Chapter 3Jokers Wild

Baxter, Jenkins

Santos had the results in front of her when Baxter arrived, and she read them once more before looking up. He suspected the second reading was for Pike, who was standing beside the desk with the air of an officer whose next six decisions hung on the answer to one.

“Within normal ranges,” Santos said. “He's passed the neurological assessment.”

Ray sat across the desk with his injured hand resting on his knee. The dressing was smaller than it had been the night before, and someone had found him a flight suit that fitted. He looked up when Baxter came in, with that same disconcerting familiarity, as though Baxter were late for something they had arranged years ago. Then he turned back to the doctor.

“And the hand?” Pike asked.

“Usable. He knows what to report if that changes.” Santos closed the folder. “He's cleared.”

Baxter had taken him up at first light. He had gone prepared to teach, because that was what he did with a new pilot and because he had no other way of finding out what a man was made of. He'd asked for a turn, and got a turn. He'd asked for a slower approach, and got exactly the speed he'd named, held there as if it had been painted on the sky. Somewhere over the second circuit he had stopped asking for things and started watching, and had noticed that Ray's corrections were so small and so early that Baxter usually saw the result before he saw the movement. He'd come back with a report that said competent in three different ways, because there was no box on the form for I have never seen anyone fly like that, and I'd like to know where he learned.

“Thank you, Doctor,” Pike said. “Ray, come with me. Baxter.”

D.D. was waiting in the passageway with his phone in his hand. His face arranged itself into reassurance the moment he saw them, which Baxter had always found more alarming than worry.

“Good news?”

“Good enough to put him on the roster.” Pike opened the door of an empty compartment, waited until they were all inside, and closed it. There was no ceremony, but Baxter found himself standing straighter anyway.

“You'll take command of Joker Flight for this sortie,” she told Ray. “Lieutenant Commander Baxter will be your number two.”

Ray's eyes went to Baxter before he answered. Baxter gave him a nod. He'd been told an hour ago, and had spent the hour sorting his objections into the ones that were about the assignment and the ones that were about how little he knew of the man receiving it. The second pile was considerably taller. He thought he'd know which pile mattered by the time they landed.

“I understand you've chosen Ray,” Pike went on. “It's near enough to Cope's call sign that we can work with it. Use it consistently. D.D. will handle the introductions.”

“Delighted,” said D.D.

“Cope's condition is restricted to A-5 clearance and above. The medical staff have their instructions. As far as anyone outside that circle knows, he is on duty. You don't discuss his recovery on an open channel, or with anyone who happens to ask you in a passageway.”

Baxter thought of Dutch asking after Cope in the hangar, and of the dozen people who'd watched the rescue crew carry him below. A secret aboard Endurance would have to survive a great many passageways. Pike knew it as well as he did. What she could control was whether an officer of this ship ever confirmed it.

“There are people on the continent who haven't had good news in months,” she said. “Some of them can't leave. Some have nowhere left to go. They'll hear the Wings is still flying, and they'll listen for what he does next. Keep them in mind.”

Ray nodded. His glance went, briefly, to the bulkhead, in the direction of the infirmary.

“That's all. Baxter, a moment.”

D.D. steered Ray out. Pike waited for the latch.

“Your report?”

“He can fly the aircraft.”

“You sound as though there's more.”

“There is. I just can't write it down yet without sounding like a man who's been up since four.” He considered that, and added, “I'll stay close.”

“I'd assumed you would.”

In the passageway, D.D. had put his phone away and was talking with his hands, shaping a future that he could apparently see more clearly than anyone else on the ship.

“The public score is my concern, Ray,” he was saying. “You needn't spend a moment on it. Just concentrate on surviving the sorties.”

Ray listened with the expression of a man being told the weather would improve.

“I want the war over,” D.D. said, more quietly. “Cope does too. Someone has to keep flying until it is.” He saw Baxter, stepped aside to let two sailors pass, and gave them both a small, practical smile. “Dutch has the cameras fitted. Do try to bring those back as well.”

The camera beside Ray's canopy was hard to see once the Hornet was moving. Baxter had watched Dutch check the mounting on deck, tugging at it with a large, deliberate hand while D.D. said lightweight for the third time. Jenkins had checked everything else. Ray had stood with them through all of it, saying nothing, and before he climbed the ladder he'd put his good hand on Dutch's shoulder for a moment, the way you might touch a man you'd been glad to see again.

