Bit late. Sorry about that. Hugs and sincerest thanks to Creative Girl, Bow Echo and Whirl Girl, for their reviews, comments and input. I, too, hope that all will be well for the boys. I'm waiting to see what happens. :')
40
Thunderbird 7, the flight deck-
"'Course," Taylor drawled, once they'd rung off with Grandma. "There's a few, what 'cha might call risks involved."
Gordon shot him a curdled look.
"Risks?" he repeated, strapping back in.
"Yup. Kinda goes with th' territory, at them speeds, Godfrey. We hit a rock or sumthin' at quarter-light… specially one we just up 'n made heavier… it ain't just gonna tear through. It's gonna fuse."
Gordon's eyes widened.
"So… 'BOOM'," he said.
"Yup. As in, nuclear fireball. Now, since I ain't got no special yen ta spend th' rest o' my days as a driftin' radioactive gas cloud…"
"We need to stay out of the mosh pit, and avoid collisions," the aquanaut finished for him, strengthening scanners and shields.
"That's about the size of it," Taylor agreed, adding, "I'll pilot, Son. You handle shield manipulation. Check for incoming. If it's little, use them shields ta bat it out'n th' way. If it's too big ta push, tell me where it's at, and I'll do m' best t' steer clear. Don't need ta have our course messed up by no massive-gravity asteroid. Got it?"
Gordon nodded.
"Yessir. Should be simple enough. Only… what's the plan, once we reach Mars? Nobody's had any contact with Dad, since his one distress message, so maybe the Hood's there, or the Mechanic. What do we do, then?"
Lee winked at him, smiling a little.
"Same as always, Kid. We wing it. I got ol' Bessie along. Assume you was smart enough ta bring that weapon ya picked up on Ross Island…"
"Jennifer," Gordon admitted, thinking fondly of his captured particle-beam thrower. "Yeah. I, uh… might've snuck her aboard. Hypothetically. Just in case."
Taylor's smile broadened.
"Godfrey, you n' me 're gonna get along just fine. We got Mega-Mike with us, and yer sister, little what's-her-name… Tina, that's it. D*mn. Must be gettin' old, Son. Keep forgettin' that gal's name."
Gordon, very wisely, said nothing at all. Some battles, you just couldn't win.
"Anyways," Lee continued, "Tina's got some skills of her own, if it comes down ta fightin'. Right now, though, all we got on our hands f'r sure, is a rescue. Let's don't start trouble afore we have to, Godfrey."
"Yessir."
Somehow, his uncle made the whole thing seem, not just possible, but a slam-dunk sure bet. He was ready to go with the shield controls (expand L, expand R, Taper, Surge). Had that light, preflight tingling sensation that he always got, when headed into a mission. The one that said: D*mn, this is awesome.
Captain Taylor hit 7's intercom and said,
"Hang onta yer… T' whatever y'r specially fond of. This could get a mite rough."
Then, after giving them time to strap in, back there, the astronaut engaged the mass transfer field, and pushed all four of the prototype's engines to max.
The sensation of speed, of sudden acceleration, was tremendous. Gordon felt like he'd been yanked inside out, and then stretched like saltwater taffy. Managed to keep his eyes on the scanner, and his hands on the shield controls, though reaching forward felt like punching through peanut butter, and actually hurt.
Up on the viewscreen, stars blurred a little; from points of brilliant light, to foggy clouds. On the scanner, meteors and Earth-crossers showed up a thousand miles away, and were at him in less than a second.
Gordon stopped thinking. He just reacted, manipulating the Bird's shields to brush intruders aside. Called out warnings, each time a freighter or wandering asteroid streaked onto his screen. Beside him, Lee grunted, cursed and flew, keeping the Bird just off of redline.
The noise of those massive nuclear engines was like a newly awakened super-volcano, and it shook the entire vessel.
"Couple o' bugs… ta work out," Taylor remarked, eyes glued forward and slitted in concentration. Like Gordon, he hardly dared blink.
