"Mark! Good to see you again." Chris Johnson, was, as Mark had expected, in black section medical - G-Force was out, and that meant their team doctor would be at hand. "Thanks for stepping in yesterday - that was a good solution you came up with."

"I'm glad," he answered absently.

"I think it's now under control. But that wasn't what you came about, was it?"

Mark glanced up towards the other end of the big main room, where a second doctor was sitting at a computer. Chris took the hint.

"Come into my office."

Mark entered reluctantly. He didn't like this room, associated as it was with everything going wrong for him. In here, he'd admitted to his problems for the first time. In here, Chris had told him that he was fine. He hadn't been fine.

Chris sat down behind the desk, and Mark pushed the memories way down. Just for once, he didn't make the effort to transfer into the chair tucked against the desk on the visitor's side of the office, instead pushing the wheelchair close. In the past year, every time he'd sat in that chair the outcome had been bad.

"So, Mark, what can I do for you?"

He'd thought out his arguments on the way here, and abruptly they all seemed entirely inadequate. They were still all he had.

"You said my implant could be repaired, once I had normal movement back. That would be now."

Chris was very visibly taken aback, and took several seconds to reply. "That was months ago, Mark. To be brutally honest, that was before your muscles wasted almost to nothing. Right now you need to get fit again. Normally."

"That's going to take months."

"Yes, I'm afraid it is. It took nine months -"

"Heard it before. Nine months to get to this state, nine months to get back to where I was. Nearer ten, now. I could get there faster with the implant, Chris."

Chris just looked at him, and Mark realised how it must sound.

"No, I'm not looking for an easy answer! I'm looking for something to help me push myself harder. Right now I get tired so fast it's useless. I can't build leg muscle thirty seconds at a time! A bit of backup from the implant and I could make that time a minute, maybe two. Work harder, build more muscle faster. Positive feedback."

The doctor nodded, but it was the sort of nod which, if Mark had seen if from someone he'd been intimidating in birdstyle, he'd have followed up with picking the man straight up by the collar for a bit of reinforcement. "I'll need to discuss it with Mike Bennett."

"Of course you will. I'd like to talk to him too. Can we get him in here now?"

"I'm afraid not. He's not around at the moment. I think he's at a seminar abroad somewhere."

Crap. Mark's determination deflated. He couldn't persuade an implant expert who simply wasn't here.

"Look, Mark, leave this with me. I'll speak to Mike as soon as he's available. I'm sure he'll want to talk with you about it. But right now the best thing you can do -"

"Is carry on getting fit by myself. I know. Thanks, Chris."

.

He headed back down the corridor towards the main elevators considering his next move. Leave it to Chris? Chris didn't know what his urgency was, and had no particular reason to speak to Mike Bennett the moment he got back. And Mark felt that days mattered, here. No, he'd go back to his Team Seven office and leave a message for Mike to contact him urgently. He could make his own appointment to speak with the only man he wanted anywhere near the inside of what was left of the chip on his neck, and send Mike to speak with Chris afterwards. How long could a seminar last, anyway? Surely not longer than a few days. Maybe it would be on Mike's voicemail, or his email autoreply.

He was just signing out, at the guardpost next to the elevators, when one of them pinged its arrival and the occupants came over to wait behind him.

"Hey, Dean," the captain manning the guardpost said to the tall security officer leaning on the counter.

"Morning. Permit for Wade. Armed accompanied only, the usual."

Mark handed his own badge back over and spun his chair round, to find himself facing Don. He was guarded by a further security officer, holding a gun in the small of his back.

"Don? What happened?"

"Nothing, Commander." His voice was flat, calm, and still nervous. Mark could appreciate the combination, from someone not wanting his guard to get the wrong idea. "My implant doesn't stay in tune like it should after what Spectra did to it. When it slips, I call Dr Bennett and I get escorted in here for him to fix it."

Mark frowned. "Mike's out of the country."

"You're mistaken. I just spoke to him." Wade looked puzzled, as did his guards.

"You..." Mark stopped, putting the pieces together. He'd been had, pure and simple. He spun the chair round so fast he almost tipped it over and headed back the way he'd come, ignoring the shout from the guardpost. He didn't even stop for the swinging doors at the entrance to Medical, instead slamming through them.

