Chapter 12Forty-Eight Hours

Santos, Pike, Halloran, Tasha, Kate

Santos had started pouring the water before he arrived. She noticed this on the fourth morning after Drinwich, standing at her desk with the jug in her hand and the glass already full, and Ray not due for another ten minutes. She looked at the glass for a while. Then she left it where it was.

He came at nine exactly and knocked on the frame of the open door, as he always did. He sat in the chair that was still too low for him. He drank the water without being asked and without, she thought, noticing that he had, and set the empty glass on the corner of her desk, and waited. Outside, across the threshold, the dog had lain down to wait for him, as it did now at every appointment. Santos had stopped remarking on it.

She refilled it.

“Last time,” she said, “you told me it won't happen again. That nobody will be lost.”

“Yes.”

“I said we'd come back to that. I'd like to talk about the day it does.”

He didn't answer. He looked at the door.

“I know you don't want to,” Santos said. “I'm not asking you to want to. I'm asking you to try. Just for a minute. Imagine you come back from a sortie and somebody doesn't. What do you do?”

He went very still. It was not the stillness of a man refusing a hypothetical. She had seen that often enough, the polite blankness of people who would not let themselves picture the thing. This was something else. His hands had come together between his knees and were holding on, and his eyes had gone to the noticeboard beyond the door, to the roster with both flights on it, and stayed there. He looked like a man who had been asked to describe a room and was standing in it.

“It won't,” he said, very quietly.

Santos understood then, with a coldness that started at the back of her neck, that for him it was not a place he refused to go. It was a place he had already been, and had come back from, and would do anything at all not to go again.

She didn't say so. She let the silence go on until it had stopped being about the question.

“Last time you said you couldn't tell me their names,” she said. “The people you lost. Is that still true?”

“Yes.”

“Because you're not allowed to?”

A long pause.

“Because they wouldn't—” He stopped. She watched him stop. It wasn't the stop of a man catching himself on the edge of a secret. It looked more like someone who had walked into a door in the dark. “Because I can't.”

They wouldn't. Wouldn't what? Wouldn't want him to? Wouldn't know? Santos turned it over and couldn't make it fit any of the shapes she had. It wasn't about classification, she was nearly sure of that. Nobody said they wouldn't about a blacked-out line in a service record.

She let him off. She had a feeling that if she didn't, he would find a way never to sit in this chair again.

Instead she opened her desk drawer and took out a notebook. It was plain, with a grey card cover, the kind the stores officer bought by the box. She kept a few for patients who couldn't talk, or who could talk perfectly well about everything except the one thing.

“If you can't say them,” she said, “write them down. Or don't write. Draw. Make a list. Anything you like. Nobody reads it. Not me, not the XO, not Baxter. It's yours. I won't ask to see it, and if you leave it in here by accident I'll give it back to you without opening it.”

He took it from her. He held it the way she had seen him hold Tasha's cake on the apron at Snider's Top, level, in both hands, as if it might spill.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You're welcome.” She held out a pencil. “Would you humour me? Draw someone. Now, here. Anyone you like. I only want to see whether it's any use to you, or whether I'm wasting stationery.”

She expected him to refuse. She half expected a stick figure, something a man draws to get a doctor off his back. He looked at the pencil for a moment, then took it, opened the notebook on his knee and bent over it.

He didn't hesitate. That was the first thing she noticed. The pencil moved quickly and lightly, without stopping, the way his aircraft moved in D.D.'s recordings: no correction, no second attempt, every line arriving where it meant to go. She watched his face while he worked. For a few minutes the watchfulness went out of it. He wasn't looking at the door.

After perhaps five minutes he turned the notebook round and held it out to her.

Santos had sat on a hospital arts committee for three years, in another life, and had been made to look at a great deal of art. She knew immediately that she was looking at something extraordinary. It was a girl, or a very young woman, standing in a doorway with a tray in her hands: a teapot, two cups, a little dish of something. She had just looked up, as if somebody had come in. There was a crease at the corner of her mouth that wasn't quite a smile, and you could tell from the way she held the tray that it was heavy and that she had carried it a long way and would carry it again tomorrow. The whole thing was a few dozen lines. It was more alive than most photographs Santos had seen.

She had no idea who it was.

“That's remarkable,” she said, and meant it more than she could easily say. “Who is she?”

He took the notebook back and looked at the drawing for a long time.