Now the Hornet held steady ahead, with Tasha and Coster stacked out to the right. Four aircraft. There had been a time when four aircraft together meant there were more behind them. Baxter disliked how much comfort he was taking from simply being able to see all of these.

“Joker, Four,” Coster said. “I've got the harbor frequency. Pike's asking to dock again.”

“Put it through.”

The harbormaster at Meriton spoke like a clerk returning a form with the wrong box ticked. “Endurance, I'm obliged to ask again. The former Federation territories are now independent. Which republic does your vessel represent?”

“The Federation of Central Usea,” Pike said. “Navy.”

“My ministry can't establish that such an organization exists. San Salvacion is neutral. I'm instructed that an approaching carrier is a matter for our border patrol, and they've been told to watch you.”

“Charming,” Coster said on Joker's channel.

Baxter could see the port from here: cranes, a breakwater, the white smudge of a town that had presumably had its lunch indoors at a table. He let himself picture a few hours alongside, fuel and fresh food and a floor that didn't move, and then made himself stop before the answer came back and spoiled it.

“I could see the ice cream place,” Tasha said wistfully. “There's always an ice cream place by a harbor.”

“From eight thousand feet?”

“I know what one looks like, Bax.”

“I'd have bought you one,” Coster said. There was a short pause. “All of you. I'd have bought the flight ice cream.”

“Ray too?”

“Ray too. If he wanted one. I don't know what he likes.”

“Nobody knows what Ray likes,” Tasha said. “That's the point of him.”

Ray said nothing, which was presumably also the point of him. His Hornet stayed on its heading while control came on the net.

“All Endurance aircraft, the ship will withdraw from San Salvacion waters and proceed to Deltheim. Coming to heading two-seven-five in four-zero minutes.”

“Rain check on the ice cream,” Baxter said.

“You're going to forget,” said Tasha.

“I never forget a debt. Coster's, anyway.”

Out to the right, Tasha had drifted a little closer to Joker Four than the book liked. Baxter considered mentioning it, decided she was keeping perfectly good station on Coster rather than on him, and that this was a distinction only a former lecturer would bother to draw. He let it go.

“Endurance, Dealer. Slow movers, bearing one-four-zero, low. Look like reconnaissance drones.”

Ray's Hornet was already turning. Baxter hadn't found them on his display yet.

“Joker Flight,” said Pike, “splash those drones. They don't report our position.”

“Joker Two, copy. One, two contacts, still outside range.” He gave Ray the distance and caught himself halfway through offering the heading as well. It was very hard to stop being a teacher when there was a new man beside you, even when the new man had spent the morning demonstrating that he didn't need anyone to explain a Hornet to him. “Dealer, whose are they?”

“Can't confirm the operator. The make says one of the separatist outfits.”

“Of course it does,” Baxter said, more sharply than he'd meant. Men who had worn the same uniform six months ago, helping the Sotoans hunt for whatever was left of it. They'd chosen new names for themselves, and he supposed that made it easier.

The drones came on as drones did, blind and incurious. Baxter began the sequence out of pure habit, select, lock, and Ray's first missile was already gone, the second a beat behind it. There was exactly enough space between the launches for each to belong to its own target and not a fraction more.

The first drone came apart while Baxter was still watching the second missile. Tasha whooped.

“Two more beyond them,” Dealer said. “Dealer to Joker 1. A little advice.”

Ray's nose moved through a correction so shallow Baxter would have missed it if he hadn't been staring. A missile left the rail.

“First time poker players tend to play it too safe.”

The second missile followed. Baxter could see now, too late to be useful, the order in which the two drones would come into Ray's approach, and understood that his lead had arranged that order before they'd been close enough for Baxter to notice there was one.

“They never raise—”

The second drone broke up. Dealer stopped talking.

The silence on the net went on long enough that Baxter could hear his own oxygen.

“Uh,” Dealer said eventually. “All four down. Never mind.”

“Nice work, One,” Baxter said.

“Ray!” Tasha said, as if he'd done a card trick at a party. “That was amazing.”

