Chapter 17In His Name

D.D., Toprak

The Sotoan papers came down from the intercept office at nine in the morning, in a cardboard folder with a rubber band around it, and D.D. had not been to bed.

He had meant to. He had meant to every night since Faith Park, and every night something had prevented him, and the something was always the same. It was lying on his desk now, under the edge of the keyboard, where he had put it at four o'clock that morning so that he would stop picking it up.

It was a photograph of Joker One, sitting alone on the edge of the flight deck at first light with his helmet beside him and the dog leaning against his leg, looking out at the sea. D.D. had taken it from the island with a long lens, without asking, and it was the best photograph he had ever taken, and he could not use it.

He had other things he could use. He had the long cut of Faith Park, eleven minutes he was holding back from the first release because he couldn't bear to spend them all at once: a canyon so close you could count the strata, and a runway, and a bomber that couldn't be caught being caught, and a board with nothing left on it. He had the best footage of the war. He was fairly sure he had the best footage of any war. If he did nothing else for the rest of his life, he had that.

And none of it had a face in it, because the man in it would not give him one! Not even one.

D.D. bore this, on the whole, with good grace.

He would have liked it understood that he bore it with good grace, because in a smaller man it might have curdled into something else.

He spent forty minutes every morning on his hair. He owned three suits that had each cost more than his first car, and he wore them aboard a warship, in the face of a good deal of comment, because somebody had to. He knew which side of his own face the light ought to come from, and he had known it since he was fourteen. He had worked hard, for a long time, to look as though he had not worked at all.

Joker One rolled out of a cockpit after nine hours in a flight suit gone dark with sweat, with his hair flattened to his skull by the helmet and the red crease of the mask still printed across his cheek, and looked like a recruiting poster. He did it without trying. He did it, as far as D.D. could tell, without knowing, without ever having looked in a mirror long enough to find out, and D.D. found it deeply and professionally offensive.

It was unfair.

It was a waste.

He would have liked, just once, to see the man photographed badly, and he had tried. He had two hundred frames from the island by now, taken over a month, in every kind of light the sea could produce.

In some of them Ray was eating.

In one he was sneezing.

They were all, every one of them, entirely usable, and D.D. was not allowed to use any of them.

Yesterday afternoon a Marine captain he had never met had come into his office, looked at the photograph on the desk for perhaps three seconds, and said, That's a poster.

He had known that for weeks. He had simply never had a hero before who refused to be seen.

He took the rubber band off the folder and spread the papers out beside the keyboard. Clippings, mostly. Transcripts of Sotoan broadcasts, translated by somebody in the intercept office with an orderly mind and no sense of humor. A photograph of a wall in a Sotoan city with something painted on it in red.

He read them all. It didn't take long. They all said the same thing.

THE GHOST OF THEVE. That was the headline of the first one, over a cartoon of a gray Hornet with a skull in the cockpit. The Federation's dead man flies again.

The second: Where is Jan Cope? The puppet the Federation calls its Wings has not been seen on the ground since October. What are they hiding?

A broadcast transcript: Federation pilots say the Wings of Theve does not speak, does not land in daylight, does not show his face. Our pilots know why. Our pilots shot him down over the bridge on the thirty-first of October, and they know a dead man when they fly against one.

And the painted wall, which the orderly translator had rendered without comment: HOW MANY TIMES CAN YOU KILL A GHOST.

D.D. sat back.

None of it was new, exactly. The Sotoans had been saying it for a month. He'd been putting the clippings in a drawer and not thinking about them, because the footage was so good, and the footage spoke for itself.

But clipped to the back of the folder there was a second sheet, and it wasn't Sotoan. It was a summary from the Federation's information office ashore, three paragraphs long, marked for D.D.'s attention, and it said that in the past two weeks the same rumors had begun to turn up inside the Federation.

In the cities still in Federation hands. In the camps. In the factories.

People were saying the Wings was dead.

People were saying the Navy had put somebody else in the aircraft in October and kept the name on it because it didn't know what else to do, and had been lying about it ever since.

People were saying, the summary noted drily, that if the Navy would lie about the Wings it would lie about anything.