“She made tea,” he said.

“For you?”

“For someone.” A pause. “Someone I flew against.”

Santos waited. He didn't add anything. He closed the notebook over the drawing, gently, as if it might smudge, and held it on his knee in both hands.

An enemy pilot's tea, drawn by a man who couldn't tell her the names of his own dead. She added it to the list she kept in her head, and the list was getting long.

She picked up the other piece of paper on her desk, the one she had been looking at before he came in. “And there's something else. The XO wanted me to tell you, because she thought you'd take it better from me. I think she's wrong about that, but she outranks me.”

He looked at the paper.

“You're stood down,” Santos said. “Forty-eight hours from tomorrow morning. Off the ship.”

She watched it land. She had expected him to argue. He didn't. He went still again, in the other way, the way a man goes still when he's told he's being sent a long way off and isn't sure he'll be let back.

“All of Joker?” he said.

“All of Joker.”

“And Queen?”

“Queen has the alert.”

Something crossed his face. It was quick and it was gone, and Santos couldn't have named it if her licence had depended on it. She wrote nothing down. She had found, over the last few weeks, that there was a growing list of things about this patient she kept in her head instead of her notes.

The earliest operational opportunity came, against every expectation Pike had, four days after Drinwich.

It came as a signal from Snider's Top. Squeeze was delayed. The Army needed time to move fuel and armour up through Drinwich, and the Navy needed to wait for them. There would be two days, perhaps three, when Endurance wasn't needed for anything but keeping her pilots current. Use the time, the signal said, to rest your people.

Below that was a second paragraph, which Pike read three times. Captain Lund's people, inventorying the hangars at Drinwich, had opened the long storage building on the northern apron and found it full. The Federation had staged a squadron's worth of aircraft there before the base fell, preserved and sealed, and the Sotoans had either not known what they had or not had the people to make use of it. Fourteen F/A-18 Super Hornets, E and F models. One EA-18G Growler. All recoverable. Snider's Top wanted to know whether Endurance could crew them.

Pike went down to the hangar deck and gave the signal to Jenkins, because she wanted to see his face.

He read it. He read it again. Then he took off his cap, which she had never seen him do, and held it against his chest like a man at a funeral.

“Fourteen,” he said.

“And the Growler.”

“And the Growler.” He put the cap back on. “Ma'am, I'd like to go to Drinwich.”

“You'll be going to Drinwich. So will Joker. They're stood down.”

“All of them?”

“All of them. Including the one you're about to ask me about.”

Jenkins looked across the hangar to where Dutch was working on Joker One's Hornet. The old aircraft, the one Cope had flown for two years and Ray for five weeks. Dutch had his hand flat on the side of it.

“He'll want to keep that one,” Jenkins said quietly. “Dutch. He'll want it kept.”

“For what?”

“For when the commander flies again.”

Pike looked at the aircraft for a moment. Then she nodded.

She sent for Joker One that afternoon. He came to her cabin in a clean flight suit and stood just inside the door, as if he were trying not to take up room. He looked worse than he had at Deltheim. Not tired; Pike had seen tired. He looked worn, the way a stair rail goes smooth and pale in the one place where everybody's hand has been.

“Sit down.”

He sat.

“Doctor Santos has told you,” she said. “Forty-eight hours, from 0800. Off the ship. That's an order.”

“Ma'am, I don't need—”

“I didn't ask what you need. I told you what you're getting.” She softened her voice, very slightly. “Drinwich. The Army has offered beds and hot water and a mess that doesn't move. A chief warrant officer called Halloran has been making a considerable nuisance of herself on the Army net about the chance to buy you a drink. And Jenkins is going to be there with a ferrying team, because it appears that Captain Lund has found us fourteen Super Hornets.”

He didn't seem surprised. She noticed that. She noticed it the way she had begun noticing several things about him, and filed it with them.

“And Commander Cope is going,” she said. “Doctor Santos took him out of the frame on Tuesday. He's in the chair still, but she's agreed to forty-eight hours, as long as Baxter takes responsibility for the knee. He asked to go. He said, and I'm quoting, somebody has to make sure the kid doesn't spend two days counting the runway lights.”

That one landed. Something went across his face, too quick to name.

“He's out of the frame?”

“As of Tuesday. Santos says he'll be on crutches within days, if he does what he's told. Which he won't, so probably sooner.”

