November 2012
Nine days had passed since the destruction of MI6, and the building still reeked of smoke and felt like death. Bond paid the cabbie with money he'd stolen from M's safe and headed to the security post set up in a tent outside the visitors' entrance. In a classic governmental case of belated overkill, the wrecked building was surrounded by men in the uniform of the Met — men who looked far too military to be entirely convincing.
His first priority was to arm himself; he'd do no one any good if he were actually dead. Second priority was to find Taylor. His name hadn't been on the list of the dead, thank god, but the Help Desk was in chaos. According to rumour, they'd been moved offsite with the other nonessential and administrative personnel, to a supposedly secure location. Bond hadn't been able to find out any further details.
But why hadn't Taylor called? Bond had carried the anonymous burner phone since leaving Greece. He'd checked it a dozen times — he'd called Mike a dozen times — but there was nothing. No contact. Why?
For now, he pushed the thought out of his mind. He'd arm himself and then he'd find Taylor, because that was what he did. He could find anyone. And then he'd — well, he couldn't move Taylor and Cherie to his flat, because he didn't have a flat, but he'd get them somewhere safe and anonymous, somewhere no enemy of MI6 would ever think to look for them, and then he could concentrate on finding the bastard who'd struck at his organisation.
As a dead man, Bond's credentials had technically been revoked. Fortunately, he knew his way around and found a security guard willing to look the other way. Not that any number of security guards would have been able to stop him. For three months, Bond had gone without a weapon; now, he needed one.
According to M's computer, critical services had relocated down in the tunnels deep below MI6. Inconvenient, that; Bond much preferred having the armoury on the first floor, just above the security desk. Still, he'd found the entrance to the tunnels back in his earliest days at MI6, and after a couple of false turns, he finally found the right emergency staircase.
His skin crawled at the thought that some outside force could cause such havoc at a distance. He very nearly felt redundant. He felt naked — no gun, not even a bloody earwig — and he kept telling himself that this wasn't a mission, even though MI6 was no longer the safe haven it had once been.
It never would be again.
Well, Q thought, staring at the somewhat-drippy and far-too-close storage cupboard wall. This hadn't turned out exactly the way he hoped.
If Q considered the situation logically, it was easy to trace where he had gone wrong. The tiny toy mouse that he'd made for Cherie was perfect in his flat, but not here in the tunnels where they'd been living for nearly two weeks.
Two weeks of sleeping in a cot in the cupboard that was his new office, as Quartermaster. Two weeks of no contact with the outside world because of increased network security. Two weeks of no bloody signal for any of his mobiles — not his personal mobile nor the MI6-issued secure mobile and, worst of all, not his 'special' mobile.
He hoped that Alec had contacted James to let him know what was going on, but he doubted it. Surely Alec would have come down to the tunnels if he knew. He would've tried to find Taylor, to help re-establish communication — at Bond's request, if nothing else.
And it would be very nice if Alec showed up right about now to save Q's life.
Q had replaced Cherie's tiny toy mouse with a robot he'd found in a cupboard on one of his Security-escorted excursions up to the old Q branch. He'd armed it with laser pointers that went off at random intervals for Cherie to chase. It had been a brilliant plan to keep Cherie occupied while Q was stringing cable — not to mention providing endless amusement for Danielle and the rest of the morale-strained Q Branch technicians, at least until they could acquire a department ferret.
But as much as Q was starting to enjoy his new name and new digs, he found himself alone in cold, dark tunnels a lot more than he generally preferred. He wasn't a nervous person by nature, but the fact was that while they had people working on mapping the tunnels for miles around their new location, security was not guaranteed.
Switching out Cherie's laser pointers for a turret-mounted weapon had seemed like a wonderful idea. In a late-night fit of narcoengineering, he'd decided on a heavily modified .22 calibre handgun: powerful enough to cause damage, compact enough to let him load the ammo hopper with no less than four thousand rounds to make up for the small calibre.
Q had been amused when the bot had followed him out of the bunkers, its motion sensors spinning and whirring. It had even been amusing when it chambered a round in reaction to a paint can that fell off a shelf. It had ceased to be amusing when the bot starting shooting at everything that moved.
In hindsight, perhaps it would have been wise to take the heavily armed bot to a range to test it first, before releasing it into the tunnels with him.
