“It’s best if you let things quiet down,” Delphine said after he’d admitted what had happened.
He’d made a point—several times—that this wouldn’t put an end to her flying. Just that they’d have to be more careful about where they flew, and how. Lower—slower—flights had always been what they’d discussed for her. She’d felt a pang of regret—of loss—when she’d thought he was saying that he was grounded. But the more she thought about what happened—the more details he filled in—she realized how much danger he was putting himself in every time he flew. And she couldn’t fault him for not anticipating the attention he’d draw. She hadn’t considered it either. None of them had—at least, not out loud. Edith half expected Hank to say that he’d always known something like this would happen. But that was the old Hank. The jealous Hank. A small part of him might still think that, but that part was shrinking each day that passed.
“You’ll just have to stick closer to Earth like us mere mortals,” Edith said. She’d meant it as a joke, but the look on his face wiped the smile from hers at once. She’d just reminded him that he was different—which was another way of saying he didn’t fit in. The hurt she saw on his face was quickly masked, but not fast enough to stop the lump forming in her throat, or the water welling in her eyes. He’d kept his hurt feelings behind solid gray mental barriers, which had saved her from bursting into tears.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice thick with emotion.
“I know,” he answered, reaching for her hand. He gave it a small shake to distract her—to give her time to collect herself. Delphine stepped forward and rubbed her back gently.
Each of them fought private battles—feeling, in their own way, like outsiders looking in. Not just the three of them, Edith had realized months ago. Every member of their team, for reasons of their own, thought of themselves as an outsider. Six brilliant men and women, all brought together to study a man—a phenomenon. They in no way represented an average cross section of humanity, except perhaps in that one respect. Was it part of the human condition—this sense of a thin pane of gss between yourself and the rest of the world? Did everyone feel that way? Were some people simply better at hiding it?
Edith wiped away the few tears that escaped onto her cheeks and drew a long breath before letting it out. She resisted the urge to wrap her arms around him. It wouldn’t be fair to Delphine. And Aric wasn’t her emotional support bnket.
Even though he was.
When his arms were around her she could remember being very young—wrapped in a soft yellow bnket that was little more than a bundle of thread by the time she turned ten. It was the same feeling of safety. Of contentment.
But also—tely—guilt.
Remorse. For Delphine. For what her friend wanted, but didn’t possess.
Edith couldn’t pinpoint when the feeling had started, except that it had been after they’d returned from Cornwall—after the two of them had csped hands and climbed the rickety dder to share Aric’s bed. Her bond with Delphine was as unique as the one with Aric. She loved them both—in different ways, certainly—but love nonetheless. And her love for both of them had led her to make a request—more a statement of position—to Aric.
“You don’t need my permission,” she’d said to him afterward as they y together on the couch in his rented ft. He’d denied that the ample piece of furniture had been the real reason he’d selected it from the small list of short term rentals avaible to them, none of which included a ndlord who would countenance a man and two women—all unmarried, all a bit too friendly with each other—living together under one roof. She realized the moment the words left her mouth that it was almost verbatim what she’d said to Delphine all those months ago when she’d broached the idea of taking Aric to Min for fashion week. But this request was different.
“I think I do need your permission,” he’d said. “Yours and hers. And mine. This is a many-bodied problem. We’re three stars caught in each other’s gravity—moving in a complex dance of motion and attraction. It won’t be just one of us who gets hurt. It’ll be all of us. I won’t risk that. Neither will she. She loves you too much to hurt you that way.”
Her head rested on his chest when she pleaded her case, her words reflected back by the steady rise and fall beneath her ear. She kept her voice soft, as if he were a stray cat she didn’t want to startle into running away.
“It wouldn’t hurt me, that’s what I’m trying to say. What’s hurting me now is watching her hurting. Don’t tell me you don’t see it—I know you do. Better than me. You see it. You feel it.”
It was a truth he couldn’t deny. He and Edith had taken to being less outwardly affectionate in Delphine’s presence, thinking it would make things easier for her. It had done the opposite.
"Est-ce censé me réconforter?!” she’d cried, her voice thick with pain and tears. ”Me faire sentir moins seule? Que je suis si superficielle—vous avez une si mauvaise opinion de moi?!” Is that supposed to make me feel better?! Less alone? That I’m so shallow—that you think that little of me?!
Edith’s heart had shattered at the grief they’d inadvertently wrought. “No, love—we think that much of you.”
