Chapter 2Ray

Baxter, Jenkins

Baxter had expected Cope to look more like himself once they had washed the blood off.

It had been a foolish expectation, but he had carried it down to the infirmary nevertheless, along with Cope's watch and the three other things someone had put in a plastic bag. There was a locker key, a coin, and a receipt folded until the print was nearly worn away at the creases. Baxter had accepted them from a sailor who seemed relieved to find someone authorized to take possession, and had spent the walk considering where Cope could possibly have bought anything lately. It had been easier than considering what Santos might tell them.

Now he stood beside the bed with the bag in his hand. Cope's hair was still damp where it emerged from the dressing, and without his habitual expression of mild interest his face seemed unfamiliar. A tube was secured at his mouth. Baxter could see the rise of his chest and hear the machine that assisted it; neither gave him the reassurance he had hoped to find in seeing him breathe.

Coster had stopped just inside the doorway. He was still wearing his flight suit, with a mark on the collar where his helmet had rubbed, and kept looking from Cope to the monitor as though the latter might offer a less difficult account of what had happened. Tasha went past him and stood on the other side of the bed. She had hurried to meet them in the passageway, asking questions Baxter couldn't answer, but now that there was someone present who could, she seemed unwilling to ask.

“He's sedated,” Santos said. “He isn't going to wake up for this visit.”

“But he will wake up,” Tasha said.

Santos looked at her before answering. Baxter appreciated the care she took, even while wishing she would say something careless and comforting.

“That's what we're working toward.”

Tasha pulled a chair closer without sitting down. The noise of its feet on the deck made Coster come forward at last; he took up a position near Cope's shoulder and put a hand on the bed rail, then removed it when he saw the cables running beneath.

“Can he hear us?” he asked.

“You can talk to him.”

It wasn't quite an answer, and Coster seemed to understand that. He bent a little, studying the part of Cope's face the dressing had left visible.

“Got the airliner clear,” he said. “They're all right.”

He waited, perhaps for the acknowledgment he would have received over the radio. Baxter set the bag on a shelf and arranged it so that the watch lay face up. Cope would want his things somewhere he could find them. It seemed unreasonable that Baxter should have to make a decision about where that would be.

“He brought you back,” Tasha said.

Coster looked up. She wasn't speaking to him.

The newcomer occupied the next bed, sitting on its edge in borrowed clothes, with a blanket folded beside him and a dressing over his injured hand. Baxter had noticed him when they entered, but had allowed the ordinary courtesy of a glance to serve in place of an introduction. He regretted that now. The man had been watching them, and when Tasha turned toward him his expression changed so quickly that Baxter felt he had missed something important before it could be hidden.

“They told us,” she continued. “You got him out of the aircraft.”

The man looked down at his hand. There was a raw mark at his throat where something had rubbed against the skin, and his feet were planted carefully, as though standing would require more preparation than he wanted anyone to notice.

“Thank you,” Tasha said.

He shook his head, a small movement which might have refused the thanks or only the importance she was giving it. Then he looked at Coster, and Baxter saw the same change again: recognition, apparently, followed by an effort to make it less apparent. Coster had turned away from Cope to face him and seemed about to speak, but the man looked at Baxter before he could.

There was nothing furtive about his attention. If anything, Baxter found it difficult to meet. He had been looked at that way by former students on discovering him in a place where they had never expected their old lecturer to exist. Usually they would say his name and provide enough of their own history for him to recover the acquaintance. This man said nothing, and Baxter couldn't place him.

“Ellington Baxter,” he offered. “Joker Two.”

The newcomer nodded before he had quite finished. His gaze moved to Tasha, then back to Coster, as though Baxter had begun a list whose remaining entries he already knew.

“Have we met?”

For a moment Baxter thought he would answer. His lips parted, and he glanced at Cope; whatever he had intended to say went with the glance.

“Not much of a day for introductions,” Coster said. He pulled the unused chair around so that it faced both beds. “I'm Coster. You were in the back with him.”

The man nodded again.

“I heard some of it.” Coster rested his forearms on his knees. “After we broke off. I couldn't get back in time.”

Baxter would have preferred to speak about that elsewhere, with a recording and a map and something he could put between Coster and the conclusion he was approaching. Here he had only the bed, and Cope lying in it without the ability to tell his wingman to stop being an idiot.

“You were escorting a civilian aircraft,” he said. “On his orders.”

