HYPERION

PART FIVE

'When we pull this off, the press is going to be huge.'

'If we pull it off,' Jeff said, his eyes fixed on the metal wings of the eagle that perched forever at the far corner of his desk.

If John was startled by his father's response, his expression betrayed nothing through the portrait feed. Only his voice expressed emotion. The faintest hint of puzzlement. 'What do you mean 'if'? You heard Alan's last transmission – Gunnar and Holman are alive. How is that not a success?'

Jeff's eyes continued their scrutiny of the blindly perching eagle. How to explain to his son the anxiety that crouched in the pit of his stomach, the foreboding that had gripped him the moment that Thunderbird Three had passed beyond normal transmission range. Beyond that invisible envelope of security.

'All the same,' he said to the unblinking eagle, 'until we have confirmation from Thunderbird Three we'll keep the preliminary contact under wraps.'

'But Father – '

'John.' Jeff's gaze lifted to meet his son's. Grey eyes meeting blue across twelve thousand miles of space. 'Under. Wraps.'

'But Father – '

'Alan, get back.'

Alan halted at Gordon's words, hovered undecided at the edge of the spatter of dark blood. He looked at Holman's crushed head, at Scott kneeling over the pulped remains, his brother's chest still heaving from the effort of smashing Holman's skull in.

'C'mon.' Gordon slid a hand beneath Scott's armpit, dragged him like lead weight to his feet. 'You okay?' He stared hard at Scott, his eyes moving intently across his brother's face.

'I'm okay.' Scott tried duck away from the scrutiny, to extricate himself from the insistent tugging at his arm, but his brother's position remained firm.

'You've got that crap all over you.' Gordon raised his free hand towards Scott's face.

Scott batted the hand away. He wiped at his face, his expression crinkling at the stench. 'Shit.'

Gordon's voice lowered. 'You need to decontaminate, asap.'

I know, Scott wanted to spit. Said instead, 'Is it…' His words trailed away. He could feel Holman's blood congealing coldly on his face, gobbets of it sticky where it had slid beneath his collar. He needed to get that shit off him, get it off him now, but… 'Is it dead,' he asked, voice cracking unexpectedly.

'It's dead.' Gordon's fingers pressed tighter into Scott's flesh.

'We don't know for sure.' Scott's feet refused to move, an unbidden tremor weakening him suddenly at the knees. 'We thought it was dead before. On Hyperion. They were supposed to be dead.'

'Well, it's dead now.' Gordon looked down at Holman, shot a glance at Alan standing just beyond the field of dark blood. 'Don't touch anything,' he called to Alan. 'I'll take care of it.'

'Get it off the ship,' Scott said. 'We need to get it off the ship.'

'I'll get it off.' Gordon changed his tack. Pushed instead of pulled and shunted Scott towards Alan. 'But you need to get that crap off you. Now.'

It was, without doubt, simultaneously the most disgusting and the most terrifying thing Gordon had ever done.

It wasn't like he had never seen blood before. He'd seen it spilling out of live bodies and dead ones. Felt it running warm into his hands. Felt it drying hard on his skin and turning his uniform to a crust. Slipped his fingers unexpectedly into the cool congealing blood of the dead as they lay crushed and broken in the dark, eyes wide open and glinting in the light of his lamp. And him, grimacing apologetically at their dead glazed faces and wondering if they might be able to see him, somehow, his hands covered with what was left of them and wiping it disrespectfully off on his pants.

Gordon wasn't grimacing apologetically now. He was just plain grimacing, his face pulled tight into a rictus of disgust. And no matter how hard he tried to override it, because shit, it was starting to hurt his face, the grimace remained, stuck there tight and hard and waiting for the wind to change.

Christ. This stuff was everywhere.

He scraped aggressively at Holman's blood where it stuck to the floor. Only it wasn't blood, was it. It was red, yeah, but it was darker, red tainted with black. And sticky. Gordon had never seen blood stick like this. Thick and viscous and globby, like it was trying to congeal into something firm, trying to turn itself into something solid.

He sat back on his heels, surveyed the dark sticky streaks and suppressed a shudder at the memory of Holman's head exploding, at the wild rush of blood that had leapt from the open skull and plastered to Scott's face as Scott smashed down with the gun and smashed and smashed and smashed… Christ. He was never gonna get that image out of his head, was he?

Gordon placed his hands on Holman's body, felt the bones shift and move beneath his fingers. Jesus. He rolled Holman onto a plastic sheet, half expecting one of the pale dead hands to come snaking to life and reach out and… that was when the terror crept in. Because what if Holman wasn't dead? What if…?

Gordon settled the remains onto the tarpaulin, threw the bloodied cleaning rags onto the pile, bundled the whole as tight as he could and pushed the entirety through the inner door of the airlock.

Alive or dead, this heap was getting off this ship.

The door hissed shut with a satisfying thump and Gordon had no intention of following protocol and waiting for the air to cycle out of the chamber first. He jammed a finger down hard on the panel, watched with satisfaction as the outer door slammed open and Holman's bundled remains shot explosively out of the airlock on a cloud of pressured air.

