"...and tonight it's going to rain, apparently. Nice greasy track."

Jason groaned. "You're kidding."

"I only wish." Sam, his mechanic, pushed blonde hair out of her eyes with an oily hand, leaving an unfortunate mark on her forehead. "Just enough drizzle to make it slippery, not enough to wash the dust away properly."

"It's the same for everyone." Dave O'Leary, ISO Racing's newest driver, stuck an equally dirty face out from under the car. "Makes fine-tuning the braking system a bit of a moot point, though."

"No short-cuts. They've been wrong about the weather before." Jason eyed his number two car critically. "Not the brakes I'm worried about, though. Tyres."

"Time for that tomorrow morning -" Sam looked over his shoulder. "Hi, Ed. Something I can do for you?"

There was the sound of nervous throat-clearing from behind him, and at that Jason did look round. Ed, the chief mechanic and pit boss of the racing team, was never nervous. Never indecisive. And that meant trouble.

"Jason, I need for you to come with me right now."

He frowned. "Sure. I'll just -"

"Right now. Don't pick up or put down anything. Sam, what has he been working on?"

"Brakes?" There was confusion in her tone.

"Inside the car?"

"Yes, I've been under it since lunchtime. What's going on?" Dave had extracted himself from under the car and now stood up, shoulder to shoulder with Jason. As moral support went, it wasn't much...but it was there.

Ed turned and gestured at the doorway and another man entered. This one Jason didn't recognise, but everything about him made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. Not in a dangerous, oh-look-a-Spectran-infiltrator way, but what he got from the man was a definite impression of mistrust and accusation.

"Don't worry about that. This is Mr Gordon. You two are to cooperate with him fully - he'll be stripping the interior of the car."

"But there's a race tomorrow!" Sam's voice was outraged.

And Jason felt just the same. Slow fury had started to heat at the peremptory way they were being treated, and at the mention of stripping the car - his car - it boiled over.

"Now just a goddamn minute! What the hell is going on here?"

Ed looked everywhere but at him. "You won't want to do this in public, Jason."

"I've got nothing to hide. If you have an accusation to make, you make it now. No whispers and rumours." Nothing to hide - that was the understatement of the year, but he badly needed to be seen that way. Dave O'Leary was Team Seven. It was important that he of all people didn't start querying exactly why he saw Jason quite as little as he did, given that they now had two common areas of work rather than only one.

"Are you sure?" Ed was the one who didn't want to do this, Jason realised. Didn't want to say whatever it was at all, let alone in public.

Too bad. What the hell could it be, anyway, that would have them searching the car? It was standard, for heaven's sake. It wasn't like he raced in the G-2. Tempting thought though that was. He simply folded his arms and glared.

"Mr Gordon is a drugs investigator. Traces of a banned substance have been found in your last drug test. He'll be checking the car for traces of residue."

Jason burst out laughing. "Don't be ridiculous."

"I wish I was joking, Jason. Now, if you'll come with me right away, please, we have some questions to ask and the team doctor will need to take a blood sample."

He rolled his eyes and turned his glare from his apologetic boss to the weasel in the suit now taking pictures of the car. "Go right ahead. I'm telling you, though - Gordon, is it? You leave that car fit to be raced in tomorrow or you will regret it."

"Jason..." Dave began.

"Drugs? Me?" He snorted derisively.

"Dave, he won't even drink coffee or take aspirin," Sam put in, her eyes wide and brimming.

"Dead right I don't. Whoever screwed up at the drug test place is going to regret this."

.

Ed led him to the meeting room, opened the door, and silently ushered him in. Jason had been here before, of course. Usually for reprimands. Where were you yesterday? and Don't you think this is important? and You're not indispensable, you know! He'd always gritted his teeth and played humble and apologetic, and Anderson had arranged excuses on his behalf more than once. He wasn't indispensable at ISO Racing. He was on G-Force, and his work there was a whole lot more important. He just wasn't allowed to say it.

Even so, despite all the dressings-down he'd received, he'd never seen a set of grim expressions like this. The team doctor was here, as was the top boss of ISO Racing - suited and looking decidedly annoyed at being here at all. He didn't recognise another man in a tailored suit, and the last person present was the manager of the track. All of them were seated on the far side of the long metal table, interrogation style.

