Chapter 1Second First Meetings

Jenkins, Cope, the water

The Hornet pilot still hadn't said anything.

Jenkins let two waves pass beneath the raft before leaning over to touch his shoulder, having decided that this was a reasonable interval for checking on someone without making a nuisance of himself. The man hadn't complained about the previous checks, but neither had he responded to them, and Jenkins would have preferred a little irritation to the steady breathing on which he was presently basing all his medical conclusions.

“Hey,” he said, and gave the shoulder a careful shake. The pilot's head shifted against the yellow rubber, exposing a scrape at his hairline, but his eyes stayed shut. Jenkins watched his chest rise and fall, then withdrew his hand and settled back into the scant space available to him.

There was water under their boots. Each time the raft tilted, it carried a piece of orange packaging from one end to the other, where it lodged against the pilot's heel before setting off on the return journey. Jenkins had tucked it under a seam twice already; he was beginning to take its persistence personally. Beyond it, beyond the pilot's shoulder and the low yellow side of the raft, the coast was burning. Separate columns of smoke rose from places he couldn't distinguish at this distance, their dark heads spreading together until it was difficult to remember that there ought to be towns beneath them.

“You ought to have a look,” he said. “Last of the Federation. Quite a view.”

The man continued breathing, which was something, and Jenkins rubbed his face with hands that smelled of fuel. He had spent much of his life trying to get that smell out of his skin before meals, with limited success, but he would happily have put up with it now if there had been a meal at the end of the day and somewhere to wash first. Three months ago there had been both. He'd had a hangar, a desk he could never find under the paperwork, and people who came to him when they needed something fixed. Purple Magic's pilots had come particularly often, bringing faults, apologies, and elaborate explanations of why the aircraft should have been able to tolerate whatever they'd just done to it.

Bird could make an explanation last longer than the inspection it was intended to prevent. Jenkins had once kept him in the hangar while they did the inspection anyway, and remembered with considerable satisfaction how the man had run out of things to say after twenty minutes. He'd asked whether he could sit down, then whether there was any coffee, then whether Jenkins needed him to stay for the rest of it. Jenkins had fetched him a chair and kept him until lunch. They'd complained about that for weeks, but still brought him their aircraft, and at the time he'd imagined this arrangement could go on indefinitely.

“Five helicopters,” he told the pilot, holding up his fingers before remembering that the man's eyes were closed. “That's how many I've been on since July. Every time, somebody's found us a place to set up properly. Get the tools out, unload the spares, get back to work. First place, we didn't even open all the boxes.”

He braced his heel against the floor as the raft rose, letting the motion pass through him before continuing. He knew each move well enough to describe the workshops they'd been promised and the ones they'd actually received, the equipment borrowed from people who insisted they would need it back, the orders that arrived before he'd managed to return any of it. By the third retreat his crew had stopped putting things away neatly, and by the fourth he'd stopped correcting them. There were men he'd meant to speak to before they scattered at the last airfield, matters he'd been saving for a quieter moment. He tried to remember whether he'd at least told them where he was going.

“Fourth one crashed,” he said. “Walked away from that. And now this.”

He looked down at the pilot's hands, loose in his lap, and at the swelling over the knuckles of one. A bearing gave you something to listen for when it was failing. Jenkins knew how to distinguish a vibration that would bring an aircraft home from one that meant the pilot should land wherever he could, immediately, and he'd explained the difference to enough stubborn men to be confident of his judgment. Here he had only a scraped forehead and breathing that sounded all right, while the person who might have told him otherwise lay there with his eyes shut.

“Come on,” Jenkins said, touching his shoulder again. “Don't leave me doing all the talking.”

The pilot drew a deeper breath. Jenkins kept his hand where it was, hopeful for a moment, then sat back when nothing followed. “Suit yourself,” he said, although it had very little to do with anyone's preferences. He stretched one leg as far as he could, drew it in again when the raft shifted, and looked up at the clear sky above the smoke.

