Chapter 15Clean Sheet

Pike, Santos

The casualty block was the fourth box on the second page, and Pike had typed it before she noticed she was typing it.

FRIENDLY CASUALTIES: NIL.

She took her hands off the keyboard and looked at it. It was correct. She had the returns from every unit that had flown or fought at Faith Park, the Army's and the Marines' and Dauntless's and her own, and she had checked every one of them that afternoon against the muster, and the answer was nil. It had been nil after Theve. It had been nil after Drinwich. It was nil now. Aircrew lost since the bridge: nil, on a separate line, because Command had begun asking for that figure separately in November, and had never said why.

None of that was the trouble. The trouble was that her hands had known the answer before she'd looked.

She deleted the word, opened the Faith Park returns again, and went down them one unit at a time. Then she typed it again. NIL. It looked the same the second time. She printed the report, put it in a folder, and took it up to the admiral.

Vice Admiral John Gordon's day cabin was on the gallery deck, directly over the hangar bay, and the party was still going on underneath it. The Harriers had gone back to Dauntless at five. Endurance had kept going without them. A bass line came up through the deck plates and into the soles of Pike's shoes, somebody's record, played loud, and from time to time a shout of laughter came up with it, as though the ship had been told a joke.

Gordon was at his desk with a paper plate in front of him.

He was a long, lean man in his sixties, and the length had all gone to bone. He had a long face, a long jaw, and ears that stood out from his head as if they'd been fitted for a bigger man. His hair had retreated a good way back from his forehead and gone thin on top, and he kept what was left of it cropped so close that it was hard to say what color it had been. The lines ran deep from his nose to the corners of his mouth. His brows were heavy and his eyes were pale and set well back under them. His mouth, at rest, was a straight thin line.

It was a hard face. It looked like the face of a man who had never forgiven anybody anything. People who had served under him for a week learned that this was a lie the face told, and people who had served under him for a year learned which parts of it weren't.

He sat at the desk in his working jacket, open at the neck over a white undershirt, as he did every evening once the door was shut. The three stars on the collar points had gone dull from never being taken off. His reading glasses were in his breast pocket, where they always were, and he used them about half as often as he needed to.

There was cake on his plate. There was a second plate on the corner of the desk with a second slice on it, under a paper napkin.

“That's yours,” he said. “Sit down.”

“I've brought Faith Park, sir.”

“I know what you've brought. Sit down anyway.”

She sat. He held his hand out for the folder, and she gave it to him, and he opened it at the last page and signed it. He hadn't turned a page. She watched him do it, and he looked up and saw her watching.

“It says nil,” he said. “Doesn't it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then I've read it.” He closed the folder and set it on top of the cake plate, which was the only clear space on the desk. He had a voice that had been built for the far end of a flight deck in a crosswind, and he had never learned to turn it down for a cabin. He had commanded Endurance for three years on the understanding, shared by everyone at Command, that he would be the last man to do it. The ship was the oldest carrier in the service. There had been a museum interested in her since before the war. Command had sent her an admiral at the end of his career to see her out, gently, and the admiral had been looking forward to it.

Then Sotoa had come across the sea in July, and by the end of the summer most of the Usean navy was at the bottom of it, and the senior officer afloat in the theater was a man who had been waiting to cut a ribbon.

He had found that funny for about a week. Pike knew roughly when he'd stopped, because that was when he'd started walking the ship at night. She would come into the CDC at 0300 and find him already there, standing behind the radar operators with his hands in his jacket pockets, saying nothing, reading the plot. He had the magazine doors checked twice a watch. He had the escorts' stations moved every night, on no pattern anyone could find, and he wouldn't say who'd drawn up the list. He read every signal that came aboard before she did. That was why he didn't read the reports. He'd already read everything in them.

“You went down?” she said.

“For an hour. Somebody had to.” He nodded at the deck. “Dauntless's Harrier people are all right. The tall one with the mustache tried to get me to bet on a card game. Queen's teaching them some kind of poker with the jokers left in.”

“Were you winning?”

“I didn't play. I'm an admiral. I watched Lieutenant Nguyen take forty dollars off a Marine major and then give it back, and I came up here before anyone could ask me to sing.” He pushed the second plate an inch toward her. “Eat that.”