So, what line to take? Confused? Apologetic? Furious? No, he needed to stay completely in character here. His ISO Racing character, not the Condor.

"I'm Jason Alouita. It sounds like someone's screwed up my test results?"

"I wish I could believe that." The team boss handed him a paper, and waved him to a seat. "What do you know about how drug metabolism works?"

Probably more than you ever will. Jason shrugged. "Just what I've read. It's never seemed relevant. Since I don't take drugs."

"Did you know there was a new testing system in place this year?"

"See above answer. Didn't concern me." Jason kept his tone relatively civil with an effort, and took a quick look at the paper he'd been handed. New testing schedule...sure. Pretty much the same list of banned substances that it had been for the last couple of years, with a couple of the latest party drugs added at the bottom. And then there was a brief rundown on some new testing methods, and something froze inside him.

Not testing for byproducts of the drugs themselves any more. Instead, they were looking for traces left by the body's reaction to certain drugs. Evidence of unnaturally fast reactions, for instance. Of something having stimulated the muscles into working beyond capacity, or of implausibly high levels of stamina.

Just like that, his racing career was over.

He shook his head, standing up and putting the leaflet back on the table. "You won't need blood tests. You caught me. Consider me retired."

"We'll need to ask -"

"Forget it. These drugs aren't illegal, right? So you can't quiz me on them. I'm done here. Ed, my jacket's in bay three, I need to fetch it. You won't be wanting to leave me in here alone. Oh, and tell your man he's wasting his time. There are no drugs in the car and never have been. I guess you'll be wanting these." His voice sounded, to his ears, exactly as it always did. Mark wasn't the only one who could act.

Thankfully his paperwork was in his back pocket and not in his jacket. Jason laid out his racing license and ISO Racing ID very deliberately on the table, helpfully turned them so that his name was visible on both. Forced himself not to swallow, despite the lump in his throat. Then he turned and stalked out, not watching to see if the other man followed him, as close to breaking down as he'd been in a very long time. The last time he'd been this blindsided had been when they'd been told Don was alive. He'd no idea when the time before that had been.

Of all the stupid reasons for it to be over...and the desperately frustrating thing was that he could clear his name absolutely with three words. "I'm the Condor." And that would be incontrovertible evidence that he really did never take drugs. The fact that he could still stand after interplanetary jump proved that his system was clean; that the evidence against him came from his body's reaction to the implant in his neck - and, if they wanted to know whether he used that to gain an unfair advantage, he could prove his innocence in that too, from the chip's stored memory.

So very tempting. And not an option.

.

"Jason, is there anything I can do?" Ed asked him as he followed him down the corridor. Solid, dependable Ed, always there for everyone once you got past the bluster and the inclination to eye everything in a skirt. It had been Ed who taught him the basics of track driving. Ed who had pointed him at a small, battered trailer just barely within the budget of a sixteen year old orphan, and, he suspected, persuaded the park management that he wasn't some young hooligan who would party all night and make everyone else's life hell. And now he had to let the man believe that all this time he'd been a liar and a cheat.

"Nothing. I've been caught. Sorry I let you down."

"You don't sound sorry."

That would be because I'm trying not to howl. Jason just snorted, heading for bay three. Not that there was much in the jacket - but more cash than someone in his situation should casually throw away, and also he didn't want to leave the jacket itself for them. He always wore it here, and if they thought to test it, finding no drug residue on it whatsoever might make someone think. He needed for them not to think. That was going to involve them assuming he was guilty beyond all hope of redemption. He hated it - these people had been his friends and colleagues for longer than he'd known Mark. And he trusted them to the same level. It made no difference. They couldn't know who he really was, and that meant they had to believe he was a drug cheat.

In bay three, Sam and Dave stood idle, backs to the wall, watching intently whatever Gordon was doing inside the car. Jason didn't dare make eye contact, just heading for where his jacket lay hung on the back of a chair over by the shelf of manuals.

"That was quick!" Sam said hopefully. "Sorted?"

"Not exactly," Ed growled.

