A little bit more. Thank you for your reviews, ED and Mitzy. I promise very soon to reply.
11: Understanding
Tracy Island, near midnight-
He didn't comprehend his own feelings very well, much less anyone else's, but three things that John Tracy did get were machines, code and most of his family. That night, urged onward by the WASP commander, he'd approached a black, roughly ovoid aircraft; a living thing, believe it or not. Alive… but abandoned and injured. Its green Cyclops eye had shrunk to a gleaming pinprick, and there was no sign at all of a hatch or boarding stairs. Just bullet-pocked metal and that lone, glittering light.
The trapped (impounded?) craft was about the size of a twin-engine business jet, he figured, or would have been, in "normal" mode. Right now the entity resembled nothing so much as a black basalt cobble, worn smooth by the passage of weather and time.
Around him, booted feet clattered, and voices snapped orders. The wind worried and tugged at everything in its path, swiping like a counterman with a freshly-wrung rag. But John's attention remained on the injured mechanism. He'd requested a PDA (his own being back at the room suite) and used it now to attempt contact. After all, as Fermat had told them, there were only so many ways to encode basic truth, and the emissions spectra of hydrogen, the first 101 prime numbers and the relative dimensions of a sphere were universal.
On the PDA's little keyboard, John tried all of the usual languages, then shifted on impulse to dialect; using a particularly slang-y meld of FORTRAN and machine code he'd picked up from Hawking and Kip, back on Mars.
Something clicked, because all at once the injured prisoner quivered, expending green energy to produce a single, stubby antenna. Thus linked, they sent a few signals back and forth, setting characters, variables and transmission rate. It was weirdly like learning a foreign language by communicating in whispers and taps with a jittery drunk guy in the next bathroom stall over. Girl, that is. She was a female, or receiver-emitter.
Aloud, to the waiting commander (and Ike) John said,
"She's lost energy and sustained a lot of damage. In order to repair herself, she needs raw materials. Metals, carbon, plastic… that kind of thing."
Commander Garrett scowled; his brows drawing together and mouth flattening, an expression John was reasonably familiar with.
"Wait a moment, please. I'll have to get clearance," said the officer, in a voice that didn't match his 'not a chance' face and 'hell no' posture.
Confused by the mismatch, John looked over at Brains, but a cadre of WorldGov officials had showed up, and Ike was soon called away. No more translations from that quarter. Garrett, meanwhile, seemed to be damn well dragging his feet.
Another help request joined the one already flashing on the screen of John's borrowed PDA. The prisoner was fading before his eyes; literally bleeding to death. Well, John had no green energy to offer her, but he could and did drag up a wrecked patio table and several wrought iron chairs, all of which he shoved through an opening she made in her flank.
Upset Commander Garrett rather badly, to judge by the man's language, but Garrett couldn't order a halt. The Tracys were wealthy eccentrics, and this was their island. WASP and the Coast Guard were the guests here, not John. Up to a point, he could do as he liked.
Once she'd got her repair materials ingested, John coded another message, bidding her shift into safe mode. When the aircraft went entirely dark, Garrett put away his military-issue cell phone and snapped,
"What'd you do? Turn the damn thing off?"
John shook his blond head, no.
"I suggested that she power down, commander, in order to save energy. I promised her she wouldn't get hurt."
"Hurt?" Garrett stared at him, facial muscles twitching wildly. "Are you kidding me? This is a Mysteron assault ship! It's part of the reason your daddy's little island got invaded in the first place. Considered one-hundred percent hostile until proven otherwise! Hurt…!" Garrett repeated, shaking his close-cropped head. "Mister, once I figure out a way to get this thing wrapped up and transported, it's heading straight for the Spectrum test labs!"
The wind didn't change, but John felt cold, anyhow. He'd promised. He'd lured a confused and willing-to-cooperate machine into believing that some of the target organics could be trusted. No matter that John had been used, himself. What would she think, once she awoke to find herself in an armored, underground testing facility? Worse yet, how would her escaped fellows react?
It wasn't long afterward that John heard other, more devastating, news.
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Some time later, at the airstrip-
The day had dawned bright and rain-washed, lovely as only a morning in the tropics can be. The Pacific Ocean roared its eternal challenge to sea and sky, bit by bit pounding rock into sand, undercutting the already cave-pocked cliffs. A soft wind fluttered amiably here and there, ruffling the flowers and foliage as though nothing whatever was wrong.
Scott Tracy was a strong young man, because anything else would have placed the burden of leadership on John's shoulders, or Virgil's. There was only so much internalizing you could do, however. And increasingly less you could say in response to all the sympathetic words and kind pats. So, he decided to fly. Dangerous or not, he decided to get as far and fast as he could. And "where to" didn't matter one damn little bit.
So he took an electric cart from the mansion (under repair) to the airstrip (newly resurfaced). Parked the cart against a driftwood wheel-stop, gravel crunching as he coasted into the dappled, swaying shade of a tall jacaranda. Little things… turning and pocketing the key, stepping up out of that cart… took monstrous effort. But Scott kept moving, because that's what Tracys did. Squared their shoulders and carried on, no matter what.
