Author's Note: Me again - just to say a huge thank you to everyone who's reading along, and for favouriting/following. I hope you're enjoying - comments welcome!
Chapter Five
OTG
In the week since the commemoration, Taylor has largely reemerged from the seclusion into which he settles, and Jim is relieved to find him standing at the window in the Command Centre, looking out over the market. No one admits to it, but, equally, everyone knows that he does so out of a whole multitude of regrets over Alicia Washington. The only difference from last year is that it's taken him less time to come out of it.
"You have the list for me, Shannon?" he asks, all business.
"Guzman, Reilly, Dunham and Reynolds." Jim advises, "They're the best we've got - if anyone can get there, find something, and get back; they can."
"Your daughter'll love you for that."
Jim sighs, "I know - but he's too damn good to leave here just because he's Maddy's boyfriend. I can't wrap him up in a blanket and keep him out of danger so that she'll be happy. That's not what he signed on for, and he'd know why he's not going."
Taylor looks out of the window again, "Part of the risk of being a soldier." He admits, "And caring about one."
Jim nods, as Taylor turns back to him, "Bring them up for a briefing at fifteen hundred hours. I want them on their way at first light tomorrow. We've lost track of that damned bunch of soldiers, so it's not going to be easy to track 'em down. The Badlands are as big as they're brutal."
"And if they find them?"
"Then they come back and report - and we decide what to do based on that report. As long as those Phoenix soldiers are away from here, I don't care what they're doing. Malcolm wrecked that terminus good and hard, and there's no one in that group who can repair it. Even if they could, there's no way to get back to Hope Plaza. Given what you would've done to the place with that pyrosonic device, there'd be no way to repair their end to the point that anyone could get back - even after two years. If they've wasted all their resources trying, then they might not even still be alive."
"Isn't that a bit mercenary?" Jim asks.
"Maybe - but it makes our lives a hell of a lot easier if they're all dead." He shrugs, "But until we know, we can't be ready. It's time we did."
"Take your time out there." Taylor advises Guzman as they finish prepping the rhino, "You have six weeks to find 'em, track 'em and get back to report. If you can't find anything, then report that. We need to know where they are now, what they're doing and whether they're going to come back and hit us - or we need to know that they're not a threat."
Guzman nods, "They looked pretty secure last time we saw them."
"That was eighteen months ago - and then we lost track when they went too far out. If that still holds true, then that's what you report back."
"Believe me, Commander, we'll tell you what you need to know, not what we think you'll want to hear."
A few feet away, Maddy is standing very close to Mark, but at least she's got to an age now where she doesn't sulk over her father's decision to include him in the team. She might resent it, but she doesn't show it.
"Just be careful, okay?" she says, for the tenth time.
"We all will." Mark smiles at her, "We've all got people to come back to."
"I know – just…"
He quickly tilts her chin up with his hand and silences her renewed stream of instructions for his welfare with a kiss.
"Enough with the love-in, already," Reilly calls good-naturedly from the cab of the rhino, "We gotta ship out."
"Take care out there." Taylor adds, as Guzman joins Reilly in the cab, while Reynolds joins Dunham in the back with their supplies, "I need you to come back alive to report to me."
"We'll find 'em, Commander." Guzman assures, as Reilly fires up the engine, "If they're still there to be found."
"I wish." Taylor mutters, mostly to himself, as the gate is raised, and the rhino speeds out.
The scorpion skitters forward and bashes into the glass of the vivarium with astonishing force for something so small. Donning the gauntlets that protect him from the creature's deadly venom, Malcolm glares at it, "I know, I know. I don't enjoy it either. If you and yours weren't such feisty little sods, then we wouldn't be having to do this."
Watching from the other side of the door, Maddy shudders. Having tried other methods of extracting the venom, all of which had some drawback or other, having to do it the old fashioned way - extracting with a small syringe - has turned out to be the only means of ensuring sufficient samples to work with. It's not as though the creature is particularly intelligent - but it seems to have sufficient brain to be able to tell when Malcolm approaches its prison with a meal, or to grab it and stick a needle in its venom sac. Given how long he's been doing it, she supposes that the creature has merely learned the differences. That said, it's not clever enough to move away from the spot where he dangles in the forceps; instead it pushes against the glass closest to where he is standing, its nasty pedipalps snapping open and shut as its tail curls over it in preparation to strike - into just the right spot for him to grasp it from the small opening above. Given how much it fights once he has it, she knows that it doesn't do so in the spirit of cooperation.
