Prologue to VHF 128.500

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The Bullseye.

A scuffed, dingy little basement flyboy club in the heart of Nausicaa city.

Everything about it was sketchy. Its entrance was a stairway down some alley. There was a support pillar in the middle of the dance floor. The bathroom walls were covered in graffiti, stickers, and old event posters.

The whole room was bathed in a dim red light, broken by the DJ’s lightshow swinging wildly across the walls and floor. The DJ bobbed his head and bounced with the music as he worked the decks.

The music from the speakers was oppressive… In a good way.

Drumbeats echoed off of the walls and ceiling, while humming, thumping, growling bass rumbled through the floor, making ripples in my drink resting on the bar.

The people on the dance floor were a perfect vertical slice of Nausicaa’s subculture, mixed in amongst each other in a colorful mass of moving humanity near the DJ booth. Lolitas in frilled dresses and platform boots twisted and kicked with the music. A group of “flyboys” and “flygirls,” wearing their typical aviator shades and flight suits decorated with patches, laughed and whooped as they bumped against each other on the dance floor.

Girls wearing school uniforms from cartoons they probably watched as kids bounced and hopped to the drumbeat. They didn’t seem to much care how their wild jumping affected their skirts.

Impossible to miss was the group of people fully enclosed in anthropomorphic furry animal suits. The inside of the club was warm enough, but watching them made even me start to sweat. If nothing else, I could say they were dedicated to dancing.

One woman caught my eye. She looked out-of-place at first, dressed in an anime school uniform, but away from the rest of the girls dressed similar. Not to mention the black bike shorts saving her from the same exposure the other schoolgirls seemed to be actively courting. And with a flight jacket tied around her waist and a rugged headset hung around her neck, I had no idea which group to place her in.

I turned around to lift my drink and drain the rest into my mouth. As I set my glass back on the counter and turned around again to face the dancing crowd, I noticed the out-of-place woman had vanished.

I’d started to think she was a ghost this whole time when I heard a voice to my side. Female. Speaking up over the music and stating something completely obvious.

“You look like a pilot.”

I looked to my right. The girl I’d just lost sight of was leaning back on the bar, right next to me. A wild mane of dark brown hair framed her light chocolate face and brown eyes.

Of course I looked like a pilot. I was wearing a flight suit, though maybe a bit more subdued than the flyboys out on the dance floor. They had more patches on than I did.

I looked at her and chuckled, pointing at the group of flyboys. “So do they.”

She looked at them, then back to me, smirking. “So why aren’t you with them?”

I shook my head. “Not my squadron. Funny, I’d halfway had you pinned as a flygirl, myself.”

“You’d be halfway right. The callsign’s ‘Sabrecat.’ What can I call you?”

“Call me ‘808.’”

She laughed. “I like it! You got good taste. You getting ready to head out, or you got time to dance?”

I chuckled. “Sure, why not?”

Leaving my empty glass behind, I followed her over to the dance floor. As we approached the floor, she untied her jacket from around her waist and put it on.

Hours later, the two of us were standing outside, cooling off in the brisk early morning air. I checked my watch. It was just past four in the morning.

Sabrecat finished off her bottle of water and threw the empty bottle in a nearby trash can. “So! Now that we’ve established that you can hang, I’m wondering if you’d be interested in joining me on a job.”

I looked at her. “So, that’s why you said I look like a pilot. So what, was that whole thing just a test?”

“Only partially,” she chuckled. “I really just wanted to dance, and you looked interesting! So, would you like to know more?”

“In for a penny, in for a pound. What’s the job?”

She pushed off of the wall and started walking up the alley. “Follow me.”

The early morning sky was dark and the streets were deserted. It was quiet, save for the occasional car passing by in the distance. Sabrecat and I walked down the sidewalk, leaving the alleyway behind.

“I’ve got an A-50 Mainstay,” she explained, “plus a flight crew for her and an operations crew. Callsign’s ‘Focus.’ Problem is, the ops crew is in Urd, while the Mainstay and her flight crew are in Eurycleia. So I’m looking for an escort to keep me company while we fly out to meet the ops crew.”

“What’re you expecting to run into?”

“Nothing, that’s why I’m only hiring one escort.”

“You have the range for that?”

“The A-50 can make it on its own, but I’ll be arranging for an air refuel when we’re over the ocean. What do you fly?”

“An F-15C.”

“Oh, that’ll definitely work.”

“Whole thing sounds pretty straightforward. What’s the pay?”

“Four-hundred-thousand sats, with the option to make this a more permanent arrangement if it goes well.”

“When?”

“A month from now.”

I smirked and stopped walking. She stopped with me. We shook hands as I nodded. “You got a deal.”

We quickly exchanged contact information. She let me know that I should start getting my plane prepared, and that she’d be in touch closer to the mission date. As I turned to walk back, I looked at the card she’d given me. Written along with her callsign and her phone number was her real name:

Utami Hasegawa.

A month later, I was seated in my F-15, holding short of the runway at an airport atop a cliff overlooking the Eurycleian coastline. I looked in my dogfight mirror to see an A-50 Mainstay, a hulking beast of an aircraft, idling behind me.

I watched an F/A-18 land ahead of me before hearing the tower over the radio, “Focus flight, two-ship, cleared for takeoff.”

Utami replied, “Cleared for takeoff, Focus flight,” as I rolled my fighter onto the runway and applied full throttle. As I rolled down the runway, I looked back to see Utami’s A-50 taking the runway behind me. Gently rotating the stick back, I pitched my F-15 up and into the sky.

I banked left, flying parallel to the runway as I watched Focus begin her takeoff roll. The massive jet rolled down almost the entire length of the small airport’s runway before lifting off of the ground and powering into the air. I banked left once more, flying above the runway to join the Mainstay.

As we formed up, I keyed my radio. “Focus, 808.”

Utami’s reply came through. “808, Focus, go ahead.”

“We good to go?”

“Yeah, let’s get this show on the road.”

With that, we turned east to begin our journey.