The sound of metal hitting concrete echoed in the room, forcing a wince from Q. That would be the temporary shelving he'd set up for cataloguing inventory that had been moved from the rubble to the new Q Branch down here in the tunnels. Fortunately, Q had been fairly efficient about moving items out, so the loss wouldn't be significant. A few external hard drives, an unloaded gun or two, maybe a tablet.
Q let his head fall back against the concrete wall with an exasperated groan. At least he had been smart enough to leave Cherie with Danielle.
Annoyed, he listened to the metal shelves rattling around on the floor. In a moment of thoughtlessness, he'd programmed the damned robot to be motion-activated, but not to filter out the results of its own actions. So, presumably, the bot was taking aim at the rattling shelf, firing, causing it to move — which triggered the bot's motion detectors and started the whole process over again.
There is no such thing as a stupid machine, Q thought to himself. Just a stupid designer. But god, how much ammunition did this thing have left in the hopper? What would run out first: the ammo or the batteries?
At least Q could thank the stroke of luck that this section of tunnel was completely empty. Since the attack, everyone had been on wartime footing, as Danielle called it. A dimly-lit room of cots served as a barracks, and they all slept in shifts, working 24/7 to get Q Branch up and running. They still had operatives in the field who needed support, and naturally England's enemies had chosen this moment to strike all around the world, while MI6 was distracted at home.
Q still shivered, remembering the secure intel briefing Tanner had given him: a four-hour nightmarish recitation of just how very close the world was to actually destroying itself in a firestorm of exotic weapons, chaos, and anarchy.
Which, of course, made him feel even more ridiculous and foolish — being trapped in a cupboard hiding from his own creation instead of helping. At least no one else was around to get hurt. Small mercies.
The sound of a bullet piercing the cheap metal made Q flinch. Too bad the shelves weren't industrial. A ricochet would have been very handy about now. The bot was small enough that a single bullet strike, aimed or not, would probably have incapacitated it.
Q stared down at his laptop (which he'd managed to grab in his mad dash for the bullet-proof cupboard), wondering if there was anything to be done other than wait for the bot's battery to die out. He didn't have internet access in here, but he did have access to Q Branch's own subnet. He put in his earbuds, sat on the floor, and started scanning the network for some way to save himself.
The tunnels were comfortably dark, with vaulted ceilings and white tile everywhere turned a sickly yellow by the temporary emergency lighting strung from one pillar to the next. The setup lacked the panache of Major Boothroyd's old lab, with its scorch-marked walls and labyrinths of inventory lockers, but this felt... cosy. A sort of World War II vintage chic.
Poor old Boothroyd. He'd been caught in the blast that had taken out so many others. Bond would miss him. He hadn't been an efficient Quartermaster — otherwise, Bond wouldn't have ended up getting primary support from a Help Desk technician — but he'd been damned fun at the office Christmas party every year, once they started serving the bourbon.
God only knew who M had chosen for his replacement. If it was some bean-counter from Accounts Payable, Bond might just have to arrange an accident. He wasn't about to account for every bloody bullet he fired.
He got a somewhat vicious grin, thinking of the potential fun to be had by dragging the new Quartermaster out into the field for a live demonstration. Maybe he'd get Alec in on it. Hell, he could even call Taylor to give him a play-by-play recounting.
There were a few desks here and there in various stages of assembly. One was little more than plywood over two sawhorses, but it actually had a computer — a MacBook, interestingly. He eyed it as he passed, wondering if he could use it to find out where Q Branch was keeping its new armoury, but there was probably security and encryption. He could hack M's computer because he knew M. Easily guessed passwords and all that.
As he turned away, he heard a faint noise from the computer — a whirr of fans and a beep. He turned and looked back in time to see a window had popped up on the screen.
Text was typed into what looked like a simple text editing program, the letters appearing slowly, one by one, as he watched. "Please identify."
Suspicious, he looked around for any sign of a motion sensor, but saw nothing. There were cameras here, strung with new cables. If the cameras had facial recognition, all sorts of alarms would be going off. He chuckled, wondering what sort of automatic protocols there would be for a dead man to invade MI6.
