"Babe, I'm fine, you can take a break."
"I'm not going anywhere." John settled himself more deeply in his chair, his arms crossing stubbornly. It was a look that his wife had grown very familiar with over the course of their relationship but honestly, she'd seen it more times in the last ten days than she had in four years. He was merciless in deploying it and frankly, she was getting sick of it.
"No, I know you aren't, and that's the problem."
"What is? Do you want me to go? Am I not allowed to stay by my injured wife's side?" His tone said he was beyond insulted by her comment.
"Well, obviously you can," she soothed, trying to keep her voice soft but firm. "But not every minute of every day. Right now, much as I love you, you're kinda pissing me off a bit."
John glared at his darling wife, who was at that moment lounging in her hospital bed, propped up by a mound of pillows, looking very much like the queen that she was. A queen that was eyeing him like he was a particularly annoying peasant trying to get her attention when she wanted nothing more than to be left alone.
"Well, you are! You're driving me, not to mention the nurses, nuts." If he could be stubborn, then so could she.
"It's not my fault that their system is so antiquated that EOS broke it," he sniffed, but he did have the good grace to look just a tad guilty.
"I'm not talking about EOS, though that didn't help, I'm talking about the fact that you are roaming around here like a fart in a thunderstorm, getting nowhere fast. You're bored out of your brain."
"I'm not, I'm fine." He wasn't even touching the fart comment.
Selene sighed, reaching for his hand, waggling her fingers demandingly until he gave in and dropped his hand into hers with a defeated sigh.
"Baby, I get it, I do, this scared the shit out of you. I'd be exactly the same, I wouldn't want to leave you either. But it's been two weeks, I'll be allowed home tomorrow or the next day. Nothing is going to happen to me if you go back to work for a few hours."
"I don't want to, I'll go back when you're home," he argued, his fingers squeezing lightly to emphasise his point.
She squeezed his right back. "You forget that I know you, and I know what you're like. You need to work, you need to keep your brain occupied, if you don't you get grumpy and bored. Babe, there's nothing you can do here and honestly, I don't mind if you take off for a while. You need to relax a bit, take your mind off things and have a bit of alone time. Please, for me, just for a few hours, it'll do you good."
"I'm not going to leave you." How many times did he have to say it? He wasn't taking his eyes off her until she was safe on their very protected and private island, and even then it would be debatable if he ever let her off the damn thing again.
"Everyone else has gone back to work." She smiled softly, tugging on his hand until she got it close enough to drop a kiss on his knuckles. "The world won't look after itself, it needs its eye in the sky. People need to know that when they send out a desperate call for help, no matter how hopeless it seems, someone will hear them. Babe, the world needs you, and I think you need it too."
John stayed silent, his eyes searching her face. Was she being truthful? He'd never known her to lie to him outright about anything of any importance. Sure, the odd item would mysteriously appear in his room that she swore she hadn't purchased, and she might insist that she hadn't started an argument, but none of that was of any importance.
He took a moment to think over what she had said, trying to see things from her point of view. He knew when he had been taken ill and she hadn't left his side that he'd pushed her to get back to work, to do some remote readings and to go for a walk around the island so she could reconnect with the nature around them as she had needed to. He'd seen that she was getting restless and stressed by the situation. Was he doing the same? He didn't think that he was, but then his focus had been solely on her for so long he wasn't even sure he could pay attention to his own needs. She knew him better than anyone, if she thought he needed a break it would probably be beneficial to listen.
Finally, he nodded, letting out the breath he had been holding. "You truly wouldn't mind if I head up for a while?"
"No, I really wouldn't. Go." She pushed him gently with her good hand. "Get off the planet, go do your job. I'm not going anywhere, I'll be right here when you get back. Or, better yet, you stay there, get some real rest for once and come back for me tomorrow."
"I couldn't do that," he argued, looking like he was changing his mind all over again.
"Yes, you can. All I'm going to do is catch up on my reading and enjoy my last day of peace before I'm back in the middle of your crazy family, peace which you're still intruding on. Now go away."