Jeff took a tumbler from the drinks cabinet, slammed it a little too loudly against the countertop as his free hand groped towards the decanter of bourbon.

He was angry. His head still hot from when he'd cut the connection to Thunderbird Five because hell, why didn't John ever know when enough was enough already? Instead John had kept poking the bear with a stick that somehow felt sharper despite the distance from which it was being wielded. Or maybe it felt sharper because of the distance. Who the hell would know? How the hell would anybody know?

Jeff sighed.

Kids.

He'd been a father for thirty years and he still felt like he didn't know shit. He never knew if John took these chances with his anger because he was so far away, or because, patently, John could. Hell, any of them could, but John was the only one who ever tried it on, with that cool, calm, infuriating expression plastered like angel-food cake to his face and an earnestness in his blue eyes that reminded Jeff so much of his own father. Reminded him too much of his father. Unreadable. Both of them. And frightening, because the expression told you nothing and you never knew what was coming next.

'Dad?'

Jeff jumped at the word, realised he'd been standing at the bar with one hand on the glass and the other on the decanter and his gaze fixed entirely on nothing. And there was Virgil, standing in front of him with his too brown hair and his too dark eyes and a look on his face that reminded Jeff too damned much of his wife.

Christ. Everywhere Jeff looked he was surrounded by ghosts. He smiled, weakly. 'Yes, son?'

'You okay?' Virgil asked.

'I was just…' Jeff's smile faded. Became apologetic as the words ceased to come.

Virgil shifted the papers he held in his hand, the dry rustle of skin over ink. 'Don't worry,' he said. 'They'll make it.'

Jeff nodded mutely, wondering how come everybody could suddenly read his mind. 'I know,' he said, and certain of it, because all he knew was he didn't need any more ghosts.

Virgil shot a look towards the piano and then back at Jeff, eyebrows lifting with unspoken inquiry. You mind?

Jeff shook his head. He listened to the creak of the piano stool as his son's weight settled on it, the familiar ripple of paper as Virgil opened the music he had been carrying and spread it wide upon the stand. And finally, at last, the raising of the keyboard, the moment of anticipation as his son's fingers hovered above the keys.

Jeff's lips tightened. Suddenly he didn't want his silence broken. Didn't want his fears soothed away, no matter how irrational his sons had made them seem. He chinked ice into the glass, unstoppered the decanter and slid two fingers of bourbon into the tumbler. He raised the glass, inhaled deep of an aroma that made his nose twitch with the promise of pleasure and his tongue twitch with the certainty of pain. He took a single, measured swallow and stepped out onto the balcony to wait for the burn.

Thunderbird Three's control room stank, the air heavy with antiseptic and overhung with the deep and lingering stench of Holman's blood. It had got into the recyclers somehow, mingled itself unsuccessfully with a cloud of something that smelt like chlorine – that blue stuff that scorched the membranes of your nose and which Brains said could kill an elephant… if the elephant sat in it long enough.

In the midst of the invisible cloud of bleach and blood sat Alan, hands curled to fists on the edge of his console, his cheeks pale and his eyes wide with something that might have been fear. And Scott, silent and stiff beside him, with his skin scrubbed to pink and his lips dark and moist as though he might have been throwing up.

Gordon sat equally silent at the auxiliary console, uneasy inside his uniform and waiting for whatever it was Scott was hatching in his head to percolate out through his mouth. His undershirt scratched uncomfortably at his skin and he felt unclean, dirty despite the fact that he'd been suited the entire time and none of Holman's blood had so much as touched him. He'd scrubbed himself as raw as Scott now looked, but Gordon still felt like the blood was on him. As though it had somehow penetrated the fabric of the EVA suit. Slunk in through the seals when he wasn't paying attention and was crawling unimpeded across his skin, looking for a way in.

Across the deck Scott coughed, and it looked for a moment as though he wasn't yet done with throwing up. Scott must have thought so too, his hand snaking up to hover at his mouth and his forehead crinkling with momentary dismay. And then it passed. Swallowed down in the hard silence with Alan and Gordon looking on.

'Okay,' Scott croaked, to get their attention, even though neither of them had taken their eyes off him. He cleared his throat of the croak, a wet damp sound that made the green rise once more in his face. He spoke again, and this time his voice was clear. 'We're going to destroy Hyperion.'

The brothers stared silently at each other, the air disturbed only by the pinging of the console, the reassuring background noise of Three as she kept them alive, kept them moving, kept them apace with Hyperion on its inexorable journey Earthward.

Finally Alan spoke, met the challenge in Scott's faintly watering eyes. 'Scott – '

'Al.' Scott cut the sentence off before the rest of it could get out of his brother's mouth. 'This is non-negotiable.'

'But Scott…' Alan shook his head.

'What?' It was one word, one small word, but it was filled with impatience and frustration and the first raw hints of desperation.

