Chōhei Kambayashi - Yukikaze

She approached the bedside, a syringe in her hand.

“Come now, Lieutenant. You should get some rest.”

If she gave him that shot, he might never wake up again. If she wasn’t human, how could he find out for sure? Check her body, her cells, her molecules with equipment he didn’t have?

“Lieutenant, you have Faery Fever. This injection will lessen the anxiety you’re feeling. You’re hallucinating, Lieutenant. Get a hold of yourself.”

“I’m not crazy.”

Still smiling, Marnie took hold of his arm. Rei was tempted to just let go and obey her. Maybe she was right. Maybe he was sick, and this paranoia was a result.

Yukikaze’s warning message flashed in his mind. Just before she plunged the needle into his arm, Rei slapped her hand away and gripped her other wrist, squeezing with enough force to make her drop the syringe.

“What are you doing?!” she gasped.

He threw her down onto the floor and tore open the front of her uniform. Her heavy breasts spilled out. She screamed as he sank his teeth into one of them, biting into her flesh.

He pushed away from her, spat out the piece he’d bitten, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. It didn’t taste like blood. It tasted like the liquid food that she had brought him. It wasn’t protein.

“Fucking JAM!”

He looked down at her as he drew his pistol and fired a single shot. Her body jerked once, then stopped moving.

He had to get to Yukikaze. He ran out of the room. The adrenaline dumping into his system was clearing his head and returning some strength to his limbs.

The bittersweet flavor of the blood that wasn’t blood lingered in his mouth. The soup Marnie had given him didn’t have that same taste. As Rei ran, he suddenly realized what they must have made it from and felt like vomiting.

Before he could think about it any further he rounded a corner and ran into Major Yazawa. The major immediately reached out and knocked the gun out of his hand.

Keeping his grip on Rei’s arm, he followed through with an outside shoulder throw. His strength was incredible. Rei went with the fall and hit the floor on his left shoulder, feeling a bolt of pain rip through it. Ignoring it, he grabbed on to Yazawa’s arm with both hands, kicked his legs up, locked them around the back of the man’s head, and used the momentum of his body to throw him over onto the floor.

Rei released the hold and scrabbled forward, reaching for his fallen gun. Just as his fingers closed on the grip he felt the major’s powerful hands wrap around his shins.

Before he could even turn to look, he was flying through the air. Straining his abdominal muscles, he twisted his body, just barely managing to get his back around before he slammed into the wall. The shock of the impact momentarily blinded him. He couldn’t breathe. Lying sideways on the floor, he looked up to see the major leaping at him. Two shots. The report echoed down the corridor. The 9mm 205 grain rounds blew Yazawa’s head off.

Rei lowered his arms, gasping for air. After a few seconds he slowly levered himself up into a crouch and rubbed the back of his neck, shaking his head to work out the stiffness. He cautiously flexed his limbs. Nothing seemed to be broken, at least.

He stood up and surveyed the scene. Major Yazawa’s body was sprawled out on the floor. The back of his head had been splattered across the wall and ceiling, dyeing their surfaces red. But there was no smell of blood.

Massaging his solar plexus with his left hand, Rei aimed his gun at the lock on the metal door and fired a couple of shots at it. He gave the door a sharp kick and it opened onto a stairwell. He started climbing. Upon reaching the uppermost level, he spotted what looked like an exit, a doorway glowing with daylight. He ran through it…

And emerged into a bizarre landscape. It didn’t look like Faery. He was standing at the edge of a flat, smooth plain that stretched out before him like a sheet of blue ice. Thick clouds hung so low it seemed as if he could reach out and touch them. The underground entrance he’d just emerged from was situated in a forest, and around him the trees shimmered in metallic green hues. Looking back through the strange trees he saw a pond. A pond that glowed a sickly yellow. The surface roiled, as if the liquid were boiling.

He shifted his gaze back toward the open space ahead of him. There was a strip of transparent, plastic-like ground that could have been a runway. He followed it with his eyes and found Yukikaze. She was sitting on level ground about 400 meters away. He left the cover of the forest and ran toward her. He concentrated on his objective, blocking out the fact that he was completely out in the open now, an easy target.

He saw two figures approaching Yukikaze. Pilots who were going to steal her from him. JAM.

Panting for breath, Rei screamed at them to stop. One of them turned at the sound. The strength abruptly drained from Rei’s shooting arm. It was Lieutenant Burgadish.

“Lieutenant…”

Rei began to doubt his own senses, wondering if he really was mentally ill. Was this entire bizarre sequence a hallucination?

He took several steps forward, then saw the man standing beside Burgadish and froze in shock.

He was looking at himself.

“JAM!”

He fired, and the other Rei went down. Pain lashed through his right side. He saw Lieutenant Burgadish holding a gun and fired back. Burgadish crumpled and several rapid shots from Rei’s gun ended his life.

Rei put a hand to his side. The familiar, distinct smell of blood wafted up. He was bleeding badly.

He approached the two bodies and looked down at them. He didn’t think they were JAM. These were androids, created by the JAM. The JAM, who had until now ignored humans, were working out a strategy to target them here. They were creating weapons. Organic antipersonnel weapons. Just as humans had made Yukikaze, the JAM were now making humans. The aliens probably had only a tenuous understanding of human existence. To fight humanity, they probably needed to manufacture weapons that could sense a human at the same level as a human. The same way that humans were using computers to analyze the JAM. If so, it was another piece of evidence that the JAM were mechanical life-forms.

And if so, the parameters of the war had shifted from machines made by humans fighting the JAM to humans made by the JAM fighting humans. The insanity of the situation tore at Rei’s mind. Even though the JAM and humanity could barely comprehend the others’ existences, they were being forced to fight for the sake of the weapons they both made. The JAM may have been even more vexed than the humans, wondering why a machine like Yukikaze, who was like one of their own kind, was attacking them.

Rei approached Yukikaze, hauled himself up the boarding ladder, and climbed into the cockpit. He was relieved to see that the ejection seat seemed to have been properly installed. He couldn’t stop the bleeding from the gunshot wound in his side. Pressing his left hand to the wound, he started the engines.

Looking out of the cockpit, Rei saw a yellow mass headed for Yukikaze. It looked like the same substance that had filled the pond in the forest. As it flowed toward them across the flat ground, it morphed and reformed like protoplasm. Shapes would rise from the ooze and melt back into it again as it moved. Human shapes. Human limbs and heads and torsos. Above them swirled a glinting cloud of small black objects, like a giant swarm of bees.

Were those insect-like forms the JAM? He switched Yukikaze’s ECM system on. Her engines roared. Parking brake, off. The canopy lowered and locked.

“Let’s go home, Yukikaze.”

The humanoid mass pressed up against Yukikaze’s body. He slid the throttle to MIL, incinerating the portion behind them. Yukikaze turned, accelerated, and took off. Landing gear, up. FCS, ON. Master arm switch to ARM. They shot into a climbing turn. A cold sweat had broken out on Rei’s brow, and he could feel the blood pooling in his flight suit.