Chapter 6Not for Any Injury

Santos

Santos was finishing the morning handover when Baxter came to her office. He waited in the doorway until the orderly had gone, holding his helmet against his hip, as though he might yet decide he had only come to borrow something.

“Have you got a minute?”

“For you or for Cope?”

“For Joker One.”

“He's coming at nine.”

“I know. Pike told me.” He stayed where he was until she pointed at the chair. “There was something yesterday. The enemy Hornet.”

“The one he shot down?”

“He could have done it sooner.”

Santos put the handover sheet aside. “How much sooner?”

“On the first pass. Certainly on the second. He clipped a wing, came round and clipped the other one. Then he sent a missile after him and shot him when he broke away from it.”

“Was he having trouble getting a shot?”

“No.”

“You're sure?”

“I watched him shoot an Intruder at Deltheim from a distance at which I'd have been pleased to hit the wing. This was much closer.” Baxter looked at the edge of her desk. “I told him to finish it.”

“Did he?”

“After the missile.”

“What do you think he was doing?”

“I don't know. That's why I'm here.”

She asked him to take her through it from the beginning. He did it the way she imagined he had once taken undergraduates through a proof, starting with the enemy aircraft's arrival and the positions of both flights, where he had been, where the Hornet had gone. Twice he stopped to correct a bearing that could not possibly have mattered to her. When he reached the second pass she asked whether he'd seen a damaged aircraft trying to escape.

“He was trying to get out of the fight. He still had his aircraft under control.”

“And Ray followed him.”

“Yes.”

She wrote that down. Baxter watched the pen as if he expected it to do something to Ray.

“I'm not asking you to ground him.”

“I haven't decided what I'm asking him yet.”

“He brought us all back.”

“I know, Professor. I treated the man he brought back in his arms.”

Baxter nodded, picked up his helmet and stood. At the door he turned.

“Will you want me again?”

“Yes. After I've spoken to him.”

Pike arrived ten minutes later with a folder she didn't open.

“Baxter's been down,” Santos told her.

“About yesterday?”

“The Hornet.”

Pike set the folder on her knee. “He mentioned it to me.”

“You sent him?”

“No. I told him you were seeing Ray this morning. He drew his own conclusions.” She smoothed the folder's cover. “He generally does.”

“Tell me about Deltheim again. Did Ray refuse an order to land, or fail to answer when you asked why he hadn't?”

“He was cleared. He didn't take the approach. I asked why, and he didn't answer. After the drones, I told him to land and he did.”

“There's a difference.”

“Yes,” Pike said. “There is.”

“Did he explain afterward?”

“He wanted everyone tied up before he came down.”

Santos glanced toward the passageway, where someone was asking the orderly where to put a delivery of dressings.

“I'll ask him.”

“We're depending on him for rather more than—”

“I know how much you're depending on him. I've seen the roster. Has he had breakfast?”

“I asked whether he'd eaten yesterday.”

“And today?”

Pike looked at her, then closed the folder she hadn't opened.

“I don't know.”

“Neither do I. I'll start there.”

Ray arrived at nine exactly, carrying nothing. Santos had left the door open, and he knocked on the frame before stepping in, as if an open door were not quite the same as an invitation.

A dog had come with him as far as the door. It lay down across the threshold with a sigh and stayed there for the whole of the appointment. Santos had seen that dog asleep on half the people aboard. She had never seen it wait outside a door for anyone.

“Sit down,” she said. “Pike asked me to see you. You know that.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“This isn't another physical. I'd like to hear how you're managing aboard, and whether there's anything you need.”

“Am I grounded?”

“You're very quick to ask that.”

“There's another sortie.”

“There will be another sortie whether you answer my questions or not. I haven't reached a decision about you.”

He sat. The chair was slightly too low for him; she had been meaning to replace it for weeks, and had been told by three successive patients that it was a perfectly good chair. He settled his hands between his knees and waited.