Delphine had dissolved into tears then, her arguments still ringing in the air around them. They’d come together quickly—a single creature with three hearts, giving and receiving comfort.
It had been after that night that Edith had made her request.
“She needs something to hold onto besides a green bottle.”
“She doesn’t need charity,” Aric replied, shaking his head. “She’s intelligent, complex. She’d see through that in a minute—and it would break her heart.”
He’d let out a long breath, and as her head rose and fell with his breathing, Edith had realised it was just one more burden the world had pced on him—one more that she had, too.
Sleep with the woman who has become a part of us. Give her the release she needs — the one we all need.
His mind had opened up then, and it flowed out of him in an instant.
It’s not that simple. Nothing is when it involves people and their emotions. Love isn’t a sickness to be cured—not with sex, not with distance. It’s a type of entanglement that can’t be modeled or understood. We can’t predict what will happen if we add another variable.
She absorbed his thought in a millisecond. His voice in her head still sounded like him. She wondered if that would still be true if she’d heard his thoughts before hearing the sound of his voice. But in any voice the message would still be clear.
Tread carefully.
“I won’t mention it to her if you think it’s a bad idea,” she said as she rolled over and brushed his hair away from his face.
“It’s like we’re throwing knives in a dark room. None of us would ever intentionally hurt anyone...”
but we might, she thought, and we’d only know when it was too te.
Aric’s hurt feelings—the brief pain that crossed his face—were proof enough of the truth of those words. How easily one of them—any of them—could be wounded by a stray word… or a stray thought.
They came together to comfort her, like they had for Delphine. Like they had for Aric. His pain was theirs, and theirs was his.
“Sorry,” he said, his voice partly muffled by the soft warm skin of Edith’s neck. Delphine’s arms wrapped around both of them. Her own head found simir refuge on Aric. “I know I should be made of sterner stuff than cy.”
Edith ughed as her hands rubbed his back, exploring the lines and curves of his sculpted muscles. Delphine’s cheek massaged itself against his scratchy neck.
“Tu devrais essayer de te souvenir où tu as issé ton rasoir.” You should try and remember where you left your razor.
Now it was his turn to ugh.
“You said not to cut my hair or shave before Min.”
She reached around behind his neck and found Edith’s hand. The two women intertwined fingers as they shared the warmth of the connection.
“I meant for a few days. Not for three weeks.”
He turned and kissed the top of her head.
“Good to know.”
August 27, 1984 – London, Engnd
United Kingdom Air Defence Region Evaluation (UKADRE)
Air Incursion Report: UKADRE/84/23
Date Filed: 24 August 1984
Action Date: 16 August 1984
Action Location: Sector South (Scotnd), Sector North (Engnd)
Reporting Authority: Strike Command
Cssification: Air Incursion – Unidentified, unmanned
Units Involved:
RAF Leuchars – No. 43 Squadron
F-4K Phantom FG.1
Pilot: Flight Lieutenant Andrew Mallory
WSO: Flying Officer Euan Fraser
F-4K Phantom FG.1
Pilot: Flight Lieutenant Nigel Dawson
WSO: Flight Lieutenant Rupert Halliwell
RAF Leeming – No. 11 Squadron
F-4K Phantom FG.1
Pilot: Flight Lieutenant Daniel Havers
WSO: Flight Lieutenant Colin Mackay
F-4K Phantom FG.1
Pilot: Flight Lieutenant Stephen Mercer
WSO: Flying Officer Alec Greenwood
Action Summary:
At approximately 0857Z UKADGE for eastern Scotnd (Leuchars) detected an unidentified craft (UA/84/23) bearing 130 degrees climb to 5000 feet and accelerate to 1200 knots (Track ID 840816/BRAVO).
QRA Leuchars attempted to intercept but was forced to break off and divert to RAF Leeming after experiencing mechanical failure.
QRA Leeming intercepted UA/84/23 but received no reply to verbal warnings. UA/84/23 took evasive maneuvers before dropping out of visual and radar contact.
Observational Summary: Radar Tracking:
Reliable radar tracking information was collected only when UA/84/23 was moving at low speed. Significant system bias was present in both location and speed when UA/84/23 was at higher speeds. Radar masking/jamming or exterior radar absorbing yers returned no signal to onboard systems even though crew had UA/84/23 in visual range.
