Chapter 7: Silver on the horizon

Notes:

My thanks, as always, to my wonderful beta, Soleil_Lumiere. And to the other lovely person who helped with figuring out what Parker would call Scott (you know who you are).

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

Silver on the horizon
Oh-six fifteen in the morning saw Scott running along a winding road between bland holiday cottages that made the Silver Sands Holiday Park, heading for the beach and eventually the abandoned lighthouse.

The sunrise was still twenty-five minutes away. A pale silver light filtered between the sea and the clouds, still holding the blackness of the night. It was cold, and wet underfoot from the previous day's rain. Every now and then the wind sent a spray of spume across more than half a kilometre of beach and cottage into Scott's face.

He was wearing civvies, tracksuit pants and a hoodie. The sight of an International Rescue blue running down the road in the first hours of the day was likely to occasion alarm in anyone who happened to see him. As it was he had only seen a couple of cars, and no pedestrians at all.

His breath huffed into the chill as his legs rhythmically pounded along the wet concrete. A hypnotic one-two, one-two, that helped dispel the memories of the call he'd made at midnight to the grandmother watching and waiting on Tracy Island.

Now, he was numb. The cold, the lingering darkness. The anonymity. They all helped.

Then, he had watched as his grandmother's chin had trembled, even as she lifted it, facing into the wind of this latest tragedy in her life. Then, the hurt was knifelike, and lingered.

"There's still a chance, Grandma. If they got Four out, they might be somewhere in the north Atlantic, maybe trying to head against the current down south. Or maybe waiting it out somewhere up north." Though if that were true, why hadn't they contacted anyone by now? The counter-argument thrummed under his skin even as he tried to give his grandma a kindness that could only prolong the cruelty.

"Of course." Grandma's voice was unsteady, but she never dropped her gaze. "You know my grandsons are smart. They'll figure it out."

He'd agreed, and summoned up more ideas, each one increasingly unlikely. And Grandma had nodded, grateful, even as her eyes gradually filled with tears, even as Scott's started to sting, too.

"I'll stay here until I find them. I'll bring them home, Grandma." He'd said that, hadn't he. And they both knew he might be meeting that promise in ways that that could only be tragic.

One-two. One-two.

The light on the horizon was brightening, but the headlights of cars still glared. As Scott passed under one streetlamp, something was lit up in the middle of the road beneath the next.

His stride shortened, then dropped to a jog.

It was a child.

The unexpectedness of it brought him up short.

A child. Boy or girl he couldn't tell. Pretty, but then little kids often were, regardless of sex. Instantly he thought of Gordon at about two years of age, remembered loftily calling his little, big-eyed, blond-curled brother 'pretty' and his mother saying no, he was 'elfin'. As if that was better.

The splinter of grief made him gasp out loud. Numb. He needed numb.

The child looked up at him, woeful in thin pyjamas.

"What are you doing out here, hey?" Scott crouched down, suddenly aware of his height in the semi-darkness. The child tucked her chin back – a girl, he thought it was a girl – in an obvious shrinking from this stranger with the weird voice.

"So where do you belong? Not really a great idea to be out here, sweetheart." He reached for her, still hunkered down, and waited. She whimpered, and hid her head, the blonde curls dropping over her face.

He waited. He knew this game, knew it from years of being a big brother, years more of rescuing children who didn't understand why their world was suddenly full of fear and loudness and shouts. It took longer than he expected, despite his best softness of tone, despite his gentle smile. At last she raised her head slightly, and he took that for the signal to carefully stretch forward and tuck her against his chest, quietly talking all the while.

"Okay. Can you tell me where you live, honey? No? Okay, so maybe we'll just have a wander for a while, take a stroll. See what we can find." As he murmured he scanned the nearby cottages, looking for lights, an open window, a gaping door. If it came to it he'd contact the police and they could take care of her, but it would be much better if he could return her to her folks as soon as possible. Nothing seemed obvious as her point of departure. Perplexed, he began to slowly walk down the road, towards the beach.

Further to the left, set back from the road he was on, a cottage dumped on a slight rise showed lights in the front window. It would at least be someone to ask.

The child had her arms tight against her body, still refusing to hold onto him. It made it awkward to hold her, but she was shivering so badly he didn't dare put her down. Maybe these people on the hill would have something they could wrap her in?