"Not at all." Jason turned to face them, utterly determined not to let anything show on his face. "It's true, I've been taking drugs. They caught me. I'm gone. Good luck tomorrow, Dave."

In the stunned silence that followed, he was out of the door before he heard Dave's, "Well, who'd have thought it?" and Sam's replying, "I don't believe it! I won't!" in a frantic, close-to-tears tone which made him want to run back and blurt out everything. That wasn't an option either. He just kept walking.

She didn't believe it. Genuinely didn't. Sam had trusted Jason for years. There weren't many people she trusted implicitly, and this was not him, she was absolutely sure of it. If Jason had been taking drugs, then everything she thought she knew about anyone was useless.

"I wonder what he was taking?" Dave mused. "Heck, I wonder how he's got away with it this long. We -"

"You don't believe it?" Sam heard her own voice crack to a squeak, but could do nothing about it.

Dave shrugged. "If anyone else had said it, no, I wouldn't. You heard the man."

"It's not true! He's been blackmailed...or something..."

"Jason? Roll over like that for something he hadn't done?" Dave strolled over to the car, and laid a proprietorial hand on the roof. "No way. Never. So...he took drugs. Which I guess makes me lead driver for this baby."

Sam stared at him, and abruptly she couldn't do it. Couldn't be there, for an afternoon of recriminations and negative anecdotes and 'I thought there was something wrong all along'. She wasn't needed to work on the car; the investigator was apparently determined to strip the interior down to the bare metal, right down to removing the rubber pads from the pedals. Dave was perfectly capable of supervising him. ISO Racing's newest driver might be laid back and more than a little sloppy if he didn't think it mattered, but when it came down to the car he'd be driving tomorrow evening, he'd be plenty watchful enough.

"Bathroom," she said casually to him, rescued her jacket from the chair where it had been under Jason's (there were some advantages in being female; nobody would question her taking it) and headed out. Not to the bathroom, but to the front exit. She didn't sign out. She'd get stick for that, and right now she didn't care.

.

She'd thought the five minute walk back to her trailer might clear her head and help things make sense, but if anything it did the opposite. What was she doing? Showing solidarity with a drug cheat? Any implication that she was somehow involved, and her own career could be in jeopardy. The links were there, too, for an investigator with a good imagination. She was pretty sure that most of the tablets her bodybuilding-obsessed stepfather had taken for the entire time she'd known him weren't exactly legally purchased. She didn't know what they were - nothing criminal, but definitely steroids of some sort. Not that steroids would have been any use whatsoever to a race driver, but it was a link to someone who knew where drugs of dubious legality, at least in the sporting sense, could be obtained. Rather too close a link for comfort.

Jason's trailer was silent and shut up over at the far side of the gravelled area as Sam unlocked the door to her own. It felt wrong being in here this early in the day. Normally she returned just in time to cook dinner and sit in front of the TV for the evening, contentedly tired, except for the odd occasion when she went out with her old school friends. They were becoming fewer and further between, though. There just wasn't much she had in common with them any more. She had far more in common with Jason.

Or thought that she had. She released the roller blind covering the tiny window over the kitchen unit, and stared across the gravelled area to the other trailer. Silent, shut up, every curtain closed tight...and the nose of a dark blue Nissan Skyline just visible behind the right hand end, parked between trailer and the ten foot dark evergreen hedge which almost completely surrounded their particular little patch of trailer park.

The car was there. For as long as she'd known Jason, that had meant he was either in the trailer or round at the track. And he simply couldn't be at the track, not after this.

Note-writing wasn't her forte. Never had been, never would be. She sat at her table, notebook open in front of her, for several minutes, before she managed a single word. And then it all came out in a rush. Doubtless badly spelt, hopefully comprehensible.

Jason, no matter what, I don't believe it. I'm here if you want to talk. And I'll stand up for you.

She looked at it, considering. Nothing else was worth saying. And he'd know where to find her, if he cared.

The note fitted very neatly through the place where the door of Jason's aged trailer no longer fitted the frame as well as it should. She knew that knocking on the door would be a waste of time. That done, she retreated to her own trailer. She'd done everything she possibly could.

