Last F1 chapter, posted just before the Japanese Grand Prix weekend kicks off.
More stuffs been happening, started my lectures, I have two days with no lectures but I will probably fill that time up with research or other studenty things, maybe some writing if you're lucky.
I went to Collectormania in London last weekend with my sister, met Joe Flanigan, the guy who plays Shepard in Stargate Atlantis, he was pretty cool. Met some other people as well, got humongous blisters but it was pretty awesome.
I've also taken up taekwando, after one session I found out just how uncoordinated my limbs can be, and that I have muscles in my leg that seem to have been gathering dust until now.
On the plus side, it's been less than a month since my last update and I have proper internet and it's 2am at the time of posting for me.
Any similarities to real people are purely coincidental. And seeing as none of you seem to watch the amazing sport that is F1 I don't think you would be able to tell anyway.
Max hated being right sometimes. Really, couldn't for once the chatter be wrong along with her gut?
The top ten cars had parked up after the third qualifying in Parc Ferme where no mechanic could touch the cars unless approved, or the driver wanted to start from the pit lane. The drivers had gone in to get weighed, Max had sent one of her invisibleclones to stick to them, hoping it was an unnecessary measure.
It wasn't. Max watched with her split screen vision as two guys with big guns had been waiting for the drivers around the first corner, a guy behind them also producing a gun preventing them from running. They had been herded into a hospitality room and forced to kneel and have their hands bound behind their backs. Not all of them had been happy at this, the rugged Australian driver had lashed out only to be knocked back with the butt of a gun. The others restrained themselves as two more people entered the room with guns, a woman and another man.
The woman's appearance elicited a response from a few drivers, most notably the blond German driver Max had been talking with yesterday. There was obviously a history between them. The woman probably could be a supermodel of Japanese descent, but she had hints of danger around her with how she dressed, the katana on her back helping with that image along with the skin tight black clothes and high heels that really weren't practical for anyone.
She walked past the line of drivers, stopping in front of the German driver and crouching down to his level, he continued to look down, refusing to meet her eye. Only from the reflection of one of the framed pictures could Max's clone see the cruel smirk on the woman's face as she stroked the Germans cheek and force his head up. He jerked his head away and returned to looking down as if trying to pretend she wasn't there. There was a sharp crack as the woman back handed him.
Max figured now would be the best time to intervene, before any more harm came to the drivers, either physical or psychological. Finding somewhere secluded she removed her radio and pulled out a dead Gameboy, heated up a bit as if she'd been playing with it for a while and crouched down to switched places with her invisible clone, which had been crouched hidden under a table in the corner of the hostage room. A small pop announced her arrival drawing the occupants attention. She tossed the Gameboy down in mock frustration as if it had just broken and been the cause of the pop.
Max had to force herself to exaggerate the appearance of pain when one of the men dragged her from under the table by her hair and threw her down in front of the woman. The drivers all looked shocked but the woman assumed it was because of her being there, not who it was.
"Well, what do we have here? A child." Max almost growled at that. "Are you supposed to be here little girl?" The woman's voice was dripping with condescendence as she picked up the Gameboy to inspect it as one of the men patted her down and after finding nothing, Max had hidden her pass in her boot, forced her to her knees.
"Are you?" Max retorted, trying to temporarily regress a few years for the right attitude. It must have been good as she was back-handed back to the floor.
"Hmm, I'm not sure whether to make an example out of you or deal with you later," the woman mused, pressing a finger to her pursed lips in mock thought. A cruel smirk twisted her features and she tried to stomp on Max's back with her heel.
"You're going to regret your choice either way," Max grinned, having rolled into a crouch, avoiding the pointy heel, her leg arced through the air knocking the woman's gun from her hand and catching it as she straightened up to a standing position.
The men made to move in on her but the woman held up a hand, halting them.
"She's mine," the woman hissed. In the reflective surface of a picture Max saw the blond German driver flinch and look at the floor. There was a smooth hiss of metal against leather as the woman unsheathed her katana. Max tucked the gun into her jeans, it would only get in the way and she didn't want to accidently shot one of the drivers.
The two women glared, evaluating each other, Max wasn't willing to move and allow the woman between her and the drivers. The woman seemed to have the advantage, the reach and lethality of the blade she wielded, Max wasn't fazed, not with all she'd experienced.
