Grant's doing the debrief? Rick couldn't think of anyone he'd have wanted less. But he'd seen what Grant did, seen Jason handling it - badly, in his opinion - and thought about what he'd do himself, many, many times.

So when he led his team into the briefing room, every nerve on edge, it was rather a shock to find the Eagle in the debriefing officer's seat at the head of the table, with the Condor to his left cueing up the briefing tape.

"Major Grant?" he asked, hesitating.

Mark locked eyes with him. "If you'd rather have Grant than me, say. You've seen the state we're in. Procedure's not a big priority right now."

"I'd rather... not have him." He took the commander's seat, just to the right of the head of the table, considered the two helmets already sitting in the middle of the table, and added his to them. Without a visor in the way, suddenly all he wanted to do was rub his temples.

"You said you've had no medical?" Jason said abruptly. "I know they're in emergency triage mode, but right now if you need a doctor you jump the queue." He was looking pointedly at Jenny, who did, Rick agreed, look absolutely dreadful.

"I'm okay, sir. Just tired."

Jason raised his eyebrows. "If you say so. Put it this way, if you want to curl up on the floor and go to sleep, do it. I'm not going to tell anyone."

"I'll bear that in mind."

Mark cleared his throat, and Rick belatedly realised that he'd been doing the preliminaries for the tape, stating date and time and participants. "How much of the briefing tape do we need to watch?"

"None. It was all untrue. When we came out of jump, what we found was..."

Mark listened to Rick's retelling with one eye on the rest of Force Two. Jason was right - G-10 could barely keep her eyes open, but it clearly mattered to her to be here, and he wasn't sure where else she could go anyway. Medical were trying to keep people alive, the ready rooms were open to the elements, and he doubted anyone had even considered cleaning up the accommodation corridors yet. And he suspected that other parts of the building were in need of a lot more than just cleaning up. For the first time, he wondered whether they might be beyond saving, and what would happen if they were. He pushed that thought far down. Compartmentalise. Debrief Force Two. Buildings aren't your responsibility.

This was a relatively happy team. Nobody was tensing at anything Rick said, or flushing, or looking as if they weren't sure whether to speak up, and to him that was what mattered right now. Operational details, such as whether they should have got Riga involved? That was something that the tacticians would doubtless consider at great length and then present their final decision as if it was the only possible one. He wouldn't have, though.

"... we made a conservative approach to ISO, but just before we reached water entry, we discovered that there was some sort of forcefield dome over ISO..."

For the first time, Jenny flinched hard, and Mark held his hand up. "Pause there. G-10, what's the problem?"

She flushed scarlet. "I'm sorry. I saw it very late and it's not my place to give instructions, but I didn't know what to do."

"You did the right thing," Rick said. "I'm not sure I did."

No arguing, no real strain, but they were both unhappy about it. Mark glanced at Jason, who'd been fast forwarding the flight deck video alongside Rick's recitation. "Can we see that?"

They sat and watched a couple of minutes on the big screen - standard approach, and from nowhere the team's most junior member calling an urgent abort and their pilot doing it, no questions asked. Definite displeasure from the commander. Jason paused it on a particularly unflattering image of Rick scowling.

Mark squinted at the screen - it was a camera feed of a camera feed, but even so... "G-10, what do you see there?"

"I didn't see anything either," said Rick. "But we all know there was."

Jason snorted. "You don't see it? No, and that's the point. G-10, you did the right thing. G-8, you did the right thing. G-6... you could look a bit less pissed off."

"Look and sound," said Rick. "Jen, I'm sorry. You see anything like that again, you do exactly the same. I'd much rather you were wrong sometimes than that we ram a forcefield even once."

She nodded, happier, and Rick smiled at her. "Do you want to explain your discovery? Seems only right."

"Okay, I guess..." There was a nervous glance at Jason. "Can you wind the tape on a fraction, so we can see... yes, like that." The central portion of the image now had dome-shaped shading over it, and it paused again.

"We were thinking of it as a hemisphere, but if you look at the shape, it isn't. It's a hyperbola. I thought that maybe the other half of it existed too."

"And she was right," said Rick. "To cut a long story short, we went up there, we jumped through the other forcefield, G-7 put a Super through the plasma launch tube of the mecha which was sitting on the other focus, and the forcefields came down when it exploded."

Jason held his hand up. "Just a minute there. This cutting a long story short... it involves your second orbital boost of the day, your third jump, a crash jump-exit, and G-7 starting the attack run on the mecha when G-6 passed out. And I think G-10's passed out in two of the three jumps?"

Rick glared at him. "We did our best."

"You're missing my point. This is me being bloody impressed. Everything had gone to hell and you did what was needed anyway."

