Thank you for reading and reviewing. I very much appreciate the feedback. As always, I'm having a blast spending time with the Tracys. Yet again, further edited. :)
25
Thunderbird 3, in parking orbit near one of Earth's busiest docking rings-
"How do you feel about breaking the law?" John had asked them, as the surviving GDF maintenance drones zipped through space, clearing the mess outside. As for the Tracys, they were still clustered inside the aft head, along with a towering, stasis-locked cyborg.
Kayo shrugged her slim shoulders in response to the question, as if thinking: What the h*ll difference does that make?
Alan was slightly more nervous, or maybe just very against getting caught and arrested. They were in trouble enough, already.
"Depends on the law, I guess," he hedged, in a voice that cracked only a little. "What d'you have in mind?"
John glanced across at the Mechanic, who was beginning to look as though he meant to stay frozen in stasis. (A double-plus very good thing.) The cyborg's hot-metal-and-fried-meat scent still hung in the air like a chemical haze, harsh and unsettling. Whatever. Turning his attention back to Alan and Kayo, John flashed that brief, razor-blade smile of his.
"I mean illegal data scans, security breaches, trespass, breaking and entering… and possibly criminal mischief. Hold the questions. I'll explain in a hurry. You know how the Arctic seed banks and Eden were set up as a fail-safe? A way for future humans to cope with global catastrophe?"
Kayo and Alan both nodded; doing strange things to their already floating hair and making it seem they were bobbing along underwater. Having gained that much assent, their astronaut brother went on.
"There are also a series of "Arks" … hollowed asteroids, really… containing survival gear, meds, decontamination units, plus billions of seeds and frozen embryos, in case we nuke ourselves back to the Pleistocene, and need to rebuild civilisation. The arks were conceived as havens. A way to re-seed Earth or a future colony world, if our planet's no longer an option."
Kayo's dark, delicate eyebrows lifted.
"How'd I miss that one, in school?" she wondered. "Besides, you know, cutting class."
John kicked off of their motionless guest, drifting across to one of those organic-seeming new viewscreens. Over one shoulder, he said,
"You haven 't heard, because it's deliberately not common knowledge. Earth Gov doesn't want tourists or vandals mucking around with plan Z. I'm a curious guy, though. Shadow-nets and unexplained masses at 22 degrees above the ecliptic tend to attract my attention. Anyhow, I poked around and found out. Didn't make any difference at the time, so I didn't inform the family."
Now, though, matters had just crossed that red-hot "need to know" barrier. The plan he'd come up with was this: first, they would scan and record the digital portions of the Mechanic's brain, learning whatever he knew of Dad's "accident". Then, heading up and across to that cordon of re-fitted asteroids, they would break into Ceres (Ark 12); leaving their neutralised prisoner packed in amid tons of flash-frozen seeds and embryos.
"Their massed bio-signatures will disguise his," John continued, saying, "It's well off the beaten orbit, and d*mn secure from everyone else but me. If we need to, we can always go back and reclaim him… but in the meantime, he won't be disturbed or awakened. The GDF will have custody… they just won't know it."
All the same, Alan crafted a sign out of silvery space cloth and jet-black indelible ink, hanging it around the Mechanic's thick neck with electrical tape. DON'T, it read, in big, block letters. SERIOUSLY, JUST DON'T.
Announcing the second part of their training flight, John and Alan next cleared things up with local control and the GDF's Captain Carling.
"We'll be performing evasive maneuvers and shielding drills," John explained, over comm. "May disappear from your screens for a while, but it's just further practice."
"Understood, Thunderbird 3," Carling replied. "As a heads-up, the brass will be staging an inquest regarding a cloaked shuttle that somebody detonated, so stay in touch."
"Will do, Sir," promised John (by this time already back in the cockpit). "Sort of curious about that shuttle, myself."
He did not breathe easy until they were well away from Pac Orbital and off local radar. At that point, flying away from Earth at a tangent, John Tracy turned to face his younger brother and sister.
"Alright," he ventured, "Time for a 'what the h*ll were you thinking' lecture… only I don't even know where to start. Do you have any idea how badly this joyride of yours could have gone wrong?"
Alan hunched up in his seat straps, feeling all kinds of guilty and miserable.
"We were only trying to help," he objected. "Plus, maybe… if we hadn't taken the Bird to come get you… the Mechanic would have been down on the Island attacking Grandma and Brains, not out here in space."
John shook his head, sending red-golden hair drifting like seaweed; his portable keyboard floating off at the end of its tether.
