See? Aren't you glad you got this one too?
Enjoy!
"So, what's the plan?" Race asked, looking inquiringly at the three Gundam pilots.
"Well, it would be ideal if we could use the Strataquest," Quatre answered softly, eyes half-lidded as his mind raced through their options. "I assume it was compromised, which is how you got here in the first place?"
"Right," Jessie didn't even wait for her father to be confused. She still felt cold inside – not only had she watched her dad suffer so badly in ZERO, but now he was acting perfectly normally as if he didn't remember anything of the last hours. It was beyond eerie.
"It was hacked by Rage's backer who now has access to ZERO," Heero said, not looking up from where he was keeping an eye on the corridor beyond. They had taken shelter in a storeroom because the alarm had obviously been raised and it was much easier to plan when not actively dodging and avoiding discovery.
"Can you beat it?" Trowa was curled over Bandit, whose impulse was to growl at every passing enemy who charged through the hallway. But with Trowa to calm him, he managed not to alert anyone to their hiding place.
Heero did not dignify that with a response, but he did shoot Trowa a very clear look.
"All right. Then we'll try for the Strataquest," Quatre decided. "If it doesn't work, we've always got the backup with the others."
"Won't Surd's goons be expecting that, though?" Jessie put in. "I mean, they have to know we'll go back to our own shuttle."
"Of course they will," Trowa replied. "Or they will until Zero Two and Zero Five start making trouble." He allowed himself a small smile.
A soft chirp sounded from the space-suits the ex-pilots wore and they all tensed at the sound.
"That's our warning," Quatre explained. "Preventers will be here in less than 20 minutes. We should either make our move now or wait for the cavalry to clear the place and hope they're better than we expect." He stifled a giggle at the absolutely dire look Heero made at the latter option. "Okay, then. Zero Two and Zero Five…" he trailed off for a minute before his eyes sharpened, "I think they're almost in position. Let's go."
Heero nodded sharply and opened the door, waiting to take rearguard again. Trowa gave Bandit one more comforting pat before setting the dog down beside Heero, who fixed the pup with a stern glare. The five made their way into the corridor once more, moving quietly without any conversation. It was only a few twists and turns before they were crouched on a high catwalk overlooking the hangar where the Strataquest had docked.
The hangar that was, predictably, full of people.
"How are we gonna get down there?" Race asked.
"Watch," Quatre's eyes lit up.
Only a moment later there was a tremendous noise outside the airlock, and a new siren began to wail. Men were shouting at one another and, to Jessie's amusement, Lorenzo seemed to be in the midst of them, trying to keep things orderly and failing miserably. But the net result was that most of those in the hangar began rushing off to deal with whatever had happened.
"That was Zero Two and Zero Five and the Quests," Trowa informed them. "Providing us a distraction and, if we need it, a ride."
"But we don't." Heero didn't so much as hesitate before fluidly jumping over the guardrail and letting the weak gravity draw him down in a controlled fall. He landed beside one of the access panels of the Strataquest and ran a line from it to his ever-present laptop. Typing furiously, he didn't even look up.
"There's somebody coming!" Jessie pointed to a figure who was almost on top of Heero though probably hadn't seen him yet if his lack of alarm was any indication.
"Got it," Trowa pulled out a gun and snapped off a pair of shots whose noise was easily lost in the raging siren. The guard dropped without a sound. At a pair of identical looks from the Bannons, he turned the gun so they could see the red cartridge that signified he was shooting tranqs.
"Zero One is ready," Quatre said. "You two go first."
Neither Race nor Jessie had seen any indication that Heero was anything but totally absorbed in his work, but if Quatre said he'd signaled, that was enough for them. They copied Heero's action perfectly, dropping from the walkway and bouncing easily before landing. Quatre and Trowa followed, spread a little farther out in a protective posture, Trowa again with Bandit under an arm.
"So?" Jessie asked the Japanese man.
"The shuttle will not quite work the way it did before, but it'll be enough," he answered, snapping the laptop closed as the shuttle door opened. "Let's go."
Jessie only wished Jonny had been there to see. When they fired up the Strataquest's engines and took off, Heero overriding the hangar's airlock door controls for their exit, Lorenzo managed to run back into the hangar in time to make a comically surprised face while Jessie cheerfully waved goodbye out the window. She was going to remember that for a long time.
"Is that them?" Race asked as they passed into space, pointing at the unfamiliar shuttle deftly evading some attempts to disable it, looping about like some kind of deranged dragonfly.
