"I know what decompression feels like. This isn't it."
"They found the real Captain Hansen a few minutes ago, tied up in a crew locker."
"Now where's the saboteur who sabotaged my sabotage?"
"Your timing is terrible. You'll lead the Hood right to me! ... ...Give me fifteen seconds and call back."
Beep, beep.
The Hood frowned. Fireflash's cargo hold did not make that noise.
A rival with a bomb on board? That would be a disaster. But why would it beep? Any idiot knew that bombs were silent - until they went off.
He approached the source. It was a communicator of some kind, on a wristband. Light blue; Tanusha's favourite colour.
Come to think of it, he'd seen a young woman with the right appearance in a light blue shirt in the cabin.
Tanusha's here.
Where?
He was so focused on the nearby cluster of crates that he didn't see the other crate coming.
Kayo breathed a sigh of relief. The Hood was out cold.
He's not going to wake up; and if he does, he's smart enough not to cripple the tin can he's stuck in.
She clambered out of the hold, en route to the flight deck to cut the flow of sleeping gas (she was getting a little light-headed already as the concentration in the plane skyrocketed).
The Hood was not out cold for long.
He was also deeply familiar with the frail sack of meat that was his physical presence in the world. The moment he awoke, he felt it screaming. Apparently humans weren't built to take two-hundred-kilogram cargo crates at running pace. Or possibly he just hadn't been working out enough before this mission. It was moot; he wasn't getting off this plane without a GDF 'escort'.
I've lost.
But they don't have to win...
After the longest two-meter crawl of his life he could reach his trusty shock baton, the perfect instrument of vengeance. He clawed himself up the wall, feeling like he weighed five thousand kilograms. All the while, the asset he'd most neglected - his body - made its displeasure known.
He reached the avionics panel, and swiped at it with the charged shock baton. Nothing happened.
He upped the charge to maximum and stabbed the panel. There was a satisfying electrical explosion.
Fix that, Tanusha.
He slumped to the floor, exhausted.
The shock baton slipped out of the wrecked avionics panel and fell towards his torso.
Oh bugger.
There was a terrible disturbance on the flight deck, as if dozens of circuit breakers suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. This, and the fuel leak alarm, drove Kayo back down to the hold - why are there so many bloody stairs on this plane - to examine the cause.
You're kidding me.
The avionics panel had given up the ghost - there was no way she could repair it - so her concern fell to her uncle.
Her heart nearly stopped in sympathy.
Not like this.
No pulse, no defibrillator (she considered using the shock baton, but it was drained), and no time for CPR.
Not like this!
She was going to have to leave her villainous uncle for dead.
It shouldn't hurt this much!
The Kayo who next spoke to Thunderbird One from the flight deck was a very different Kayo to the one who'd left it not ninety seconds prior.
"Kayo, are you all right?"
"We have bigger problems, Scott." Scott declined to press the issue as Kayo pressed on. "The Hood's sabotaged the plane. I've lost half the avionics and I'm leaking fuel. I need to set this thing down in the next, uh, seventy nautical miles."
"Thunderbird Five, check that?"
"Looking for airports now. ...Bad news, no active facilities with enough runway to land Fireflash. Widening search."
"John, please don't tell me I'll have to use a major road."
"Good news - you don't. There's a decommissioned spaceport in the Gobi Desert with enough runway. Bearing 148, fifty nautical miles away."
Forty-three nautical miles later
"Thunderbird One," Kayo sighed. "You're a sight for sore eyes."
"You can thank me later," Scott replied. "Let's get Fireflash on the ground first. Status update?"
"Nothing unexpected. No new problems. Other than the fuel quantity warning, which we expected."
"I'm going to perform a flyby to check for external damage."
"Find that fuel leak for me, would you?"
A tense twenty seconds of visual inspection followed.
"Can't find your fuel leak. How bad was it again?"
Kayo was somewhat taken aback. "Apocalyptic. Port side of the fuselage, about halfway along."