Recommend, said the last line, that the Endurance information officer consider measures to address public confidence in the Wings of Theve.

D.D. read it three times.

Then he looked at the wall over his desk, where he had pinned, a long time ago, the first poster. The one he was proudest of. Jan Cope in his flight jacket on the deck of Endurance at dawn, helmet under his arm, grinning at something out of the frame, the way he'd grinned when D.D. told him to stop looking at the camera. THE WINGS OF THEVE, it said across the bottom, in letters D.D. had drawn himself. It had gone up on every wall in the Federation. He'd seen a child in a newsreel holding a copy so big she could barely lift it.

He got Cope's service file out of the cabinet, looking for something he could use, and turned past the flight records, which he knew by heart, to the pages he'd never had a reason to read. Cope's birth registration was on the fourth one. It was Sotoan.

He sat with the file open on his knee for most of an hour.

He looked at the poster, and at the folder, and at the summary from ashore, and he understood all at once, the way you understand the shape of a piece of film the moment before you cut it, what he was going to have to do.

Where is Jan Cope? If the Sotoans ever put it together—Sotoan-born, and alive, and in a sickbay bed aboard Endurance, while the Federation went on selling him as its hero—then Jan Cope was the most valuable target in the war, and his face was on every wall in the Federation, and D.D. had put it there.

A hero you couldn't see was a hero people stopped believing in. He'd known that his whole career.

He stood up. He took the poster off the wall, very carefully, easing out each pin with his thumbnail so as not to tear the corners, and rolled it, and put it on the shelf beside the tapes.

Then he went to find Pike.

“He won't do it,” said Pike.

She was at the plotting table in the CDC with the morning's reports, and she didn't look up when D.D. had finished. He had given it to her straight, the way she liked things: the clippings, the summary from ashore, the measures to address public confidence. He had left out the birth registration. That had never been his to give.

Once, when he got to the Endurance information officer, she did look up: at him, not at the summary, for about the length of a slow exposure. Then she went back to the reports. D.D. had no idea what he'd said.

“Then I'll ask him,” said D.D.

Pike looked up.

“You have asked him,” she said. “Four times, by my count. Santos has been trying since October. Baxter has been trying since the day he came aboard.” A pause. “I asked him myself, because you put me up to it, and I have not yet forgiven you. He answers or he doesn't, D.D., and on this he doesn't.” She put down her pen. “What exactly are you proposing?”

“His face,” said D.D. “That's all. One photograph. Not his name. God knows I couldn't tell anyone anything about him if I tried. Just his face, and something under it that tells the truth without telling all of it.” He spread his hands. “Cope was hurt saving the Federation. Somebody took up his name so it wouldn't fall. Here he is. That's the whole story, and it's true, and it's better than the one the Sotoans are telling.”

She looked down at the folder he had put on the plotting table, at the cartoon on top: the gray Hornet with the skull in the cockpit. Where is Jan Cope?

She kept looking at it. D.D. had the strong impression, watching her, that she was thinking about something he couldn't see. Pike had a way of looking at a thing as if it were a chess position and she had seen four moves further into it than anybody else in the room, and was too polite to say so.

“Ask him,” she said at last. “If he says no, it's no. I won't have him pushed.” She picked up the pen again. “And D.D.”

“Ma'am?”

“If he says yes,” said Pike, “I'd like to know why. I've never once known him to do anything for the reason anybody else would.”

He didn't go to Ray first. He went to Cope.

He hadn't planned to. He came out of the CDC meaning to go straight to the hangar, and found that his feet had taken him the other way, down two ladders and along to sickbay, and he understood, standing in the doorway, that he couldn't take a man's face off every wall in the Federation without telling him why.

Cope was in his corner, the way he always was. The bed with the steel frame rigged over one end of it, and the leg in the frame, and the crutches against the wall that he wasn't supposed to use yet and used anyway when Santos wasn't looking. A tray across his knees, with a hand of patience laid out on it in rows. He was holding a card up between his first and second fingers, about to lay it down, the wrong way around, the way nobody held a card.

He looked up when D.D. came in, and grinned.

“D.D. Come to film me losing to myself?”

