Chapter 13A Lifeline in the Desert

Baxter, Dealer, Farzan, Coster, Kate

Pike put the photograph up first, so they would know what it was for.

It had been taken from very high up and very far away, and it was grainy, but nobody in the ready room needed it explained. A long dark shape on a flat plain, with the great guns along its back and the tracks like the tracks of something that had been walking since the beginning of the world. Baxter had last seen it across the marsh behind Theve, with its barrels turning toward eight small boats.

“Land Battleship Number One,” Pike said. “Xanthos. Our friend from Theve.”

Nobody said anything. On Baxter's left, Ray had gone still in the particular way he went still in briefings, which was hardly distinguishable from the way he sat in them anyway, unless you had been sitting beside him for six weeks.

“It has a reactor,” Pike went on. “It will never run out of fuel. But everything else it uses has to come from somewhere. Shells for the main guns. Missiles. Spare parts for those tracks. And for the last two months, almost all of that has come from here.”

The next photograph. A valley in the desert, long and pale, with a dry riverbed down the middle of it and the marks of people all along its floor. Rail sidings. Tanks. A field of mirrors in the northwest, glittering. A refinery to the south, smoking. Bunkers, a row of them, cut into the valley side. An airstrip in the west.

“Faith Park,” said Pike. “Squeeze is the operation to cut it.”

She took them through it. Four clusters: the solar plant, the airbase, the refinery, the ammunition bunkers in the centre. Fifteen minutes over the target before the Sotoans could get enough aircraft in to make the valley unhealthy.

Command had set a threshold, a level of damage at which the network would be assessed beyond repair, and if they reached it the operation was a success. There were two return lines for rearming: one along the north, and a second to the west that would open once the airbase was cleared.

“The bunkers must be attacked from the front,” she said. “Low. They're built into the rock, and anything coming down from above will skip off. The refinery has two Land Aegis on rails, moving between the tanks. Queen, the solar plant. Joker, the airbase and the bunkers. Harriers on the sidings.”

She turned to intelligence for the threat picture. SAMs on the ridges, the usual. Fighters off the airstrip. An electronic-warfare aircraft that had been seen in the area, call sign unknown. And one more thing.

“There's been radio traffic out of the airstrip for two weeks under the call sign Fuscus,” the intelligence officer said. “Fuscus One and Fuscus Two. We think it's a heavy flight. Possibly bombers; possibly something else. We don't know what they're doing there. Command's rules of engagement are clear that strategic assets at Faith Park are not a priority. If they come up, don't divert from the primary objective to chase them.”

He wrote it on the board. FUSCUS 1. FUSCUS 2. One under the other.

When he asked for questions, Ray got up.

Baxter watched him go to the board. Everyone watched him; he so rarely moved in a briefing that the movement itself was an event. He picked up the grease pencil. Baxter expected him to change something on the route, the way he had in his first briefing.

He drew a circle around FUSCUS 2.

Not around Fuscus One, the lead, the one anybody would have thought mattered. Around the wingman. One clean circle. Then he put the pencil down and went back to his seat.

The ready room was very quiet.

“Joker One,” said the intelligence officer slowly. “Do you have additional information about Fuscus?”

Ray looked at him.

The intelligence officer waited. Nothing else came. He had briefed Joker for six weeks, and he had learned what everyone else had learned: you didn't get explanations out of this man. You got results.

“Noted,” he said, and moved on.

Baxter looked along the table. At the Queen end, Kate had turned in her chair and was looking at the circle on the board, frowning slightly, the way she frowned at a navigation problem she hadn't solved yet. She looked at it for a long time. Then she looked at Ray. Then back at the board. Baxter saw her write something on the corner of her map.

Pike put up the ingress. It came in from the north at altitude, the whole strike together, with Tasha's Growler out in front jamming the ridge radars as they came. It was a sensible plan. Baxter had flown a dozen like it.

“No,” said Ray.

The room turned. Pike looked at him over the top of the map.

“Joker One?”