Ray didn't answer her, but his Hornet rocked its wings, once.

“Did he just—” Coster said.

“He did,” said Baxter, and found he was smiling.

“Er, Joker Flight? Got some bad news.”

Baxter was still close enough to Ray to see his Hornet against the drifting smoke from the drones. “Just give us the lowdown.”

“Copy. We've got new bogeys inbound. Looks like recon planes with multiple escorts.”

A gap. Then Tasha's voice, small enough that Baxter checked his volume before he understood that nothing had changed at his end.

“Manned?”

Nobody answered her. She knew the answer. She could identify the aircraft as well as he could. She had only needed to say it aloud, and to hear what it sounded like.

“We can't let them report our position,” Dealer said. “Intercept them.”

Ray was already turning onto the bearing.

Baxter went with him and gave the Hornet room. He had a sentence ready, something about the difference between drones and men, a way of letting the new pilot ask for help without having to start the conversation himself. There was no gap to put it in. Ray's turn was as smooth as it had been for the drones. The altitude adjustment came the moment the heading settled. Nothing in the Hornet's flying recorded that there were now people at the other end of it.

Whatever it had cost Ray to fire on a man for the first time, he'd paid it a long while ago and somewhere else. It was on the back of that qualification sheet, presumably, under the black ink. Baxter found he was no longer curious about the units. He was curious about how many times.

“Tasha,” Coster said. “You're with me.”

“I know.”

“I'm only saying it so you know I know.”

“That doesn't make any sense, Will.”

“It made sense in my head.”

“Four, intercepted traffic,” Baxter said, mostly to give Coster something to do with his mouth.

Coster patched it through. Two voices on the enemy frequency. The first had found four aircraft, Federation types, and was drawing the obvious conclusion about a carrier nearby. The second was objecting to his phrasing, which apparently sounded Sotoan.

“They're our allies now,” said the first. “Get used to it.”

It was the tone that bothered Baxter: two men bickering like a ready room. He could imagine their coffee.

“Where's Queen Flight?” he asked.

“Out of range,” Dealer said. “Small group, older aircraft. Joker can handle it.”

Baxter hadn't asked because he doubted the missiles. MiGs killed people as efficiently as anything else. He let it go. There was no point in asking twice until someone mistook a question for an objection.

The A-50 was resolving now, beyond its pair of escorts: broad wings, the saucer riding the fuselage. Baxter had studied that shape on recognition charts for most of his career without ever having to think about the people sitting under the disc, drinking from thermoses and saying things to one another. On the enemy frequency they'd moved on to how long they needed to keep Joker busy.

“One, escorts at eleven and one o'clock, the A-50 behind.” He waited for the split. He had the speed and the position to take the nearer MiG while Ray took the other, and then they could cover each other onto the big aircraft. It was the right way to do it. It was how he'd have taught it.

Ray didn't give him either fighter.

“Bax?” Tasha said. “Ray? You both all right?”

“We're fine. Stay with Four.”

“Recon aircraft is the priority,” Dealer reminded them.

“Understood.” Baxter looked across at the Hornet ahead of him and made a decision that had been coming since the drones. “I'll stick with Number 1.”

“Roger that, Teach.” Tasha sounded steadier with an instruction to hold on to. “Where did they even come from? The separatists. Who are they?”

“Former friends, mostly,” Baxter said. “That's all anyone's established.”

The MiGs began to separate. The nearer pilot gave up a little height to improve his angle on Ray; the other held wide. It was a sensible defense. It should have made Joker choose.

Ray let the gap open. Then he moved his line, barely. Baxter saw the near MiG turn in and the far one start closing the distance, and understood with a peculiar chill that each pilot now believed Ray had left an opening for the other. They were both coming into the same piece of sky in front of the Hornet, and they were doing it because he'd asked them to without saying a word.

The first missile left while Baxter was still deciding whether to call the near MiG's turn. The second was away before he could have finished the sentence.

One fighter began to break. Baxter saw its angle change and watched for flares, and for a moment the man in that cockpit still seemed to have sky left to use. Then he didn't. The other MiG was already rolling when it was hit, and kept rolling through a shape that was no longer an aircraft.

