A/N: Apologies for the delay - twelve hourworking daysand three deadlines are not good for fitting in writing time!

Chapter 13 – The Unknown

"Scott? Alan? Answer me!" Jeff shouted over the comms link. "John, can you hear them? Can you see? What's going on?" He drummed his fingers on his desk as John turned away from him on the screen to consult his dials.

"I can't hear them Father. Their circuits are dead. They're not in visual range by a long way. Virgil's trying to contact them."

"Can he see them?" Jeff batted away Gordon, who had just run, full pelt into the room and was standing at his side, trying to get his attention, plucking at his sleeve urgently. Virgil's screen blipped on and he started to tell his father what he could see, still keeping one eye on his control panel,

"I can see the ship. It looks like there's a hole in one end, quite near where Scott and Alan were. It's broken off the line, but I don't know if that was an actual snap, or if it got cut by flying debris. I can't see them, but if they'd been blown off the ship, they'd be floating off out here somewhere and they're not. The ship is turning, but it's still in a stable orbit. Their comms circuits are definitely down. I'm going to fly in closer, I'm going up to the bridge. I'll call in again when I get there." The link shut and Jeff rubbed his hand rapidly over his face, he looked extremely pale.

"John, keep monitoring all circuits, I want to know anything that happens, keep trying them."

"FAB." Said John, quietly. He was as worried about his brothers as his father, but being able to make an effort to find them was helping. Jeff turned to Gordon,

"What is it? Can't you see what's just happened?" He snapped. Gordon took a step back, but kept his head,

"It's Ned. He's in Scott's room. It sounds…it sounds like he's broadcasting…like a report or something." Gordon was breathing hard now and stepped back again as Jeff leapt up from behind his desk.

"Damn him!" He shouted, and flung his hand down on a switch on his desk,

"Brains." He called, "Cloak the island, I don't want a single damn transmission to get off except what I'm sending from this room, understand?"

"Yes M-Mr T-Tracy." Brains replied, and hurried to obey.

"Gordon, go and use the emergency override on your brother's door and windows, code zero five nine. Jump to it."

"Yes Sir." Said Gordon, and ran back out of the room, a look of deepest concern on his face. Tin-Tin was still sitting on the couch in the corner, her hand over her mouth, shock oozing out of her. No. Surely Ned wouldn't do that. Not when they had trusted him, when he had been so understanding. Virgil's screen flipped back and Jeff threw himself back into his chair to hear the report, his heart racing, the hand on the desk shaking,

"Go ahead Virgil."

"I've taken a wide circle round the ship Father, I can't see them, but the hull is so mangled where it's blown out, that I can't be sure they're not in there somewhere. I'll go round again."

"What about the people in there?"

"I don't know. I haven't seen one body. I don't know what the internal structure is like. Have you got the information from the university yet?"

"No. Gordon could only get hold of the secretarial team. They're going to try to get hold of one of the professors who deal with it. They don't have the information we need on their files. They think there are six people on board, but that's it. Hopefully they'll get back to us quickly. But it's useless if we can't find out what's happened to Scott and Alan." The colour started to drain from his face again and he splayed his hands on the desk, applying pressure to regain control.

A tiny 'bleep' sounded in Scott's helmet, a soft tone against a gently hissing background. He tried to open his eyes, realised that they were already open, and then noticed the stars in the blackness. He had obviously been knocked out.

"Alan?" He asked, softly. No response. He moved his arm and caught his breath: it hurt plenty.

"Ahh, Scott calling Space Station, come in John." No response. "Scott calling Thunderbird Three, come in…Virgil." No response. He huffed into his mic, but there was no foldback on the personal comms system, and he couldn't tell if it was working or not. Given the circumstances, he decided it probably wasn't.

Moving his head painfully, Scott looked around for Alan. He spotted him, only a few yards away to his right, at the same time as he heard the 'bleep' again.

"Aww, no." He moaned to himself, and started to run the tip of his left middle finger around on the outside of his suit. There was a rip somewhere, he was losing pressure and air and he needed to find it really quickly. The sensor in the fingertip of his glove should locate it fairly easily, it was one of Brains' best inventions.

The sensor fed back a shrill, rising tone to his earpiece as he ran it up his right arm and he looked down, the pain in his arm was explained by the long rip down his sleeve. The self-healing layer was stopping him losing all pressure, but it couldn't seal completely on a gash that long and staring hard, he could see the tell-tale wisps of escaping air, crystallising as it hit freezing space. Scott reached down to his tool belt with his undamaged arm and pulled out the repair kit he carried. Running the gun-like device over the tear, he fired sheets of gummy fibres repeatedly over the gap until the bleep in his ear calmed down and then stopped. He looked at his dials: the air supply was down to about a third and pressure was low. That was probably what was making him feel light-headed. He waited and the pressure started to build again. As it came back to normal levels, Scott felt more lucid and turned to move towards Alan.