The woman slashed forward, Max sidestepped and brought her leg up, behind the woman's defence to land a solid blow across her stomach, her knee leading the blow. She could feel the steel ribs of the corset the woman wore, it limited the effect of the blow spreading the momentum to the point the woman probably barely felt it, yet left Max's leg throbbing a bit.
With the initial moves played it was time for the fun to begin, the two women began to move faster and more viciously. Max was trying to carefully keep herself as a blockade, gaining a few light cuts in the process when she realised what ever move she would have made would have left the drivers unprotected. They were her priority and she would protect them until backup arrived or she knew she was in a position to not only take out the woman but disarm and take down all of the men.
From what she could tell, to do so she would have to get behind the woman which left the drivers unprotected for a few seconds. An idea popped into her head, it was a bit childish but would hopefully distract the woman.
As she dodged the next slash of the katana she slipped past and grabbed a huge handful of the woman's hair and pulled it as she launched her offensive on the men. There was a clatter as the katana dropped while the woman was tossed around as Max moved until she let go of the hair. The men dropped like flies having not expected the attack.
But then again so did Max when the woman retrieved the gun she had stolen from the woman earlier. The butt of the pistol smashed against the back of Max's head and pain exploded throughout her skull, her vision briefly going white as she hit the floor. It was far from enough to keep her down, though the bullets that hit the back of her enhanced Kevlar vest did it's best to help. Max lay still for a few moments, allowing the woman to think she'd won. Then Max lifted herself up, picking out the small rounds from the vest and dropping them one by one.
Her cover had just been blown, innocent kids don't generally wear Kevlar. She didn't care, she'd been shot at and she was taking it personally.
"Who do you work for?" the woman demanded, pointing the gun at the back of Max's head, a place obviously unprotected. Max wasn't sure why that hadn't been the first target. Max considered her answer for a few seconds before ducking her head and spinning to knock the gun away from her. The woman had a tighter grip on it this time and it was only pointed in a different direction when she leapt on the woman, grinding the pretty face into the carpet, twisting the weapon out of her hand.
"You'll never leave this room alive," the woman hissed. Max frowned and pulsed her FA to see if the woman was just bluffing. She didn't feel like getting shot again, snipers were more likely to go for head shots which she doubted she would survive.
The three snipers covering the entrance to the building told her that, no, the woman wasn't bluffing. On the plus side there were no rigged explosives. People were easy to disable, explosives weren't so much.
The snipers were easily dispatched by a couple of her pre-placed clones. The snipers must have known where the best spots were and waited until the end of the race to get into position, Max had been regularly checking good places for sniper nests and waited for the best moment to strike.
"You think that scares me? A bunch of words from you. You obviously haven't been doing this long," Max said scathingly, she maliciously pressed her knee into the woman's back smirking at the slight whimper of pain the woman couldn't hold in.
One of the woman's accomplices was stirring, reminding Max that she should actually wrap this all up. It was a shame she only had one pair of hand cuffs but she took great delight in cranking them as tight as she could around the woman's wrists. She removed some sebon from the heel of her boot and sent the mooks back into the wonderful land of unconsciousness.
She turned to the drivers, ready to untie them, all of them had the same shell shocked look on their faces. What worried Max more was the look on the cute blond German's face, he'd reacted badly to the woman's appearance and look like he was completely in shock. She moved quickly, flicking out a knife and cutting the blond and his team mates bonds, she passed the team mate her knife so he could help the others. Max knelt down slowly in front of the blond.
"You're ok, she's not going to hurt you anymore," Max whispered gently, she bent her head lower to try to look him in the eye. The bruise that had blossomed on his cheek seemed huge. "I'm here to protect you." She was careful not to initiate any contact, she didn't know how he would react in this state, anything could set him off.
From the look in his eyes he wasn't understanding her, English just wasn't getting through, Max wracked her brains for the German vocab that she needed, any progress she had made yesterday had been lost to the urgency of the situation.
"Schützen. Ich schützen du," she finally managed to stutter out, even to her own ears the words sounded mangled but the driver looked at her and cracked the faintest of smiles. "Ich halten du sicher." More mangled words but the smile grew a bit more and he looked up to meet her eyes, she could see they were watery but no tears had fallen, he was too stubborn for that. "Come on, you look like you need a drink." She helped him up and let him lean on her shoulder until he was steady on his feet. The other drivers were milling around, unsure what to do now. They had been spooked by the woman's threat and so were avoiding the door.
