Thanks, E.D. and Tikatu... edits coming soon.
46: Night Flight
Thunderbird 2, leaving Tracy Island-
Virgil had been a little slower to set off than the others, as he'd had to load the correct pod into Thunderbird 2. For this particular mission (freeing victims of an underground train wreck) he was going to need Firefly, advanced medical gear andsome heavy-duty structural braces. Certain preparations had to be made, as speed and good intentions were nothing without the right equipment.
Eventually, Hackenbacker got the pods and software sorted out. Then, Virgil was able to stub out his third cigarette and head for the cockpit. Brains rode shotgun, muttering to himself as he played with logistics on his PDA. He never spoke much on rescue flights, preferring instead to set up contingency plans and study the situation.
They strapped in without exchanging more than three or four words, Hackenbacker occupied and Virgil content to let him remain so. They had more than enough to do, both of them.
At first throttle-up, Thunderbird 2 left her cliff-side lair. Massive and slow, she growled her way down the tarmac, surrounded by drooping palms. It would be nightfall, soon, and the floodlights had already cut on. Bright circles played over muscular hull and bold, white '2', blunt nose and stubby wings. Virgil accessed the runway cameras to watch, and not just because she'd been upgraded, again. In her own way (less sleek than 1 or 3, slower than vanished 7) Thunderbird 2 was utterly beautiful. It was a show he never got tired of.
Virgil taxied to the end of the runway while humming a little Mozart, subconsciously tapping melody contour and chords upon the steering yoke. Eine kleine Nachtmusik.
Once in proper position and cleared for takeoff, he triggered Thunderbird 2's launch sequence. Big as she was, on a runway this short, his girl needed help getting into the air.
First a set of clamps locked onto her wheels, their booming thud as loud and familiar as the low hum of the launch ramp's hydraulic jacks. Thunderbird 2 began to tilt, her nose lifting some 45 degrees to the horizontal. Tarmac, palms and glowing sunset vanished from his view screen, replaced by purpling sky and a few shy stars.
Virgil glanced over at Brains, but the engineer failed to respond, too busy sending data files to Houston to notice a little thing like the view. The pilot turned his attention forward, again, waiting for the reverberant clang and flashing indicator lights that announced a locked and ready ramp. And… there; good to go.
He ran up the main engines, throttling forward until the giant cargolifter shuddered and roared in her restraints. Shock waves raced away on all sides, rippling grasses, shaking trees, and sending flocks of birds wheeling off in startled panic. Not that they'd long to put up with all his noise and tumult, for moments later the clamps fell away, and Virgil gave her full throttle.
Thunderbird 2 sprang into the air with a last, resounding boom, the flash and heat signature of her launch wellmasked from satellite and ground station, alike.
With a deft touch to her steering rockets, Virgil sent the cargolifter into a sharp, climbing bank, putting her nose toward the coast of distant Chile. Heading in this direction, they'd be plunging deeper into the night, chasing a full moon higher into the sky with every mile.
The last red streak of sunlight had faded from the horizon by the time Virgil leveled off. At 50,000 feet, with Shadowbot providing cover and dense clouds hiding the Pacific, there seemed very little chance of detection. That being the case, he decided to test a few of the steering upgrades. Brains had promised that they'd make Thunderbird 2 easier for a lone pilot to handle, but with Braman down, and the new LOIS system still glitching like damp gunpowder…
"Th- They work," Brains stated flatly, when Virgil angled the steering rockets for a second shallow turn. The engineer hadn't raised his eyes from the computer's little screen. "Y- You'll find 2 as, ah… as functional and r- responsive as ever, I believe."
The pilot pushed his cap aside long enough to run a big hand through his shock of wavy dark hair.
"Yeah, I know, Brains… I just wanted to get a feel for how she handles, is all, before we reach the danger zone."
Moonlight gleamed off the engineer's glasses as he turned his head to reply.
"I recall that your, ah… your f- father indicated a n- need for, ah… for expeditious progress, Virgil; not f- flight testing. The n- new system is, ah… is entirely trustworthy."
Okay... Just a little touchy, there? Made sense, he supposed… Hackenbacker (more than Virgil's father, even) had to be feeling bad for all the trouble Braman had caused.