“I know.”

The newcomer watched Coster with an expression Baxter found harder to explain than recognition. He leaned forward, began to lift his bandaged hand, and stopped before the movement could become anything definite. Coster noticed and looked down at it.

“You ought to let them look after you, too.”

Something like a smile passed over the man's face. It wasn't there long enough to answer.

Pike appeared in the doorway with a folder under her arm. She paused to let a medical orderly pass, then came in and closed the door. Baxter had served with her long enough to notice the extra care she took with the latch. Whatever discussion she intended to have, she didn't want it carried into the passageway.

“Doctor. A moment?”

Santos crossed to her, but there was nowhere in the compartment they could talk without being heard. Baxter watched Tasha return her attention to Cope, making a deliberate effort to give them privacy. Coster remained seated.

“His condition?” Pike asked.

“Serious. For now, stable. I can't give you a recovery date.”

Pike glanced at the bed and held her folder a little closer against her side. Her uniform was as orderly as it had been when she'd met the rescue helicopter, although someone had evidently caught her in the middle of another task; there was a pen tucked through the fastening where she would never ordinarily have left it.

“And our other survivor?”

“Exhausted. Bruised. Still under assessment.”

“Can you determine whether he's fit to fly?”

Baxter turned toward her. Coster sat up, and Tasha abandoned the effort to pretend she wasn't listening.

Santos folded her arms. “I can determine whether he's medically fit. I can't tell you whether he knows what he's doing in an aircraft.”

“His qualification record arrived while you were treating Cope.” Pike shifted the folder under her arm. “The question now is whether he's well enough to use it.”

“And then we brought both of them here.” Santos looked at the newcomer. “He doesn't get another flight on the strength of surviving the last one. I'll finish examining him.”

“Of course,” Pike said. She gave the doctor a moment to accept that the agreement was real, then addressed the man on the bed. “We need your help.”

He had been listening closely since she'd entered. At those words his gaze moved toward Cope, and Baxter thought, unhappily, that he might have guessed where this was going before any of them.

“Cope will be off the flight roster for some time,” Pike continued. “His absence leaves us with a problem beyond the aircraft. People ashore are listening for the Wings of Theve. So are the Sotoans. We can't give either of them reason to believe he's been put out of action.”

“Ma'am,” Baxter said, “we haven't told them anything.”

“They'll notice when he stops flying.”

“He isn't always on the radio.”

“No. But Joker is. There will be reports of the encounter, and sooner or later someone will ask whether he came back.” She looked at Cope, giving him the same direct attention she would have given a man sitting upright and able to participate. “I'm not asking the medical staff to misrepresent his condition. The people treating him will know what they need to know. Outside that, this doesn't become a subject for discussion.”

Tasha's hand rested on the edge of the mattress. Baxter wondered whether she'd noticed where she'd put it.

“You want him to pretend,” she said, looking at the newcomer.

Pike didn't evade it. “I want the Wings of Theve to remain in the air until Cope can return.”

The machine beside the bed continued its patient work. Baxter had heard some version of this argument often enough from D.D., usually accompanied by figures for audience reach or an account of what someone had said in a shelter. It had been easier to accept while Cope could roll his eyes afterward and ask whether the navy owed him a second salary for all the extra work his imaginary self was doing.

“He's been aboard a few hours,” Baxter said. “We haven't flown with him. We don't even know what to call him.”

“We have rather more to go on than that.” Pike opened the folder and passed him a sheet. “Personnel matched the rescue intake to a surviving copy of his service record. Look at the aircraft qualifications.”

Baxter began at the top, expecting the usual progression through training aircraft into an operational type. He found it, but the list continued well beyond the point at which a pilot would ordinarily have settled into a squadron. There were aircraft he had flown himself, aircraft he had only taught people about, and others whose continued presence in the inventory generally came as an unpleasant surprise to whoever had to supply their parts. He checked the column headings to make sure he hadn't mistaken familiarization for qualification.

“These are all current?”

“Every Federation fighter and attack aircraft in service,” Pike said. “Including carrier qualifications where applicable.”

Coster came close enough to read over Baxter's shoulder. He followed the list down with a finger held just clear of the paper, then went back to an entry near the top.

“Both?” he asked.

“Both,” Pike said.