“Not today,” said D.D.

He sat down on the end of the bed. Cope's grin faded a little, watching him do it. D.D. did not sit on the ends of people's beds, as a rule. He hovered in doorways with his phone.

Cope laid down the card he was holding, and picked up another, and looked at D.D. over it.

“Something's happened,” said Cope.

“Not yet,” said D.D. “I'd like to stop it happening.” He looked at the cards on the tray, and then, because there wasn't any way to do this that wasn't this, he looked up at Cope. “Jan. I know you're Sotoan.”

Cope didn't move.

“I found it this morning,” said D.D. His voice came out quiet, and apologetic, as though he had broken something of Cope's and was owning up to it. “In your file. Your birth registration.” He swallowed. “I haven't told anybody. Not Pike. Not Command. Nobody.”

Cope sat in the bed, with the leg in its frame and the card in his fingers.

He had waited fifteen years for somebody to say those words to him. D.D. could see that. He could see it in the stillness, and in the way the color went out of Cope's face and then came back. He had imagined it, D.D. thought, a hundred different ways. An officer at a desk. A journalist at a door. A Sotoan voice on a radio. He had braced for it every morning for fifteen years.

He had never once, D.D. was quite sure, imagined it would be the information officer, on the end of his bed, sounding sorry.

Cope put the card down on the tray, face down, very carefully.

“Why now?” he said.

D.D. told him. The folder. The cartoon. Where is Jan Cope? The rumors at home, the summary, the measures to address public confidence. And then the thing he had worked out at nine o'clock that morning with the poster in front of him: what would happen to a Sotoan-born Federation hero, alive in a sickbay bed, if the wrong people ever put the two things together.

“Your face is on every wall in the Federation,” said D.D. “Every one. I put it there. And every day it stays there, somebody on the other side is looking at it and asking where you are.” He took a breath. “I want to take it down. I want to put his up instead. His face. So that they stop looking for you.”

Cope looked at him.

“His,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Does he know?” said Cope. “About me?”

D.D. opened his mouth, and shut it again.

“I don't know,” he said. “I don't know what he knows. I don't think anybody does.”

And Cope, who had been holding himself very still the whole time, laughed. It came out of him all at once, a short helpless sound, and he put his hand over his eyes.

“No,” he said, behind the hand. “No. Nobody does.” He took it away. He was still half laughing, and his eyes were wet. “He pulled me out of the sea, D.D. He held my head out of the water till the helicopter came. He's never once asked me a single question about where I'm from. Not one.” He shook his head slowly. “I've sometimes thought he knows more about me than I do.”

He wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand.

“Ask him,” he said. “Go and ask him. Tell him I said it's all right.” He paused. “Tell him I'd rather it was his face than mine. Tell him—” He stopped. “No. Just tell him I said it's all right. He'll understand the rest. He usually does.”

“Jan—”

“And D.D.”

“Yes?”

“Thank you,” said Cope. “For coming to me first.” He looked at D.D. steadily. “Keep not telling them. Please. For a while longer. I'll do it myself, when I'm ready. If I'm ever ready.”

“I promise,” said D.D.

“Good.” Cope picked up a card, considered it, and put it back. “And make him look better than you made me. It won't be hard.”

Then he lifted his right hand off the tray, and before he held it out he laid it flat against his own chest, just below the collarbone, over the heart, and kept it there for a moment. Then he held it out.

D.D. had seen him do that a thousand times. On the flight deck, in the wardroom, with every new pilot and every visiting officer and every journalist. He had filmed it. He had cut it out of three different pieces of footage, because it looked odd on camera, a little hitch before the handshake, and he had always meant to ask Cope what it was and never had.

He understood it now. He couldn't have said how.

He took the hand.

Queen's walk-around took about eleven minutes. Ray let himself have that much: dusk, the deck by the island, the wind too cold for anyone else to want it.

Four aircraft at the far end of the line, chained down, with the last of the light on them. He counted them anyway. Four.

She was walking around the nearest one with her plane captain, with her hand out along the leading edge of the wing, feeling for what the eye would miss. The wind was pulling her hair loose, and she pushed it back with her wrist without looking up from the wing. The last of the light was on one side of her face.

