Chapter 18Retaking of Theve II

Coster, Jenkins, Baxter, Venn

Queen had been happy for ten days, and it was beginning to get on Coster's nerves.

He didn't begrudge them. He would have liked to say that clearly, to anyone who asked: he didn't begrudge them in the least. Faith Park had been the best day the ship had had since the war began. The valley was ash, the battleship's supply line was cut, nobody had so much as a scratch, and the whole of Endurance had spent ten days walking around as if somebody had let the sun in. The galley had produced a second cake without being asked. Jenkins had been seen to smile. D.D. had put out the solar-field footage, the mirrors going up one after another in long glittering bursts, and somebody had pinned a still of it in the wardroom with QUEEN DID THIS written underneath in Everson's handwriting.

So it was only natural that Queen should be in the Joker ready room after supper, with their boots on the table, being insufferable.

“Forty miles,” Everson was saying. “Forty miles of canyon. On his own.”

“We know, Chester,” said Cruz.

“At a hundred feet.”

“Fifty in places,” said Nguyen, who had heard it from Jenkins and had been waiting all day to say so.

“Fifty in places.” Everson put his hands behind his head and gazed at the ceiling with an expression of great contentment. “And the Ladon. Going off the end of the runway. I didn't even know there was a Ladon. Did you know there was a Ladon?”

“Nobody knew there was a Ladon,” said Cruz.

“He knew there was a Ladon.”

“He circled it on the board,” said Cruz. “I was there. One circle. Didn't say a word.”

“Didn't say a word,” Everson agreed happily. “That's the thing. God, I'd love to see it. I'd give a month's pay to see that canyon from the cockpit.” He sat up and swung around in his chair toward the corner, where Coster was sitting with a cold cup of coffee and his brother's record player on the table in front of him, not playing anything. “Noise. You've been down to D.D.'s. Everybody says. Have you seen the tape?”

Coster looked at his coffee.

He had seen the tape. He had seen it at half past one in the morning in a room the size of a closet, and he had watched forty miles of red rock go past a canopy at fifty feet. He had watched the frame loosen over the western ridge like somebody breathing out, and snap straight again at the sound of Tasha's voice. He had watched himself, small and whole on the far side of a valley, and heard the breath let out afterward by the man who had crossed that valley to keep him that way.

And before that, though nobody in this room knew it, he had sat in a hangar at Drinwich and turned the pages of a gray notebook until he came to a laughing man with a cup, and a tired woman in a wheelchair.

“Yeah,” he said.

“And?” said Everson. “Worth seeing?”

They were all looking at him now. Cruz with his feet on the table. Nguyen with his chart. Everson leaning forward, bright-eyed, like a kid outside a movie theater. They had seen the White Valley footage, and some of Theve. Cruz had told him once, in a passageway, in a voice Coster hadn't understood at the time, that they'd come out of D.D.'s office that night looking as if they'd seen a ghost. And here they were, wanting more. People were like that. The dreadful things wore off and the wonderful things stayed, and that was probably how anyone got through a war at all.

“Yeah,” Coster said. His voice didn't come out right. He tried again. “The canyon. You won't believe it. I didn't.” He tapped the cup twice, off the beat. “Most beautiful thing I've ever seen.”

That was true. It was all true. He just couldn't make it sound the way it should.

Everson beamed. Cruz looked at him a moment longer than the others did.

Across the room, Tasha had looked up from the Growler manual she'd been pretending to read. She just watched him, with her head a little on one side, the way she watched a radar she didn't trust.

“And the rest?” said Nguyen.

Coster opened his mouth, and didn't know what was going to come out of it, and was saved by the door.

It was Pike. She had a folder under her arm and the particular stillness she brought into rooms when there was going to be an operation. Queen took their boots off the table. Everson sat up straight. Pike looked around at all of them, and at Coster in his corner, and for a moment, Coster thought afterward, she looked at him longer than at anyone else.

“Good,” she said. “You're all here. Saves me a walk.” She put the folder on the table. “Operation Gut Shot. We're going back to Theve.”

The plan, when she had finished explaining it, was simple, and Coster hated every word of it.