Mark cleared his throat again. "That's cut too short for me. A crash jump-exit? Jason may have scrolled ahead but I haven't seen that part of the tape."

His second grinned, unrepentant, and Rick hesitated.

"We'll take the orbital boost as read. Keep it short, but I do want to know about this third jump."

Rick hesitated again, glancing sideways. Not wanting to drop anyone else in it, Mark realised.

This is wrong. We're colleagues. I shouldn't be sitting in judgement on what they did. The idea was to help them process it.

He reached out and turned the recorder off, very deliberately. There was an audible click. Six jaws dropped.

"I can't debrief someone who outranks me," he said. "You'll have the recorder tomorrow, or whenever it happens, and it'll be Anderson in this chair. For now, let's hear what happened. Actually... Jase, what did they do?"

"You realise I've watched it at twenty times speed with no sound?" But his second was relaxed, not his patent frown of disapproval, and he continued. "The second focus is nowhere near any sensible jump-points and they figured normal flight wouldn't get them through the forcefield, so they picked one down the right line and did an emergency abort to put them in roughly the right place. Got it pretty darn close, too."

"It... wasn't a good jump," Dylan said. "We jumped into enemy fire and only three of us came out of it conscious. We got so lucky."

Jason raised his eyebrows, and Mark realised this was his cue. "You were lucky any of you came out of it conscious," he said. "The time we had to do that, the one time... none of us did."

"Course, our jump-drive chamber was in three pieces at the time," Jason said easily. "Might have had something to do with how bad it was. Still, it was horrible. Really not recommended."

Paula gasped. "That rescue flight - when you jumped home in the G-1. That's what you're talking about."

"Yeah."

"You looked like death warmed over."

"Felt like it, too. I'm startled you were in any fit state to fight."

"Fine," said Rick. "You think I made the wrong call. What would you have done? I'm serious. I want to know."

Jason rolled his eyes. "I'm the last person to second-guess you, Rick. I said I was bloody impressed and I meant it. What would I have done? I'd have told my commander that a crash jump-exit was an option and I'd have waited for him to make the call. For what it's worth, I'm not seeing too many alternatives."

This could get heated, very fast. Mark said, "My call? Any idea at all about how Fiery Phoenix would interact with that forcefield in realspace? Because I'm with everyone who's said they don't fancy trying to punch a spaceship through it."

Jason shrugged. "It might have worked. But just getting there in normal space would have been slow, and if it hadn't worked they'd have been out of options, because there's nothing to use as a jump-point anywhere round there."

"I'd have asked you for your opinion, you'd have said that, I'd have called for the crash jump-exit, and we'd all have crossed our fingers and hoped." Mark caught Rick's eye. "You may have to defend your choice when you get to a formal debrief. You've sat in these things, you know how they work, but I'll say it anyway. Base controllers struggle with the concept that there isn't always a good option. I don't know where they think one should come from, but any time you've picked the least worst it's always a sticking point. If I were you I'd tell him you considered the Fiery Phoenix option and discarded it. Jason's right, the fallback option from there is terrible. But it's something that the strategists will have on their list once they've spent a day analysing everything, when you had five minutes tops."

"You know I said I wanted command?" Dylan said. "I take it back."

Mark suspected that the rest of Force Two would normally have laughed. Now all he raised was a set of weary smiles. Rick patted him on the shoulder, and Dylan just shook his head and closed his eyes. On the other side of the table, Paula muttered something so quietly that even with implant-enhanced hearing he missed it, and both Dimitri and Jenny rolled their eyes.

They've turned into a team. He never would have believed it. He'd taken four of them up to Comsat Three, only a few weeks ago, They'd been a bunch of individuals then. He thought he'd done a reasonable job of bringing them closer together, but Rick had cemented them together in a way he had thought might not even be possible.

He'd been given G-Force back. Rick had lost G-Force, been given command of Force Two... and it was starting to look as if it had been the right call.

"Anyway," said Rick. "We need rest, so I really am going to cut this short. G-10 and I both passed out in the crash jump-exit. G-10 was out until after it was all over. I was out for a couple of minutes, just long enough for G-7 to start the attack run on the mecha which was exactly where we'd expected. I really am too tired to analyse the combat right now, but the short version is that we put a Super through their plasma launch tube and it blew itself to hell. And the forcefield came down. Both of them. Like I said before."

He sat back, eyes locked with Mark, daring him to object.

Mark nodded. Rick had compartmentalised, handed everything over mentally, moved on. Job done. Well, almost done. There was one elephant still in the room, and he wanted it out in the open, not realised in the middle of the night.

"I think this is more complicated, isn't it? The Spectrans down here expected the forcefield to come down at sunset, presumably because that was easily identifiable from inside it."

Rick's face fell. "You mean we were wasting our time? They were going to drop the damn thing anyway?"