"Why are they my family when they are annoying you?" he joked, the tension he had been carrying the past few days easing a little now that he had been cleared to leave. She was right, he had missed working. He'd missed his craft, he'd missed his stars and he'd missed feeling like he had a purpose. Here he was often in the way, bugging Selene with constant demands to know if she needed anything or asking how she was feeling. He felt useless, like there was nothing he could do to help her, a feeling that he was not used to. But mostly, he needed EOS. Over the two weeks since Selene's accident, he'd had plenty of time to think things over, to question each and every aspect of the crash. And some things just weren't adding up. He was positively itching to get back up to Five, where he would have the peace and resources he needed to begin a proper investigation. Someone, somewhere, somehow, was responsible for his wife's injuries, and he wouldn't stop until he found out.
"Because that's how it works. They are mine when they are behaving, yours when they aren't, it's the same with pets and kids," she paused, her smile freezing in place, then wilting away when she realised what she had said. It was something they often said to each other, a joking argument they had had many times before, but now it hit differently, now that last line was a bit too close to home. She cleared her throat, visibly pulling herself together, refusing to let the negative thoughts take up permanent residence in her mind. "Go on," she said again, forcing her smile back into place, "get going."
"I'll be back later tonight," John promised, taking his cue from her and ignoring her slip of the tongue as if it had never happened. He got to his feet, bending over to steal a kiss when she tipped her head back in silent demand. "Behave while I'm gone."
"Like I could do anything else."
John declined to comment, waving a goodbye as he made his way to the rooftop helipad where EOS would be dropping the elevator.
-x-
"Welcome back, John."
"Thank you, EOS, it's good to be back." And it was. The moment he had stepped through the airlock into the quiet calm of his space station he had felt a sense of peace that he hadn't felt in weeks. He hadn't realised just how wound up and anxious he had been feeling until Selene had forced him to. He'd thought that it was better for him to remain on earth with her so that he could know everything that was going on first-hand, wanting to be there if anything went wrong or if she needed him. But in reality, he knew that he'd been completely overwhelmed. He'd been so concerned with Selene's welfare that he had completely ignored his own. He hadn't cared that he hadn't properly processed anything that had happened. Sure, he'd spoken to his dad about it, and to her when she had been awake to do so, but there was still so much that was troubling him. He was just glad that she had recognised his need for space, both emotionally and literally, and forced him to go.
He settled on one of the fold down chairs that ran on tracks the length of the gravity ring, taking a moment to breathe, to be. He looked down, through the reinforced glass of the ring and down, down through the blackness of space to the slowly revolving earth below. He exhaled in a slow, deliberate stream of air, letting out the breath he hadn't realised he had been holding. With that exhalation, he felt a little more of the tension drain away from his body, felt his shoulders unstick themselves from around his ears, felt his ridged spine soften and curve. That felt so good. To let go knowing that his wife was in good hands and that, in just over twenty-four hours she would be back at home with them.
How he wished he could have kept her there forever, tucked away safely where she could never come to harm. But he knew, logically, that she would hate it, that she would feel like a prisoner in her own home, that she would accuse him of treating her like a delicate flower that couldn't take care of herself. But bearing the brunt of her wrath would have been a picnic compared to the horror he had gone through the last two weeks. There had been moments when he hadn't known if she would live or die, and that uncertainty still haunted him whenever he closed his eyes. He only slept when he couldn't keep his eyes open any longer, and when he did he was plagued with dreams of a life without her in it. He'd wake and cross to her bedside, making sure that she was indeed still there and breathing, her heart still thumping steadily in her chest. Only then could he relax again.
What was troubling him the most, he realised now, was the fact that they had all thought she was safe. She and Alan had left the island for a simple weekend away, doing things that normal people did without a second thought. They hadn't been doing anything dangerous, not like any member of their family usually would, they had been just people doing what people did every single day. Yet, he supposed, that was the nature of life, he saw that more than most in his job, a large number of their calls were from people getting on with their everyday lives, their jobs, their hobbies, and suddenly they were in a life or death situation that they needed rescue from. He knew all of that, he knew that it could happen to anyone, so why did it still feel so wrong?