"What the -" came from the other doctor. Mark still didn't stop, hitting the door to Chris's office hard enough to dent it before he caught the handle, threw it open, and went right in.

Chris's guilty expression, caught phone in hand, said it all.

"Abroad, is he? What the hell is going on here, Chris? Need to get your story straight before you tell me why I can't be fixed?"

"It really isn't like that, Mark. You need to -"

"Don't you dare tell me what I need to do! I know what I need to do! I need to talk to you and to Mike, and you are going out of your way to try to stop me! What -"

He stopped at the sensation of cold steel, just under and behind his right ear. Just barely stopped himself from his instinctive reaction: to twist round and take the gun away before any unimplanted human could pull the trigger. That didn't work so well when he himself might as well have been unimplanted. He settled for Plan B.

"Take that thing away. Now."

"Doctor?" the guard asked.

"He's angry, Sergeant, not dangerous. Put the gun away."

The barrel moved away, and Mark swung round to fix the man with a furious glare. "Do you know who I am?"

"Yes, sir. You're someone who just burst in here without a badge despite being ordered to stop. We only didn't shoot because we'd seen you hand the badge in." He was entirely unapologetic - a security guard in the same mould as Todd Sanderson. Tall, well-built, early thirties, crew cut, not a high-flyer in terms of rank. Mark would have put a considerable sum of money on him also being a black belt in multiple martial arts, a crack shot, no idiot, and with plenty of active service experience. Probably a decorated veteran. Certainly he'd done everything right just now. Mark hadn't heard him coming - not that he'd been listening - and he was now standing out of Mark's reach. He'd holstered the weapon, but his hand was still on it. And no, he quite evidently didn't have the faintest idea who Mark was.

"He's Commander Jarrald, Sergeant," Chris said. "Does that mean anything to you?"

The hand didn't leave the gun, though the jaw dropped visibly. "Yes, sir. Sorry, sir."

"Consider it an exercise," Mark said, keeping his voice calm with an effort. "Now get out."

The man still glanced at Chris, who nodded. Only then did he leave, shutting the door quietly behind him.

"You'll be wanting to know why I lied to you," Chris said quietly.

His initial fury spent, Mark didn't trust his voice. He simply kept looking steadily ahead.

"I have no idea how your body will react to the stimulus of the implant after this long without it. I wanted to discuss it with Mike in private first. Five minutes, while you got back to your quarters, that's all I needed. You'd have known he wasn't away the moment you tried to leave him a message."

"I don't need protecting from the truth." Despite his effort to sound mature and in control, it came out with more petulance than he'd intended. Not as much anger as he felt.

The doctor looked down, straightening an already neat pile of paperwork on his desk. "Maybe not. But I couldn't give you false hope again. I wanted Mike to do his research, and to be as sure as he could be, before he discussed best case scenarios with you. I've already let you down too many times."

"Fine. So let me tell you what's going to happen now. Mike's fixing Don Wade, Don says. That'll take how long - half an hour? After that, you and me and him are going to sit down and we're going to discuss the options. All of them. The good ones and the bad ones and the chances of them going right or wrong. I've said this before, Chris, and I'm not going to say it again. I am not a child. I can make the hard calls. I've proved that. I've made them for my whole team. I've made them for cities. I've made them for planets. You will let me make them for myself."

Chris's eyes came up, and he nodded. "Yes, Commander. Shall I call you when Mike's finished?"

"I'll wait."

.

He could probably have intimidated Chris into giving him access to one of the medical department's computers, but he decided he'd been quite intimidating enough for one afternoon. Instead, he wheeled his chair into one of the window alcoves, pulled his handheld out, and scrolled unenthusiastically through a long list of new emails. He was finding it increasingly difficult to care about whether Dave O'Leary should be on an intensive remedial flight course or basic training yet again; whether Shih Quan's English was good enough for him to be excused from the non-native speakers' course; whether Callen James should be recommended for Spectran immersion. Two of the new Academy graduates were under consideration for fighter jet training and fast-track to Team Three, and the lump in his throat rose again. How long was it going to take him to get to the point of having a flight clearance again? He'd have loved to be able to reply 'I'll evaluate them' and just go out and do it. Put the kids in a plane and see whether they had what it took or not. That would be so much more efficient than all this second-hand looking at endless records and test scores and reports by basic level flight instructors.

