Saluton! As they say, um... wherever they speak Esperanto. ;) Thank you for reading, you guys, and double thanks for reviewing! I'll pick up the pace a bit, because it's back to work, soon, for me. :)
23
Edinburgh, Scotland, at the north-eastern edge of the former U.K.-
To say that she felt alarmed, out of place in this city of ghosts, would have been a laughably wild understatement… had there been any leeway for humour. Kayo and her father had flown through the night, arriving in Scotland near dawn. The weather continued chilly and foul, partly hiding the nightmare below.
Cloaked as it was, their arrow-sleek Bird hadn't triggered any alerts on crossing the border. Only a fool would venture there, anyhow. After IR's battle with an ancient killing machine and the Mechanic, even GDF salvage operations had been suspended. Kayo's friend Rayna worked elsewhere, now.
Edinburgh had been a major and bustling port city, the second largest in all the U.K. Site of a terrible, winner-less battle, it had been burnt to a glassy wasteland; it's rippled surface pierced through with rusted spires of metal and heat-shattered stone. The ocean and broad, rain-lashed firth were choked with wreckage, from both losing sides of that long-ago battle.
One of the old city's great peaks… Castle Hill… had been blasted mostly to rubble, but Arthur's Seat was still there; grey-brown, hulking and barren. As she circled the radioactive shadowland, Kayo shook her head. What sort of beings would deliberately choose to meet, much less live, in such a horrible, grief-haunted place? The answer, people who wanted to hide, brought her no comfort at all.
Craning his head, looking out both sides of the canopy, her father said,
"Bring us down lower, Princess. Slowly, though. We don't want to appear threatening."
Kayo obeyed, grumbling,
"If this is their idea of a wonderful place for a meet-and-greet, Dad, I don't think one cloaked plane's gonna scare them." Then, throttling back and shifting to VTOL, she added, "Dropping to five-hundred feet… coming out of stealth mode."
The clouds thinned out a bit, lower down, though the rain continued to spatter and squall. Here and there, she glimpsed the splintered stumps of old buildings. Once or twice, some abandoned GDF salvage gear, and a lone archaeology base camp.
"Wait," said her father, halfway through her second lap. "What's that?"
Colonel Tracy might have pointed, but Kayo picked up the direction of his glance some other way; 'seeing' what he did, before quite turning her head. A light was flashing below. Pale green and forlorn, it was blinking a clear mathematical pattern. Not Morse code. A burst of numbers which Shadow's computer identified as the Fibonacci sequence: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34… Like that.
"It's a signal," the girl decided aloud. "I think the welcome mat's out, Dad. Shall we land?"
The pale, flashing light came from an LED bulb mounted at the end of a roughly square, mostly level clearing in all of that melted and refrozen slag.
"Take us down, Princess, but be ready to launch in a hurry, if anything looks suspicious."
"F.A.B., Dad. Don't suppose you've got your sidearm?"
She heard him chuckle, from back in the padded rear seat.
"Yes, Tanusha. My GDF pop-gun is primed, all ready to swat flies with."
"Be fair," the girl teased, as that grey, heaving ocean disappeared behind wrinkled hills and corroded wreckage. "It's good for cracking peanut-shells, too."
"I toasted a pop-tart with it, once," her father admitted, "from a distance of under a meter. I was hungry, and didn't have time to leave my office."
Trying to talk while landing a plane and watching for trouble, Kayo asked,
"You didn't set off the alarms?"
"Nope," her father responded, as their view tilted from grey-and-rust patchwork to crumbled concrete and junk. "Sensors picked it up as a blow-dryer."
That shouldn't have been funny, considering that their lives might soon depend on a weapon with no more oomph than a lightly stretched rubber-band, but they were tired and punchy; inclined to scoff at potential disaster. Hiding a grin, Kayo aimed for a cleared square of ground, roughly the size of a football pitch. They landed vertically, shaken by rumbling engines and gusting wind. The up-rushing tarmac looked oddly new, beneath its light coating of wind-driven sand. Nor was their landing site the only surprise in this war-riven graveyard.