Xanthos was sitting in a frozen river valley forty miles south of White Valley. It had been sitting there for weeks, waiting for the supplies from Faith Park that hadn't come and now never would. And as long as it sat there, its gun could reach Theve. Theve couldn't be retaken with that gun on the horizon. Everybody on Endurance had learned that on a black beach, with eight boats turning for home.

So it had to be moved. And there was one thing in the north that Sotoa wanted more than it wanted to sit on Theve.

“At Faith Park I told you there was something at White Valley the Sotoans wanted very badly,” Pike said. “As of this morning I'm cleared to tell you what. There's a cannery up there, as some of you know."

"What you don't know is, that cannery is a weapons factory, and it has been building a weapon to kill land battleships.” She let that sit. “It's nearly finished. Sotoa knows. As of last night Xanthos is moving north to destroy it before it's ready.”

Coster thought of Purple Magic, up at White Valley.

“And that means that for the first time since the summer,” said Pike, “the capital is out of range of its gun.”

“The landing goes in the moment it's committed,” she said. “At night. There's cloud forecast down to two thousand feet, and we'll take all of it.”

She put up the map: Theve, the river, the waterfront, two arrows coming in from the sea.

Further in, between the heads of the arrows and the beach, there were five red marks in a cross: one out in front, one on either side, one astern, and a big one in the middle. Pike didn't touch them. “Two ground groups. The Marines from Stalwart take the waterfront and push for the regional headquarters. The Army goes in up the river and holds the bridges. Eight landing craft, the same eight. Lieutenant Venn has them again.”

Somebody at the Queen end let out a breath.

“Queen has the boats. Joker has everything that wants to stop them. Jackpot will be in under you from Dauntless.” Pike's finger moved east along the shore, to a block of gray outlined in red. “And this you leave alone. That's Enso's research complex. It's neutral ground, by treaty, and it's lit up like a hotel, and you will not put so much as a cannon round inside the line. If anything shoots at you from in there, you call it, and you go round.”

“Is anything likely to?” said Baxter.

“Command says not.” Pike's voice didn't change. “Command has been wrong before.”

She turned the page.

“And somebody has to keep Xanthos busy when it gets to White Valley. Keep it shooting at White Valley, instead of thinking about where it's just come from.” She looked down at the order. She read it in the voice she used for things she would rather not be reading. “Purple Magic will engage Land Battleship Number One on its approach to White Valley. Purple Magic will delay the enemy's advance by all means available, until relieved or until the Theve objective is secured.”

By all means available.

Coster had been a pilot for nine years. He knew what by all means available meant, in an operation order. It meant we don't expect them back.

Nobody looked at him. It was the kindest thing they could have done, and they all did it at once, Queen and Joker together, the way a flight breaks on a single call. Everson, who five minutes ago had been gazing at the ceiling, was studying the table. Cruz had his hands clasped between his knees. Tasha had put the manual down.

Ray was standing just inside the door. Coster hadn't seen him come in. He must have come in behind Pike. He wasn't looking at the order, or at Pike. He was looking at Coster.

“Questions,” said Pike.

There were questions. Times, frequencies, tanker tracks, the cloud. Nobody asked about the five red marks off the beach. Nobody asked what happened if Xanthos didn't stay at White Valley. Coster noticed that afterward, going over it. The whole plan rested on a battleship staying busy at White Valley for long enough, and nobody in the room asked what happened when it was finished there.

Ray didn't ask either. But when Pike had finished, and the room began to empty, he was still standing inside the door. And he was still looking at Coster.

Coster read the order again at three in the morning, alone, in the Joker ready room. He read it three times. Then he sat with it in his lap.

Four Eagles against a thing the size of a town. A railgun that had taken the top off a ridge at Theve from twenty miles away. Missile batteries, flak, and the four of them told to keep it busy for as long as it took.

He had a new letter from Bird in his breast pocket, two days old. It said they've doubled the guard again, and nobody tells us anything, which, fine, we're a rock band, nobody's ever told us anything, and if you hear something, Noise, tell me.

He had heard something. He couldn't tell him.

At half past three he gave up and went looking for Ray.

He tried Ray's cabin first, then the wardroom. It took him twenty minutes to think of the hangar deck. Ray was down there under the work lights, sitting on the deck beneath the nose of his Super Hornet with his head back against the nosewheel, staring at the jet parked next to his. It was Queen One's. The handlers parked jets wherever there was room, so that was probably a coincidence. Probably. The dog was asleep against his leg.

