Part Two

'Mr Tracy? I know you can hear me.'

A cool hand slid beneath the collar of his uniform, fingers reaching firmly for the pulse in his throat.

'Can you respond?'

No, he couldn't respond. Didn't want to respond. Virgil was quite happy as he was, curled into a ball, tongue stuck hard to the roof of his mouth.

The hand removed itself from beneath his shirt. 'This sensation will wear off in a few hours, Mr Tracy.'

Virgil wasn't sure he wanted that. He quite liked the heaviness in his body, the lead weight of gravity pressing him to the floor, the thick sludge of blood pooling at the extremities of his limbs.

Footsteps passed close to his face and a voice sounded from somewhere high above. 'Confiscate everything.'

Virgil's boots were slid swiftly from his feet, his socks peeled neatly away from his ankles. Hands reached into his pockets, fumbled briefly with the buckle of his belt, his body pushed and pulled as his trousers were slipped cleanly away. His sash and shirt were pulled carefully over his head, his wristcom unsnapped and slid free of his arm. Virgil's bared skin prickled in the cool air, his flesh rising in slow and uncontrolled waves.

'Pick him up.'

Hands slid beneath his body, raised him to sitting, hoisted him into the air and balanced him on leaden legs. He was dragged, feet scraping over a cold floor, lowered again, limbs arranged neatly around him. Bile rose bitter in his throat as his head settled limp upon a flat surface. He felt breath across his face, a hand fluttering against his cheek, a thumb resting briefly in the cup of his eye. The fingers reached once more for his throat and paused, reassured by steady beat of his heart as it pulsed there. And then the hand was gone, and he was cold. And alone.

Alan tugged his uniform over his head and dropped it to the floor.

'T-shirt too,' Tin-Tin directed as she set up the diagnostic equipment.

Silently Alan peeled the shirt away from his body, stood goose-pimpling in the antiseptic air.

'Your father has asked for a full workup,' Tin-Tin continued as Alan stared at the floor. 'I'm sorry, but it may take a while.' She loaded a trolley and pushed it towards the diagnostic pallet. 'Hop on the bed so I can get you set up.'

Alan studied the pattern on the tiled floor.

'Alan?' She turned to look at him.

The blue eyes lifted slowly.

'On the bed, please.'

Alan looked at the bed, bent down to remove his boots.

'Are you alright?' Tin-Tin observed his movements carefully.

'I'm fine.' He straightened, methodically unbuckled his belt and dropped his trousers to the floor. 'I saw what I saw, Tin-Tin. This,' he waved a hand towards the bed, 'isn't going to change anything.'

'I'm only doing as your father ordered.'

'I'm fine,' he repeated as he approached the bed.

'Unfortunately your father wants that in writing.' Tin-Tin smiled uncertainly as she patted the crisp white sheet. 'Hop up, please.'

Alan slid silently onto the pallet and lowered his head to the small pillow. 'This is a waste of time,' he said as she began attaching electrodes to his torso. 'We need to start looking for them!'

'Where, Alan?' Tin-Tin placed the final electrode and rested her hand upon his chest, his heart beating steadily beneath her palm. 'Where are we going to look?'

Alan lifted his eyes to stare at the ceiling, clenched his jaw tightly as Tin-Tin activated the diagnostic panel and dutifully recorded the readings.

'Everything reads normal,' she said reassuringly.

Alan's eyes continued their inspection of the ceiling as Tin-Tin lifted her fingers to probe carefully through his hair.

'I'm not injured,' he protested as her hands moved across his scalp and down towards his neck.

'You said you fell during some turbulence. Sit up, please.'

'Tin-Tin...' His shoulders tensed as her fingers worked their way slowly down his spine.

'What day is it?' she asked as she inspected the musculature of his back.

'What?' Alan grunted as her fingers dug into a bruise at his hip.

'Today's date. Do you remember?'

'Of course I remember.'

'What is it?' She finished her inspection of his back, tilted him down to the pallet and commenced probing across his chest.

'October twenty-second,' he replied.

'Year?'

'2029.'

She pressed her fingers carefully into his ribs. 'Did you get those bruises on the rescue, or on the way home?'

'On the rescue.' Alan winced as the incessant hands worked their way across his abdomen.

'We're going to need an EEG, I think.' Tin-Tin turned to the trolley beside the bed. 'And I'm going to need some blood.'