“Low.” He was looking at the map, not at her. He got up, which was the second time in one briefing, and went to it, and put his finger on the dry riverbed that ran into Faith Park from the north, and drew it down the channel all the way to the last ridge before the valley. “Down here. Under the ridges. A hundred feet. Pop up over the last one.”

“That riverbed is forty miles long,” said Pike. “And narrow.”

“Yes.”

“The Growler can blind their radars from altitude.”

“After they've seen us coming.” He took his finger off the map. Baxter had never heard him string so many words together in a briefing.

He seemed to be forcing each one out, as if each word cost him something.

“Hornets aren't stealthy. Not the old ones, not the new ones. If we come in high, the valley knows we're coming for ten minutes before we get there. Ten minutes is enough to get things off the ground. Things we want on the ground.” He looked at the board, at the two lines in grease pencil, one of them circled. “If we come in low, they don't know until we're over the last ridge.”

“Through a canyon,” Cruz said, “at a hundred feet, in aircraft we've had for two days.”

“Yes.”

There was a silence. Kate was looking at Ray with her head slightly on one side.

Baxter knew that look. He had seen it across a great many lecture theatres over twenty years, on a great many young women, usually aimed at whichever young man in the second row had just said something unexpected. He had never once known any of them to be aware they were doing it.

“Have you flown it?” she asked.

He paused. Baxter would think about that pause for a long time afterward. It went on a fraction too long for the question, the way it had at the tanker.

“Something like it,” Ray said.

Pike looked at the map for a long time. Then she looked round the room.

Baxter looked at the riverbed. Forty miles of narrow channel, white with salt, with ridges on either side and no room anywhere for a mistake. He thought about doing it at four hundred knots in an aircraft he had flown for two days. He thought about it honestly, which was the least he owed anybody in that room, and found that he couldn't. He could see that Ray was right. He could not see himself at the bottom of that canyon.

Nobody else could either. He watched it go round the room: Cruz shaking his head, very slightly; Everson with his arms folded; Nguyen looking at the contour lines on the map and going pale; the Harrier leads exchanging glances that said not a chance. Even Kate, who would have flown into the sea if she'd thought it was necessary, was frowning at the map as if it had insulted her.

“I'm not sending eight aircraft down a canyon,” Pike said at last. “I'm sorry, Joker One. I take the point. But I'm not doing it.”

“One,” said Ray.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Not eight. One.” He was still standing at the map. “Me. Fifteen minutes ahead of the strike. The rest come in high, as planned. They'll see you ten minutes out. By then I'll be there.”

The room had gone very quiet.

“Alone,” said Pike.

“Yes.”

“For what? What's so important at Faith Park that it can't wait ten minutes for the rest of us?”

He didn't answer. His eyes went to the board, to the circle. Pike followed them there, and Baxter watched her look at it and decide, visibly, not to ask a question she suspected she wouldn't get an answer to.

“I'll go with him,” Baxter heard himself say.

He hadn't meant to. He had looked at that canyon thirty seconds ago and known he couldn't. But he said it, and found that he meant it, and that he would go.

“No,” said Ray.

It came very fast and very flat, and Baxter had never heard that tone from him before. Ray had turned from the map and was looking at him, and for a moment there was something in his face so fierce that Baxter felt it like heat.

“No,” Ray said again, more quietly. “You come in high. With Three and Four.”

Baxter closed his mouth. Pike looked from one of them to the other.

“Fifteen minutes,” she said finally. “You go down the riverbed alone, and the strike follows high. Tasha jams on the way in, as planned.” She looked at Ray for a long moment. “If you hit a canyon wall, Joker One, I'm going to be extremely angry with you.”

“Yes, ma'am,” said Ray, and went back to his seat.

Then she put up a third picture, which was a map, and on the map a line had been drawn in red pencil from where Xanthos was now to somewhere a long way north.

“This is where it was heading when Faith Park started feeding it,” she said. “I'm not cleared to tell you why. I'm cleared to tell you that it's White Valley.”

Baxter didn't look round. He didn't need to. He felt Coster go still at the far end of the row, the way you can feel a change in an engine through the seat before you hear it.