He managed to lose himself in the work somewhat, by using his old trick of telling himself it had to be done; the safety of the galaxy depended on him doing it quickly and accurately. He'd done paperwork on this basis for years. Sometimes it had even been true. This time he knew it wasn't, and he was distracted every time a door opened or someone walked past him. He'd have liked to believe he was just being alert, but he knew it wasn't true. He was nervous as hell about what Mike Bennett would have to say, and about making the right decision. No matter what he'd said to Chris, making a hard call was very different when you knew that the consequences were personal.

"Mark? Chris says you want to talk?"

He jumped about ten feet in the air. Of course, the time the person approaching was the one he wanted was the one time he'd failed to notice him. Mike Bennett was half way across the room towards him, with Chris hovering at his office door. Over to his left, two armed guards were escorting Don Wade away.

"Doctor. Can I have ten minutes of your time?"

.

"I haven't discussed this with Mike at all," was the first thing Chris said, sitting down after carefully rearranging the chairs in his office such that all three of them fitted and the door would close.

Good. "Then I guess I'll get an honest reaction," Mark said. "Mike, I want you to repair my implant. Can you do that?"

The implant specialist glanced at Chris. Back at Mark, concern in his eyes. He took a breath and let it out again. Then he frowned and rubbed at his forehead with one hand. "I wish you'd given me time to think about this."

"I don't want the polished answer. I want to know what the issues are."

"Oo...kay. How much do you remember about what went wrong before?"

Every last damned word you ever told me, replayed over and over... "I'll tell you when you lose me."

"Fine. Well, I think it's most unlikely you'd reject it - all the new circuitry will be entirely internal. I can't guarantee that you'll be able to access it, since you never had conscious control before. And there has to be some risk that playing with your neural functions will make you regress."

"Paralyse me again?" Mark went cold.

Mike raised his eyebrows. "You wanted to know the issues. I don't think that one is a major risk. But then I didn't last time, either. At this point I can't rule it out completely."

"Anything else?"

"Well, it's an operation a few millimetres from your spinal cord. Standard risks for infection and damage."

"When could you do it?"

"When do you want it? We'd need a surgical slot, but that doesn't need a lot of notice. I've had the components ready ever since..." His voice trailed off, as his hands tightened on the arms of the chair.

Since you planned to put me back together again a week after my first op. Mark nodded. "Can you get me more detailed stats on the outcomes, or is this as good as it gets?"

"We don't exactly have a lot of prior cases. I don't think it would make things any worse and I think there's a reasonable chance you'd get at least some access to the functionality. I have no idea what, or how complete."

"Mark, where's this come from?" Chris asked quietly. "What's the big hurry?"

"You don't think waiting nine months is long enough?"

"I'm concerned you may be after a quick fix. You've been through rehab before. You don't need me to tell you it can't be rushed."

"It can be speeded up, though." Mark tried not to look pleading, the memory of that morning's frustrating session burnt on his mind. "How can I build muscle if I'm exhausted after three minutes of leg exercises? How can I get my balance back if I can't stand for more than thirty seconds? How can I learn to walk again when I can't support my weight on one leg yet?"

"Slowly, and steadily, and patiently. Even a fully working implant wouldn't change that."

"No, but maybe it would give me five minutes of exercises instead of three. A minute standing at a time. I know using it like that would flatten me. I can handle sleeping twelve hours a day and wanting to die I'm so exhausted." He caught and held Chris's eyes. "I can't handle being so feeble I can't even start to push myself."

Chris nodded slowly. "Can you leave it with us to sort out the details?"

"How long?"

"Barring major distractions, I'll call you tomorrow."

Major distractions... Mark considered the orange lights, still on to indicate a mission in progress, and abruptly felt ashamed. G-Force was out there fighting, and he was wailing about having his implant fixed. A major distraction, as seen by the head of black section medical, would be one of them coming back badly hurt.