As he approached, he heard a loud thump and a yell from inside the cottage. The child shrank even further in his arms.

A different kind of coldness crept up his spine.

"Shh, shh, sweetheart. Let's go see if we can find someone who knows who you belong to, hmm?"

He shifted her onto his hip. The door had amber glass in two of its panels; next to it, a window with net curtains limply hanging over the sill showed a possible way Scott's waif had found herself outside. Another crash, an angry voice raised again, and Scott found his numbness vibrating through his bones as he lifted his hand to knock.

"Fuck off, you nosey bitch!" The sound of steps and the door was flung open.

Inside, not what Scott expected; a tall, good-looking young man dressed for an office somewhere, neat and smart. He was shaking and flexing his hand as if it was hurting. He looked belligerently at the figure on the doorstep, silhouetted with the growing light from the east, and the child gave a little gasp.

"Yeah? What?"

Scott found his own voice was calm.

"Do you happen to know where this one belongs?"

"Maudie? What are you doing out there?" The young man turned, speaking to someone behind him. "Hey, Charlotte. Your kid's outside. What the hell's she doing out there? No, I'll take her," he said, suddenly moving to block Scott's view into the room.

It was too late. Scott saw a suitcase on the floor by the door, and the leg of someone obviously sitting or lying on the ground. In one smooth move he used his body to wedge the door open, one arm still tight around the child who had begun to clutch around his neck at the sight of the man moving towards her.

"I think I better get her inside. I'm a trained emergency worker."

"I can take her!"

"That's okay, sir. Really, no trouble at all."

Another smooth hip check, and Scott was into the room.

On the floor a young woman half lay, half sat, one side of her face dark red, the skin split across the brow. Scott shoved past the man, ignoring his, "Hey, pal, what do you think you're doing?" to hunker down beside her.

"Are you alright?"

Like her daughter, the woman hid her face.

"I'm fine. I just tripped."

"Hey, pal. I'm talking to you." Scott felt a hand, rough on his shoulder, pulling him back. "Leave my wife alone."

Gently, he leant forward to brush her hair back from her eyes.

"Are you sure? Is this your little girl?"

She didn't make a move to take the child, despite Maudie's wriggle towards her, and then Scott saw it – the way her eyes flickered from the suitcase to the door, a bleakness in them that shouted, then came back to him.

Take her. Get her out of here.

Okay.

Scott stood, and disengaged Maudie, all too happy to go back to her mother.

"There you go," he said. The woman's hands clutched around her girl. She looked up at Scott.

And then there was a wall, and a man against it, and a hand at the man's throat, a fist drawn back, and a howling black rage roaring through Scott's body, filling the hollow, screaming for release.

"Oh, god. Oh, god." The man's face was turned away, his eyes squeezed shut.

A sudden, sharp scent of urine.

And Virgil nowhere to hold him back.

Only – he was.

As if he stood behind Scott, one arm across his shoulder, that low, calm voice saying, Easy, Scott.

"Don't hurt him! Jesus, don't hurt him!"

The urge to punch the man before him was almost overwhelming. He could see his fist go through the man's head, into the ply board wall, on and out into the morning. Letting light through the hole, letting the fury out of his own body.

Instead, he breathed heavily, in and out, feeling his brother's arm, hearing his brother's voice.

He relaxed his fist and reached in his pocket for his phone. The man flinched at the movement. His face was white, streaked with tears. Scott brought his camera up and took a photo.

"This," he ground out, voice like bedrock, "will be going up in the officer's mess and the enlisted canteen on the GDF base. Underneath it, I am going to mention what kind of man you are. And I am going to ask if anyone ever hears of you raising a hand to a woman or child ever again – they are to contact me. It won't matter where I am, I will come back, and I will find you, and I will finish this. Do you understand me?"

The man shivered as his child had done only minutes before, in fear and distress.

Scott shook him hard against the wall.

"I need to hear you say it."

"Ye-es. Oh god. Don't hurt me."

Scott stepped away as if the man in front of him was poison. One last look of utter contempt, then he turned to the woman.

"Do you have somewhere to go?"

She nodded, scrambling to her feet, awkward with her daughter on one hip, swaying with the after-effects of the blow to her face. Upright, marks on her arms could be seen, old and new bruises mottling her skin. Scott moved towards her, to help, and she shrank back.

