S0WE30 - Souls on Board

"Souls on Board" is the thirtieth episode of the W-Series and an Epic on Track B, with Luther at its center. A drone flying thermal lines for Yuri Volkov's reconstruction survey finds a mothballed Lynxley climate station on Vladifrostok's north coast holding a temperature it has no business holding, and a long lens on a ridge finds out why. Director Costa comes to Luther's office in person and sends him north with Reacher's team to go through the door. It is a two-act story, a recovery on the ice followed by the flight home, and the second act is the reason the title is a question controllers ask.

Synopsis

Volkov's grid survey flags Station Nine at Ostrog Point, a decommissioned Lynxley climate station running nineteen degrees warmer than the ice under it, and a long lens photographs a corsac fox carrying a tray past an open door. Costa brings the pictures to Luther: Perkins and Botasky, listed as presumed dead when their station went dark, were kept by Icener as assets and left on the ice when his network fell. Luther and Reacher's team take the building in ninety seconds and their keeper, Rustem Adaev, alive for a Vladifrostok courtroom, and Luther crouches in the doorway and says both names. Perkins asks that White's name stay on the memorial wall exactly where it is. Flying them home, the chartered TransZoo Airbison suffers an aft cargo fire that defeats both suppression bottles, and sabotaged crew oxygen kills First Officer Ansel Quirke and leaves Captain Ilva Drossen with a brain injury. Luther flies from the right seat with Neagley beside him, talked down by chief pilot Odalys Kranz and controller Ines Baruk, and with no trim and no elevator puts the aircraft into Sandy Cove. The ten survivors get off; purser Odile Ripley counts ten instead of eleven, and Reacher goes back into the water for Quirke's body. ZSI traces the sabotage to a badge and a bank, and Luther, who will not let Pawbert read his statement to the voice recorder, asks him to his face the one question he refused to put on tape.

Plot

In the dark of a nine-by-twelve room, Perkins lies on a welded steel shelf counting the hitch in Botasky's breathing. He has counted the days too, and has never said the total aloud. Their keeper, a corsac fox named Rustem Adaev, brings bread and a length of pine Perkins uses to wear his teeth down, checks Botasky's badly closed abdominal wound, and gives no answer to the question Perkins has asked every way a mammal can: what they are for. Far to the south, a thermal line in Yuri Volkov's reconstruction survey reports Station Nine at Ostrog Point, decommissioned, standing nineteen degrees warmer than its own ice. A generator means fuel and fuel means a supply chain, and weeks of state security work end with photographs from a ridge: a fox with a tray, and behind him a shape on a shelf the wrong size for anything a fox would keep. Director Costa carries them to Luther's windowless office himself. Icener kept the two rabbits as assets he never got to spend, and when Luther took him off the board their keepers were left with a generator, a fuel account and no instructions. Costa refuses to give Luther the number of days.

Pawbert reads it off the carrots. Luther comes home and starts breaking down vegetables for a soup already on the stove, which Luther does not do, and Pawbert turns down the heat and asks how long he will be gone. Six days, maybe eight, in Vladifrostok, half a closed file. Then Luther tells him the two names are alive, and Pawbert, who knows them as frames on a wall and as the names behind a call that once interrupted a pack movie night, does not ask how long. The promise was never a veto, he says, only that the decision come home before it was made, and it just did. Upstairs, Luther admits he worked the number out in the car and will not say it in the house. Then Pawbert asks for one thing from whoever reaches the room first: that somebody say their names out loud, the names and not the call sign.

Volkov meets the transport before dawn with a thermos and five cups, having read the manifest himself. Major Irina Barsova of state security briefs the building from archive drawings, and O'Donnell asks about the medicine rather than the tactics. Volkov wants Adaev alive for a courtroom; Luther says he is going out there to take two mammals off a shelf. The team walks three miles across sea ice, Reacher on his own lane because his weight is a calculation Neagley made on the flight. They take the building in ninety seconds. At the bottom of a bad stair Adaev is waiting, two paws on a pistol and his shoulders pressed to the barred door, saying Icener is dead and nobody came; Neagley tells him somebody came, and it took a while, and he sets the pistol down and laughs until it becomes something else. Luther lifts the sticking bar, puts his weapon on its sling where the rabbits can see it, and goes down on his heels in the doorway the way a lynx in a kitchen taught him. He says Perkins, then Botasky, then that Costa sent him to take them home. Perkins asks him to say it again.

