Shields are right at thirty-percent, and he can take maybe three or four more hits before electrical interference starts to damage flight-critical systems—but Scott isn't about to mention this to his brother, in case it prompts John to do something incredibly stupid. Again.
In hindsight, he probably shouldn't have collared John into this job. He probably should've let John fly back to Tracy Island. He'd feel much, much better about this whole situation if John were managing it from afar instead of right in the middle of it, with his exosuit and his misplaced confidence and his highly, highly illegal weaponized EMF generator. Beyond that, if John weren't here, Scott could just push his engines to full throttle, leave the cluster of drones behind, and hightail it back to the island. If he leaves now, he risks the swarm scanning the skies and retargeting his brother, who won't be able to handle a dozen drones actively on the attack, no matter what he thinks. It's taking all of Scott's attention to keep himself flying, and he doesn't know how the hell they're going to get out of this mess.
In between everything else he's got to worry about, Scott manages to find a few spare moments to be furious about the fact that they're in this mess in the first place.
There's probably a lesson they should've learned by now about walking (flying/diving) into traps. They should all probably be taking steps to be more careful, to look at situations like this with a baseline of suspicion, prudence. It's terrifying and unfair to think that there's someone in the world who would use their profession against them; would turn their desire to save lives into a way to lure them into harm. In retrospect, so many aspects of the whole scenario seem like red flags, and they're exactly the sort of red flags that John usually looks out for.
But this is hardly the time for hindsight. Scott just has to hope that his brother is as good at thinking on the fly as he is at thinking on his feet. He's given John a solid half a minute to think, and he's about to bark over the open channel for his brother to give him some options, when he hears a faint huff of breath, a frustrated sigh. And then John says something Scott doesn't want to hear.
"…Scott, I really don't see a way out of this that doesn't require disabling that swarm. You're gonna need to bring them to me, or break off and let them find me themselves."
That's not happening. Another shot lands against his hull, the dampening shield flickers and his display drops it to twenty-six percent. "Negative. You shouldn't even be here—"
"You'd be dead if I wasn't. There weren't supposed to be two of us. We weren't supposed to be armed. Clearly you were expected to get aboard that cargo jet and get caught in the cockpit while it dive bombed, and then without you actively flying it, Thunderbird One was supposed to go down. It would've gone down. We can get out of this, but you have to work with me. I can do this."
There's irony in the fact that Scott had thought a rescue would be a good way to stop having a stupid argument with his brother. They're still arguing about whether John's a good enough pilot, only now the stakes have changed. Now the stakes may actually be life and death. And Scott shakes his head, though John can't see him. "Your shielding—"
"Will be in a better state than yours, in a minute here."
"Only takes one to kill you."
"There are twelve trying to kill you."
"I can—"
"You can't handle this alone!" John's voice cuts him off sharply, gains an edge of sternness it hasn't had before now, the same that Scott's been trying to use to bring his brother up short. Desperation bleeds over into the warning, as he continues, "This was a trap, meant to kill you and take down TB1. If you go down, they'll head for me anyway. You have to let me help, or—"
Scott doesn't hear the rest of it, or maybe the blinding flash of plasmic blue in the skies overhead cuts John off. A particularly well timed strike brings twenty-six percent down to a bare twenty. Alarms start to blare, bathing the interior of Scott's cockpit in bloody red emergency lighting.
And it just reinforces the fact that John's right.
Scott exhales, hard, and his hands tighten slightly on the controls. He accelerates, trailing the swarm along behind him, as he starts to prepare to bring his ship back around, towards his brother. The sweat on his palms is wicked away immediately by the fabric of his gloves, but the clammy, anxious feeling remains. "…Okay, John. Coming to you. Just tell me what you need me to do."
Basically, John needs his brother to thread a needle with his Thunderbird at about three hundred miles an hour.
"I need you to make a pass at your lowest possible speed, while I channel an EM field for you to fly through."
It's a little known fact about Thunderbird One—not that there are any widely known facts about Thunderbird One—that it's actually harder on its engines to go slow than it is to go fast. Of course, this references a scale at which "slow" is anything under Mach 1, and "fast" is sustained flight at Mach 20, fast enough to circumnavigate the globe in two hours flat. TB1 is, after all, designed to push that upper limit, not to linger at the lower border of what's achievable by commercial aircraft. If Scott goes too slow, his engines risk stalling. If Scott wants to leave TB1 hovering stationary in midair, he has to turn his engines off entirely, and rely on a suite of thrusters designed to keep the ship in the air.