"What would you do if it learned how to jump?" Maddy asks, as Malcolm emerges, having transferred the sample into a small glass ampoule.
"Most species of scorpion can't jump at all, Maddy." He advises, handing her the ampoule, "A few can, but I've never seen this one do it. Things would only get problematic if the front of the vivarium drops - but that catch is locked, and I'm the only one with the code to open it. It's the slot at the top or nothing."
"It really hates you." She says, looking back at the room, where the creature is still facing them.
"I don't blame it. How would you feel if someone kept coming in, grabbing you and sticking a needle in you?" He sighs, "I'll be as glad as anyone else to get it out of here. Mind you, I think I'll take it out to one of the outposts and release it there. I don't fancy having it come back to the compound in search of me."
Maddy laughs, "I don't think it's that intelligent. It's so busy trying to attack you that it hasn't worked out that it's putting itself right where it needs to for you to grab it."
"That's what I'm hoping." He reaches for his plex to send a message through to Elisabeth that he's finished messing with the scorpion, "How useful are those papers?"
"There are some ideas we can try, though I'm wondering if there's anything in that venom that we can combat. It all seems incredibly resistant to anything that might break it down. We might have to make do with something that just slows it down."
"Even that's better than nothing at the moment." He pauses and looks at her again, "How are you doing?"
Maddy reddens a little; she'd been hoping he hadn't noticed, "Okay at the moment. They've only been gone a couple of days."
"Guzman's very good at what he does. He'll keep them safe."
"Mark proposed to me before he went." Maddy adds.
Malcolm almost drops the plex, "He proposed? Do your parents know?"
She nods, "He asked Dad before he asked me."
Ever the gentleman, then. No wonder she's distracted. In an instant, however, Malcolm is rather lost for words, "I…er…I'll leave you to it then." He beats a rather hasty retreat.
Yseult stands outside the labs, fumbling with the samples of steel and trying to summon the nerve to enter. She hasn't approached Malcolm since that moment when their eyes locked, and the potential awkwardness of going in there and finding that he was caught by surprise and is rather embarrassed about it is holding her very firmly outside the doors.
She couldn't take her eyes off him when he was standing on the steps and reciting the sonnet; even the sound of his voice is attractive to her, and her biggest fear now, other than his not reciprocating, is that Mike is right and he actually is a jerk.
Her watch beeps the hour, and she realises that she can't dither any longer: he'll be expecting her. Squaring her shoulders, she reaches for the door.
His office is not exactly a closed space per se: more a glass partition with doorways either side that have no means of being closed. In the midst of the piles of samples, dead insects in perspex cases, reports and even books that adorn every available flat surface is a large table upon which sits his workstation. He is bent over something, a set of magnifiers resting on his nose, and when he looks up, his eyes suddenly appear at least three times too large for his face.
"Max! God, I'm sorry - I got completely wrapped up in this. I forgot the time." He snatches off the magnifiers and hastily starts trying to clear a space amidst the chaos, "Please come and sit down; it's been a bit mad in here today, I had to get more venom out of the scorpion, so…" he stops, realising that he's rambling. This is not a good start; not if he's attempting to appear a calm, collected and capable human being, at least.
"Thanks," Yseult seats herself on a chair that, only a moment ago, was home to a pile of insect specimens. She can't help but wonder if she will have to make space for something every time she wishes to sit down in the labs, though the fact that he is flapping as much as he is is very endearing. She forces herself to concentrate, "We've left the samples intact - I didn't want to risk making things difficult for you in the analysis."
"That's fine. If you want to come through, we can get started. I've cleared the spectrometer for the rest of the afternoon so we can do as many tests as we need to."
As she had assumed he would merely take the samples and dismiss her, the words 'we' and 'rest of the afternoon' give her sharp thrill in the pit of her stomach. He wants her to stay. She certainly wants to, as well, though she has no idea if his assumed invitation is thanks to simple courtesy on his part, or whether he genuinely wants her to be here.