“There's something there the Sotoans want very badly,” Pike said. “I don't know what it is. I know that if Xanthos reaches it with full magazines, they'll have it. Cut the valley, and sooner or later it runs out of things to shoot.”

Pike had one more thing, which was the question nobody else had asked.

From Joker's row, Ray said, “The return line. How long to rearm?”

Pike checked her notes. “Four minutes, if the crews are good.”

He nodded once, as though he were doing a sum.

Kate glanced at him again. Baxter saw her do it, and saw her not know she'd done it. Two seats along from her, Nguyen looked at his watch.

Jenkins had doubled the water in every seat kit for the desert. He said so in the passageway, to anyone who would listen, and everybody agreed it was very sensible, because it was a desert. Dutch, standing by the ladder with his clipboard, listened to them all agree, and said nothing, and Baxter saw him look at Ray's aircraft and then at the floor.

It wasn't new. Nobody else noticed it wasn't new.

Coster had a letter in his breast pocket. Baxter knew because Coster had been touching it all through the briefing, the way people touch a sore tooth with their tongue. It was from Bird. It had arrived on the mail helicopter the day before, and Coster had read it at breakfast with his face going slowly still, and folded it up very small.

Tasha knew which pocket it was in. Baxter saw her look at it when Pike said White Valley.

The new aircraft were a revelation, and Baxter disliked how much he was enjoying it.

He had flown the old Hornet for four years and had thought of it as a reliable, stubborn friend. The Super Hornet was a different animal: bigger, stronger, longer-legged, with more of everything and a way of answering that made him feel as though he'd spent four years shouting at the old one.

Ray launched at 1120, alone, and Baxter stood on the deck and watched him go until the grey Super Hornet was a dot over the sea, and then nothing.

The rest of them launched at 1135. They came over the desert from the north at twenty-five thousand feet with the sun straight overhead, so that the aircraft threw no shadows and the ground had none either. Below them the land was pale and wrinkled and enormous. Baxter could see the dry riverbed from up here, a thin white thread winding south between the ridges toward Faith Park, with the smaller dry channels running into it from both sides like the veins in a leaf. It looked about as wide as a hair.

Somewhere down in that hair was Ray.

Dealer had lost him at 1131, ten minutes after he crossed the coast and went down into the riverbed. “Joker One, Dealer. I've lost you in the ground clutter.” Two clicks, faint, the last thing anybody heard from him. Since then nothing at all. Baxter had looked at the empty patch of display where Joker One ought to be perhaps two hundred times.

“Oh,” Tasha said on Joker's channel. “Oh, look at it.”

She was off Coster's wing in the Growler, which she had been flying for two days and already flew as though she'd been born in it. Baxter had watched her take off from the carrier that morning and had felt, absurdly, a kind of pride, as though he'd had anything to do with it.

“It's like the sea stopped moving,” she said. “All of it, all at once. Isn't it the most beautiful thing you've ever seen?”

“It's sand, Tasha,” said Coster.

“It's beautiful sand.” A pause. “Do you think he's all right? Down there?”

Nobody answered her. Baxter looked down at the thin white thread of the riverbed and thought about a hundred feet, and walls of rock, and forty miles.

At 1150, Dealer said, “All Joker, Dealer. They've seen us. Search radars active, Faith Park. Ten minutes.”

Then, a moment later, in a different voice: “Stand by. Contact. Single contact over Faith Park, north end, very low. Where did he— Joker One. That's Joker One.”

Dealer got Joker One back on his plot the moment he came up over the last ridge, and for a few seconds he simply sat and looked at it.

Nineteen minutes of nothing. Forty miles of riverbed, and not one blip. Then a single aircraft standing up out of the ground over the north end of Faith Park, as if it had climbed out of the earth, with every radar in the valley still pointed the other way at the strike coming in high. He had never seen anything like it. He suspected the people in Faith Park hadn't either.

Then a contact came up at the western end of the runway that made him sit forward.

It was big and accelerating hard. He knew the signature before the computer did. A Ladon: the big swept-wing strategic bomber, the fast one. He had only ever seen one on a plot twice before.

