The corridors of black section were deserted, lit only by red emergency lighting augmented by flashing alarms. He'd planned to take a window out with his boomerang, but it hadn't been necessary. There probably wasn't an intact pane of glass left in the building. Even in the central corridor fragments crunched under his boots as he ran. But the ceilings were still in place here, and the plaster on the walls was uncracked. That meant - probably - that the structure was safe in this section of the building, at least.
Control was fully internal. No windows to break, and the screens appeared to be intact. Something to do with the pressure difference in an explosion? He'd let someone else figure that one out. Mark dropped into the senior controller's chair and typed in his emergency codes, keeping everything mentally crossed. And around him, systems came to life. Screens flickered, disks whirred. The lighting changed from red to white, and the radio crackled to life.
"... in, Control. Repeat, come in, please."
"Control here," he responded. "Garuda, status?"
There was a single relieved gasp. "Status green. Request instructions."
Mark mentally rolled his eyes, looking around him at rebooting systems. Not that the crew of Garuda would have any idea what had happened here, to be fair. "Let me speak to G-6."
There was a brief pause. "Chief?" Rick's deep voice was unmistakeable.
"Eagle. Talk to me - all our systems are down."
"Mission was a decoy and we've had no contact with ISO since we jumped away. We've taken out the mecha which was generating the forcefield from orbit, and local ISO forces report they've destroyed two Spectran troop transports which took off from ISO USA. I think the threat's over, for now at least."
Think or know? But Rick was the one with the working sensors, who knew what the heck was going on, who was, much as Mark hated it, Galaxy Security's senior active commander. He was also possibly the least likely person Mark knew to guess and hope that things were okay. If Rick said he thought the immediate Spectran threat was over, that meant he was near a hundred percent certain.
He prodded the controls hopefully. Everything appeared to be working correctly, and the last thing they needed right now was Garuda sitting on the runway for all to see.
"Come on home. Cautiously. I think the sea doors are open, but I have limited confirmation." That would be somewhere on the consoles in front of him, which he had no idea how to use. His training was purely for emergencies like this, and limited to the main controller's role.
"Acknowledged." The connection went dead, and Mark tried to remember how all the other systems here worked. The intercom down to the hangar levels, for instance. Jason had said there were people down there; they should know that Garuda was coming in, and if they could deal with the rest of the docking procedure it would be far smoother than his shaky memories of how to initiate processes which normally he sat and experienced passively.
He finally navigated his way through comm menus to the relevant sub-level, and was feeling reassured by the relaxed reaction of the maintenance chief down there (sure, they'd got power back, they could get Garuda docked and shut down no problem), as Anderson came in. He headed to the logistics console and started flipping switches.
"Do you want this console?" Mark asked as soon as the maintenance chief signed off.
Anderson shook his head. "You stay there and handle Garuda." He was typing as he spoke, then talking into the comms unit, asking for damage reports, talking to other ISO installations worldwide and transferring every responsibility he could to them, recalling every operative who'd been away for the weekend, assigning cleanup teams to report to Ivanov, asking for information on casualties...
Casualties. Oh lord, Team Seven. Unarmed, inexperienced, and up against a squad of goons with machine guns, and he'd left them to handle it. He'd sent Jason in that direction to clear explosive charges, and now he was dealing with a medical emergency.
You had no choice, he told himself firmly. You're the strategist. You had to look at the bigger picture.
He kept the channel open, forcing himself to focus on the details of the docking procedure. All running smoothly, apparently. At least something was. And the main lighting was back on, and the screens in front of him were showing real data, and none of it was worrying.
"Confirm Garuda safely docked," came over the channel after a completely standard length of time. "Uh... Commander, any chance of a maintenance crew?"
"Stand by." He raised his voice. "Chief, Garuda's in and I'm being asked logistics questions I can't answer."
"I'll take it from here." Anderson stood up in a way which made it entirely clear that now he did want the big chair, and Mark hastily got out of his way.
In the corridor, things were looking a little better. The alarms had stopped shrieking. The lighting was back to normal here, too, though the orange alert lights of a team on mission were still... and they went off even as he noticed them. Garuda was back, and now there was a competent base controller in the chair the alerts would behave the way they should. Someone had swept up the glass fragments into little heaps, and at the far end of the corridor two of Grant's security team were clearing the heaps, too. From outside he could hear a whole lot of activity - multiple vehicles, many with sirens, and what sounded like a helicopter taking off from the lawns to the north. And Jason, detransmuted, approaching from the direction of the main black section entrance.
"I need to talk to you."
"Go ahead."
"In private." He headed towards their ready room without further explanation, and Mark followed him.
Nobody had started clearing up in here. One pane of window glass remained intact; the rest sparkled on the floor. The biggest screen had a crack from top to bottom. Spectra had never done damage this close to home before. Their ready room.
"Team Seven was hit hard in the first attack," Jason said the moment the door was shut. "There's no easy way to say this, Mark. Nykinnen's dead."
That's impossible. The world suddenly made no sense at all. "He... but it's Sunday. He's never here on a Sunday, even when we're the duty team, it's always Saturday. Why -"
He realised he was babbling. Stopped, with an effort. Could do nothing except stare at his second, whose face wore an expression of raw sympathy.
"Finding out exactly what happened wasn't a priority, but yes, he was there. Single shot to the head. It would have been quick."
Mark felt as though his brain was rebooting; very slowly, one process at a time. "Then he wasn't the medical emergency you were dealing with?"
