"So, Doctor? Your status report on the Eagle, please?"
Chris knew full well what Ivanov meant. Time for him to eat humble pie, in front of every senior official in black section. There wasn't much else he could do, not given what everyone else had said about the things Mark had achieved in the past week. He'd known the man was dedicated. He hadn't expected the rate at which he'd been able to drive himself back towards being a functional member of G-Force. Maybe he should have done. Once the way was clear in front of him, Mark had always been unstoppable.
Well, Chris had never been happier to admit he'd misjudged someone. Ever.
"Mark's physical status is…" He couldn't keep himself from smiling. "It's about where I'd prayed it might be in six weeks or so. He's made extraordinary progress. Mike's suggestion of fast-tracking his recovery using old implant settings is working amazingly well."
"Not so well from where I'm sitting," Grant muttered, then raised his voice. "He's short on time to get back up to speed since you retuned him to sleep like a baby. We may need to reconsider priorities. He has to get back up to date on Spectran battle tactics. He has to know what the rest of ISO's capabilities are. He needs to start coming to the weekly intelligence meetings again, given the current satellite threat."
"I won't do anything to slow his physical recovery," Chris said as forcefully as he could without actively shouting. I've betrayed his trust far too many times already, and this is where I draw the line in the sand. He caught Anderson's eye, from where he sat at the head of the table. The security chief nodded, and Chris continued more quietly.
"At some point fairly soon, faking his implant out isn't going to help any more. It's persuading his system that it needs to get back to the musculature he used to have. It won't do a darn thing about the state that muscle is in. He will have to get fit by himself. At that point, he'll go back to needing a normal amount of sleep."
"We had a list of conditions which Mark had to achieve before we would reactivate him," Anderson said. "How close is he, Major?"
Grant made a show of riffling through the papers in front of him and pulling out what Chris assumed was the list in question, typed up and neatly laid out with bullet points. Most had neat pencil crosses next to them. "He's achieved everything we require except whirlwind pyramid. I believe that's scheduled for tomorrow at ten."
"So, if he performs satisfactorily in that?" Ivanov asked.
Chris held his hands up, wishing it wasn't always down to him to put a dampener on the situation. "No, not yet. We'd still need to retune his implant and optimize for jump. We can't do that while it's working with year-old physical settings. Look, I know it took me a while to believe it could happen, but now? Yes, we are getting the Eagle back. It won't be just yet, but I really will tell you when I think he's ready. And it won't be too long."
He leaned back in his chair, not bothering to look to see who was smirking. It felt good to be able to tell them that things were finally going right.