Somewhere, if the broadcasts could be believed, the Wings of Theve was still in it. Jenkins had thought about that pilot more than once while loading equipment onto helicopters: the victories, the escapes, the aircraft that apparently kept going through all of them. Someone had to be servicing its hydraulics and changing its tires. He'd have liked to meet the mechanic, compare notes, find out whether a famous ace could describe an intermittent fault any better than Bird. At present he'd have settled for a flypast and a radio call to someone with a boat.

“Where's your famous Wings, then?” he asked. “Could do with a little of that luck down here.”

The pilot sat up so abruptly that Jenkins caught the raft's side to keep his balance. Water sluiced around their boots, and the man's injured hand closed on the grab line with a force that must have hurt him. His eyes were wide open now, fixed on the sea beyond Jenkins, and his breathing had quickened until Jenkins could hear it over the slap of the waves.

“Easy,” he said. “We're afloat. Look at me.”

The man turned from the burning coast, glanced down at his own chest, and finally looked at Jenkins. There was something searching in the way his eyes moved over Jenkins's face, pausing at his forehead and mouth as though the scrape of a razor or a missing tooth might have settled a question. Jenkins had seen pilots frightened after crashes, and most of them tried to tell you what had happened even when you weren't the person they ought to be telling. He was preparing to listen when the man's expression changed, leaving him with the uncomfortable conviction that he'd already answered something.

“That's it,” Jenkins said. “You're all right.”

He couldn't have defended the diagnosis. The pilot looked as if he might be sick, or start crying, and Jenkins was trying to decide how to accommodate either possibility in a raft where they were already sitting on each other's feet. But he'd recognized him. Jenkins had been recognized by strangers before; his name traveled with the aircraft he'd worked on, and Purple Magic were generous about recommending him to other people's maintenance crews. Usually a pilot thanked him and supplied a tail number so they could establish what for. None of those encounters had prepared him for being looked at with this much relief.

“We've met?” he asked.

The man opened his mouth without answering. His grip eased, and he laid his other hand against the raft, fingers spread over the rubber, before looking back toward the coast. Jenkins followed his gaze. The smoke hadn't changed much; a little more of the shore was hidden, perhaps, although he couldn't have said which part. When he looked back, the pilot was watching him again, and the orderly way he seemed to be examining everything troubled Jenkins more than the panic had. He'd looked at the raft, at the land, at Jenkins himself, with the care of someone checking that things were where he'd left them.

For a moment Jenkins had the absurd impression that the man knew this particular patch of sea, that he had expected to find himself here and was still getting used to having been right. It was an impression he couldn't explain even to himself. They'd both been here the whole time, and the man had every reason to be confused after whatever blow he'd taken to the head.

“What's your—” he began, but a helicopter emerged above the smoke before he could finish.

He was on his knees waving before he'd properly heard the engines, nearly upsetting the raft in his efforts to make them visible. “Oh, you beauty,” he said, then looked down to find the pilot gazing up at the aircraft with his hands still on the rubber. “Come on. Give them a hand. Let them see there's two of us.” The man raised an arm, and Jenkins caught his shoulder as the downwash reached them, flattening the water and throwing spray into their faces. There was a crewman at the open door, with a helmet and rescue equipment and a place for them to sit behind him. Jenkins began thinking of a doctor for the pilot and dry clothes for himself, and only then allowed himself to hope for coffee.

“One more ride,” he said. The pilot looked at him quickly, but the rescue swimmer was already descending, and Jenkins had to let go of his shoulder to help.

Jenkins: The Ship

They sent the pilot up first. He followed the swimmer's instructions readily enough, although he studied the man's face with the same attention he'd given Jenkins, and caught Jenkins's sleeve when a wave came over the side. Jenkins waited while the water drained around their knees, then covered the clenched hand with his own.

“I'm coming too,” he said. The fingers loosened, and he helped settle the sling before the swimmer signaled. He watched the pilot rise toward the open door, then took his own turn, holding himself carefully upright as the raft dropped away. He couldn't remember ever having been so pleased to leave a piece of equipment behind.

