Well aware as he was that Tony was almost literally hovering over him as he worked, Lucas didn't pause for so much as a second as he burrowed, ducked, and wove his way around firewalls and digital security blockades, one after the other. There was a drink beside him, very likely put there by his roommate, but Lucas hadn't even paused long enough to take so much as a single swig of it. He thought there might have been something edible as well but he didn't even spare a glance to confirm that either way.
He didn't have time for anything like that. He didn't have time for anything but the task right in front of him, actually, and considering the stakes of the situation they had all found themselves in he didn't think anyone would disagree with him on that front.
"You've been at this for hours," Tony commented, almost absently, from his place behind where Lucas was seated, typing away at the keyboard and keeping his eyes glued to his screen as data and coding flitted past at an almost dizzying speed. "How long's it gonna take?"
"It takes as long as it takes, Tony." Lucas didn't pause as he answered, and he didn't even really think about the words that came out of his mouth as he spoke them. For all intents and purposes he was running on autopilot, laser focused on the job ahead of him. "I thought you were helping run diagnostics up on the bridge."
"I was," Tony shot back. "I am." There was something almost like disappointment in the other man's voice when he said, "Nobody's found nothin', at least not last that I knew." He paused for a moment. "I gotta get back up there any second now. I thought maybe I'd take word to the Cap'n that you were all done here."
Lucas gave a low sound of acknowledgement. Even though he had heard what his roommate had said he hadn't really been taking it in beyond the basics. The Captain still wasn't sure there weren't any other major corruptions in the seaQuest's main systems and that was somewhat troubling, but they were still looking. They weren't giving up or taking anything for granted. That was reassuring. That sounded like business as usual, despite the circumstances they were dealing with.
"It takes as long as it takes, Tony," Lucas repeated, without any additional specific emphasis or weight of any kind, hoping that his roommate would get the message and keep from dropping any more hints or just flat out asking the question again.
It was quiet behind him for a minute or so, he wasn't sure how long exactly, and then the other man let out a huff that he thought might have been a sigh. "Okay, fine. I don't get why this stuff takes so long though, I thought computers were supposed to make everythin' easier or somethin'."
"Mr. Piccolo," came a voice from the PAL attached to Tony's belt.
The Seaman gave a frustrated sound, muttering to himself, and then unclipped the device to answer the call. "Piccolo here, sir."
It was Commander Ford on the other end of the line. "We were expecting you back up on the bridge five minutes ago."
"Aw, crap." Tony caught himself, but too late. "Sorry, sir. I'll be right up, Commander."
"See that you are, Mr. Piccolo. We still have work to do." That was, it seemed, the end of the conversation. Tony's PAL fell silent.
Lucas had continued to work the entire time, not looking up or back even once. He did, however, give a shadow of a smile at his roommate's small stumble.
"Shut up," Tony grumbled, even though Lucas strongly suspected that the other man couldn't possibly have seen that smile from where he had been standing. Without another word, and thankfully without asking the question one last time, Tony made his way up the few steps leading out of their quarters and carried right on through the door, leaving Lucas in blissful solitude and silence so he could well and truly lose himself in his task.
Stupid kid.
Stupid smart kid.
Tony had been keeping time perfectly until he'd stopped by to check how Luke had been doing with the whole hacking thing, the job that only he could perform because no one else on this boat was capable of understanding all of that crazy computer stuff as well as he did. Tony guessed plenty of other people on board could do plenty of things with it, and Ortiz had shown through all of this mess that he was more than capable when it came to the submarine's systems and whatever else he had tampered with, but the kid had a specific skillset, one that Captain Bridger was making full use of in this current situation.
Good thing, too, he knew, beyond the slight sting of his indignation in the wake of the sharp reprimand from Commander Ford. If they didn't have someone like Wolenczak on board there was no telling where they would be able to go from here. Nowhere, probably. And that was nothing against the rest of the crew. It was just a fact, hard and cold and indisputable. They couldn't escape it.
No less than five minutes after he left his and Lucas' room he was passing through the clamshell doors, saying as he did so, loudly enough that the right people would hear it, "Sorry, sir. Won't happen again." Even as he said that he didn't stop, instead continuing on his way onto the bridge proper and then up onto the starboard platform. He didn't stop until he reached the sensor station, dropping himself into the seat and quickly donning the headset that had been set on the console.
"We'll be holding you to that, Mr. Piccolo." Captain Bridger was looking up at him as Tony glanced down, and he thought he felt a slight rush of heat into his cheeks, but instead of giving it another thought he put his head down and got back to work.