Baxter turned the sheet. Several entries on the reverse had been almost entirely blacked out. Dates remained, and the same qualification codes as on the front, but the aircraft designations and the units responsible were gone. Someone had taken particular care with a note beneath the final entry; all Baxter could establish was that it had once occupied three lines.

“There are more,” he said.

Pike took the sheet back before Coster could lean farther over it. “There are.” She addressed the newcomer. “The copy that reached me included attachments my clearance doesn't cover. They should have been removed before it was sent. I read enough to know that the qualifications aren't the result of a clerical error.”

The man's eyes moved from her face to the folder. He didn't seem surprised, which Baxter found almost as interesting as the record itself.

“I won't ask you about those postings here,” Pike continued. “We have work for you on aircraft I'm permitted to know about.”

She closed the folder, smoothing the edge of the sheet back into place with her thumb. Baxter had seen her receive replacement engines with something approaching gratitude, and once a shipment of medicine that had made her stop in the passageway to read the manifest twice. There was a little of that relief in the way she looked at the man on the bed. A single pilot couldn't repair what had happened to the Federation, but this one could apparently fly whichever serviceable aircraft Jenkins could give him. Baxter could understand why she had come down herself.

“You are something of a godsend,” she told him. “I'd prefer to explain how badly we need you when you've had some rest. Unfortunately, we need you now.”

“He's still going to need a check flight,” Baxter said.

“Arrange one as soon as the doctor clears him.”

Coster rose, leaving the chair slightly crooked. “Cope was supposed to have a backseater this afternoon. That's how short we are. If this is going to mean putting someone in his aircraft and sending him out alone—”

“He'll have your flight with him,” Pike said. “We have aircraft we can't crew and crews we can't keep rested. I can't fill the next watch with objections, however reasonable they are.”

“Baxter can lead,” Tasha said.

“I expect him to.”

That settled one question and left the more difficult one where it was. Baxter could see Tasha trying to decide how to ask it. No one wanted to point at the unconscious man and say that the legend had never depended on his ability to shoot, or that it might be safer in someone else's hands. He had defended Cope to Cruz over coffee that morning. It seemed much longer ago.

“Queen is on combat air patrol,” Pike continued. “Joker needs to do its share. We can't keep leaning on Evans's people while ours sit below.”

Baxter happened to be watching the newcomer. At the mention of Queen, the man's fingers stopped moving against the blanket, and his next breath came a little late. By the time Baxter looked at his face, he was listening to Pike with the same attention as before.

Pike was returning the folder beneath her arm. Coster had turned toward Cope, and Tasha was adjusting the chair beside his bed. Santos checked a reading on the monitor. None of them looked up.

Baxter couldn't have said what he thought he'd seen. A response to the flight's name, perhaps, or to Evans's; perhaps the man had simply found a position that hurt his hand. He had already been too ready to find recognition in the newcomer's face. There was no reason to put another question to him on the strength of a missed breath, and Baxter let Pike continue.

“Your experience gives us some options we haven't had for weeks,” she said to the man. “We'll work out how best to use it. For now, I'm asking whether you're willing to carry the name.”

The newcomer turned toward the other bed. There was nothing there to ask permission of, but he looked for a long time.

“For a little while,” Pike said, more quietly. “Until he can come back.”

Baxter wished she hadn't offered a limit none of them could yet guarantee. He could see why she had; she wanted it as much as the rest of them. For the first time since entering the compartment, she had stopped looking as though she could arrange matters into something workable simply by attending to them in the proper order.

The man nodded.

Coster rubbed his face, then let his hand fall. Tasha watched the newcomer with a troubled concentration. Baxter could almost see her weighing the thanks she'd given him against what they were asking now, and deciding that one didn't give them the right to the other.

“That doesn't settle the medical question,” Santos said.

“No,” Pike replied. “It doesn't.”

“I'll need the unrestricted part of that record,” Baxter said.

Pike inclined her head to him. “I'll have a copy sent to you. Talk to him when the doctor is finished. Work out what you'll need for the check flight.”

It was an order he could carry out. He had wanted something he could do for Cope since the sailor had handed him the bag, and disliked the fact that this was what had finally been provided.

Tasha stood properly beside the bed, smoothing a crease she'd made in the blanket. “What are we supposed to call him?”

Pike looked at her. “That's something we can—”

“It isn't Rex.”

Her voice hadn't grown loud, but Coster glanced at the door. Tasha noticed and kept going, with the determined courtesy she used when she knew everyone was about to tell her she was being impractical.