Alan was clipped to the edge of a spine under an overhang of gnarled metal, and with a jolt of shock, Scott realised that it was not the spine on which he had started off. Clearly the explosion would have blown him free of the ship and he was extremely fortunate to have been snagged by a jagged break on this other spine. Scott looked back at his own tether. It dangled freely in space. His boot was jammed in the junction at the base of two spines. That was all that held him to the ship. He closed his eyes again and swallowed a wave of nausea. Only a hair's breath had separated him and Alan from flying off into space. With all the debris he could now see in the far distance, it would have been hard for Thunderbird Three to pick them out. The smallest fragments were invisible and the larger ones were getting harder to see as the sped away. Scott calculated that he could only have been out for a short time, but that meant they would have left the ship at tremendous speed. Scott had been on plenty of space rescues with people floating free. He knew how it worked. If you were going at a gentle speed on your own, you'd be picked up. If you were going one hell of a lick in the middle of a cloud of debris, your chances were slim.

Scott yanked his boot free and went hand-over-hand to Alan. He ran his sensor over the suit: no damage. Good. He looked in through the visor. Alan was out cold, blood trickling down his forehead. The dials on his suit registered better levels than Scott's, and his life-signs were okay, but being out cold in space was dangerous and Scott didn't fancy towing him back to Thunderbird Three with one arm out of commission and no radio. He tried his short-range radio,

"Alan, can you hear me? This is Scott. Alan, wake up. Alan!" He shouted. No response. Either his radio wasn't working, or Alan was too far away to hear. Scott pressed his visor to Alan's, bawling his name through the scant connection of the opposing curves of the helmets,

"Alan! Wake up little bro. Wake up! Hey, squirt. Time for school Kiddo!" He tried, attempting to hit some primal centre in Alan's brain. Alan stayed resolutely unresponsive. Scott tapped hard on the suit next to Alan's chest panel. He had to wake him. He couldn't get to the sensitive part of the ribcage at the sternum where a good hard rap would often get a response when other methods failed. He thought for a moment and brought one hand round to each side of Alan's chest. Holding his ribcage, he started to squeeze. He'd be mighty unpopular if he broke anything, apart from endangering his brother's life, so he really hoped he'd wake before…

A movement inside the helmet caught Scott's eye and he stopped squeezing. He pressed his helmet back to Alan's and listened,

"Ow…stop i'" moaned Alan, his eyes still tightly shut, head rolling to one side.

"Alan, wake up. It's me, it's Scott. You're on a rescue, you need to wake up, you're in space. Open your eyes."

"Thr'open." Alan muttered.

" No, they're not. Alan, listen, wake up. Think. Open your eyes." At last Alan's eyelids flickered and one opened slowly, then the other. He found himself staring back into Scott's eyes, about four inches away from his, through the two helmet visors. He blinked, and Scott breathed a sigh of relief,

"Alan, is your radio working? Mine isn't, can you try to contact base?" He heard Alan try through the visor, but no sound came through his earpiece. Alan shook his head.

"What happened?"

"Not sure. Something exploded, but we're still on the ship, so I guess it was pretty local." Scott decided not to bother Alan's mind with information about just how close a shave it had been. "Knocked me out too, and I've done something to my arm, wrecked my sleeve so I'm low on air. I reckon we check out what happened, then I'll head back to Thunderbird Three if you're okay, get anything we need, change suits and update Virgil. Are you alright?"

"I think so. Head hurts, but I think it's just a knock. Let's go take at look at this ship. Hey, you said you wanted a rescue that wasn't in a storm for once!" Scott nodded ruefully.

They clambered back across the cluttered hull, to where a jagged hole, the size of a family car, showed where the explosion had taken place.

"Coming in?" Asked Alan, helmet to helmet again.

"I guess. I hope they're not worrying about us. I'd quite like to have seen Three before we went in, so they know we're okay, but I just can't see it, it must be round the other side, and there isn't time if I'm going to check this out and get back."

"Oh they'll be worrying alright. Wouldn't you be? Must be pretty bad on Ned hey? I mean, this is the first rescue he's known you're on that he hasn't been with you. It's pretty tough to be the one left at home."

"Don't, Alan. He might not even know. Dad wasn't going to just let him watch the rescue in the lounge. He's probably not even letting him know where we are. But I can't think about that now. We've got to concentrate, come on, get in there, those people have little enough chance as it is.

Alan slipped carefully through the hole, watching to see that he didn't snag his suit on the metal. Scott followed, and as he made it through, he saw Alan ahead of him in a large, wedge-shaped chamber. Alan had unclipped a scanner from his belt and was pointing it ahead of him, looking for life-signs. Scott caught him up and looked at the readings: nothing. He checked his air dials, another five minutes or so and he would have to go, regardless; he didn't know how long it would take him to get back to Thunderbird Three.