Afraid of me, he thought. She's afraid of me.

And the urge to violence, and the black rage that birthed it, drained away, leaving shame and sorrow and a swelling nausea.

"I'll be alright, mister," she said, easing past him to grab the suitcase. She spared one quick look at the man on the floor against the wall, sitting where he slumped after Scott released him, weeping silently in spent fear. With her daughter and the suitcase she hurried from the little cottage into the morning now fully committed to a gray daylight.

Unlike her, Scott couldn't bear to look at the young man he had so completely humiliated. He followed her out the door and stood by the doorstep, watching as she struggled down the road, half-running, the little arms around her neck clinging tightly. He kept watch until she reached the main road and a waiting car. An older woman got out, exclaimed something before hugging her and the little one, then bundled both into the car and drove off.

Behind him, the man was sobbing.

Scott closed the door and jogged back down the hill toward the beach. The waves were surging up along the shoreline, leaving traces of wrack and other weed lying on the dark wet sand. It was firm and springy beneath his feet, and he picked up his pace, running hard with the wind behind him, faster and faster until he was digging up spurts of sand and the ache in his thighs could pierce the ache in his chest.

He didn't throw up until he reached the turn off for the lighthouse, and he could rest one hand on the stone wall bordering the beach and support himself until there was nothing left in his stomach.

**** ***** ***** ***
He stayed in the shower for almost twenty minutes, the longest shower he'd had in years. He told himself he was cold. That he was trying to scrub something else from his skin was a truth he decided he could ignore today.

By the time he reached the operations room, Kayo was already there, standing beneath the blue sit-rep wall that had come to assume a kind of oppressiveness in Scott's mind. It loomed above them all as an implacable record of an ever-changing sea amidst an ever-stagnant situation, the orange marker drawing his eye to it as relentlessly as to a gaping wound. Colonel Casey's face looked grim in its cold light.

"Good morning, Scott. Have you heard the latest?"

"No?" He looked at once to Kayo, and found her face closed. She only ever looked like that when she was struggling with something beyond her ability to wrangle. He felt the quick spike of alarm.

"Good news." Colonel Casey's voice held that tone of professional pleasure reserved for making the political best of the ambiguous. "Three escape pods have been found off the north coast of France."

For the worst of seconds his heart was ahead of his brain. Kayo's frozen look was his warning.

"From - ?"

"The GDF flight and the two rescue missions. Fifteen personnel in total. It's an excellent outcome."

Of course. The GDF flights went down in the North Sea. The currents brought them south.

Scott swallowed.

"That's – that's great news."

"Yes." But her eyes told him the rest; that alongside her joy and relief for the people found was sorrow for the two of her lost pilots who weren't coming home. That she knew having nothing to say of Thunderbird Four meant that International Rescue was one day further into the impossibility of survival. That for all an effort of resistance was needed for the World Council, if she'd waited a day Drago Kasun's flight may have been reconsidered, and another pilot would be safe. "I've just informed General Afemui."

"What's the word from the World Council?"

"Oh, you haven't heard?" Kayo's arms were crossed over her stomach, protective. "They've received a demand."

"An ultimatum. From the group responsible. No longer calling themselves the Luddites. They're now the Rogalian Regency, it seems. We have been informed that all energy generating plants should be shut down in the next week, or else flights across the Atlantic will be targeted next."

"And after that, cities. They claim they can target twenty cities at a time."

Kayo didn't need to elaborate; her expression told Scott what she thought of the claim, both in its intent and its achievability.

"Rogalian?" Scott asked the room in general.

"An old word – naturally," said Colonel Casey, dry as dust. "Rogalian is a seventeenth century word for a great and ruinous fire, apparently."

"Not at all pretentious, then," murmured Kayo.

"Great. So. The council response?"

"We're working on it. They're working on it." Colonel Casey turned to face the blue wall and its insistent blue whorls. "If we don't come up with some way to challenge them, I don't know what we can do but capitulate, at least for now."

Scott almost growled.

"That's unacceptable."

"Give me an alternative." Her eyes were grave, and tired, but her head remained high. "If International Rescue knows something – if you have anything I can take to General Afemui?"

And he didn't, of course he didn't, nothing but his heartbreak and his stubbornness.