Thunderbird One directed the full power of its scanners and Scott's eyeballs at the area, and found precisely nothing. "I'm not seeing an exterior fuel leak at all. Thunderbird Five, please confirm from my telemetry?"
"Can confirm," came the voice from orbit. "You're not losing any fuel to the atmosphere."
"Which means it's all pooling in the plane..." Kayo's head swam with visions of Fireflash becoming Fireball.
"You'd better continue landing prep. I have the checklist."
"You're a lifesaver, Thunderbird Five."
"That's the least original compliment I've heard all year."
(Scott tried hard not to laugh.)
Kayo confirmed her control input. "Flaps at position four."
John scrolled the checklist down. "Deploy landing gear."
Kayo pulled the lever. Four seconds later, one green light indicated successful deployment of the nose gear. The main gear were not as cooperative. "Stand by, trying again." Same actions, same result. "This isn't good. Thunderbird Five, I have failure on both main gear."
"Say again, Fireflash?"
"I have failure on both main gear. I can't land like this."
"Not with that fuel situation you can't," interjected Thunderbird One, "the plane will explode!"
"Guys, now would be a really good time to tell me Thunderbird Two is on its way."
"Actually,", interjected Thunderbird Two, "we are. The Terrible Two are preparing pods to serve as replacement landing gear. We're four minutes out."
Relief blossomed in Kayo. "You're a lifesaver, Thunderbird Two."
"Sheesh, Kayo," interjected Thunderbird Five, "do you even know any other compliments?"
"Pods deployed!" Gordon's obnoxiously enthusiastic voice sounded from one of said pods. "We're ready for you, Kayo."
"I'm on the approach now."
Fireflash hurtled towards the runway of a decommissioned spaceport in the middle of nowhere, handling like a brick all the while.
"You're coming in way too hot," said Alan from the other pod. "Can't that thing go any slower?"
"Can't those things go any faster?" Kayo shot back.
"Actually, no, they can't," Gordon said, all obnoxious enthusiasm gone. "I'm pushing this thing too hard as it is."
"Well, keep pushing it. I'm still slowing down."
"Raise the pads," Virgil advised from Thunderbird Two. Alan and Gordon both commanded their pods to do so. "Alan, move two metres to your right." Alan carefully maneuvered his pod across the runway. "Gordon, you need to gain four metres on Alan." Gordon, whose pod had fallen behind, floored the accelerator to make up distance. "Easy... easy..."
"Flaring now," said Kayo, "brace for impact!"
Fireflash pitched up in place, slowed even further, seemed for one moment to hang unsupported in the air - and then slammed down on the pods replacing its main gear. The nose gear touched the ground an instant after.
"Brakes on, everyone! Remember, Fireflash, negative thrust reversers!"
Fireflash screeched to a halt with perhaps two hundred feet of runway to spare. Kayo's disappointed "that was not my best landing" was completely unechoed by all other participants, who filled the radio channel with whoops of joy.
Further celebration was preempted by a metallic noise.
"Uh," said Thunderbird Five, "what was that?"
"Pod Alpha reporting structural malfunction." Gordon sounded a bit stressed now. "Did we check the load capacity of the pods?"
Ten seconds and counting. Scott slammed Fireflash's forward port passenger door open and triggered his suit's PA speaker. "This is International Rescue. Everyone off the plane, now!"
Twenty seconds and counting. In the days of flimsy aluminium planes, it was recommended that an emergency evacuation, if called for, be completed within ninety seconds of the aircraft coming to a complete stop. This was not an arbitrary guideline; every second wasted in an evacuation was paid for in blood.
Thirty seconds and counting. Virgil, hanging by his harness, triggered another safety slide on the starboard side and directed Thunderbird Two to pull him back to the last one. Scott, having deployed all slides on the port side, was hustling still-half-asleep passengers out the doors as fast as he safely could. Both were driven by more than the ninety-second rule.