The equipment that he proposes to use is immediately unfamiliar. While Yseult made use of mass spectroscopy while she had the chance at University, the machines available to her were considerably older and outdated; all available funds for research being redirected to trying to salvage what they could of the Earth's climate. The setup here is far more sophisticated, albeit slightly battered from two years of use with no access to fresh parts, and she has no idea how the machinery works. Much as she would like to give Malcolm the impression that she knows what he's doing, she can't, and she has no intention of making a complete fool of herself by trying.
"What smelting technique did you use for the smaller sample?" Malcolm asks, as he prepares a small piece for testing.
"I tried to replicate the traditional Japanese method - there are some old videos that show the use of a tatara furnace. The average temperatures were a bit difficult to monitor, because the whole thing was treated as a craft rather than a scientific process. Our best guess was that we were somewhere in the region of 1600 degrees or so. We used something akin to a backyard blast furnace for the bigger sample. There were some significant differences in the techniques, so it'll be interesting to see the carbon and phosphorus contents. Once we have a better idea, we can work on processing the steel to remove the rest of the impurities and…" she stops. Now she's rambling. Hopefully, he hasn't noticed.
The testing takes a fair portion of the afternoon, and the results seem promising, at least for their newer sample, "I can't keep using the tatara," Yseult admits, "It just eats charcoal, and we can't keep up with it. Short of finding a stack of coal that we can coke, it's charcoal or nothing at the moment, so we've got to make sure that we manage the woodland properly, or we'll just end up deforesting the surrounding areas."
She is examining the results on Malcolm's plex, and he watches her, trying hard not to look as though he's doing so. She might lack his depth of academic expertise, but she's keen, knowledgeable of her field, and willing to improvise to a degree that he's never needed to. Improvisation is not in his nature, and the requirement to adapt to changing circumstances is something to which he is still becoming accustomed - whereas she and her team have been improvising from the moment they arrived. With things as they are, maybe that makes them the better prepared for the world in which they now find themselves.
"These look very promising." She says, pulling him from his reverie rather sharply, "Could you send them through to me? I can go over these with Mike this evening."
"This evening?" Malcolm asks. God, is she working late, or is it a date with work attached? Is he her boyfriend, then? But she's a widow, isn't she? Damn and blast it…
"We're all going over to Boylan's." She explains, "It's been a long week, so it'll be nice to have something to celebrate. It looks like we're going in the right direction with our furnaces."
"Right. Well, enjoy the discussion." He hopes she can't hear the relief in his voice that there might not be a man in the picture after all.
"Thanks." She hopes he can't hear her disappointment that the afternoon is over.
"Two coffees, one white, one black." Skye says, setting the drinks down, "I'll bring your food over when it's ready."
Accepting the proffered thanks, she smiles and returns to the bar, "How are we doing?"
Josh looks up from his paperwork, "Good enough for Boylan to be eating his words. That coffee roaster that the Sustainable team built for us has really helped to keep up with demand. I guess he never saw how well we'd do without anything stronger."
"How's he doing on that?" she sits beside him.
"Not as well as he was boasting he would. He's tried to make some apple cider - but I don't know what it is with the apples, they must be the wrong type or something."
"That bad, huh?"
"You have no idea. He wants to go research it using the Eye - but Taylor won't let him: serious research only."
"And having no booze isn't serious?" Skye smiles.
"That depends if you're Boylan or not. Dad's enjoying not having to break up drunken fights."
"I'll bet." She looks up as a group approaches the bar, "Hey, Max. We don't see you down this end of the compound much."
Yseult smiles, "Not unless there's a good recital on. We just thought we'd have some coffee with our staff meeting. It's decided to rain stair rods out there, and there's only so much you can get done before the racket on an aluminium roof becomes too loud to shout over. Besides, Graham makes coffee that tastes like mud."
"Hey!" the offended party protests, good-naturedly, "that's Coffee flavoured mud, thanks very much."
"Take a seat, I'll bring the coffees over."
"Thanks, Skye." She directs her group to a corner where they pull up chairs.
"How are our charcoal stocks?"
"Okay for the moment, Max," Pete, her woodsman, advises, "I've got a stack of that oak seasoned and ready to go when you do the next burn - though I'd definitely incorporate a retort if you want to get a better yield."