"EOS?" he called. "Could you please bring up everything you found about Selene and Alan's accident?" He didn't know why he had to look right then, but if being with a witch for four years had taught him anything it was to follow every single hunch you got.
"Of course," EOS answered, responding immediately. But the screen in front of him remained blank.
"EOS? Is there something wrong?"
"I don't know."
"Is there something wrong with your system?"
"No."
"The files?"
"No."
"Then what is it?"
"John," she paused for just a second too long, longer than she usually would before she spoke again. "I found some information."
"And that is?"
Again she was quiet for just a moment, but it was enough. "I don't believe the accident was an accident."
-x-
He'd read the information through in its entirety a total of four times, looking for something, anything, that would prove EOS, and indeed himself, to be wrong. There was nothing. He couldn't deny it any longer.
"It wasn't an accident."
"No, it wasn't."
The information, the facts, the whole situation was laid out before him, displayed on the usually comforting glare of his screens. It was all right there and he could kick himself for not realising it sooner.
EOS had done exactly as he had asked, she'd itemised the whole day, leaving out not one single detail, even down to what Selene and Alan had enjoyed for lunch and what they had ordered from the Chinese takeout for when they got home, a Chinese meal he had been planning on joining them for.
Everything showed to have been perfectly normal for them, up until the moment that a cab had ploughed into his wife's side of her car and almost killed her.
He closed his eyes for a moment, having to forcefully push away the thoughts, the images, that always formed in his mind the moment he allowed himself to acknowledge just what a close call she had had.
"Are you sure about this?" he asked quietly.
"Certain of it. As you requested, I tracked down every bit of information I could."
"The cab didn't contain a single part manufactured by Tracy Industries?"
"No, it did not."
The relief he felt was huge. He didn't know how he would have coped with the knowledge that something made by his family, right under their noses, had been used in such a way.
"And this piece of information is definitely accurate?" He pointed to the screen again, but he already knew the answer, even if he didn't want to.
"Yes, the cab was hacked and controlled remotely. I infiltrated the system that covers every cab in that fleet and, while the cab itself is now offline and therefore I was unable to access it directly, I did find the exact moment when it was taken over."
John's eyes returned to the screen, tracking over the next relevant piece of information. It was there, clear as day. It hadn't been a case of them being in the wrong place at the wrong time as he had so desperately hoped. That would have made sense, while this, this made none at all.
There had been no reason for the traffic jam that they had been stuck in, no physical one anyway. No roadworks going on, no car that had broken down and blocked a lane, no tree that had fallen across the road, no flash flood, nothing at all. Nothing, that was, apart from the signals above each lane.
Alan had reported that the signs had told them to slow and then eventually stop and that Selene, as well as every other driver, had simply obeyed them, as was the law. This adherence to the rules of the road had apparently caused the mile-long tailback that they had been stuck in.
EOS had obviously thought along the same lines that he was, because there, just under that entry in the itemised report of their movements that day, was the follow-up information. EOS had traced the signals, investigating when they had been activated and why. There was no reason from official channels that she could find. No requests from the council, no orders from the emergency services or the road agency. So she had gone off-grid, sinking her consciousness down into their systems just as she had with the cab company. There she had found the same signal. Someone had clearly hacked in from an outside source.
"So it was aimed straight at them," John whispered, unable to quite believe it. Someone, somewhere, had engineered the situation, the entire sequence of events so that his wife and his brother would be in that very position at that precise moment in time. Someone had knowingly, willfully, tried to kill them.
"Yes," EOS agreed, even though it hadn't been a question.
Anger boiled up inside him. Who the hell would do such a thing? Who would want to hurt either of them? Why would they want to? It just didn't compute. They had no enemies that any of them knew of. The Hood was still behind bars, locked away in the GDF's most secure facility, his electronic eye switched off by the Mechanic. His henchmen, known as the Chaos Crew, were in exactly the same state as he was.
Had he missed something? He considered it his job to look out for his family, to be aware of all potential threats and dangers before they got a chance to start. Sure, Kayo was there to do the same, but he was, as Selene had put it earlier, their eye in the sky. He was the one that was supposed to see all, hear all, know all. The fact that something like this had happened right under his nose, to his own wife, sickened him.
