YUKIKAZE (21 page)

“Why do you think? ’Cause he’s a hero, ain’t he?”

They laughed and then went back to their usual stupid chatter. About how someone had gotten into a fight with some woman and had his arm broken, but no, that was just some story he’d made up to get out of work, and how could he humiliate himself that much just to get out of work, and was it still snowing outside…

Lieutenant Amata drained the flask, dropped it on the floor, and closed his eyes.

THE WEATHER ON the day commemorating the founding of the FAF was a Class 2 winter storm. The 3rd Mechanized Snow Removal Unit was ready for deployment. After being told to disregard the commemoration ceremony, the motor graders and the secondary rotary plows were divided into teams and sent out to face the white devil. They came in only to rest and refuel and were immediately sent out again. As it grew busier and busier, with more and more vehicles breaking down, tanker trucks were brought out to do hot refueling—pumping gas directly into the plows’ tanks while the engines were still running. The huge airfield was like a battle zone, but with snow and ice as the enemy, not the JAM.

While his coworkers were on the ground freezing, Lieutenant Amata put on a uniform he’d never worn before and headed for the ceremony hall. The huge underground auditorium was warm, like another world. In fact, it was hot enough to make him sweat, and he found it almost as oppressive as being in the middle of a blizzard.

As he stood in line with the other medal recipients and listened to the congratulatory speeches being given, he frowned occasionally. Each word of praise from the loudspeaker seemed to bore painfully into his hungover brain. The scene in the stiff and formal ceremonial hall didn’t seem real to him at all; there was no snow here, no numbing cold. The stern attitudes of the generals and the faces of the soldiers there to receive their commendations… They all seemed to exist in a different dimension from him. They looked like dolls, like they weren’t alive. He had to keep reminding himself that the scene before him wasn’t a fiction.

When he thought about it, though, this entire war seemed to be a fictional one. The JAM had never shown themselves to humans, and a ground grunt like Lieutenant Amata couldn’t begin to imagine what sort of enemy they were. He would watch the fighter teams take off and return, but what the enemy planes looked like or even whether or not they existed was beyond him. He didn’t think about it, either. To him, the most pressing concerns were getting fuel for his grader, or stopping the cold wind that blew in under the bent door, or how he would have to buy some more whiskey soon because he was almost out. Stuff like that. The snow and the cold were the lieutenant’s enemies. Not the JAM.

The JAM, an enemy the lieutenant had never seen, was beyond him. But the FAF was equally so. And now this huge, unknowable thing was giving him a medal. It was like having a monster from his dreams appear in front of him shaking a bell. All of it, all of it was utterly unreal.

We’re all dolls,
he thought,
the generals, the medal recipients, and me, too.
Just gaily dressed mannequins in a shop window, whose sole purpose was to entice the passersby to come in and spend their money. He was being used to sell the idea of fighting spirit to the soldiers in the field, an immobile doll inserted into a make-believe world.

At last, his name was called. With a feeling of grim resignation, he walked forward and saluted the general presenting the medals. As the general, his chest plastered with ribbons and decorations, took the Order of Mars from his adjutant, Lieutenant Amata saw his eye fall on the snowflake-shaped insignia on Amata’s uniform. A look of doubt clouded the general’s face, and Amata felt a jolt of alarm run through him. Wasn’t this farce of a ceremony being conducted under the order of the command staff ? Why would the general be surprised by it?

“Congratulations,” the general said as he hung the Order of Mars around Amata’s neck. “You’re a hero.”

He sounded almost offended when he said it. Amata took a deep breath and desperately tried to sort out the jumble of thoughts in his head. What was going on here? Why was the general looking at him like that? Had something gone wrong?

There was only one answer he could arrive at: the command staff didn’t know about this, either. Why would a snowplow driver be awarded a medal? Who was it that had made the decision? It wasn’t his division, it wasn’t the Corps, and it wasn’t the command staff, either. Which meant that it was nobody in the FAF.

Impossible. Amata shivered. The situation had gone from absurd to ominous. The gold medal hung heavily from his neck. It was engraved with an image of a Super Sylph, a creature that had nothing to do with a man like him who spent his life crawling around on the ground. But he couldn’t give it back. The Corps wouldn’t allow it. He had decided that if he had to become a decorated doll, a figurine to boost morale, he was prepared to accept his fate. But now even that justification had vanished.