She was beautiful. He had never found a better word for it than that one, and he had looked.

He could have drawn her from here in four lines. He had never managed it in fewer than forty. There was nothing in her he could bear to leave out.

She had walked around her aircraft like that the first time too. Same ship, same deck. He had stood about here and watched her do it, and thought there was all the time in the world.

There hadn't been. He knew exactly how much there had been, to the day.

This time he wasn't going to be anything to her. That was the price. He had sworn it to himself, and as prices went it was cheap: four aircraft at dusk, all of them coming home.

Everson had his head out of the cockpit of the next aircraft and was shouting something at her across the wind. Ray couldn't hear what. He saw Kate stop at the wingtip and tip her head back and laugh.

He had lost that. He hadn't known until now. He remembered nearly everything about the first time, the worst of it best; her face at the end he had drawn so often he could do it without looking. But somewhere he had lost the sound of her laughing, and here it was, coming down two hundred feet of cold deck on the wind, the whole of it, as if it had never been gone.

Ray stood very still until it was over.

Somebody came up beside him and stopped. D.D., by the hair, which had something in it out of a bottle and was losing to the wind.

Ray didn't look around. There was a minute left.

He found Ray on the flight deck at dusk.

Not in the hangar, where he usually was at that hour with Dutch and the aircraft, and not in the ready room. On the deck, by the island, in the cold, with the sun going down red behind the ship and the wind coming down the deck hard enough to make D.D.'s eyes water. He was standing with his hands at his sides, not doing anything at all.

D.D. came up beside him and stopped.

Ray didn't look around. He was looking across the deck toward the far end of the line, where Queen's four aircraft were chained down in a row with the last of the light on them.

D.D. was thinking about the light.

It was extraordinary light. Red and low and coming in flat across the deck from behind the ship, so that every aircraft on the line had a long shadow and a bright edge, and so did the man beside him: the side of his face lit red and the rest in shadow, and an expression on it, looking down the deck, that D.D. had spent six weeks trying to catch on camera and never once managed.

He watched it the way he watched anything he wanted to shoot, which was to say very closely and entirely for the wrong reasons.

The dog had come up the deck from somewhere and sat down against Ray's boots. It looked up at him, and then down the deck where he was looking, and then up at him again, with its ears flat in the wind, and leaned its whole weight against his shins. Ray didn't look down. One hand found the dog's head without needing to look for it, and stayed there.

If I had a camera, D.D. thought, with a pang so professional it was almost physical. If I had a camera, right now, that's the poster.

He stood beside Ray for nearly a minute, framing it in his head. Ray didn't seem to know he was there.

Then, at the end of the minute, Ray turned his head.

“D.D.”

“Evening,” said D.D. He cleared his throat. “Have you got a minute? I've got something I'd like to ask you. You can say no.”

Ray looked at him.

D.D. told him. He told it the way he had told Pike, plainly: the folder, the cartoon, the summary from ashore. He said public confidence, and heard how it sounded, and went on anyway. He said one photograph, and not your name, and something under it that tells the truth without telling all of it. He was, he knew, at his most earnest. He had been told that it was his best quality and his worst, often by the same people.

Ray listened to all of it without moving.

“No,” he said.

D.D. had expected that. He opened his mouth to go on.

“Nobody wants to see my face,” said Ray.

D.D. shut his mouth again.

It was, by a distance, the most words he'd had out of the man in a month that weren't a callsign or a heading. Ray said it quite simply, the way he might have said that the wind was from the north: as a fact about the world, long since established, of no particular interest to anyone.

D.D. had been waiting for this. He hadn't known it, but he had been waiting for it since yesterday afternoon, when a Marine captain in a white jacket had looked at a print on his desk for three seconds and asked for one, and he found that he had his answer ready, the way you have your hand ready on a door you know is about to open.

“Actually,” he said, “I've had requests.”

Ray looked at him.

D.D. didn't say who. He didn't mention the drawer in his desk, either, or what was in it, or how many copies of it there now were in the world. He only waited.