He sat with that for a moment. Then he said, very quietly, the thing she had known he would say from the moment he came in.

“And if something happens? While we're stood down?”

Pike had thought about that. She had lain awake over it.

“Then Queen handles it,” she said. “Evans has handled four months of this war, and she has never lost a pilot. Not one. She can handle forty-eight hours. If something happens Queen can't handle, I'll recall you. You'll be thirty minutes away. You have my word.”

She had meant it as reassurance. She saw it go into him like something else. He looked at her for a long time, and she had the strangest feeling that he was doing a calculation she couldn't see, with numbers she didn't have, and that one of the numbers was four.

Then he nodded. “Yes, ma'am.”

At the door he stopped, as she'd been told he always did. A last thing at the door, without turning round.

“Thank you.”

He went before she could answer. Pike sat looking at the closed door for some time. She had given orders to a great many pilots. She had never once had one thank her for being made to stop.

Halloran flew out to fetch them herself. Nobody had asked her to. She simply turned up on the Army net at 0600 and announced she was taking a transport out to Endurance to collect the Navy's guests, and dared anyone to stop her. Nobody did.

She put down on the carrier's deck at 0758 and sat with the rotors turning, watching them come across. The tall one with the unhurried walk would be Baxter, the dry voice from the radio. A quiet lieutenant with a record under his arm, held flat, the way you'd carry something you'd been told was valuable. A young woman beside him, talking with her hands about the record. A man in a wheelchair with one leg out straight in front of him, being pushed by a very large plane captain and complaining at length about the wind. A big shaggy dog the colour of wet sand.

And one at the back, a little apart, in a plain flight jacket, with a grey notebook in his hand. The dog had dropped back to walk beside him, pressed against his leg.

She'd have known him anywhere. She'd watched him for twenty minutes through her canopy, at fifty feet, in the last of the light.

He was smaller than she'd expected. Younger. She had half thought, God help her, that he'd look like the poster. He looked like a junior engineer who hadn't slept in a month.

In the cabin door, Sergeant Pruitt went red to the ears.

“Not one word,” Halloran said on the intercom.

“Chief, I wasn't going to—”

“Not one.”

She flew them back up the northern valley. She hadn't planned the route; it was simply the route. But halfway along she glanced back into the cabin and saw him at the window, looking down at the slopes as they went past. The black scar on the scree where the first launcher had been. The notch in the right-hand ridge. And at the last ridge, where she could see down into the southern valley, a field on its floor, burned twice over now, with the twisted wreck of a MiG-31 lying in it.

He looked at each of them in turn, quite still, as if he were checking them off. She didn't know what he was thinking. She didn't ask.

The mess at Drinwich had been the Sotoan officers' club five days ago, and still smelled faintly of somebody else's cigarettes, but it had a long bar and a floor that stayed where you put it, and by seven in the evening there were more soldiers packed into it than Halloran had seen in one room since the war began.

Word had got round. Word always did.

When he came through the door, the whole room stood up. Two hundred soldiers, more or less, rising with a scrape of chairs and then a silence so complete she could hear the generator outside.

She watched his face. She'd remember it.

It wasn't pride, or embarrassment, or the polite, pleased discomfort she'd seen on decorated pilots at a hundred mess dinners. It was much closer to panic. He stopped dead in the doorway with two hundred faces turned toward him, and for a second she thought he was going to turn round and walk out into the dark.

Then Cope, in his wheelchair at his elbow, said very loudly, “Oh, for God's sake. Sit down. He's off duty.”

Halloran was on a chair before she'd thought about it. “You heard the man. Sit down, you lot. He's not here to be looked at. He's here to get drunk and be left alone. First round's on me.”

They sat down, with a roar, and the room became a bar again. It took a few minutes, but it went. She saw him let out a breath he had probably been holding since the helicopter.

She got him a beer. He held it for an hour and drank perhaps a third of it. She sat beside him at the end of the bar, with Cope on his other side already dealing cards to three infantry sergeants and losing to all of them with enormous good humour.

“I owe you a new opinion,” Halloran said. “I put it in the signal. I wanted to say it to your face.”

He looked at her.

“Nineteen years. Never trusted a fast mover. You fly up there with the map and we fly down here with the people, and we're never in the same war.” She drank. “You flew ours. At fifty feet. I've never seen that.”