Intelligence would tell him afterward that it had been due to leave Faith Park at noon, that its crew had been taxiing out for an ordinary departure when the search radars picked up the Federation strike coming in high from the north, ten minutes out. They had done exactly what any crew would do. They had firewalled the throttles and gone for the runway, to be airborne and away over the mountains long before any of those aircraft arrived. They would have made it with minutes to spare. They hadn't known there was anything already in the valley.

Its call sign came up from the intercept people a second later. Fuscus 2.

Dealer looked at it. He thought of the board in the ready room that morning and a circle drawn round one line. He hadn't been in the room. He had heard about it on the net, the way everybody heard everything on this ship, and he had thought, odd, and nothing more.

He looked at his orders on the second screen. Strategic bomber assets observed at Faith Park are not a priority. Do not divert from the primary objective to pursue. You couldn't catch a Ladon once it was in the air. Everybody knew that. Chasing one was a waste of fuel and missiles, and the strike hadn't even arrived.

He keyed his microphone. It was the correct call. It was the call in the orders.

“All Joker, Dealer. Fast mover rolling, west runway. That's a Ladon, Fuscus Two. It's not a threat to the operation. Let it go. Do not pursue. Repeat—”

He never finished it.

He saw it on the plot. Then, because Queen Two's strike camera was up on his third screen, he saw it in the picture too, and he would watch that footage many times afterward and still not quite believe it.

The Ladon was halfway down the runway with its nose coming up, four engines at full power, a long shimmer of heat behind it, accelerating faster than anything that size had any right to.

The grey jet came in behind it from the west, very low, along the length of the runway. It wasn't chasing. You couldn't chase a Ladon. It was simply there, at the one moment when the bomber was committed to its takeoff and not yet flying. Too slow to escape. Too fast to stop. It had turned for the runway before the Ladon had started its roll. It had turned, Dealer worked out later from the plot, at the top of the pop-up, in the same second it cleared the ridge. Fifteen minutes ahead of everyone. Exactly fifteen.

One burst, into the engines, at the instant the main wheels left the concrete.

The bomber's nose dropped. It came back down onto the last hundred metres of runway and went off the end into the desert, and the desert went up in a rolling ball of fire a kilometre long.

Nobody got out of it. Dealer never learned who had been flying it. Nobody aboard Endurance ever did.

It was 1151. The strike was still nine minutes out. Not one bomb had fallen on Faith Park, and the only aircraft over it was Joker One.

The grey jet pulled up through the smoke and turned, without a pause, for the SAM sites on the northern approach, the ones the strike would have to come in over, as though the thing it had actually come for was done and the rest was only work. By the time Baxter and the others came over the ridge at noon, three of those sites were already burning, and the lane in was clear.

On the AWACS channel nobody said anything for a long time.

Dealer had been doing this for sixteen years. He'd have said luck if he'd seen anybody else do it. He had been watching this one for six weeks. He had stopped being able to say luck about anything he did.

At noon the strike came over the northern ridge into a valley already burning at one end, and the SAM sites on the eastern ridge, which Ray hadn't had time for, woke up and reached for them, and there was no time for anything.

“Three,” Baxter said. “Your turn.”

“Going,” said Tasha, and the Growler went forward and up, and the valley went blind.

He had never seen anything like it. One after another the radars on the ridges simply lost them. The warning tones in his headset rose, faltered and fell silent. A launcher on the eastern ridge fired at nothing, a missile going straight up into the white sky and wandering off like a lost dog. Tasha was talking quietly to herself on the channel, frequencies and bearings, the way she must once have talked herself through a display routine. Baxter heard her say got you to a radar he couldn't see, very softly, like someone catching a moth.

“Three,” said Coster, after a while, in a voice Baxter had never heard him use. “That's—you're—that's brilliant.”

“I know,” Tasha said, proudly. Then, in a smaller voice: “Is it? Really?”

“Really.”

Baxter looked at the ridges, where not one radar could see them, and thought about an aircraft with JOKER 3 chalked on its side, and a man asleep against the wall beside it. It doesn't have to kill anyone.

The electronic-warfare aircraft came up from the airstrip at 1204.