She had read the posters on the way down. Everyone had. There was one outside the wardroom, Cope's face with the sky behind it, and somebody had already pinned a new clipping beside it from D.D.'s latest broadcast: four aircraft over Deltheim, one sentence about the Wings that had been rewritten until it sounded like scripture. The man in her chair did not look like scripture. He looked like a junior officer who had not been sleeping and who was trying to work out what she wanted from him so that he could give it to her and leave.

“What you tell me stays here unless it affects your care or your fitness to fly. I'm not preparing a story for D.D.”

He nodded.

“Have you had breakfast?”

“Yes.”

“What did you have?”

“Eggs. Toast.”

“With Joker?”

“Before them.”

“How much before?”

“The mess was opening.”

She looked at the clock. “Were you up early, or hadn't you gone to bed?”

“I'd been to bed.”

“When?”

He gave her a time, then admitted, when she asked, that he hadn't slept until considerably later. He had woken twice and got up before the alarm. The night before had been much the same.

“What wakes you?”

“Sometimes a noise.”

“And the other times?”

“Dreams.”

“Do you remember them?”

“Yes.”

She waited. He looked at the empty corner of her desk.

“Water,” he said eventually.

“From when you were rescued?”

“Sometimes.”

“Too much of it, then. Drowning.”

He shook his head, very slightly. “Not enough.”

Santos looked up. A man pulled out of the sea a week ago, who dreamed about water and said there wasn't enough of it. She waited for him to explain, and he didn't, and she noticed that while they had been talking he had drunk the whole glass she'd poured for him when he came in, and was holding the empty glass as though he'd forgotten to put it down.

She refilled it without comment. He thanked her, and drank half of that too.

She wrote down the sleep he could account for. There was less of it than she'd hoped, though she had treated men who would have been glad of that much.

“What do you do when you wake?”

“Get up.”

“And then?”

“Check the board. If there's work, I do it.”

“What work?”

“The aircraft. The next sortie. Jenkins usually has something.”

“Does Jenkins ask you to come down?”

“Not always.”

The delivery trolley rattled past the doorway. Ray turned toward it before the orderly had stopped to ask where a box belonged, and kept watching after Santos had answered, until the trolley had gone round the corner and there was nothing left to see.

“Do you need to go somewhere?” she asked.

“No.”

“You can leave them to it for twenty minutes.”

“I just want to make sure it's done properly.”

“The dressings?”

He looked at her, and for a moment she thought he might laugh. He didn't. “Everything.”

She made a note. He watched the pen, then her.

“Do you think they need your help?”

“They might.”

“They'll call me if they need me.”

“I know.”

“Then you can let them.”

He moved his hands apart on his knees. She couldn't tell whether he had accepted the suggestion or was only waiting for the next question.

“Does Jenkins need you watching his work?”

“No.”

“But you go down.”

“Yes.”

“Do you tell him what you're there to check?”

“Sometimes.”

“Try telling him the other times. He may be able to save you a trip.”

“Pike told me you stayed up at Deltheim,” Santos said.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I wanted everyone tied up.”

“Stalwart as well as Endurance.”

“Yes.”

“You were in the right place when the drones came. I'm glad you were. What would you have done if they hadn't come?”

He looked at her as though she had left a word out of the question.

“If nothing else attacked,” she said. “The ships were coming in, the others were aboard. When would you have landed?”

“Once they were safe.”

“When would that have been?”

He didn't answer.

“At the berth?”

“Perhaps.”

“You'd have run out of fuel eventually.”

“I was watching it.”

“Then you'd have landed because you had to.”

His hands came together again. “I don't know.”

She let the answer stand. It was, she thought, the first entirely honest thing he'd said since he sat down, and he seemed to dislike it as much as she did.

“Who's looking after your return?”

“The deck crew. Control.”

“While you're still flying.”

“Dealer has my position.”

“And Baxter?”

“He's doing his job.”

“Do you let him?”

Ray looked up.

“He tried to ask what you were doing at Deltheim. So did Pike. You didn't answer either of them.”

“I gave him my fuel state.”

“You knew how much you had before he asked. He was trying to find out whether you were in trouble.”

“I wasn't.”

