Mark felt faintly ridiculous walking to the simulator room which was permanently set up as the flight deck of the Phoenix. Birdstyle and a stick - what must he look like? But he had to start somewhere with his bid to make it back onto the team, and a simulation where he sat in the front right seat and gave orders was far and away the easiest option, physically. It was a whole week since his implant had been rebuilt. He'd proved he could transmute, and link to the jump-drive, and control the birdstyle wings. He'd pushed his fitness training as hard and far as he possibly could in a week. The obvious next stage was trying him out with the team again. Despite Chris Johnson's obvious complete disbelief that anyone was even considering it. He'd felt so very much better when Anderson and Ivanov had rounded on the doctor and told him to think again; that an Eagle with a working implant and body was very much under consideration for reactivation regardless of his current fitness level.

Even so, a full mission simulation had come up on his schedule far sooner than he'd anticipated. Sooner, he suspected, than the senior staff had initially planned. Jason had to be pushing the schedule. He only hoped that the Condor's plans weren't going to backfire. Anderson very much disliked being manipulated.

"The plan's for you not to have to get out of your seat until you're fully fit," Anderson had said. "But if you do need to, you can't rely on there being a shoulder around to lean on."

It made sense when put like that, and made him feel better about the stick. And, he told himself, it meant he was being taken seriously despite his current condition, and not that the doctor was right and nobody else had realised how physically weak he still was.

He was deliberately early for the simulator exercise. He'd wanted to be absolutely sure that the team was still in the daily physical training session. That would give him the chance to be in his seat when they arrived, to hide the stick away, and, most importantly, to refamiliarise himself with a set of controls he hadn't used in almost a year.

They'd set the chair up especially for him, he realised as soon as he sat down. Rick was the best part of six inches taller than he was, and he'd had some concern that not only would he not be able to remember the controls, he'd not even be able to reach them. He wasn't sure whether to be pleased or concerned that it wasn't going to be an issue. Jason might be treating his reinstatement as a done deal, with these tests purely to determine when it should happen, but Mark wasn't nearly so confident. He'd be entirely unsurprised if this turned out to be an unplayable scenario; a demonstration to all concerned that he simply wasn't up to the job. Mark himself could think of a dozen ways to do that, and if he'd been the one trying to disillusion the team, he'd have started out by making sure there was no obvious, basic reason why things had gone badly.

No point dwelling on it, he told himself. You can't control the scenario. Just like you can't when it's for real. So quit fretting and make sure you can still fly the ship.

.

"Is this what you anticipated?" Anderson asked the older man sitting alongside him in the observation room.

Samuels nodded. "From what he's said to me, Mark's concerns are on a very practical level. Can he remember how the systems work? Will he make mistakes? What if he has to do something which is physically beyond him?"

"Valid concerns."

"Of course. But not terribly important. The team does not need his individual expertise - they can cope quite well with nobody in that chair at all. The question is how they will respond to someone different in command. Especially Jason."

"Jason's been vocal that he wants Mark back as G-1."

"That's no guarantee that his instincts will be to follow orders he may not agree with."

Anderson groaned. "Have they ever been?"

"That's my point."

Anderson leant back in his chair, alternately watching through the observation window and glancing down to the readouts on the supervisor's console he sat behind. Mark was apparently oblivious as he worked his way steadily through the basic Phoenix preflight checks for his console. He wasn't even attempting speed, Anderson noted. The arrogance which had occasionally brought him near to disaster in the past had certainly gone. But what about the brilliance, the lateral thinking, and the confidence? Had those simply stagnated along with Mark's physical abilities? Not for the first time, Anderson second-guessed the way he'd handled things. If only he'd been able to persuade Mark into a role in the control centre, instead of an administrator's office not even in black section. Careful precision and absolute adherence to protocol, from the man who they so desperately needed to be innovative and insightful, was painful to watch.

Mark had just finished the full preflight simulated checks when the door to the simulator flight deck opened.

"You're early," Tiny said cheerfully, heading to his own console. "Did they set it up right?"

Mark appreciated the casual tone, and tried to make his response match. "Yes. Lucky, really - I doubt I could see over the console from where Rick has it. What did you do with the others?"

"They're on their way. Jason was running through some move with Princess and Keyop. Fifty times too fast for me, so I thought I'd come see if you were here yet." He glanced at Mark's board, still showing the telltale green lights of a completed check. "Started without us?"

"Really not wanting to make a fool of myself right now."

"You won't." Tiny sat down in his own seat and ran his hands over the controls. "No mission information yet?"

"Nothing." He resisted the urge to glance over his shoulder at the one-way glass window overlooking the consoles. He was sure there were people up there already. Probably every senior officer in ISO black section. All here to see just how far the Eagle had fallen from where he had been. He contemplated running the checks again, and then decided that would be overkill. He wanted to appear prepared, not panicked. Instead, he sat back in his chair and made a determined effort to relax, one muscle at a time. He could do this. Just a training run. He'd done hundreds, if not thousands, of the things.

Five minutes later the door opened again and Jason came in, followed closely by Princess and Keyop. They'd barely taken their seats when the screen above Mark's console fizzed to life, and he had to resist the urge to stand up.