Ray flew between them. Baxter followed with his weapons live and nothing to point them at. Thirty seconds ago he'd been preparing to kill one of those men. Now he was checking that the wreckage wouldn't drift across Tasha and Coster as they came through behind.

“Debris left of you, Four.”

“Got it. Tasha, right a little.”

“I see it, Will.”

The A-50 filled more of the windscreen. Ray was low against it, and Baxter thought he understood: under the belly, where the crew couldn't see what was about to happen to them. With the escorts gone there was nothing to stop him. The big aircraft had begun a turn, ponderous next to the Hornet.

Ray adjusted to follow it. Then his nose kept coming up, past the line Baxter expected, until they were climbing toward the tail instead of sliding under the fuselage. For a second Baxter wondered whether he'd misread the approach. Then he caught the glint of the camera beside Ray's canopy.

Being seen was part of the job. Pike had said so. D.D. had said very little else. Perhaps Ray had just remembered it. Perhaps that was all. Nothing in his flying said one way or the other. The Hornet rose until the crew of the A-50 couldn't fail to see it coming, and held there while the distance closed.

Baxter could make out panels now, markings, the line of windows. He couldn't see faces. On the intercepted frequency someone was calling for a response and not getting one.

The gun fired as Ray came over the tail.

Baxter saw the first strikes and then the line of them walking forward along the top of the fuselage. He'd expected a burst and a correction, maybe a second try on another pass. Ray kept firing, making the small adjustments needed to carry the stream the whole length of the aircraft as his position changed over it. He wasn't trying for a kill. He'd decided on one before he started.

The enemy voice went up half an octave.

“It's him— that's the emblem, it's the Wings— the Wings of Theve is here, do you copy, the Wings of Theve—”

Other voices broke over him. Baxter never learned whether anyone acknowledged. He heard the man say it a third time, the way you might hold a door shut, and knew he'd be hearing it long after the recording became something people discussed across a desk.

Ray cleared the nose. The gun stopped. Baxter followed him into open air and looked back in time to see fire go through the length of the A-50 at once, the way it had been cut. The cockpit was visible for a second. Then it wasn't.

“Recon aircraft destroyed,” Dealer said. “Escorts destroyed.”

Baxter checked his flight. Coster was where he should be. Tasha was beside him.

“Three?”

“I'm here.” Her voice was level, and there was nothing in it at all. He was grateful she'd found a voice for it.

He looked ahead. Ray's Hornet was already clear, its next correction made before Baxter had settled from the last. Two escorts and the aircraft they were escorting, in one pass. Nobody else had fired. Nobody else had been given anything to do but follow him and watch the parts of the sky he wasn't looking at.

“This guy's no Cope,” Coster said.

Baxter should have told him to keep it off the radio. He thought about it, and found that he couldn't think of a single better thing to say in its place.

“New contact, inland,” Dealer said. “Single fighter, fast. Mirage 2000-5. He's picked you out.”

The Mirage had height and speed and was clearly hoping to reach Joker while they were still untidy after the interception. Ray turned to meet him.

“Four, keep Three clear of this.”

“Already on it. Tasha, come right with me.”

“I'm coming. Contact, two o'clock high, Bax.”

“Thank you, Tasha.” Baxter swung back to his lead and found the Hornet accelerating.

He assumed Ray wanted to close fast, fire, and break away before the Mirage could turn it into a longer fight. That made sense. Baxter would cover the separation if the missile missed. But the range came and went, Ray was still accelerating, and nothing left the rails.

Baxter pushed his own throttles to the stops and still lost ground. Ray was taking everything the Hornet had to give. There was no sign that he meant to trade any of it for a turn.

“One, he's coming round—”

The Mirage's delta tilted as its nose began to come onto Ray's line. Its pilot had seen the speed and reacted to it, and was plainly expecting some answer in return: a turn, a break, a moment of caution. Ray made one correction, so slight that Baxter only saw it because he was looking for it, and kept the power in.

He was going to use the gun.

At that closure there would be nothing left of the moment once it arrived. Baxter wanted to say something. There wasn't time to choose what. He had the range and the angle and his own need to stay out of the way, and he was dealing with the last of those when Ray fired.

The burst was very short. At that speed it had to be. The Mirage was ahead of the Hornet, then beside it, and pieces were lifting from its forward fuselage before Baxter had properly heard the gun. Ray went straight through the space the enemy had been trying to occupy, without slowing, and kept going.