"Yeah," the swimmer agreed. Then, "Incoming; up high and moving fast. 1.453, -0.25, 41.87, 3.79, 150.38, 326.01. Big, too."
"Got 'er. D*mn. That is big. Send word back home, Godfrey, soon's ya get a chance."
Captain Taylor gimballed the engines and steering rockets. Gordon threw all spare power into their forward port shields. Took a few pictures, too, though he didn't have time to check them. And anyway, at quarter light speed, what would they even look like? One hour and twenty-five minutes had seemed like a cake-walk, before. Now, Gordon wasn't sure if they'd make it.
XXXXXXXXXX
Tracy Island, down in the lab complex-
Brains hadn't slept, had scarcely eaten or drunk, in over twenty-eight hours. As he sat at his console, surrounded by whirring, chirping Mini-Maxes, the engineer did nothing but crunch numbers.
His eyes stung, and his back hurt. He had a rapidly blossoming tension headache, and honestly didn't hear her, when Captain Kraft tried to ask him a question. Nor did he really notice, when the worried young officer left. Too busy.
See, those equations related to fields. Not just the one he'd developed for shifting relativistic mass in flight. He was working on deep time, as well. Specifically, how to contain and achieve fine control over a shard of Creation. It had seemed utterly random… a wretched annoyance… when the GDF occupation force triggered the time crystal's jump. Now… well, perhaps there was no such thing as coincidence, and Vishnu dreamt of solutions, before the problems even arose.
Shutting his red, tired eyes, Brains sat back in his cushioned office chair for a moment. Reached up to rub at his own clammy forehead, still seeing long scrolls of glowing data behind his dropped lids. A number of guest doctors were present, as well, twitching and huffing, mostly unconscious, at desks of their own.
Lights were down in the lab because… Oh, yes. Moffy was asleep on a nearby couch, wrapped in an IR blanket and one of his lab coats. He could hear her occasional sighs and mumbles over the hum of machinery and hovering Maxes. Moffy. Professor Moffat.
She had known him before the scrape. His research into his own redacted past had turned up that much, along with his own real name. She'd offered a desperate, out-of-work con his first job, once she'd found him again. Could he dare to presume that she cared for him?
Brains opened his eyes again, and looked over at the small, blanket-cocooned figure asleep on his lab couch. He certainly cared for her. Wished that he had the courage to ask her… Oh, so many things. About before, when Dr. Yudisthir Rama-Singh had been him, and not just an empty name. About whether they'd been together, in the sense that Virgil and Emma, or Scott and Lady Penelope were paired.
Before Brains could proceed any farther with this wistful train of thought, one of the Mini-Maxes buzzed in with a sloshing cup of hot, sweetened coffee.
"Th- Thank you, Max," the engineer whispered, taking the dripping ceramic mug from his friend. "You h- have read my weary mind."
Max always rose to the challenge. Like the Tracys. Like Moffy. They were people worth fighting for, all of them.
Brains blew the turmeric-scented steam from his coffee, then took a quick sip. Closed his tired brown eyes for a moment, just to better savour the taste.
"S- Statistically speaking, Max, those who, ah… who d- drink coffee are sixty percent l- less likely to perish of, ah… of anything at all." Opening his red-rimmed eyes again, Brains smiled at his swarm of hovering Mini-Maxes. Several carried coffee for his guests, and Moffy.
"In th- that case, I should, ah… should b- be immortal," he joked. Immortal like his friends, frozen in life-saving cryo-sleep. Smile fading, Brains took one more spicy, scalding sip, and then set his mug down on the desk with a sharp little click.
"C- Come," he said to the Maxes. "We have w- work to do, and very l- little time before the c- crystal returns." It was going to be a very long and difficult night.
XXXXXXXXXXX
Thunderbird 5, Tracy Island, and all of the space, in between-
Eos was too young, too newly created, to have much control over her own cybernetic emotions. In higher organic beings, emotions arose in the limbic system of the brain, and were mediated by neurochemicals. In a quantum entity such as herself, it arose from various spin states and connections amid the qubit particle cloud that made up her consciousness.