"You couldn't have known that," Jason said. "But it didn't come down at sunset. Not until it was practically full dark. They didn't take it down when they should have because they were tied up trying to fight off Garuda. If they had..."

"How long?" Mark asked. Jason had the tape with the timestamps, but it was Paula who spoke.

"It felt like forever. I was on point defence and I have no idea how many missiles I took out but it was a lot. But it can't have been..."

"Twelve minutes," said Jason. "Twelve minutes when the Spectran troops had cleared the building expecting it to go up right away and we were inside disarming explosives as fast as we could find them. I'd say that saved ISO from a huge amount of damage. All you can ever do is stop the bad guys from doing whatever it is they're trying to do. You did that. There's never time to analyse why they were trying to do it."

Mark nodded. It might not be right, or it might be a vast oversimplification, but it was what Force Two needed to hear right now.

"And the Spectran troop carriers?" he asked. "Looked like a pair of Z-17s. Were they in the right place at the right time, or did you put them there?"

This time Rick went scarlet. "Commander, I..."

"Spit it out, Rick," said Jason

"He looked at the table. "I didn't want to leave ISO USA unwatched and I didn't trust our own airfield hadn't been taken over. So I called the closest ISO airbase and told their patrol aircraft it was a foothold situation. They're who took the troop carriers out."

Mark frowned - why was this worrying Rick? "I'm not seeing the problem. Sounds like a good solution to me."

"He told them he was Galaxy Security Actual over a deliberately dodgy radio link," Paula said. "Sorry, Rick. Best just said."

Mark still didn't see the issue, but Jason was cracking up alongside him, shoulders shaking with silent laughter, and Rick hadn't looked up yet.

"Oh, man," Jason finally managed. "You are so lucky Grant isn't in here - don't you have form for impersonating a senior officer?"

Impersonating... oh! "Rick," he said, "you are Galaxy Security Actual. If a couple of Z-17 pilots assumed that Galaxy Security Actual's permanent callsign is Eagle, that's their problem. I'm guessing you were going for Eagle rather than Condor? I can't see you sounding much like Jason no matter how bad a radio link your comm-tech set up."

"I'm sorry, Mark," Rick said without looking up. "I needed them to do it without asking questions, and I wasn't sure they'd do that for me. And yes, it was you I was going for."

"Noted and not a problem, though Major Grant might disagree. But does that airbase still think they're in a foothold situation?" That needed dealing with right now. That in itself justified this debrief. He reached for the communicator, but Jason was quicker and handed it to him, channel open. "Chief?"

"Go on, G-1."

"ISO local may be acting under Foothold protocol."

"Armstrong-Tracy," said Rick. "And I'll need to be the one to stand them down. Sorry, Chief."

Anderson sighed audibly. "I'll patch them through to your bracelet, G-6. Stand by."

Mark considered making a joke about doing it instead, and didn't. Instead he sat and pretended not to listen while Rick announced himself as Galaxy Security Actual, repeated the instructions he'd given earlier, and told them to return to their normal chain of command. Not a mention of his callsign on either side of the conversation.

Rick cut the link and leaned back in his chair. "You know what I need? A hot bath, a hot meal and my own bed. And I suspect I can't have any of them. I'm seriously considering commandeering this briefing room - at least it's internal, no broken windows. And I -" He stopped as the room's communication device bleeped.

"G-Force, Force Two." Anderson's voice. "We are transferring black section operations to Centre Neptune. Launch in twenty minutes. Confirm, please."

"G-Force confirm," said Mark automatically.

Rick dropped his head into his hands momentarily, looked up again. "Force Two confirm." As the line went dead, he picked up his helmet, looking round his team. "Sorry, guys, seems like the day's not over after all. Get your personal stuff, I'll see you in Garuda in fifteen."

As the door shut behind them, Jason ejected all the tapes with a groan. "Centre Neptune? They're wiped, Mark. Are they even fit to fly?"

Mark had been wondering that himself, but they weren't his team, it wasn't his call, and what they needed right now was confidence that they were trusted.

"If they're not, they'll have to ask. You just sat through the same exchanges I did, Jase. Rick's the senior commander in Galaxy Security right now. I don't get to tell him what he can and can't do. For what it's worth, if he's too tired to fly safely, I think he'd say so."

"I hope you're right." Jason groaned again. "Who's even going? All of black section operations? Does that include Tiny? Does it include Princess? I'm presuming it includes Keyop."

"I'm presuming someone else is making those decisions," Mark said, and meant it. "Given the state this place is in, we could be based there for weeks. Given what Spectra just did to us, it could be permanent."

"So much for this season's races." But Jason headed for the door without serious complaint. Before he got there, he stopped and turned back. "Rick was right about one thing, though - I could murder a hot meal."