She nods, "I've nearly finished forming the pipes for that - I just need to cannibalise a few more bits of spare iron if there's any lurking."
"I'll find something." Mike promises, "What are you going to do with that bloom - more testing with International Face of Khaki?"
"Be nice, Mike." Yseult chides.
Josh sets a tray with the coffees and a jug of soya milk on their table, "Do any of you guys know how to make apple cider?" He ventures.
"I thought you just fermented apple juice." Graham, the coffee-flavoured mud maker offers, cheerfully.
"Tried that - got vinegar." Josh grins.
"What varieties are you using?" Pete asks, with a knowledgeable air.
"No idea," Josh admits, "Boylan managed to get a stack of apples and crushed them into juice."
"That's the trouble with you new-world folk." Pete grins, cheerfully, "You have no idea what goes into a proper cider."
"Which you do?" Mike snorts.
"Herefordshire born and bred, mate. Cut me and I'll bleed the stuff."
"Fair enough," Yseult laughs, "We can just bend you over a vat and cut your throat."
Pete turns back to Josh, "Give us a bit of time to finish up here, and I'll come over and have a chat. It's a bit more rarified than just smashing apples."
Josh grins, "Thanks. You'll be Tom Boylan's best friend."
"And that's meant to be a reward?"
Malcolm reviews Maddy's assessment of her latest results, and frowns slightly: The results are showing some promise, but she seems to have missed the strongest indications of that; listing instead another failure. She is definitely becoming more distracted; normally she would have latched onto that hint of possible success.
"Maddy." He approaches her, where she is looking at some samples, yet apparently not actually seeing them.
She looks up, "Hmm?"
He hands her the plex, "Why don't you have another look at your results? I think you might have missed something."
"I have?" She looks rather startled, but accepts the proffered plex and re-reads, "Oh…"
"The peptides?"
"Oh, God yes. Sorry Malcolm, I must've missed that. I'll re-do this."
He could, if he wanted to, embark upon a lecture about the need to be focused, to not permit distractions to get in the way of interpretation of results. Perhaps, if she were not an intern whose fiancé is currently on a dangerous mission far from home, he would. Instead, however, he sits down beside her, "Take the afternoon off, Maddy. It's never a good idea to be distracted in a laboratory."
"I'm really sorry…" she thinks he's punishing her.
"It's okay - I'm not telling you off, and I'm not kicking you out of the labs. You look tired; and an afternoon off seems the best thing at the moment - you've been working at this straight almost since you first got here. It doesn't do any harm to have a break from it, you know."
"I'm not sure it'll help." She admits.
"Because of Mark?" It's not really a question. They both know why she's so distracted.
"I'm sorry." She says again, very quietly.
"For being human?" Malcolm asks, "I'm perfectly serious. Have the afternoon off - go and annoy your brother for free coffees or something. The labs won't collapse because you're not here. That only happens if I have any leave."
"You won't tell Mom, will you? She'll only worry."
"Fair enough - now get yourself out of here."
She smiles, altogether brighter, and departs. Shaking his head with a tolerant smile, he gets up, and nearly drops his plex when he sees Yseult standing in the doorway.
"That was nice of you." She smiles at him.
"Max - er, hi…how can I help you?" Malcolm stammers slightly, and reddens at how idiotic he must sound.
"I've brought some more bloom from yesterday's smelting." She says, "I just wanted to drop it off with you to run tests."
"Of course - do you want to come through? The spectrometer's free - we could do it now." He is quite convinced that she will hear a double entendre in that, and hurriedly rephrases, "I mean, test it now…"
Again, Yseult feels that startled thrill, "That would be great." His hasty correction has gone over her head, as her German sensibilities have never quite grasped that aspect of British humour, but she is more than happy to stay. It seems bonkers to be bonding over a mass spectrometer, but she'll grasp any opportunity to share his company that she can get.
An hour later, bent over the results, she can't help but be pleased; the quality of the bloom has improved, reducing the need for additional work quite considerably. As before, her only disappointment is that she has no excuse to stay for much longer, and she can't think of another reason either to hang around, or to come back another day. The only other project that requires cooperation with the science team at the moment is the domestication of the cotton - and that's Rob Stanley's job.
