Note: Not counting her trip back to Del Oro (from Ekaterinburg), Kat travels 7,194 miles in this fic. Roam if you want to, girl!
Kat drummed her fingers on the console, watching impatiently as Yevshenko positioned Kat's comatose friend/teammate/protectee in the center of the generator. The rest of the chamber had been cleared and Yevshenko had chickened out and opted for a Chemturion suit; all this to avoid nanoprobe contamination.
The caution was taking a while and that was not cool with Kat. "Y'know, a wise man once said, 'When you're racing, it's life. Anything that happens before or after is just waiting.' "
Berto was under a different section of the console, on his back and fighting with wires. "Who?" he asked, distracted by her interruption.
"Steve McQueen in Le Mans. How much longer?" She flexed her fingers - open, closed, open - and wondered uneasily if they should still be tingling from the nanoprobe-flicker of three hours earlier. Her scrape from Dragonelle's katana in Berlin had healed cleanly, though, and that was the same hand. "His twelve hours are pretty much over."
From beneath the console, Berto said, "Actually, we're already on borrowed time. My calculations gave him nine hours, but twelve sounded more feasible."
And he'd gone with the mostly doable twelve so the government would be inclined to chip in.
Hardball in NerdLand.
"Don't worry - nuestro hermano is tough. He'll hang on longer if he needs to. But I think we're OK now." He scooted out from under the console and asked one of the government techies something that involved a long string of jargon and acronyms. The g-man geek answered back using the same alien language, and Berto said, "Start the countdown."
Berto was looking about as tired as she felt. Not really comforting. Kat leaned forward and stared through the control room's thick safety glass like she could x-ray vision Josh back to normal - well, as normal as he could get. "It's gonna work, right?"
Berto blew out a heavy breath and rubbed his eyes. "Nothing in science is one hundred percent."
"Great," Kat said, underwhelmed by the reassurance.
"We only need one nanoprobe to survive undamaged," Berto said, lecturing now. "Yevshenko and I agree about that. Fully charged it can self-replicate and fix or replace the damaged probes. All we need is one out of a few trillion. The odds are good."
"But not one hundred percent." Kat sat back, worrying silently. It would've been better if she knew anything about nanoprobes. It would've been better if this had been a problem she could solve by fighting, or racing, or flying. But it wasn't and she just had to wait.
Berto issued a string of more supergeek to the goverment guys. They either scurried to do his bidding or hovered nervously in the background. One of them, twisting his tie into origami, said, "Boy, I wish we could do a test-run first."
"You haven't tested it?" Kat demanded of Berto, alarmed and incredulous.
He met her eyes with an uncharacteristically flat, hard stare, and she was reminded that there was a heck of a lot more to Dr. Roberto Martinez than nerd glasses and a taste for Hawaiian t-shirts. "There's no time," was all he said.
One by one the scurrying techs returned or called in over the com, or just yelled across the control room: "Main power clear," "Secondary systems clear," "Gyroscopes clear" - an unending checklist, regular as a clock ticking.
In Ekaterinburg the bomb clocks had been just clocks. She felt this countdown like a weight on her chest. It made it surprisingly hard to breathe.
"All clear," the origami-tie tech finally reported.
Berto exhaled again and said under his breath, "Por favor, Madre de Dios... Don't die, hermano."
He pressed the button. The generator rings lurched into action, picking up speed as they rotated, and she had to fight the urge to cheer them on. Berto was white-knuckling the control console and rapidly muttering more stuff in Spanish. Kat just white-knuckled it.
Green light blossomed, the generator fired, and then -
Berto let out a whoop. "Ciento por ciento! One hundred percent! He's back online - all systems running normal - well, OK, not all of them yet, but -"
"He's OK?" Kat demanded, although she really wanted to ask, Nothing in science is one hundred percent?
Berto looked at her with an ear-to-ear grin. "Thanks to you... hermana."
Boy, if that didn't make her pride ratchet up a notch or two. And it was really pathetic, but when Josh stood up - not really steady yet, but standing - and let out a whoop of his own and flashed a thumbs-up their way, she almost felt like crying. Almost. And just a little. Maybe one tear that she could wipe away quickly without anyone seeing.
"Good job, Ryan," she told herself. "Now go to sleep."
So she did.
Six hours in dreamland later, Kat felt slightly more human. Her fingertips were still a little tingly and, instead of fretting about it, she made a mental note to check on that with Yevshenko. But later. First things first.
She went looking for her boss.