“After the report, sir.”

“The report's done. I signed it.” He leaned back in his chair and stretched out his legs under the desk. “Three operations, Commander. Theve, Drinwich, Faith Park. Nobody dead. Not a pilot, not a Marine, not a kid on the deck. You know how many times I've signed one of those?”

“Yes, sir. I typed them.”

“Three times in thirty-one years,” said Gordon. “And all three this autumn.” He put his finger on the folder. “I want to know what we're doing right. Because the day we stop doing it, I want to know why before the Sotoans do.”

Pike looked at the second plate. It was a corner piece, with most of the icing.

“You know what we're doing right,” she said.

“I know who.” He didn't wait for her to argue. “The Federation's got its Wings of Theve back, that's what. Old one's in a wheelchair in your sickbay telling the doctor how to run it. New one won't sit still for a photograph. I've had Command on the phone twice this week about that. The information people want a face for the posters. I told them to take it up with the young man himself, and they said they had, and I said then they had their answer.” He shook his head. “Wings, plural, that's what we've got now. Fourteen new Super Hornets sitting in a shed at Drinwich. If we can find the bodies to put in them.”

“Snider's Top has sent six names,” said Pike. “Two of them have flown off a carrier.”

“Two's a start.”

“Two's a training program, sir. I'll have numbers for you on Thursday.”

“Shame it was Hornets.” Gordon scraped up the last of his icing. “If that shed had been full of F-35Bs, we could've sent them over to Dauntless and given those Harrier kids an upgrade. They've earned one. They've been flying museum pieces longer than we have.”

“Dauntless couldn't take them, sir.”

“Why not? They're jump jets. That's the point of them.”

“The B's exhaust runs a great deal hotter than a Harrier's,” said Pike. “Straight down, on the landing spot, every recovery. Dauntless's deck was never specced for it. It would blister the nonskid and cook whatever's underneath it. She'd need new coating on every spot before she landed the first one, and she can't come off the line long enough to get it.”

For the first time that evening, Gordon looked pleased.

“Commander,” he said, “we've got so many airplanes we're arguing about which deck can't hold them. You know how long it's been since this navy had that problem?” He pointed his fork at her. “That's a good problem to have.” Then he put the fork down, and the pleasure went out of his face as if somebody had shut a hatch on it. “It's the only good problem I've got. You want to hear the rest?”

“Yes, sir.”

“This is the last deck the Federation's got that can launch a Hornet,” he said. “The last one. Everything else that could is on the bottom between here and the Sotoan coast. I lie in that rack every night and I do the arithmetic. I watched two Sotoan fleets go to pieces in one morning off Anderson. Cruisers. Good captains. Air cover. Gone before lunch, because one flight came over the hills low and found them. That's how fast a ship dies now. One flight. One bad morning. One Sotoan in the right place with the right missile, and that's the end of this ship, and that's the end of the Navy in this war, and after that it's the end of Theve.” He rubbed his face with both hands. “Four thousand people. I can count, Commander. And every morning I count, and every morning it comes out the same. It comes out to one.”

“Theve was the landing force,” said Pike. “Lieutenant Venn's craft—”

“Came home eight out of eight because somebody called every railgun shot on the common net four seconds early. Who was that?”

Pike looked at the cake.

“Drinwich,” said Gordon, “the Army said would be a crater. It isn't. Who did that? Faith Park. A circle on your whiteboard around a call sign nobody had heard of, before the brief told anyone what it was. Who drew the circle?”

“The deck crews have had—”

“The deck crews are the best I've ever had, and I'll put them all in for something. And Dealer. And Queen.” He held up a hand before she could go on. “I'm not insulting anybody. I'm telling you where the weight's sitting. We owe that boy everything, Commander. Every one of those nils. Every kid on this ship who's going to go home at the end of this and bore his grandchildren. Everything. You don't find what he's got twice, and if we lose him, we don't find it again.”

Pike picked up the plastic fork from the second plate and turned it over in her fingers, and put it down again.

“That's what I want to talk to you about,” she said.