Once inside, he sat opposite the pilot and accepted a headset while another crewman examined the scrape at the man's hairline. The pilot had a blanket around him and still seemed to want Jenkins in sight; each time Jenkins shifted to make room or peer through the window, his eyes followed. Jenkins gave him a thumbs-up, and decided it would be a kindness for him to stay where he could be seen. With nothing to brace against or haul himself over, he began discovering injuries he'd missed. His shoulder ached, his knees hurt, and he had apparently bitten the inside of his cheek. He was attending to these discoveries when the helicopter banked and the carrier came into view.

He'd pictured a broad empty deck with a space kept clear for them. Instead it was crowded with aircraft and vehicles, with people moving between them in colored jerseys, doing jobs he could recognize even from this height. A jet was taxiing past the island while a deckhand waved it on. Jenkins leaned toward the window and felt some tightness in his chest ease. He'd spent so long helping to take airfields apart that the sight of people still maintaining one, even an airfield that moved, made him want to get down there and ask for work.

They landed, and the crew handed them over with practiced efficiency to a black woman waiting beyond the landing spot. Her hair was cropped close and her uniform had plainly seen long service, but the fastenings were done up properly and her sleeves sat neatly at her wrists. She looked over both men while listening to the rescue crew, asked a brief question Jenkins couldn't hear over the rotors, and took them into the island before introducing herself as Commander Pike, the executive officer.

She waited until she had their attention, looked at the pilot's forehead and the wet blanket, and welcomed them aboard. Jenkins had heard those words become increasingly perfunctory over the past three months, when anyone bothered with them at all. Pike gave them the same considered attention she'd given the rescue report. She was going to have a great many matters to attend to after this one, but neither her posture nor her tone suggested that they ought to hurry through the business of being received. Jenkins found himself standing straighter. The Sotoans were taking the Federation apart ashore; aboard this ship its officers still introduced themselves, welcomed its people, and waited for an answer. He wondered how much effort it took her to keep doing that.

“Major Jenkins?” she asked.

“Yes, ma'am. Air Force maintenance.”

“I know.”

It was gratifying to discover that someone still knew who he was. Somewhere they must have a personnel list, possibly even one that hadn't yet become an evacuation manifest, and he was ready to be useful to anyone who'd managed to preserve it.

“Where do you want me?” he asked.

“We can offer you a hangar full of naval aircraft.”

“I've worked on worse.”

“We may test that,” Pike said, allowing something almost like a smile, before turning to the doctor who had come up beside the pilot.

Santos introduced herself and began with questions the man could answer by nodding. Jenkins watched her attention settle on his pupils, the scrape, and the hand he lifted toward his head. She asked when he had lost consciousness, and Jenkins found himself trying to recall what he could honestly tell her about the interval on the raft. He was about to offer it when she said that a proper assessment would be necessary before she could clear the man to pilot an aircraft.

“Can he navigate?” Pike asked, and, at the doctor's look, added, “We need a backseater. We also need him conscious.”

Santos turned back to the pilot, who had begun looking at her as intently as he'd looked at Jenkins. His hand came away from his head and closed around the blanket; Jenkins recognized the change in his expression without understanding it any better than he had before. Santos noticed something too, for her next question was gentler. She waited for an answer, and this time the nod came slowly, with the pilot's attention fixed on her face.

Pike watched the exchange before calling a sailor over. “Take Major Jenkins to the hangar. Dry clothes first, then find out what he needs.”

Jenkins could have given her a list immediately, beginning with his tools and the men he'd left on the mainland, but he asked the sailor about tool control instead. They had a system; he would be shown where everything belonged. It was a sufficiently ordinary answer to comfort him, and he turned to the pilot feeling that he could leave him now, with a doctor watching over him and someone keeping the ship in order.

“See you around,” he said. “You know where to find me.” The man held his gaze, and Jenkins waited a moment before accepting that he wasn't going to answer. He nodded to him and followed the sailor down the ladder, toward the familiar noise of tools and people disagreeing over an aircraft.

Cope: The Greeting

D.D. had reached the new man first and was making good use of the advantage. Cope could hear him from beside the aircraft, recounting the end of the evacuation and the voices still reaching them from the mainland: people asking for help, asking after one another, insisting that there was someone left to fight. D.D. spoke warmly to everyone, but particularly to people who hadn't learned to interrupt him, and this newcomer was giving him an entirely clear run. He stood in borrowed clothes, looking past D.D.'s shoulder while the explanation went on, and Cope, following his eyes, found that they had gone not to Joker's Hornets but farther along the deck, to the aircraft parked beyond them with the crown on its tail.

