Disclaimer: I don't own Thunderbirds or Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons.
Scott's head collapsed into his hands the moment the call disconnected, fingers clenching his hair until his scalp sent signals of pain in protest.
Aliens had threatened to destroy International Rescue.
It sounded pretty ridiculous when phrased like that. Aliens were goofy things from pre-millennial cartoons with funky antennae, green skin, and heads shaped like upside-down eggs. They carried guns that shot fantastical lasers, and were stymied by humanity's perseverance until they gave up and left Earth alone – or befriended humans instead.
The Mysterons, from what little he knew of them, were something else entirely. Something harder to grasp, both physically and mentally. Harder to comprehend, harder to understand.
Cruel and opportunistic, too. Unafraid of collateral damage, and in fact actively seeking to send the planet into despair.
And their next move was to target International Rescue. To target his family.
Scott hoped what defences they had would be enough to protect them. Their location was secret enough that even the idea of the Mysterons knowing where to strike seemed a little far-fetched, but Scott wasn't about to dismiss the possibility entirely. The GDF didn't like Spectrum, as a rule, but they respected them and he'd overheard Dad and Colonel Casey discussing them when he was a teenager.
Any organisation the GDF respected was worth at least some of his attention, even if it was just long enough to form his own opinions on them. So far, they seemed like any other military organisation – self-centred, unwilling to compromise with what they viewed as 'civilian', and a little too interested in their location.
"Scott?"
John's voice had him raising his head out of his hands again, dragging him out of his thoughts to face the situation head-on. If there was one thing that was blatantly obvious, it was that Scott had to treat the threat as real and react accordingly.
"Have they started sending over the data yet?" he asked.
"I've received one file about the Mysterons so far," John answered, "but there's not much information in it."
Scott sighed, placing his palms flat on the surface of the desk in front of him and pushing himself sharply to his feet.
"They're holding information back so we have no choice but to let them in," he said. "Despite the fact that I asked for all of it." He huffed, back straightening as he looked directly at John's hologram. "Get all the information they have," he ordered. "Whatever it takes."
"F.A.B."
John blinked out of existence, the same way he always did, but something about the sudden loss of his holographic presence in the den had Scott's heartbeat suddenly accelerating. That was odd – it didn't normally do that, even if he never liked his brother vanishing. Then again, normally there wasn't a threat of destruction via aliens hanging over them.
Aliens.
Extra-terrestrials.
Martians.
Space inhabitants.
Scott froze, heart fluttering like a rabbit's.
"John!" he called, slamming on the call command to reconnect the signal. His brother answered immediately, forehead furrowed in obvious confusion.
"What is it, Scott?" he asked. "This isn't easy, you know."
He didn't, but that wasn't the point.
"I'm coming up," he said, to widening turquoise eyes. "I'm taking up Thunderbird Three and bringing you home. Once you've got all the information, make sure it's accessible from Tracy Island; we'll analyse it here."
"Scott…"
"You're the closest section of International Rescue in relation to Mars," Scott pointed out, fingers folding into trembling fists. "If they launch a straight forward attack, you're the one they'll hit. I can't let that happen, John. You're coming home."
For a moment, John didn't answer, instead clearly turning his attention to some data that had just appeared in front of him. From his position, the other side of the holograms and at the mercy of the cameras dictating what he could see, Scott had no idea what it entailed.
"John," he pressed, stalking over to the launch seats for Thunderbird Three. To say that Alan would be very upset at the rocket launching without him would be an understatement, but Scott wasn't about to let his youngest brother loose in orbit when there were malevolent aliens promising destruction.
"F.A.B.," came the surprising surrender. Scott had fully expected John to argue his case for remaining up on Five, but was relieved that he hadn't.
He couldn't lose John like he'd lost Dad.
He couldn't lose any of them.
"Kayo." He connected to his sister's personal comm as Thunderbird Three's seats sank down into the floor. She answered immediately, flickering into view just as his uniform settled over his clothes.
"Yes- Scott, where are you going?" she demanded, sharp amber eyes obviously taking in the IR blue that had replaced his civvies. "Is there a rescue?"
"Put Tracy Island on lockdown," he ordered, leaning back as his boots clicked into place. "I just received a warning that we're going to be attacked."
"What?" Kayo's eyes flew wide open for a moment before narrowing, all business as head of security. "Who, why, and where are you going?"
"I don't have the full information yet," he admitted. "John's digging up what he can, but the warning came from Spectrum."
She frowned, but her figure started moving. Scott assumed she was heading for their primary security measures. "The military organisation that deals with hostile extra-terrestrials?"