He gestured with his head to Kayo.

"Come on. We'll go find a something."

"Gladly."

They left the operations room, but instead of going back to their quarters, Scott led her to where the car assigned to them by the GDF was parked.

"Let's visit Penelope, see if she and Parker have any ideas."

"You mean something besides giving these madmen exactly what they want?"

"That's the one."

They drove south down the A941, in silence, until Scott suddenly pulled the car off the road and onto the verge. Kayo shot him a questioning look, but he sat silently, his hands folded on the wheel.

The numbness was gone. So was the black rage. Both had been scoured from him by his own actions in the cottage, and now he sat, suspended between emotional states in the kind of limbo he loathed.

Twice he opened his mouth to say something, and each time the words died in his mouth.

Kayo exceeded her day's patience quota twice over before she ventured to speak.

"Scott. Spit it out. Whatever it is."

He gave a sigh and bent his head forward over the wheel.

"It's nothing."

"Fine." She paused, but he heard that short intake of breath, knew what it meant. Come on, Scott. I need you to be strong now. "Can we keep going then?"

He stayed, head down, for another few seconds, then straightened up.

"Yeah. Sorry Kayo."

He didn't dare look at her. He knew he'd see pity, and he didn't want that.

Because despite everything, despite the bad news of yesterday and the good news of today that nonetheless brought with it the most shameful of stings – despite the World Council panic, and the GDF indecisiveness, despite not knowing what they were fighting and having nothing to fight it with anyway – despite all this, somewhere in the pit of his belly, a small flame had begun to burn.

He knew it for what it was, and he cursed himself. It was foolish, and against all sense, and he couldn't speak of it without watching it die almost at once. But somewhere inside him, Scott Tracy still hoped.

They were both silent in the car until they reached Elgin, and Lady Penelope's choice of hotels, Mansion House.

"Mansion House. Of course it is," said Kayo. They found a stately looking building set back on leafy grounds, sufficiently gabled and lawned to suggest a kind of faux aristocracy. Scott suspected Lady Penelope chose it ironically. He drove the car to the front door with the confidence that comes from a billion dollar bank balance and not a single care for snobbery that claimed propriety as its shield.

Parker stood at the door itself, beckoning them in.

"'Er Ladyship has him on the comms. I think 'e may 'ave something after all."

"He?" Scott mouthed to Kayo. From inside the front lounge room with its large windows and views of the garden, Scott heard his youngest brother's voice. "Alan?"

"No, sir. Mister Brains."

"Brains! What in – " Scott barged into the room, to see Brains' avatar suspended in mid-air, talking earnestly about a molecular model suspended beside him.

"Oh, Scott. What good timing." He didn't remember ever seeing Penelope looking so relieved. "I'm afraid I'm an awful duffer. Brains has been explaining all this to me and it's just not sinking in."

Scott took a moment to look at Brain's eyes. They were over-bright, and his face was flushed.

"Hey, Brains," he said, carefully. "How are you feeling?"

"I'm per-perfectly capable of doing my w-work. This is an emergency, for g-goodness sake."

"It is at that." Scott dropped onto a well-worn velvet seat beside Penelope, and leant forward. "You've got something?"

"Scott!" Alan's head appeared beside Brains, who rudely shoved him away. His voice could still be heard. ""He's sick, Scott! He won't listen."

Brains ignored him. "Yes, I have something, if p-people would stop fussing around m-me and p-pay attention." His stutter was markedly worse.

"Paying attention now, Brains. Fire away."

"Very well. I have isolated the aspects of b-both schematics of the GDF p-planes and Thunderbird Two that are b-both analogous with one another and may have some p-part to play in this situation. The factors are reduced to 16, of which f-four were likely culprits. I've since reduced that to t-two."

The flame grew.

"Which are?"

"The terellium alloy and the AFC. S-Scott, it's a conductivity problem. As you know, terellium alloy is the world's g-greatest isotropic electrical conductor. Six times superior to c-copper. Its ampacity is extraordinary. But! If you apply an electrical field that has current going in the opposite direction, it is an anisotropic- an anisotropic conductor. Do you see?"

"I'm sorry, Brains, not quite there yet." Scott glanced at Kayo, who gave the smallest of shrugs.