"Do you know where they've gone?" he asked.

Mike Bennett shrugged.

"Interstellar," Chris said. "That's all I know. I'm sure Control would tell you more?"

Mark grimaced at the thought. He'd survived the past few months by not knowing what was going on. Hiding his head in the sand, maybe - but it was so much easier not to stress about what G-Force was going through when he didn't know until it was all over. Go into Control, now, to the possibility of disaster which he could do nothing to avert?

"No, thanks. I'll leave the controllers to it."

"I wish you'd brought Samuels in on that," Mike Bennett said, having left enough time for Mark to get out of earshot and then some.

Chris sighed. "So do I. No way he'd have let me haul in a shrink, though. He doesn't want anyone asking what's really going on. There's no way in hell this is because he doesn't want to take his time in rehab."

"So what is it about?"

"I wish I knew. But he's certainly been a lot more involved with Jason recently. I thought he might go into Control for a moment then, which is what Anderson and Ivanov have wanted him to do all along - but he always did hate watching from the sidelines."

"He can't want to come back. Surely not."

Oh, good grief, if only… Chris was still reeling from the last meeting he'd had with Anderson and Samuels. From the psychiatrist's certainty that it wasn't a question of whether Jason would stop coping, it was a question of when. That they needed, as a matter of urgency, to start thinking about who would command G-Force next.

Bennett didn't know any of this, and didn't need to. And, in any case, the last thing anyone needed was to start fantasizing about getting the Eagle back in command of G-Force any time soon. It would be all too easy to use it to avoid thinking about the hard decisions they needed to make. The man could barely stand up. Mark wasn't a viable candidate for G-Force, any more than Don Wade was. This conversation needed to be redirected.

"I'm thinking he's heard about those remote controlled fighter planes. He'd be one hell of a pilot for them. Squadron leader, maybe. It wouldn't be G-Force, but it would be pretty darn close to active service. Probably as close as he'll get."

Bennett raised his eyebrows. "I hadn't thought of that. It would suit him, wouldn't it? But why wouldn't he just say so?"

"Can you guarantee he'll get that particular implant functionality back? The hardware link?"

"I can't guarantee anything." The sigh was especially deep.

Bennett stood up and crossed to the window, staring out into the distance, and Chris left him to his thoughts and went back to reviewing medical records. The new fighter planes should cut down on the horrendous losses that ISO's squadrons had been taking - but they needed implanted personnel, and that had been a problem all along. Not the same magnitude of problem that they'd had finding Force Two personnel, since there was no requirement for the candidates to be able to handle jump - but they still needed to be implanted before the end of puberty, and that meant Academy kids, not established pilots. The scary thing was that these days many of their established pilots were the same age as Academy kids. He had an entire page of records here for people who had been injured on active service and would never fly a plane again…and were still young enough to be considered as implantation candidates.

And here he was, with five available implants, a couple of dozen damaged, unhappy young ISO officers who desperately wanted them, and Mark wanting to jump the queue, or at least, reclaim the tray of technology which had been earmarked for him originally. And deserving of it, surely? What if he did say no and tell him he'd have to wait his turn? What effect would that have on the rest of G-Force? Even the possibility that it would make them think twice about their treatment should they get hurt was too much of a risk. No, if Mark wanted his implant mended, Mark would get it. One of the others would have to wait. Mike might not be able to guarantee that Mark would get his hardware link back, but then he couldn't guarantee that a new implantee would get it either. And it wasn't like any of the names on his screen were candidates to be birdstyle operatives.

Bennett turned back after a couple of minutes, eyes on Chris, clearly wanting to share something more than standard pleasantries, and Chris blanked the computer screen and gave the other his full attention.

"I'm worried about this. I don't like using the Eagle as my test subject. What if I screw him up even worse?"

"That has to be his call. It's not like we have someone else we can operate on first."

Bennett's hands clenched nervously. "There's Don Wade."

"You know we'll never get the clearance to upgrade Wade's implant. He's the security risk from hell."

