“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.