He had thought it wouldn't move Ray, and it didn't. But it landed somewhere. For a second, in the red light, Ray looked at him with an expression D.D. had never seen on him before and would not have predicted: plain, open bafflement, as if D.D. had told him something in a language he had not known D.D. spoke. As if it had never once occurred to him, in his whole life, that he might be someone people looked at.

The wind came down the deck. It did a number of things to D.D.'s hair, which had taken forty minutes that morning and was holding up under the circumstances. It lifted Ray's, which had not been touched by anything but a helmet since breakfast, and dropped it again across his forehead, and improved it.

He really doesn't know, D.D. thought. And then, with real feeling: howabsurd.

He tried again. He talked about the camps, and the factories, and about Theve, where people sat behind blackout curtains under the occupation with the sound turned down and listened to the Federation's broadcasts for news of him. He talked about morale, which was a word he hated and used anyway. He talked about the children. He had seen, in a newsreel from one of the camps, a whole wall covered with children's drawings of a gray aircraft over the sea, a hundred of them, all slightly wrong, because nobody had ever shown the children what the man inside it looked like. A hero you can't see, said D.D., is a hero people stop believing in.

“No,” said Ray.

He said it quite gently. He wasn't angry. He simply didn't seem to think there was anything to discuss.

D.D. stood in the cold with his hands in his pockets and the wind in his face, and felt the whole thing slipping away from him, and heard himself say the one thing he hadn't meant to. The thing that wasn't his.

“They're looking for Cope.”

Ray went still.

D.D. had seen him go still before, from a distance, in briefings, on footage. He had never seen it this close. It was like standing next to an engine when it stops: you don't notice the noise until it isn't there.

“The Sotoans,” said D.D. He kept his voice low, though there was nobody within fifty feet of them. “Every paper. Every broadcast. Where is Jan Cope? They know the man flying isn't him. They want to know where he is.” He swallowed. “And his face is on every wall in the Federation.” A pause. “I put it there.”

Ray didn't move. D.D. couldn't see his face properly in what was left of the light. He could only see the stillness.

“I asked him,” said D.D. “This afternoon. Before I came to you. It's his face; I couldn't do it without asking.” He looked at Ray. “He said to tell you it's all right. He said you'd understand the rest.”

Down the deck, Kate had finished her walk-around and was standing at the wingtip of her aircraft with her helmet under her arm, saying something to Cruz. The light was almost gone.

“If they've got my face,” said Ray at last, slowly, “they stop looking at his.”

“Yes,” said D.D.

Ray was quiet a moment longer.

“One photograph,” he said. “Not the cockpit. Not close.”

D.D. would have agreed to anything. He would have agreed to a photograph taken from the island through a fog bank. He nodded, fast, not trusting his voice.

Ray looked at him. Then he looked back down the deck, once, briefly, toward the far end of the line, and away again, and went past D.D. to the island door without another word.

D.D. stayed on the deck in the dark after he'd gone.

He thought about Pike. If he says yes, I'd like to know why.

He thought he knew. It was for Cope. It was obviously for Cope. He had seen Ray's face go still at the name, and that was the reason, and it was a good one, and it was true.

And tomorrow, if the light held, he'd have his poster.

He took it the next evening, at the same hour, from the same place by the island.

He had thought about it all day. Where to put him, what to have him wearing, what to have behind him. He had drawn small diagrams on the back of a signal form, and crossed them out, and drawn more. He had thought about the deck at dawn, the way he'd done Cope, and decided against it, because dawn was Cope's, and this needed to be something else.

In the end he used none of it. He went up at dusk with one camera and no plan, and found Ray standing by his aircraft near the island with his helmet under his arm, waiting, the way a man waits for a dentist. And D.D. looked at him standing there, at the gray Super Hornet behind him, at the last of the red light on the deck and the sea going dark beyond it, and put the camera up, and said, “Just stand there. Don't look at me. Look at whatever you like.”

Ray didn't look at him. He turned his head, very slightly, toward the sea. Toward the far end of the deck.

D.D. took one frame.