'Destroying it…' Alan's shoulders lifted in a plaintive shrug. 'It's not what we do.'

'No.' Scott took a lungful of air, bit down on the inside of his lip as he exhaled loudly through his nose. 'It's not. But we can't let that thing get to Earth, and we just gave it a fucking road map to Cape Canaveral. Hell, we even set the course for it.' He slammed a hand aggressively against the console. 'Could we have been any more stupid?'

'We weren't stupid,' Gordon said softly, the first words he'd said since he'd scraped the remains of Holman off the deck. 'We were doing what we came here to do.'

'And destroying Hyperion is not what we came here to do.' Scott nodded, his expression tight. 'I hear you. But the game has changed.' He fixed each of his brothers in the steel blue of his gaze. 'We need we do this. And we need to do it now, while we can.' He turned his eyes towards Gordon. 'You saw that thing. You saw what it was capable of.'

Gordon felt his head nodding in a vague, palsied agreement. 'Okay. Say we destroy Hyperion. What do we tell Base?'

'More to the point, what do we tell NASA?' Alan said.

Scott turned to look at him.

'I already told Base Gunnar and Holman were alive. As per your orders.' Alan looked defensively back at his brother. 'They've probably already notified NASA.'

'Shit.' Scott looked away, stared unseeing at the console.

Alan adjusted himself in his chair, angled an uncomfortable glance toward Gordon, then towards the chronometer on the wall. 'We can tell them we made a mistake.'

'That won't work,' Gordon said. 'We're professionals. We don't mistake dead men for live ones. We tell the world we made a mistake like that and International Rescue's reputation is shot.'

Scott leaned forward in his chair, knowing he didn't have to say it, but saying it anyway. 'Even worse, the mission will have been a failure. The worst kind of failure. According to our most recent transmission we had two lives safe in our hands and we're going to tell them we lost them. How are we going to explain that to Dad? To NASA?' He dropped his head into his hands and pushed his fingers into his hair. Held them there and squeezed.

Gordon looked at his brother's bowed head, at the fingers clenched tight in the dark curls. Shit happens, he wanted to say, to alleviate his brother's pain, but the words were too flippant. Too trite. Made a mockery of what they were about to do. What they were being forced to do. Instead he said, 'so what do you want to tell them? That we've encountered alien life but it's too dangerous to let loose on the world and we're going to destroy it?'

'Shit,' Scott said. And then 'fuck,' his head still buried in his hands. He lifted his head and contemplated his brothers bleakly. 'We tell them Gunnar and Holman opted to stay on Hyperion after we uploaded the data link.'

Gordon nodded. That much was plausible. 'And then what?'

'And when the engines reengaged the whole thing exploded. Unforeseeable circumstances.'

'It still won't look good.'

'What would look better – letting that thing, and whatever else might be on Hyperion with it, get back to Earth?'

'We could just leave it,' Alan said. 'Cut our losses and run.'

'And then what? NASA send out their own recovery crew and they walk into the same mess that we did?'

Gordon dropped a hand to the console, traced a finger along a seam in the panel. 'Maybe Hyperion won't make it that far?'

'It'll make it,' Alan said. 'Hyperion's speed and trajectory will have it at Earth in around thirty-six days. Even if it's unable to process a successful landing it will still re-enter Earth atmosphere and impact on the North American continent.'

'It won't burn up on re-entry?'

Alan shook his head. 'As an interplanetary research vehicle Hyperion was designed for atmosphere penetration, which means that even unpiloted it will re-enter the atmosphere in one piece. The only hope then would be for it to break apart in the lower atmosphere, in which case the impact zone would be huge. And,' he glanced at the readout on his screen, 'if the information we have is correct, it's still carrying a ton of fuel.'

'And if it doesn't break up in atmosphere?'

'Then Hyperion hard-lands relatively intact – '

' – along with whatever might be inside her.' Scott's face set in concrete determination. 'That settles it. We need to destroy it. We can't risk anybody finding it. And in a year, a hundred years, hell, a thousand years, somebody will find it. We need to blow it up.'

'Any ideas how?' Gordon said. 'It's not like we're carrying heavy ordnance.'

'Yes,' Alan said, 'we are.'

Scott and Gordon turned to look at him.

'Three's self-destruct system,' Alan said. 'I can dismantle it and separate the payload. But just placing it on Hyperion's hull won't be enough.'

'Why not?' Gordon asked. 'Why can't we just blast the shit out of it?'

'Because,' Alan said, 'explosions in space don't work the same as they do in atmosphere. Hyperion was designed to withstand impact, which means the blast radius will project outwards instead of inwards. If we're lucky we might blow a hole in the hull, but the detonation won't reach the engines or the fuel cache. We'd only cripple her, not kill her.'

'So what do we do?'

'We need to get inside, attach the payload to the drive and ignite whatever fuel is left. There's no other way.'

'Which means,' Scott's voice was grim, 'the only way to be sure is to get on board.'

'Which also means,' Gordon said, meeting his brother's eyes, 'we'll have to deal with Gunnar.'