YUKIKAZE Read Free Page A

to?”
    “Unknown.”
    Rei loosened his turn radius and craned his neck back to look in the direction his partner indicated. The other craft was closing on them. It was definitely the same model of plane as Yukikaze. It was now initiating a high-G turn to try and come around to their twelve o’clock. Rei rechecked the IFF. UNKNOWN was Yukikaze’s reply. Then, detecting the waves of enemy targeting radar, it signaled that the unknown plane was preparing to attack.
    Rei set the master arm switch to ARM. The stores control panel displayed his onboard armaments. RDY GUN, RDY AAM III-4. Their antiaircraft gun and four short-range air-to-air missiles. He had no long-range missiles to fire.
    “I’m shooting it down,” said Rei as he hit the dogfight switch.
    “Stop! It’s not an enemy! That’s a Sylph!”
    Before his EWO could finish speaking, Rei banked Yukikaze steeply, then burned into a combat climb to face his target, performing a 180 degree head-on snap-up as he prepared to attack. The radar switched to boresight mode. He squeezed the trigger. The antiaircraft cannon fired a burst. No hit. The unknown plane had evaded him. He turned again, maneuvered to about 900 meters behind it and attacked from the rear. The remaining ammo indicator now read zero. Still no hits.
    “Have you lost you mind, Lieutenant Fukai?!”
    The unknown dived to the right, with Yukikaze in pursuit. It went into a six-G turn to try and come around to Yukikaze’s rear, but Rei pulled six-and-one-half Gs at the maximum angle of attack and closed to a range of less than 400 meters.
    He now could see the unknown clearly with his own eyes. It was a Sylphid. But he didn’t abort his attack. His IFF couldn’t determine if the unknown aircraft was a friendly or not, and as far as Rei was concerned, if it wasn’t a friendly, it was a hostile. Yukikaze’s central computer wasn’t canceling its warning, and the unknown was still preparing to attack. If he had hesitated while wondering if it was friendly or not, Yukikaze would already have been shot down. Although his eyes told him that the other plane was an FAF fighter, it had to be a JAM. He was certain of this. It was a formidable enemy too, as fast and maneuverable as Yukikaze.
    Rei pressed the missile release button. There was no launch. The fire control system readout on his head-up display was warning him that the target was too close. The FCS had calculated the relative velocities of the unknown aircraft and Yukikaze, and had used those figures to determine the minimum safety range for the short-range missiles. It had come up with a value of 450 meters; firing a missile any closer than that would endanger the plane that launched it.
    Rei pushed the missile release button again and held it down, commanding the central computer to ignore the FCS’s warning and execute an emergency attack. If he missed this chance, they could be killed in the next instant. The central computer issued the order to attack, and the subordinate tactical computer then overrode the FCS and cleared the minimum mode from the missile seeker’s armament control. In that instant, the missile was launched from Yukikaze’s belly.
    The range was less than 370 meters. Yukikaze withdrew quickly, but the unknown executed a sudden Split S maneuver and moved in on a collision course with Yukikaze, as though intending to lead the missile back toward it. The missile banked steeply, thrusting toward the unknown, and barely slipped in on its right.
    Yukikaze was now less than two hundred meters away. The FCS had been transmitting guidance data to the missile, but sensing the new danger it cancelled the guidance control. The cut-off of guidance data from Yukikaze and the change in the Doppler frequency should have locked up the missile’s detonator. A comparison of the Doppler shift of Yukikaze’s radar pulse to the pulse reflected back from the target would cause the missile to detect that it was at the minimum Doppler gate when