Amused, Bond leaned down and rubbed at his aching shoulder. He typed in the string of words, numbers, and other characters that made up M's login credentials and hit enter.
"Try again," came the response. "Less nonsense and more of a useful identification. Or do you not know how to type?"
Well. This wasn't an automated system. He considered for a moment, a hint of alarm creeping through him. Rumour had it that the attack on MI6 had been done through computers, rather than physical infiltration and assault.
Had he just found the enemy's point of entry?
"How about you identify yourself first?" he typed back, wondering what the hell the security protocols were for this.
Q watched the man on the screen, considering. The interloper was well-muscled, and if the situation had been different (not stuck in a cupboard, hiding from his cat's favourite toy), then Q might have been tempted to admire the broad shoulders and admirably tight trousers. As it was, the low rez was functionally useless; he needed to see a cleaner image of the man's face to attempt an identification. Q switched from the CCTV cameras that dotted the halls of Q Branch (MI6 refused to invest in nice ones, due to their repeated destruction at the hands of projects gone wonky) to the laptop's webcam.
"Oof," Q muttered to himself. Well-muscled interloper was apparently creepy homeless interloper. The man was unshaven, craggy-faced, in obvious need of a shower, and wearing the most absurd combination of a polka-dotted button-down and leather jacket. The tunnels were fairly extensive, and though MI6 had made a significant effort to map every possible access point, he supposed it wasn't completely unreasonable to think a wanderer might have somehow made it in.
"I'm an employee here, able to verify your login if you have one," he typed back. If homeless-looking guy was MI6, that would work out quite nicely for Q — well-muscled and rough-looking probably meant agent, which meant likely to be armed. Which would be very useful for Q in his current predicament. However, if he were just a random person who wandered in from the tunnels... security breach didn't even begin to cover it.
"I don't need to check my damn email. If you really are an employee here, just tell me where the armoury's hidden. If you're not, tell me where the armoury is anyway, and I'll try for a capture rather than a kill when I come after you. Agreed?"
As soon as he was done typing, he walked away. Q switched to CCTV and watched as he began to search the small, mostly empty inventory cupboards along the back wall. It really was a shame about the scruffy, weathered face, he thought idly. The body definitely deserved a second look, especially from behind.
Agent seemed more and more likely, but given MI6's recent unfortunate event, there was no way in hell Q would just trust his gut. "Sorry, mate. Access to the armoury is limited to employees only. I'd be happy to assist if you can verify your identity. And 'try for' isn't reassuring. How on earth is that incentive?"
He watched on CCTV to watch as the man eventually wandered back to the computer. He bent over, and Q reluctantly switched to the laptop's view. "Accidents happen," the homeless agent typed back without hesitation. Then he stood, treating Q to a view of a very flat-looking abdomen, despite the best efforts of the godawful shirt to make it unattractive, and hips that most definitely had no extra weight to them at all. He was just standing there, so Q switched (reluctantly) to the CCTV, where he watched the man hold up what looked like a cheap flip phone.
Flip phone? Q stared at it, wondering if they even sold flip phones anymore.
Then the homeless agent snapped it shut, shoved it in his pocket, and leaned down again. "Explain again why I'm supposed to be giving you my identity when you have yet to identify yourself," he typed.
Q frowned. This was getting very annoying, and Q was sick of wasting his time. He wanted out of this damn closet, and if the scruffy person hell-bent on getting armed wasn't going to help, he needed to be done with this.
While the man continued exploring, working his way closer to the hallway where Q was trapped, Q typed, "I'm Q Branch. Which means that, when I tell you I've accidentally created an armed death robot hell bent on its creator's destruction (which is why I'm stuck in a cupboard instead of harassing you in person), you should believe me. Are you an agent who can help, or not? If you are, give me your damn name already!"
If scruffy guy was an agent, that should be decent motivation, Q thought. Fortunately, it was only another minute before the man came back to the laptop.
"006," was the response. "That should be enough, if you are who you claim. And what death robot? Are we making bloody Daleks now?"
It seemed like the unlikeliest sort of luck that the one agent in MI6 that Q knew (if only by reputation and a single voicemail) would happen to show up just at the right moment. Q took a deep breath and pulled up 006's file, deeply grateful for the Double O agent files he could access on the limited Q Branch network. If he could access the real personnel files, he'd have more information, but this was a start.