Ray didn't look around. Coster stood there for a while, and then he cleared his throat.

Ray's head came around. The dog woke, got up, considered Coster, and came over and lay down across his boots, heavily, and stayed there. Coster bent and put a hand on it without deciding to.

“Couldn't sleep,” said Coster.

Ray's eyes went to the order in his hand, and then, for a second, back to Queen One's jet, as if he'd been caught at something. Then he waited.

“Faith Park,” Coster said. “The return line. It's not enough, you said.” He turned the paper over. “Were you thinking about this? Then?”

Ray took a while to answer.

“It's been waiting for supplies for a month,” he said. “It hasn't had any. Every shell it fires tonight is one it can't replace.” A pause. “It came out of that valley with less than it needs.”

“How do you know?”

Ray didn't answer that.

“How long?” said Coster. “Before it runs dry. How long do they have to hold it?”

Ray looked at him. Coster had never seen his face like that, with something underneath it, held very hard, pulling at the edges.

“Not as long as it thinks,” he said.

It wasn't an answer either. Coster knew it wasn't. But it was the closest thing to hope he'd been given since Pike put the folder on the table, and he held on to it with both hands.

Jenkins was not, as a rule, a man who laughed at pilots. He'd spent too long fixing what they did to his aircraft to find them funny.

He laughed at this one. He couldn't help it.

“How many?”

Ray told him again.

Jenkins stopped laughing. Ray was standing at the foot of the Super Hornet with his helmet under his arm and the dog at his heel, at seven in the morning, eighteen hours before launch, and he wasn't joking. Ray never joked. Jenkins wasn't sure he knew how.

“Lieutenant,” he said, “that airplane won't carry that. You want twelve Mavericks, and your full air-to-air, and two bags of gas? On one jet? There isn't a station left on it. She's a Super Hornet, not a pickup truck. She has limits. They're written down. I have them in a binder.”

Ray looked at the aircraft. Then at Jenkins. He waited.

Dutch had come out from under the wing. He stood with a rag in his hands, looking at the pylons, and Jenkins saw his eyes going from station to station. Counting.

“Racks,” said Dutch.

“No,” said Jenkins. “Don't say racks.”

“Drinwich had racks, Major. Triple racks, crated, from before the war. Came over with the Hornets.” Dutch didn't take his eyes off the pylons. “Four stations, three apiece. Tanks inboard. His air-to-air where it always goes.”

“Those racks are older than you are.”

“Still in the grease.”

“She'll be two tons over catapult weight. Two tons, Dutch. Near enough. I'd want that in writing. I'd want it in writing from God.”

“Then he goes off near dry,” said Dutch, “and goes straight to the tanker.”

He said it the way another man might have suggested putting the coffee on. Jenkins had worked beside Dutch for seven weeks, since the day he'd come aboard off a raft, and in seven weeks he had heard Dutch say no to plenty of people. To Jenkins, most days. To a commander who wanted to borrow his tow tractor. Once, at some length for Dutch, to the dog.

He had never once heard him say no to Ray.

He looked at Dutch. He looked at the aircraft. He looked at the man standing beside it.

“What's it for?” Jenkins said.

Ray looked at him.

“Trust me,” said Ray. And then, more quietly, in a voice Jenkins had never heard him use: “Please.”

Jenkins found he didn't have it in him to say no to that word either. He didn't think anybody on the ship would have.

“That's a two-day job,” he said, to nobody. “Thirty hours. Minimum.”

“Fourteen,” said Dutch. He was already pulling the first rack out of its crate.

It took fourteen. It took fourteen hours and two arguments with the weapons officer, and Jenkins complained through every one of them, and Dutch's entire contribution to the conversation was, once, “Torque wrench,” and once, to the dog, something Jenkins didn't catch. The catapult officer, a lieutenant commander called Ferris, looked at the figure on the weight sheet for a full minute and then signed for the launch without a word, and on his way out of the hangar he said, for the Wings of Theve, as if it were a password. Jenkins took the sheet and folded it into his breast pocket, because it was in writing, and it wasn't from God, but it would have to do.

At nine that night Jenkins stood back and looked at the Super Hornet sitting on its wheels under the hangar lights, hung with something on every station from wingtip to wingtip, and three on four of them, and felt something between pride and terror.