“He couldn't know that until you told him.”

Ray looked toward the doorway again, but this time nobody was passing it.

“Next time you stay up, tell him why,” she said. “If you don't know why, you can tell him that too.”

“I'll tell him.”

She put down her pen. “Will you?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Baxter came to see me this morning,” she said. “About the enemy Hornet.”

Ray stopped looking at the door.

“He described three passes. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Could you have finished it sooner?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn't you?”

He drew a breath and let it go without using it. Santos waited. Outside, the orderly answered the telephone and lowered his voice when he saw her door was still open.

“I enjoyed it,” Ray said.

“The flying?”

“Yes.”

“What was different about it?”

“He was good.”

“Good enough that you needed three passes?”

“No.”

“Then what did being good change?”

For the first time she saw something other than wariness in his face. It came up from somewhere a long way down, quick and bright and entirely unguarded, the look of a man describing the one thing in the world that had never once disappointed him. It was gone almost before she'd recognised it.

“An enemy with teeth,” he said, and looked at his hands.

“You wanted to see what he'd do.”

“Yes.”

“After you'd damaged his aircraft.”

“Yes.”

“And on the last pass?”

“The missile made him turn.”

“Into your gun.”

He nodded.

She had heard enough pilots describe fights to recognise the moment at which the account turned into something they wanted to live through again. Ray had reached it and gone past it before he remembered who he was talking to. Now he was sitting very still, the way people sat in that chair when they had told her the thing they came in determined not to tell her.

“Did you think about the man in the aircraft?”

“Not enough.”

“Would you have fired if he'd surrendered?”

“No.”

“Or if he'd ejected?”

“No.” That came at once. “He'd be out of the fight.”

“Could you have given him that chance sooner?”

A long pause. “Yes.”

Santos picked up her pen, then decided she didn't need it yet.

“Are you sorry you shot him down?”

“He was attacking us.”

“That isn't what I asked.”

“No,” he said. “I'm not sorry I stopped him.”

“But you're sorry about how.”

“Yes.”

“Because Baxter noticed?”

He looked at her then, properly, and she wondered whether she'd pushed too far.

“No.”

“Then why?”

He turned his right hand over on his knee and studied the healing knuckles as if they belonged to someone he had been warned about.

“I'm good at it,” he said.

He did not say it the way pilots said it in the wardroom. Santos had heard that version so often she could have written it on the noticeboard: half a boast, half an apology for the boast. This was neither. He said it the way she had once heard a man in a burns unit describe what his own hands had done in a fire. It was a charge against himself, made by someone who expected to be found guilty.

“Most of the people on this ship would give a great deal to be good at it,” she said carefully.

“I know.”

“You don't think it's something to be glad of.”

He didn't answer. She hadn't expected him to.

There were other questions she could have asked, about other fights and other pilots, and about where a man learned to fly the way Baxter described before he was old enough to have learned anything. She had enough to discuss with Baxter without turning the appointment into an interrogation about a service record neither of them had been permitted to read in full.

“Was anyone else at risk while you were making those passes?”

“I had him.”

“You had one aircraft. Where were the others?”

He began to answer, stopped, and looked down again.

“Baxter was covering you,” she said. “Coster and Tasha were waiting. Queen still had work to do. If you're asking them to trust what you do in a fight, they need to know you're doing it for a reason they can rely on.”

“I know.”

“Did you know it then?”

He was slow to answer. She was glad of that, at least.

“I wasn't thinking about them.”

Santos let that sit for a while. Then she reached for the thing she had been saving.

“The XO had D.D. bring some of your recordings down to me last night,” she said. “I'm not a pilot. I won't pretend I understood half of what I was looking at.”

He waited.

“But I've seen Tasha fly. Everyone aboard has; D.D. plays her air-show reel whenever he thinks morale needs it. She flies like someone showing you something she loves. I've watched Baxter bring an aircraft aboard in weather that had the deck crew praying, and he flies like a man doing sums he's sure of. Coster flies like someone doing a job properly because somebody's counting on him to.” She turned her pen over. “You don't fly like any of them.”