"No problem. ETA to Ciudad Real: 21 minutes, 42.7 seconds from… mark. There before you know it, Brains."
The engineer's attention returned to his softly chiming PDA.
"I'm q- quite cognizant of our, ah… our flight path, Virgil, thank you."
So much for light conversation. Thinking that some of the problem might be Fermat, Virgil tried another tack.
"I'm sure they'll be all right. The kids, that is. Couple of loose elephants and a stuck bus or two aren't much more than a foreign PR opportunity, really. It's Scott who's got the hard job."
Once again, Brains looked up and over. Blue eyes perfectly level, voice nearly lost in 2's deep, vibrating thrum, he said,
"I am a firm b- believer in Murphy, Virgil. And in th- the laws of, ah… of thermodynamics. It is axiomatic that n- not only can things go wrong… th- they almost certainly w- will."
At this point, Virgil decided to just shut up and fly. Clearly, Brains didn't feel like conversing. Trouble was, he'd gotten kind of spoiled, having Gordon for a co-pilot. The kid loved to talk, which had gotten on his older brother's nerves, at first, but… well, it did make the time pass. Brains, on the other hand, had better things to do.
The cockpit fell more or less silent, livened only by engine noise, occasional, hissing thruster bursts and the faint clatter of stylus and keyboard. At least high-altitude night flights were challenge enough to keep him interested; and the view alone was worth losing sleep for.
Round as a coin, a full moon shed her soft silver light, crafting entire cities from the cloudscape below. Towers, hills and shadowed valleys there were, ethereal and pale as something out of a drowsing mind. He'd have to paint that someday, Virgil decided, or find a piece of music that did it for him.
Unfortunately for daydreams, stealth and great art, those clouds halted just short of the Chilean border, barred from reaching land by the frigid Humboldt Current. Like an icy mountain range, the current blocked moisture and shriveled clouds, dumping tons of rain into the Pacific, leaving just a cold, bone-dry wind to howl over the resulting desert; the Atacama. And what a desert…! The only things to be had there were salt, lava flows, giant sand pictures and ancient mummies. Some parts of this wasteland had received not a single drop of rain in all of recorded history… which was why John had ended up training there, along with the rest of the Ares III crew; the Atacama made a fairly decent stand-in for Mars.
Virgil looked up through his overhead port, seeking the red planet's sharp little glint. They'd be home soon, hopefully; with wild stories to tell and alien scenery to describe. …And, in John's case, a deep yen for beer. They'd sit down for a 'conference'; Virgil, Scott and John. Talk all day and into the night, probably, about everything that had happened in eight long months, and why John's sorry ass needed to stay on Earth, where it belonged.
Pushing these thoughts aside, Virgil called into Ciudad Real tower, and began his descent. With a tail wind speeding her along, Thunderbird 2 shot over Chile's red, wrinkled landscape like a meteor, the fanged Andes on one side and a jeweled ribbon of highway on the other. He pushed forward on the yoke, angling rockets for a steep leftward bank. Boulders and hills zipped past, growing larger as she neared the ground. At last, stooping to meet her flickery-pale moon shadow, Thunderbird 2 touched down on a bed of dried salt. She bounced once, undercarriage squealing, then hit the ground to stay. Still doing over a hundred miles an hour, Virgil applied full-burn thrust reversers to slow her momentum. He and Brains were shoved into their seats by the sudden braking force, but it took awhile to stop, even so. Corroded mining equipment flashed past, vying with a fleet of police cars, blasting salt and the Pan-American Highway for Virgil's attention. Had to watch where he was going; the last thing IR needed now was to have him wreak further havoc by swerving onto a public thoroughfare. With all this in mind, Virgil felt deep and genuine relief once the jouncing, grumbling Bird began to slow.
Directly ahead and drawing closer by the moment, the lights of Ciudad Real gilded the northern horizon. A flourishing port city, Real guarded the west entrance to the mighty Trans-Andean Tunnel, one of the engineering marvels of the 21st century world. Consisting of three levels (freight, bullet train and private traffic), the tunnel traversed an entire continent, surfacing 1,584 miles further east in Rio de Janiero. Beautiful work, but a terrible place for a train wreck; hundreds needed evacuation, with very little room to maneuver.