What was this medal? As the military band struck up a loud performance of “Hail to the Faery Air Force,” Lieutenant Amata felt sick.

THE NEWS THAT an alcoholic snowplow driver had been given the Order of Mars was soon all over Faery. As the Maintenance Corps command had anticipated, people became more aware of the importance of the Corps’ duties, including snow removal, but precious few agreed that Lieutenant Amata deserved the medal. Everyone else was baffled as to why he was given it. Some went so far as to tell him straight to his face that it was a mistake. Others would speculate on what kind of stratagem he had pulled to dupe the decorations committee and then would insult him further by saying that they knew he wasn’t capable of something like that.

Amata could only take their scorn in silence. He knew his work meant nothing to almost everyone else, but up until then no one had actually said “You’re garbage” to his face. As soon as he’d been decorated, however, his wretchedness had been exposed for all to see. Everywhere he went, he could hear the murmurs of
Why you?
and felt even worse as he had no answer to give. He wished they would just stop. He hadn’t wanted the damn thing in the first place.

He tried to drown his indignation in the bottle and drank so much he was practically pickled in alcohol. The Order of Mars had become a golden maggot that ate into his flesh, a sylph that sprang from rotten meat.

He couldn’t give the medal back. He couldn’t throw it away. He couldn’t destroy it. He was trapped on all sides. All he could do was drink and hope the alcohol would eventually sterilize the wound.

Conscious of the weight of the medal hanging around his neck, Lieutenant Amata donned his cold weather gear. “I’m a great man, a hero,” he announced to the empty locker room. “Yahoo. The hero is marching off to war.” Was that dull ache in his side from his liver, or was the medal poking him in the stomach? He staggered a bit as he made his way out.

It was below freezing in the garage. The snow that clung to his grader was white and crystalline. Dazzling light flooded in as the shutter door rose. It was clear weather for a change.

Amata stumbled as he boarded his machine. The other members of his unit saw it but said nothing. It wasn’t unusual for him to go out drunk, and besides, he was a hero, wasn’t he?

The graders rolled out. The bent door on his machine still hadn’t been fixed. He’d banged at it with a hammer, but that had just made the problem worse. The wind outside was strong. Low, dark, roiling clouds moved with ferocious speed across the sky. Shafts of sunlight would occasionally pierce through them to stab at the ground like swords of light. It was even colder now than it had been during the blizzard. The hard-packed snow was tougher to deal with, but Amata almost preferred the relative warmth of the storm. He dazedly watched the patterns formed by the snow as it was whipped about by the wind.

The unit took advantage of the break in the weather to do a large-scale snow removal of the airfield ground facilities. In spaces where the graders couldn’t get in, waves of men were dispatched to do it by hand. It was only at times like these that the snow removal units had help, with every off-duty member of the division mobilized for the job.

Amata stopped his grader in front of the hut that stood next to the elevator egress of the Tactical Air Force’s SAF. He smiled faintly as he took in the scene of the SAF pilots shoveling snow. His teeth chattered as he watched. The cold air blowing in through the gap in the door caused his breath to fog up and obscure every part of the windshield not directly hit by the driver’s seat defroster. He could actually hear the moisture crackle as it froze on the glass.

The grader would plow away the snow shoveled off the elevator head by the men, but until they were finished, he had to wait. He rubbed his face with his gloves. It was so cold it hurt.
Hurry up,
he thought.
I’ve got other work to do.
After the next wave of scheduled sorties, he had the takeoff runway to clear.

As Lieutenant Amata sat in the driver’s seat, rubbing at his face and knocking his knees together to keep from freezing, a guy who looked like an SAF officer hand-signaled him to move. The SAF elevator platform was rising to reveal an enormous fighter plane. A Sylphid. Amata pressed down on his parka over the spot where the medal lay hanging against his stomach.

“Would you hurry up and move it?!” yelled the man outside his window. Amata backed his machine away.