"Definitely Duo piloting," Trowa said without cracking a smile. But his eyes were bright nonetheless. "They'll break off now and meet us at the rendezvous."
"And everybody's okay?" Jessie looked at Quatre carefully.
"Yes. We'll have some work to do when we're all together again," and he only barely nodded at Race, who was busy looking through the Strataquest's systems to figure out what Heero had patched to clear ZERO's influence, "but everything is fine."
"Depends on your definition, Cat!" came a bright voice. A screen flicked on to show Duo and Wufei and the three Quests strapped into the cockpit. "But close enough."
"Frequency is fully secured, Zero Five?" Heero demanded.
"Obviously," Wufei replied.
"You worry too much, Hee-chan!" Duo grinned. "Anyway, who wants to fill us all in on things while we clear out for the Preventers to try to do their jobs? Emphasis on try. Bets on whether Une calls us to clean up after them?"
In the end Dr Quest gave the pilots a basic summary of events. He detailed Surd's plans as best he could, but there was so much yet they didn't know. And when he turned to Race and Jessie to find out what had happened to them, he found himself smoothly interrupted by Quatre.
"So, how do you know Jeremiah Surd? He's in the Preventers files, but we show nothing of this magnitude. And why does he hate you all so much?"
"He's a scientist, used to be the top of both chemical and digital military research before he went a little crazy. He became tetraplegic because of me," Race answered. "When I worked in the service years ago, I was part of the team that stopped him while he was attempting a terrorist action using chemical weaponry and the bust went bad. He's been kinda mad ever since, and he's tried to get back at me, and all of us, ever since."
"Yeah, while some of you were out fighting wars, we've been tangling with a supervillain," Jonny quipped.
"It's worse than that," Heero didn't even look up from where he was still piloting. "Surd may well have been the originator of ZERO. There was something I turned up in my original investigation that suggests it, and he does have the background. We can't ask certain individuals," and the five pilots could not help but remember the Doctors of their once-acquaintance, "but I'll bet Howard knows about him. From what you've said and what I found, he knows too much to not have been a part of the Operation Meteor project from the start."
"Oh, that is so not good," Jessie let out a breath.
"No kidding, Red," Duo nodded. "What's say we get back to the colony and go from there?"
"Acknowledged," Heero responded. Then, with an uncharacteristic smirk added, "Assuming that bucket of Preventers garbage can keep up with a real ship."
And he cut the connection and pushed the engines hard.
That was the trip that taught the Quests not to ever underestimate the pilots and their continual desire to test every new craft presented to them. Or, as Hadji might have put it later when they weren't there to overhear him, a "reckless fascination with attempting to achieve super-sonic speeds without adequate preparation."
-==OOO==-
Once again in the familiar hangar, Jonny and Hadji and Benton wasted no time rushing over to make sure for themselves that Race and Jessie were all right. But strangely, they were given almost no time for a reunion before the pilots hustled them up to the rooms they had so recently vacated.
"Race," Quatre said amiably as he led the way through the dining room to a fair-sized office beyond, one none of the Quests had yet seen, "I know Heero already has the mission reports from your initial encounter with Surd, but would you mind reviewing what he's got and filling in any blanks? There might be something that would help us, some detail the officials left out but you remember."
"Sure thing," Race nodded complacently. Heero stepped over to the computer and within a few moments had the proper documentation displayed upon the screen. He rose and offered Race his seat.
As soon as Race sat down, Quatre motioned silently to the others to return to the dining room with him, leaving Trowa in the room leaning against the doorframe while Duo loudly proclaimed something about getting everyone a snack.
"Sorry," Quatre said as he closed the door softly behind everyone. Duo took off while the other pilots took up positions near the door. "I don't mean to be brusque with you. It's just that I need to explain this as quickly as I can."
Benton listened carefully, his eyes growing wider with horror as Jessie and Quatre described in turn what Surd had done and what the blond had managed to mitigate its effects. He glanced at the door with a cold pit swallowing his stomach – Race had seemed unusually distracted and almost placid when they'd first seen him over the shuttle's viewscreen. And now he knew why. Surd had tried to break his mind and soul, and only Quatre's remarkable gift had kept the consequences of that in check for so long.
Come to think of it, now that he was looking for it, he could see a slight energy in Quatre's face that was a trifle unusual, and he surmised even now Quatre was listening for Race.
"Jess, are you okay?" Jonny asked, stepping close to her.
"Don't ask me that right now, all right?" she said tightly. Wordlessly, Hadji stepped up behind her and put an arm around her shoulders. She leaned into him and tipped her head against Jonny's shoulder gratefully.