He was quiet for a moment, turning the bottle in his hands.

“You held the line,” he said. “Eight aircraft. You never let it break. Not at the launcher, not at the guns. Your number five wanted to go left at the bend in the river, and you called him back in.” He set the bottle down. “I just went where you were going.”

Halloran stared at him.

She had forgotten number five. She had forgotten the bend in the river, and calling him back. It had been one second in a long afternoon, and she'd forgotten it before she landed.

He hadn't.

“Nobody's ever said that,” she said.

“Somebody should,” he said, and drank some of the beer.

A little later a young Army pilot, a lieutenant who couldn't have been more than twenty-two, worked his way down the bar and stood beside them gathering his nerve. He had the look of somebody who had been dared.

“Sir,” he said. “I just wanted to say. I watched you, on the north route. I was in number six.” He swallowed. “It must be the best feeling in the world. Flying like that. For somebody like you, I mean. It must be—” He ran out of words and made a shape with his hands instead, wide and soaring, that somehow conveyed everything he meant.

There was a pause before the answer. Halloran saw it. It was very short. The boy didn't notice it at all.

“It's a beautiful thing,” the Wings of Theve said.

The boy went away glowing. Halloran watched the man beside her look down at the bottle in his hands, and she didn't know what she had just seen, only that she had seen something, and that she didn't like it.

Pruitt came over at about ten, red to the ears again, with his cap in his hands and a pen, stammering something about a signature. Halloran opened her mouth to send him away.

He took the cap and wrote something on the inside of the brim, short, and handed it back. Pruitt read it and went redder still and fled. Halloran got it off him later by threatening his leave. It said: For the crew chief who loaded every flare. Thank you.

At midnight she went out for air and found him on the edge of the apron, alone, looking along the line of her helicopters under the floodlights. His lips were moving. She watched him for a while before she understood what he was doing. He was counting. From the first aircraft to the last, and back again, and then again. The big sand-coloured dog was sitting against his leg, very upright, facing the same way, as if he were counting too. Or as if he had decided that nobody should have to do it alone.

She left him to it.

At breakfast she told Baxter. He looked into his coffee for a long moment.

“He does that,” he said. “Every night.”

He spent the whole of the first day trying to find somewhere quiet, and failing.

Tasha watched it happen. Every time he settled anywhere, somebody recognised him. A cook. A pair of mechanics. A whole platoon of infantry eating lunch on the steps of the barracks, who stood up as one man when he came round the corner. He was polite to all of them. He shook every hand that was offered. Then he moved on, and found another corner, and someone found him there.

“He's hiding,” said Coster, at about three in the afternoon, watching him disappear round the back of the control tower.

“From whom?” said Tasha.

“From the Wings of Theve,” said Baxter, and nobody laughed.

On the second afternoon they found him.

They had been sitting outside the mess with Cope, who had graduated that morning from the chair to a pair of crutches and was making everyone suffer for it. He refused to sit down. He refused to let Dutch carry anything. He had been explaining for twenty minutes, to anyone who would listen, that a man who had been shot down by a Sotoan ace and pulled out of the sea by a stranger was not going to be bullied by two pieces of aluminium, when Jenkins came across the apron from the long storage building at a pace that wasn't quite a run.

Jenkins had spent both days in that building in a state Tasha could only describe as rapture, going from one sealed aircraft to the next with a clipboard and a torch and the expression of a child at a fair. He stopped in front of them now and said, low, “Your lead's in six. Asleep. Go quietly.”

Cope was on his crutches before anyone could tell him not to be.

“It's three hundred yards, sir,” said Dutch.

“Then I'll be slow,” said Cope. “He's waited for me often enough.”

It took them ten minutes. Cope did the whole of it on the crutches, sweating and swearing under his breath, with Dutch a pace behind him with his hands half out, ready, not touching, and the rest of them pretending not to match his speed.

Hangar six was the end of the storage building, where the light came in through a high row of dirty windows and lay across the concrete in long gold bars. The Super Hornets stood in rows under their dust covers, wings folded, and at the far end, by itself, was an aircraft that looked like the others and wasn't. Strange pods hung under its wings. Somebody had written on the fuselage below the cockpit, in chalk, in Jenkins's square capitals: JOKER 3.

Ray was asleep against the wall beside it, with Tasha's dog asleep across his boots like a draught excluder.