He knew it was the one before he had lowered the camera. He had known that perhaps five times in his life. For six weeks he had been trying to catch the thing everybody saw in the flying, the thing in the canyon and on the runway and over the board with nothing left on it, and he had never once got it, because it wasn't in the aircraft. It was here. A young man standing by a gray jet at dusk with his helmet under his arm, half turned toward the sea, his face in profile and partly in shadow, looking at something a long way off. As if he had been looking for it for years. As if he had found it, and couldn't go to it.

He thought it was the sea. He thought, afterward, looking at it on the monitor in his little office, that it was the most beautiful photograph of the sea he had ever taken.

At the far end of the deck, out of the frame, Kate Evans was standing at the wingtip of her aircraft with her helmet under her arm, turning to say something to Cruz.

It was not the photograph in his drawer. He put the two side by side on the desk that night, out of honesty, and looked at them.

They ought to have been the same photograph. The same man, the same deck, the same sea; he was looking out at it in both. But in the one from the drawer, at first light, with the dog against his leg, he was looking at it the way you look at a door you have been told someone will come through: not hopefully, exactly, but as if he had been sitting there a long time and meant to go on sitting there whether or not they ever did. It was the loneliest photograph D.D. had ever taken, and he had taken it of a man surrounded by five thousand people.

In this one the waiting was over. That was the difference, and once D.D. had seen it he could not stop seeing it. Whatever the man had been watching for at first light, he was looking at it now.

It was the sea, D.D. decided. Or it was what the sea was for: the coast beyond it, and the camps, and the country, and the man in sickbay whose name was going under the photograph.

A man looking at the thing he would die for.

D.D. thought that was exactly right, and that it was what a poster ought to be, and that he would never in his life manage to light a face like that on purpose.

He had no difficulty choosing between the photos, in the end.

He wrote the caption at two in the morning.

He wrote a great many. THE WINGS OF THEVE. He took up the name so it would not fall. Too long. THE WINGS OF THEVE. The name lives. Too much like a gravestone. THE WINGS OF THEVE. Still flying. That was the Sotoans' joke turned around, and it was good, and it wasn't enough.

He sat with the print in front of him and the pen in his hand.

Then he wrote it, and knew.

THE WINGS OF THEVE. Onward, in his name.

He looked at it. Four words under the title.

You could read them as a caption: this is the man who flies on in Cope's name.

Or you could read them the other way, as an exhortation, the kind of thing you would shout down a line of men before they went over the top: onward, in his name.

He had meant both. He found he couldn't have said which he meant more.

His. Lowercase. He thought about capitalizing it, and didn't.

Whose name? Cope's, of course. A man who had been hurt saving the Federation, and a man who had taken up his name so that it wouldn't fall. That was what D.D. meant by it. That was the true story.

But you could read it other ways. You could read his as the Federation's, the country's name, carried onward. You could read it, if you were the kind of person who did, and there were a great many of those in the camps, as something larger than a country. D.D. sat with the pen over the page and thought about capitalizing it, and thought about the children's drawings on the wall in the newsreel, and the old women in the factories, and left it exactly as it was.

People would read it the way they needed to. Whether they heard the his with a capital letter was in the ear of the beholder.

He thought it was the best thing he had ever written. He thought it might be the only true thing he had written since the war began.

He went to bed at four and slept for the first time since Faith Park.

It went out the next day with the long cut of Faith Park, on every frequency the Federation had and a good many it didn't, and across the lines.

In the cities still in Federation hands it went up on the walls by evening, over the old posters, so that in some streets you could see the edge of Jan Cope's grin still showing underneath, at the corner, where the paste hadn't quite covered it. In the camps they passed it from tent to tent. In a newsreel a child held a copy so big she could barely lift it, and looked at the face for a while, and said to the camera, very seriously, he's sad, and the newsreel cut away.

Aboard Endurance, somebody pinned a copy up in the wardroom, beside the urn. Nobody ever found out who. Marlow, everyone assumed. Marlow said nothing, which everyone took as confirmation.

Kate Evans came in for coffee at six that evening and stopped in front of it.

She looked at it for exactly as long as she would have looked at anyone's photograph. Perhaps a little less. Then she poured her coffee and took it to Queen's table and sat down, very upright, and drank it, and said to nobody in particular that it was a perfectly adequate photograph and she didn't see what all the fuss was about.