Radar observations:
UA/84/23 decelerated from 1200 knots to zero knots in 2.5 seconds during QRA Leeming intercept. UA/84/23 then accelerated from zero knots to 260 knots, climbing to 9950 feet in 14 seconds before descending to 5000 feet and accelerating to 4000 knots in nine seconds. None of these readings can be accepted as accurate given current airframe stress tolerances and observed radar irregurities.
Crew Observations:
QRA Leuchars closest approach was 1.74 miles (radar estimate, possibly unreliable). Both Leuchars pilots had visual acquisition of UA/84/23 before it accelerated away. Pilots described a small craft with no visible control surfaces. Reflective surfaces at times made the craft appear brighter and rger but more blurred than at lower speeds.
All QRA Leeming crew members had visual acquisition of UA/84/23 during approach and when UA/84/23 executed a rapid vertical ascent. QRA Leeming was forced to take evasive maneuvers and lost UA/84/23 before they could establish pursuit. No missile warning tone was detected during the event.
Conclusions:
UA/84/23 dispyed no heat signature, emitted no detectable electromagnetic emissions.
Sustained flight at low altitude and high speed indicate an unmanned aircraft. Possible a guided single munition ptform, but too small to allow for multiple warheads or reentry vehicles.
Radar masking, radar jamming, or radar absorption technology implies UA/84/23 is experimental in nature.
The possibility that this was a test of those technologies—of their effectiveness and our ability to track and respond—cannot be discounted.
Recommendations:
Flight crew statements to be cssified.
Radio communications to be cssified.
Radar data to be cssified.
Signed OSA statements required from all personnel with any knowledge of UKADRE/84/23.
Restrict access to AIR UKADRE/84/23 EYES ONLY/Chief of Staff Committee.
Air Chief Marshal Harrison Smith scanned the document again until he found the section he was looking for.
Flt Lt Mackay: “I watched as the range gate colpsed from five miles to one in less than a second, and a bloom filled the center of my scope. That’s when I called out the arm.”
Flt Lt Havers: “On my WSO’s warning I executed a hard break to starboard and began a thirty-degree climb in reheat. As my nose came around I regained a brief visual on the bandit above us and accelerating before it departed at high speed.”
Fg Off Greenwood: “I was close to graying out, and my mind was pying tricks. It must have been the pattern of radar-absorbing panels—the way they reflected the sunlight—that made it look like a... Once some blood got back to my brain I was able to process what I saw.”
Flt Lt Mercer: “I only got a glimpse. I thought I saw decals of some sort—curves, stubby control surfaces. The way they caught the light, it almost looked like arms and legs.”
It was a good story—the sort of thing men said afterward to paint over a serious recorded blemish. Harrison Smith would have made no more of it but for the st passage, the addendum that had arrived just yesterday.
Flt Lt David Haines, RAF — Senior Air Defence Controller, UKADGE Northern Sector: “I was in Ramstein in 1979 for REFORGER during a terrorist attack. During that attack, long-range radar surveilnce picked up an object bearing zero-niner-zero, flying toward us at twelve hundred knots and five thousand feet. The object dispyed the same small radar cross-section and erratic behavior as UA/84/23. We were instructed afterward not to discuss what we saw.”
In 1979, Fg Off Haines’s statement had been collected and cssified along with everyone else’s. By 1984, Flt Lt Haines was on the operations floor at Boulmer during the August 16 incursion and had been required to go through official channels before he was even permitted to mention what he’d seen in 1979, let alone provide a cssified statement.
Both the West Germans and the Americans were still keeping those cards close to their chests. His questions—directed through NATO—had produced a thinly veiled suggestion that this “asset” was a covert British weapons ptform, spirited into the FRG and just as quietly taken home when the exercise ended. The current inquiry, they implied, was merely a smoke screen in case Britain’s allies had detected the asset’s flight over northern Engnd.
ACM Smith wished he could discount the possibility that it was theirs. More accurately, he wished he could confirm that it belonged to them and not to someone else. But he knew too well that there were many nooks and crannies within Britain’s military-industrial complex, and that one of them—or several together—might be testing something new. Something that could change the game, shifting the bance of power toward a small cluster of isnds that was growing more irrelevant each year.
He returned the papers to the buff-coloured folder and wrote Recommendations approved as is across the minute sheet before clipping it to the front. It would receive the appropriate red cover sheet and internal register before being locked away with other, equally sensitive documents.
Harrison Smith knew that the subject of that report would have to be located before it could be simirly detained—if that was even possible.
It wasn’t. But he had no way of knowing that.