"I wish I would have thought to program it to say 'EXTERMINATE', just to make it more amusing, but sadly I didn't have the foresight," he typed as he waited for the file to load. Then he frowned. "Photos don't match. Try again."
"I'm undercover. Alec Trevelyan. DOB 10/05/68, Kremlyov, Nizhny Novgorod Oblast. SBS until 2003. Double O status 2005. Now where is the bloody armoury?" he typed quickly, scowling.
Q scrolled through the file for 006, verifying the information. Everything he said was accurate, but what Q found most reassuring was the fact that he'd specified his hometown so thoroughly. The map in his file referenced the town as Sarov, with a notation that the closed town's name had changed after the fall of the USSR (and Q briefly wondered what a 'closed town' in Russia was). He peered at the image of the man in the hall — he had the same body structure, same height, same hair colour. If he truly were undercover, then MI6 had a number of creative ways of altering facial structures.
Q switched back to the laptop view, but the scruffy agent wasn't in sight. CCTV showed him at the back wall, and Q felt a moment of panic as he realised 006 was about to step past the corner of the hallway, into the death robot's line-of-sight. Frantically, he typed, "Don't go there!" but he knew it was a wasted effort. The agent wouldn't see the message until he went back to the computer — and as the deafening echo of bullets fired down a concrete-and-metal corridor rang out, he wondered if he'd just managed to get James' best friend killed.
The tunnels under London were an extensive, poorly explored, and generally hazardous mix of bomb shelters from the turn of the twentieth century, command bunkers, London Underground tunnels, and now the lair of MI6's upper echelons — everything from the idiot scientists of Q Branch to the executive team. Somehow, it was fitting; MI6 was more than half shadow government/half cult, anyway.
The armoury would be secure, unfortunately, but the security would be minimal and makeshift — nothing he couldn't bypass. So between chats, Bond looked around, figuring he'd start with the closest doors first on the principle that Q Branch had always liked keeping an eye on its stock of weapons.
He opened the first door, figuring it was as good as any, only to discover that it had been wholly taken over by a nest of cables disturbingly like a technological version of something out of HP Lovecraft. He slammed the door before anything could come to life and grab hold of him — this being Q Branch, he wouldn't be surprised if the cabling-cupboard had defence systems to do just that — and went to the next cupboard in line.
The tunnel with its single working computer probably should have felt spooky, but Bond didn't scare easily. 'Reckless disregard for personal safety' came to mind, in fact, a phrase the MI6 psych-rats seemed to enjoy applying to all the Double O's. What the bloody hell did they expect? A prudent sense of self-preservation? Not exactly in the job description.
Still, fearless only went so far, and Bond wasn't just trained but overtrained. He'd run out of cupboards, which meant the next thing to check was the hall at the back corner. He took two steps down the dark hall, staying within the pool of yellow-tinged light from the emergency lighting systems.
Suddenly, gunfire rang out — the sharp, bright ping of a .25 or .22, he guessed as he threw himself back around the corner. He heard the sound of crashing, wood splintering, pings of bullets off metal. Swearing the whole time in Russian, he ducked to make himself a smaller target in case the ricochet sent rounds down the hallway and into the cement ceiling supports.
Unarmed, unknown enemy firing down a confined hallway with no cover. Why hadn't he stayed in Greece?
Then, he remembered something about a death robot. He'd thought it an idle threat — some bored Q Branch geek playing with pop culture references.
Apparently, the geek hadn't been playing.
Well, fuck.
Q desperately wished that he had been able to open some sort of audio connection so he could yell at the bloody idiot. Next time he sent out a prototype death robot, Q thought bitterly, perhaps he'd load it with less than four thousand rounds.
Thank god, 006 was clever. Once the firing stopped, he shrugged out of his jacket, showing inhumanly broad shoulders, and tossed the jacket to his right, sending it flying across the hallway entrance. As soon as the deathbot started firing, he broke from his crouch, running right for the long pit where trains had once run.
The bot's slaughter of the jacket was chillingly ruthless and efficient. As soon as the last shreds were finally still, it aimed at 006 instead. He stopped in mid-stride and dove sideways for the shelter of one of the concrete columns.