Gordon folded his hands on the folder and waited. She noticed that he'd been expecting it, and had let her get there herself.

“Go on.”

“How did he know about the second Fuscus?”

“Intelligence had two call signs.”

“Intelligence had two call signs and thought they were a heavy flight. He circled one of them before the brief got to it. How did he know?”

“You asked him?”

“I asked him. He said he'd guessed.” She kept her eyes on the admiral. “How does a lieutenant his age come to be qualified on every fighter and attack aircraft the Federation has in service, carrier qualifications included? Who blacked out the back of that sheet, and why did it reach me with attachments I'm not cleared to read? Why did he ask for the drones at Drinwich at half past five in the morning, when nobody had said anything about drones?”

“You've made a list.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. So have I. Mine's longer.” Gordon looked at her across the desk. The pale eyes under the heavy brows were steady and clever, and people who forgot about them generally did so once. “Are you asking me to send the man who's keeping my crew alive to counterintelligence, Commander?”

“No, sir.”

“Then what are you asking?”

“Whether you've asked yourself.”

“Every night,” said Gordon. “Somewhere around the second time round the hangar. And every night I come to the same place. Counterintelligence would take him off my deck for six weeks to find out, and I can't spare him for six hours. If the Devil himself came aboard and flew wing for Queen and brought them all home, I'd find him a bunk, horns or no. And I'd post a sentry on it. For his sake, not mine.”

“He has a bunk.”

“I know he does. I've walked past it.” Gordon tapped the folder. “Light's on at two in the morning, most nights. Did you know that?”

Pike hadn't. She didn't say so.

“When did anyone last make sure that boy's all right?” said Gordon. “Not fit. All right.”

“Santos saw him.”

“And what did she say?”

“Fit to fly. Not sleeping. Will not discuss.” She knew the report by heart. “He had forty-eight hours' stand-down after Drinwich.”

“Fit to fly's what I need,” said Gordon. “It's not what I asked.” Below them the record ended, and there was a cheer, and somebody put on another. Gordon listened to it, his head a little on one side. “You hear that? That's a ship that's forgotten how to be scared. I've watched it happen. The arresting gear crew are taking bets. Queen are flying lines they wouldn't have touched in September. Everybody on this ship has stopped being afraid except the one man doing the work, and he's up at two in the morning with the light on.” He looked back at her. “That's the whole war, Commander, sitting in one rack. Somebody had better be looking after it. You make sure he's okay. That's an order.”

“Sir, I can't order a man to be—”

“I didn't say order him. I said make sure.”

Pike took a breath and let it go. She took a sheet of paper out of the folder instead.

“The Army's salvage list from Faith Park,” she said. “They went through the railhead this morning. Page three.”

Gordon took it and held it at arm's length, then gave up and found his glasses in his shirt pocket.

“Missiles,” he said.

“A Sotoan air-to-air missile, damaged, recovered from the sidings. They broke it down for intelligence. Line fourteen is the seeker assembly.” She didn't need to look. “The lot number on the seeker is in Enso's format. The prefix, the date code, the inspector's stamp. It's the same format as the seekers in our own magazine. I sign for those, sir. Every month. I know what they look like.”

Gordon read line fourteen twice. Then he took off his glasses and put them back in his pocket, and sat for a moment looking at the paper.

“Everybody buys from them,” he said at last. “That's what they're for. They built half the Anderson project with us before the war, and I don't doubt they've built a few things for Sotoa since. That's a business. It's not a crime.” He didn't sound as if it comforted him. “I don't like it. I don't like anything I can't put a missile into. But I can't put a missile into a lot number.”

“No, sir.”

“You're not satisfied.”

She thought about the question, which was the only one she had that she couldn't turn into an order.

“Then who's winning?” she said.

Gordon was quiet for a moment.

“Nobody yet,” he said. “Whoever's still afloat in the spring. You make sure it's us.”

She took the list back and put it in the folder.

The seeker was only the one piece of the whole business she could hold in her hand. A navy that had put half the Federation's fleet on the bottom of the sea by the end of the summer now lost every fight it picked with a carrier that should have been a museum. Sotoa had come across the water in July with everything going its way, and had kept everything going its way for four months, and then had stopped, all at once, as though somebody had changed their mind. She did not believe in luck. Luck was what people called the things they hadn't troubled to understand, and she had not yet troubled to understand this, and she didn't like it.