The nearest building had looked like a ruin from the air. At eye-level, it sported a rust-free, grey metal door. Some sort of bunker entrance, it no doubt led underground. She had to shut off her engine, and run a post-flight, of course, but her father was already unstrapping. Rain hissed and drummed on Shadow's canopy, spat from the clouds in furious sheets. Then, between one eye blink and the next, it stopped completely; blocked by a sudden force dome. Not blue, like IR's. Distorting and colorless. Meant to conceal, as well as protect.
"They definitely know that we're here," remarked Jeff, as his daughter rushed through her bare-bones lockdown and checklist. "Let's hope they're as friendly as they are prepared."
Kayo cocked a slim eyebrow, and smiled.
"Are you kidding?" she scoffed, almost sparking with willingness to fight. "There's two of us here, and my wrist-comm's working, again. They've got us right where we want them, Dad." Her family code name was Artemis, after all.
Jeff waited until his daughter popped the canopy. Then, he stood up. That light had quit flashing, he noticed. Looking up at the underside of the force dome, Jeff saw a reverse-image scene of rocks and detritus, just like the rest of poor, shattered Edinburgh. On the surface, at least.
Thunderbird Shadow was still ticking and settling, engines steaming in the cold northern air. Colonel Tracy vaulted down from the cockpit, landing in a slight crouch, on dark, undamaged tarmac. He straightened slowly, right hand close to his gun. Heard Tanusha jump down, as well, then come up behind him.
Jeff was about to suggest that they try the door in that sleek concrete bunker, when all at once it began to grind open.
XXXXXXXXXXXX
Space, between Mars and the Earth-
The alien derelict had slowed even further. Now, it began to change shape. Lines of blazing white energy shot through the vessel's dark flanks. In their searing wake, the massive ship seemed to bubble and shift. Like some inert, fire-scorched tree stump suddenly putting forth branches, the derelict's metal started to buckle, blister and flow. Inorganic, yet somehow alive.
Thunderbird 3 slid through the blackness of space, drawing nearer her quarry on simple inertia; her engines having been shut off, soon after leaving orbit. Safer to drift in, they'd reasoned.
Scott was in the copilot's seat, beside his youngest brother. He would rather have left Alan and Charlie behind, but the one was their second-best pilot, the other a powerful time-bender… and both were safer on Thunderbird 3 than stranded on Mars. He hoped.
"What's it doing?" Scott asked, in a husky half-whisper. "Dividing, or something?"
"I don't think so," said John, floating behind his brother's chair, one hand on the bulkhead to steady himself. "Deimos Station is picking up some fierce mass-energy conversions. It's turning its own matter into raw power, then using the energy to create something."
"That can't be good," Alan fretted, hating this unpowered drift like he hated back-pimples and his own squeaky voice.
"Yes and no," growled the Mechanic, from his magnet-locked stance on the deck. "Less mass equals less gravitational pull… and those look like engines."
Kane was right, Scott realized. Sprouting from the death-ship's sides were four titanic pods, like much larger versions of 3's engine nacelles. Dark and cold, except for their web-work of shimmering energy, the protrusions were growing fast, like the extra limbs on a gen-mod spider.
"Whatever we're doing had better be quick, guys," said Gordon, wishing that Charlie was somewhere… anywhere… else.
Virgil hovered in the air behind Alan, clinging to the metal seat frame. Like the others, he'd been frustrated by Chancellor Shaw's cautious "wait and see" attitude. That thing wasn't just going to drift past the Earth, like it had Mars. It was headed straight for their home, with malice aforethought. Thinking aloud, Virgil mused,
"We've got a powerful ship, Mega-Max, Eos…"
"And Jaeger," put in John, sort of stubbornly.
"Yeah. Him, too… plus ourselves, the Mechanic, a time-bender and a chaos-magician. More than Pete or Shaw know about. Gotta use that to come up with something quick and permanent. John?"
"The mass-transfer generator," suggested the tall, red-haired astronaut. "Put me down on that thing with our generator in hand, and I think I can cause it to become so massive that it tears itself right through space and into another universe. Eos has found a couple that are totally lifeless, and pretty close by… in multiverse terms."
Cody Beech and Kane came up with the same objection, almost together.
"Placing it on the surface isn't good enough. It'll just tear off a big chunk of hull, and banish that," said Beech.
"You'll have to get your device to the ship's centre of mass," rumbled the cyborg. "That means going inside."
