7
Tracy Island-
After Thunderbird 2 performed a quick 'turn and burn' landing and drop-off, Alan seized TinTin's arm and hauled her between false palm trees to the Cliffside hangar. His brother, Virgil, had returned to the island just long enough to ditch his two young passengers and switch pods. The process could be accomplished outside, despite all the rain, thanks to the maze of lifts, trapdoors and access tunnels that underlay her runway. Thunderbird 2 rumbled up to the right spot, laid her old pod like a dragon's egg, then rose to await its removal and the hydraulic ascent of another. In this case, pod 4. Ten minutes, tops.
Next, he'd be off to Europe, for Gordon. At this point, Virgil had been in the air for over 15 hours, and the strain was beginning to show. He'd been sort of brusque, Alan thought, about ordering them off the plane.
Alan was pretty exhausted, himself, but doing his best to conceal it. He'd pulled people out of the water until the rescues… downed planes, capsized boats, washed-out bridges… began to blur; the crowd becoming a single, protean victim with death-grip hands, chilly flesh and frightened eyes.
'Save me',it seemed to cry,clinging to shattered hulls and floating junk, 'or go down with me'. Dang, but he was beginning to hate the ocean…!
Alan Tracy usually glowed with confidence. Now, though, he was tired and cold, had spent many hours rescuing victims from the darkest and loneliest of graves. And the day wasn't over…
TinTin was quiet (mad at him, the youngest brother supposed), robbing Alan of a much-needed sounding board. She stumbled, crossing the threshold.
"C'mon, T," he grumped, "snap out of it. It wasn't that bad."
She looked, with her wet, short hair and circled eyes, like something Death had not only refused to warm over, but tossed out with the trash.
"Je m'excuse, Alain…" she muttered, after Thunderbird 2 roared off, again. "I have a bad head."
Their sodden clothing steamed when the two teenagers stepped from tropical downpour to climate controlled hangar. TinTin began to shiver. For just a minute, Alan was irritated; her evident weakness, when he was already worried, irked the boy. Then, he felt bad for her. After all, she was just a girl…
Gallantly, he seized the blue drop-cloth from one of Brains' yawn-worthy contraptions, swirled it through the air like a matador's cape, and settled it about her drooping shoulders.
"Luxuriate, Mam'selle," he commanded, striking a dramatic pose and affected French accent, "…in ze warmth and comfort of ze penelon shawl! Very nice, no?"
He sounded just like Francois, Lady Penelope's favorite designer.
TinTin giggled, hugging the 'shawl' a little closer. Alan was, yes, obtuse and self-absorbed, but sometimes (just a little) he could also be rather sweet.
They dripped across the big, echoing hangar, weaving among tall gantries, and pausing occasionally to allow trains of maintenance robots the right-of-way. In here, the air was cool and dry. Perfectly calm, but for insect-like clicks and hummings.
Only the overhead lights' intermittent flickering betrayed the tempest that raged outside. It was getting worse.
One hand firmly planted on TinTin's left shoulder, Alan hurried her along. He had no desire to slip on the smooth concrete floor, but didn't want to be stuck in this windowless cavern if the lights went out, either. TinTin sneezed and grumbled, but wobbled a little faster, nonetheless.
Alan hadn't said anything about the girl's raggedly chopped hair, mostly because TinTin/hair versus TinTin/no hair hardly mattered compared with Gordon's confusing behavior, what he'd seen bubbling out of the ocean, and getting dad to agree to home schooling. A little hair, more or less, barely registered on the 'Alan-meter'. The truly chilling possibility, that they might send him to Wharton, was to be plotted against with every weapon in his teen-aged arsenal.
'Hair! Girly heartache. Yeah, right.'
They crossed the hangar to the second, bottom-level, access door. The lights did go out, once, but the island's generators cut on again almost immediately, micro-welded by swift robots. The pair started up the metal staircase that led to Jeff Tracy's office, waking the echoes with their heavy-footed clomping.
At the top, Alan blanked on the access code, and his water-shriveled hands confused the palm print scanner. In short, the office door wouldn't open.
Frustrated, Alan kicked the thing, getting very little satisfaction from the resulting scuff mark and sore toes. At his side, leaning heavily and half asleep, TinTin murmured something that sounded like,
"Peanut butter lipstick…"
Alan was all set to get mad, when he caught a sideways glimpse of the maintenance tunnel he'd crawled through to give Gordon his first glimpse of Thunderbird 2. In all the resulting furor, they'd nearly been killed. Remembering, Alan grinned.
'Heh. Good times.'
And he wished, suddenly, that Gordon was there, and Fermat, too; that the four of them (yeah, you had to count the chick) were working this out, together.