Pressing a button-remote on his key-ring caused the hangar's white double doors to roll open, and a plane (nose-wheel in trolley) to slide forth. All of this Scott Tracy observed without visible emotion, his handsome face calm and composed. Well… frozen corpses look peaceful, too, don't they?
There was further movement in the hangar, though; a pair of lurking shadows which resolved themselves into Virgil and John. Scott folded both arms across his broad chest, creasing a brand-new white cotton shirt. He wasn't angry, or even surprised. Before, he might have smiled at the sight of muscular Virgil and whisper-slim John. Now, numb clear through, he just waited.
They crossed the tarmac toward him, John with his hands in his jeans pockets, not making eye-contact, Virgil firm and direct as a prize-fighter's clenched fist.
"Hey, Scott," Virgil greeted him, once they'd drawn near. "Going someplace?"
Their older brother managed a shrug, directing himself from what felt like the bottom of a cold, dark well.
"Thought I'd go for a flight," he said, quietly.
"Sounds good," Virgil replied. "Mind if we join you?"
"Why?" countered Scott.
John stopped examining the leaf-strewn ground, looking up long enough to say,
"Because you're less likely to ignore your fuel and altitude gauges with us along."
Scott should have been angry, but instead was just… nothing. Just empty.
"I didn't ask for company," he told them, sounding distant and thin as a band of high clouds. Cirrus, he thought... or strato-cirrus.
"Too bad," Virgil answered. "You got some, anyway. Nothing John and me like better than an early morning flight. Right, Johnny?"
"I could use an outing," admitted the astronaut, eyes flicking restlessly, everywhere else but at Scott.
Long and the short of it was, his two younger brothers got into the plane with Scott Tracy, who didn't feel like arguing, didn't feel like returning to the house… didn't feel like breathing. But scar tissue is frequently nerveless, whether inside the body or out.
Once in the cockpit, Scott took the left seat, John the right. Virgil strapped in behind them, looking grim as a judge. Looking worried. Like an automaton, Scott fired up the Lear's engines and triggered release of the nose-wheel trolley, then taxied his plane onto the main airstrip.
Jets make a thousand characteristic noises; an orchestra of beeps and clicks, radio hisses and engine howls that to Scott's mind equaled freedom. Freedom to, and (more importantly) freedom from. All he had to do now was throttle up and go, but for some reason, he said,
"I need a drink."
John's white-blond head swiveled. Over the noise of engines and airframe, he said,
"There's beer in the refrigerator, Scott, but only if I do the flying."
Scott Tracy hesitated, while everything… all the thoughts and goodbyes and feelings he'd refused to let out… hung twisting on a single, very long thread, down that same hollow well with his sucked-dry remains.
"Fine," he said at last, passing flight control over to the right-seat instrument and yoke assembly. Virge got the beer, two bottles exactly, both of which he handed to Scott.
John called in to Gordon for flight clearance. Got it, too. (Their dad was away, still; explicating TA's laundered finances for a WorldGov auditing squad.) John thanked the "tower", and then throttled up, sending their Lear screaming along the tarmac with cliff and jungle on one side, ocean at the other. The scenery picked up speed and shot past their windows. Then the nose-wheel lifted, and their plane sprang from the ground like a freed raptor. Vibration eased, all but vanishing once the landing gear was safely folded inside. Meanwhile, their shadow shrank away to nothing beneath them, dropping behind with the jewel-toned island and booming sea.
"Where to?" said John, after he'd leveled off at 20,000 feet and gotten his instrument bearings.
Scott was well into his second bottle by that point. He didn't answer, at first. Then, staring hard at curved green glass and a silvery label, he said,
"We could fly over… where it happened. Have a look around."
Not very clear, maybe, but his brothers understood what Scott meant. Virgil reached forward to grasp and squeeze Scott's shoulder, while John began punching coordinates for the site of… Well, where Cindy's press flight had been attacked and brought down, several hundred miles to the north-northeast. No activity had been reported in the region since, but the trip remained hazardous.
He flew, Scott drank, and Virgil kept the beers coming, remarking once in awhile on fairly ordinary stuff. Home and ranch and family things. Memories and connections, to which John at times added his bit. They were a close-knit threesome, if not much demonstrative. But sometimes, friendship isn't measured in hugs; sometimes it's measured in being there. Filling up the silence and drawing off pain.
They reached the spot after awhile. John didn't have to make any announcements. He simply banked the plane, causing the Lear to cut a wide, tilting arc over a certain patch of deep and restless water. The engines changed pitch and everyone hung sideways in their seat-straps, but John held position, circling as slowly as possible.
Scott said nothing aloud. But it was probable that he let go just a little and let in thoughts of the dead: hand pressed against the left window pane, eyes on the sea. That (in his mind) he spoke to a very pretty smart-ass reporter, talking about love and longing and pain. All the things he'd wanted for her… for the both of them. Kids and life and happiness. How he'd missed her. Would go on missing her, all the rest of his days.
Possibly he started to shake a little, but Virgil reached over once more to seize his shoulder; a grasp Scott responded to by clasping his brother's hand, while John kept on flying the plane. Because his two closest friends were there to help, Scott Tracy pulled himself out of a well, that day. And then, they flew home.