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"Mr Eckhart ... Sir?"
Mason watched the young man who sidled into his office with the unblinking attention of a snake, taking his amusement where he could and definitely finding it in the tremble of the messenger's hands, the breaking note in the voice when he spoke.
"Ms R-Riley s-sent me w-with ..."
The office boy trailed away and just held the slim manila file he was clutching for dear life with sweaty hands out towards Eckhart, a man he had never even seen, who was so far away from his lowly position the Tree of Hierarchy went through four pieces of paper and a footnote before lines met. Dimly through his terror he realised he must have done something to annoy Ms Riley. Why couldn't she have just poisoned him, or had him shot like all the other supervisors did to unwanted interns. Must have done more than annoyed her. Maybe he'd forgotten the sugar in her Earl Grey one morning, or carelessly let one of her rival Operations Managers look through her private documents. What ever it was, his days were clearly numbered.
Pointedly, without speaking, Eckhart looked from the files to his desk. It took a moment, but the cretin standing before him finally got the idea and dropped the paperwork into his In Box. Waiting until the boy had scuttled backwards out of the office before reaching for the file and opening it, he read the contents of the single sheet of paper. Then he read it once more, the fingers of his unemployed hand tapping out a slow beat on the desk with the hollow, wooden, sound of a coffin tattoo. Thoughtfully, he crumpled the file into a ball in his fist and reached forward to the intercom on his desk, pressing a button with one gloved finger.
"Send Ms Riley to my office, naturally at her earliest convenience. Cancel my appointments for today, I do not expect to be disturbed for any reason."
Having no interest in whatever inane reply his secretary began to stutter, he released the button immediately and sat back in his chair to smooth out the paper and read the short paragraph just one more time. Very slowly a smile began to grow, the lines of it holding not even a trace of humour.
D.O.D. SENSORS REPORT MASSIVE ELECTRICAL POWER SPIKE OVER ...
Adam was proud of his ability to remain calm in a crisis, not just because it was a virtue, but because of how hard he'd had to work to achieve it. He had quickly found that, when you rank among the most intelligent men in history, able to do almost any conceivable mental task with ease, being proud of anything became an issue. But the logical approach, the intellectual over the emotional ... that had gone against his once excitable, overly energetic, nature; and that he had been proud of.
He pressed his forehead against the cold metal of the stubbornly silent generator and took a deep breath to aid in resisting the growing urge to hit it repeatedly with a hammer. For the last two hours the machine had steadily resisted every effort at making it work, even though he had been sure he had made a serviceable repair after the first half hour. There was some thought hovering in his mind, something he was missing, and it was just on the tip of his ...
"Shalimar's woken up, I thought you'd want to know as soon as she did. A few bruises and a fractured rib, but she's fine. Her hearing will be tinny for a while though, and she's having difficulty reverting back to human sight. It's sort of useful though, I can make sure she doesn't sneak off the chair just by checking to see where the glowing orange eyes are ... here."
The foggy train of thought slid away as he turned to see the shadow shape of Emma pick her way through the room debris towards him, taking the cup of coffee she held out to him automatically when she stepped into his pool of lamp light. Finally his mind caught up with her words and he gave a wide smile of relief as he sipped the welcome drink and then replied.
"I'll come and see her now, I can't get this functioning, there's no point in wasting more time on it." He held the cup up a little, almost as a toast. "Thank you."
Emma's smile was as warm as ever, despite everything that had happened and he found himself gaining back a little of his usual optimistic equilibrium in response. Briefly he wondered whether she was using her abilities to nudge him towards good, but had to admit if only to himself that he really didn't mind if that was the case. Besides, there were more pressing questions to ask, and he had to concentrate on those even more closely now the generator was a dead loss.
"Has Jesse managed to find any sedatives? Is Brennan okay?"
He winced a touch at the order he had asked in, wondering if it made him sound as heartless as he thought it did. But he couldn't honestly say he had gotten the priorities wrong. Emma didn't seem to find it particularly shocking as she replied as briskly as they were walking down the corridor, giving her report to his questions quickly and concisely.
"None that didn't need computer regulated dosage, and he remembered how strange the nervous systems of Elementals can be when you drug them; he didn't want to risk it. But Brennan hasn't woken up yet anyway."
Now there was a note of worry creeping into her tone, despite obvious efforts to keep it out. He gave her shoulder a light squeeze as he moved past her into the lab they had made their central base of operations. "He's going to be fine Emma, just tapped himself out, that's all."
With a slight frown he considered his words as he walked towards the examining chair that had become Shalimar's recovery bed for the moment. There was that sensation of the answer just out of reach again, and once more he couldn't quite put his finger on it. So much for being the world's smartest man.
Shalimar's smile was almost glinting in the glow of the storm lamps dotted around the lab that gave just enough light to be comforting, but not quite enough to take the shadows from the walls or ceiling. It made it seem far more of a cave than it ever had before, even when he had first discovered the colossal cavity in the side of the cliff and decided to make it home. As Emma had said, the orange hued cat's eyes flickered with no sign of fading as they usually did. For the moment he decided not to worry, it could be any number of things causing it, not least of which was a knee-jerk reaction to being in a nearly completely dark environment.
"Hey Adam, will you tell Jess' and Emma to let me get up?"
"I could, but then I'd get glared at and I'm just not sure I could handle that right now."
He kept his tone light, but made it perfectly clear she was going nowhere until he had made sure of her health. With a disgruntled expression, the wild cat settled back against the chair again, picking absently at the lightly shredded leather armrest with sharp finger nails that artfully began to make the shreds into tears.
"It's nearly pitch black for you guys, how could you see them glare?"
"Don't have to, I can feel it."