They weren't here, though. The door was. Wiping his white and wrinkly hand on sodden uniform pants, Alan tried the palm scanner again, mashing his hand to the black square as hard as he could. (To flatten out all the soggy-wrinkles.)
The door opened, all right. From the inside. It was his mom, with towels, drinks and food.
"Awesome," he breathed, seizing an over-stuffed egg salad sandwich and a bottle of purple Gatorade. Shoving food in his mouth, Alan tried to simultaneously towel off, chew, kiss his mother's cheek, and thrust TinTin at her.
"How's oo ahm?" He managed to gust out, not spraying too badly.
"Better, Sweetie, thank you," Gennine responded. "Mr. Hackenbacker laser welded it for me. It hardly hurts at all, now."
"Cool. Can I have another sandwich?"
Gennine smiled at her son, proud and concerned together. He looked worn, she thought. His blond hair was crusted with salt; his eyes were red, and his voice hoarse from shouting. But the wide stance and full cheeks were scrappy-loveable as ever. He'd do.
TinTin, on the other hand, seemed much less alert. She held her sandwich by a corner, blinking at the lumps of yellow filling that dripped onto the stair landing. Ordinarily, Gennine would have swooped over to wipe up the mess. Here, though, she'd learned not to bother.
Projected from above, a glowing red grid appeared on the floor around the spilt food, precisely identifying its location for the house computer. Moments later, a spidery cleaning mech clattered down the wall, incinerated TinTin's spill, then swarmed off along a handy metal pipe.
Gennine took the sandwich from TinTin.
"Never mind, Dear," she soothed, placing her good arm around the cloth-draped girl, "Maybe once you've had a nap."
Didn't happen, though.
Inside the office, Alan's dad, who was down to the crusts of his own meal, was having a very serious discussion with Scott.
"…from Kuiper, placed her about 8.2 million miles away," Jeff Tracy was saying, his craggy face grey with exhaustion. Scott swayed a bit, but managed a fair semblance of his usual ramrod posture as he stood beside the wooden desk.
"Understood, Sir. Provided she isn't drifting too rapidly, and we launch immediately, Thunderbird 3 should be able to get there."
Jeff ran a hand through already mussed hair. Lips tightly compressed, he nodded.
"You'll need to cut the engines and drift most of the way, Son, to conserve fuel for your return. On-site maneuvering will be extremely limited. Two or three short burns, at best."
And then he said, for the Times Square incident was just beginning to hit the news,
"Take Alan with you… TinTin, as well, if she feels up to it. Kyrano's given the go-ahead, and this job is going to require two pilots and a space walk. Be very careful, and for God's sake, hurry."
His brown eyes flicked over to the flat-screen TV, then returned to his eldest son's grim, handsome face.
"Something may have gone wrong with John's mission. No real word yet. If anyone else could reach Kuiper…"
Jeff refocused,gave himself a shake, and resumed briskly,
"Just make it quick. Over to Kuiper for survivors, then home. I'll contact Riley, at the Moon Station, in case you fall short and need a second-choice landing spot."
He hadn't any grand-sounding exhortations about 'toughest mission we've ever faced' to add. Just,
"Fly safe."
A brief handshake and quiet,
"Yes, Sir,"
…closed the briefing. The Tracys were not a particularly demonstrative clan, and sometimes, Jeff regretted this. Especially, now.
"C'mon, T," Alan whispered after downing the entire contents of a second Gatorade bottle, "Get up!"
The girl had collapsed on the fireside settee, getting rain water all over Jeff's Moroccan leather upholstery.
"You can sleep on the way!"
She managed a drowsy yawn, but it was Scott who drew TinTin to her feet; carefully, because even in straits like these, he remained a gentleman. Glancing at his younger brother, who'd given his mother a final, red-faced kiss and a lot of promises, the fighter pilot said,
"Let's go save some cosmonauts, Junior."
Trenton, NJ, Underground-
'Like a relay race in hell,' John thought disgustedly, staring at the computer screen, 'just one damned thing after another.'
He'd located the source of the hacks that frightened Drew into breaking her four-year silence. Guy named Cooper Fielding, currently inhabiting one of those comfy rooms with the downy-soft walls. Interesting, and far from the end of the line.
John had a sort of 'investigative rule of thumb': follow the money.
Someone had hired Fielding, setting him up with a damn fancy set of attack boxes and a super-fast, almost untraceable internet connection. 'Someone' had deep pockets, and a US government credit account, which John traced to one 'Vicente Vargas'. He was now occupying a refrigerated berth at the DC coroner's office.