Everson looked up from his plate with an expression of perfect innocence.

“You could probably get it signed, Lead,” he said. “If you asked.”

“Personally inscribed,” he went on, warming to it. “To Kate. Watching your six. Always.”

Cruz hid a smile in his cup. Nguyen said nothing. He looked at his coffee.

Kate didn't look up from the stack of maintenance cards in front of her. “He'd have to look at me first,” she said briskly, and initialed the top card, and turned it over, and went on to the next, with the air of a woman who has disposed of a thing entirely.

The three of them looked at each other over the top of her head.

At the end of the table, there was a very small click from Nguyen's breast pocket.

Ray never looked at it. Not once. He came in and out of the wardroom every day for a month with the photograph on the wall beside the urn, and walked past it every time with his eyes on something else, as if it were a picture of a man he had never met.

It could not go up on the walls in Theve. It went into Theve anyway, the way things did: folded small, in a coat lining, in the bottom of a basket under the vegetables, passed hand to hand in occupied streets where the Wings of Theve was a name you did not say aloud. On the third night somebody pasted one to the wall of the old post office in the square. A Sotoan patrol had it down by morning. The next night it was back.

In Sotoa it was in the papers by the next morning.

On the other side of the war, on the evening the papers came, Girish Toprak sat in the back of a staff car on the gravel outside Lux Lunae's headquarters and didn't get out.

It was late. The headquarters was a big cold administrative block on the edge of the main field, built for a wing three times the size of the one that used it now, and at this hour it was dark from end to end except for one window on the second floor. Behind the car the flight line was lit and empty, the dark aircraft standing in their rows under the floodlights with the white moons on their tails, and no one walking around them.

Serdar had driven him back from the line. Serdar Qusa, Shadow 23, who had flown on Toprak's wing since the border war and had a face like a closed door and gray in his hair that he claimed was entirely Toprak's fault. He had switched the engine off and was sitting in the driver's seat with his hands on the wheel, waiting, the way he had waited on Toprak for fifteen years.

Toprak was looking up at the lit window.

He could see her in it. A shape against the lamp: Carmille in her chair, at the window, not moving. There was something in her lap. He couldn't see what it was from here. He knew.

The papers had been in the mess all afternoon. The intercept people had sent copies across from the Federation side, the way they sent everything, and somebody had pinned one to the board by the bar, as a joke. Their new ghost. A gray Hornet at dusk. A young man with his helmet under his arm, half turned away, with a face nobody in the mess had ever seen. And underneath, in the Federation's careful lettering: Onward, in his name.

Toprak hadn't looked at the face. He had read the caption, and turned around, and walked out of the mess, and sent for the car. Behind him, somebody had laughed. He would remember who.

He knew what she would read in it, because he had read it too, standing in front of the board by the bar. In his name, the way you put a dead man's name on a ship, or a school.

It meant that the Federation had stopped pretending.

Jan Cope was dead, and they had handed his name to some boy in a gray Hornet, like a flight jacket that would do for the next man. Toprak had gone after that name three times. He had taken it over a bridge, through the flares, and it had cost him Serkan Bulut, and Ali Rıza's flying. He hadn't expected them to pass it on.

He had been killing Federation pilots since the first morning of the war. He had a number, and he knew it exactly, and nobody else in the wing was within half of it. The sky belonged to whoever was strongest in it, as it should. It was the only place left where nobody could argue with that, or vote on it, or print it on a poster.

A name could be passed on. Flying couldn't. Somewhere on that carrier was a boy who'd been told he was the Wings of Theve, and had perhaps begun to believe it, and Toprak found that he was looking forward, quite a lot, to correcting him.

She had been saying it for a month. Every night, in the wood-paneled room, in front of every Federation broadcast: It isn't him. It doesn't fly like him. They're lying. He's dead. She had said it the way you argue with someone: angry, flat, certain. As if, by being certain enough, she could make them admit it and be done.

They had admitted it. And now she was sitting at her window with the paper in her lap, and the lamp on, and everyone else gone home.