Dealer saw it first, as a smear. A whole sector of his picture to the west went to snow, contacts blurring and doubling and vanishing.

“All Joker, Dealer. I'm losing the western picture. Jammer, west field. I can't give you—”

A cool voice on the open channel, Sotoan: “Orcus up. Let's see how they fight in the dark.”

Baxter's display went to soup. He'd never seen it so bad. Somewhere out there was an EA-6B, an old Prowler with four seats and no guns and nothing in it but radios and very clever people, and it was eating the sky.

“I've got him,” Tasha said. Her voice had changed. It had gone very calm and very fast. “I've got him, I've got his frequencies, he's good, he's really good, give me—”

The snow on Baxter's display began to thin. Not much. In patches. Tasha was pushing back, the Growler against the Prowler, two aircraft fighting a war nobody could see, and for a few seconds Baxter could make out shapes again in the mess.

It was enough. In one of those clear patches he saw the Prowler's symbol, just off the western runway and climbing slowly. Then he saw Ray's symbol cross it.

The snow cleared all at once, the way fog goes when a door opens.

Ray had been over the airstrip on his way to the refinery. He had simply turned, in the hole Tasha had made, and killed the Prowler on the way past, without slowing down, and gone on toward the refinery. Orcus had been in the air for forty seconds. Dealer never finished his sentence.

“Three,” Baxter said, when he could. “Thank you.”

There was a pause.

“I didn't hit him,” Tasha said.

“No. You found him.”

Another pause. Then, very quietly, so quietly that Baxter wasn't sure she'd meant to transmit it: “Oh.”

Major Kaveh Farzan of the Sotoan Army Logistics Corps had built Faith Park out of nothing in eleven weeks, and he was prouder of it than of anything he had done in his life.

He wasn't a fighting soldier. He had been a railway engineer before the war, in the dry country in the south of Sotoa where the wells were failing, and he had spent fifteen years building lines that carried water to towns that would otherwise have died. When the Army called him up, it gave him a major's rank and a map and a single instruction. Keep it moving.

So he had. He had taken a dead cargo field and a flooded rail siding and a refinery somebody had abandoned half built, and made them into the heart of the war in the north. Every shell the land battleship fired had passed through his valley. He kept the numbers in a ledger on his desk, in his own neat hand, and he checked them every night before he slept.

The sirens went at 1150, when the search radars picked up a raid coming in high from the north, ten minutes out.

Ten minutes was a long time.

It was time to get planes up in the air, and to get men into shelters, and Farzan had been walking, not running, toward the refinery when a single grey jet came over the northern ridge as though it had climbed up out of the ground, where nobody had seen it and nothing should have been, and went straight for the western runway.

The first thing he saw, turning at the sound, was the Ladon - that big, beautiful jet that he had only heard his son excitedly talk about in hushed tones, from rumors on social media, about how it would give Sotoa total air dominance - going off the end of the concrete into the desert in a ball of fire, nine minutes before the raid arrived.

Then he ran for the shelter by the pump house. He was fifty-one years old and heavy, and had never run anywhere in his life.

From the shelter doorway he watched it happen.

The other jets were doing what he had expected jets to do. Four of them were hitting the solar field in the northwest, and the mirrors went up in great glittering bursts like a sea breaking. Two were working along the bunkers in the centre of the valley, coming in low and straight at the doors, one at a time, with a patience that frightened him. Harriers were on the sidings. That was terrible. But it was a kind of terrible he understood. It was a raid.

The grey jet with the old emblem on its tail wasn't raiding. It was taking his valley apart.

He saw it come over the refinery and go for the Land Aegis. There were two of them, great armoured things on rails, moving between the storage tanks with their missile racks turning. Farzan had watched them shoot down a Federation reconnaissance aircraft only last week. They were the best defended things in the valley.

The jet didn't attack them. It waited.

It circled out over the desert, wide and patient, while the first Land Aegis rolled along its rails between the tanks. Farzan didn't understand what it was waiting for. Then the Land Aegis reached the point where the rails ran past the big crude tanks on the eastern side, the ones he had begged three times for steel to reinforce and never got. The jet came in, one missile, and the Land Aegis and three tanks went up together in a single pillar of fire that rose higher than the ridge.