The Sylph was towed out. It was an SAF reconnaissance plane. Not just a Sylphid, then. A Super Sylph. The twin vertical stabilizers bore a boomerang insignia. Beneath the cockpit, in a small calligraphic hand, was the plane’s personal name: Yukikaze. A cold-sounding name.
But I’ll bet it’s warm inside that cockpit,
Amata thought enviously. This was the first time he had seen a Super Sylph from this close up. It was an intimidating aircraft. His motor grader, designed for use on the enormous FAB runways, was the size of a house, but the fighter before him was even larger.

Yukikaze’s jet fuel starter broke the silence as it started up, making a noise like a low siren. The sound explosively increased in volume until it melted into the howl of the right engine turbine revving up. As the fan revolutions rose, the fine snow layer covering the runway was sucked into the air intake, and soon a small vortex of snow, solid as a pillar, bridged the space between the ground and the intake. The characteristic ear-splitting scream of the fan engine diminished as the pilot pulled the throttle to idle. Lieutenant Amata let out the breath he’d been unconsciously holding. Then the pilot started the left engine. The cold air rang again with the low-pitched siren of the jet fuel starter.

After another few minutes the ground crew gave the “go” sign, and the pilot waved his hand in acknowledgment. The grader shook with the roar of Yukikaze’s engines. The thunderous noise rose even higher, and then suddenly, as though pushed from behind, the huge plane moved forward. The exhaust from her engines whipped the snow behind her into a small storm. Amata turned on the grader’s windshield wipers.

Yukikaze taxied out onto the broad runway. Soon she was lifting off from it, her afterburners blowing long tails of flame, and in the blink of an eye she vanished into the thick cloud layer. The thunderous roar of her engines lingered for a moment before it, too, faded into the ringing silence that remained.

Lieutanant Amata couldn’t tell whether his ears felt numb more from the cold or from the sonic assault of the fighter’s start-up. He drank his whiskey, mentally comparing his motor grader to the fighter plane named Yukikaze, then sighed. They shared only one common feature: they both ran on liquid fuel. Aside from that Yukikaze excelled in every way. Loaded with bombs, she would weigh nearly thirty tons. The grader weighed only sixteen. The plane could generate nearly thirty tons of thrust, while he could just about manage 300 horsepower. The fighter was magnificent, while the plow was just lame. The same could probably be said of their operators as well.

“Thanks for the help out here.”

Amata started. Outside the door, the superior officer who had signaled him before was looking up at the grader’s cabin. Amata kicked the door open and looked down.

The man from the SAF had a deep scar on his cheek. His rank insignia indicated that he was a major.

Amata’s throat closed up from the cold. His lungs seemed paralyzed for an instant. The freezing air stung his eyes. He blinked, inhaled even though it hurt to do so, and snapped, “How long are you going to make me wait? Sir…”

“Sorry,” the man replied. “Major Booker from the SAF.” He squinted up at Amata. “You been drinking?”

“Yeah.”

“Can you do your job?”

“Yeah, if you’d let me. If I don’t get to it soon, I won’t have any time to rest up before my next shift.”

“Can you plow the runway straight when you’re sotted?”

Plowing the runway involved several motor graders driving abreast, with rotary plows working on both sides to push the snow collected by the graders off to the side of the runway.

“Don’t worry. A beacon signal keeps the graders driving straight. I don’t even have to hold the wheel. Funny, huh? I don’t even need to be here.” His voice grew tight. “And for that, they made me a hero.”

“So, that’s who you are,” said Major Booker, staring at him. “You’re the famous Lieutenant Amata.”

“None other. What, are you shocked?”

“You reek of alcohol. How fitting for a hero.”

“Yeah,” the lieutenant answered. Then suddenly, he was moved to tears, tears he wasn’t even aware he was shedding. “I can’t help it. It’s all that medal’s fault… It’s cut me off from all my friends. If I keep quiet, they rag on me. If I speak, they resent me. No matter what I do or don’t do, I’m cut off from everyone else. It’s not like I was really close to any of ’em, but they’re all I had. And there’s nothing I can do about it. It’s all—” He choked back the bile that rose in his throat, tasting blood. He tried washing it down with a slug of whiskey, gagged, and spat it outside the cabin. A reddish brown stain spread across the surface of the snow.
Guess I really don’t have much longer,
he thought.