"So what happens now?" Jonny looked to Quatre.
"Now everybody eats something," Duo announced, returning with a tray laden with food. He didn't even wait before marching through the knot of people and reentering the office. "Here – have a sandwich while you fix the paperwork," he said brightly, passing one to Race who took it with a smile.
"Thanks! I didn't know if it was this chair or my stomach that was making so much noise!"
"He makes a good point," Trowa said, taking a sandwich himself and passing a mug of tea to Quatre. "We could all use this before what comes next."
Benton looked at how pale Jessie was, at the worry in his sons' eyes, and agreed. Feigning a nonchalance he didn't feel, he stepped back into the office, took a sandwich and a mug for himself, and found a seat on a leather sofa in one corner. Hadji steered Jessie in that direction and pushed a sandwich into her hands as well before taking a seat on the floor near Benton's feet; Jonny joined him after a moment's squabble with Duo over the last remaining mug of coffee rather than tea. While to all appearances waiting quietly while Race perused the reports, everyone ate with a certain grim, mechanical quickness, as though preparing for the tension in the room to break unexpectedly.
Jessie, for her part, didn't really pay attention to anyone else, never noticing her own sandwich disappearing, nor the worried gazes of her friends. She just ate automatically, not really looking up from the food or her feet. She wasn't hysterical, not like she had been before. But she was incredibly, to-the-bone afraid. Quatre may have been able to postpone her father's eventual reaction to whatever ZERO had done to him, but he wouldn't prevent it entirely. Surd had said he hoped the system would make her dad crazy and violent enough to try to kill her. But he couldn't. He just…couldn't.
And yet on some terrible level, Jessie knew all too well that a mind manipulated could do practically anything. If Quatre had been capable of committing mass genocide with Rage's chemical weaponry, her father very well could be lost enough to kill her.
"Jessie," Quatre said quietly after a few minutes, interrupting her train of thought, "I shouldn't keep the block I put on Race in place much longer. It will be very painful for him when I release it, though. Are you ready?"
"No," she answered honestly, looking up at last. "But do it anyway."
"All right." He turned back to the room. Almost without even a glance Wufei and Duo suddenly decided to find business elsewhere and left. Quatre looked to Trowa and Heero, but they both shook their heads at him and he nodded in understanding; since they could probably feel his own apprehension, he couldn't blame them for not wanting to leave him. But he stepped over to Benton first.
"What will it do to him?" Dr Quest asked softly, enough that Race remained entirely absorbed in his task.
"I don't really know," he replied. "I've never done this before and ZERO takes people differently. It could be very dangerous. It might be best if you left."
"No," he said solidly. "No, I won't leave Race alone to this. But maybe…" He started to look at his sons.
"We're staying," Jonny affirmed curtly. And if he was particularly tense remembering his own release from ZERO, he hid it admirably.
"Then everyone get back, please." Quatre waited until his order had been obeyed before he approached Race. The white-haired man looked up from the screen and smiled.
"What's on your mind, Quatre?"
"Race, I'm very sorry," and he swallowed against the bile rising in his throat at what he was about to do. But he knew it was better to let Race try to process those memories and feelings now than to have them explode sometime later when no one would be ready for it. Before Race could question him, he reached a hand out and laid it on the broad shoulder before him.
Remember.
The change happened before almost anyone could react. At one moment, Quatre was standing before Race, stretching to touch him. In the next, Race was howling like a wounded animal and had overturned the chair as he launched himself. Quatre had already dodged to one side, so Race went barreling for the first threat his eyes found – Benton Quest.
"Dad!" Jessie shouted, and only Jonny grabbing her shoulders saved her from trying to rush into the mad charge her father made towards his best friend.
But Heero and Trowa were quicker. Trowa placed himself in front of Race while Heero dove for his legs. There was no finesse in Race's movements – he was swinging blindly like a rabid bear – and Trowa easily blocked the blows. He took only one more step before Heero leveraged his seemingly little weight and pulled Race backwards over him, crashing him to the ground.
"Quatre!" Heero shouted as the man fell on him.
The Arab was also already moving, and just before Race's head bounced off the floor he was there, catching and cradling his skull to prevent him from being hurt. Race ignored the small body pinning his legs from underneath in favor of reaching up to grip at the new foe looming over him. But again Trowa was there, neatly intercepting the grab. Quatre tangled his fingers in the short, white hair, and closed his eyes. Race fell still.
"What…what is he doing?" Hadji found his voice.