It hadn't taken him long to get the hang of the whole diagnostics process and after watching it run through a couple of times he had wanted to take a crack at it himself. With only a couple of minor mistakes he ran the process from start to finish and after that initial, somewhat stumbling attempt, he had felt confident enough that he could continue on without supervision. He was a quick learner, at least when it came to things he wanted to learn, and as was the case with most things aboard the seaQuest this process fell into that category.
For all his complaints about being stuck on this tug, as he semi-affectionately called it in his sourest moments, he knew he had gotten extremely lucky when he had been placed under Captain Bridger. Considering the alternatives this placement was not just the best he could have hoped for but better than anything he could have imagined. Far better, in fact.
On the screen in front of him the system showed that it was initiating the diagnostic process, running through God only knew how many different levels of coding or whatever it was that made up the computers of the seaQuest. Tony had never claimed to be any sort of expert with things like that, the sorts of things that Luke could understand in the blink of an eye or figure out in about five minutes. Tony didn't claim to know anything beyond the basics to get by, though since coming aboard the submarine he had learned a heck of a lot, a lot more than he ever would have thought he would know. Now he could watch a screen like the one in front of him and just about understand what it was doing, and not just because he had been told what the end result would be.
Unfortunately that didn't make the waiting part any more interesting. It was a struggle not to prop his elbow on the edge of the workstation and rest his chin in his hand, and he distracted himself from the urge by taking lengthy looks at what the WSKRS were up to. They were part of the diagnostic as well, naturally, but they were still functioning while they were being analysed from within and their readings gave him something to look at, if nothing else.
Mother was scanning her way through an almost unbelievably large shoal of bright silver fish that flashed brilliantly as they darted through the water, while Junior was conducting an analysis of his own, specifically of the water in which they were currently sailing and the breakdown of bacteria and other microscopic lifeforms that populated it.
Loner should have been studying a rocky outcropping about a hundred metres off to port, closer to the stern than the bow, but when Tony really looked at the readouts he noticed that they were inconsistent. And it wasn't that there was anything strange about those rocks either. The readings had gaps in them. It was like Loner was completely overlooking parts of the rocks, half-assing a job that he should have been committing to completely and without a second thought.
A second thought? Tony shook his head. If he was starting to think of the WSKRS like living creatures with minds of their own then maybe he had been working the sensors station too much. Or maybe he had been spending too much time around Ortiz.
But there was definitely something off about what he was seeing. "Uhh—" His frown deepened even more as Loner's readings dropped out altogether, becoming little more than static and white noise, before jumping back in. He guessed that explained the gaps in the readings. "Sir?" He would let the senior officers decide which one of them he was addressing specifically. So long as he got someone's attention he didn't much care whose it was.
"Mr. Piccolo?" Captain Bridger was looking his way, and Commander Ford and Lieutenant Brody followed suit. The latter looked glad for the distraction. "Do you have something for us?"
"Uh, maybe, sir," he said, sounding uncertain because if he was honest he couldn't be sure about something with which he had absolutely zero experience. "I'm not sure what I've got."
"Well," the Captain said, "don't be shy, Seaman. Share with the class." He nodded at the viewer, an obvious cue for what he wanted Tony to do next.
He didn't disappoint, hitting the keys and flicking the switches that would achieve what the Captain was expecting. He almost sent the wrong readout to the main screen but caught himself at the last moment, and within a few moments Loner's erratic and increasingly nonsensical readings were up at the front of the bridge for all to see. Even to Tony, who had already seen them on a smaller scale, they looked even more conspicuous and just plain wrong now that they were magnified like that.
"What on earth?" Commander Ford had leaned forward in his seat. "Is this the only WSKR malfunctioning?"
Tony checked the network for the devices and flicked between the readings for all units currently running, letting the system diagnostic analyse those that were currently dormant inside seaQuest itself. "Yes, sir. Looks that way."
"Has the diagnostic finished running on sensors?" Captain Bridger asked.
Another check. "Not yet, sir. It's gettin' there but it's not quite done." Raising his eyebrows a little he said, "I just noticed Loner actin' all whacky and figured I should say somethin'."
"You figured right, Mr. Piccolo," Bridger said, rising from his seat and moving closer to the main viewer. Almost as if on cue Loner's readings glitched, practically jerking at a diagonal across the screen, before dropping out completely. After several moments they came back, but now several of his primary systems seemed like they were refusing to reboot.