There's an inverse relationship between the size of the field that John's EMF device can generate, versus its duration. It leaves them with two options. "I can give you a hundred meter field for three seconds, or a thirty meter field for ten. You'll burn the last of your shielding on the way through, but if they stay in formation on your tail, it'll take the swarm out with it."
There's math to be done here, but not the sort of math that's done with numbers. It's the sort of math that's done by feel, pure instinct. Scott doesn't need to do the math to know how close he can safely fly his ship, and he makes that call almost immediately, "Gotta be a hundred. I'm not flying within fifteen meters of you, the turbulence will be more than you can handle"
John's less worried about that than he is about the timing. Three seconds isn't much time. "It's not much of a window."
"Not your problem. You just open it when I tell you to. I'm coming back around, get ready."
"FAB."
So that's that, decided. They're doing it, and now John needs to get himself in position. He's just thankful that Scott trusts him enough to help.
Whether he realizes it or not, it's lucky he's had eight hours of practice. John hasn't had time since they first deployed from island airspace to switch out of thinking like he's flying, the muscle memory of the suit's controls remains fresh. He's thinking too hard and concentrating too closely on what needs to happen next to second-guess himself, as far as the positioning of his ailerons or whatever else. In the briefest possible moment of distraction, John remembers the cargo plane and glances earthward towards where he remembers seeing it last. It's still falling, trailing a corkscrew spiral of smoke downward towards the tops of the clouds below. It's only been a few minutes since this whole ordeal started. Less than a quarter of an hour ago, Scott was nagging him to get back in the air and back to training. Kayo's probably about seven minutes distant, but up here that may as well be an eternity. If John's learned anything today (and if he's honest, he's learned plenty), it's that time passes strangely in the sky.
And that the world is surreal, hovering at seventy thousand feet.
They're high enough that the curve of the Earth is apparent, and far below are the fleecy, undulating clouds of a mackerel sky, marred only by the helix of smoke from the back of the cargo jet. At this height, the divisions of the atmosphere are visible, the aura of sunlight throught the stratosphere like a halo around the Earth, stretching up into the darkness of the mesosphere, then the thermosphere beyond. It's strange and otherworldly, even by John's standards, and for living his life well outside the Earth's atmosphere, there's something about the presence of gravity that changes absolutely everything.
It seems obvious, in hindsight. He probably owes Scott an apology.
Later, though.
Static hisses in his ear, and then Scott's voice, firm and decisive, "Coming around for final approach now. Fire on my mark."
"FAB."
It's a simple plan, which are the best kind, in John's experience. He dials in the appropriate calibration for the EMF generator, and the pad of his thumb ghosts the trigger, waiting.
He doesn't have to wait long.
"Mark."
John immediately squeezes the trigger for the EMF generator, and the field radiates out from the source. He feels the peculiar, untranslatable sensation of his exosuit's extant shields, as they cancel it out. It's going to work, there's no reason it wouldn't. There's nothing in the skies against which he can gauge relative speed or distance, and time seems to slow as he watches TB1 on approach. Even at his lowest speed, Scott's moving fast enough that John feels him pass overhead rather than sees him, the disturbance of his passage enough to buffet him downward through the air, but not before he compensates with his thrusters, and stays level.
The swarm of drones has stayed tight to Scott's tail, exactly according to plan, and even as the three seconds pass and the EMF field peters out, John can see they're already falling, tumbling uselessly out of the sky around him; eight, nine, ten, eleven—the sudden spark of triumph ignites another giddy rush of adrenaline, and it's impossible to suppress a slightly hysterical laugh over the comm channel, at the closeness of the call, even as he turns in midair, watching his brother coming back around.
It's come off almost without a hitch.
But the hitch in question is one single drone, slightly different to the others, not a part of the AI hivemind. Configured for direct, remote control, and piloted by someone clever enough to have seen the shape of a trap, and to have known how to turn it back to his own advantage.
When the last mech comes careening out of the sky, John doesn't know what's hit him. But it tears an entire wing off his suit, and discharges the last of its energy into a bright, plasma blue bolt.
And like Scott said, it only takes one.