"Nope. Nothing anyone could do for him, or four others. Dave O'Leary took a bullet to the spine and survived it somehow. No way he could be moved safely. I figured if I stayed with him, I could transmute as the forcefield came down and birdstyle would be at least some protection for both of us. Wasn't strictly necessary as things turned out - we must have disabled most of the local charges, a few ceiling tiles came down and the windows shattered - but I couldn't have left him there alone, he's badly hurt. You must have heard the chopper. He should be at Central Hospital by now. You want to chew me out for disobeying orders?"
"Oh, Jase." He could say nothing more. They'd both known Dave for a long time - Jason in particular; Dave was his fellow driver at ISO Racing. This was all far, far too close to home. This wasn't supposed to happen. ISO was supposed to be their sanctuary. They went out and put themselves in harm's way. It wasn't supposed to come to them. It really wasn't supposed to come to their friends.
No, he wasn't going to chew his second out for disobeying orders.
"You okay?" he asked instead.
"Not really." Jason sagged into the sofa, breathing nowhere near as steady as it should be, and Mark followed suit. Nykinnen was dead? Nykinnen, who'd been told to accept the senior members of G-Force as part of his training team and treat them just like everybody else, and had calmly done so? Nykinnen, who'd given Mark a desk job away from black section when that was what he'd asked for and needed, and let him rebuild his shattered confidence in his own time? Nykinnen, who he'd trusted without question, and who he'd known he could go to for help and would get it, no judgement, no queries?
He wanted to howl. More than that, he wanted the last few hours of his life back, so he could go through that door instead of locking it, get in the way of the bullet, do something, anything to change what had happened.
"We should go help," he said instead.
Jason glanced sideways at him. "We should stay out of the way, and be prepared for a second attack. Someone else can sweep glass."
There's something badly wrong when Jason's the one with the strategic view. Especially when he was right. Mark slowed his breathing, deliberately and steadily, closing his eyes and focusing. They'd been trained in methods for this, though he'd almost never needed to use them, not even in life-threatening situations and certainly never while sitting on the couch in the ready room. This was what they were for, though. Times when he caught himself losing the big picture, wanting to act rashly, behaving based on what he wanted to do rather than what he needed to do. Heart over head, the psych guys called it. Unless he had a this-is-wrong screaming premonition, it didn't work. Right now, no premonition at all. Just desperate regret. Nothing wrong with that, but it needed to be compartmentalised. The Eagle needed to be calm, and ready, and thinking clearly, and this technique allowed him to do that.
"You should transmute," he said.
Jason jumped - Mark rather suspected he'd been using the same almost-meditation techniques himself. "Huh?"
"If they try again - and that's what I'd do, if I had any attack capability left - then we're at least some use if we're in birdstyle when the power goes out."
"Where 'some use' means 'bulletproof' and not much else." But Jason pushed himself to his feet and transmuted, and then wandered over to the screens and flicked them on. They all lit up, even the cracked one.
"There's not as much damage as I expected," Mark said. "In here, especially. Everything seems to work. But that was one hell of an explosion, even though it wasn't as bad as it might have been."
"You haven't seen the front of the complex. It's a real mess. They never got near black section with the charges," Jason said. "Probably didn't guess it was black section. Would you think the ultra secure part of a base was the old building tucked away round the back?"
"If they even thought that hard about it. They must have known that the canteen wasn't high security, or the admin offices. Nearer the front exit, though. Safer. Closer to their transports. Less likely for them to get ambushed. Did you see any sign that they went up any of the stairwells? I didn't. They dumped their charges the first chance they got."
Jason shrugged. "So what you're saying is: goons are cowards? Yup, I'll buy that."
"Lucky for us. They -" He stopped at the tap on the door.
"Cleanup it is then," Jason commented, going to open it. "Oh. Hi, Rick."
The Kite, still transmuted, looked straight past him and caught Mark's eye. "So, no medical check, no debrief... I figured maybe you could tell me what the hell is going on?" His tone was light, but there was an edge in it which Mark didn't like at all.
They might gripe about debrief, but it was a ritual, something which always happened. It was when, as commander, he compartmentalised the decisions he'd made and handed them over. Not being debriefed right now wasn't particularly worrying him, but after his first mission in command - or any of his first twenty? He'd have been throwing up in the corner, desperate to discuss what had happened with someone and way too insecure to do so with any of his team-mates.
He stood up. "Get your team. Briefing room two, five minutes. Stay in birdstyle. I'll find Grant."
Rick nodded and was gone, and Jason frowned.
"Grant? Are you insane?"
"Anderson's way too busy. Ivanov's running the black section cleanup. Grant's probably sitting in his office feeling like crap and shouting at his security teams, but he'll be up to running a debrief. There's nobody else."
"There's you."
Mark would have laughed if Jason hadn't so obviously been perfectly serious. "Jase - I don't even know what their mission was!"
"Like that matters. Grant doing Rick's first debrief for a mission like this mess? He'll tear him to shreds."
"I don't think he'd -"
"Trust me on this one, Mark. Grant was in my first debrief and that's exactly what he did. If you won't debrief them, I will. You'll be a damn sight better at it."
G-Force's first mission, the one they'd come home from without Don. The one none of them ever talked about. Mark hadn't been part of G-Force then, hadn't known any of them, but from the little he'd been told, Jason had never been the same again.
Had any of that been due to the debrief? Certainly Grant and Jason had never been more than cordial, often a lot less, and Grant had been scathing about the decision to put Rick in command of Force Two from the start.
"Okay," he said. "But you're coming too."