But what should have been a graceful forward roll turned into a collapse as the man's right shoulder seemed to give out under him. As the bot kept firing, Q distinctly saw 006 curse — he didn't need audio to understand fuck! when he saw it. Scrambling, the agent dove off the platform and into the murky, dark ditch where trains no longer ran.
Q realised he should open the cupboard door to wave a red flag or toss something heavy to give 006 time to get away. He pulled himself up off the cold floor and started digging through the plastic tubs on the shelves, looking for something useful to throw.
Death robot, Bond thought, just a bit dazed at the surreal turn the night had taken. It really was a bloody death robot.
He was going to find the tech or techs responsible and start wringing necks. Assuming he didn't bleed out.
He sank down against the trench wall and pulled up his shirt. Lovely. Another bullet wound, though this one hadn't hit anything critical. It just hurt and was bleeding, and why the fuck had he gone to MI6 instead of tracking down Mike?
A weapon. Duty. Right, then.
He closed his eyes and slowed his breathing, one hand pressed to the wound low on his right side. He considered the layout of the room. Four doors, a hallway or secondary room teed off to the right of where he'd been, which was where the death robot was. That's why it hadn't seen him when he'd been at the computer, around the corner. Line of sight.
Staying low, he ran back to the very end of the platform. He considered staying in the train tunnel, going to the next exit, and escaping that way, but that could be miles off, if he was on one of the dead branches. He couldn't chance it. He'd need to vault up and dive to his right, since he was now facing the robot's killing lane, and hope to get out of the way before he got shot again.
Sadly, this wasn't new to him. Except that this time, he wasn't on the bloody payroll.
He took one last look down at himself. The dark trench turned his blood to ink and shadow. He didn't know if that was better or worse than the bright crimson it would be in daylight, assuming he lived that long. And if he wanted a shot at surviving, he'd have to stop getting distracted and start moving.
He took a deep breath, crouched down, and vaulted back up onto the platform.
Q shook his head in disbelief as he watched Alec make his way to the corner of the trench via a shuffling crouch. The robot may not have had line of sight on him, but Q did. He watched the agent evaluate what Q assumed was a wound, and frowned.
Fuck but Q needed some way to communicate with him. If he let 006 bleed to death in his own office because of his own stupid cat toy, especially so soon after losing so many friends, James would never forgive him.
Q silenced the echoes of understatement bouncing around his head by switching the music to S.O.S. by Rhianna (perfect mood music, really) and dumped the last of the useful items into the bucket in front of him. He set the laptop on a shelf, so he could he could keep an eye on Alec's progress, and readied himself to start throwing things. Adrenaline spiked through him, but he told himself that getting shot in the arm by a .22 calibre bullet probably wouldn't do that much damage.
Then a sudden realisation hit Q, and he cursed himself for being too fucking tired to think clearly. 006 was readying himself to vault back into the line of fire, and he typed fast while still holding the jar of bolts he'd chosen for his first volley. He hadn't been talking to 006 on a standard-issue Q Branch computer — it was Danielle's personal laptop, left in Q Branch last night to compile some code she'd been working on over lunch. And, god bless the woman, it was a MacBook.
Q opened remote access, typed into a new text file, and launched the built-in accessibility reader.
"DON'T MOVE," he made the laptop read aloud at top volume in its worst female computer voice —
Just as the idiot agent — and god, they really were all idiots, weren't they? — leaped back into the death bot's targeting sights.
Bond hit the platform to the high rattle of low-calibre gunfire and a female robot shouting at him not to move. Wonderful. A bloody female Dalek. Someone had a sick sense of humour.
He kept low, avoided a hit, and scrambled ungracefully to the right, away from the mouth of the hallway. Just then, he heard a door open, somewhere down the deathtrap hallway. Something moved — not human, perhaps something thrown — and he heard gunfire echo in the other direction, giving him just enough time to run for cover. Someone was apparently helping him.
Breathing too deeply hurt, breathing too shallowly didn't get him enough oxygen, his shoulder ached, and he really shouldn't have had those last two glasses of whisky — not for this.
And he'd wanted a gun. Thought it'd be safer. Bloody fucking hell.