Queen One's jet. Kate Evans had brought it down an hour ago, and the deck crew were still crawling over it. There was nothing to look at there that couldn't be seen on any other Hornet aboard, but the newcomer looked at it the way a man looks at a lit window in a house he used to live in, and went on looking a beat longer than anyone would have looked at an aeroplane. His lips moved once. Cope didn't catch the word; it was too short to be much of one. Then D.D. said Cope's name, and the man's attention came back so promptly that Cope was left wondering whether he'd imagined it.

The immediate concern was a group of contacts beyond the horizon. They weren't identifying as friendly, and the ship had too few reconnaissance drones left to send one on the strength of an uncertain radio call. Cope would have to investigate, and Pike had provided him with a navigator from the rescue flight. He hadn't expected to receive a backseater who still looked half drowned, but there weren't many people aboard who didn't look as though they needed a week's sleep and a doctor, and it seemed unkind to hold this one's condition against him.

“Your new navigator,” D.D. said, bringing him over. He then introduced Cope in rather more detail, supplying the Wings of Theve's name, its celebrated victories, and the story of the capital's evacuation. Cope let him finish. Every attempt to shorten the introduction merely encouraged D.D. to explain why the detail he'd been asked to omit was indispensable.

The newcomer looked at Cope throughout it, and Cope had the uncomfortable feeling that he was being inspected for something the introduction wouldn't explain. He held himself still, with his hands at his sides, while D.D. listed achievements that ought to have brought a different response. Most people looked impressed, or skeptical, or determined not to show that they were impressed. This man was exhausted and visibly bruised, but his expression eased a little each time Cope moved, as if the lifting of an arm mattered more to him than anything D.D. was saying.

When there was at last an opening, Cope put his right hand briefly against his chest before extending it. He seldom noticed that part of the greeting until he'd done it; efforts to rid himself of the habit hadn't survived the first conversation in which he had something else to think about. The new man looked at his hand, hesitated, and touched his own chest in the same place.

Cope was left holding his hand out between them. A stranger could copy a gesture, of course, and there was no reason to treat it as anything more than politeness. He had just watched Cope do it. Yet there was a care in the movement, and in the way the man's eyes returned to his face afterward, that made Cope feel abruptly exposed. D.D. was still beside them, with his immaculate account of Cope's life and accomplishments; for a moment Cope wanted him to stop speaking altogether.

He took the offered hand instead. “Welcome aboard,” he said, and allowed the newcomer to hold on for longer than the greeting required. The bruised knuckles must have hurt, but he made no effort to withdraw them. Cope gave his hand a slight reassuring pressure before letting go.

“Old habit,” he added, touching his chest again as though he'd just remembered doing it. D.D. had looked down at his phone, and Cope couldn't decide whether that was a kindness or merely his attention being required elsewhere. The newcomer nodded without offering any explanation. Cope meant to ask where he'd come from, at least, but the deckhand was waiting by the ladder, the launch crew were moving into position, and the unknown contacts weren't going to postpone their business while he inquired into a handshake.

“Let's get you strapped in,” he said, turning to the aircraft. The man followed him immediately.

The man knew his way around the cockpit, which relieved Cope of a concern he'd been trying to keep out of his voice. He'd expected to explain the harness and connections, possibly more than once, but the newcomer settled into the seat and made his checks without searching for anything. He protected the bruised hand when he could and used it when he had to. Cope watched long enough to be satisfied, then asked if he could hear over the intercom. The man nodded and gave another nod when Cope told him to speak up if he needed anything.

There was no way to decide, with the engines running, whether his silence ought to worry them. Santos had her concerns, and the man had spent part of the afternoon unconscious in a raft, but he'd understood every instruction so far. Cope turned forward to complete the checks, taking some comfort in a sequence that offered a right answer to each question. He reported the systems, fuel and flight load to the air boss and received clearance.

Before they were airborne, he began undoing D.D.'s introduction. It seemed only fair.