“There was an electronic-warfare aircraft working over Faith Park for a week before Squeeze,” she said. “Call sign unknown. As though somebody expected us. But they didn't know about the storage building at Drinwich, and that was in their own hands for a month. They knew to watch Faith Park and they didn't know what was in their own shed. They know some things, sir, and not others.”

Gordon didn't wave it away. She had half expected him to. He sat forward instead, and lowered his voice, which she had never once heard him do.

“Who've you told?”

“You, sir.”

“Keep it that way.” He looked at the door, and then back at her. “If somebody's talking, I don't want them to know we've noticed. Not until we know who. Not Dealer, not intelligence, not your pilots. Write nothing down.”

“Sir.”

“I mean it, Commander. Nothing.” He sat back, and then he said, in an ordinary voice, as if he were asking about the weather: “What do you make of our information officer?”

Pike had known him three years. She knew that voice. It was the one he used for the question he'd called her up here to ask.

“D.D.?”

“Mr. Doniphan. Executive advisor to the carrier Endurance, on loan from the Enso Order, with Command's compliments.” Gordon took his glasses out of his pocket again and turned them over in his fingers. “I didn't ask for him. He arrived with a letter on Enso paper and four cases of camera equipment and three suits, and he's been in every briefing since. He's got the run of the CDC. He knows the strike plan before the pilots do. Every week a pouch goes off this ship with his film in it, and the only link this task group has to the outside world is his, through their satellite.”

“I read his pouches, sir.”

“I know you do. What's in them?”

“Film. Captions. Letters to his office ashore. Once, a letter to his tailor.”

“And what do you make of him?”

Pike considered it. She had considered it before, on a number of evenings, and had never come out anywhere she liked.

“I don't trust him,” she said.

“Why not?”

“He's too smooth by half, sir.” She heard how thin it sounded, and went on anyway. “I ask him a question and he answers a better one. He's never once been caught without an answer. He's never once been caught at all. He's charming to the deck crews and charming to Queen and charming to me, and I've never seen him charm anybody without wanting something, and I've never found out what he wants.” She paused. “And he's Enso's.” She didn't look at the salvage list. “He's never made any secret of it, and the whole ship stopped seeing it months ago. So did I, sir. Until line fourteen.”

Gordon nodded slowly. He didn't look surprised. He looked like a man who'd had a number confirmed.

“Keep reading his pouches,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“And if you find anything, you bring it to me before you do anything about it. I know you, Commander.”

“If he's selling us, sir,” said Pike, “I'll find out.”

“I know you will. That's what worries me.” He put his glasses away. “Now eat your cake.”

She picked up the fork.

He let her get halfway through it before he told her. She thought afterward that he'd planned that too.

“Command wants me ashore,” he said. “After Theve.”

Pike put the fork down.

“They want a fleet staff,” said Gordon. “They've got about a third of a fleet and no staff at all, and somebody's noticed I'm the only flag officer in the theater who's still got a ship under him. So they want the ship out from under me, and me behind a desk in some basement at Snider's Top drawing up plans for carriers they haven't got.” His thumb was working at the edge of the folder. “I've told them yes. After Theve, not before. I'm not leaving in the middle.”

“Who's getting the ship?”

“I'm recommending you.”

“No, sir.”

“That's not up to you.”

“Not yet,” said Pike. “Sir. Not before—” She stopped, because the end of the sentence was not before I know what's holding it up, and she couldn't say that to him, not after the last ten minutes.

Gordon watched her not say it. Then he leaned down, grunting, and opened the bottom drawer of his desk, and took out a cardboard box and put it on top of everything else.

It was a stores box, plain brown, with the Navy's label across the lid and the tape across the label. The tape had never been cut. Pike knew what it was without reading it. Every captain had one.

“Next-of-kin forms,” said Gordon. “Fifty. Came aboard with me three years ago, and they gave me a new one in July in case the first was out of date. Every captain I ever served under opened his inside the first month of a war. I had a man on the Lindqvist, back when you were in school, opened his the first morning and filled in three before lunch.” He put his hand on the lid. “I never opened mine.”