"Eagle, you are in command for the duration of this training session," Anderson said. "I recommend the use of codenames rather than numbers for clarity. Emergency launch; briefing to follow."

Mark's console lights were all still green. Do the checks again? He couldn't see why. And Anderson had ordered an emergency launch. In an emergency you didn't run checks twice.

"Sound off," he called.

They'd always done this with numbers, but it was just as clear with names...and using the names would hopefully save him from the embarrassment of referring to Jason as "G-2" when things got more hectic.

Their voices sounded out, in the old, familiar order, and Mark smiled and relaxed as Tiny did his job and ran the launch sequence which he could doubtless have done in his sleep. For about five seconds, until his console pinged at him and the mission data came through.

It was an old favourite. Find the mecha which is buzzing the cities and splat it. This time it was shaped like two cylinders side by side with another, smaller one at right angles to them rather than any attempt at the usual animal theme. Easier to program, he presumed. It made no real difference, since they couldn't hope to guess what animal Spectra would actually use. It was just a mecha to blow up. He'd done it hundreds of times in simulation and a few dozen for real. There didn't even seem to be any particular twist to this one. Mark glanced sideways at Tiny, but the pilot was still busy. And turning round and asking for comments from Jason, for something this basic? That wouldn't look good at all.

"Swallow, what's your best guess for the mecha's cruising altitude?" he asked.

"Sixty thousand," came back promptly.

"Owl, take us to sixty-one. Intercept course based on last known course and speed – the report allegedly came from a pilot, so shouldn't be too far wrong. Swallow, sensors to maximum, search for the profile, goodness knows it's weird enough. Swan, any radio traffic?"

It's coming back, he thought as Keyop acknowledged and Princess reported that no, there wasn't any obvious Spectran radio chatter going on which she'd somehow not thought was important enough to tell him about without being prompted. I can do this.

Then again, anyone could have done this. It was a basic scenario.

Except that in basic scenarios, you were supposed to be able to find the mecha. Mark had them try the standard search patterns first, widening as time went on. Higher and lower than the estimated altitude. Nothing. No other reported sightings, even when it would surely have had to be seen somewhere else by now.

"It's landed," he said. "Where could Spectra hide a mecha that size?"

"Couldn't have reached the ocean," Jason said. "Or any lakes big enough."

Keyop suddenly spluttered. "Shape. On the ground. Not animal. Like a building."

"Satellite images -" from Princess.

"On it," from Jason.

And a yelp from Keyop. "No need. Moving!"

"Pursue and -"

And the console pinged at him again. "New data available," Anderson's voice said over the speaker. "We believe some of the mecha crew have been based at a facility we've been trying to find for months, but the mecha isn't based there." Fake static replaced his voice.

"What the...? Swan, get that connection back!"

"We're being jammed."

"I'll just blow it up!"

Mark almost laughed. Some things never changed. "Jason - no! Prepare to run an infiltration - who do you want to take?"

There, he thought. See, I can sit in my chair and send other people out to do the field work.

His satisfaction lasted about three seconds. "Energy buildup on mecha," Keyop reported. "Going to self-destruct."

"How soon?"

"Too soon. I need to shoot the engines off it."

"No. We -"

"Mark, we've seen this before," Princess put in.

We've seen this before. So that was the test. Had he done his homework? Did he know what Spectra was doing these days? Blatantly not. Mark sagged back in his chair.

"Proceed, Condor."

The missiles were in the air almost before the words had left his mouth. Two strikes, both at the back of the strange craft, near that upward vertical cylinder which on the ground, would have looked just like another tall industrial chimney. And the mecha began to fall out of the sky.

Mark said something extremely rude before he could stop himself. Talk about screwing things up. If they'd found it sooner, still on the ground, capturing personnel would have been a piece of cake. As it was, the wretched thing was going to blow up when it hit the ground -

"Swallow, prepare the tractor lines," Jason said behind him, and this time Mark did glance round. What the hell were tractor lines?

"Commander...?" Tiny asked, and Mark could do no more than shrug towards Jason's console.

"Stand by," Jason said, and Tiny's hands reached across the controls again. He obviously knew what was going on. Mark hadn't a clue.

"Hatches opening!" Keyop barked, and around him the team went into a frenzy of activity. The Phoenix dived towards the mecha and, as a collection of spherical escape pods burst from the doomed craft, suddenly lines snaked away from both wingtips of the Phoenix, forward and down. Those on the left met only thin air. On the right, they wrapped themselves round one of the escape pods.

"Yes!" That was Keyop, and while Mark wasn't watching, he was pretty sure the kid had punched the air in delight.

"Retracting," Jason said. "Owl, get us out of here."

And the screens went blank. Mark was just starting to turn when Anderson spoke again.

"Eyes forward, no communication, detransmute. Individual debriefs will take place immediately. Mark, you stay where you are. The rest of you, leave the simulator at ten second intervals, please. You first, Jason."

So we can't make up some story about how that was carefully planned all along. Like it wasn't completely obvious that I had no idea what was happening. Mark had no desire whatsoever to communicate with anyone. He'd rarely been so embarrassed.