Baxter pulled clear. The Mirage went under him, rolling in a way its pilot had never intended, shedding parts as the nose fell toward the sea. He looked for a parachute. He looked again when he had room. There was only the line of wreckage on the water.

“Enemy fighter destroyed,” Dealer said. “Intercept had him as GIGAS. One of their aces.”

“Was,” Coster said.

Ray's Hornet was still accelerating out of the pass. Only now did it begin to ease, coming back down toward a speed Tasha and Coster could join without effort.

Every pilot tried to know where the other aircraft would be when the rounds arrived. Every pilot Baxter had ever taught had tried, and some of them had got close, and he'd been proud of them. He'd never seen anyone succeed so completely that a second attempt simply didn't come into it. He found it frightening, and was ashamed of finding it frightening, and was more ashamed of the other thing he felt underneath. He had spent years explaining flight to people, and he had just watched something he had no words for. He wanted badly to see it again.

The Hornet slid into position off his wing. The helmet turned toward him. For an unreasonable moment Baxter had the impression that Ray was waiting to be told he'd done something wrong.

“Flight's together,” Baxter said. “Ready to return.”

Two clicks.

“Joker, Dealer. Head home. Queen's coming out to relieve you.”

They came round toward the carrier. A few minutes later Queen appeared on the scope, four contacts coming out in good order. As the flights passed, Baxter heard Kate's voice on the common channel, crisp, putting her people into their sectors.

“Joker, Queen One. Anything we should know?”

“Four drones, an A-50, three fighters,” Baxter said. “All down. Course may be compromised; they got a transmission off.”

There was a pause.

“All of that?”

“All of that.”

“We'll keep our eyes open.”

Joker turned for home. Ray didn't. For a few seconds his Hornet held its heading, out on the edge of the formation, as Queen went past beneath them. Baxter saw his helmet turn to follow the lead aircraft, the one with the crown on its tail, and stay turned until Queen One had gone well beyond them toward the coast.

The common channel clicked open. Baxter waited for the two clicks, or for anything at all, since it was the first time all day Ray had opened a channel he wasn't obliged to. Nothing came. The channel stayed open for two seconds, then three, carrying only the hiss of the set and someone breathing in a mask, and Kate's voice was the last thing that had been on it. Then it closed.

Baxter had seen students do that at the end of a lecture: come up to the desk with a question, stand there with it, and leave without asking, as though the asking would cost more than they had on them.

Ray came back to the flight without a word.

“One?” Baxter said.

Two clicks.

Baxter decided that was a question for another day, and that he'd need rather more than a day to work out how to ask it.

Pike listened to the account without interrupting. Baxter had expected questions about the Mirage pass, or the decision to take the A-50 with the gun. She let him finish, and then asked only what mattered to her.

“The reconnaissance crew transmitted?”

“Yes, ma'am. We heard them call the Wings.”

“Then we'll assume someone heard them.” She wrote something down. “The aircraft are gone, but the course may not be ours any longer. Plan the next watch on that basis.”

Ray sat beside Baxter with his hands loose on his knees. He had looked at each speaker in turn and answered when asked, and volunteered nothing. Tasha and Coster were on his other side. The quiet among the four of them wasn't the quiet of the infirmary. Baxter hadn't yet decided whether it was better.

“You brought your flight back,” Pike told Ray, “and you stopped the search. Good work.”

Ray nodded.

“Baxter. Your assessment?”

“He can do the job.”

“And the Wings?”

He'd watched Cope keep two fighters busy for a quarter of an hour while somebody else finished the fight. Today he'd watched Ray make it unnecessary for anyone else to take part at all. Neither account would fit on a poster without leaving out nearly everything the people in it would think mattered.

“He might,” he said. “Joker will have some adjusting to do.”

Pike looked from him to Coster, and then to Tasha. “I expect you'll manage it.”

She dismissed them with the next watch already on her face. In the passageway Tasha asked whether they could go down and see Cope. Ray turned toward her so quickly that Baxter was glad she'd said it before anyone had time to find a reason not to.

“Together, then,” he said.