It was just as the Captain was making a beeline for the platform and the sensors station in particular that the computer in front of him alerted him to the fact that the diagnostic program had finished running. Just as Bridger joined him Tony reported, "There's definitely somethin' up with him, sir." He looked up to the Captain, noticing that the older man wasn't in the least bit fazed by the terminology he used to describe the WSKR. That figured. The Captain had known Ortiz for a while now, and Miguel always talked about the WSKRS the way that Tony himself just had.
Captain Bridger leaned in and scanned the data for the results, even as Tony took a look through the rest of the notifications. "Everything else is clean, sir. The only problem we got with sensors is Loner and—" He waved a hand at the WSKR's readings. They spoke for themselves, he thought.
The Captain obviously agreed, raising his voice enough for everyone on the bridge to hear when he said, "Bring that WSKR aboard, Mr. Piccolo. I want a team to figure out what exactly is causing it to malfunction, and how."
Tony gave a firm nod. "Yes, sir." No sooner had the words left his mouth than he was entering the commands for WSKR recall, hoping that Loner was functioning enough to understand and accept it and that they wouldn't have to head out there in a sea crab and retrieve him that way.
"Didn't Ortiz say something about Loner giving him trouble?" Commander Ford asked, brow furrowed in a frown.
"Yes, he did," the Captain returned, making his way down from the platform. "And he had it raised up on sea deck for a while. Henderson." He turned towards her at her station on the port platform. "Did you find out what exactly he was doing to that WSKR when you assisted him?"
She hesitated, her mouth open as if to respond impulsively before she thought better of it. Closing her mouth she shook her head after several moments. "No, sir. I didn't." She looked slightly sheepish. "I didn't get involved in whatever he was doing, I just helped however I thought I could."
With a flicker of relief as Loner gave an affirmative to the recall command and started making his way back to seaQuest Tony thought it would be a safe bet that Ortiz had intentionally done something to the WSKR. The question was, what exactly had he done? And why?
It didn't take long to figure out the what. Or the why.
Lonnie watched in slack-jawed horror and disbelief as Commander Ford and Lieutenant Brody retrieved the concealed item from the guts of the WSKR that had been raised up, still dripping water generously into the moon pool below, bringing it out into the light and therefore the plain view of everyone present. As she managed to break her gaze from what had been found and looked around at those gathered she saw her own expression, the disquiet and the grim sense of reluctant understanding, mirrored on their faces.
Because it made an awful kind of sense, what they had found, and where. Lonnie almost couldn't believe that she hadn't thought of it before. She had been here when it had been hidden, when it was being concealed and tucked away out of sight and out of mind, before it was sent back out into the waters surrounding the seaQuest. Miguel had to have known that it would be discovered, that Loner would start to malfunction at one point or another.
Was that why he had hidden it where he had? Because it would be found?
Lonnie folded her arms across her chest, telling herself that that didn't make any sense. What did it matter whether or not it was found? Tim had been found, and they had known what had been used in the attack, what had been stolen from the galley. She understood, as much as she didn't want to, the impulse to hide it after the act, but she still couldn't reconcile that action with the man responsible for it.
She looked at the knife again, held in Jim's hand and reflecting just enough light for her to see that most of the blood had been wiped away but not quite all of it. There was still just enough of a trace that she could see it. She didn't want to see it. So she blinked her eyes, rapidly, against the sting of tears that had sprung up unexpectedly, turning her gaze away. It was too horrible to think of one person she cared for deeply doing that to another, too awful to imagine Miguel doing that to Tim. They were close, best friends, they had served together for years, even before Captain Bridger had assumed command. She didn't want to picture it but she found that she couldn't stop. Now that she had started she just couldn't stop.
Annoyed at herself, frustrated by the show of too much emotion in the wrong place at the wrong time, she swept her hand first under one eye and then the other.
Before she even realised she had company a gentle hand was touching the back of her shoulder, rubbing lightly from one side to the other. Lonnie wasn't surprised to see that it was Wendy standing there when she composed herself enough to look, giving the other woman a small, fleeting smile that she knew wasn't in the least bit convincing. "I'm okay," she lied, knowing that it was foolish to try but finding herself unable to do anything else. There really wasn't time to be anything other than okay, and she needed to hold herself together and do her job. She was a sailor now, she was serving on the UEO's flagship. She needed to stop letting her emotions get the better of her.
"I know how you feel," Wendy said, and then gave an apologetic smile for the accidental double meaning of her words. Dipping her gaze for a moment she then turned it to regard the two men who had opened the WSKR and retrieved the knife from its interior. "It's hard to think of any one of us doing that, psychically influenced or not." She turned her attention back to Lonnie. "But it's important to remember that he was influenced. Heavily."