He was sitting on the floor in a bar of sunlight with his back to the corrugated wall and his head tipped against it, and his hand lay open on his knee over a grey notebook. A pencil had rolled a little way across the concrete.

None of them had ever seen him asleep.

Tasha stopped walking. Without the stillness, without the attention that never let go of anything, his face was impossibly young. She had thought of him as older than her. Older than all of them, somehow. Asleep, he looked about her own age.

“How old is he?” she whispered.

Baxter didn't answer at once.

“I don't know,” he said. “I've never asked. I don't think anyone has.”

Cope had stopped beside her, leaning on the crutches, breathing hard. He was looking at the sleeping man with an expression Tasha couldn't read at all.

Tasha looked past him, at the chalk on the fuselage. JOKER 3.

“What's that?” she said. “Bax. What's that aircraft?”

Jenkins had come in behind them, quietly, as he'd asked them to.

“That's a Growler,” he said, very low. “Electronic attack. It jams radars. Blinds missiles. Puts a hole in the other side's picture so everyone else can get through it.” He looked at the chalk, and then at the man asleep beside it. “He came in here yesterday when he was supposed to be resting, which I'll be telling Pike about, and asked me for it. For you.”

Tasha didn't say anything. She couldn't, quite.

“I asked him why,” Jenkins said. “I thought he'd give me one word, like with the drones.” He rubbed his jaw. “He said, It doesn't have to kill anyone. That was it. Most I've ever heard him say at once.”

She had told them all, a long time ago, why she wouldn't shoot. She had told Cope first, and then Cruz, and then everybody, and most of them had been kind about it and some of them, like Everson, had been tired about it. She had never told Ray. He had never asked. She had not thought he'd ever needed to know.

She stood in the gold light looking at an aircraft that could fight a whole war without killing anyone in it, with her call sign chalked under the canopy, and found that her eyes had gone hot, and that Coster had moved, very slightly, so that his shoulder was against hers. Beside her, Cope reached out with one hand, still gripping the crutch, and touched her arm once and let go.

Coster bent and picked up the pencil, because it was the sort of thing he did, and turned to put it back beside the notebook. Then he stopped.

The notebook had fallen open. It wasn't names.

It was drawings, in pencil, small and quick and very good. Coster listening to his record with his eyes shut. Tasha laughing at something, her head thrown back. Tasha asleep at a briefing table with her cheek on her arm, which she had no memory of doing and was suddenly certain she had done. The three of them at a mess table, Coster talking, Tasha pointing her fork at him, Baxter looking at them both over his coffee. Page after page of ordinary minutes, drawn as though every one of them had to be got down before it could disappear.

There were none of him.

There were a great many of Baxter. Baxter at the briefing table with his glasses pushed up on his forehead. Baxter reading in the wardroom. Baxter in his cockpit, seen from a little way off, turning his head to check on someone. More of Baxter than of anyone. Baxter, looking over Coster's shoulder, didn't know what to make of that, and found he didn't want to try.

Coster turned a page without meaning to, and then another. Dutch, with his hand flat on the side of the old Hornet; Dutch, behind them, made a small sound and was quiet. Jenkins under a wing. Cope asleep in the infirmary bed with his cards spread across the tray. Cope looked at that one for a long time.

The dog, over and over. More often than anyone but Baxter. Curled in a coil of cable; sprawled across a passageway; sitting very upright at the end of the deck at night, looking out to sea. Drawn with a tenderness that was almost hard to look at, as if the dog were the one thing in the book he let himself keep.

Then Queen. Cruz, turning his cup on a table. Everson holding up a glove by its cuff, as if he hoped someone would explain it. Nguyen bent over a chart. Each of them drawn with the same care as Joker, as though they mattered exactly as much. Coster hadn't known Ray had ever looked at Queen long enough to draw them.

Then the four of Purple Magic, laughing on the flight deck at White Valley with their bags at their feet. Ray had met them for perhaps an hour.

And then people none of them knew at all.

An old woman at a kitchen table with her sleeves rolled up. Two children asleep under one blanket. A man with a beard holding a lamp in a doorway. A farmhouse with a low roof, drawn from outside, with smoke going up from the chimney and a dog lying in front of the door. The faces were drawn as carefully as Tasha's, as Baxter's, as Cope's. Whoever they were, he had looked at them long enough to know them.

“Who are they?” Coster whispered.