The shooting stopped, thank Christ, so he got up onto one knee, pressed his hand to his side again, and forced himself to stand. Just his luck that he wasn't drunk enough for the gunshot to not hurt, but at least the adrenaline rush was compensating. A little.
The computer over on the sawhorses was glowing at him. There were more programs open now, including one that said, in all caps, DON'T MOVE.
He stomped over to it, resisting the urge to kick the damned thing, and stabbed left-handed at the keyboard:
"thx wtf spex on roobt"
Right. So much for spelling. Hopefully, his unknown assistant really was Q Branch and not some bloody accountant who'd come down to play with buttons, and would understand a wounded field agent's request for enemy intel and specifications.
"2011 Roomba vacuum robot with much-improved motors and speed, armed with a .22 calibre handgun on a turret, initially loaded with 4000 rounds. Motion-activated, with timeframe for reaction in the 2-4 second range. No adaptive programming."
Bond stared at the text and looked down at the blood staining his shirt. Suddenly, this had all taken on a very surreal edge, making him think idly about the use of hallucinogens as an interrogation technique. Was this actually happening, or was he in an enemy holding cell somewhere? Because really? Four thousand rounds in a bloody vacuum cleaner?
This was a video game. He remembered Alec saying something about it, in fact: something about a murderous robot and gun-turrets that talked.
"while i deal with this, i expect you to look up the definition of overkill and be prepared to write a bloody essay on it," he typed out very, very slowly, with judicious use of the backspace key. He wished he could use the shift key for emphasis, but that wasn't currently an option.
"I will write any damn essay you want, on any subject you wish, if you get me the hell out of this cupboard without either of us dying in the process!"
Bond stared at the response, suddenly convinced that this was a very strange hallucination. Slowly, meticulously he typed his response:
"why are you in a cupboard"
"It was supposed to be on my side. Bloody thing betrayed me. I chose strategic retreat."
Wishing there was a damned chair, Bond looked down at himself. The bleeding was getting worse. Why couldn't life be like a damned movie for once, so that two minutes of pressure from a hand stopped the bleeding? He took his hand from the wound and ignored the saturating heat that started to spread, concentrating instead on quickly unbuttoning his shirt. He wadded it up, pressed it to his side, and shoved the end under his belt. It wasn't direct pressure, but it was probably better than nothing. If nothing else, it was less unpleasantly damp, at least for the moment.
He typed two-handed, ignoring what it did to the keys. "youre in the hallway, arent you and that dalek is right outside where you are?"
"Yes. I threw the jar."
"don't do anything again," Bond typed, thinking that M would kill him for real if he managed to get some Q Branch geek killed. Of course, it was the Q Branch geek's own damned fault for unleashing a Dalek. Obviously he hadn't seen that episode.
Oh, lovely. He was dealing with bloody Rose.
Well, at least she had spirit. He continued, "just stay there and don't die. ill come get you. acknowledge."
"It's just a .22. On the slim chance I get shot in the arm while helping you not get shot in the chest or face, it would be fine. Let me help."
"stay in the bloody closet. thats an order. acknowledge," Bond typed, stabbing bloody fingers at the keyboard. Everyone else at MI6 folded when a Double O started snapping out commands — everyone except Danielle, but she wasn't stupid enough to get herself trapped in a closet like this.
"I'm not under the jurisdiction of the Double O Programme. Nice try. But I promise only to intervene if the situation requires it. Do you have a plan?"
"other than taking my belt to your bloody backside if you open that door" Bond typed before he could stop himself. This was an MI6 computer, wasn't it? No, MI6 didn't use Macs. He and Taylor had gone through that already.
God, he missed that steady, calm voice. How had he ended up with an overly helpful idiot? This wasn't Rose. This was Arthur Shappey.
His plan depended on two things: lots of things to throw, and a guarantee that the trapped idiot wouldn't open the bloody closet door. So he typed, "code red, arthur. stay in the fucking closet."
Without waiting for a response, he grabbed hold of the laptop by its screen and walked to the wall closest to the deadly corner where the death robot waited. There, he dropped the laptop and then gave it a good hard stomp, then another, breaking off some good-sized pieces. He crouched down, one hand smudging blood on the wall as he kept his balance, and picked up one of the chunks.