“No.”

“And yours—” She stopped, because she had meant to say it carefully and found there was no careful way to say it. “Yours are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.”

He didn't move.

“I don't mean the killing. I know what's at the end of every one of those passes; I'm the one who'd have to deal with it if it were one of ours. I mean the flying. There's nothing wasted in it. Not one movement. It's like watching water find its way downhill. I watched one of them three times last night, knowing exactly what it was, and I still—” She turned the pen over again. “Ask anyone on this ship. They'll tell you the same.”

He had gone still in the way he went still when someone passed the door. He wasn't flattered. It looked more like a man being told that a wound had healed beautifully, while he could feel it opening under the dressing.

“It's ugly,” he said.

“It isn't.”

“It is.” There was no arrogance in it at all. He said it as a correction of fact, the way he'd have corrected a bearing. “They don't know what they're looking at.”

“Then tell me what I'm looking at.”

“Me,” he said. “Making it ugly.”

“On purpose?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

He looked at the door. Not the passageway this time; the noticeboard, and the roster pinned to it.

“If it's ugly, I'm watching,” he said. “Where they all are. Every second.” He stopped, then made himself go on. “If I start to like it, I stop watching.”

“So what I watched three times last night—”

“Is what it looks like when I don't like it.”

Santos sat with that for longer than she meant to. A man who had ground every particle of pleasure out of the thing he did best, deliberately, every sortie, and what was left still looked to everyone else like the most beautiful thing in the world. She found herself wondering what it had looked like before, and then wishing she hadn't wondered.

“And yesterday you liked it.”

“Yes.”

She had watched that recording too. It had been different, though she couldn't have said how, any more than she could have said exactly what changes in a man's face when he forgets anyone is looking at him. The others had been beautiful the way a blade is beautiful. This one had been beautiful the way a person is. She had thought, God help her, that it was lovely, and had been ashamed of thinking it before she knew why she ought to be.

“That one was different,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And while you were enjoying it, you weren't watching the others.”

“No.”

“Nothing happened to them.”

“Not this time.”

She heard what was folded inside that. She set the pen down.

“Has it happened before? You were enjoying a fight, and somebody paid for it?”

He was quiet so long that she heard the orderly finish his telephone call and hang up. His hand had closed on his knee.

“Once,” he said.

“A good pilot. An enemy with teeth.”

“Yes.”

“And while you were—”

“Yes.”

She didn't make him finish. She didn't need him to. She thought of I'm good at it, a few minutes ago, said like a charge against himself, and understood a little more of what the charge was. It wasn't that he was good at killing. It was that once, at the wrong moment, he had loved it.

“What happened to them?”

He looked at her. It wasn't refusal, exactly. It was the look of a man standing at the edge of something with no way down, and she decided that she would not push him off it on a first appointment, however much she wanted the answer.

“So now you make it ugly,” she said instead.

“I make it ugly.”

“Every sortie.”

“Every sortie.”

“That must be exhausting.”

He looked at her as though nobody had ever suggested that it might be, and as though he had not considered it himself, and as though, now that she had said it, he could feel every one of those sorties at once.

“Yes,” he said.

“Then why yesterday?”

“He was good.” A long pause. “And I forgot.”

“Forgot what?”

“For a minute.” He turned his hand over and looked at the knuckles again. “What it costs.”

Santos wrote nothing. Some things a doctor ought to keep in her head instead, where nobody could ask to see them.

“And when you are thinking about them,” she said, “what are you thinking?”

“Where they are.”

“All of them?”

“Yes.”

“Is there anyone in particular you're afraid of losing?”

He looked at the door. There was nothing in the doorway, nobody passing, only the edge of the passageway and the noticeboard beyond it, where the morning's flight roster had been pinned beside the broadcast clipping. Both flights were listed on it.

“Everyone,” he said.

It was an answer. It might even have been true. Santos had been a doctor long enough to know that a true answer could still be standing in front of another one, and that a patient's eyes went where his mind had already gone before his mouth caught up. She wrote everyone in her notes and did not underline it.

