Yukikaze y-1 by Chōhei Kambayashi

Author:Chōhei Kambayashi [Kambayashi f.c]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sf_action
ISBN: 978-1-421-53986-7
Publisher: Haikasoru
Published: 2010-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

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.

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