been called a waste of a human being, and he had agreed. The same went for all the other guys in his unit. They were sneered at and paid less than the pilots, and even what little pay they received was frequently docked for conduct violations—like drinking on the job.