“You should know,” he said, “that I've never shot anybody down. Not one. The ace business is D.D.'s, and the internet's, and I've let them have it because it does more good than I do. I can take off and land. I'm very good at not being hit. That's the whole act.”

He waited for the disappointment. There was a great deal to attend to on the deck, and he couldn't turn far enough to see the man's face, but nothing came over the intercom that sounded like it. If anything the silence behind him had the quality of somebody who had heard this before and was relieved to hear it again. The catapult took them, and whatever his passenger thought of him, he would now have to live with him until they came back.

“Big, isn't it,” Cope said, once they were climbing. The sea had opened out beneath them, flat and enormous in every direction, with the carrier already small enough to cover with a thumb. “People ashore think the ocean's the safe part. It's the loneliest place in the world. Nobody's coming to get you out here unless they already know where you are.” He listened. “You know what I mean?”

No answer. There was room for silence up here, with the engines filling it and the horizon offering nothing that needed saying. Cope let the question go. He'd spent enough flights with people who wanted to talk; perhaps this one would be restful, if Santos's concerns came to nothing more than exhaustion.

He pointed out the carrier to their right as the man's new home, then drew his attention to Coster in Joker 4. The other Hornet held its station so steadily that Cope could have mistaken it for something fixed to his own aircraft. There were days when he found that reassuring and days when he worried about what would happen if Coster followed him somewhere neither of them ought to go. Today he was grateful for the company. Control supplied their target's bearing and range, and he acknowledged before bringing them around.

“About D.D.,” he said. “He's not a bad man. There are people stuck on the continent who've got nothing left but the radio, and he thinks they need someone to listen for. He's probably right. So he puts me on every channel he can find.” He adjusted the trim. “And I've got my own reasons for letting him.”

That was as far as he intended to explain. His passenger had been aboard less than a day, and Cope wasn't sure what would be worse, discovering that the man was curious or that he wasn't. Behind him a hand went briefly to the man's chest, then returned to the console. Cope remembered the greeting on the deck and looked forward again, increasing altitude as they approached their contact and asking him to watch the sky.

Their contact resolved into a passenger aircraft flying steadily above the water. Its pilot called before they were close enough to join up.

“Unidentified fighters, this is Air Ixiom Flight 365. We are a charter flight carrying refugees for a human rights organization. We are non-combatants. Repeat, non-combatants.”

He said it twice more before Cope could answer, and Cope was sorry they'd left him to wonder for even that long.

“Air Ixiom 365, this is FCU Navy. Relax. We'll see you somewhere safer.”

“FCU—” A breath, very audible. “Thank you. Thank you, Navy.”

Cope began arranging the escort while checking the rest of the sky. Three contacts were approaching from the north at a speed and spacing that made their intentions reasonably clear. He could see the invitation to pursue them, and had no intention of letting the airliner accompany him.

“Coster, get that passenger plane out of here.”

“You sure?”

“Yes. Go. Less to keep track of.”

Cope waited through the brief hesitation, knowing Coster was looking between the civilian aircraft and the incoming flight. The acknowledgment came, and Coster moved. The airliner began its turn with Joker 4 beside it, while Cope brought his nose away from them, opening a stretch of sky he hoped the hostile pilots would be too interested in him to cross. His backseater had become very still, although he hadn't needed the radar display explained to him.

Shadow 22 opened the radio. Cope recognized the voice before the man had finished announcing himself.

“Wings of Theve. I was hoping it would be you. Third time, Cope. Are you going to run again?”

The Wings of Theve attracted a particular kind of pilot, and this one had a persistence Cope would have admired in almost any other line of work.

“Three times,” he said, on the intercom, not the radio. “It's like getting the coconut one in a box of chocolates three times running. You start to think somebody's doing it on purpose.” The joke gave him something to do with his irritation while he increased power. Behind it, he was watching how quickly the fighters were closing.

One fighter came around behind them, another held out to catch the turn, and the third stayed close enough to take over if either lost him. Cope watched the formation settle and assigned his passenger the flares, directing him to the side panel. The first warning sounded almost immediately.

“Break. Break. Break!”