Looking around, it was not immediately clear what had happened to cause the damage, but then Scott started to see a pattern of indentations in the walls, radiating from a point in mid air that must have been nearest to the wrecked hull-plate. It looked like a device of some sort had been detonated in there, probably too small to do more than crack the hull at first, but the pressure difference must have weakened it progressively until the cracks gave way and it exploded, the fleeing air firing all evidence of the device off into space. Scott realised that Alan had stopped moving, though he still floated forwards under his initial momentum. He looked back into Alan's visor. He had blacked out again. Scott cursed and checked Alan's dials. His breathing was shallow, his pulse fast. Scott yelled at him again, squeezed him once more, but he wouldn't wake. The scanner still showed nothing, though they were near a hatch that should take them further into the ship. Scott grabbed Alan's arm and yelled: he had gone for him with his injured arm and the pain was unbelievable. His flashlight was failing, it must have been damaged in the blast, and he realised that Alan's hadn't been working at all. It was dark inside the ship, they were facing away from the Sun and the Earth and there was nothing to light it but the faint starlight outside. Biting his lip, Scott moved around Alan and got hold of him with his other arm. By pushing him ahead of him, he could keep his outline silhouetted against the faint glow of outside and manoeuvre him towards the hole, even when his light gave out completely and they were in darkness.

Jeff paced up and down the room, firing suggestions at the two moving portraits on the wall,

"Have you tried changing the frequencies you're checking Virgil?"

"Yes, all the time. There's nothing. Their radios must be down altogether."

"Can't you get Thunderbird Three back round to see what's happened?"

"I'm working on it. I couldn't move at first with all that debris around, and I wanted to keep scanning it to check they weren't part of it…"

"John, keep scanning that debris."

"FAB, Father."

"What's stopping you now Virgil?"

"Nothing Father, I'm just turning her round, I can't go too fast, I'm trying to line up properly to bring her in close without getting caught up in her. I just need a little more time, I'm not so used to flying her as Alan or Scott is."

"Could you swap with John? He's good in Three."

"Negative, it's too far. I might as well take the time here as there, at least I might see them here."

"Have you got the ship in visual range yet?"

"Oh she's in visual, always has been, it's just I had to come back round on such a wide circle to stay comfortably in this orbit, that I can't see the side they were working on. But they must have hung on during the explosion, and most of the ship still seems to be alright."

"But if their radios are down, they must have taken a pretty hard blow, get round to them now Virgil, we don't know what might have happened to them."

"FAB. Course set. I'm moving in now."

"Track him John."

"FAB."

There was a pause, an eternity of seconds, while Thunderbird Three made her cautious progress through space towards the Scorpion ship. Jeff paced more quickly, catching sight of Gordon, comforting Tin-Tin who was still in a state of shock.

"Gordon, get back onto that university. We have to know who's in there. I'm not messing around any more, they have to tell us. I can't contact my sons and they're not helping us."

"Yes Sir." Said Gordon, and headed back to the communications panel.

"As if having a lying, cheating, traitorous fool in our midst wasn't enough…" Tin-Tin sobbed in the corner,

"Oh, Mr Tracy…" For once, Jeff ignored her. He focused back on Virgil's screen, which was now showing Thunderbird Three's view of the other ship; and John's, which showed Five's scan-view of Three.

Scott pushed Alan out of the hole, muttering to himself, telling himself not to be so weak, willing Alan to wake up. Hanging onto Alan's ankle, he gave himself a jet burst that propelled them both out of the hole and back out into space. Checking his rapidly sinking air-levels, he clipped himself to Alan the only way he could, chest to chest on the main line-clips. This restricted his movement and view, and meant that he had to operate Alan's back jets instead of his own chest jets, but it was the only way he could work things with only one arm to spare. He had to get over the ship, find out in which direction Thunderbird Three lay. He touched a jet that pushed them up, off the ship, and bashed his arm hard on the edge of a spine as they went past. Pain obliterated all his other senses and they flew out into space as he fought to regain his vision and his awareness. Alan was a limp fabric bag pinned to his front and his apparently lifeless face was all Scott could see. Space was a peripheral nothing, hardly touching the edges of his sight and Thunderbird Three was not in it. He was panicking, he knew it. He summoned up all his training, but it wasn't there. His brother was in front of him, he had to get him back to the ship, back to safety. He was adrift in space. All was absolute silence save his rattling, gasping breathing. He was losing oxygen. That was it. The dials must be wrong, there was no air in here. It was getting hotter. He wanted to see his brother's eyes open just one more time, hear his voice…just like Ned's…Ned's…ah well…he wouldn't see him again now, he guessed. That hurt. That hurt…That hurt…That…didn't hurt any…more…any…more…Sorry…Ned…

Sorry…

…