“If this airframe so much as creaks,” he said, and didn't finish.

“Won't creak,” said Dutch.

“How do you know?”

Dutch put his hand flat on the side of the aircraft, the way Jenkins had seen him do a hundred times, the way you'd put it on a horse, and didn't answer.

Joker went off the bow at 0040, into cloud so thick that Baxter lost the sea before his gear was up.

He hated night launches. He had hated them for twenty years, and in a lecture hall he had explained to a great many students exactly why the inner ear was not to be trusted at night, and none of that knowledge helped. The catapult flung you into nothing, and for four seconds your body insisted you were climbing like a rocket, and the instruments insisted you weren't, and you had to choose the instruments, every time, against everything that you were.

He chose the instruments. He came up through the cloud at four thousand feet into a sky so full of stars it looked spilled.

Ray had gone off ahead of him. Baxter had watched him go, from the next catapult: the gray jet sitting low on its gear under that load, the deck crew stepping back from it as if it might go off, the long shudder down the track and the jet going off the end and sinking, dropping out of sight below the deck edge for a second that went on and on, and then coming back up out of the dark over the water, climbing, slowly, slowly, on two columns of fire.

He'd launched with almost nothing in his tanks, and the two drop tanks under his wings empty. Baxter had heard Jenkins say so, in a voice like a man describing a car accident. Now he was on the tanker, a dark shape against the stars with the drogue streaming behind it, and Baxter flew up alongside in time to watch him take on fuel till the drop tanks were full and drop off and roll away, and fall in at the head of the flight as if he'd been there all along.

“Joker, Dealer. Push.”

They pushed, and twenty miles out they caught the package up. The boats first: eight long white wakes on the black sea, in two lines, with the spray standing up behind them. A hundred and forty Marines in each. Joker settled in behind them, low, at the back of everything. High on the right, Jackpot, the Harriers from Dauntless, their lights blinking. High on the left, Queen, four dark shapes against the stars.

Forty minutes to Theve. Baxter checked his fuel, and checked it again, and then looked across at Ray's jet in the starlight and did the arithmetic for him, because somebody had to.

Ray never kept anything back. At Faith Park he'd gone back across the return line on fumes and come home on less. And tonight he'd launched near dry, under a load that was burning fuel just by being carried.

“Look at them all,” said Tasha on the common, and she sounded about twelve. “They must have pulled in everyone for this! Never expected to have so many friends…”

Baxter looked round at it: the wakes below, the lights on either side, everything Command had left in the north, strung out over the sea in the dark.

“Despite the odds,” he said, “we all made it here together.”

Then Dealer, in exactly the same voice he used for everything else:

“All aircraft, Dealer. LCACs are moving on the landing sites. But enemy ships are blocking them.” Then, to Joker: “Surface contacts, twelve miles ahead of the boats. Five ships. One large.”

“Attackers inbound,” said Kate on the common, level, the way she said everything in the air. “Let's take them out before the LCACs land.”

“Protect the ground forces,” said Dealer.

Ahead of Baxter, Ray rocked his wings.

Baxter saw it in the starlight: the gray jet dipping left, then right, then left. The old signal. Follow me. He'd seen it once before, on another night, over this same water, on the way to this same beach.

Then his afterburners lit, two long blue-white flames.

Baxter's hand was already on the throttles. He took them all the way forward, through the detent, and felt the burners kick him in the back.

“Three, Four, follow us in,” he said on Joker's channel, and then there was no time to say anything else.

They went through the package together, Ray and Baxter, down low, over the top of the boats, between Jackpot on the left and Queen on the right, so close over the landing craft that Baxter saw the spray blow sideways in their wake. Then the boats were gone behind them, and there was nothing ahead but the dark between the boats and the beach.

Baxter looked for the ships. At first there was only the dark, and the cloud breaking up ahead, and under the edge of it a strip of sea gone silver where the moon had got in. He thought of the five red marks on Pike's map, between the arrows and the beach, and Pike's finger not touching them.

Then the ships came out into the moonlight with their lights out. A destroyer in front. A cruiser on either beam, and a third astern. And between them, long and flat and enormous, with its island standing up against the water like a building that had put to sea: a carrier.