“Is there someone at home?” she asked. “Someone waiting for you?”

“No.”

“Someone you've lost?”

He was quiet for so long that she thought he had decided not to answer, and she was preparing to let him. Then he said, “She's alive,” and it was not the way people usually said it. It was the way people said a thing they had checked that morning, and would check again tonight, and did not entirely believe in between.

Santos waited for the rest. There wasn't any. She didn't write that down at all. She thought of once, earlier, and the way he hadn't answered what had happened to them, and found that she couldn't make the two answers sit together however she turned them.

She could have left it there. She was fairly sure that a better doctor would have, on a first appointment. But she had treated the man he'd pulled out of the sea, and she had watched him on the deck at Deltheim through the infirmary porthole, flying circles round a ship that didn't need him, and she thought that if she didn't ask now he would make very certain she never got the chance.

“But you have lost people.”

“Yes.”

“Pilots?”

“Yes.”

“People you flew with.”

He nodded.

“Tell me about them.”

He opened his mouth. His eyes went to the door again, to the roster on the noticeboard beyond it with both flights listed, and stayed there. She watched him try to begin, and stop, and try again.

“Can you tell me their names?”

“No.”

“Can't, or won't?”

A long pause. “Can't.”

Santos thought of the service record Pike had described to her, with its blacked-out lines, the postings nobody aboard was cleared to read. That would explain it. A man could lose a whole flight somewhere he wasn't allowed to name and have to carry it around without a word for any of it. She didn't ask whether that was it. He looked as if he might have said yes simply to make the question stop, and she wanted the truth or nothing.

“And since then,” she said, “you've decided it isn't going to happen again.”

He didn't answer, which was an answer.

“Nobody gets to decide that. Not you, not me, not the XO. You know that.”

“I know.”

“Then what happens the day it does?”

He looked at her properly then, for the second time in the appointment, and she wished at once that she had asked something else.

“It won't,” he said.

He said it quite calmly. That was the worst of it. It was not a hope, or a boast, or the kind of thing frightened young men said to make themselves brave. It was a man telling her the terms of an agreement he had made with someone, and intended to keep whatever it cost, and had very likely never told anyone else.

Santos had said the next thing to a great many people in this chair. She said it to him because it was true, generally speaking, and because someone ought to.

“Whatever happened to them,” she said, “in a war, with people shooting at you—it isn't your fault. You know that. Survivors always think it is. It almost never—”

“What if it was?”

He didn't say it bitterly. He said it the way he'd given her his sleep, or what he'd had for breakfast: a plain account, offered because she had asked.

“Not survivors,” he said. “Not the war. Me. If I'd been where I should have been, and done what I could have done, and they'd all be alive.” He looked at his hands. “What do you tell someone then?”

Santos opened her mouth and found that she had nothing in it.

He saw her look for it and not find it. Something in his face softened. It took her a moment to recognise it, because she was used to seeing it from the other side of the desk. He was sorry for her.

“It's all right,” he said gently. “Nobody does.”

Santos put her pen down. “We'll come back to that,” she said.

“Yes, ma'am.”

She had the distinct impression that he was relieved she had stopped, and equally certain that he had no intention of letting her start again.

Near the end of the appointment, she asked when he could come back. He offered a time after the next scheduled patrol, provided it didn't run late.

“If it runs late, send word,” she said. “Don't make me come and find you.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“And eat a proper meal with the others today. You don't need to wait until everyone else has eaten.”

“Am I still cleared?”

“I need to speak to Baxter about the flying before I finish my assessment. I'll tell you and Pike when I have.”

“The next patrol—”

“Will be arranged by Pike. You have this morning free. Use some of it to rest.”

He stood when she did, then paused beside the chair.

“Cope?”

“No change overnight. He's being looked after.”

“Can I see him?”

“A short visit. If the nurse asks you to leave, you leave.”

He nodded. At the door he turned back.

“Thank you.”

She told him where to find the nurse and watched him go the right way. He stopped beside the infirmary hatch instead of going straight in, and waited there for someone to let him through, though nobody would have stopped him.

