Chapter Text
The Hornet pilot still hadn't said anything.
Jenkins let two waves pass beneath the raft before leaning over to touch his shoulder, having decided that this was a reasonable interval for checking on someone without making a nuisance of himself. The man hadn't complained about the previous checks, but neither had he responded to them, and Jenkins would have preferred a little irritation to the steady breathing on which he was presently basing all his medical conclusions.
“Hey,” he said, and gave the shoulder a careful shake. The pilot's head shifted against the yellow rubber, exposing a scrape at his hairline, but his eyes stayed shut. Jenkins watched his chest rise and fall, then withdrew his hand and settled back into the scant space available to him.
There was water under their boots. Each time the raft tilted, it carried a piece of orange packaging from one end to the other, where it lodged against the pilot's heel before setting off on the return journey. Jenkins had tucked it under a seam twice already; he was beginning to take its persistence personally. Beyond it, beyond the pilot's shoulder and the low yellow side of the raft, the coast was burning. Separate columns of smoke rose from places he couldn't distinguish at this distance, their dark heads spreading together until it was difficult to remember that there ought to be towns beneath them.
“You ought to have a look,” he said. “Last of the Federation. Quite a view.”
The man continued breathing, which was something, and Jenkins rubbed his face with hands that smelled of fuel. He had spent much of his life trying to get that smell out of his skin before meals, with limited success, but he would happily have put up with it now if there had been a meal at the end of the day and somewhere to wash first. Three months ago there had been both. He'd had a hangar, a desk he could never find under the paperwork, and people who came to him when they needed something fixed. Purple Magic's pilots had come particularly often, bringing faults, apologies, and elaborate explanations of why the aircraft should have been able to tolerate whatever they'd just done to it.
Bird could make an explanation last longer than the inspection it was intended to prevent. Jenkins had once kept him in the hangar while they did the inspection anyway, and remembered with considerable satisfaction how the man had run out of things to say after twenty minutes. He'd asked whether he could sit down, then whether there was any coffee, then whether Jenkins needed him to stay for the rest of it. Jenkins had fetched him a chair and kept him until lunch. They'd complained about that for weeks, but still brought him their aircraft, and at the time he'd imagined this arrangement could go on indefinitely.
“Five helicopters,” he told the pilot, holding up his fingers before remembering that the man's eyes were closed. “That's how many I've been on since July. Every time, somebody's found us a place to set up properly. Get the tools out, unload the spares, get back to work. First place, we didn't even open all the boxes.”
He braced his heel against the floor as the raft rose, letting the motion pass through him before continuing. He knew each move well enough to describe the workshops they'd been promised and the ones they'd actually received, the equipment borrowed from people who insisted they would need it back, the orders that arrived before he'd managed to return any of it. By the third retreat his crew had stopped putting things away neatly, and by the fourth he'd stopped correcting them. There were men he'd meant to speak to before they scattered at the last airfield, matters he'd been saving for a quieter moment. He tried to remember whether he'd at least told them where he was going.
“Fourth one crashed,” he said. “Walked away from that. And now this.”
He looked down at the pilot's hands, loose in his lap, and at the swelling over the knuckles of one. A bearing gave you something to listen for when it was failing. Jenkins knew how to distinguish a vibration that would bring an aircraft home from one that meant the pilot should land wherever he could, immediately, and he'd explained the difference to enough stubborn men to be confident of his judgment. Here he had only a scraped forehead and breathing that sounded all right, while the person who might have told him otherwise lay there with his eyes shut.
“Come on,” Jenkins said, touching his shoulder again. “Don't leave me doing all the talking.”
The pilot drew a deeper breath. Jenkins kept his hand where it was, hopeful for a moment, then sat back when nothing followed. “Suit yourself,” he said, although it had very little to do with anyone's preferences. He stretched one leg as far as he could, drew it in again when the raft shifted, and looked up at the clear sky above the smoke.
Somewhere, if the broadcasts could be believed, the Wings of Theve was still in it. Jenkins had thought about that pilot more than once while loading equipment onto helicopters: the victories, the escapes, the aircraft that apparently kept going through all of them. Someone had to be servicing its hydraulics and changing its tires. He'd have liked to meet the mechanic, compare notes, find out whether a famous ace could describe an intermittent fault any better than Bird. At present he'd have settled for a flypast and a radio call to someone with a boat.
“Where's your famous Wings, then?” he asked. “Could do with a little of that luck down here.”
The pilot sat up so abruptly that Jenkins caught the raft's side to keep his balance. Water sluiced around their boots, and the man's injured hand closed on the grab line with a force that must have hurt him. His eyes were wide open now, fixed on the sea beyond Jenkins, and his breathing had quickened until Jenkins could hear it over the slap of the waves.
“Easy,” he said. “We're afloat. Look at me.”
The man turned from the burning coast, glanced down at his own chest, and finally looked at Jenkins. There was something searching in the way his eyes moved over Jenkins's face, pausing at his forehead and mouth as though the scrape of a razor or a missing tooth might have settled a question. Jenkins had seen pilots frightened after crashes, and most of them tried to tell you what had happened even when you weren't the person they ought to be telling. He was preparing to listen when the man's expression changed, leaving him with the uncomfortable conviction that he'd already answered something.
“That's it,” Jenkins said. “You're all right.”
He couldn't have defended the diagnosis. The pilot looked as if he might be sick, or start crying, and Jenkins was trying to decide how to accommodate either possibility in a raft where they were already sitting on each other's feet. But he'd recognized him. Jenkins had been recognized by strangers before; his name traveled with the aircraft he'd worked on, and Purple Magic were generous about recommending him to other people's maintenance crews. Usually a pilot thanked him and supplied a tail number so they could establish what for. None of those encounters had prepared him for being looked at with this much relief.
“We've met?” he asked.
The man opened his mouth without answering. His grip eased, and he laid his other hand against the raft, fingers spread over the rubber, before looking back toward the coast. Jenkins followed his gaze. The smoke hadn't changed much; a little more of the shore was hidden, perhaps, although he couldn't have said which part. When he looked back, the pilot was watching him again, and the orderly way he seemed to be examining everything troubled Jenkins more than the panic had. He'd looked at the raft, at the land, at Jenkins himself, with the care of someone checking that things were where he'd left them.
For a moment Jenkins had the absurd impression that the man knew this particular patch of sea, that he had expected to find himself here and was still getting used to having been right. It was an impression he couldn't explain even to himself. They'd both been here the whole time, and the man had every reason to be confused after whatever blow he'd taken to the head.
“What's your—” he began, but a helicopter emerged above the smoke before he could finish.
He was on his knees waving before he'd properly heard the engines, nearly upsetting the raft in his efforts to make them visible. “Oh, you beauty,” he said, then looked down to find the pilot gazing up at the aircraft with his hands still on the rubber. “Come on. Give them a hand. Let them see there's two of us.” The man raised an arm, and Jenkins caught his shoulder as the downwash reached them, flattening the water and throwing spray into their faces. There was a crewman at the open door, with a helmet and rescue equipment and a place for them to sit behind him. Jenkins began thinking of a doctor for the pilot and dry clothes for himself, and only then allowed himself to hope for coffee.
“One more ride,” he said. The pilot looked at him quickly, but the rescue swimmer was already descending, and Jenkins had to let go of his shoulder to help.