“Ignis,” said Dealer. “Sotoan Navy. Fleet carrier. With Inundatio, Scissum, Marea, and one more cruiser, unidentified.” A pause. “She's turning into the wind.”

Turning into the wind. Launching. Baxter saw it happen: the long hull swinging, the deck lights coming on along her length all at once, so that for a second she was lit up in the dark like a runway. On her bow, an aircraft was already moving.

And behind him, coming on at forty knots straight for her, were the boats.

“Joker One, Two,” Baxter said. He kept his voice level. He was proud of that, afterward, for as long as he could be proud of anything about that night. “The ships. Do we take the ships first?”

Ray didn't answer.

He didn't need to. The gray jet was already going down, toward the water, toward the carrier, so low that Baxter, following, saw its wake on the sea.

Baxter would remember that, after. That there wasn't a pause. Not even the beat Ray always left before an answer, the one breath you could hear on the net. He'd been going for those ships since he rocked his wings. Since the briefing, Baxter thought later: since five red marks on a map that nobody had asked about.

Baxter went down after him, feeling like a man following somebody into a burning building.

He kept waiting for Ray's tanks to come off. Anybody's would, going into a fight like this one: you cleaned the jet up, you got your turn back. The tanks stayed where they were.

“Joker One, Two,” he said. “You've still got your tanks on. For a man who never asks for anything, that's a lot of luggage. You planning on carrying all that home?”

Kate was at eight thousand feet, high on the left of the boats, with Victor on her wing and Chester and Loc stepped up behind. A minute earlier Joker's lead pair had come through underneath her on full burner, so low over the landing craft that she'd seen the spray go up behind them, Joker One in front and Baxter behind him, already a little further behind than he'd started.

“Somebody's late for dinner,” Chester had said on Queen's channel.

“Two's dropping back,” said Loc. “Half a mile. Six-tenths.”

From up here she could see the whole of it now. The eight wakes below her. Jackpot's lights on the far side. Two pairs of blue sparks going away low over the black water ahead of the boats, the second pair still losing ground, and beyond them, under the edge of the cloud, the carrier swinging into the wind with her deck lit up.

Kate knew what a carrier turning into the wind meant. For three months it had been the whole of her job. Queen had flown fleet defense over Endurance while Cope was off being Cope, and Kate had spent those months high over her own ship, counting inbound, being the last thing between some other ship's deck and hers.

She had never once been allowed to go and hit an enemy deck itself. You didn't, with four Super Hornets and no escort. You waited for them to come to you.

The cruisers saw the two jets. The sea lit up around them: tracer from the close-in guns, a long string of it coming up off Scissum's deck, the white flash of a missile leaving Marea and curling the wrong way into the dark, because Tasha had found its radar and filled it with noise. The lead pair of sparks went straight through it, down the line of the ships, between the two beam cruisers. At six miles Joker One answered.

Four Mavericks came off his wings together and went away low across the water, and Kate watched the fires split: three for the destroyer out in front, one going on past it to the carrier.

Then four more joined it. Then four more, out past her, for the cruiser astern.

She did the arithmetic while the missiles were still in the air.

Three for a destroyer, by the book.

Four for a cruiser.

Five for the carrier, and a deck full of fueled aircraft to do the rest.

Twelve Mavericks, though. She had watched that load go past her on the deck at half past midnight, with Jenkins walking beside it like a man at a funeral, and had thought it was showing off.

The lead jet pulled up, hard, standing on its tail, tanks and all, and climbed away into the dark.

Inundatio went first. Three hits along her side, close together, and her guns stopped, and she began to roll.

Then Ignis: below the island, along her waterline aft, and then the rest of it, onto a flight deck lit up like a runway, with aircraft on it fueled and armed for launch. The one on the bow had just started its run. It never finished it.

The carrier blew up in stages, from aft forward, each explosion lifting the next, fuel and ordnance going off down the length of her hangar in a long rolling wave of fire, until the whole island stood up against a sheet of flame and leaned, and went on leaning. An aircraft that had got off the deck a minute before, a Su-33 that had been climbing out to meet them, came apart in the air above her, caught in the blast of its own ship. And astern of her, Marea took her four, and a moment later her magazine went too.

Kate had seen ships hit before. She had never seen a carrier die.