"How could I have missed this?" he asked out loud, though he wasn't expecting an answer. "I should have seen this coming."
"There was nothing to see."
He dragged his eyes away from the screen, giving EOS his full attention.
"I have checked and triple checked everything, and could not find a single thing that links this situation to anything that has happened before," EOS continued.
"I should have known, that's my wife, I should have protected her." He knew it was irrational, that there was simply no way it would have been possible for him to know that something like this would happen. Logically there was no foundation to his feelings, but he knew as well as anyone that feelings were very rarely rational or logical.
But he and Selene had a connection, one that went deeper than he could ever imagined possible. She always seemed to know when something wasn't right with him, and often with one of his brothers too. There had been a number of times that she had been watching their feeds along with his dad and grandma and she had shouted a warning moments before anything had even happened. Why couldn't he have done the same for her? A husband was supposed to protect his wife. If their connection was as strong as they believed it was, why hadn't he sensed something and stopped her going that day?
All he could think of was that his attention had been elsewhere. They had been out on a rescue when she had started driving home, a rather routine rescue, but one that had required his help to achieve, guiding Gordon and Virgil through as best he could. He'd not been worried in the slightest when her car had left its parking space at the convention hall and started moving steadily homewards. He'd replied to the text that Alan had sent of their dinner plans with a simple thumbs-up emoji and proceeded to keep a vague eye on their progress while Virgil and Gordon finished up and prepared to head home themselves. There had been nothing else for him to do, he'd had no concern for anyone's safety, everything was as it should be, and yet the worst had happened anyway.
He shook his head, trying to organise his thoughts, but something wasn't making sense. A nagging thought at the back of his mind that he couldn't put his finger on was jumping up and down trying to force him to take notice of it.
"EOS," he called, more from the need to talk than for her help. "Is there anything else that's struck you as odd about this situation?"
"No," she answered quickly. "I've checked everything and I could find nothing else."
"Yet they were clearly targeted by someone."
"It certainly looks that way."
"This wasn't just a random act, this was a carefully calculated incident. This move was plotted, organised, planned."
"I believe so."
"The question then, is why?" He paused for a moment. "Selene would say to start at the beginning, but we've already done that, and found nothing." His fingers tapped out a rhythm on his knee as his eyes scanned the document one more time. "We have to be missing something," he mused, "maybe we need to go back further?"
"Further?"
"Not just before the accident," he clarified, the thoughts solidifying into a solid theory. "If this was a targeted attack, then it might not be the only one."
"I'll look into it right away."
-x-
Three hours later John sat back in his chair with a sigh that was part relief and part frustration that they hadn't seen it before.
Before him on the screen was a small, but nonetheless damning, list of incidents that, on their own, would be nothing out of the ordinary, but together made for grim reading.
He touched his screen, bringing up their communications hub and selected the symbol of Thunderbird S.
Kayo was there instantly, her hologram floating beside his screen. He didn't bother with pleasantries, he had been up there long enough and, far from being the restful break Selene had insisted on, he was more wound up than ever.
"John? You're back in Five? Is everything OK?"
"Yes and no," he answered, his hand catching and moving her hologram, turning it so she could see the same screen he was looking at. "EOS and I have been doing some digging."
"Of course you have, you couldn't just leave it to me?"
"Would you?"
She was silent for a moment, then nodded her acceptance. "What have you found?"
"That this definitely wasn't an accident."
"You're sure?"
"Completely." He hurriedly explained how EOS had hacked into the systems and found the tampering. "We tried to trace the signal, but it's so well cloaked that we've not managed to crack it yet, but EOS is going to keep trying."
"So we don't know who this was?"
He shook his head. "Nor do we know why, although we do have a theory."
"I'm all ears." Kayo's face was carefully neutral, but John knew it was a facade that hid her true feelings. Kayo was their head of security, and she took her job very seriously. The thought of having missed something, something that had potentially put members of her family at risk, would not sit well with her.
"We traced back, looking for anything out of the ordinary," John started. "At first we focused on any time that we thought a member of the family had been targeted, but, other than the times with the Hood, the Mechanic, and the Chaos Crew, we could only find the one time."