"He's not blocking again," Trowa answered. "He's trying to lead him through it, the way he does when any of us is lost."
Race resumed fighting again after a moment and Quatre opened his eyes. Trowa and Heero had both taken the opportunity to tighten their holds, but that didn't prevent Race from thrashing about, bellowing incoherently.
"I either need a lot of time, or…" Quatre trailed off. Then his eyes lit up. "Dr Quest! He trusts you. Come here – you can help me!"
To his credit, Benton did not hesitate and instead knelt beside the blond. Quatre grabbed a hand and guided it to Race's shoulder before settling one of his hands on Race's forehead and the other on Dr Quest's arm. His eyes fluttered closed and a moment later Benton's did as well.
It became very quiet for a while. Then Jessie spoke a little roughly.
"Jonny, was it…was it like that when you…?"
"No," he shook his head. "No, not like that. For me…" he trailed off and met Hadji's knowing gaze. Then he coughed and went on, "For me it was like waking up from the worst nightmare you've ever had when you're so tired you don't really know you've stopped dreaming. I might have been fighting a little when I first came out of ZERO, but by the time they dragged me to the others I was pretty much just a lump."
"Whereas when Heero emerged from ZERO," came Duo's solemn and unexpected voice from behind them, "he tried to strangle Cat and I almost had to kill him myself or lose both of them."
"We know he wanted us to leave," Wufei held up a hand at the death-glare Heero had directed towards them over where he pinned Race's knees, "but the privacy he wished for Bannon is foolish compared with his need for us."
"What do you mean?" Jessie asked. She was grateful – anything was a better topic for her to focus on than the feral person who was supposed to be her father, the person whose mind had been so thoroughly unraveled that she could see the sweat trickling down Quatre's face as he tried to save it.
"Quatre and Dr Quest are doing for him what Quatre did for me on the satellite," Heero answered, his tight grip not slackening in the slightest. "Quatre doesn't know Race, so he needs Dr Quest to be able to reach him. He is straining himself to create a pathway for Race to fight his way out of what ZERO has done to his mind."
"ZERO rewrites neural patterns," Hadji said. "So does that mean Quatre is attempting to correct them by his sheer force of will and empathy alone?"
"Exactly," Wufei answered. "With one of us, it would be difficult. For a stranger, it is exhausting, for he must not only ensure the changes he makes are correct in a mind with which he is not familiar, but he must also protect himself as well as Dr Quest from the effects of the process."
"Can we help?" Jonny wanted to know.
"No," Trowa actually smiled a little. "Just trust him. He's all right. He's strong enough for this."
But a moment later there was a shout that rattled the room. Three shouts, to be precise.
Trowa and Heero threw themselves fully at Race, who was bucking wildly, almost foaming at the mouth in his ZERO-induced madness. Wufei and Duo streaked across the room and each hooked their arms around Quatre, pulling him up and away, neither missing the shakiness of his legs that refused to hold him or the gasping rattle of his breathing. Duo pushed him into a chair and stood protectively over him while Wufei went back and yanked Dr Quest, scarcely in better shape than Quatre, away as well.
"What is it?" Jessie demanded.
"Does it matter?" Wufei demanded. With Duo standing guard over Quatre and Dr Quest, he advanced on the still-fighting Race. His arm flashed out with lightning quickness and Race fell still, forced into unconsciousness by Wufei's uncanny knowledge of pressure-points.
"Dad?" Jonny hedged around the perimeter of the room and got to his father's elbow. "Are you okay?"
"I don't really know. I'm not even sure how to explain what I have experienced." He failed to suppress a shudder. "But if that is even a bit of what exposure to ZERO does to the human mind, I vow here and now never to design anything remotely like it ever again." He pulled Jonny close at the remembrance that his boy had been through something quite similar. "I'm so glad you're okay."
"I had help," Jonny shared a quick look with Hadji, "and I wasn't so far gone."
"Yeah, what is happening, Cat?" Duo wanted to know. The blond looked up from where he'd been staring wide-eyed at his knees or the floor – definitely not Race or anyone else – as Heero and Trowa, both assured that Race would be out for a while, gathered around him. Wufei stood near, but in position to intercept Race were it necessary.
"It's…sort of hard to explain," Quatre began. "We're on the line between empathy and something else and I don't really know how to tell you how I'm doing what I'm doing, but here goes. The brain's natural patterns, the brainwaves that define how a person thinks and feels and perceives the world, they're kind of like a web, intricate and interconnected and dependent upon all the places one strand meets another. ZERO tends to break those strands and reattach them in different places, changing the overall pattern. Normally I can identify the places the pattern is wrong and help the mind repair the connections itself by finding the heart of the person and drawing it out, resetting the brain, I guess."