The fireball came up off the hangar deck and kept coming, past a thousand feet, past two, a column of fire standing on the sea taller than anything in Theve, and the light of it came in through her canopy and lit her instruments and her gloves. Then the shock reached her, six miles off and eight thousand feet up: one hard flat blow through the airframe, like a door slammed somewhere in the ship.

Sixty thousand tons. Every other ship on that sea had been placed to keep that one alive, a destroyer out in front and a cruiser on every side, the way you'd post a guard on the colors.

She knew how she'd have done it, if she'd been told to. Stand off. Call Jackpot in. Take the escorts apart from the outside, one at a time, with room to turn, and the carrier would have launched everything she had while Queen was doing it.

Joker One had gone in at a hundred feet, straight down the guns, between two cruisers that were both shooting at him, and held his jet as steady as a table for the seconds it took twelve seekers to lock. With his tanks on. With nothing to turn with if he'd needed to turn, and he had never meant to turn. He had gone through the guard into the middle of their fleet and torn its heart out with one pass.

She found she was gripping the stick hard enough to hurt. She wanted, badly and without any decency at all, to have been the one who had done it.

It was almost as if he'd done it for her. A knight riding out alone against the whole host with his lady's favor at his wrist, cutting his way to the heart of them, tearing it out and lifting it high, still burning, so that she, up in her tower at eight thousand feet, would know whose it was.

Which was ridiculous! Patently ridiculous. She had never given him so much as a ribbon, and surely he had never looked even once, to see whether she was watching.

It was nevertheless a very fine attack, and she would say so at the debrief, in those words. She would also say it was reckless beyond anything she had ever seen, and that nobody in Queen was to try it, ever, and she would mean both.

On every net she could hear, Federation and Sotoan, there were five or six seconds of nothing at all. The shore guns stopped. The tracer coming up off Scissum stopped. Kate would put that in her report, in a sentence the staff would cut: for five or six seconds the war stopped and looked.

Then the guns on the two beam cruisers started again, and the war went on.

Venn had eight craft on her display and a hundred and forty Marines in her troop compartment, and she could hear them over the lift fans.

It was a low noise, steady, the sound of men checking weapons they had already checked three times. Somebody was beating time on the deck with a rifle butt. Doyle, her sergeant, a big freckled man who had been aboard Craft Two the first time, stood at the cockpit door with his back to her and didn't tell anyone to stop.

They had been here before. They had sat in this compartment in the dark, under a railgun, a mile off that beach, close enough to see the waterfront, and been turned around and taken home. Every one of them brought back alive, and not one of them had thanked anybody for it. Theve was their capital. Some of them had family behind that waterfront. They had come within a mile of it and been sent away, and they'd had a long time since to think about that.

So had Venn.

One of them had the poster. She had seen it at embarkation, folded into eighths and tucked into the band of his helmet: a man by a gray aircraft at dusk, with his face half in shadow. THE WINGS OF THEVE. Onward, in his name. Half the Marines on Stalwart had one. The other half had wanted one and got there too late.

Venn didn't have a poster. The men could have their Wings. Venn had eight craft, and spray, and dark, and a beach that would be shooting at her in eleven minutes, and a score to settle on it.

She checked her boats. One, on her left, close. Three, Four and Five in line behind. Six and Seven. Eight lagging, as Eight always lagged; she'd have words with Eight's craftmaster later, if there was a later.

“Here they come,” said a woman's voice on the common.

Two jets came over the top of them from behind, very low, on afterburner, so close that the spray blew sideways off her bow, and were gone toward the coast before the noise had caught up with them. Two more came after, behind. And then the coast lit up ahead of them, the whole long dark line of it, gun flashes and the slow red climb of tracer, all of it reaching for the boats.

Then the light came.

It came from nearer than the coast. Through the spray on the windscreen she saw a carrier that had been a red mark on a chart that afternoon burning from end to end on a moonlit sea, off her right bow, between her boats and the beach, so bright it threw shadows across her cockpit.

She counted. It was what she did. Eight craft on the display, all moving. Queen high on her right, four. Three fires where ships had been. Two ships still there, still firing. Something going down into the sea on the far side of the carrier, small and burning, that had been an aircraft.

In the troop compartment, a hundred and forty Marines saw it through the ports, and roared.