“She knows,” said Toprak.

Serdar didn't answer.

Toprak sat looking at the window. He knew what she would say, if anyone asked her. He knew it the way he knew the sound of her chair in a corridor. She'd say it in her formal careful Usean, or her plain frontier Sotoan, and she'd mean it, or try to.

It was war. The Federation's best pilot had merited nothing less than an order from her own wing, signed in her own hand: to find the Wings of Theve and bring him down.

It had been a good order, the best she ever gave: her best pilot against theirs. He had done it, and it was the finest thing he had ever done in the air, and he would not pretend otherwise to her or to anyone.

She knew all of that. She would never once, he thought, say otherwise. Not to him. Not to anyone.

“She'll never forgive me for killing him,” said Toprak.

He said it quietly. He didn't take his eyes off the window.

Serdar was a long time answering. In the dark of the car Toprak could hear him breathing, slow and even, the way he breathed on a long patrol.

“She doesn't blame you, Colonel,” said Serdar at last. “She gave the order.”

“I know,” said Toprak.

He watched the shape in the window. It hadn't moved.

“That's why,” he said.

He sat a while longer. Then he opened the door, and got out into the cold, and went in. Past the night sentry, who came to attention and was ignored, and up the stairs two at a time, and along the dark corridor to the door with the light under it.

She was at the window. She didn't turn around when he came in. The paper was in her lap, folded so that the photograph was on top, and beside her on the sill her tea had gone cold with a skin on it.

He didn't look at the photograph. He looked at her.

He didn't say anything about it. Neither did she.

He took the cold cup off the sill and went out with it, down the corridor to the little galley at the end where the duty clerks made their tea, and made a fresh pot the way she liked it, with too much sugar, and brought it back on a tray with the day's patrol reports tucked under the teapot. He set the cup on the sill beside her. He put the reports on her desk.

“General,” he said.

“Colonel.” She didn't turn around. Her voice was level; it was the voice she used in briefings. “Is that tomorrow's line?”

“Tomorrow's line. And the 55th's fuel figures, which are a disgrace, and a signal from Fatsia about the council escort that you're going to want to throw out of the window.”

“Leave them.” A pause. “No. Sit down. We'll do them now.”

He sat in the hard chair across the desk from her, where he always sat. Before she turned her chair from the window, she folded the paper. She did it slowly, with great care, along its own creases, so that the photograph was on the inside and the caption was hidden, and smoothed it flat with the side of her hand, and laid it in the top drawer of her desk, and closed the drawer.

They did the patrol line. They did the fuel figures, which were a disgrace, and which would go on being a disgrace for some time. The refinery at Faith Park had fed the whole northern front, and the depot beside it had fed the refinery, and there was neither now; and the 55th's MiG-31s, which were the thirstiest aircraft in the wing, felt it first. Toprak had never thought much of the 55th. They flew the fastest aircraft in the wing in straight lines, as if speed were a kind of skill. Toprak had already cut their patrol hours by a third. He would have to cut them again by the end of the week, and he said so, and she agreed, and initialed the order. Neither of them said aloud whose doing it was.

They did the signal from Fatsia, and she did not, quite, throw it out of the window, though she read the last paragraph aloud in a voice that made him laugh once in spite of himself. She drank the tea. He watched her drink it, all of it, and said nothing.

They worked until a little after midnight. Neither of them mentioned the photograph, or the caption, or the bridge, or the name. The drawer stayed shut the whole time, a hand's breadth from her elbow.

At the end she signed the last of the reports and pushed it across to him, and he took it, and stood up.

“Goodnight, Colonel,” she said.

“Goodnight, General.”

At the door he stopped, with his hand on the frame. There were things a man might say at a door like that. Toprak had killed the best pilot in the Federation on her order, and was not sorry, and would not insult either of them by pretending.

He went down the stairs, past the sentry, out into the cold. Serdar had the engine running before he reached the car.

“Home, Colonel?”

“Home,” said Toprak.

He didn't look back at the window. He knew she would be sitting at it for a long time yet, with the lamp on and the drawer open, and that she would not want anyone, least of all him, to see her do it.