Lonnie nodded, a little too hard. She was trying to convince herself as much as anyone else when she said, "I know." Taking in a deep breath she gathered herself enough to meet the other woman's eyes. "It's just—" The words knotted themselves into great tangles in her mind, forcing her to take a few moments to organise them to a point where she could finish her train of thought. "I was with him when he did this." She nodded at Loner, suspended from the rig. The dripping had slowed but not yet stopped. "And I didn't even suspect anything was wrong." She frowned, though perhaps it was more a grimace than anything else. "Not like this, anyway." She looked to Wendy again. "I just thought he was upset about what had happened to Tim."
Wendy raised her brows, saying softly, "He was."
Lonnie frowned, a wave of melancholy sweeping through her. Of course Miguel had been upset, even if it wasn't in the way that she had assumed. She tried to imagine how she would have felt in his position, forced into doing something so horrible, and to someone she cared about as much as Miguel cared about Tim. Her stomach lurched and she had to close her eyes, holding her breath to keep the swell of nausea from rising any higher and taking too much of a hold on her. Not the time. Not the place.
"I know," Wendy said quietly, moving her hand across Lonnie's upper back once again. She didn't say anything more than that. She didn't need to.
"So how does this change things?"
Nathan looked down at Jonathan and sighed. "It doesn't." At the other man's disapproving expression he went on, "Not really. We knew that a knife had been used in Lieutenant O'Neill's attack, and that that knife had been stolen from the galley." Glancing to another seat where Lieutenant Brody had seen fit to settle himself, albeit rocked forward with his elbows on his knees, he concluded, "But that does solve two small mysteries we had ongoing."
"What was wrong with Loner, and the location of the knife." The Lieutenant didn't sound happy with the resolution to those small problems. They had been little more than fleeting blips on the radar compared to the real issue they were facing.
"Precisely." Nathan paced around his ready room for a short while, letting his mind run, before he took it upon himself to prop his weight against the edge of the desk. It gave him a good view of the other two men in the room, as well as the door. "Unfortunately it doesn't really help us find this Dvornikov woman."
"Or Miguel," Brody added.
"Well," Nathan said, "if we find one we'll surely find the other as well. Not that that knowledge helps us either, at least not until Lucas has some kind of luck with what he's doing." Hacking, he knew, but such words always felt a little strange in his mouth, like some sort of foreign language he was never really going to be comfortable speaking. "What we can do is figure out just what we're going to do when we do get a location."
"If we get one," Jonathan said quietly, not quite under his breath but near enough that Nathan couldn't help but wonder if he was supposed to have heard it at all. The Commander looked between them and added, "We have to face the possibility that there might not be anything for Lucas to find." With a shake of his head he went on, "It's not anything that anybody wants to think about, I know, but we have to be realistic."
"There's a different between being realistic and giving up." Brody was looking right at Jonathan as he said that and Nathan sensed what might happen if he didn't interject. The two men were just as likely to butt heads, and intensely, as they were to put their heads together and combine their skills and intelligence to come to a solution.
"Nobody's giving up," he said, satisfied when both other men looked his way and said nothing more to one another that could have been any sort of continuation of the near-argument. Maybe one day they would stop locking horns and goading one another but Nathan couldn't see that happening any time soon. And who knew? Maybe that was beneficial to both of them, pushing them to be better than their accepted best, even if it was in the hopes of outdoing one another. "We don't give up," he continued, "and we don't leave any man behind."
That got a firm nod out of each of the officers and Nathan allowed himself to feel satisfied with that. They were in agreement on that much, at least.
"So," he began again, "how about we come up with a plan for how we can proceed?"
"Yes, sir." Brody gave another nod and started to lay out ideas that he had clearly already been turning over in his head, tactics and strategies for several contingencies depending entirely on what they found when they had a location to work with. Nathan listened to the younger men as they discussed mostly among themselves the best way to go about tackling an enemy who would foresee any move they tried to make. Every now and then he added a suggestion of his own, based entirely on his own experiences with psychics as well as more traditional operations in his military past.
They had made good progress by the time the sound of running feet reached them, moments before there was a dull metallic clang at the door and it swung open to reveal a very obviously animated Lucas standing there. He didn't apologise for the intrusion or the interruption, or for entering unannounced. Instead he said, his voice clear and satisfied, "I've got it, Captain." A very real smile swept across his face then and he said, by way of needless clarification, "I've got the frequency."