Nobody answered. Baxter thought of the blacked-out lines on the back of a service record, and of a flight lost somewhere nobody was allowed to name. He thought: these are them. These are the ones he lost. He thought it so firmly that he never once considered it might be anything else.

It took Coster a little while to notice the stubs, because they had been torn so carefully.

There was one near the front, between a drawing of Coster and a drawing of the four of them forming up over the sea, taken out along the stitching so cleanly that you would only know it was gone if you looked. Then he looked, and found another. And another. Once he had seen them he couldn't stop seeing them: narrow ragged edges all through the book, between Tasha laughing and Baxter at the briefing table, between Dutch and Jenkins, three together after the drawing of Cruz and Everson and Nguyen. They were thickest around Queen. Every page with a Queen pilot on it had a stub beside it, or two.

Coster counted them, without meaning to, the way you count stairs in the dark. He stopped at twenty. There were more.

More pages had been torn out of the notebook than had been left in it.

“What did he tear out?” he said. He didn't understand. He turned the stubs over with one finger as though they might tell him. “Why would he draw all those and then—”

Baxter understood immediately and completely, and said nothing at all.

He knew what was missing. Not the faces; he'd never see those. But he knew whose they were, and he knew why they were gone, the way he'd have known a missing term in an equation from the shape of the space around it. Somebody had sat in this hangar, or in his bunk at night, or wherever he did this, and drawn one face over and over, and torn each one out, carefully, along the stitching, because he could not let himself keep them. And then drawn it again.

He felt Cope, beside him, looking at the stubs too, and then at him. He didn't turn his head. He knew Cope had understood it as well.

Then Coster turned one more page, and Baxter took his glasses off.

It was himself, asleep in the chair beside Cope's bed in the infirmary. It must have been one of the nights in the first week, when he had sat there long after visiting hours because he couldn't think what else to do. He hadn't known anyone else was in the room. He had been very sure, at the time, that he was alone.

He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes and kept them there.

“He loves us,” Tasha said. It came out barely above a breath. She was looking at the drawing of herself laughing. “He's been drawing us so he'd still have us. Even if he—” She stopped.

Even if he lost us, she thought. Like the people in the farmhouse. Whoever they were.

Coster began to close the notebook.

“Wait,” said Cope.

He said it quietly, but there was something in his voice that made Coster stop with the cover half shut. Cope had shifted his weight onto one crutch and was holding out his other hand.

“The back,” he said. “There's more at the back. I saw it when you turned.”

Coster opened the notebook from the other end.

There were only two more drawings, on facing pages. They were drawn with the same care as all the others. That was the first thing that was wrong.

On the left-hand page was a man in a flight suit with the zip pulled halfway down, sitting sideways in a chair with one arm over the back of it and a cup in his hand. He was laughing at something off the page, his head turned, his eyes half shut with it. A lean, handsome, careless face, a little older than Cope's. It was drawn the way Ray had drawn Coster with his record, and Tasha laughing: as something precious, got down before it could disappear.

On the right-hand page was a woman at a window, with her hands round a cup, looking out at something a long way off. She was sitting in a wheelchair, though not any kind Tasha had seen before: a sleek, powered thing with a high back and two slender jointed arms folded at its sides, like a sleeping animal's. She looked very tired. Behind her, in the doorway, small and half finished, was the girl with the tea tray.

Tasha didn't know either of them. Nor did Coster. Baxter stood with his glasses in his hand and looked at the laughing man, and felt something prick at the back of his memory and couldn't find it.

Cope knew them both.

Tasha watched it happen in his face. She had seen Cope frightened once, a long time ago, in the first week of the war, when a missile had come close enough to take paint off his canopy. This wasn't like that. This was something slower and colder, as if the floor of the hangar were tilting very gently and he was the only one who could feel it.

“That's Toprak,” he said.

Nobody answered. He took a breath.

“Girish Toprak. Shadow 22.” He lifted one hand off the crutch and gestured, a little helplessly, at his own leg. “Lux Lunae. The Sotoans put his face on their broadcasts every week. Their Wings of Theve. D.D. used to get very jealous about it.” He looked at the drawing. “He's chased me across half the coast. He's the one who shot me down. He's the one who put us both in the sea.”

He looked at the right-hand page.

“And that's Carmille Tewy. Selene. She commands Lux Lunae. She's on their news every night.” His voice had gone very flat and very careful. “She's the one who sends him.”