"Yeah…" John admitted, fidgeting with his golden uniform sash. "I kind of figured. Just didn't want to say it, in front of my brothers. They worry a lot."
Scott inhaled sharply, about to start snapping commands and rebuttals. Virgil stopped him with an upraised hand.
"Wait, Scott… let's think this through. Gordon, you said that Charlie can make you faster, compared to your surroundings, right?"
Very cautiously, the swimmer nodded.
"Yeah. That's what we did back in the hangar, moving those ships out of danger, crazy-quick… but he's just a kid, Virgil. There's no way I'm going to…"
"There's a lot of kids involved in this, Gordon," said Alan, cutting in. "And they're all back on Earth, right in the path of that thing." He jerked his blond head at the lumbering death-ship, mountain-high in their forward windows. "And, if we don't stop the impactor, now… they're all gonna die, G-man."
Gordon looked over at the boy, who'd fallen asleep in a bulkhead harness, while playing Alan's videogame.
"He's, like, ten years old!" the aquanaut protested. But Cody shook his head, no.
"Probably not, Tracy," said the chaos-adept. "He's a Dos Santos. Stress and panic makes them grow faster, as kind of a reflex defense-mechanism. He's been kidnapped and brain-scraped. I'd put him closer to three or four, actually."
Gordon couldn't speak for a bit. Didn't have to, though, because the Mechanic grunted, saying to John,
"You'd last ten seconds in there, without me to hold off the nanites. Need Beech, as well, to tip disaster our way."
"And, you might need some heavy lifting," added Virgil. "No telling what it's like in there, not being constructed for humans, or anything. Couple of Mini-Maxes could prove useful, too."
Scott sat bolt upright, realizing that he needed to give the go-ahead, but not wanting to put his brothers at risk.
"It's a stupid-ass plan," he snapped, stalling for time, or a better idea.
"You're right," John conceded. "But it's also the only one we've got. Pretty sure I can do it by myself, though."
"Pretty sure you'll be nanite-bait, three steps from the hull, Tracy," snorted the Mechanic. "Then, your generator will be lost, together with all the rest of your litter, and Earth."
The debate might have turned ugly, had Beech not stepped in. Smiling a little, the pale, slender young man said,
"It's going to take all of us. Some, here on your ship, running operations, and some over there, inside the derelict. Despite your chancellor's assurances, we can't wait for WorldGov. Left to themselves, the Typicals will convene one meeting after another, while plotting their own escapes, until that alien ship lands on their doorstep. I suggest we take it out of their hands. After all," he shrugged. "I don't have any place better to be."
Gordon had drifted over to look at Charlie. The boy… his little fella… was fast asleep, because, for maybe the first time in his very short life, he'd felt safe. The videogame was still beeping its tinny music, clutched in the time-bender's hand. Meanwhile, all of that longish brown hair drifted about with the air currents, looking like kelp.
A lot of stuff went through the aquanaut's mind, then; teaching Charlie to swim, ride a bike, shoot baskets. About life, and being a guy. But… it all came down to here, and now. Either they took the risk, and stopped that monster, or life on Earth was finished. It was an unfair, impossible situation. He wanted to rage and curse. To hit someone.
Instead, John glided over to put a hand on his shoulder. Very quietly, so as not to waken the sleeping boy, John said,
"There may be another way, Gordon. See… Jaeger can slow things down, too. It's why I thought I'd have a chance, by myself."
The swimmer surprised his older brother with a sudden tight hug, knocking them into the opposite bulkhead.
"I'll go in with you," he offered, his voice thick with emotion. "I'm almost as strong as Virgil, and you never know… maybe I could confuse their computer with stupid jokes."
But John shook his head, no.
"Charlie needs his father, Gordon. You're all that he's got. You can't leave him."
"But…"
"I'll go," said Scott, unstrapping to float up out of his seat. "Me, John, Virgil, the Mechanic and Beech, plus Jaeger. Eos stays here, to help protect Thunderbird 3. No further debate. Virge, John… strap into your gear, and fetch that generator. Cody, get a spacesuit on. Kane, we need a drone-pod. Something big and powerful enough to carry us in there. Let's move, people."
Like he'd said, a stupid-ass plan, but all that stood between Earth, and the end.