Then the intelligence officer in him tests Luther with a deliberately wrong Costa, and Luther gives him the jaguar, the left eyebrow, the two sugars, and the fact that Costa has never once pronounced Botasky's name correctly. O'Donnell takes the room over; Botasky's wound was closed by a fox who read a book, badly and well enough that he is still alive. The fox, Perkins says, is both the reason they are breathing and the reason they were on a shelf, which will be somebody's problem one day. Told that two of the three names come off the ZSI memorial wall tomorrow, he asks that the third stay exactly where it is, not moved up, not set apart, not given a plaque, so that White stands in the gap where they were. Then he stands, waits out the gray rising through his vision without putting a paw out, and walks through the door.

A specialist decides the scar holding Botasky's grazed artery shut is failing and he needs a vascular team at home, so the Department of External Relations charters a TransZoo Airbison A320-214 off the Canter rotation, fitted overnight with litter frames and a spare O'Donnell insisted on. Luther watches the servicing and finds every seal, badge and stamp in order. Purser Odile Ripley straps Reacher to a galley hardpoint over his objections. Captain Ilva Drossen catches him taking notes on her checklist flow and gives him the right seat and the airplane for half an hour; her first officer, Ansel Quirke, teaches him the fuel page, the crossfeed, the second radio, and why the go-around is briefed before anything else. In the cabin Neagley sits within Perkins's field of view without entering his space and tells him the raid cost nobody on either side. He has spent a long time building the debt he would owe whoever came, and it has been handed back unpaid. He was not sitting still, she tells him, he was holding a position, and he sleeps.

At 5:12pm a smoke detector in the aft hold sounds. Both suppression bottles go and do not hold it. Seven minutes later the smell comes through the air conditioning, the crew go on oxygen and declare MAYDAY with eleven souls on board, and that is the last transmission Drossen makes. Quirke slumps against his harness. Drossen, her eyes wrong, is told by the wolf in her jumpseat to take the mask off; she does, says the autopilot is holding, and goes over against the window. Neagley steps into the fourteen inches beside the left seat, the only mammal aboard who fits, and lifts the captain out with her whole body against her; Luther does not look at her face. He takes the right seat, she takes the left, and Dixon tells Center plainly that both pilots are down and nobody aboard knows how to land the airplane. After the longest pause of an eighteen-year career, controller Ines Baruk says she is staying and asks who she is talking to. Luther answers with one word, Rook, and in a hardened room under ZSI headquarters Costa hears it.

On the company frequency comes Odalys Kranz, TransZoo's chief pilot for the northern routes. Smoke through the floor seam tells her the fire is in the same underfloor space as the aircraft's systems, and her standing order is that when something quits Luther says what it was, does not chase it, and flies the airplane. The autopilot drops at 5:31pm and the trim goes with it. In the stripped bay O'Donnell works Quirke for six minutes and stops, because Drossen has a pulse and the litters cannot move themselves. Neither pilot fought for air, which tells him the masks delivered next to no oxygen and nothing to alarm them, and he warns the flight deck to breathe nothing but the cabin's smoke hoods. Reacher carries the first officer aft, and Ripley straps him into seat 11A under a blanket. At 5:38pm Costa calls Nick on a stairwell and tells him somebody has to be standing next to the lynx before this reaches a screen.