Again Max flashed FA and saw some agents were position down the corridor each side waiting for movement. Amongst them were Tony and Itachi, standing with Alex who had obviously recognised them from Australia. She knelt down and slipped her pass out of her boot, hopefully they would notice it before they opened fire. She slipped passed the other drivers keeping the German close.
As she pushed down the door handle she heard the feint clicks of guns being armed. She stuck her arm out, holding the pass, waited a few seconds and poked her head out too, grinning sheepishly at them.
"It's all safe, the threat has been neutralised." One of the senior agents nodded at her and allowed some paramedics through to check up on the drivers and a few agents to secure the room.
"Told you she would be in the middle of it," Max heard Itachi mutter to her brother. Her lip twitched into a smirk, of course she was in the middle, it was the best place to be. She followed the paramedics back into the room, keeping close to the driver she had taken onto herself to keep safe.
When she'd been told to debrief, she'd left the driver in Itachi's care with some hot chocolate, there wasn't a person on the planet she trusted more at that moment and hot chocolate was the best remedy for shock that didn't contain alcohol or caffeine. Agent Harkin hadn't been pleased with Tony's presence but Max had persuaded Harkin that another person off the books wasn't a bad thing if someone somehow got hold of the agent manifesto for this operation.
The rest of the day was mostly uneventful. Everyone fell back into their routine, a story was feed to the spectators, the drivers were given a choice on whether they wanted to drive tomorrow. The mental trauma could affect their driving but it was their choice. Max stuck around the garages, personally checking up on the drivers. She'd managed to get personally attached to the subjects of her mission, something that hadn't happened for a long time.
It was only because Itachi practically kidnapped her that she actually went back to the guest house for the night, taking the opportunity to check her over for injuries, in the stress of everything else no one had thought that she might have got hurt.
Race day was buzzing, the air was practically electric and it was easy for Max to get swept up in the excitement and forget she still had a job to do, just because one incident had occurred didn't mean someone else might try.
The pit straight was packed with the cars, drivers, engineers and reporters as they prepared for the start of the race. It was raining a bit to most of what could be seen were umbrellas in various team colours.
At 1pm everyone vacated the track save the drivers who were strapped into their cars, revving the engines. Two green lights started the warm up lap, the drivers desperately weaving across the track to get as much heat into their tires and brakes as they could. Warmer tires meant better grip. They returned to the start/finish line down the pit straight and waited. One by one five red lights lit up above the start/finish line. The cars were revving up as they lit up.
Then a few seconds later the five red lights went out and the cars roared away from their grid positions, trying to make up as many places in the first few corners without connecting with some of the more daring drivers.
If watching a race on TV was thrilling then being there in person was ten times cooler. Max felt immersed in it all as she watched from the pit wall, her clones giving her many viewpoints, showing her all of the action, no matter where on track it was.
A couple of cars crashed out and others had some form of car failure that ended their race, it was pretty much expected in most races. It was very rare for all the cars to finish a race.
Max was happy that all of the drivers from the top ten yesterday finished. A Brit standing on the top step filled her with pride even though that wasn't technically her current nationality, the cute German was on the second step, a rarity for him with his car this year not being with some of the other teams in terms of pace. The third step was occupied by another Brit, his first podium of his F1 career in a car that no one thought had the pace to get even near the top three despite good qualifying.
The crowd went wild, with two countrymen on the podium they had a reason to go wild, and even the German got cheers from the people. There was going to be a lot of partying going on tonight, Max had received invites from most of the teams and during the course of the evening she visited them all before she disappeared off to her next adventure.
With the F1 over the trio headed back for the airport, Tony had to get back to work, he wasn't looking forward to the grilling he would get from the Director. On the plus side, Max was lending him her car since his had been blown up. Max did have a pretty sweet car.
Itachi wanted to go home but from Max's body language she wasn't ready to cut short her wanders. It was just a matter of time before she would get another call and have something else to do.
They were sitting in Hyde Park when the call came from the SGC, a gouald ship had crashed in Ealing, not far from London. They wanted someone who knew the dangers to get there and contain the scene before some innocent civilian came by.
Max had grinned at Itachi and headed off to where her bike was parked.
I could translate the German for you but it's pretty much what Max said in simpler German words
Bonus points for anyone who can guess the next new crossover