Coster fell in beside Tasha. Halfway down the ladder he put his hand out flat behind her, not touching, the way you might steady someone on a moving deck. The ship wasn't moving much. Tasha didn't notice. Baxter decided it wasn't any of his business, and went down after them.

Dutch had started his walkaround before D.D. came down. Jenkins stood under the wing with the expenditure sheet, comparing what the aircraft had brought back against what the pilot said he'd used. There wasn't much to argue over. The empty rails accounted for the missiles. The gun had used enough rounds that Jenkins wanted to see the recording before he asked any questions about it.

D.D. hovered while Dutch went over the camera mount. The plane captain ran his thumb along the fitting, checked each fastener, and only then began removing the recorder. He handed it over with both hands.

“Any trouble?” D.D. asked.

“Pilot didn't report any.” Dutch looked at Jenkins, who shook his head. “We'll go over the mount again before the next flight.”

D.D. set the little screen on the trolley and started it. Jenkins heard the radio first, Baxter's voice and the girl's, then the gun, and looked round in time to see the A-50 sliding under the camera's view. The recording gave him no time at all to understand what he was looking at before the Hornet had passed over it.

“Again,” Dutch said.

D.D. ran it back. This time Jenkins watched the reticle. The aircraft came up under the tail, steady as a train on its rails, and the rounds walked forward along the spine of the A-50 while the Hornet went over it. The camera shook with the gun and never stopped shaking until the nose went past.

D.D. stopped it on a frame with the coast in the background and the reconnaissance aircraft just starting to burn. Then he played the audio. The voice on the enemy frequency tried three times to tell somebody that the Wings of Theve was there.

Nobody said anything.

“They'll have heard that,” D.D. said finally.

“Pike thinks so,” said Jenkins.

“Show me the Mirage,” said Dutch.

D.D. found it. The Mirage was a speck, then a shape, then it was the whole screen. The gun fired for less time than it took to blink. The shape went past on the left in pieces, and the horizon didn't even tilt.

Dutch bent closer. He stayed there a long moment with his hands on his knees.

“He didn't slow down,” he said.

“Is that unusual?” D.D. asked.

Dutch straightened, slowly, the way a big man did everything. “Sir, I've had Commander Cope's aircraft for two years. I've had others before that. Everybody slows down.” He nodded at the frozen screen. “You come in that fast, you get one look. If you're wrong, you're in the sea, or you're in him. He knew he wasn't going to be wrong.”

D.D. looked at the screen as though it had changed while he wasn't watching.

“I want the cameras to stay on,” he said.

“They're drag on the airframe,” said Dutch. “And another thing for the crew to check.”

“I know. I'm still asking.”

Dutch looked at the Hornet. He looked at it for some time.

“People should see that,” D.D. said. He laughed, short and not very happily. “God help us. People should see that. The ones in the shelters. I've been telling them for three months that the Wings is still flying, and half of them think I'm reading them a bedtime story. Look at it.” He didn't sound like a man looking at good news. He sounded like a man who had asked for a lion and been given one, and was now standing in the same room with it.

“He made it look easy,” Jenkins said.

“That's what I mean.” D.D. ran the A-50 again, and stopped it before the fire. “It shouldn't look easy. Should it?”

Nobody answered that.

Dutch took the pencil from its cord on his clipboard and made a short note on the turnaround sheet. Then he put the clipboard down on the trolley and rested one hand flat on the Hornet's nose, just under the camera, as if he were checking for heat.

“I'll keep them fitted,” he said. “I'll check the mounts every turnaround.”

“Thank you, Dutch.”

Jenkins looked once more at the paused image. Beyond the Hornet's nose the shore was clear, all roads and the pale shapes of towns he couldn't name from that angle. Someone down there might recognize them. Someone might watch this in a cellar on a borrowed screen and find out that a Federation aircraft had been close enough to see where they still lived.

He could see why D.D. wanted it. He was glad, all the same, that the man who'd made it had gone below with the others to sit with Cope, and wasn't standing here while the three of them decided which parts of his morning people needed to see.

When Jenkins went below an hour later, the dog was lying in the passageway outside the infirmary hatch with his chin on his paws, waiting for somebody who was inside. It wasn't Cope he was waiting for. The dog had never once waited outside that door for Cope.