The Wings, somebody was shouting. The Wings, the Wings, and somebody had the folded poster out of his helmet band and was holding it up toward the fire as if it could see. Doyle had turned around to face them, and he was roaring too.

Venn looked at the carrier burning.

There were men in the water out there. She could see them in the light of the fire, small dark shapes in the burning sea, and some of them were swimming. She watched them swim and found she had nothing for them. She'd left all of that a mile off this beach the first time, sitting in the dark with her boats turned for home.

Good, she thought. Now you know.

“Watch One,” she said, and the helmsman turned his eyes forward. “Eleven minutes. Let's go take our city back.”

The men cheered.

The flares went up from the two cruisers a minute later, white and hanging, lighting up the sea for a mile around the carrier so that the escorts she had left could find her people. Baxter wished they hadn't.

He saw the oil first, burning in long bright patches on the water. Then the shapes in it. Some of them were moving. Most of them weren't. There was a boat in the water already, one of the carrier's own, half full, and men swimming toward it through the fire, and men not swimming toward it.

And there were voices.

On guard. On the international distress frequency every set in the world was built to monitor, the one nobody could turn off. Sotoan voices, a great many of them, all at once. Somebody calling a name, over and over. Somebody giving a position in a voice that kept breaking. Somebody screaming, and the scream going on, and on, and stopping. Baxter didn't speak Sotoan. It made no difference.

He looked across for Ray.

The gray jet had come round in a long climbing turn above the burning sea and was flying level, alone, in the light of the flares. Baxter came up alongside and saw into the cockpit by the light of the fire: the dark helmet, facing forward, not moving.

On Joker's channel, Coster's voice, flat as a weather report.

“Never saw someone kill a carrier before. Feels like shooting somebody's mom.”

With Coster you could never tell if it was a joke. Nobody answered him. Then, after a moment: two clicks. Ray's. Acknowledged. As if he'd been given a fuel state.

Baxter had never in his life wanted so badly to say something and had less idea what.

He said none of it; he'd learned that much.

“Joker, Two,” he said instead, in his lecture voice, the one he used when the room had gone wrong and needed something to hold on to. “We're not done. Two cruisers, and they're still shooting at our LCACs.”

Two clicks from Ray. A copy from Tasha, steady. And Kate on the common, crisp: “Queen has the one on the right.”

“Four,” from Coster, and nothing else.

Coster rolled in on Scissum behind Baxter and put two missiles into her, and pulled off and around, clean, on the count, and the cruiser's forward guns went quiet.

The carrier was a fire behind him now. Below him the landing craft were nearly at the beach, with Queen over them. The Marines would be ashore in four minutes.

He came off the pass with his nose pointed north, toward White Valley, where there was nothing to see but cloud. Somewhere under it Purple Magic would be going to meet Xanthos. Four Eagles.

“Joker Four,” said Tasha, on Joker's channel. “Will.”

“Four.”

“You keep looking north.”

“Copy,” said Coster.

“One more pass,” Tasha said. “Then the boats are clear. That's all. That's the whole job.” A pause. “And I'm jamming. They can't see. You could do it in your sleep.”

He looked north anyway.

“Dealer, Joker Four,” he said. “Request the common.”

A pause, very short. Then Dealer's voice, flat, the voice of a man reading a plot.

“Joker Four, Dealer. You have the common.”

Coster breathed out.

He took his hands off the stick, put his knees against it and held it there, and the Super Hornet flew on straight and level over the burning water.

He got his music player out of his leg pocket, and his thumb found the switch.

A quarter of a mile off his wing, Tasha's Growler held steady in the dark, jamming, watching him.

He sat there for a second with his thumb on it, looking north.

He pressed it.

For half a second there was only the hiss of the open channel. Then the first notes went out, thin through the little player and the cable he'd made, and then louder, as somewhere behind him in the dark Dealer turned something up and gave them the whole frequency.

It went out over everything. Over the boats and the beach, and the dark shapes in the water, and the city with its lights out. Over Queen and Jackpot and a gray jet flying alone with its helmet facing forward. North, over the cloud, to White Valley, and four Eagles going to meet a battleship.

_I'm breathing shallow and my tongue is dry_

_Become a shadow as my thoughts slip by_

_Last one in the sun_

_And still the first to see morning light..._