"That's them," Scott confirmed. "I'm bringing John home. He's currently getting all the information he can get out of Spectrum on the Mysterons so we can organise our defences."
He really hoped it wouldn't come to calling Spectrum to Tracy Island directly. Even giving them the general location of the South Pacific was more than he was comfortable doing – in the back of his mind, Dad repeated the strict mantra about secrecy and the devastation that any military organisation would wreak if they got hold of their technology.
But he meant what he'd told Colonel White, even if it meant disobeying Dad. Dad was his hero, yes, and the idea of going against anything he wanted felt wrong, but if there was one reason that had always trumped Dad's orders, it was protecting his siblings. This was a little more extreme than reminding bullies why his little brothers were off limits at school, but if giving Spectrum their location was what it took to keep his siblings safe, then he'd do it.
"Make sure you forward the information when John gets it," Kayo reminded, as though he needed it. "I'll put the island into lockdown once Thunderbird Three launches."
The loading arm was just depositing Scott into the cockpit as she said that, and he nodded. "F.A.B."
"Let me know when you're on the return approach so I can authorise Thunderbird Three's landing," she added.
"I will," he promised, reaching for the controls and beginning to flick through the pre-flights. "John, Kayo, I'm launching in T minus thirty seconds."
Both of their holograms appeared in the cockpit, transmitting from Thunderbird Three rather than his personal comm now that he was settled in the rocket.
"F.A.B.," they chorused, John clearly giving him the bare minimum of attention he could get away with as he presumably focused the rest of his considerable brainpower on obtaining all the information on the Mysterons, rather than the censored cut the military branch were trying to spoon feed them.
Sensors told him that the blast door for the silo had slammed shut, and he started the mental countdown from five to make sure everything was secure before igniting the rear thrusters. The sheer power that exuded from beneath him as the largest Thunderbird in the fleet roared defiantly up towards the atmosphere never failed to fill him with awe.
She wasn't his Thunderbird, and he would always be a pilot before he was an astronaut, but her acceleration always made his pulse thrum in excitement.
"Thunderbird Three is go," he announced as she left the round house in her dust. "Thunderbird Five, my ETA is eleven minutes."
"F.A.B.," came the almost distracted voice of his immediate brother. Scott didn't press; the faster John got the information downloaded, the faster he could get him home.
"Security Protocol Gamma activated," Kayo reported after a moment. "Tracy Island is officially locked down and on full alert."
Scott couldn't see their home from Thunderbird Three's cockpit – all the portal showed him was the ever-darkening sky as he rapidly gained altitude and prepared to punch through the Earth's various atmospheric layers – so he had no choice but to trust Kayo's word for the moment.
Not that that mattered when Kayo's word was highly trustworthy. If she said it was activated, then it was.
"Did you launch Thunderbird Three without me?" Alan appeared without a greeting, a pout gracing the thirteen year old's face as though Scott had just stolen his favourite toy and was refusing to let him have it back.
"This isn't a training flight," he told him. "You're not coming this time, Alan."
"There's a rescue?" The pout wavered as blue eyes lit up in a familiar look of excitement warring with a continuing sulk that he wasn't yet cleared to go out with them on rescues.
He wasn't getting cleared until he got rid of the childish eagerness to throw himself into danger. Scott ignored the little voice in the back of his head – the one that sometimes sounded like John, sometimes sounded like Virgil, and often sounded like both of them ganging up on him at once – that pointed out that he was still an adrenaline junkie at heart. He didn't let it show, so it didn't count.
If he told Alan no, then the sulking would begin anew. If he said yes, he'd be lying. Scott refused to lie to Alan about things like this, but he also didn't have time to pacify a teenage strop.
"Alan, I need you to take Grandma down to the security bunkers," he said instead. "I want both of you to stay in there unless Kayo, John or I tell you otherwise."
A face that had yet to lose all its preteen chubbiness frowned at him, openly puzzled. "Why?"
Another reason he wasn't clearing Alan for rescues yet.
"I'll explain later," he promised. "But right now, I need you to do what I tell you."
His youngest brother grumbled, holographic form shifting in a way that told Scott he was shuffling his weight side to side. "What's that got to do with you taking Thunderbird Three out without me?" he asked.
The urge to snap at him to do as he was told reared its ugly head in the flash of an eye, frustration at the teenage attitude mixing with the underlying terror for his family's safety to create a volatile combination.
Luckily, Scott had just enough of a lid on his temper when it came to Alan's pubescent attitude not to let it out. Yet.
"Alan, I will explain everything later, but right now, I need you and Grandma in that bunker. Now." The last word came out more of a snap than he'd intended, and he saw the hurt flicker through his brother's eyes, but thankfully it seemed to get the urgency through to the thirteen year old.