According to the police files John had hacked, he'd been found in the trunk of him employer's car, shot to death; one bullet, from behind, close range. Nor did the chain end there.
Vargas' employer was none other than Lamar Stennis, the senator whose televised press conference he'd switched off, earlier. Apparently, Stennis had admitted being a terrorist mastermind, then committed suicide on national television. Not before announcing warmly that his organization, 'The Red Path', was under new management. Question was… whose?
Whose silent string-pulling had resulted in one gibbering mental patient and two perforated corpses? A thorny problem, that one, because it was at this precise point that the money dried up.
Whoever provoked Stennis to suicide, killed Vargas and drove Fielding insane wasn't writing any checks. Right. So, where did that leave him?
John Tracy wasn't much given to 'intuition', but no matter how he put the pieces together, the only answer he got was the Hood. Who else had the requisite motive, ability and sheer, ugly ruthlessness? The man had made twisted use of his own niece, once. Why not a politician? And, Five had said that the Hood was back, returned to life by the same probability shift that moved Endurance from Mars to New York City.
As problems went, it was running neck and neck with several others, such as why Denice seemed completely at ease with a 19-year old John Tracy, one who couldn't possibly have been old enough to fly a Mars mission. In fact, he had to remind her constantly that he was an astronaut… and worse yet, remind himself. Certain events were beginning to fade. For awhile, he'd decided to keep notes, write everything down. Until strange patterns began turning up in the placement of capital 'A's and lower-case 'q's, that is. Safer, maybe, to quit writing, no matter how much was temporarilylost to shifting realities.
John gazed at the glowing computer screen, tapping a pencil and re-reading a minutely detailed police report. Lots of facts, no answers. But... if the Hood was controlling Red Path, he had to be sending orders and making decisions, leaving some kind of 'click trail'. Not the sort that his pursuer could follow by ordinary means, though.
Coming to a decision, John pushed the squeaking office chair away from Denice's work station, and stood up. He'd shifted the piled junk, a bit. Now there was a straight path between computer, bed and pass-through.
As he turned away from the desk, John's eye chanced to fall upon the 'random' marks he'd made, tapping his pencil. Instead of a meaningless scatter, the graphite dashes formed a halfway recognizable pattern. Some of the spots were darker than others, as though closer to the viewer, some a little smudged, as if moving. At once alien and familiar, it was a message or equation of some sort; something his former body had been destroyed to remove. Something he'd lost Mars for.
With a sudden, violent move, John tore the marked sheet from DNC's notebook, wadded the paper and hurled it into the hanging grocery bag that served as a garbage can. Then, shoving away confusion, and all its ugly friends, he went up front. Only a curtain of plastic strips separated living quarters from work place. The real security was out front; invisible and unsleeping.
Denice looked up from adjusting her display case. She'd just received a 'misdirected' box of wireless routers. High-end, experimental stuff, meant for military use. As John stepped into her shop, DNC gave him a brief, companionable nod.
"What's up, guy?" She asked him, shutting the glass-topped case. With a tall metal cabinet and titanium alloy laptop, the case and its altered goods made up her whole store. Nice place, really, for the underground. She'd built into the snug, solid corner between a steel support pylon and a concrete load-bearing wall. Prime real estate.
The wall was painted a certain shade of green, with silver lines and dots resembling the engraved paths on a circuit board. The pylon she'd rigged to look like streams of flowing data.
"You need something?"
John nodded, indicating an object on the bottom shelf of the display case.
"The cyberlink." An even rarer device, and handmade.
DNC's dark eyebrows lifted slightly. Almost, she smiled; chipped teeth gleaming briefly against tan skin.
"You back in business, K?"
Although, as she'd told him once, she didn't care for the male species, as a whole…
"Denice," she'd introduced herself, fiercely. "D-E-N-I-C-E. Den-iss. Got it? And I don't like men."
To which he'd replied, a little confusedly,
"Neither do I," earning himself a harder backslap than even Virgil could deliver.
…John was a special case, unswervingly loyal, even in the face of blackmail and threatened imprisonment. He shook his blond head in response to her question.
"No. I gave my word. I'm just looking for someone."
Denice hesitated, one hand on the locked display case.
"Sure you don't want to wait till I close up, John? It ain't safe jacking all the way in like that, with no one there to watch you."
But he shrugged off her concern, saying,
"I'll be fine, and so will the link. This won't take long, I promise."
Thunderbird 3, the cockpit, somewhat earlier-
She launched like a bolt from the gods, flung, not out of the heavens, but into them. Thunderbird 1 was fast, Thunderbird 2 powerful, 4 able to endure the crushing pressure of the depths. But Thunderbird 3, rising on a plume of golden flame, was a spaceship; sleek, swift and graceful.