Judy drives on lights with no siren. In his office at ZRS, Pawbert asks for the door closed and asks after everyone aboard in order; the list holds until he asks whether Luther can land it and Nick, who has never lied to him, says he does not know. Pawbert comes off the chair and Nick catches him. By 5:44pm Luther cannot read the airspeed, so Kranz has the cabin depressurized and the direct vision window slid open at two hundred knots, which turns the flight deck into a drum and takes the smoke out. Ines brings them straight over Tundratown across two weather walls because the published arrival costs nineteen minutes he does not have. At 5:57pm the fire burns through the wiring that carries the elevator its instructions, and Kranz walks him through flying on thrust alone, in long waves he must ride rather than fight. Dixon, unasked, calls the altitude at the bottom of each wave. Five hundred feet a wave, the field eighteen miles ahead, three waves left. Kranz tells him he is not going to make the runway, and Ines has an answer past the second wall: Sandy Cove, four miles of shallow water off the Sandy Ridge shore with the freight terminal closed for the night.

Ripley braces the cabin and makes both rabbits repeat that they will do nothing until somebody comes for them. Reacher has decided the order, Botasky first and the bear last. On the flight deck Luther asks whether the recorder is running and makes a statement for the investigation: the crew ran the procedure correctly, the oxygen was bad, and Ansel Quirke, twenty-nine years old, said the go-around gets briefed first. Then he speaks to Pawbert, and tells him to go back to work, because he was the one who knew from a kitchen to say the names. He will not say the one word, because on a tape it could only be a question with nobody there to answer it. Neagley looks out her own window to give him the only privacy a flight deck has, and at ten feet she puts her paw over his on the levers. It goes in tail-first at a hundred and seventy knots and settles nose-up in fifteen feet of warm water. Reacher carries Botasky and then Perkins out. Luther goes back up the flooding aisle to tell Ines they are down, and her reply is to get off her airplane.

A honey badger named Delphine Roux takes nine mammals off the raft in her workboat while the tenth swims it. At 6:21pm Ripley counts the deck a shoulder at a time and gets ten; O'Donnell tells her the count is right. Reacher takes off his jacket, gives Perkins his reason, and goes over the stern rail, and the third dive is the long one. Ripley counts again and gets eleven. Ashore, Chimney runs triage with Hen reading everyone twice for carbon monoxide, recognizes Luther, and tells him his husband has been at the top of the ramp some time without blinking. Pawbert does not run, because he cannot; Judy has held his arm since the guardrail. He watches a soaked wolf come up a boat ramp and does not look away from any of it, which is what undoes Nick. Luther stops and asks him to say something, because he has had two voices in a headset for forty minutes and needs a different one, and Pawbert steps under the tape and tells him there is soup in the fridge.

Botasky comes out of a vascular theater at Zootopia General and wakes to a window with a tree outside it, and Perkins, who has carried the number the entire way, opens his mouth to answer how long and does not, promising it for a bar one day and not a bed. Around midnight Pawbert finds Ines on a bench by the elevators, off shift, come to see whether they were real, and tells her that her voice never once picked up speed. Drossen wakes with a hypoxic brain injury that will cost her a year and most likely her licence. Kranz tells Luther that everybody who comes out of one of these is handed a story about themselves, and that his will be that he did something remarkable; it is wrong, because he did what he was told, in order, and never once tried anything clever. O'Brian works the sabotage from a chair, from a servicing cart to a badge to a bank, and Barsova arrests three mammals inside a week. Adaev, shown a photograph of the cart in his cell, asks that his keeping them alive be written down near the other thing, and Volkov writes it down.

Perkins comes to the wall alone ten days after the water, and Luther, who has spent the morning in the lobby pretending to read, stands beside him. Perkins touches his own name and finds it cold and slightly gritty and nothing more. Luther gives him the why the file will not: someone left over from Icener heard two officers were coming home, understood what a debrief would get out of them, and paid a contract mammal to stop it, for intelligence that had gone stale within a month of the shelf. Perkins says Ansel Quirke's name the way it was said to him in a doorway, moves his fingers up to White, and says he left him. Luther says yes, and that it was the only correct call, and that a bear got to go into the water for a mammal already dead because Perkins had no boat, no time and no cove he could see the bottom of. Perkins asks for work. Investigator Sabine Fleming of the Zootopia Transportation Safety Board brings the transcript to Pawthorne Mansion in person, and it goes into a drawer unread, because Luther will not have Pawbert reading his husband saying goodbye in the past tense. So he says it to his face instead, slower and worse and in the wrong order, until he reaches the word he would not put on the tape. Pawbert takes both his paws and tells him to ask it now, because he is right here and has been the whole time. Luther asks. Pawbert answers.