"He's uncomfortable and miserable, and I can't keep his implant in tune any more. It's fried, Chris. Maybe not as fried as Mark's was, but still fried, and getting worse by the day. He's terrified of needles. He comes in here when he can't face how bad he feels any more, at gunpoint, and I strap him down and torture him. It was bad enough when I was doing it once a month. I've done it three times this week, twice in the last two days. It's cruel. We're supposed to be better than them. Right now? If that was me, and someone told me they could fix my chip, I'd tell them anything they wanted to know. That's a far bigger security risk, if you ask me."

He let out a ragged breath as Chris regarded him in astonishment. He'd known Don was a mess. Known, too, that his implant had been badly abused, and that Mike had had a few tries at retuning it. And of course that could only be done in black section, and there was no way that Wade, a self-confessed Spectran collaborator, would be allowed in without an armed guard.

Chris hadn't appreciated that Wade's implant was damaged. As his doctor, he probably should have guessed, and was a little surprised that Wade hadn't mentioned it to him - but he could appreciate that the very last thing Don wanted was anyone else poking and prodding him in that area. That was, after all, what the Spectrans had done. And that put a whole new light on it. If Wade needed his implant fixing for medical reasons, then suddenly Chris's priorities had to change. He was Don's doctor. It was his job to see that Don got the medical treatment he needed.

"Do you think you can fix it?" he asked.

Bennett grimaced, and Chris had the impression that he was making an effort not to pace. "I can try. If we operate and open the chip up, I can disable the power source. At the very least, that should stop the discomfort. But...I'd rather have a real try at fixing it properly. Personally I think the kid's suffered enough, and what the hell does it matter if theoretically he could fire a jump-drive? Let him keep his reflexes and his coordination; he's already lost everything else that ever mattered to him. I never said it before, because Grant would probably have locked me up. But if we presented it as a useful precursor to fixing Mark? Without Grant, Anderson and Ivanov might go for it."

Chris thought rapidly. "Is it a useful precursor to fixing Mark? The problems aren't the same. The implants aren't the same model, either. Sympathy only goes so far – that's a few hundred thousand dollars of electronics you're talking about putting in the back of his neck, in the full knowledge that he'll never use it. When we have people waiting who may well use it." He indicated his computer. "If you use a chip on Wade, that's one fewer candidate for Team Eight, in the near future at least. And we really do need those remote control planes in action sooner rather than later. I was looking at implanting five potential remote pilots, and now we're talking about reducing that to three. Four, with Mark. If that's what Mark's intending to do. It's not like we can make him."

"I think demonstrating that we can make major repairs to a chip after the implantation window has closed is well worth doing in its own right." Bennett grinned. "Imagine if we implanted a blank chip in every Academy kid at entry, and put the expensive internals in later for the ones who made the grade at eighteen or twenty. It could fix the whole problem of needing to use kids. That would be huge."

He turned hopeful eyes on Chris. "But I think we should do it quite apart from that, and now. Mark gets fixed when he ran away from his responsibilities, and Don doesn't when he did nothing wrong except to get caught and tortured? That's beyond wrong, but it is what Grant will do. You know it is. But Grant isn't part of the decision-making process at the moment. If we get in there quickly, now, Don might get some sympathy and fair treatment. I hate to wish ill of anyone, but if we wait until Grant's back to use his veto, the kid's going to be in hell forever."

Chris thought desperately. On one hand he agreed. On the other hand...

The other hand wasn't his problem, he decided. The other hand was the security staff's problem, and he was much happier with that being Anderson's call than Grant's. Medically, emotionally, physically, he had to agree with Mike. He disliked the ethics of operating on the more disposable man first, or of rushing the decision based on someone else's illness, but that was just too bad. One of them had to be first, if either of them was ever to have the implant repair they needed. And Chris was pretty sure he wouldn't be able to live with himself if Grant came back on duty and persuaded the other senior decision-makers that neither of them needed it.

"Right," he said. "We will need to move fast. Grant's going to be fit for duty again within days, and that's something I am not prepared to manipulate – I'm his doctor too. I won't harm one of my patients, even to benefit another. Let's see what Anderson and Ivanov think while they're still the only ones making the decision."

He turned back to his computer, and, feeling sick, returned the bottom two names on his list of final implantation candidates to the waiting list. The only consolation was that they'd never know how close they'd come.