I'll stand up for you.

Jason read the note three times, hoping to find some other meaning in it. There wasn't one. Sam, utterly loyal and trusting, would simply refuse to accept that he was guilty. Would point out, repeatedly and insistently, just how out of character it was for him, with years' worth of specific examples. And, sooner or later, someone would listen to her and look more closely at his history. And that would spell disaster.

He knew what he should do. Go over there and tear her trust to shreds. Destroy her belief in him beyond redemption. He could do it, too. Easily. There were races he'd pulled out of without explanation, plenty of them over the years. Some because of scrambles, some because of his promise to himself. He'd use the implant enhancements to prevent accidents - but if he did so, he'd not finish the race. It would be easy enough to present them as times when he'd known he'd fail the drugs test.

He couldn't do it. Not just because every fibre of his being protested that it was bitterly unfair that he could have nobody who believed he was innocent, but because of the quiet weeping he could hear on the very edge of implant-enhanced hearing. She was already devastated. He couldn't do it to her. Even more than that, he couldn't do it to them. To a friendship which, one day, he'd hoped might go to another level. Some day, when the war was over, when he dared have a relationship which lasted more than one night, with someone who he actually cared about, someone who could be told the truth.

That left him with few choices. None, officially. One, if he decided to break all the rules and trust someone without a security clearance to her name. He'd never done it. Not even once, not by choice. He knew Mark had, and he was pretty sure parts of Tiny's family knew more than they should. And Jill hadn't had a formal security clearance, though she'd figured it out on her own, and besides she was known and trusted already, even if she didn't know it. Sam did work for ISO - it wasn't like she was a stranger. But it was still a huge risk to take. He'd be not just trusting Sam with his own life, but effectively trusting her with the future of Earth.

Regardless, he had to do something. He couldn't leave her to go back to the track, refusing to believe his guilt, and vocal about it. She could reveal his identity without ever realising what it was herself.

.

Sam opened the door of her trailer to his knock, eyes swollen and lines of mascara trickling down her left cheek. The right one was one big black smudge where she'd rubbed at it. She looked very young and completely lost, and Jason knew what he had to do.

"Sam, I'm sorry to let you down. But, dammit, kid, you're gullible! What, you thought I was some kind of saint?"

Sam reached past him and pulled the door shut. "No."

"No what? Perfect Jason, never corrupts his body with anything? It never occurred to you what a damn good cover it would be?"

A fresh stream of tears flowed. "No. Didn't buy it then, won't buy it now. Jason, I don't know why you have to leave all of a sudden like this. I guess it's ISO Security, am I right? You've been reassigned somewhere and you need an excuse to walk out of the racing team no questions asked? Well, I won't let it go down like this. If you have to go, you have to go. But I won't let everyone say you deserved to be kicked out. Why should I? What the hell difference will it make? Other people get to just leave when they're reassigned. Allen did."

Jason sighed. Out of options, and the only thing left was the truth.

"Sit down, Sam."

"If you're going to lie to me some more, I'd rather you just left. Nothing you say can make me believe you should have failed that drug test." She paused, frowning at him, her eyes brimming again. "What, you think that's funny?"

I'm hoping in ten seconds you'll think it's funny too. Jason took a last confirming glance round the trailer. All curtains shut, bright sunlight outside, and no voices or footsteps to the limit of his hearing, even when he leaned hard on the implant. Insofar as doing what he was about to could ever be secure...it was.

He locked eyes with Sam in a way he hoped would be reassuring, brought his left arm up and over, and said, "Transmute!"

The usual coloured flare of light, far too brilliant to see past, the usual sensation of what he was wearing shifting into birdstyle - and an entirely unusual shriek. That, he'd not taken into consideration. He hoped nobody was close enough to hear it.

He opened his eyes again to see Sam, sitting rigid behind the table, eyes wide in an expression of shocked disbelief and her hands over her mouth. Silent, now, and staring. And, after years of imagining what he'd do when he finally got to reveal who he really was, he couldn't think of a single thing to say. Nor, apparently, could she. So he did the only thing he could think of: sat down opposite her on the narrow trailer bench, removed his helmet and placed it on the table between them, and put out his hand, still gloved.