The second Land Aegis was on the far side of the refinery. The jet went round once, the same wide patient circle, and waited for it to reach the western tanks. It did. Same missile. Same pillar.

It had taken perhaps ninety seconds, and it had looked, Farzan thought, almost easy. As though the jet had known exactly where those rails would take them, and when, and had simply arrived to meet them there.

And then it began on the rest.

Not the big things. Not what burned best. The main pumping station. The pipeline junction where the refinery fed the sidings. The transformer yard he had begged for three times. A small concrete building at the end of the sidings that held the only signal relay in the valley, which he would have bet his life nobody in the Federation knew existed. Each of them was hit once, cleanly, and never twice.

It was what Farzan would have done if he had been told to destroy his own work so that it could never be rebuilt. You didn't just break a supply network. You found the pieces that couldn't be replaced, and took every one.

He was being dismantled by someone who understood his valley better than he did.

And God help him, it was beautiful.

He was an engineer; he knew what elegance was, the shortest line, the fewest moving parts, the thing that does exactly what it must and nothing more. He had spent his life trying to build things like that. He stood in a shelter doorway with his work burning around him and watched a man fly the most elegant line he had ever seen, from the pumping station to the junction to the relay, without a single wasted turn, and he couldn't stop watching. He hated that he couldn't.

Then the jet came round toward the parts workshop, and Farzan's heart stopped, because there was a whole section of engineers in there who wouldn't have heard the sirens over the machines.

A new voice on the Federation channel, which his radio operator had been monitoring and had left playing in the shelter because nobody had remembered to turn it off. A young woman's voice, quick and clear.

“One, the workshop, there are people inside, they're coming out the west door, there's—six, seven, more coming—”

The jet didn't fire.

Farzan saw it. It was lined up on the workshop, and he saw it simply not fire, for two seconds, three, while his engineers came pouring out of the west door and ran across the yard into the scrub. It was the only time in fifteen minutes he saw it wait for anything.

“Clear,” said the young woman's voice. “They're clear. Thank you.”

Then the workshop went. *

Coster flew on Tasha's wing, the way he always did now, and thought about Bird's letter.

It was in his breast pocket, folded small. He had read it at breakfast. It was mostly about the band, about Keyes falling off a stage in the officers' mess and Wilson trying to learn the drums from Keyes while Keyes was in a sling. Then, at the end, in Bird's untidy hand: something's going on up here, Noise. They've doubled the guard on the north hangars and nobody'll say why. People are saying a battleship. Have you heard anything? I don't want to be dramatic. Bird.

He hadn't heard anything. He hadn't heard anything until this morning, when Pike had drawn a red line from Xanthos to White Valley.

Dealer called the threshold at 1209. Threshold achieved. Supply network assessed beyond repair. Nine minutes. Coster felt something in his chest unclench. They'd done it. They could go home.

Ray went west.

Coster watched him go, out over the airstrip, which was burning now, toward the second return line that Pike had said would open once the airbase was cleared. He'd cleared it. He went west over the ridge, and was gone.

He came back at 1213, with a full load.

Four minutes, Coster thought. Four minutes, if the crews are good. He'd asked in the briefing. He'd done the sum. He had known at nine in the morning that he'd be going back across that ridge after the threshold, and how long it would take.

Coster came alongside him over the western ridge. He didn't know why. He wasn't sure he was allowed to.

“One, Four,” he said. “You don't have to do all of it. We passed the threshold. Command's got what it wanted.”

A pause. He expected two clicks. He'd have put money on two clicks.

“It's not enough,” Ray said.

He said it in words. Coster sat in his cockpit with the desert going past beneath him and heard it, and thought about Bird. Bird and Garnett and Keyes and Wilson, and a red line on a map. He had never told Ray about the letters. He had never told Ray about Purple Magic at all, except that he liked the record, and everybody knew that. He hadn't told anybody what Bird had written last night.