"But it's so – " Brains sighed, extravagantly. "It's the AFC. They've – they've used the AFC as a s-sort of electrical m-magnetochiral anisotropy creator. It's the dopant atoms in the terellium… The fluon engines with their crystalline central c-cortex become a chiral scattering mechanism which forms the – it f-forms the – Scott?"

"I'm here, Brains."

"It's the conductivity. It's turned the whole p-plane into a semiconductor that – the current is flowing into the AFC. Do you see it?"

"I think I h'understand. You've reversed the polarity!" cried Parker.

"Yes, that is p-precisely what I did not say," said Brains, with asperity.

"I'm afraid you've gone somewhere beyond us, Brains," Lady Penelope said, with great accuracy. "Is it possible, I wonder, to put all this into something that we could understand?"
Brains dropped his head into his hands.

"How c-can you not see it? It's so clear. It's so – it's s-simple. It's so simple."

"Scott. Really." Alan's head appeared above Brains' bent one. "He's like, 102 in the shade."

"I'm not- !" Brains' head shot up, forcing Alan away again. "Yes, I am aware I have a f-fever, but I'm right on this. If you only applied b-band theory to - I c-can't explain it, you're all sooo - but I'm right. N-nothing with terellium alloy or an AFC w-will be able to work with this p-particular weapon."

Scott found he was standing up without ever being aware of getting to his feet.

"You're sure, Brains? You're absolutely sure?"

"Absolutely. Scott, you n-need to find a plane without t-terellium alloy or an AFC."

"Thank you, Brains," Scott said, gravely. "Now, please. Leave this with us. Go and get some rest."

"Scott? Kayo?" Brains peered at them, eyes intent and unfocused to a level only the drugged or the sick could achieve. "Scott, d-don't give up. I've been thinking. They c-could be alright. D-don't give up."

"We won't."

"I m-mean it. Manual release of the m-module. Get it ab-bove. Two would have to sink f-faster, but they would see that."

Scott nodded, slowly. "Get the main body of Two to sink faster so that the module would float clear." The possibility began to live in him. "Virgil's smart enough to figure that out. He'd find a way to get Four free. It's physics, like John always says."

"And Scott?" Brains was crouching down so low over the comm unit his face filled the view. "I think they used the p-prototype of this weapon on Two b-before. In the London attack? Not yet as effective, b-but perhaps it wasn't a malfunction of the AFC, as we thought."

A hand with a thermometer band appeared on his head. Brain's face was so close even Scott could read the numbers that appeared there.

"It's 103!" Alan's voice was a wail. "Scott-!"

"Oh, for g-goodness sake!"

"Brains, he's right. You need to get back to bed."

"I'm already in bed!"

"Then – "

Lady Penelope's smooth voice came through. "Brains, you've been simply wonderful. We'll take it from here. Now you must stop worrying Alan. He's quite distressed. Be a dear and take your medicine for him, won't you?"

Centuries of simply expecting people to obey a Creighton-Ward request was in that voice, and Brains was not immune.

"Well, alright. If you p-promise me, Scott."

"I promise. Both things."

"I am f-feeling a little… a little…"

"Yes, Brains, I'm sure you are." If caramel could speak, it would sound like Lady Penelope when she needed to soothe. "Get some rest, and we'll report back to you soon."
The avatar disappeared, and it seemed as though everyone in the room drew in a breath.

"Well…"

"Scott? What do you think?" All smoothness gone; this was Penelope on the hunt.

"I could grasp about half of that. I think I get the general idea. But I need to talk it over with John. He might make more sense of it." Scott tapped his comm unit. "Thunderbird One to Thunderbird Five."

A moment, and then EOS' sweet voice.

'Thunderbird Five here.'

"EOS, I need to speak with John."

'I'm afraid I can't let you do that.'

A blink.

"Say again, EOS?"

'I can't let you wake him up. I've put him to sleep.'

A flood of cold through his body, a turning of recent nausea. His throat grew tight, but he managed to keep his tone calm.

"What do you mean by that, EOS?"

'He needed sleep. His bio-scans were alarming. And he wouldn't go to bed. I made so much noise he had to get up off the bathroom floor and go to bed. Then I put him to sleep.'
A swooping fear of euphemism. Instant images of vacuum invited in, of oxygen denied.

"How did you do that?"

A delighted child's chuckle.