When she'd gotten back to N-Tek, as debriefed as she was gonna get by those CIA losers, she'd handed the disc to Jefferson Smith with a muttered, "He says bonjour." Understanding had flickered over Jefferson's face and he'd taken the CD with nary a question.
On that long, long ride home she'd learned that more people than Dragonelle had been playing her towards their own ends. It turned out that Bob had been willing to give N-Tek a generator in exchange for Kat simply stirring things up - which she'd accomplished, no doubt; Dr. Kaspar Wolff was in custody and Sergei Nikolaivitch Avadeyev was probably moving to the top of the CIA To-Do List. Not to mention she'd flushed Dread out of hiding.
That had been the CIA objective all along, but they couldn't do it since they had those pesky international politics to worry about. The pansies.
"Yo," she said when she found Jefferson. Pretty informal way to greet the big boss, but she was the golden child this week, so what did she care? "Are the men in black still here?"
"Agent Ryan." He glanced around casually. "No, they're gone. Speaking of which. It's come to my attention that you used my personal files in your very unauthorized mission."
She shrugged. "Desperate times. Got results, didn't it?"
He gave her a strange look. "It certainly did. The CIA is pushing through paperwork to reactivate N-Tek as a counterterrorist agency. We're to resume full operations ASAP. That includes..." He trailed off, focusing on a point over her shoulder, and finished with a greatly satisfied, "Team Steel."
"Talking about us behind our backs, Dad?" Josh's voice said behind her. No, Max's: it was pitched lower and was slightly cockier, although that part was always a judgement call. Kat turned to see Max - and Berto, tagging along with an overlarge PDA connected to Max by a spaghetti tangle of wires - coming to join them.
"Not if he's talking to me, Steel," she retorted. Because she was so definitely on Team Steel for life now, and she had the giant IOUs to enforce it.
He winked and moved past her. Jefferson got an enthusiastic hug from his only adopted child and the world's only nano-spy. "Morning, Dad. It's a great day to be alive, huh?"
"Good morning, Max," Jefferson managed, wheezing slightly, after the embrace was over. "It seems like you're doing just fine."
"Ninety-nine percent and holding strong. He's kind of cleaned out the fridge, though," Berto added, a little embarrassed. No one had predicted that fresh-squeezed nanoprobes liked their host to eat round the clock. (Merely one more quirky nanoprobe thing, but a heck of a lot more forgivable than sucking the life out of people.)
Max slapped his father on the back, obviously pleased to simply be breathing, and returned his attention to his smirking teammate. More serious than his jovial greeting to Jefferson, he said, "Kat, thank you. You went way beyond the call of duty."
Her smirk vanished when he stepped toward her.
"Uh, yeah. Kind of already explained -" He caught her in another enthusiastic, bone-crushing hug and the rest of the sentence was cut off for lack of oxygen. But it wasn't the lack of oxygen that made her want to squirm away.
"Has he been like this all morning?" she asked over Max's shoulder, trying to extract herself without knocking him down. She was not a hugging person.
Berto rocked back on his heels, grinning. "I'm afraid so."
"Thank you," Max said again, holding her at arm's length. Then he pulled her into a less painful hug and said quietly, loud enough only for her: "Like I said - you don't have to beg."
"Not going to," she said back, just as quiet but ninety-nine percent snarkier. He let go and flashed her the widest, most arrogantly self-confident smile she'd seen since she'd looked in the mirror that morning.
"We'll see," Max said to her, then turned to Berto. "OK, bro, let's hit the vending machines - I'm starving!"
What's up with that? she thought. Her mind flicked through the new challenges automatically, weighing the pros and cons of picking up the gauntlet. IOUs or not, it would be the kiss of death to job security, that was for sure: You didn't see Rachel Leeds chatting with the boss these days.
But then, of course, Rachel wasn't nearly as awesome as she was.
Jefferson waited until his son had left earshot (that always took a while, given the nano-enhanced hearing) before coughing discreetly. "As I was saying, Agent Ryan."
She jerked her attention back to her employer. "Right."
"I'm returning Team Steel to full-time active duty, and you're back as Senior Field Agent. Officially, this is ops only. No sports, no protection work. Unofficially -" He paused and studied her for a moment, amusement dancing around the edges of his face. "Unofficially, someone still needs to keep an eye on my son. Are we clear?"
"No problem, boss," Kat replied with full confidence. Of course I can save your son. I can save the whole freaking world. Every day, if I have to.
"Good," Jefferson said, clapping her on the shoulder as he left. He was whistling to himself.
Kat folded her arms across her chest. She tried not to smile; she had no reason to smile. It was the most thankless job in the world, chaperoning Max Steel, and it was her own fault, really...
-END-