“That's Cope's call sign. He can be the Wings if he wants to, and you can tell people whatever you need to tell them. But we aren't going to sit here beside Cope and start calling someone else Rex.”

Baxter looked at Pike. She had an answer ready; he could see it in the slight movement of her mouth. Then her attention went to the bag on the shelf, where the watch lay face up with its worn strap curled beneath it.

“Choose something else, then,” she said to the newcomer.

He studied Tasha's face. She held his gaze, still a little defiant, and gradually the tension left her shoulders. Whatever she saw in him, it wasn't an intention to argue.

For a while he seemed unable to answer. Baxter had grown used to accepting the silence as part of his exhaustion, but now he could see an effort being made within it. The man looked at Cope once more, then back at the three pilots waiting beside his bed.

“Ray,” he said.

His voice was rough and quiet. Coster straightened a little at hearing it, and Santos watched with the interested expression of someone who had received a useful answer to a question she hadn't needed to ask.

Tasha tried the name under her breath. Then she nodded.

“All right, Ray.”

Baxter pulled the crooked chair closer to Cope's bed. There would be time for the service history, for qualifications and orders and the strange business of teaching a man to stand in for someone he had only just rescued. He looked at Santos.

“May we stay with him a while?”

Coster had already found another place to sit. Tasha took the chair she had first drawn up beside Cope, looking at the doctor with an attention which made it clear that the request belonged to all three of them.

“Until I need the space,” Santos said. “And keep your voices down.”

Ray watched them settle around the bed. Something in his face eased, and Baxter was considering asking whether he would like a chair himself when a knock came at the door. Pike opened it to find D.D. waiting in the passageway, with his phone put away and his tie straightened. He looked past her toward Cope, and for once seemed to have nothing ready to say.

Pike stepped out with him. Their conversation was brief, too quiet for Baxter to hear, and when they returned D.D. came to Ray's bed rather than Cope's.

“Ray,” he said, trying the name as though Pike had only just supplied it. “Major Jenkins has been asking about you. I thought we might go and reassure him in person.”

Santos gave him a look. “When I've finished here. And then the hangar and his quarters. You're not taking him on a tour.”

“The hangar and his quarters,” D.D. repeated agreeably. “I can manage that.”

Baxter doubted that the visit would be entirely social. Pike had plainly found someone to take charge of their new pilot while she returned to the work awaiting her, and D.D. had an interest in him that would grow considerably beyond showing him where to sleep. But he waited by the door without interrupting Santos, and when Ray was finally allowed to stand he offered an arm rather than a question.

Ray declined it with a small shake of his head. He stayed beside the bed for a moment, finding his balance, then looked toward Cope.

“We'll be here,” Baxter said.

Ray met his eyes and nodded. He followed D.D. out, leaving the blanket folded where he had been sitting. After the door closed, Tasha began telling Cope, in a tone which made room for the possibility that he was listening, what she thought of the arrangements being made in his absence.

Halfway through, without pausing, she reached across and turned down Coster's collar where it had folded under at the helmet mark. She smoothed it flat with two fingers and went back to the arrangements. Coster sat very still while she did it, and then went on sitting still for some time afterward, as though he'd been told not to move and hadn't yet been told he could. Neither of them said anything about it. Baxter looked at the monitor and kept his opinion to himself.

Jenkins had been given a locker, a bunk, and a collection of tools whose previous custodian had marked everything with yellow paint. He would have preferred his own tools, but the sockets were good and the inventory was accurate, and there was something deeply reassuring about a drawer in which the missing items had been recorded as missing. Someone had maintained this place through the retreat. Jenkins was beginning to learn their names, helped by a large, quiet plane captain who had taken him through the tool drawers before showing him the aircraft.

His name was Emeka Okafor, although everyone who stopped to speak to him called him Dutch. Jenkins hadn't yet asked why. He had asked about an entry in the maintenance log, and Dutch had found the relevant job sheet without having to consult the index, which interested Jenkins rather more.

He had also been given an aircraft to look over, which was a better welcome than any speech could have provided. He was comparing a maintenance entry with the work actually done when D.D. brought the pilot into the hangar.

“There you are,” Jenkins said. He put down the paperwork and went to meet them, wiping his hands on a cloth which hadn't improved much since he'd been issued it. “I was starting to think they'd found you another raft.”