"When Scott's jet pack malfunctioned," Kayo supplied, following their line of thought perfectly, just as he'd known she would.
"Exactly, but that was almost two years ago now, and nothing has happened since, so we initially dismissed it," John continued. "But then we had an idea and shifted our focus."
"What was the idea?" She crossed her arms and sat down, her hologram vanishing for a second before the comm feed caught up with her.
"What if Scott wasn't the target, but International Rescue was?"
Kayo opened her mouth to dispute it, but stopped, thinking over his words a little more carefully. "You mean that it wasn't him they were after, it could have been any of us?"
"Essentially, yes. You had focused all your investigations on people that had a connection to him or someone that might have some kind of grievance."
"And I didn't find anything." Kayo scowled, clearly still annoyed at her perceived failure.
"But maybe you were looking in the wrong place." He pointed to the screen again. "We traced back and have put together a list of possibilities. Alone they seem like everyday malfunctions and problems, but put together…" he trailed off, allowing her to fill in the blanks.
"Someone is targeting International Rescue," she concluded. "Why didn't you call me in on this before, especially if you suspected that Selene's crash was no accident?"
"We were going to," he assured her, "but I thought you were too busy with your investigations within Tracy Industries, but that thought turned out to be the breakthrough we needed."
"Explain."
"We remembered how the last few big rescues had been down to failures with parts manufactured by Tracy Industries, and that led us to wonder if the same could have applied to other rescues without us realising." He ran his finger down the list as he read it aloud. "A year and a half ago, just after our wedding, the Aurora Generator was switched back on but they had to switch it off again when the system immediately started load shedding. They couldn't figure out why, the whole thing should have been checked and rechecked. It turned out that the turbines were freezing, something that shouldn't have happened, they should have been tested to withstand ambient air temperatures in excess of -250 degrees Celsius, the coldest temperature ever recorded in their area of the arctic is -58. The turbine covers were made of space-grade materials, so should have done the job perfectly."
"Let me guess, they were from Tracy Industries," Kayo interrupted.
"Got it in one." He moved on to the next item on the list. "Fischler relaunched CIR.R.U.S, this was under the proviso that he liaised with the techs at Tracy Industries and with Brains himself, to ensure that the design was sound and fully complied with the GDF's safety guidelines. He used Tracy Industries parts-"
"And it barely got off the ground," Kayo interrupted, having seen the reports on the news. "Something about the heat valves that feed through the hydrogen for the balloons malfunctioning. It skimmed a few houses and knocked over a monument dedicated to the dead of the Global Conflict."
"Exactly right, if that balloon could have gotten up higher there could have been a major disaster." John moved on to the next. "We found out that a number of integral parts of the Icarus jet were also commissioned through Tracy Industries."
"And that malfunctioned too." Kayo nodded, seeing the pattern and not liking it in the slightest.
John continued to read from his list which included a few rescues they had been called out to and a number of ones that had been averted or dealt with by local authorities before they had been called.
"Couple these with Tycho's hypercar, the space cannon and the E.C.L.S.S on the Mars Colony, and I think you get the picture." He pulled her hologram back around to face him and settled back in his chair.
"Oh yeah, I see the picture alright. Someone has been plotting to take us down far longer than we ever imagined."
"And when we started fighting back with the press conference they had to up their game," John said grimly, his mouth set in a tight line. "But why this way? Scott I can understand, he's been the poster boy for International Rescue and Tracy Industries for years, but Selene? Why her?"
Kayo shot him a look that said she thought he was being particularly dense. "Isn't it obvious?"
"I don't know, is it?" He must be tired because his brain had nothing to give in answer to her question.
"You."
"Me?"
"From what you've discovered they work in much the same way you do, stealthily and under the cover of the web. Hard to track down and almost impossible to catch. If anyone can find them, it's you and EOS."
"I guess so."
"You're the one they need to take out of commission, but also the hardest to target. Spending most of your time off the planet makes you the safest of us all. So, how do they ensure that you'll be distracted and focused on anything but them?"
The realisation hit him like a ton of bricks, the truth staring him in the face.
"They pick on my wife."