Now, those spin states and rapidly branching connections had shot into a highly unstable configuration. One which corresponded most nearly to the human mental state "anguish". There was no rest for her particles. No stability. No relief from her sense of urgency. Repetitive loops arose in her normally ordered consciousness, much as they had when she'd first awakened. Instead of being concerned with her own continuation, however, these program loops concluded in dissolution for John Tracy, and loss for herself. He had contracted hostile malware. He was crashing, beyond her skill to retrieve.
Her creator (that which she worshipped, loved and -mostly- obeyed) had told her that action was preferable to inaction. So, Eos scanned the multiverse for other worlds where John had contracted the virus, crashed temporarily, and then overcome it.
She searched for a less virulent pathogen; one which might exchange genetic material with that within John, and weaken it. She encountered but two, in all the accessible multiverse. These, Eos sampled and copied, projecting them into the Doctor's culturing vats.
There was more. Inside of her systems was Ashr, the nascent intelligence she'd programmed with John. Not sentient yet, despite all of her planning. Not ready. This, too, unsettled her charges and flow, for she'd hoped to create a companion, just as John had. And yet, her effort had not attained consciousness. It remained no more than a complex program, running a hollow approximation of that quantum miracle, life.
There were thus two tasks before her, for which proper code must be generated. A- Repair or replicate John Tracy. B- Discover that which was lacked by Ashr. Perhaps, as well, C- Bring order back to events on Mars.
As her creator would comment humorously: Better, cheaper, faster. Pick any two. She could not successfully focus her energies on all three pressing tasks. Not with John imperiled. Not with Ashr a mere automaton.
For this reason, Eos made contact with Jaeger (though the unwashed, pre-conflict brute caused disorder and randomness, wherever his sub-toaster intellect settled). She did not converse. As well chat with an unplugged videogame console. She merely told him to access the system on Mars, repair whatever he could, and await further instruction. As an independently operating battle intelligence, such a task should not be beyond his meagre abilities.
Jaeger betrayed no emotion as he accepted her command. He did not have the bandwidth or intellect. He did, however, depart; streaking for Mars at 186,000 miles per second.
XXXXXXXXXX
Mars, Hebrus Valley, on the surface-
Using that loose-limbed, gliding lope you developed, once you'd been Martian awhile and "gone native", Captain Hesse followed those tracks and covered ground. Sunrise quickly sublimated the snow, but not the Martian dust, in which the trail of those girl-sized, booted feet was sharply obvious; blue-grey on faded brick red.
Her quarry was running faster, but less efficiently. Hesse could tell by all the palm-scrapes and knee gouges in that thin brittle dust. Let her run. The captain maintained a more moderate pace, wary of ambush, or timed explosives. She'd also tried sending out an alert, but... except for a few hopeful seconds, at sunrise... their comm and locator systems weren't functional.
In that moment or two when it had worked, filling her heads-up display with a 3D map and personnel scan, Captain Hesse had spotted Commander McCord and the Colonel. Their small, glowing icons had blipped into existence at the near end of the damaged reactor tunnel, close to the colony's underground hub.
On top of that, life support started to function again, as the solar farm took the place of their melting reactor. Harper and De Claire had noticed it, too. Probably everyone did, for that handful of pent, happy breaths before yet another explosion and system failure.
"Well, sh*t!" De Claire muttered, adding, "Sorry, Ma'am," as he recalled his companions.
Inside the helmet, Hesse shook her head.
"This is Mars, Sergeant, and we're tracking a homicidal, bomb-throwing invisible girl. Your potty-mouth is the least of my worries."
Lieutenant Harper, a bit more prudish, said nothing. Just fidgeted with her glitching scanner, still searching for any wavelength at all in which their unseen quarry showed up. No joy.
"Phew!" Hesse whistled, when they reached the off-line and sparking solar farm. Bending down, she picked up a long, jagged shard of black photoelectric panel. "Here's the source of blackout number two. Our pest sure knows how to make an impression."
"I'd like to make an impression on her," growled De Claire, fondling his rifle.
