Q wasn't prone to motion sickness. He'd spent most of his childhood with his nose in a book on long car trips. Even his fear of flying was more a fear of pilot error than the rollercoaster sensation of turbulence. But watching the live feed on his monitor made him dizzy, and he had to keep looking away to regain his balance.
Finally he triggered his mic and said, "If you could please stop lifting your head when you look at the door, I'd very much appreciate it."
"Sorry, Q. If a guard comes and shoots me, I'll bleed all over your precious chip," came Bond's casually amused response. "Besides, I'm under a bloody desk. I have to lift my head to look at the door."
Without responding, Q glared at the monitor, thinking he really should have put the micro-camera somewhere other than on the glasses Bond was wearing for this latest mission. Still, when Bond obediently looked down, Q was able to see right into the guts of the computer Bond was disassembling.
"There — the small one that's plugged in, not soldered," Q said, squinting a bit at the somewhat grainy feed. The chip wasn't even two millimetres across, with four tiny pins, but it was the only way to bypass the authentication on the network Q needed to infiltrate.
The image correction software was struggling to keep up with the shadowy light conditions under the desk; it didn't help that Bond kept making minute shifts to his position, leaning in closer before backing away, tipping his head up and down as he looked from his toolkit to the motherboard.
"Got it." Bond didn't reach for the chip bare-handed, thankfully. Instead, he looked down at his toolkit and took out the carbon fibre tweezers.
"Work them gently under the chip, rocking —"
Bond interrupted with a sharp hiss, and the monitor's image shifted wildly for a moment. It settled on the door to the room — a door which was opening.
"Shit, shit," Q whispered without triggering his mic. He needed that chip undamaged, and Bond was spectacularly good at inflicting wide-scale damage in the name of self-defence.
Q watched as Bond quickly pried the chip free, breaking two of the contacts. That was all right. Q could repair the damage. As long as the chip was intact and there was enough of a trace for him to get at the connection, it was all right.
For three seconds, the view swung between the door and the motherboard. Through Bond's earwig, Q heard a man's voice shouting something about, "I'll find him, Gabby!"
"Find whom?" Q muttered, wondering if his intel had been incomplete. Who was Gabby? Were they after Bond, or were they still unaware he'd infiltrated the executive's home office?
Before Q could trigger his mic to ask for an update, everything went to hell, as the camera tipped up to show a man stepping into the office. The first sharp report of gunfire made Q flinch and quickly turn down the sensitivity on the earwig pickup. Q's heart thumped hard against his ribs as he tried to make sense of the fragmented images on the monitor. Bond's uncharacteristic swearing did nothing to calm Q's nerves.
Then the camera feed changed again, showing a bizarre creature that looked like a cross between a rabbit and a rat, with prominent rounded ears and a long, tufted tail. "Bond?" Q asked, baffled. The creature was scampering away, and it looked like Bond was diving after it, which made no sense. The feed had to be crossed with... something else. Perhaps one of Q's staffers was watching cute baby animal videos on YouTube.
"Bloody fucking hell," Bond grunted, and Q saw the animal dive into a container sculpted to look like the creature itself, only with an entry port where the face should have been. Q could just barely make out words at the bottom: Chinchilla Bath.
"Bond, what on earth —"
"It swallowed the chip," Bond said as he reached into the camera feed's viewing angle. He snatched up the animal, still inside the bizarre container.
The image swung around again, ending at a sharply tilted angle. Bond brought up both hands and fired off two quick shots that must have hit his target dead-on, though the muzzle flash left the software straining to correct. Then a puff of what looked like smoke or dust came up into the image, though Q hadn't heard a third shot.
"Are you injured?" he demanded, one hand poised over his keyboard. He was fully prepared to abort the stealth mission and activate the backup team. A direct assault on the house was a less-than-optimal solution, but Q needed that chip.
"Negative," Bond answered gruffly.
"Do you have the chip?"
"The chinchilla —"
Q huffed, adrenaline making his voice sharp as he demanded, "Do you have the bloody chinchilla, then?"
The display changed, showing the chinchilla peeking curiously out of the little container. Bond picked it up and scrambled to his feet. "Affirmative. Starting the fire, then bringing the chinchilla to the extraction point."
"Acknowledged. Extraction team will be awaiting your arrival. HQ out," Q said, already typing the command to switch to the camera feed of a nearby shopping centre, where Bond's getaway car had been parked twenty minutes earlier by a field agent posing as a grocery shopper.
Then he switched to the MI6 contractor directory to search for an exotic animal veterinary surgeon with Top Secret level clearance.
By the time the weekend finally rolled around, Q had received the chip via diplomatic courier pouch, infiltrated the network, and acquired almost two thousand gig of data that would have Intentions & Analysis working overtime for weeks to interpret. Relieved that Q Branch's part was over, he left them at it and went home to sleep for sixteen blissfully uninterrupted hours. As a reward to himself, he spent the rest of the weekend finishing his backlog of old video games, and he went back to the office on Monday morning feeling refreshed and satisfied at how his department had finally come into the modern age. He was in such a good mood that he stopped at a bakery to pick up two boxes of pastries for his morning staff.
He had to set the boxes down to trigger the biometrics that unlocked the door to his main workcentre. Holding the door open with one foot, he picked up the boxes and turned to let himself in.
Then he froze, staring at a massive wooden cabinet. "If that's one of Major Boothroyd's old gadgets..." he began, flinching inside at the memory of some of the unexpectedly explosive things his team had uncovered from the wreckage of Boothroyd's former labs.
"Hardly that." Bond stepped out from around the cabinet, grinning. "Enjoy your chip, Q?"
"Very much," he said guardedly. He set the pastries down on the nearest table and walked over to Bond. His team, which had apparently been gathered in front of the cabinet, all scattered.
The cabinet proved to be open at the front, with wooden shelves and ramps, boxes, and bright-coloured plastic tubes. There was a pan of wood shavings at the bottom and a water bottle hanging on the wire mesh door that covered the entire front. Sitting prominently on one of the shelves was the chinchilla Q had last seen in Bond's mission video feed, now with a shaved belly and a neat line of healing surgical stitches
"Q, meet Chip," Bond said smugly. "Your new department mascot."