"Normally. So what happened with Race?" Benton asked.
"Well, even with you helping me find the connections that felt wrong to you, the ones that ZERO had changed and needed to be fixed, there was a lot of resistance to repairing them."
"Is that what I was doing?" Dr Quest mused to himself. But he nodded for Quatre to continue.
"The pattern has been reprogrammed somehow. It's…like a mental block, I guess. A psychological trigger that changes everything. And when that trigger is tripped, his whole mind shifts its configuration to something ZERO implanted."
"So, like with the gears on a truck, you put it in drive and it goes ahead like normal, but if you shift into reverse everything goes backwards?" Duo asked.
"Close enough," Quatre nodded. "It's deeply embedded, so much so that it can't just be the influence of ZERO on the brain. Surd must have done something, programmed some specific command so that every time Race's mind triggers the switch, the ZERO-induced madness takes over. Like a subliminal message implanted during hypnosis."
"Can you remove it?" Wufei's voice was cold.
"With time, probably." Quatre cradled his forehead in his hands, elbows on his knees, shoulders slumped. "I think. I've never done anything like this before. I wasn't even sure if I'd be able to lock it down the first time, but I managed that. So maybe I can do this. But I just don't know for sure and I can't fix it quickly without risking hurting him."
"So, every time he is triggered, he will revert to what we just saw," Hadji said softly.
"What's the trigger?" Heero asked, eyes narrowing.
Quatre sighed and looked up, face drawn and sad. "Jessie. Without my block in place, every time he sees Jessie, he will be overtaken by ZERO's reprogramming."
Everyone turned to her. She had heard the words, but somehow they didn't quite make sense. She felt cold and numb and bizarrely neutral. She idly wondered if this was how Trowa had felt after cutting off his own emotions when Quatre had been in ZERO. It was uncomfortable, but bearable, and vaguely, unsettlingly, comforting; apparently not feeling pain had its advantages after all.
"Sit, Jess," Jonny said, grabbing her elbow and dragging her to a chair. "You're in shock."
"No, I'm not," she answered automatically as her legs folded under her. "Or maybe I am. But I'm fine."
"Jessie," Dr Quest moved to stand beside her and put a hand on her shoulder, "it's going to be all right. We'll fix this. And you're not alone now or ever. We're going to make this right."
"You said Surd did this?" came Duo's voice, near to shaking with anger.
"He must have," Quatre replied. "ZERO by itself wouldn't bother to do something like this. But if Surd is changing the program's core intent, to put his own mind into the system and through it into whatever he wants, he could have added just about anything to its capabilities."
"He has to be stopped," Trowa said softly, but the quietness of the words belied their steel.
"Oh, I am so way ahead of you," Duo put in, his face a mask of rage and cold fury. "Even for a bad guy, this is going too far."
Jessie was puzzled momentarily why he was so mad and then remembered – Duo was an orphan. The way he had talked about her having a family, a real one, about how he depended on his bond with the other pilots; of course he would see Surd deliberately cutting a family apart in a particularly harsh light.
"In the meantime, Winner, can you restore whatever you did to prevent him from reverting?" Wufei asked.
"Yes, I think so," Quatre said wearily. "But it's a strain on us both. There's no telling how long it will hold in his mind, especially since I don't know how it held in place as long as it did given the extent of the damage. It will fail eventually."
"Then you have to stay away from him," Heero looked at Jessie unflinchingly. His whole demeanor was utterly stoic, the set of his eyes unforgiving. "If Quatre's block breaks, we cannot risk you being near enough to trigger him."
"For that matter," Wufei added, "from this point on, no one so much as mentions her to Bannon until this has been resolved. For all intents and purposes, she does not exist if you are in the room with him or communicating with him in any way. Is that understood?"
Jessie's throat went tight and she felt sick. She nodded sharply, aware of the pitying eyes on her, and pushed off the chair. She just couldn't be here anymore. Dodging Dr Quest's attempt to stop her and refusing to heed Jonny and Hadji calling her back, she quit the room and found herself leaving the apartment entirely. But she didn't go down to the hangar – too many faces, too many people who might care. Instead she turned the other way, to where the complex let out into the colony itself. In a sea of strangers, she could be alone with herself.
Because if she couldn't be her father's daughter, she needed some time before she would be ready again to be anything else.