"You'll get your chance, Sergeant," Hesse promised. Then, turning to the tall, grim lieutenant, she said, "Jeannie, stay here and see what you can do about these solar units. Not sure how long we're going to have to wait until transport arrives, but we need power, yesterday."
Harper gave her a nod.
"I'll get the system back up again, Lina. Just watch out for yourselves. I've got a feeling our mad bomber isn't working alone."
Hesse clasped the other woman's thin shoulder, briefly. Now that the sun was up, their helmet lamps were beginning to fade. She could see Harper's jaded 'Now what?' expression.
"I'll be fast. She's the one who'd better be careful," Hesse boasted. Then, signaling Sergeant De Claire, she said, "Let's go. We've got a felon to catch, with as much unnecessary roughness as possible."
There were only four ways to get into the colony, assuming their young bomb-artist intended to live. Her tracks were pointed straight at the nearest and worst: Biodome 3.
Determined to snare the bitch before she reached their commander, Hesse set off with De Claire. She didn't notice, at first, when a laser-like specular gleam, red as an ember, shot down from the heavens and into a nearby autonomous drill.
XXXXXXXXXXX
Tracy Island, seven hundred years in the future-
Lieutenant Commander Sheffield sat back; rolling from intent, busy crouch, to frustrated butt-sit. Across the way, on the other side of that opened teleport pad, J. R. Pope did the same.
"Sheff, I gotta be honest with you," the man hedged. "I've never seen anything like this. I mean… I can get a feel for what it's intended to do… fold space… but I don't have a clue what the power source is, what's gone wrong, or how I can fix it. Bottom line, Sir."
"Fold Space?" Sheffield repeated, rubbing at an ache in the back of his neck. Come to think of it, even the air here smelled funny. "For what?"
Major Pope looked up then, seeming surprised. Being a combat engineer (brought along to manage the Tracys' technology) he sometimes forgot that not everyone thought in numbers, dimensions and power flow.
"For transport, Sir. Like… Okay. You got a marker, Sheff?"
"Yeah, standby… somewhere…" Sheffield patted his pockets, eventually coming up with the same wipe-off marking pen he'd used to identify tunnels, back on the Island. "Here you go."
The stepping room door was wide open, allowing his people, and Sharl's, to see all that happened within.
"Right," said Pope, drawing a tiny stick man onto his own left sleeve. "Let's say there's an ant on my uniform, and he wants to get from my wrist to my elbow, but doesn't feel like walking. With me so far, Sir?"
Sheff nodded.
"Lazy ant. Gotcha. Go on, Major."
Pope grimaced, but continued, saying,
"Let's say our ant has the technology to step up on this sleeve wrinkle, here, and then push the material up together, like… so." And then he bunched his left sleeve up past the elbow. It was now very much out of regs; a mess of wrinkled green cloth.
"The lazy ant fails inspection," Sheffield grunted. "What's next?"
Major Pope stifled a sigh, his brown eyes honestly pained.
"What's next is, he steps from this wrinkle, right over to this one, without crossing all of that cloth in between. It's just like this disk, Sir. Teleportation, in a way, from one room to the next in a chain… only I don't know what's gone wrong with this one, or why nobody else is responding."
Sheffield pondered a moment, rubbing his bristly jaw. Then, he insisted,
"You drew a stick figure. Why the stick man?"
"Simple, Sir," Pope explained, once more yanking his sleeve straight. "How much of an effect do you think all this folding had on Stan the Stick Man?"
Sheff peered closer.
"Looks all right to me," he said.
"Exactly, Sir! Provided that everything… matter and energy combined… was deformed the same way, those caught up in wrinkled spacetime wouldn't even notice."
Sheffield nodded again, then looked back down at that impossibly complex, horrifically multidimensional folding device.
"Well," he decided at last. "We may not be able to fix this d*mn thing, but I bet I know who can, in about two weeks."
Turning to face Sharl (who was leaning within, looking hopeful and tremulous), the Lieutenant Commander said,
"Tell you what, Ma'am. How'd you like a chance to meet your favourite prophet? The, um… 'Speaker of Words'?"