Ray knew anyway. He was making sure Xanthos never reached White Valley at all. Not slowed down; never. He was taking every last thing the battleship could ever use out of this valley, so that it would never be able to fire on four people Coster loved and Ray had met for an hour on a flight deck.

Coster didn't know how he knew. He decided, very firmly, that he didn't want to know how.

Two fighters came up off what was left of the airstrip at 1214, MiGs, and one of them was good.

Ray turned on them. The first died at once. The second turned with him, hard, using the heat-shimmer and the ridge, and for a turn and a half the two aircraft went round each other above the valley and Coster saw the Hornet's line begin to change. A roll a fraction wider than it needed to be. A turn that went on a beat too long. He had seen that before, at White Valley, and with Darre, and he felt his stomach go cold.

Then there was a third aircraft behind Coster, and he didn't know.

“Will, behind you!”

Tasha's voice, sharp as a slap. Coster broke without thinking, and the burst went through the air where he had been. At the same instant, across the valley, the grey Super Hornet snapped flat and straight, as abruptly as a hand jerked back from a stove, and the MiG died on the next pass. A second later the aircraft behind Coster died too, a single burst from somewhere he couldn't see. Ray had come across the whole valley.

“Four, status,” said Baxter.

“Fine,” Coster said. His hands were shaking. “Fine. Thanks, Three.”

“Don't,” said Tasha.

“I'll say thanks if I want to.”

Baxter didn't say anything on the channel. Coster was quite certain, though he couldn't have said how, that Baxter was smiling.

Dealer kept score. It was what AWACS controllers did, and he had never minded it. Somebody had to keep the books, and Dealer liked books. He liked the way a tally told you the shape of a fight, if you knew how to read it.

Over Faith Park, the tally told him a shape he had never seen.

Joker and Queen together had passed the threshold at 1209. He had called it, the way he'd been told to. He had half expected the strike to wind down after that; pilots did, once the box was ticked, and nobody blamed them. The tally didn't wind down. One column of it kept climbing.

At 1215 the strike finally turned for home, and the valley behind it was burning from end to end. Dealer pulled up the final tally for Faith Park and looked at it.

Command's threshold at 1209. Six minutes after it, one column of the tally had grown by nearly as much again as Joker and Queen together had managed in the first nine. Every cluster. Both Land Aegis. Every target intelligence had counted, and thirty-eight it hadn't. An electronic-warfare ace forty seconds after takeoff. A strategic bomber that couldn't be caught, caught on the runway nine minutes before the rest of the strike arrived, by one aircraft that had come forty miles up a dry riverbed alone.

He had kept score on a great many fights. He had never seen one with nothing left on the board.

He keyed the microphone one last time.

“Joker One, Dealer. Faith Park complete. Every target. Every one.” He hesitated. “That's the cleanest board I've seen in sixteen years.”

A long pause.

Two clicks. Nothing else. No thanks, no pride, no relief. The acknowledgement you'd give a fuel state.

Dealer took his headset off and sat with it in his lap.

He had told the kid once, on his very first sortie, that first-time poker players play it too safe. He'd been wrong about that, as it turned out, but not in the way he'd expected. The kid didn't play safe. He didn't take risks either. He didn't gamble at all.

He just took the whole pot, every hand, and never once sounded happy about it.

Ray came aboard last. He always did. His pylons were bare.

Baxter, waiting by the island, watched him come down the ladder slowly, and saw something he hadn't seen before: Ray sat in the cockpit for a while after the engines stopped. A minute, perhaps more. Dutch went up the ladder and leaned in, and said something Baxter couldn't hear, and stayed there, close, with one hand on the canopy rail. After a while Ray nodded. Dutch came down. Ray came down after him.

His hands were steady by the time he reached the deck. Baxter noticed that Dutch was standing between him and the rest of the deck crew, the way a big man stands when he doesn't want anyone to see something, and that Dutch's face was very carefully blank.

Somebody handed Ray a bottle of water. He drank all of it without stopping, standing at the foot of the ladder with his head back.

Baxter had seen men do that after a desert sortie. Everybody was thirsty after the desert.