“She was a pilot,” Tasha said.

They all looked at her. She hadn't moved. She was staring at the woman in the chair, and her face had gone a colour Baxter had never seen on it, a kind of grey under the sunburn.

“Before,” Tasha said. “Before she commanded anybody. She flew. She was one of the best they had.” Her voice was very steady and very far away. “Then she was shot down, over the border, years ago. She lived. She never walked again.”

“How do you know that?” Coster said gently.

Tasha didn't take her eyes off the drawing.

“Because my mother shot her down,” she said.

Nobody said anything.

“She never talked about it. She never talked about any of it. I found out from a book, when I was twelve.” Tasha swallowed. “She had a photograph of her. Of Tewy. In a drawer. Not a newspaper picture. A real one, from before, that somebody must have given her. I don't know why she kept it. I asked her once and she just—” She stopped. “She kept it.”

Coster's shoulder was against hers again. Tasha didn't seem to notice.

The hangar was very quiet. Somewhere at the far end a dust cover moved in a draught.

The man who had pulled Cope out of the sinking Hornet had drawn the man who put him there. Not as an enemy. Not from a broadcast, not from a photograph. He had drawn him laughing in a chair with his zip undone and a cup in his hand, the way you'd draw a friend you'd sat with a hundred times, from a few feet away. And the woman who sent him, tired at a window, in the chair Tasha's mother had put her in, with her tea girl in the door behind her.

He had drawn them the way he drew Joker. As people he could not bear to lose.

“How?” Coster whispered. “How would he— Cope, how would he even know—”

“I don't know,” said Cope.

Baxter thought of the blacked-out lines on the back of the service record, and the attachments Pike wasn't cleared to read. Of Can't, said to Santos. Of a handshake on the flight deck, and a hand going to a chest. Of a man looking at all of them, in the infirmary, that first day, as though they were a list whose remaining entries he already knew. He thought of every explanation he had built for any of it over the last five weeks, and felt each one of them give way beneath his weight, one after another, like rotten boards.

He looked at the sleeping man against the wall in the gold light. Who was very young, and had drawn them all, and had asked for an aircraft that didn't have to kill anyone, and had pulled Cope out of the sea.

“Close it,” said Cope.

Coster closed it. He put it back under the open hand, exactly as it had been, with the pencil beside it, so carefully that the hand didn't stir.

The dog opened one eye, looked at Coster, and closed it again. It shifted its weight a little further across Ray's boots, as if to make sure of him.

“Nobody says a word about this,” Cope said. “Not to Pike. Not to D.D. Not to Santos. Not to him. Not a word. Do you understand me?”

“Cope—” said Baxter.

“He pulled me out of the sea, Ellington.” Cope didn't take his eyes off the sleeping man. “I don't know who he is. I don't think I want to know who he is. I know what he did. That'll do me for now.” He shifted on the crutches. “Let him sleep.”

They went and sat in the hangar doorway. Nobody said they were going to; they just did. They sat on the step in the sun with their backs to the building, Cope on an ammunition crate that Dutch found for him, with the crutches across his knees. For three hours, whenever anyone came across the apron toward hangar six, a mechanic, a sergeant, a pair of curious infantry, one of them got up and said quietly, “Sorry. This hangar's closed.”

Nobody talked much. Tasha didn't know, for a long time, what they were doing there: whether they were guarding him, or watching him. She decided in the end that it was the first. She decided it on purpose, and held on to it.

He loves us, she thought. Whoever he is. Then we'd better make sure he never has to use the drawings.

At some point in the long afternoon she found that she was sitting with her shoulder against Coster's, and that she had been for some time, and that she didn't want to move. Coster didn't seem to notice. Baxter noticed. He said nothing. It was that kind of afternoon, and he had other things to think about, and some things you let people find out for themselves.

Queen flew the alert for forty-eight hours, and nothing happened.

Nothing at all. Not a contact, not a scramble, not so much as a fishing boat in the wrong place. Kate flew four patrols in two days and spent all of them wound as tight as a spring. On the third, Chester asked her on Queen's channel whether something was wrong, and she told him she was simply being thorough, because Joker was the most valuable asset in the fleet and if anything came at Drinwich while it was stood down she would never hear the end of it from Pike. She'd have felt exactly the same about anybody's flight. It was professional.

“Mm,” said Chester.

