Eos was getting desperate.
Virgil's vital systems were beginning to fail. John's vital systems, his voice, his everything was growing more and more frantic to find a solution to the obstacles preventing them from retrieving their brother.
The youngest was doing his best to connect up the generator to prevent the hospital from losing function when the power was cut, but the systems had not been designed to support the alternative power source, integrating was a challenge, and time was growing short.
She found herself planning more and more improbable strategies in the hope of finding a solution.
One part of her consciousness was monitoring the single connection they had with the obviously injured engineer. Mrs Tracy was applying commendable medical procedure in trying to keep Virgil awake.
The Commander was a mass of motivated emotion and when he utilised the line to attempt to speak to his brother, she could hear the anguish in his voice.
It could be correlated with her own response three months ago when John launched with his exo-suit only to disappear aboard a freighter she could gain no access to.
His absence had hurt so much.
It had taken the youngest and a similarly angry commander to free her father.
Once Eos had access to the persons responsible, she had made it very clear that they should never do anything of the like again.
John didn't know about that and she had no plans to tell him.
She had done a similar investigation on the current irritant. She watched his arrogance towards both her father and the commander and had started pulling up information, digging through financials and following interest trails.
Such traits in a politician usually led to revealing facts.
The man was wealthy…and, as expected, likely corrupt. She found several instances of shady reporting, suspicious monetary movements and conflicting interests.
She pondered the information. There were several very permanent and career ending things she could do, but none of them would help her father get his brother out from under that building.
But it was leverage.
What the man needed was motivation.
She had studied what motivated humans. Initially she had wanted to know why John did not want to kill her. She was suspicious.
But then the subject needed to be expanded to what motivated his brothers, his entire family, International Rescue.
It was a lesson well learnt and a standard to gauge everyone else.
Very few lived up to it.
The continual cruelty of the Hood and his accomplices further informed her of motivations. How and why such a person might act.
A conversation with John had her examining her own motivations as well.
And she had to do that now, because there was a way to motivate this particular person into assisting rather than obstructing what International Rescue needed to do.
And it contravened the correct conduct of an International Rescue operative.
John would likely not approve.
But then, her father had been known to bend rules almost to breaking point in order to save people.
This would be saving people. Important people.
Her father's brother. The kind one who always asked after her in his nightly conversations with John.
And no one would need to know.
The town below was patchworked with blackout due to the building collapse – a building poorly funded by the irritant, no less. Some areas had no power, others were functioning well due to being on a different power network within the system.
But those systems weren't entirely isolated. There was no way to power the buildings that were blacked out, but it would only take a tweak of the settings at the nearest distribution centre to redirect the power surge towards the bank and possibly the industrial sector. She had access to the man's accounts and interests, but destroying them would not motivate, it would only punish.
She could do that later.
Now she needed to motivate.
And an incidental threat to the man's precious treasure trove should do the job.
Then it wouldn't just be Virgil's life on the line.
Decision made, she reached down to the planet below.
No one would ever know.
-o-o-o-