"That's beside the point, Al. You had no idea at the time, that the Hood meant to strike Island Base. I'll grant you this dumbass stunt split his forces… but only because you managed not to get captured or killed. If you'd botched the launch or crashed into a freighter…"
"Worth it," snapped Kayo, looking defiant.
John halted to stare at her, blurting,
"What?"
"I said, it was totally worth the risk. We needed your help, and couldn't wait for a stupid, slow GDF shuttle and mail plane. Maybe it wasn't the best plan, but it worked. You're here, and we caught the Mechanic. I'm not sorry, and I'd do it again to come find you… just like we'd all do, for Dad."
Because, deep down, that's what all this had been in aid of; Kayo, very much missing the brother she'd not seen in years. Trying out ways to locate whatever was left of their father, Jeff Tracy.
Her big green eyes clashed with John's narrowed aquamarine ones; Alan looking from brother to sister and back again, like he was watching a hand-grenade tennis match. Neither John nor Kay would back down or break eye-contact… until something pinged their high-soaring rocket.
"Warning! You are about to enter restricted space. This zone is off-limits," chimed a canned, cheery voice. "Please divert course to marked shipping lanes, immediately."
Murmuring,
"The number you have dialed is imaginary. Please rotate your phone by ninety degrees, and dial again,"
John cloaked Thunderbird 3. Using a bit of fancy projection, he then generated a 3-D electronic decoy. A few more taps to the keyboard made that mock crimson Bird alter its course to a safer region of space. Nice and obedient.
Ceres, meanwhile, had resolved itself from pale dot to greyish disc with a single, brilliant white point and massive crater near dead centre. Not that they were home-free. Not yet. A loose sphere of sensor buoys and security drones had got to be quietly passed through, first. John took the opportunity to change the subject, call home and then teach the kids a few piloting tricks. Scott could handle discipline, he decided, once his older brother had packed off the Hood and recovered from crashing.
About twenty minutes from Ceres, John let Alan take over the Bird; offering occasional advice as he focused on hacking Ark 12's very basic security system.
"Seems a little unfair," Kayo mused, hanging in midair behind John's right shoulder. "I mean, think of all those poor people scraping themselves together after a giant war or disease or…"
"Zombie apocalypse," offered Alan.
"Asteroid strike," John suggested.
"…whatever. They manage to survive disaster and build a spaceship, then follow a beacon to Ceres only to find the Mechanic. He'll tear them to shreds."
John glanced up at his scowling sister. Shrugged a little, saying,
"A: he may not be here that long. B: if they read Al's sign, they'll leave him the h*ll alone… and C: for all we know, the Mechanic would make an excellent disaster-scenario leader. He was doing alright at the game I hit him with. Making choices I'd characterize as 'responsible' or 'heroic'."
Shifting his attention back to sifting out weak GDF passwords, John added,
"I don't know what part he played in Dad's accident; whether or not the Hood controlled him, like he tried to do Scott. Brains 'll have to figure that out, from our digital scans. I don't like him any better than you do… but the Mechanic seems to be more than just a raging psychotic."
Alan shuddered, still creeped out to the depths of his core by that hulking, much-tattooed cyborg.
"I'll be glad when he's off the Bird and out of our hands," the boy groused. "Pack him in under the lima beans and squash, or something. No one wants those. He'll be buried for centuries."
Added Kayo,
"Beans, squash and black licorice whips. The refugees would have to be really desperate to dig into garbage like that."
John relaxed enough to smile at them.
"From personal experience, I'd like to add natto to the list," he put in. Then, "Oh, sh*t. There's someone I'm supposed to call. Conroy's sister, Drew. Have to wait until later, though."
…Because they had rounded Ceres' limb, aiming for a poorly hidden docking port. Bang at the centre of a bright-shining salt patch in Occator Crater, the port had a standard model airlock with minimal security. No sense making things worse for those putative hardscrabble refugees, after all.
It took John, Kayo and Alan about ten minutes to extend Ceres' docking tower, line up and effect capture. A matter of careful braking and steering rockets, then gentle drift followed by the sudden THUNK and SNAPof successful docking.
After all that, Thunderbird 3 was one with the grey, pockmarked planetoid below; her mass and inertia making it actually tilt. A bit of rocket adjustment cured most of that problem, leaving them free to proceed with fetching the Mechanic and dumping him in Ceres' deepest, least critical storage compartment. That was the plan, at any rate.
"In and out," John advised, as they headed aft to pick up their frozen stowaway. "Fifteen minutes, tops. Thunderbird 3's mass will affect Ceres' orbit, so we've got to be done and gone before anyone notices."
On the bright side, security tapes could be erased, and vanishingly few people knew that those arks even existed. Ought to have been very simple.
Right?