Beside her, Malcolm is watching her again; and trying his level best to hide it. He doesn't want her to go any more than she wants to leave - but he can no more think of a reason to keep her here than she can find one to stay. Just ask her out, you idiot. What's the worst that can happen?
Apart from refusal, embarrassment, awkwardness or humiliation, of course. It sounds so utterly mercenary - trying to date a widow. The words 'do you want go for a drink' hover at the back of his throat, but the ghostly presence of a dead husband keeps them there, and won't let them out.
"Do you have any spare iron lurking around here?" she asks, suddenly, catching him entirely by surprise.
"Iron?" he asks, rather dumbly.
"Sorry - yes, I'm forging a retort to use in our next charcoal burn; but I'm a bit short of raw materials, so I'm scavenging."
"Er…" he delves into his memory for some suggestion that might be of use, "I'm not sure that I have." Why didn't you suggest she come with you to have a look? You utter moron!
"Ah, well." She smiles, "I thought I'd check." Then she pauses, "Actually, would you be willing to test some of our seasoned wood and charcoal? It's a horribly wasteful process, and we're trying very hard to increase our yields. I'd also like to see if we can get something close to Japanese white charcoal without having to steam the wood."
"I'm sorry - steam the wood?" Malcolm asks, bemused.
"Yes - to remove the pyroligneous acid. If I can find a variety of tree that's not got a lot of it in the first place, that might help."
"I take it there's a reason to remove it?"
She nods, "White charcoal is famous - it produces no smoke or smell when it burns, and it's porous, so it does a great job filtering water and absorbing impurities. If we can get it right, it could replace the filters in people's air ducts."
"You think of everything."
"I try."
"In that case," he offers, "Bring some samples over and we can get testing."
"I'll do that." She smiles, and departs - radiantly unaware that her sense of jubilation at finding a reason come back is as great as his.
Taylor stands on the balcony overlooking the marketplace and watches, but doesn't see much. His team has been gone three weeks now - and he has no idea where they are, what they're doing, whether they've found anything or even if they're still alive. While radio silence was his tight stipulation, for their protection, his concern for their welfare, and his natural protectiveness, is screaming at him for being such a fool as to cut off any means of keeping tabs on Guzman's progress. That said, if they had encountered problems, he has no doubt that they would have called for help. Guzman is not one of those idiotic not-ask-for-help-because-it-looks-weak types.
He is surprised to see Elisabeth coming up the steps to join him, but makes room for her beside him at the balustrade.
"Any news?" she asks, more in hope than expectation.
"Nothing yet, Elisabeth." He advises her, "I ordered them to maintain radio silence while they were out there - unless they were facing a life threatening emergency and needed me to send the cavalry. I'm operating on the basis that no news is good news."
She nods, "Maddy's finding it very hard."
Taylor nods, sympathetically, "It's tough to love a soldier." I should know.
"Mark asked her to marry him before he left." She adds, quietly.
He turns to her, surprised, "Seriously?"
"Seriously. I'm not sure whether that was good or bad timing on his part. I suppose he wanted her to know that he was committed to her no matter what. She got very upset when she found out that he was part of this expedition."
"Who knows about this?"
"Jim, me, you and Malcolm."
"Malcolm?" Taylor looks surprised; he is, after all, hardly the closest friend of the family, despite the smoothed over ground between Elisabeth's ex-boyfriend and her husband.
"She told him - though I think it was more something she did without thinking rather than because he's her supervisor. Our past is entirely in 'water under the bridge' territory. Besides, haven't you noticed he's interested in Yseult?"
"He is?" Taylor may be highly watchful of the people over whom he presides - but some things go right under his radar, it seems.
"Very much so. It's quite sweet, actually. The pair of them are behaving like teenagers - he's too scared to ask her out, and she's too shy to push him into doing it. Or doing it herself, actually."
He rolls his eyes, a part of him wants to get down those stairs, find Malcolm and tell him to grow a pair and just get on with it. He made the same mistake with Wash, and look where that got him.
"If I hear anything before they get back, I'll speak to you or your husband." He says, quietly, "Mainly because, if I do, it means things have gone south. We want to hear nothing."
Elisabeth nods, "I'll bear that in mind."