The dog had got up and gone with him. Halfway along the passageway Santos saw Ray's hand drop toward its head and stop, the way it must have stopped a dozen times already; and saw the dog, without breaking step, push its head up under the hand anyway.

Pike came down when Santos sent for her. This time she left the folder upstairs.

“Your assessment?”

“Not finished. I want another conversation with Baxter about yesterday before I decide on the next sortie.”

“How soon?”

“As soon as he's available.”

“I'll send him.”

“He's sleeping badly. He needs rest, and I'd like him back here after the next patrol if he flies it.”

Pike nodded. “Did he tell you about the drones?”

“We discussed them.”

“Does he know why he stayed up?”

“He couldn't give me a point at which he'd have been satisfied it was safe to land.”

Pike looked toward the infirmary, where the nurse had let him in to see Cope.

“Do you think he's frightened?”

Santos considered the question longer than Pike probably wanted.

“He doesn't seem to mind being in danger himself. He's much less comfortable leaving anyone else in it.” She hesitated. “And he isn't proud of what he can do. I'd expected that to be the difficulty. It's the other way round.”

“That's a difficult distinction in his job.”

“Yes.”

Pike left. Santos asked the orderly to find Baxter, and later, carrying her breakfast tray back from the office, she passed the mess.

Coster had hooked his feet around the legs of an empty chair to keep it from being carried off to another table. Tasha was sitting opposite him, explaining something with her fork.

“It's not a song if you have to be told when it's finished,” she was saying.

“It's a long song.”

“It's three songs, and the band couldn't decide which one they meant.”

“That's the point. That's the whole—” Coster spread his hands, nearly losing the chair. “It's supposed to go somewhere.”

“It goes on.”

“You didn't hear it last night. Bird talked through the whole second side.”

“I've heard it through the ready room door every day for four months. I know exactly where it goes, William. Nowhere. Very loudly.”

“Then come and listen to it properly. Without the band.”

“When?”

He opened his mouth and found he hadn't got any further than the invitation. “Whenever. After the patrol. I'll find the good pressing.”

“There's a good pressing?”

“There's a better one.”

Tasha pointed her fork at him. “If I sit through the whole thing, you're getting up for the sunrise.”

“That's not a fair trade. The record's good.”

“So is the sunrise.”

Neither of them seemed to notice that Santos had slowed. Neither of them seemed to notice anything much beyond the width of the table. She had seen that sort of argument before, between people who would have been astonished and slightly offended to hear it called anything else, and she found that it improved her opinion of the morning considerably.

Ray stopped beside them with a plate.

“Is someone sitting there?”

Coster looked down at the chair under his feet as if he had forgotten it.

“You, if you want,” he said, and moved his feet.

He had been holding it since before Tasha sat down. Santos knew, because she had seen him start doing it from the serving counter when she came up for her tray, and had seen him turn away two people who asked for it. He didn't mention that. Tasha moved her cup to make room. Ray sat.

The dog, who had been asleep under the table on Coster's feet, got up, turned round twice, and lay down on Ray's instead. Coster looked under the table. “Traitor,” he said, without any heat at all. Tasha said nothing. She watched the dog settle, and watched Ray not look down, and her face was very thoughtful.

Santos meant to go on. She stopped at the urn instead, with her back to them, and refilled a cup she didn't want.

“Ray,” Tasha was saying. “Settle it. Sunrise or a record.”

“He doesn't get a vote,” Coster said. “He's never heard the record.”

“He's seen the sunrise. Every patrol.” Tasha leaned toward him across the table. “Don't you love it? Up there, first thing, before anything happens? I used to think that was the whole reason anyone flew. Just for that. Just because it's the best feeling in the world.”

Santos heard the silence before he answered. It was not a long one. Nobody at the table would have noticed it.

“It's very beautiful,” Ray said.

“See?” said Tasha to Coster, triumphant. “Beautiful.”

“That's not the same as the record.”

“It's better than the record.”

Santos took her coffee and went on before any of them could see her face.