Key Moments

• Perkins counts the hitch in Botasky's breathing in the dark of Station Nine and never says the number of days aloud
• Volkov's thermal survey flags a decommissioned station running nineteen degrees warmer than the ice, and a long lens on a ridge photographs a fox with a tray and a shape on a shelf
• Costa comes to Luther's office at Precinct 1 in person and refuses to give him the number
• Pawbert reads the news off the carrots and tells Luther the promise never came with a veto
• Pawbert asks that whoever reaches the room first say their names out loud
• Volkov brings five cups to the apron, having read the manifest himself
• The team takes Station Nine in ninety seconds with no casualties on either side
• Neagley tells Adaev that somebody came, and he puts the pistol down
• Luther goes down on his heels in the doorway and says both names, and Perkins asks him to say them again
• Perkins tests Luther with the wrong Costa and gets the jaguar, the left eyebrow, the two sugars, and the mispronounced name
• Perkins asks that White's name stay in the gap on the wall, unmoved and without a plaque
• Perkins stands up off the shelf without putting a paw out and walks through the door
• Drossen gives Luther the right seat for half an hour, and Quirke teaches him to brief the go-around first
• Neagley tells Perkins he was holding a position, not sitting still, and he sleeps
• The cargo fire defeats both bottles, the sabotaged oxygen takes both pilots, and Drossen pulls her mask off when Luther tells her to
• Neagley lifts the captain out of the left seat through a fourteen-inch gap, breathing to a count
• Dixon tells Zootopia Center that nobody aboard knows how to land the airplane, and Ines Baruk says she is staying
• Luther identifies himself on the frequency as Rook
• O'Donnell stops working Quirke at six minutes and works out from the way the pilots went down that the crew oxygen was mostly nitrogen
• Costa calls Nick on a stairwell, and Nick tells Pawbert in his own office with the door closed
• The list holds until Pawbert asks whether Luther can land it and Nick says he does not know
• Luther opens the direct vision window at four thousand feet and the smoke goes out
• Ines walks the frequency down the hall to the approach floor and brings them over Tundratown across two walls
• The elevator wiring burns through and Luther flies on thrust levers alone while Dixon calls the bottom of every wave
• Kranz tells him he will not make the field, and Ines gives him Sandy Cove
• Luther makes a statement to the voice recorder and refuses to put the one word on it
• Neagley puts her paw over Luther's on the thrust levers at ten feet
• Reacher carries both rabbits out of the sinking aircraft, Botasky first
• Luther goes back to the flooding flight deck to tell Ines they are down
• Odile Ripley counts ten, and Reacher goes back into the water for seat 11A
• Pawbert's knees go at the guardrail when Nick says Luther is out
• Chimney recognizes Luther on the slip and Hen reads everyone twice for carbon monoxide
• Pawbert cannot run, so he stands at the tape and watches the whole of Luther coming up the ramp
• Ines comes to the hospital off shift, and Pawbert tells her about the voice that never got faster
• Botasky wakes to a window and a tree, and Perkins refuses to give him the day-count
• Kranz tells Luther to keep the version of the story where he did nothing remarkable
• O'Brian traces a cart to a badge to a bank, and Adaev asks that his keeping them alive be written down
• Perkins touches his own name on the wall and then White's, and Luther tells him the call in the corridor was the only correct one
• Perkins asks for work
• Fleming carries the transcript to the mansion door herself, and it goes unread into the second drawer of Luther's desk
• Luther says the statement to Pawbert's face and asks the question he would not put on tape

