Thanks, Agent Five, Eternal Density and Tikatu!
Chapter 55: Ice Box
Pleistocene Park, Siberia, a deeply mired tour bus-
At one and the same time, TinTin ran along the tilted center aisle, and strengthened her link to Fermat. Both Alan and the young genius needed her help, and both situations were critical.
Scooping up her med-kit, TinTin hurried past seventeen coughing, groggy tourists. (Their bodies roused faster than their minds; all but the children recovering rapidly now that the wind had carried away most of that insidiously seeping gas.)
At the muddy front, TinTin found a bit of space to kneel beside Alan and the half-conscious driver.
Ordinarily, she'd have dealt first with the civilian victims, but her friend was clearly in greater need. He'd sustained a violent, glass-peppered skull fracture, and had yet to fully open his eyes or call out.
Cold air nibbled and probed; there, and at the other end of Lake Svetlana. TinTin reached into her med-kit, and searched anew for Fermat.
'The bombe,' she queried the younger boy, 'are you able to defuse her, if I can provide the… the wireless channel to you?'
TinTin made sure not to move Alan's head, beyond very gently easing it back into the neutral, midline position. He was so badly hurt…! Behind her, someone's baby had started crying. Overhead, a circling heli-jet bawled commands and searched for a place to land. In her tired mind, Fermat whispered back,
"Yes, TinTin. If you… c-could guide me in- inside… the bomb's hardware, I believe I… c-could shut it down."
Once again, the young boy refrained from asking how she was able to speak with him this way, when at least two miles of iced-over lake and freezing mud separated them.
TinTin cleared a spot on Alan's neck, wiping it clean with stinging disinfectant before applying one of her precious trauma patches. The right side of his poor head was a bloodied mess, and he breathed hardly at all. His sky-blue eyes were nearly shut, but the swollen lids failed to conceal a left pupil that was very much larger than its mate.
The heli-jet landed, stirring up so much snow and shrieking wind that her makeshift hospital might have stood upon an ice flow in the midst of the Drake Passage. Nevertheless, TinTin soldiered on, magicking concentration out of exhaustion and dread. It hadn't returned, the cyborg, and she began to feel hope that it was entirely gone.
So much to do… TinTin reached along the mass illusion that was space and, guided by Fermat's perceptions, drifted 'into' the bomb. There were wires, sensors and computer chips there; each substance and structure having its own peculiar feel. Not of color, texture or temperature. Instead, what her mind sensed was a sort of jumbled size, position, density and power level. The separate bits and their connections vibrated in the hollow of her mental grasp like a dragonfly she'd snatched from the air. It was a wondrous thing to behold, especially with Fermat as interpreter.
He moved within her scaffolding thoughts like a child in a playground climbing-frame. Just as he had when given access to the cyborg's internals, Fermat felt around, trying to understand what he 'saw'.
Much as a perfectly ordinary object… a pocket calculator, say… might elude comprehension if felt in the dark with gloved hands, the bomb's inner workings seemed odd now to Fermat. It took a moment for the boy to regain his bearings; to figure out what he was 'seeing'.
(It added not one bit to Fermat's clarity of purpose that he and Dr. Aginbroad were hanging from a bare tree, as tightly secured as a spider's next meal.)
Once he'd adjusted, though, and the fumbled-over shapes matched a few memorized circuit diagrams, Fermat hit upon a plan. Never mind the explosive itself, attack its triggers. While TinTin, in some part of his perception, was rushing to the back of the bus again, greeting a heavily-armed Russian Army captain, Fermat cut off the explosive belt's motion and sound sensors. Then he directed a bit of TinTin's power to disconnect the battery. Thus…
…No signal, no charge and (hopefully) no 'Boom'.
Meanwhile, TinTin was trying to speak with the young captain, but having very little success. Fermat blushed at her quiet assessment of the strapping fellow, and had not much to offer in the way of help. His own command of Russian ended with da, nyet, spasibo, tovarisch and dosvidanya.
So, he tested his handiwork instead, leaving TinTin and her Slavic Adonis in peace. (But on future missions, he definitely recommended bringing along some translation software.) Clearing his throat a bit, the boy said aloud,
"D-Dr. Aginbroad? Are y-you… all right, S- Sir?"
Nothing exploded, though for an instant Fermat's eyes screwed shut and his abdominal muscles clenched so hard that the explosive belt nearly slipped off. A weak and bewildered voice from another side of the tree said…
"Young man… is that you? How…? What became of our transport?"
Fermat's face was too numb and swollen to manage much of a smile, but he tried, anyway.
"Y- Yes, Sir. It's… m-me. The hover sled is… I th- think, destroyed. B-But m-my friend has… d-driven off our attacker and… w-we're still alive, Sir."
Unlike poor Dr. Andropov, who both of them suddenly remembered.
"My young friend," said Dr. Aginbroad, a quiet moment or two later, "let us descend, flag down some help, and corral Sergei's mammoth herd before the Army decides to carve steaks. Least we can do, for a respected colleague…"
Fermat nodded in the face of biting wind and toothy cold. 'Respected colleague' made him think of his mother, for she sometimes called him that. All of a sudden, the boy felt extremely ten years old. He shivered, partly from hypothermia, partly from needing his own respected colleagues.
"Y- Yes, Sir. They'll… be safely brought in. Th-that's what… International Rescue came here to e-ensure, and w- we won't leave until th-the… job is completed, Sir."
There followed a few rustling sounds… Dr. Aginbroad pulling himself free, perhaps… and a quiet reply.
"You have our thanks, young man; my own, and, as I'm sure he'd add if he were able, Sergei's."
Together, Fermat Hackenbacker and Dr. Larry Aginbroad worked loose of their bonds, then climbed down from their gnarled and barren tree.
As for TinTin, the girl's stammering confusion in the face of military bearing (with a square jaw and bright blue eyes, no less) led her to try something even more desperate. She attempted to reach John Tracy.
'There is no distance…' she told herself, and almost had something. The briefest strange contact,silent and disorienting. The 'image' was multiple, as though in reaching so widely she'd gotten not one John, but many. Also, like the tiny figures in an Escher print, he seemed to be moving… oddly; as though striding head-downward along the underside of a long and twisted staircase.
He (all of him) seemed briefly to notice her. Then the phantom contact vanished, leaving TinTin with a faint, pained apology, and a few more words of Russian. Leaving her, too, knee-deep in snow with Kapitan Konstantin Zaitsev, who drew her aside as his team began evacuating victims from the frigid bus.
"This mekhanizm-chevlovek," he asked her, "Sama ty pugata'…Alone youscare it?" A warm smile touched the handsome young captain's face, then. "Devushka, You… ochen' krabryjja are… very brave girl."
A second shock wave occurred then, this one because he'd impulsively reached out to pat her arm. The startled captain produced an imaginatively colored, 'three-decker remark', colliding briefly with TinTin. Snow jumped and articles quivered in a ring that expanded away from the girl at the speed of a sudden, hot blush. Love hurts.