When he threw it across the hallway entrance, the death robot fired. He picked up one of the keyboard chunks, broke off a key, and tossed it; another gunshot. So size didn't matter — motion sensor, definitely, and a bloody oversensitive one at that.
The question was, was the robot a fixed installation or mobile? It had an arc of fire, but could it turn the other way? And if so, how could he get it to turn without actually putting himself in the line of fire?
He leaned left, looking at the hallway wall. And it was definitely a hallway, not a room — about six feet wide and an unknown depth. Christ, he wanted to look around the corner, but the thing had already shot him once.
Well, there was always bouncing. He pried off another key and took aim.
Q stared at the screen in absolute disgust. Alec was an idiot. Worse than an idiot, he was a self-righteous bastard who wouldn't even consider letting Q help him formulate a plan without haring off. If it had been Bond, they would have talked through options and had an efficient discussion about the best approach to the situation. Once, Bond had promised to come find him in the tunnels. But he was too busy drinking himself to death in Greece to —
He cut the thought off viciously. Let Alec get shot for being an idiot.
Then Q watched with horror as 006 eviscerated the laptop. Not only was Danielle going to be angry, it also cut off their communication.
What were his options now? He had no idea how long the bot's batteries would last.
The gunshots outside were now coming swiftly, and —
Fuck!
Q threw himself down as a shot hit his cupboard door at just the right angle to dent the metal. Had the bastard turned the bot?
He felt the tips of his fingers and toes start to go numb as panic thrummed through him. His vision tunnelled a bit, bringing his awareness of the room around him strictly to the bright glow of his laptop. Why wasn't he still back at the help desk? Why the hell had he let Tanner and M lure him into this? He didn't want to be the head of anything much less an MI6 department full of things that wanted him dead.
While Q wasn't prone to anxiety attacks, he was exhausted and his system was already completely awash in neurochemicals of the fight-or-flight sort.
In a fit of narcoengineering, he'd turned his kitten's favourite toy into a mobile, self-aiming death machine. He'd got himself trapped in a cupboard. And now, James Bond's best friend was going to get himself slaughtered in an attempt to rescue Q, after calling him Arthur Shappey.
Oh god. The absolute absurdity of surviving a terrorist attack only to die like this...
That did it. Q couldn't help it. He laughed. And laughed. He set down the laptop, leaned back against the wall, and let himself not care about anything but the ridiculous irony until the panic leached itself from his system.
Breathing hard, he lifted his head and looked at the blessedly intact door. His fingers were trembling from adrenaline, but he managed to type the commands to open up the cameras.
The death robot... was dead. Toppled over, wheels-up, and looking positively mangled. His rescuer was leaning hard against the cupboard door, which was why Q couldn't budge it — not with that much weight keeping it closed.
The handle rattled. He watched on the laptop screen as Alec finally wrenched the handle hard enough to disengage the locking mechanism. He staggered back, and the door swung slightly open.
Q twisted around just in time to see Alec hit the far wall. There was far too much blood soaking through the wadded-up shirt pressed low against his right side, and there were more wounds now, freshly bleeding — two in his left arm and a graze on his right shoulder above a scar that was only a few months old.
"Fucking hell!" Q shouted in alarm, rushing to help Alec.
Alec's head came up, bright blue eyes — much brighter than they'd seemed on the webcam — fixed on him. Then Alec dropped as if his strings had been cut.
Q stared at him for a ridiculously long moment. This person had blue eyes, whereas 006's eyes had been listed as green. Q pulled off his cardigan and crouched next to his bleeding white knight, applying pressure and observing. Thinking.
Fresh bullet wound scar above his collarbone.
Knows intimate details about Alec Trevelyan, 006.
Got himself shot for someone he assumed was a random Q Branch tech in a closet.
Q bent a little closer hoping the shock, blood loss, and possible unconsciousness were enough to suppress the agent's reactions a bit. He tipped the man's head up and very gently lifted his eyelid, just to be sure the vibrant blue wasn't the result of contact lenses.
It wasn't.
It took Q only a matter of moments to find one of the old-school copper-wired phones that still ran through the tunnels in order to call a team down from Medical. He informed them that he had a wounded agent in need of immediate assistance, but didn't mention a name yet. After all, he didn't actually know if James' eyes were blue or not.