He watched as she wrapped a tourniquet around his upper arm.

'Make a fist,' she instructed. 'When was your last birthday?'

'What the hell kind of question is that?'

'Alan, you know what kind of question it is. Make a fist.' She lifted the syringe from its tray. 'When was your last birthday?'

'Tin-Tin.' Alan's hand lashed out as she moved towards him, pinioned her wrist in fingers carved of steel. 'There's nothing wrong with me!''

'Please remain seated.'

Virgil fell heavily back into the chair, muscles screaming from his aborted effort to stand. The laboured beating of his heart sent blood rushing through burning veins, a hot tide that seared its way into nerve fibres and pulsed unceasingly beneath the surface of his skin. Sweat pricked in a wave across his shoulders as he lifted his head to appraise the dark-skinned woman who had entered the room, and who was now positioning a data pad on the table in front of him.

'What,' he slurred, tongue thick in his mouth, lips unable to continue the momentum of the sentence.

The woman raised a hand to enforce his silence. 'Pay close attention, Mr Tracy.'

He watched as she seated herself in the chair opposite, noted the close crop of her hair, the tight fit of the jumpsuit that was zippered all the way to her throat. His tongue moved in his mouth as he forged words and sentences and demands for information that one by one failed to materialise into actuality. He blinked, the sharp contrast of this dark woman against the bright white walls of his prison burning holes into his retinas. He wanted desperately to close his eyes. To sleep. To let the heaviness of his body pull him back into oblivion.

'Mr Tracy.'

The words cut through the fog in his skull, a clean slice of sound that shot pain unexpectedly through his temples. He swallowed, the muscles of his throat closing over cut glass.

'On November 26th 2029 your organisation responded to an emergency broadcast from a collapsed mine in Carajás, Brazil.' The woman slid a finger across the data pad, bringing it to sudden life. 'What you did not know when you responded to this call was that a number of the men trapped in this mine were members of a partisan political group…'

'October.' Virgil dredged the word from the dark space at the bottom of his lungs.

. '…one of whom will,' the dark eyes met his as the woman ignored the interruption, 'at the end of 2030 AD, be responsible for the destruction of the civilised world.'

'It's October.' The words lurched drunkenly out of him.

'This man,' the finger tapped the data pad, bringing forth an image of a heavy-set middle-aged man, 'is Hernan Matéo Alvaro.'

'The twenty-second.' Virgil felt as though he were talking underwater.

'From descriptions Alvaro gave to the media at the time, Gordon Tracy and yourself were responsible for extracting him alive from the disaster area.' She pushed the data pad closer to Virgil, aligned it with painful precision against the edge of the table. 'Please memorise his face. It is very important.'

Virgil looked at the face on the data pad, his lips working uselessly, eyes squeezing shut as his body exploded into flame, a wave of pins and needles that pricked their way across the surface of his skin, fingered their way into his scalp and drenched him in sudden sweat. He hunched forward as his stomach twisted into a hard, painful knot, veins tightening in his throat as he retched and vomited only empty air.

The woman studied him with her dark eyes, noted the laboured heave of his chest, focussed intently on the flicker of the pulse at his temple, the hands that trembled where they curled across his abdomen.

She rose, scraped the data pad into one hand and looked down at the top of his bowed head. 'A few more hours, then.'

'Give it up, son.' Jeff stepped aside as his eldest son swept into Thunderbird Two's cockpit and dropped heavily into the pilot's seat.

Scott's face glistened in the artificial light, his muddied uniform plastered to his body with sweat. He curled his fingers around the steering yoke, gripped it as though he could somehow intuit what had happened through the palms of his hands. He brought up the flight data one more time, eyebrows furrowing in irritation.

'Scott.' Jeff angled forward to lay a hand on his shoulder. He squeezed gently, felt muscles turn to stone beneath his fingers. 'We've downloaded the flight data.' He squeezed harder, tried to break his son's single-minded determination. 'Brains is going through the flight recorder now. Maybe he's found something.'

Scott shrugged his shoulder out from under the firm grip, stabbed angrily at the console as his father's hand fell away. 'They can't have just disappeared!'

'But they have.' Jeff leaned forward and disengaged the console beneath Scott's hands, powered Thunderbird Two methodically down until the great beast settled into darkness. 'And now we have to deal with it.'