Countermeasures were streaming behind them before he'd finished the call, and he felt the load come on as he rolled and pulled clear of the missile's approach. When he leveled out low over the water, the bridge was ahead of him, its roadway carried between massive supports that interrupted a good deal of otherwise usable sky.

He'd flown past it at a distance sufficient to admire the engineering. He hadn't intended to learn the arrangement quite this well, but the Shadows were following closely enough that it might be possible to persuade one of them to make a mistake. He banked around the first support, letting it fill the canopy before reversing through the next opening. The roadway passed beneath them, so close that he could distinguish the markings, and he was already beginning another turn when he caught the first glimpse of the gap it would have to take them through.

At this speed there was very little to correct after a decision had been made. He had to judge each opening on its approach and begin the turn while it still looked too narrow, carrying the Hornet around concrete he could no longer see once it passed beyond his shoulder. He disliked the margin he was allowing himself, and disliked the thought of asking his passenger to trust it, but the man's hands remained occupied with the countermeasures. When another warning sounded, the flares went out promptly, with no question or fumbling to distract him.

Shadow 22 ordered his wingmen to stay with him, and Cope brought them back around the span before they could establish a clean line behind him. He caught one of the fighters in the mirror as it tried to shorten the turn. Its nose was coming up to clear the next support, but it hadn't finished rolling; a wing remained below the height its pilot needed, and Cope watched it catch the top corner. The aircraft jolted, shedding pieces, then rolled away beneath the roadway. A column of smoke began rising on the other side as he took the Hornet clear of the bridge.

The remaining two followed him without allowing enough time to see whether anyone had ejected. Cope had hoped for a little disorder, an angry radio call he could make use of, but Shadow 22 held the surviving wingman in position and kept coming. Both were fast, committed to the pursuit, and expecting him to continue it. He brought the throttles back and opened the airbrake, bracing against the harness as the Hornet slowed.

He had to hold his course until they were past. They would follow him through a turn if he began it early, and his hands wanted to begin it, with both contacts closing so quickly behind him. He watched the distance diminish, let the wingman sweep ahead, and waited the extra moment for Shadow 22 before bringing the Hornet away from their line. He'd only started the turn when the other fighter's nose pitched up.

Cope knew the post-stall maneuver, but had never been well placed to watch anyone perform it. The fighter shed its speed sharply, rising into an angle at which his own aircraft would have ceased to be of much use, and went on rotating as it hung there. Its nose was coming back toward him while the surviving wingman continued ahead, still carrying the speed that had taken both Shadows past. Cope was reaching for the throttles when Shadow 22 fired during the reversal.

The missile hit the wingman. No warning had been given, and for a moment Cope was still expecting a call, something that would explain why the other man hadn't been told to get clear. The fighter broke apart ahead of them while Shadow 22 continued bringing his nose around. Behind Cope there was a sound over the intercom, the first his passenger had made, and he couldn't spare the attention to interpret it. He'd spent their speed on the overshoot and needed it back; the engines were responding, but he could feel how long they would take.

Shadow 22 fired again. Cope pulled toward the space still open to him, with the flares going out behind them, and the detonation came before he could complete the turn. Something struck his helmet as the canopy whitened, and he was trying to correct a bank he hadn't commanded when he lost his grip on the stick. There was air roaring into the cockpit, a warning he couldn't identify among the others, and someone behind him who had to get out. He tried to turn his head to say it, but couldn't keep the thought together long enough.

The Water

Cope's head fell forward against the panel.

The man in the back seat waited for it to come up again. It was a very short wait, a fraction of a second that the aircraft could not spare, and then his hands were on the controls and the Hornet's nose was coming up out of its roll. It answered him unevenly. Sometimes the jet gave him enough to level the wings and sometimes it gave him nothing at all, and he took each response as it came and spent it, bringing the nose higher while the sea filled the cracked windscreen. He put them in tail first, nose high, at a speed the manuals recommended and almost nobody ever managed to hold.

The harness drove the breath out of him. Water broke over the canopy, and for a moment after the impact the aircraft sat almost still, settling, in a quiet that held nothing but his breathing and the tick of something cooling. Cope did not move. Water was coming into the cockpit fast enough to watch, darkening the seat and the shoulders of Cope's flight suit as the nose began to go down.