Forty seconds and counting. Kayo finished shutting down the flight deck and made haste to the cabin, carrying the still-unconscious copilot.
Fifty seconds and counting. Gordon and Alan were still in their pods. Not by choice, either. The massive weight of Fireflash forced the elevator pads down towards the pod cores, preventing either from opening the hatch to escape, and threatening to crush them entirely.
Sixty seconds and counting. John could only watch from orbit as the Terrible Two's lives hung in the balance. Kayo handed the copilot over to Virgil and ran for the hold.
Seventy seconds and counting. A respectable number of passengers were now off the plane. Having expected to be flying all the way to the east coast of Australia, they were confused to awaken on an airstrip in the middle of nowhere with International Rescue telling them to evacuate. With nothing else to go on, they trusted International Rescue. They saved lives.
Eighty seconds and counting. The evacuation was almost complete. Virgil maneuvered Thunderbird Two into position, preparing to lift it up to allow the pods to drive out. Said pods produced more noises of metallic protest.
Ninety seconds and counting. Kayo was the last person to exit the plane, carrying the Hood's corpse. Thunderbird Two hooked cables around Fireflash's rear section and lifted.
One hundred seconds and counting. Kaboom. The explosion cleaved Fireflash in two as a fireball engulfed the immediate vicinity. The lifted rear section, no longer properly supported, tilted on the grapple lines and smashed engines-first into the flame-covered pods.
As Scott applied extinguishing foam to patches of fire that threatened groups of dazed passengers, Virgil abandoned the fallen section of Fireflash and directed Thunderbird Two's full power towards the pods. Two grapple lines attached to each pod core and yanked it clear.
Pod Bravo pulled free immediately, and Virgil wasted no time blasting it with foam and then rappelling down to check on Alan.
Alan's head was gone.
When Fireflash's number four engine had impacted his pod, it had smashed the elevator pad into the pod core hard enough to shatter the suspension beneath it. Every part of the pod had given as much as it could, but the falling engine had demanded more, and the elevator pad had split, allowing the rear of the engine nacelle to shatter the windshield and hit Alan's skull in ways it wasn't meant to take.
As Virgil left his stomach contents on the runway, Scott leapt to action. Despite the best efforts of everyone involved, all the way down to several passengers who helped Scott dig through burning rubble, it was a further ten minutes before Pod Alpha was extracted. By then, there was no hope for Gordon. The elevator pad had unexpectedly held together, shielding him from the number one engine nacelle, but the weight behind it had instead piledriven the pad and core into the wheels. The front of the core had failed, utterly crushing Gordon's legs, leaving him with a best possible outcome of 'double amputation' - if teleported to the operating theatre the instant after impact. With the delay, he simply bled out.
The three surviving members of International Rescue on site policed a dead relative each (not that one wanted their relationship known) in silence until the GDF planes appeared on the horizon. It was as Colonel Casey shepherded the three into her command aircraft's empty cargo bay that Scott broke down first.
"Kayo, you did all you could. Everyone on Fireflash was counting on you, and you saved them."
Kayo stared back into Casey's eyes, not reassured in the slightest. "So were Alan and Gordon."
A/N:
1: I'm sorry, I just don't know where the gore came from. It pretty much wrote itself.
2: The first time I saw the beginning of that fight scene, I thought "Kaaaaayyyyyo, that kills people!" It's true, humans are surprisingly flimsy.
3: I've seen Up from the Depths part 1 (aired a couple of days ago in Australia). As of this update, this fic is still a whole season behind. I'll get there. Eventually.
4: I've seen Up from the Depths part 1. It would appear that the show's getting a little darker and edgier. Not that I have a problem with that... okay, fine, I feel a little threatened. It's this fic's territory!
EDIT 2017-01-12: Added the last two sentences. I was really peeved when I realised I forgot those. They were meant to be the figurative centrepiece of the chapter.