“What does mm mean?”

“It means mm, Lead.”

On the fourth patrol Loc flew her wing in silence for an hour, and once, when she turned her head to look west toward Drinwich for no reason she could have given, she caught him looking at his wristwatch, and then writing something on his kneeboard. She asked what he was writing. He said fuel figures. She had no reason to doubt him and didn't.

On the second evening Pike cleared Queen to recover at Drinwich and refuel, to prove the runway worked. Kate brought them in under the floodlights and taxied past four dark marks on the concrete where the drones had fallen: two on the centreline, one on the apron short of the magazines, and one at the very edge of the runway. She looked at that last one as she went past. It was a long way from the bunker. It was a very long way from the wall.

She told herself she was going to find Joker's lead because she was Queen's lead, and it was her job to know how he was. She had almost believed it by the time she found him.

He was at the end of the helicopter line, under the floodlights, alone. He turned when he heard her, which he didn't usually do, and for a moment she thought he was going to look at her. He didn't. He looked past her, at the four Queen jets standing on the apron where she'd left them.

She watched him count them. One, two, three, four. Back again. Four, three, two, one. She didn't think he knew he was doing it.

“What are you counting?” she said.

He seemed to come back from a long way off. “Making sure.”

“That they're all there?”

“Yes.”

She didn't ask what happened when they weren't. She saw his hand close on nothing, at his side, and open again.

She didn't know why she said the next thing. It wasn't something she had planned. It came out matter-of-factly, lead to lead, the way she'd have given a position report.

“Queen's four,” she said. “All four. Nothing happened. Two days of absolutely nothing.”

It was, she realised as she said it, the first time she had given him anything.

He looked at her then. Only for a moment, and then away, at the jets again. But for that moment she saw his face properly, in the hard white light, and she would remember afterward that he had looked at her the way a man looks at a letter he has waited a very long time to receive, and is afraid to open. She would spend a good deal of that night deciding it had been the floodlights.

“All four,” he said, so quietly she almost didn't hear it. He wasn't saying it to her. He was saying it the way you'd say a thing to make it true, or to check that it still was.

Then: “Thank you, Queen One.”

She had been about to tell him that Kate was fine. Off duty. She heard the words arrive in her mouth and didn't know where they had come from, and didn't say them.

She walked back toward the mess with her hands in her jacket pockets, appalled. Kate's fine? She had never in nine years invited a pilot from another flight to use her first name. Not once. Victor had taken six months. She had nearly said it to a man who talked to her shoulder and thought Queen needed watching like a class on a school trip.

It was the floodlights, she decided. And the fuel fumes on the apron. And two days of patrols. Possibly she had a mild concussion she hadn't noticed. She would ask Santos. She was annoyed with herself, and couldn't work out what for, and decided it was tiredness, and believed it most of the way to the door.

Baxter was outside the mess, finishing a cigarette he would have denied smoking.

“He's asleep,” he said, before she could ask. “Properly. I looked.”

“I didn't ask.”

“No,” said Baxter. “You didn't.”

At 0800 the forty-eight hours ended.

They flew back to Endurance in the new aircraft, because Jenkins had spent two days making sure they could and would not hear otherwise. Joker in Super Hornets, Queen in Super Hornets, Tasha in the Growler with JOKER 3 painted over the chalk, flying it alone as if she'd been flying it for years. Jenkins had grumbled that it was built for two. Tasha had pointed out that she'd spent half her life flying a display jet with a smoke switch and a camera and a commentary feed, and that a jammer couldn't be harder than a commentary feed. Jenkins had looked at her for a long moment and said that was very probably true.

Dutch flew back in the helicopter with Cope and the dog, who sulked the whole way, Dutch reported, with his nose pressed to the window on the side the aircraft were, and the old Hornet stayed in hangar six under a cover, with a tag on the nose in Dutch's careful hand. Reserved. Cdr. Cope.

They came over the carrier in formation, eight aircraft, Queen on Joker's wing. Baxter, in Joker Two, looked across at the new aircraft holding station all around him. He looked at Joker One out in front, steady as if painted there. He thought about a grey notebook full of strangers, and all the pages torn carefully out along its stitching, and the one face that wasn't in it anywhere.

Pike was waiting in the ready room when they came down, with a folder under her arm.

“Welcome back,” she said. “I hope you rested. Operation Squeeze.”