"F.A.B." It was a sulky acknowledgement, but it was an acknowledgement, and Alan knew better than to use IR jargon if he didn't mean it. His image disappeared, and Scott made a mental note to make it up to him later.
And there would be a later.
Usually when Scott docked to Thunderbird Five, John was waiting for him by the airlock. It was a running joke between them that John didn't trust Scott unsupervised inside his Thunderbird, although the unspoken reality was that as much as he liked his own space, John was always happy to see his brothers.
Today was one of the rare occasions when John wasn't standing by the airlock, quip ready on his tongue the moment Scott stepped through. That was normally a point of concern – the only times John didn't greet him in person were when he was ill, injured, or working himself into an early grave and needed forcibly stopping (that had happened once, and Scott was not eager to repeat any part of the experience). This time, Scott knew it was because John was throwing everything he had into hacking Spectrum for their data.
No time to spare with frivolous greetings.
Scott pushed himself through the stationary and therefore weightless gravity ring somewhat awkwardly – zero-g wasn't unknown to him, but unlike John, Alan, and even Gordon, he wasn't really at home in it – until he reached the comm centre.
Sure enough, John was in the centre of it, flitting around from hologram to hologram with streams of data surrounding him on all faces of the sphere. Scott had never seen so much data at once, and the stray question crossed his mind about if this was what John saw every rescue.
It was certainly more data than Scott could parse at once, that was for sure.
"What do you need me to do?" he asked, tentatively floating past a pile of files on what looked to be one of the Spectrum Captains to come to an awkward stop by his brother.
John didn't even pause to register his presence. "Supervise the download to Tracy Island," he ordered. "It's in the sector by the door."
The same sector Scott had just passed, and with an acknowledging, "F.A.B.," he pulled himself back over there to make sure the data was all moving properly. It was, admittedly, all he could reliably do unsupervised in amongst the current cyclone of data.
It also gave him a chance to read some of it as it flickered through, and while initially he was wondering why John had elected to obtain data on two of the Captains as well as the Mysterons, it quickly became apparent after skim-reading a couple of sentences as they flitted past.
That was both concerning and intriguing.
Scott wasn't sure how much of the data he was supervising came willingly from Spectrum or had been syphoned by John, but there certainly was a lot of it. Despite what he'd said to Colonel White, it would probably take them a little while to get through it all, even with John inevitably writing algorithms to speed up the process exponentially. He did know that even with Thunderbird Five's powerful computers and their lightning-fast download speeds, it took an hour from when he arrived before the data finished transferring to Tracy Island.
The comm centre looked very suddenly empty when the last of the files disappeared, leaving them floating in the middle of a large, panelled sphere.
"Grab anything you need," he ordered. John wilted slightly, imperceptible if not for the fact that he was Scott's little brother, and reluctantly propelled himself out of the sphere and back towards the gravity ring. Leaving his Thunderbird with no guarantee he'd have one to come back to was something Scott wouldn't wish on any of them, although for John it held an even heavier weight; Thunderbird Five was at least as much his home as Tracy Island was, and Scott knew he had personal, sentimental, items stashed away on board, too.
It was the reason he wasn't herding John straight into Thunderbird Three, despite the unknown imminence of a potential attack.
He waited for his brother by the airlock, not willing to board without him but also giving him the space to gather any essentials without being hovered over. Despite the emotional attachment his brother had to the station, he knew John wouldn't mess around or waste time; sure enough, less than two minutes after separating, John appeared with a small bag slung over his shoulder.
"Let's go," his brother said, barrelling past him and into the airlock without a backwards glance. Scott wondered if he thought he'd lose his composure if he did, but didn't mention it as he followed.
Normally when both of them were in Thunderbird Three, John took the helm as the senior astronaut. Scott never minded – it was no different to being the co-pilot or passenger in Thunderbirds Two and Four – and found himself brought up short when he entered the cockpit after John to see the ginger settling in the co-pilot seat.
"You're not piloting?" he asked, taking the open seat.
"I'll start looking through the data with Kayo," John replied, holograms flashing up in front of him. Scott caught sight of the two Spectrum Captains' faces in his periphery as he reached for the controls.
"Sounds good," he said. "Fill me in when we get back home."
John didn't say anything else, but the small noise that came out the back of his throat was more or less an affronted of course.
Kayo was waiting for them in the hangar when they returned, data streaming through her comm. She and John could have been twins with the way they were both fully absorbed in the holograms even as they walked.
"What have you two got so far?" Scott asked, gently shepherding the pair of them to the den and making sure neither of them – especially John – tripped over anything as they moved.
