"Jason? Can I talk to you?"
Jason glanced sideways in between strikes of the punching bag. Alternate hands and feet. "You are talking to me."
"With you listening."
Rick Shayler, all the tact of a teapot. Jason stopped at the end of the next sequence and steadied the bag, resisting the urge to snap back. It wasn't Rick's fault that G-Force was grounded, he reminded himself. Though if this was some attempt to rub his nose in it...
"Go on."
"I'm worried about Jenny. She didn't react well to the news."
"And what am I supposed to do about it?"
"I hoped you could reassure her that she's ready. Heck, I hoped you could reassure me that she's ready."
"You need to ask Grant or Sheridan. One of the people who's been training her."
"I want the truth, not the party line."
Something in his voice rang all the alarm bells in Jason's mind. The 'party line' would, of course, be that she was ready, they were all ready, everything was wonderful. Goodness only knew, Rick had played that game himself in front of the press and even black section staff, smiling and joking about how everything was wonderful in the new G-Force. They'd been falling apart at the time.
And they'd still been on active duty. Not a mention of standing them down.
He doesn't know why it's happened now. And he doesn't trust anyone else to tell him.
Jason stripped off his pads and dropped them on the bench. "Come on. I'm not discussing this in public." Outside would do. He'd come back and shower later, when he was done playing nursemaid.
.
"You're ready," he finished. "Anderson wouldn't have grounded us for any of that otherwise. Would he?"
"I guess not." Rick swallowed visibly. "Damn, I thought I was ready for this. I'm supposed to be the confident one."
Jason snorted. "Then fake it. That's what they need."
Rick glanced at him in surprise. Opened his mouth and closed it again. Came to a decision.
"Is that what you do?"
"Hell yes. It's what we all do. You never figured it out?"
"Well, yes. Be right or be wrong, but don't be unsure." His expression twisted as he looked out to sea. "It didn't occur to me that you still needed to fake it. I thought you just knew how to be right. I thought I'd be past needing to fake it by now."
"You'll never be past needing to fake it." He considered the man sitting next to him, who'd tried and failed to become an integral part of G-Force. Jason knew just how much of that was down to him. And if he was ever going to say it...
"For what it's worth? Me not using you? I couldn't be unsure so I went for being wrong. At least some of the time. It was a damn sight safer. But I had three other people who I knew I could use. You're about to have four people as inexperienced as you were under your command. You're going to have to trust them. And I don't envy you."
He left Rick staring out to sea, and headed back towards the buildings. The Kite would be fine. He hoped.
"Jason? I was looking for you."
He bit back his snarled response. Don was fragile. And Don was one of the few people with absolutely no responsibility for G-Force being grounded. He stopped and deliberately lost the glare before turning round.
"Yeah?"
"It's Jenny. Can you come talk to her?"
He snorted before he could stop himself. "About how of course she's ready to replace me? Hell no."
"How about 'of course she's ready to calculate a real jump'?"
"If she needs me to tell her that, she's not ready."
"Like you never lost your nerve."
Jason almost hit him. Anyone else would have been on the floor for saying that. But Don had been there himself. Still was. Still couldn't face the outdoors, or even an open window. For someone who'd lived to fly, it must be beyond miserable.
But he had learned to deal with everyday life. There were windows in the corridor they stood in now, though Don had stopped before he stood right next to one. There were even windows in the gym where he trained with the Kestrel.
Young Jenny had needed - still did need, in Jason's opinion - hour upon hour of sparring practice, preferably with a fellow implantee who didn't massively outsize her. Putting her and Don together had been one of his better ideas. He'd expected Mark to throw a fit, but he'd been surprisingly relaxed about it. Possibly his commander had realised that the obvious alternative candidate was himself, and hadn't much fancied being kicked round the dojo by a super-fit fifteen year old girl revelling in her implant.
Don was ideal. He'd always been short and slight, he was sufficiently out of practice that the kid had been better than him to start with, and sufficiently skilled and motivated that, from things he'd heard, she'd had a major struggle to stay better than him. She'd hit the gym, he'd hit the gym, and now she was nowhere near as far behind her team-mates as she had been, and he was back up to being worthy of the black belt he wore.
Jason hadn't considered, and probably should have done, that Don would have discussed other aspects of her training with her. Don was, after all, probably the second most naturally talented jump-pilot in ISO. Not that he'd be sharing that particular opinion with either Mark or Dylan.
Crap.
"Tell me she's ready. Then tell me how you know."
Don met his eyes, unrepentant. "She's ready, and I know because I've run the jump-simulator for her when the Raven's been unavailable. And no, I didn't ask permission."
Because you know full well you wouldn't have got it. Jason wondered whether Jenny would have realised that. Probably not.
He wouldn't have asked either.
"Okay," he said, "so what do you want me to do? She's been cleared by Grant, you realise?"
Don actually grinned. "She thinks you're the Second Coming. Possibly because some moron gave her access to the G-Force mission logs. Right now she's hysterical about the last one. I only glanced at it over her shoulder - but, Jason, what the hell were you thinking?"
Jason swore in several languages. It didn't help.
"Do you want to talk about it?"
"Hell no. Where's the kid?"
"Simulator room."
.
Jenny was sitting at the jump-calculator's training console in tears. That horrendous, red lights everywhere set of jump data was laid out in front of her on one screen, and his half-guessed last ditch solution on the other.
"I can't do it," she said without turning round. "I can't see it. I'm sorry. I know there's nobody else. But this... I can't. It isn't a solution." She gulped. "I've seen the tapes. This is what you had and this is what you jumped on. I'd have given Dylan something else, and..."
Jason sat alongside her, in the seat used by the jump-pilot. Oh, for a tenth of Mark's diplomatic tact.
"You'd have jumped with that many red lights?"
"You did, sir."
Jason sighed. Perfectly logical. From where she was sitting, which seemed to be a place without all the information.
"You must know what the real jump-equations look like?"
"You mean before we start approximating?"
"Exactly. Before we take out the negligible terms, and assume some things are constant, and other things cancel, and a whole bunch of things which are no longer true when those red lights come on."
"Oh," she said. "Oh. But I don't..."
He reached across and called up the unedited version of the equations. They took up the best part of a screen. Hideously difficult non-linear partial differential equations. Nobody could solve them analytically. The best computers on the planet struggled to solve them numerically.
The Kestrel took one look at them, made a desperate, unhappy sound, and threw up on the floor.
And Jason went to the bracelet. "G-1," he said, "I need you in the simulator room, right now."