The dog had come out of the island hatch the moment the Super Hornet caught the wire, as he always did now, and was leaning against Ray's legs, hard, with the whole weight of him. Ray didn't look down. But his free hand had found the dog's head and stayed there, and Baxter noticed that it was holding on.

Kate got to the debrief early, because she always did, and found Ray already there, because apparently he always did too. They were the only two in the room. He was sitting at the end of the table with his helmet on the chair beside him, looking at nothing.

She sat down two chairs away. She hadn't planned to say anything. She found she had.

“Four minutes,” she said.

He looked up.

“The return line. You asked Pike how long it took to rearm.” She turned her pen over on the table. “You'd already worked it out before the briefing ended, hadn't you. That you'd go back. After the threshold.”

“Yes.”

“And the circle.”

He didn't answer that. He looked at the table.

She hadn't meant to ask the next thing either. It came out quietly, almost curiously, the way she might have asked Nguyen how he'd known the weather would turn.

“What else have you worked out?”

He looked at her.

It was the first time he'd looked at her properly since White Valley. She knew that because she'd been noticing, for some time now, the way he didn't, the way he talked to her shoulder or to the aircraft or to the space beside her. This time he didn't. He looked straight at her, and she saw his face for perhaps two seconds, and in those two seconds there was something in it so enormous and so carefully held that she felt it like a change in air pressure.

Then he looked away.

“Not enough,” he said.

Cruz came in, and Nguyen behind him, talking about the solar field, and the room filled up, and the moment was gone. Kate sat through the debrief and gave her account clearly and in order, as she always did. Afterward she couldn't remember a word of it.

Not enough. She turned it over all through the debrief and all the way back to the Queen ready room, and by the time she got there she had decided exactly what it meant. He had been being cryptic at her. Deliberately. She'd asked him a perfectly reasonable professional question, lead to lead, and he had looked at her as though she'd said something unbearable and then given her two words, like a man handing a child a sweet to make it go away.

“He's impossible,” she told Queen, dropping into her chair.

Victor and Chester exchanged a look.

“Who is?” said Chester, innocently.

“Joker's lead. I asked him a straight question about the return line, and he—” She stopped. “He looks at you as though you've said something terrible. Have you noticed that? And then he won't answer.”

“I've noticed he looks at you,” said Chester.

“That's what I just said.”

“Yes, Lead.”

Loc, at the chart table, wrote something down.

She filed it with the others, as a professional grievance.

She was beginning to need a bigger file.

She was quite sure it was the kind you kept on difficult colleagues.

Coster wrote back to Bird that night, at the table in Joker's berthing, with Tasha on the bunk opposite pretending to read and actually watching him chew the end of his pen.

He wrote about the Super Hornets, because Bird would want to know. He wrote that Tasha had a new aircraft and had blinded an entire valley in it and then said oh in a very small voice, and that he'd tell Bird the rest when he saw him. He did not write about the red line on the map, because he couldn't, and because Pike would have his head.

At the end he sat for a long time with the pen over the paper.

Then he wrote: Don't worry about the battleship. I can't tell you why. But you've got a friend out here who isn't going to let anything reach you.

He looked at it. He didn't know, quite, whether he meant himself.

“What are you smiling at?” Tasha said.

“Nothing.”

“You're smiling at your letter.”

“I'm allowed to smile at my letter.”

She considered this from the bunk with the book open on her chest.

“Tell Bird I said hello,” she said. “And tell him track four is slow.”

Coster added a postscript. Tasha says hello. She also says track four is slow. She's wrong, but she's been very brave today, so I'm letting her have it.

He folded the letter and put it in his breast pocket, where the other one had been, and didn't notice that she had seen exactly which pocket.

Down the passageway the dog was lying across Ray's door again. Tasha had stepped over him on her way back from the washroom.

“He used to sleep on my bunk,” she said to the ceiling.

Coster looked up from the letter. “Do you mind?”

She thought about it honestly. He could see her doing it.

“No,” she said. “He always knew who needed him most. At home he used to sleep outside my mother's door, on the bad nights.” She turned a page she wasn't reading. “He's not wrong.”