The pilot's mouth moved into a faint smile. He looked better in dry clothes, although Jenkins disliked the pallor beneath the scrape and the careful way he carried his injured hand. He had seen enough pilots pretend they were perfectly fit to know that asking in front of someone else rarely produced a useful answer.

“Got a name for me this time?”

“Ray,” D.D. supplied.

Jenkins looked at the pilot, who nodded.

“Ray it is, then. How's Cope?”

“Doctor Santos is looking after him,” D.D. said.

That told Jenkins what kind of answer they had available. He glanced at Ray, whose eyes had lowered, and decided against asking anything further. The boy had been close enough to Cope when they brought him in; he didn't need Jenkins taking him back through it in the middle of the hangar.

“Well,” Jenkins said, “let's show you what we've found.”

He led them past a trolley and a pair of sailors working at an open panel. Ray watched his footing but seemed to need little help with the route, moving aside before Jenkins could warn him about the space required to get around a folded wing. D.D. kept close, looking at the aircraft with the interested expression of a man deciding which questions would make him sound informed.

“Pike tells me you've flown a little of everything,” Jenkins said. “Just as well. We're still working out what we've got enough parts to keep.”

They stopped beside the Hornet he'd been inspecting. Its wings were folded and a ladder stood beneath the open canopy. Dutch was coming around the nose with a clipboard, checking each item before he marked it off. He finished the entry he was making and came over to meet them.

“Your plane captain,” Jenkins told Ray. “Emeka Okafor.”

“Dutch, sir.”

Ray looked up at him. His good hand had begun to move before Dutch offered his own; when they shook, Ray held on a moment longer than Jenkins expected. Dutch waited without looking down at their hands, then released him gently.

“Ray,” the pilot said.

“Good to meet you, sir.”

Jenkins watched Ray's attention settle on the clipboard and the pencil secured to it by a short length of cord. He seemed easier standing here than he had when they'd asked about Cope, and Jenkins decided there was something to be said for introducing a pilot to the people who would be looking after him before discussing the equipment.

“Dutch had Cope's aircraft for the last two years,” he said. “He knows how Joker likes things done.”

“How is the commander?” Dutch asked.

“Still asleep,” Ray said quietly.

Dutch nodded, looking past him for a moment before returning his attention to the Hornet. He had accepted the news with the same care he'd given the maintenance entries, and Jenkins wondered how many people he'd asked before someone had brought him an answer.

“We'll have this ready for you,” he said to Ray.

Ray looked up at the cockpit, then along the fuselage, giving the aircraft the sustained attention Jenkins had been hoping to see.

“F/A-18C,” Jenkins said. “One seat. This is the one they're assigning you.”

He let Ray take it in before continuing. There was no reason to hurry a pilot through meeting an aircraft, particularly when the last one had left him swimming.

“I've got a few things to finish before Baxter takes you up. If that goes well and the doctor clears you for duty, she'll be yours for the first operational sortie.” He rested a hand against the ladder. “She's had a busy few months. I'm going through the records, and then I'm going through everything the records say I don't need to worry about.”

“Major Jenkins has rather exacting standards,” D.D. said.

“You'll be pleased about that if we ever put you in one.” Jenkins glanced at him, then back at Ray. “No climbing today unless the doctor said you could. We can have a look from here.”

Ray came closer to the ladder. He raised his uninjured hand to the rail and looked into the space above it, where the seat waited beneath the canopy. Jenkins had expected questions about the aircraft, or perhaps a request to see the maintenance log. Instead Ray stood quietly, with his thumb moving over a patch of paint worn smooth by the hands of other pilots.

Jenkins followed his gaze. There was less cockpit here than in the aircraft they'd lost, and no place for someone to sit behind him. He wondered whether Ray was thinking about that, and whether it would come as a relief after the afternoon he'd had.

“Anything you want to know?” he asked.

Ray looked back at him. For a moment Jenkins thought he would speak, but he only shook his head and let go of the rail.

“All right. You'll think of something later.” Jenkins picked up the maintenance log from the trolley and held it out. “Come and find me when you do. In the meantime, you might as well see what we're doing to your aircraft.”

Ray took the log and opened it carefully with his good hand. D.D. began asking about where the pilot's name would go, and Dutch showed him the canopy rail. There was enough room, he said, and he would find someone who could do the lettering properly. He listened to the additional suggestions without committing himself to them, then came back to stand beside Ray at the trolley.