"The Mysterons are definitely dangerous," Kayo admitted. Scott nudged her to side-step around a slightly shaky panel of flooring Virgil had earmarked to replace once he got the chance. "But as long as they don't get into our defence system, we'll be secure."
"And how likely is that to happen?"
"Nothing physical is getting past our barriers," she said confidently. "As long as we don't let anyone in, there's nothing they can exploit."
"So calling Spectrum in would do more harm than good?"
"That's fifty-fifty," John interjected. "Letting them in would temporarily put a chink in our defences, but the payoff would be having their experience on hand to handle any attacks that come."
"When combined with the fact that letting Spectrum in would give them information about us that they could use later, I would say it tips away from favour," Kayo added.
Scott pulled John away from the corner of the wall he was headed for.
"Break it down for me," he said. "Any pattern in their previous threats?"
"They gain insider access by killing strategic personnel and replicating them perfectly," Kayo began. "Their retrometabolism allows them to replicate anything they've killed or destroyed flawlessly, but it's under their control."
"So if we don't let anyone in, that should stop that," Scott mused. "Anything else?"
"It's a psychological manoeuvre," John said. "If they fail, they don't try again. It seems that they do either a single attack, or give a time frame, and if they don't succeed, they concede the defeat rather than continuously attacking until they succeed."
"So which one are we?" Scott let John take the desk chair, with Kayo perching on the wood itself, while he stood next to them.
"A time frame," John told him. "Twenty-four hours from their declaration, which was a hundred and three minutes ago."
"So we've got twenty-two hours and thirty-seven minutes until we're in the clear," Scott mused. "Kayo, did Alan and Grandma go to the bunker like I said?"
"They're there," she confirmed.
"Virgil and Gordon?"
"Cooking up some equipment based on Spectrum's files with Brains," she grinned. "They've developed weapons and detectors, and Brains thinks he can get us something similar. Virgil's helping brainstorm and build, Gordon's testing."
Scott wondered what they'd thought about being told Mysterons wanted them dead, but that was a discussion for later – once they'd survived.
"Okay, good," he said. "I want Alan and Grandma in those bunkers until forty-eight hours have passed since the threat. We'll reassess the risk levels then. International Rescue is also grounded until at least then; I'll alert the GDF shortly. Once the guys in the lab have finished making the equipment, I'm sending Brains and Virgil into the bunker as well. You too, John."
"Virgil won't like that," John warned. Scott knew that, but Virgil also didn't have the mindset to attack and potentially kill anyone, even if they were already-dead Mysteron zombies.
"He doesn't have to," he said out loud. "He just has to be safe."
John made a noise of agreement. "And the three of you staying out?" he asked. "What about you?"
"We'll retreat if it gets too dangerous," Scott promised, "but I'm still not convinced they'll know where we are in the first place." The only people who knew where International Rescue were based who weren't part of the organisation were the top few in charge at Raoul, and he highly doubted that they'd sold them out to aliens.
There was no conceivable way that the Mysterons could know their location, although Scott couldn't quite shake the thought that the Mysterons themselves weren't fully conceivable.
"Make sur-"
A horrible, shrieking wail interrupted whatever John was intending to say, echoing through the villa. As one, the three of them clamped their hands over their ears as they turned to where a bright red light was flashing in the morse pattern for SOS.
It was John's portrait, the holographic interface lighting up like a crimson beacon in the same repeating pattern over and over again.
Scott had only seen it happen once before, and that had been when they'd tested the system to make sure it worked.
This wasn't a test.
In the desk chair, John – real, flesh and blood, John – was frozen. Kayo was the one to lunge for the comms, opening up the channel between Tracy Island and Thunderbird Five.
"Impact imminent, impact imminent. Predicted level of damage: extreme to annihilation. Evacuation of Thunderbird Five necessary. Contact in t minus five, t minus four, t minus three…"
Scott swallowed as the countdown rang out around them, tearing his eyes from the red flashing light to instead look at his brother. John was white. Scott suspected he wasn't much better. It was barely fifteen minutes since they'd left the space station.
"-t minus one, t minus ze-"
The sudden silence was at least as deafening as the alarm had been, if not more so.
For a moment, there was nothing. No-one moved, no-one breathed. Their world paused, suspended out of reality, and a silent heartbeat passed.
An almost-silent sob shattered it, and the harsh reality abruptly crashed over Scott.
Thunderbird Five had been destroyed.
I'd say I'm sorry, but I'm really not. Pure TAG this time; we'll get back to the Spectrum lot next chapter.
Thanks for reading!
Tsari