As they quietly bantered he found his diagnosis matching Emma's, there was nothing serious beyond a possibly broken, but more likely cracked, rib, and that had been taped. Unlike the notoriously difficult to medicate Elementals, Ferals could take almost anything you threw at them and painkillers were easy enough to find. He decided to relent, the last thing any of them needed was a cabin-fevered Shalimar.
"You can get up..." He forestalled her rush to her feet with a gentle hand to her arm. "... if you promise me you will tell someone if you begin to get dizzy, nauseous or drowsy. That's a nasty bump on your head and I want to make sure you haven't cracked your skull."
She slid off the chair and held two fingers up with an earnest expression "Scouts honour ... "
Echoing footsteps coming towards them down the corridor became a moving light that the shadows dance warmly on the fire stained walls, and then finally became Jesse. Emma had a cup of coffee to hand him in a second, as if she'd heard him coming from further away than even Shalimar could have. Once more Adam had a slight suspicion she was using her rapport to ensure everything went as smoothly and calmly as possible, even with the little things like having a hot drink to hand. At some point when he was feeling brave enough to face the fact she'd probably made a fire out of some of his books, he'd ask how she'd made the coffee at all.
"Well, he's put to bed, and he hasn't moved for an hour." Jesse paused as he look abstractly at the mug in his hand, then back to Adam. "But it's weird, he was really hot when I first moved him. I thought my hand would be burned; we're talking hotter than this coffee. When I left, he was cold enough he should have been iced over, but his pulse is fine. He's fine, he's just not waking up."
Emma at last gave Shalimar her cup and then stood back, looking between to the two men. "Is that good, or bad? I mean, do we want him awake right now?"
Adam drained the last of his mug and set it down on the computer panel, shaking his head slightly. "To be honest, I have no idea. Did you manage to make any contact in his mind at all? Anything, however small, that can tell us what's happening in there. We need him to get the generator working again, but by the same token, he might just blow it and us up ... "
He stopped and mouthed the last few words to himself, realising at last what the flyaway thought eluding him had been. But he waited for confirmation, for Emma to tell him what she had seen, even as his mind at last began to work out the puzzle it now had all the pieces for.
"I could hardly read anything just before it happened, and I haven't been able to get anything at all since ... but it was like something else was in there with him, and he was fighting it ... I think. Or, he was fighting me, I don't know. It was all pretty crazy spinning in there."
With his head nodding slowly, Adam saw his hypothesis begin to be validated, and he spoke slowly into the silence that Emma's subdued words had left.
"I still can't say for sure what caused this in the first place, but it's clear this is what Brennan has been hiding. Hopefully we'll be able to ask him when he wakes up. But I think I know why we can't get any of the electrics working, including him."
The other three watched him as he began to pace, it was an oddly comforting thing to see, a habit of his that they had come to associate with him finding the answers.
"If Brennan had one hundred percent lost control, we would almost certainly be dead and the machinery would be completely fried. Now, he obviously lost control at the beginning, which meant he must have regained it as the charge was being released, realised what was happening..."
Jesse's eyes widened as he realised where Adam's theory was headed, he couldn't quite help finishing the sentence. "... and he reversed the power flow back into himself. He alternated the current."
"Yes!" Adam pointed at the other man with a nod and a smile as it all began to come together, at least a little bit. "And if he's alternating, nothing electrical can possibly work because he's constantly draining electricity and releasing it, putting everything into neutral. Which is why he's going hot and cold. I bet we couldn't build up a static charge right now even if we tried, let alone get the generator working.
Shalimar spoke slowly, following most of the explanation, but preferring to be entirely sure about one question that had not been answered to her satisfaction. "Is he going to be okay?"
A troubled silence greeted her question, until finally Adam gave a small smile. "I think so. I hope so. His bio-chemistry and synapses must have altered radically to make him capable of this, it's unlikely it won't have compensated to allow for health."
That seemed to satisfy them for the moment, each taking a moment of peace and quiet after this small break through to have a moment of needed respite. He took that moment to quietly leave them talking, stepping out into the corridor and towards Brennan's room. There was one small detail he had not told them, could not tell them. That an evolution this fast was not even slightly natural, and he had no idea what had caused it. Leaps of logic and intuitive guess work were something of their speciality by now, but he just couldn't see how this had happened. Maybe he had fewer pieces of the puzzle than he thought.
Another four hours until they began to show signs of the virus. Jude forced herself to stop checking her watch and concentrate on calculating the probable outcomes of the unexpected electrical surge that had been intercepted over the DoD channels. It would have wiped out the computers, possibly the disk that she had gone to so much trouble to provide them with.
Had there been time for Adam to decrypt it? No, no she didn't think so, and neither did Eckhart. Which meant there was no way for them to know they were infected, no way for them to work on a cure. Chances of their survival were diminishing by the hour, and chances of her survival were diminishing by the minute, there was no way she would come out of this intact. It was time to take drastic action.
Quickly she changed out of her plain business suit into the casual clothes she always kept a set of in the office, for those frequent times she had to work late and attend some function or other immediately afterwards. The dark red hair she kept back in a bun and hated with a deep and abiding passion was let down to a less severe plait, the glasses she hoped made people take her more seriously were replaced by contacts and pumps were replaced with a comfortable and battered pair of Docs. She knew she now looked about eighteen, despite her twenty-five years. More importantly, she now looked very little like Jude Riley.
In five minutes she was ready to leave, and did so, passing as few check points as possible on the way out. It was entirely possible Eckhart would bless her plan, but it was also just as possible he'd take the next four hours to personally introduce her to the delights of being the R&D guinea pig.
The cab ride to the airport was quick enough, and a plane easy to charter once she had greased the right palms with her expense account money, neglecting to tell them they might be flying over an electrical dead zone, after all, that was what they invented parachutes for. It was time to pay a house call.
Notes
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