Key Lines

Characters Introduced

Locations

• Station Nine, Ostrog Point — A mothballed Lynxley climate station on Vladifrostok's north coast, two floors above the ice with the lower levels flooded and sealed; the nine-by-twelve room with its welded shelves, the corridor, the bad stair and the yard under a sodium lamp (first appearance)
• Vladifrostok — The airfield on the eastern edge, the hangar office where Barsova briefs, the apron where the charter is serviced, and the hospital that keeps the rabbits a few days
• Precinct 1 — Luther's windowless liaison office, where Costa lays out the photographs; the stairwell where Nick takes Costa's call
• Pawthorne Mansion — The kitchen and the second cutting board; the bedroom the night before; the foyer where Fleming will not come past; the master bedroom and the second drawer of Luther's desk
• TransZoo 106 — A TransZoo Airbison A320-214 off the Canter rotation, reconfigured with litter frames; the flight deck, the stripped bay, the galley hardpoint, and seat 11A
• Sandy Cove — East of Sahara Square off the Sandy Ridge shore, shallow, warm and sheltered on three sides; where the aircraft settles by the tail in fifteen feet of water (first appearance)
• Sandy Ridge landing — The concrete slip below the coast road where Chimney runs triage and Pawbert waits at the tape
• ZRS — Pawbert's office with the jade plant, where Nick tells him
• Zootopia General — The vascular theater, the family room with the vending machine, the bench by the elevators, and the fifth-floor room with a tree outside it
• ZSI Headquarters — The memorial wall in the rebuilt lobby, and the hardened room beneath the building where Costa listens
• TransZoo operations — The parking structure where Kranz takes the call, and the whiteboard room where she meets Luther six days later

Items

• The third litter frame — O'Donnell's portable spare, clipped into the seat track over nobody's objection; carries Ilva Drossen through the ditching and off the aircraft (first appearance)
• The voice recorder transcript — Luther's statement from the flight deck, redacted from the public docket and delivered to the mansion by Fleming in person; unread, in the second drawer of Luther's desk under the itinerary notebook (first appearance)
• The ZSI memorial wall — Dark gray stone in the rebuilt lobby, names only, in the order lost; Perkins and Botasky come off, and White stays in the gap
• The piece of pine — Chewed down at one end, turned fresh side out on the tray; how Perkins kept his teeth down, and something he had to ask for
• The Marie Delphine — Delphine Roux's one-engine workboat, first alongside the raft; the deck where the count is taken twice (first appearance)
• The Green Sweater — Hanging in the open closet while Luther packs; named on the recorder as the thing that stays where it is
• Drossen's photograph — Two half-grown calves tucked into the side window frame, beside her face when she goes over

End Credit Song

"Answer Me" (From 'The Band's Visit'), Original Broadway Cast

The finale of The Band's Visit is a town's worth of voices asking the dark for someone to answer. The episode is built on the same asking. Perkins puts one question to his keeper every way a mammal can and never gets an answer. A controller keeps talking to an aircraft after the radar loses it. A wolf will not say the word into a recorder, because on tape it could only be a question with nobody there to answer it. In the musical the phone rings. Here the answers arrive in person: a name said twice in a doorway, and the word asked out loud in a bedroom.

Notes

• "Airbison" is the Zootopified Airbus, and the charter is an A320-214, the exact type and variant Chesley Sullenberger ditched in the Hudson River in 2009.
• The callsign TransZoo 106 comes from N106US, that aircraft's tail registration rather than its flight number.
• Perkins, Botasky and White are the rabbit commandos of Motofumi Kobayashi's Cat Shit One, published in English as Apocalypse Meow.
• The failure chain is modeled on UPS Airlines Flight 6 (2010), with Swissair 111 (1998) and ValuJet 592 (1996) informing the underfloor burn-through.
• Chimney's line about the worst city in the world to live in nods to 9-1-1 (2018–present)'s Los Angeles being an unlivable disaster magnet. Have you seen their Season 10 trailer!?