“Swim,” the man said. His voice was hoarse, and it wasn't quite his own: the rhythm belonged to the man slumped in front of him, easy and patient, the voice of somebody saying a thing he had said many times before. “Get clear. Make it home.”

He stopped. He waited, as if for the next line, and Cope's helmet stayed against the panel and said nothing at all.

His bruised hand slipped on the harness release. He changed hands, freed himself on the second try, and leaned forward through the narrow space between the seats.

He put a hand on Cope's shoulder first. It was a gentle touch, much too gentle for the situation, the kind of touch that asks someone to wake up. Then the cold reached his ribs and he got an arm under Cope's chest, lifting his head while the other hand searched for the front harness. Cope was heavy and awkward in the confined space, and every adjustment let the water a little higher. The straps had to come away. The connections had to come away. Something was holding Cope's leg, and the face had to stay above the water while he found it.

The harness came loose all at once, and Cope's weight fell against his arm. He drew him backward, but the leg stayed caught. The water was at his own throat now. He braced Cope against the cockpit rim, took a breath, and went under, following the flight suit down by touch to the boot jammed against a bent fitting beside the seat.

He worked at it. Heel, then toe. The fitting gave when he pushed against it and sprang back the moment he eased off, and it cut his hand. Above him Cope's body slid away from the rim and he had to let go of the boot to catch a wrist, pull him back up, wedge his own feet against the seat, and go again. His shoulders had begun to jerk with the need to breathe. He went on anyway.

Something tore, and the boot came free.

He followed it up. He drew Cope through the cockpit and out past the broken canopy, lost him for an instant on a snagged strap, found him again, turned him to get the shoulders through. By then he had been under for a long time. He kicked toward the light, slowly, deliberately, with the aircraft sliding away beneath his feet, and came up into the air with Cope held against his chest.

He breathed, coughed it out, and breathed again, and lifted Cope's face out of the water. The flotation gear was within reach once he'd turned him, but his hands kept failing on the fastenings. A wave went over them both. He kept working at it with Cope's mouth held clear, and at last there was enough support under them to let him loosen his grip without the head going down. There was blood inside the helmet. The sea was spreading it over Cope's face faster than he could find where it was coming from.

“Cope.” He brought his face close. He shook him once, and stopped, as though afraid of what shaking might break, and went for the mask instead. He opened that fastening the way a man opens a door in his own house, without looking, and then his fingers slipped and he had to look after all, with the swell lifting and dropping them. When it came free he said the name again.

Cope coughed.

The man went very still. He bent closer, and a second cough came, and after it a breath he could barely tell apart from the water running off the helmet. He settled Cope into the position that seemed to make breathing easiest and watched his mouth, and his lips moved as he counted, until a wave broke the count. Then he started over. He kept his own body between Cope and the oncoming swell as best he could, and when Cope's eyes moved once behind their lids without opening, he said, very quietly, “Stay. Please. Stay this time,” in a voice that wouldn't have carried to anyone else, and went back to counting.

It was a long wait. He kept looking at the sky, losing the count and finding it again, and coming back to Cope's face. When the sound of rotors finally reached him he tried to raise an arm, and had to bring it down at once to keep his grip.

The swimmer arrived reaching for the injured man. The man from the back seat tried to give a report and could only produce Cope's name and the fact that he was alive, and he went on repeating it after the swimmer had checked and nodded and told him so. He did not want to give up the flotation gear. He let the other man fix the sling, but kept his own hand in place until he was told it had to come away, and then he watched Cope rise toward the door with his hand half lifted after him the whole way up.

At the door a crewman recognized him and made a kind joke about hauling the same man out of the water twice in one day. He didn't answer. Cope was on the cabin floor, with someone bent over him and another man talking into a headset, and he tried to go to him and his knees went out from under him. The crewman caught him under the arms and lowered him beside the stretcher. Someone put a blanket around his shoulders. He didn't seem to notice it. He had found a place from which he could see Cope's chest rise and fall, and he did not take his eyes off it while the helicopter turned for the ship.