Into the storm she launched, drawing spears of lightning that rode her contrail straight down to the roundhouse. This time, the lights really did go out, and stayed that way.
Not that the three aboard ship noticed. Beyond a handful of flickering instruments, the power surge scarcely affected them. TinTin, strapped into a couch in the 'lounge', concentrated as best she could on the staticky computer screen. Brains had uploaded every file, press release and technical spec available on Kuiper. At the moment, however, it was just about impossible to do any reading. Between the shaking, the thunderous din and chest-popping pressure, TinTin had all she could do just to complete a thought. The alertness tablets had taken effect, though; that was something.
Up front, Scott and Alan Tracy faced the same struggle. For Scott, it was harder. He was recovering, still, from injuries that had come close to killing him. The nanobots had done their job well, but he was weak yet, and troubled by pains that 3's agitated shaking made worse.
Setting his jaw, Scott kept his blue eyes riveted to the view screen and his hands clenched on the arm rests. At the moment, there wasn't much flying to be done. Like any rocket, anywhere, 3's initial launch was pretty much 'point, shoot and pray'.
Beside him, strapped into the copilot's couch, Alan was actually whooping aloud (15 years old and going into space on a heroic mission- how much better could it get?). Tired or not, he wouldn't have missed it, or noticed much else.
The shaking eased as Thunderbird 3 broke the clawed grip of gravity. Rising, she shrugged the storm clouds off like a dropped shawl, and emerged into peace and blackness. The stars shone forth, and angry Mars, burning like crystals.
Now Scott took a hand in things, checking telemetry from the island and Kuiper before gimbaling the rockets and ending the burn. Fuel, as Jeff had indicated, was going to be painfully tight. Thunderbird 3 continued to spin, following the last applied force. It would be several hours before another correction was needed.
"Alan," Scott began, looking over at his entranced younger brother, "you and TinTin are going to be pulling a lot of the weight, this time out."
Alan managed to tear his eyes from the view screen for a whole, what… three seconds? Much buoyed by food, spaceflight and alertness tabs, he blurted,
"Huh? Yeah, okay. Weight, gotcha."
There was internal gravity, thanks to something very big spinning really fast (Alan wasn't too clear on the details, but it sounded scientific) at the center of the ship. Didn't quite kill that swooping, roller coaster thrill, though. According to the cabin monitors, gravity had dropped to 2/3 Earth normal. His golden hair fluffed out rather entertainingly. Reflected in the windows, he looked poofy.
"I'm serious, Al."
That got the boy's attention; he'd never merited a nickname, before. Not one he wanted, anyway. 'Junior' and 'Brat' didn't count.
Scott continued gravely, as Thunderbird 3 rolled on, and the Earth's curvingrim slipped from the bottom, to top, of their forwardview screen,
"I didn't want to say anything, before, but I'm not in as good condition as I led dad to believe. A lot of this is going to devolve on you and TinTin. I'll provide what help I can, and continue to mend, but… damn, I hate this!"
The last time he'd been forced to let one of the boys take the lead, Gordon had nearly ended up entombed in a sunken freighter. (Bad back, worse planning; but then, as now, what else could he do?)
Said Alan, as the rear hatch slid open and TinTin hurtled in,
"Dude. Be, like, at ease. This rescue is so handled. You put us there, the chick locates our targets, and I pick 'em up. Uno, dos, tres. Seriously, what could go wrong?"
Wharton Academy, a little later-
As the crowd of boys began filing out of their stone dining hall, Fermat, Sam and Daniel hung back, a bit. If they timed it just right, they might slip away between the last wave of students and their shepherding proctors. Clearly, this was no time for assembly, or classes, either. This was an emergency.
All at once, though, Daniel Solomon got a notion. Signaling Sam and Fermat, he took a deep breath, then approached Anne Wilde. As she stood rather near, quietly admonishing the massed boys to remember their umbrellas, this took no more than a second or two.
"Miss Wilde…?" He ventured, screwing up courage from sheer desperation. In weather like this, they had to have a real driver. They had to have an adult along; someone trustworthy.
The young history teacher looked down and around, her worried grey eyes softening at the sight of Daniel's face. She whipped her own umbrella around to 'port arms', then brought it down to tap his shoulders, one at a time, like a queen knighting a bold squire on the eve of battle.
Illuminated by lightning-flash and wall lamps, her ash-blonde hair looked almost white.
"Say on, Goode Sir Daniel. What wouldst thou?"
Her flowery language raised the ghost of a smile from Daniel Solomon.
"Ma'am," he began, gaining confidence, "we really need your help, and so do the astronauts."