Jenkins saw him turn the log a little so that Ray could hold it open without using the injured hand. Ray had found the current entry and was reading it, with the aircraft close enough that he could look up and compare what was written with what stood in front of him. Dutch waited while he did, apparently quite content to let the questions come when the pilot was ready to ask them.

Jenkins drew the trolley nearer and went through the entry with him. Ray followed readily enough, but after a few minutes he began shifting his weight from one foot to the other, and Jenkins took the log back before the effort of standing became something they would all have to pretend not to notice.

Something came round the end of the trolley at knee height and stopped.

It was a dog: big, shaggy, the colour of wet sand, with a greying muzzle and the unhurried manner of an animal that had long ago decided the ship belonged to him. Jenkins had seen him twice already that afternoon, once asleep in a coil of cable and once being fed something by a cook who was pretending not to.

“Ensign Severskaya's,” Dutch said. “Came aboard with her in July for the photographs. Got stuck here, same as the rest of us.” He looked down at the dog with mild surprise. “Doesn't usually bother with pilots.”

The dog walked past Jenkins. He walked past Dutch, who had been giving him the ends of his sandwiches for three months. He went to Ray and sat down on his boots, heavily, and leaned his whole weight against his shins, and looked up.

Ray looked down at him.

Jenkins would remember the next part. Something went across the young man's face that he hadn't seen on it all afternoon: it softened, all at once, the way ice goes on a warm day. His good hand came down toward the dog's head.

It stopped an inch short. It stayed there, not quite touching, for a long moment, as though he had reached for something on a shelf and remembered it wasn't his. Then he took the hand back.

The dog didn't move. He went on leaning, patient as a sandbag, with his eyes half shut.

“That'll keep until tomorrow,” Jenkins said, a little more gently than he'd meant to. “Go and find your bunk.”

D.D. had evidently remembered his undertaking to Santos. He put his phone away and offered to show Ray to his quarters, this time without suggesting anything else they might look at on the way. Ray thanked Jenkins, then Dutch, giving each of them the same careful attention as when he'd arrived. Dutch told him where to find them in the morning. Jenkins watched him follow D.D. between the parked aircraft and hoped someone had found him a place where he could actually sleep.

They went back to the Hornet. Dutch held the job sheet while Jenkins checked the work beneath an open panel, and for a while their conversation consisted of the brief questions and answers required to establish what remained to be done. Jenkins had just reached for a pencil when D.D. returned.

“Settled?” he asked.

“In his quarters,” D.D. said. “I left him deciding whether to take his shoes off before lying down.” He seemed faintly put out. “The dog came with us. All the way. It's lying across his door. I tried to move it, and it looked at me.”

“Good.”

D.D. came closer, looking up at the canopy, then along the wing. Dutch waited with the clipboard against his side. He seemed to have understood that there was another request coming, and was giving D.D. time to arrive at it.

“How difficult would it be to fit a camera rig?” D.D. asked him. “Something lightweight. Small cameras, a recorder. Enough to bring back footage from his flights.”

Dutch looked at the aircraft before answering. “Depends on where you want it mounted.”

“I'd like to see what he sees. And the aircraft, if we can manage it. I can show you the equipment I'm thinking of.”

“I'll need the weights and the mounting details,” Dutch said. “Major Jenkins will have to look it over.”

“Bring us what you've got,” Jenkins agreed. “We'll see where it can go.”

D.D. nodded, but didn't reach for his phone immediately. Beyond the aircraft, a trolley was being moved toward the elevator, its wheels rattling over the deck. He waited for it to pass.

“There are people listening to our broadcasts in places they can't leave,” he said. “They've seen their towns occupied. Some haven't heard from their families for weeks. When we say the Wings of Theve is still flying, they want to believe us.” He looked toward the open hangar entrance. “I'd like to give them something they can watch. The coast from up there. Our aircraft over it. Something happening that they can hope will reach them.”

Jenkins glanced at Dutch. The plane captain had lowered his eyes to the clipboard, although he wasn't reading it.

“People need hope,” D.D. said. “We have very little we can send them at the moment.”

Dutch shifted the papers beneath the clip and found a space on the sheet below. He wrote a short note, then looked back up at the Hornet, considering it from the nose to the folded wings.

“Bring the rig down,” he said. “We'll have a look.”