Sam looked down at the hand, back to his face, down again - and then put her hand on his, and cleared her throat shakily. "How long have you..."

"Always. I'm sorry."

"What for?" She cracked a feeble smile. "Am I the last person in the universe to know or something?"

"Hardly." He considered her, sitting back and apparently trying to act normal. "I thought you'd have a million questions."

"Probably, once you've gone. For now..." She bit her lip. "So you did take drugs? But because you had to?"

"Nope. I can't. Any drugs in my system, anything at all, and I'd keel over every time we made an interplanetary jump. I'm not this anal about avoiding caffeine because I think it's cool or something."

Sam wiped her eyes. "This is unreal. You sitting here, dressed as...like that, talking about interplanetary jump? But then how come...?"

"They've changed the testing method. I guess what they've picked up is something bizarre in my system. Residuals from using the implant. And before you ask, no, I don't use it when I race. Not unless I have to, to avoid a smash - and then I pull out."

She nodded, the expression relaxing somewhat, wiped her eyes again - and looked at the back of her hand. "Man, I must look a state."

Jason smiled ruefully. "You've looked better."

At that, Sam really did look alarmed, bolting from her seat and disappearing into the bathroom. There were sounds of female horror, presumably as soon as she looked in a mirror, and a minute later she emerged, makeup-free and considerably less tear-stained. She stood uncertainly in the narrow space between bathroom door and kitchen unit.

"I do have a question. If you didn't take drugs...why say you did?"

"Because I can't tell anyone the truth." Jason rubbed his eyes with a gloved hand, then removed the glove and pinched the bridge of his nose properly, trying to stave off the headache he knew was coming.

"But you told me...oh." She suddenly looked terrified. "Are you going to get into trouble for this? Am I?"

Jason snorted. "I'll get an official reprimand. You? Go round telling people, sooner or later you'll get attention you don't want. If I thought you'd do that, I'd never have told you." He was quite sure she wouldn't. She'd had a year or more to brag about her part in bringing down a Spectran operation; her rescue by G-Force. She'd discussed it with him, once. He'd never heard it mentioned by anyone else.

"So what do I say? 'Actually, I changed my mind, I think Jason's druggy as hell'?"

He sighed. "I don't have a solution to that yet. Do me a favour, though?"

Sam spluttered. "Jason, you're the commander of G-Force…and I can't believe I'm saying that. A favour? You save the world every other week and I fix racecars. If there's something useful I can do, name it."

"Be too upset to go back into work for a couple of days? I'll figure something I can say and let you know."

"Something that will let you carry on driving?"

"I don't know." And his bracelet lit up in a call sequence he couldn't refuse. He locked eyes with her again, raising it to his mouth. Time to demonstrate that this was for real.

"G-1, go."

It was Tiny's voice, clear but tinny. "Urgent meeting in thirty. Can you come in?"

"I'll be there." He cut the channel and grimaced. "I have to go."

He could see the realisation dawning - he always said that. "All those times..."

"Yeah. This is kinda bright."

Sam nodded, turning away and covering her eyes, and he detransmuted.

He was half-way to ISO when he realised it wasn't going to work. He'd broken his cover and all for nothing - because Dave O'Leary had been there too, and would expect to see serious censure for him in his other ISO role. Team Seven wouldn't tolerate someone taking performance-enhancing drugs any more than ISO Racing. Jason swore out loud in an assortment of languages, made a rude sign to someone pulling out in front of him with what was, really, plenty of space...and still didn't feel any better.

His head ached, too; the slow pulsing throb behind his right eye which had become a familiar prelude to a cracking evening migraine over the past couple of months. Four, five times a week it was happening now, and he'd had enough of it. Badly needed, he suspected, to go take the drugs for a few days and get his system back into balance instead of lurching from one migraine to the next and depending completely on the electrode net. He'd thought a day working at ISO Racing would help. Relaxing and non-stressful.

Yeah, right. Man, I need a vacation. And I have no chance, none at all, of getting one for the foreseeable future.

How long can I keep on doing this?

Because it sure as hell isn't indefinitely.