As the local constabulary raced up, blue-and-red lights shredding the darkness, Virgil at last brought Thunderbird 2 to a complete halt. She ended her flight in the shelter of a barren hill, a safe distance from road and city. Virgil smiled, listening as her engine noise faded to soft, steamy rumbles, then quieted altogether. He'd been wrong. They'd actually arrived in less than his estimated 21.43 minutes.
Brains took the comm, using its instant messaging feature to make plans with the gathering authorities. (He intensely disliked visual conferencing.) Meanwhile, Virgil hurried through his post-flight. Lots to do. Besides filling out the flight log and shielding her nuclear pile, he had to trigger the cargolifter's light-warping invisibility field. No cameras, no prying eyes, no espionage; those were the rules. International Rescue's technology was too dangerous and unstable to be allowed into the hands of the Hood, or a terrorist organization like the Red Path… not that they'd know what to do with it.
But Virgil had his own reasons for making certain that 2 was absolutely secure; Chilean law enforcement simply didn't play. The small coastal nation hemorrhaged money with every hour that her tunnel remained shut. Anyone stupid enough to break the cordon of police and military vehicles surrounding Thunderbird 2 would quickly become unwilling guests of the Chilean judicial system. Virgil had reason to know; he'd blown a quarter of his trust fund the year before, getting some video-happy spring breakers out of prison. Okay, they'd tried to spray-paint their schoolmascot on the underside of her wing; but life?
Hitting a series of switches, Virgil initiated the pod-release sequence.
"You ready?" he asked, looking over at Brains. The process could not be completed until both men had entered pod 2 and taken control of their respective vehicles.
"A- Absolutely, Virgil. Lead, ah… lead on."
A few minutes later they'd clanged their way down the cockpit boarding ladder and into pod 2. It was more empty space than anything else, for the present equipment used very little room. Firefly rested in her braces, yellow as Thunderbird 4, but a great deal less sea-worthy. She was a top-of-the-line fire fighting and debris clearing machine, made of exotic alloys and powered by nuclear batteries. Relatively low to the ground, Firefly ran on heavy metal tank treads, and was nearly impossible to scratch, much less destroy. All in all, a good little craft, able to survive collapsing buildings and hellish heat the way other vehicles shrugged off bug strikes. Not much to look at, maybe, but her no-glamour sturdiness had already saved countless lives, including Lady Penelope's.
Virgil strode forward. Footfalls ringing loud in the huge pod, he boarded Firefly by means of a print-locked overhead hatch, climbing from treads, to access ladder, to roof, and thence inside.
Needing transportation of his own, Brains took the wheel of another vehicle, a recently modified emergency-landing 'elevator car'. He'd reconfigured the car to run along a bullet train's magnetic track, enabling faster arrival.
"L- Local authorities have c- cleared the, ah… the Pan-American Highway into Ciudad Real, Virgil," the engineer informed him, sounding a little more cheerful. "We're free to, ah… to begin operations."
"FAB," Virgil grunted, strapping himself into Firefly's tight cockpit with all the enthusiasm of a Great Dane squeezing into a beagle's kennel. "And then… when we've wrapped this up, Brains… let's talk about leg room."
The engineer sighed.
"S- Sore knees are a small p- price to, ah… to pay for m- more insulation and, ah… and a thicker f- fire wall, Virgil. Safety before c- comfort, every time."
He'd never yet won an argument with Brains, and apparently wasn't going to score his first victory tonight. In fact, there was probably an abstract painting or atonal overture in there, somewhere. Something like: Rage of the Artist's Soul Against Icy Genius… Yeah. Definite possibilities.
Another quick button-press and Thunderbird 2 released her pod, rising as regally as a Maharaja's caparisoned elephant. Virgil listened closely, gauging his Bird's status from the clean hum of hydraulic legs and the sharp clash of ratcheting locks. Glitching LOIS or not, she sounded pretty good; maybe Brains knew what he was talking about.
A green light flashed up on Firefly's instrument panel. The cargolifter had cleared the pod, readying phase two. Virgil nodded to himself.
"Okay," he said aloud, keying open the pod door. "Showtime."
As the ramp thudded open before them, admitting cold desert air and whirling police lights, he added,
"Sure hope it's a quick one."