'I flooded him with alpha waves attuned to his brain pattern. He's not going to wake up until I stop. And that won't be for another five hours.'

"Oh." He heard the small exhalation from beside him and realised Kayo had been just as deeply frightened. EOS and John might be good friends, but Scott understood two things, completely, in that second. The first was that John and Thunderbird Five would always be utterly vulnerable to EOS's whims. He'd known that, and accepted John's assurances that it wouldn't be a problem, but that certainty looked frangible now.

And the other was that he fundamentally did not trust EOS.

And yet, at least for the next few hours, he had to.

"Do you think you could reconsider that EOS? I really need to discuss something with John."

'No.'

A child's mulish refusal. Scott had a different thought.

"Well, then, EOS, do you think you could listen to the recorded conversation on the comm between Brains and I and see what sense you can make of it?"

'I'd be delighted to.' Several seconds' silence, and then another laugh. 'Of course.'

"You understand what he is saying?"

'He's awfully clever for a human.'

"That he is. EOS, do you think you could explain it to us?"

'He's already explained it.'

Kayo intervened. "EOS, we're all rather tired. It would help us a lot if you made it simple for us."

John's programming was so bizarrely brilliant that it even allowed a computer to sound smarmy.

'It really is already simple. I can make it simpl-er. The weapon is a directed anti-energy one that reverses the currents in the semi-conductors throughout a plane so that they flow back into the AFC which acts as a kind of magnet and collects every bit of power. Would you like it simpler still?'

"I told you," Parker muttered in the background. "H'it's reversed the polarity."

"No, EOS, that's fine." Scott exchanged a rueful look with Kayo. "But one question; is it specifically geared to work with an AFC and terellium alloy alone, or would this work on any electrical engine?"

'It's not like a usual EMF at all. It is targeted to work with terellium specific p-n junctions. A non-terellium engine would not be affected.'

"Thank you. And thank you for looking after John, EOS."

'My pleasure.'

The connection was gone. Kayo gave him a significant look.

"When this is all over, we are going to have to have a long hard chat with John. And not on Five."

"Agreed. But for now, we've got something to go on after all. So." He clapped his hands together. "Non-terellium engines."

Kayo raised her hands wide.

"Honestly, Scott, I wouldn't know where to start. Nothing in the air these days that doesn't have terellium all through it."

"And that's been true for the last twenty years." Scott frowned at nothing as he worked through his vast knowledge of current air machines of all kinds. "I mean, the AFC's easy enough. Just take it out of the engine – though that would leave it vulnerable to an ordinary EMF attack. Still, if we want to get after them we'll just have to trust that these jerks are using their new and improved version alone. Lady Penelope?"

"If you can't think of anything, I don't know who can. Your father brought you up in the industry after all. Is there anyone, do you think, at Tracy Industries..?"

Scott gave a half –shrug. "There's Del Irani. She's the head of development now, she's got access to the latest database. But I know for a fact terellium is the go to. No one would not use it – it's so much lighter, and stronger, and just better. Who could sell a plane made with anything else?"

A cough from Parker.

"Beggin' your pardon, Mister Scott, but I may know someone 'oo might know something about a plane on the quiet. H'if you take my meaning."

"I'm afraid we're not quite up to divining meaning this morning, Parker. Out with it, if you please."

"Quite right, m'lady." Parker straightened. "I 'appen to 'ave a friend what has access to a certain type of plane that might fit our perticular requirements."

Scott swung about. "You do? What type of plane? Where?"

"And just who is this person, Parker?"

"'Is name is Spider Dawson, m'lady."

"Spider? How unpleasant. What does he call you? Nosey, I suppose."

"Not quite m'lady."

"Well?" A stare of pure ice. Parker sighed.

"Sushi. 'E called me Sushi, m'lady."

"Sushi? Why on Earth?"

"From Aloysius. 'E 'as what you might call an h'original mind."

"That's regrettable."

"One way of putting it."

"And where does this Spider person live?"

"On the south coast, m'lady, in Kent."

"Well, then, we best get going."

"Wait!" Scott had watched this exchange with bemusement. "Wait. What kind of plane, Parker?"

"Oh, the plane?" Parker gave a sudden smile. ""A Spitfire, Mister Scott, sir."

Notes:

I may have a bit of a crush on Del Irani - hence she got in there.