Pike looked at the box.

“We lost people in the summer,” said Gordon. “You know we did. I wrote to their families on my own paper, by hand, because I was damned if I'd open that box for them. Then the bridge.” He looked at the lid. “I haven't needed my own paper since. I'm not fool enough to think that'll last. Every night I think, tomorrow. Tomorrow I'll need the paper.” He took his hand off it. “When it's yours, don't you open it either. Not while there's anything left you can do instead.”

He put the box back in the drawer and shut it.

“Finish your cake,” he said.

She ate it. It was very good cake. She told him so, which seemed to please him more than anything else she had said that evening.

At 2130 she sat down at her own desk and opened the report again.

It had been signed. It didn't need anything. She went to the last page anyway, to the box headed REMARKS, which she had left blank, and sat with her hands on the keyboard.

She typed: Seeker assembly recovered at Faith Park railhead (Army salvage list, p. 3, line 14) carries manufacturer's lot markings identical in format to those of Federation stock. Recommend

She stopped there, because she didn't know what she recommended. She didn't know what you recommended about a lot number. You could not send a fleet against a prefix and a date code. And the admiral had said write nothing down.

She deleted it, a word at a time, back to the empty box, and typed Nil, and saved the report, and sent it.

Then she went down to sickbay.

The quickest way was through the hangar bay. The party was thinning out. There were paper streamers trodden into the deck, and the vast flat cake had been reduced to a few square feet of crumbs, and Queen had taken over a fuel trolley for a card table and were still at it. Nobody noticed the executive officer passing along the edge of it, which was as it should be.

At the far end, past the last Hornet, the deck-edge opening was a long dark rectangle of sky. There was somebody sitting at the edge of it with a dog, with his back to the party.

Pike didn't stop.

Santos was still in her office, with the desk lamp on and a stack of charts in front of her. She looked up when Pike knocked on the frame of the open door, and then at the clock, and then back at Pike.

“Who's hurt?”

“Nobody.” Pike came in and shut the door behind her. Santos noticed that too. “I want Joker One re-evaluated.”

Santos put her pen down.

“Re-evaluated for what?”

“For everything. Not fitness. Not whether he can fly. How he is.” Pike stayed standing. “The admiral's asked. So am I.”

“The admiral,” said Santos. “Has something happened?”

“His light's on at two in the morning. Most nights.”

“I know.” Santos didn't look away. “I've known since October. I'm his doctor, Commander. You think I don't know when he sleeps?”

“Then why isn't it in your reports?”

“It is. Not sleeping. Two words. I'd have written more, but he gave me nothing else to write.” Santos leaned back in her chair. “What do you want me to do? Call him down tomorrow and ask him how he is? I ask him every week. He comes at nine, exactly. He sits in that chair. He drinks the water. He answers every question I put to him, and he tells me nothing at all, and he's very good at it. Better than anyone I've ever had in that chair.” She shook her head. “He'll refuse.”

“He can't refuse a medical evaluation.”

“He can't refuse to come. He can refuse everything else, and he will. He'll be polite about it. He'll sit there for an hour and say I'm fine, Doctor, and I'll have nothing I can write that isn't fit to fly, because he is. That's the trouble. He's fit to fly. He'll be fit to fly the day he—” She stopped.

Pike waited.

“Ordering him in won't do it,” said Santos, more quietly. “It'll make it worse. He'll know why he's there, and he'll close the door, and I'll lose the little I've got.”

“Then don't order him,” said Pike. “Find another way.”

“What other way?”

“I don't know. You're the doctor.” Pike put her hand on the door. “I've been ordered to make sure he's all right, Doctor. I can't do it. I don't know how. So I'm ordering you.”

Santos looked at her for a moment. Then she nodded, and Pike left the room behind her.

When the door had shut, Santos sat for a while with her hands on the desk. Then she tore a clean sheet off the pad she used for referrals, and uncapped her pen, and wrote one word at the top of it, and drew a line under it.

She looked at it. Then she put it in the drawer, under the blotter, and turned off the lamp.