zero point

five

It was morning, Virgil supposed, judging from the way the overhead lights suddenly brightened, and from the food tray that slid quietly through the flap beneath his cell door. Virgil didn't sit up to look at it. Didn't move from his position in the bed, because getting up would mean facing the reality of another day trapped in the confines of this stark, white box. And besides, he wasn't a breakfast person anyway and when were they going to figure that out and stop shoving toast and porridge and shitty sausages beneath the frickin' door?

Virgil pulled the blanket closer around his chin. It wasn't cold in the box with the air circulating softly through the vent in the ceiling, but the blanket gave him something to hold on to, and it was the only shield between himself and the ever-present eyes that watched from the other side of the two-way mirror. Just thinking about those eyes made him curl in closer on himself, with his back to the glass and the smell of cold toast and sausage swirling through the room and making him want to throw up.

He dozed. Or maybe he drifted completely off again, because the next thing the door was opening and the doctor was in the room, talking to him and calling him 'Mr Tracy' and fuck that was annoying.

'Good morning Mr Tracy,' the doctor said, and Virgil heard the door sliding shut and the soft beep of the electronic lock that signalled the bolt had slid back into place.

'You haven't eaten your breakfast.' The doctor sounded disappointed, as if it were the first time it had happened instead of being, oh, say, the sixty-fifth day Virgil had ignored the breakfast tray – if you counted your days by the number of breakfasts you didn't eat. The doctor's accent was Australian, but somewhere along the way he'd picked up some English tones to his vowels along with the annoying habit of stating the bleeding obvious, and he followed his first piercing observation with the equally insightful 'Not getting up today, I see,' which served no purpose other than to make Virgil grit his teeth with irritation.

'Mr Tracy?'

For Christs' sake. Virgil threw the blanket off and swung his legs over the side of the bed, his bare feet coming to rest on the cold tile of the floor. He leant his elbows on his knees and scrubbed his hands across his face, his fingers pushing into the uncombed curls of his hair and staying there.

The doctor picked up the breakfast tray from the floor and placed it on the bed beside him. 'Is there something else you'd prefer to eat?' he asked when Virgil tilted his head to look up at him. 'I could put in a request.' The doctor smiled, trying to make friends. 'Doctor's orders.'

Virgil sniffed, got up without answering, shuffled sluggishly to the head and undid the velcro of the pants he'd been issued with. No zips or buttons or elastic were allowed inside this cozy little hole, and if he ever got out of here Virgil never wanted to hear the excruciating sound of shredding velcro again. He aimed a steady stream into the toilet bowl, hitched his pants back onto his hips when he was done, and leaned forward to watch as the water drained from the head. And when that was done he turned and sat himself down on the stainless steel bowl, slumped back against the plain white wall and looked up at the doctor.

'I've brought you a change of clothes,' the doctor said, realising finally he was going to get nothing out of Virgil Tracy today. 'Shoes and socks. And a razor.' He indicated a pile of clothing that he'd placed next to the food tray on the bed. 'You're having visitors.'

Virgil slowly scrutinised the clothing – shirt, pants and sneakers, just as the doctor had said, and a battery-operated shaver resting on top of the neatly-folded pile. 'A bit formal for a torture squad,' Virgil said, surprising the doctor with his words.

'We don't torture people,' the doctor replied too quickly and too defensively.

Virgil raised his arm. 'Funny,' he said, displaying a series of thin scars that had been scored across his skin, the most recent with the stitches still in it. 'Because that's what it feels like.'

The doctor's eyes followed the tracks of the scars and he swallowed. 'I'm sorry about that. But it was necessary.'

Virgil lowered his arm. 'Necessary,' he repeated, and he smiled. 'And next time you decide it's necessary?' He turned to stare at the mirror that filled one wall of his cell. 'Will your goons come back in here and hold me down?' He turned back to face the doctor. 'Or am I expected to just sit here and take it?'

The doctor met the challenge in Virgil's eyes, and to his credit he didn't turn away. 'I can only tell you, Mr Tracy, that everything Spectrum does is in the interest of planetary security. I'm sorry if this has caused you any pain – '

'Pain.' Virgil laughed softly and leaned his head back against the wall.

' – or discomfort.' The doctor ignored Virgil's mirth. 'Rest assured everything that has happened has been necessary.' He turned to the bed and picked up the untouched breakfast tray. 'Now,' he said, turning back and giving Virgil his most reassuring smile. 'Is there anything particular we can get for you?'

'….ninety-eight…'

Scarlet heaved his chin past the bar, biceps straining as he held himself poised for a count of ten, then slowly lowered himself back to starting.

'….ninety-nine…'

Scarlet heaved again, sweat greasing his palms and his fingers cramping around the bar as he pulled his body upwards.

'…nnh…' he groaned as he came back down to starting, his feet hovering millimetres from the floor and his arms burning with the simple effort of hanging there. He dangled for a moment, not wanting to make that last effort, his muscles aching and his eyes stinging and the sweat plastering his hair to his head, and he grunted again, louder and longer and harder as he dragged himself up one last time, because if there was one thing Paul Metcalfe couldn't stand it was leaving a thing unfinished. Promises had to be kept and goals had to be met, even if that goal was as simple as one hundred chin-ups in under five minutes.

'A hundred,' he grunted out loud, not caring how he sounded because the Cloudbase gym was deserted. 'Unh,' he exhaled, his fingers slipping from the bar as he dropped lightly down to the mat. He was sweating, his back and his armpits soaked with it, and he lifted the front of his shirt to wipe the sweat from his neck and from his face, appreciating the draft of cool air that wafted across the flat planes of his exposed stomach.

Scarlet smoothed his shirt back into place and stood there breathing for a moment, feeling the blood pumping through his veins as he stared out the wide windows at the open sky beyond. The North Sea drifted six kilometres below his feet as Cloudbase powered towards the coast of England, but right now the ocean was obscured by a bright layer of cloud, the sun blinding as it bounced off the endless drift of white. As he watched, the silhouette of an SPJ arced overhead as it dropped off the edge of the flightdeck above him and fell smoothly down towards the cloud on its way to London. In a few minutes the passenger jet would disappear into that blinding bank of white, and in a few hours it would be returning with two men on board that Scarlet hadn't seen since the Faulkner labs had imploded two years ago, the younger of which likely still wanted to strangle the life out of him. Scarlet's lips quirked with sardonic reckoning – Scott Tracy he could handle. It was the calm, quiet anger of Jeff Tracy that scared the shit out of him.

Scarlet turned from the window and returned to the mats. His body was his instrument – whether that instrument belonged entirely to himself or not was a whole other matter.

The boardroom of Spectrum's London HQ was a standard affair with four windowless walls painted a shade of grey that bordered onto blue – or maybe it was blue bordering onto grey. Colonel White always found it irritating that the HQ colour scheme occupied one of those amorphous borderlands between one colour and the next – colours, like people, needed to make a damn decision and stick to it. The nondescript carpet was equally irritating, about a shade darker than the walls and still hovering somewhere between blue and grey. Fortunately, the boring landscape of grey-not-grey was broken by the boardroom furniture – as Spectrum's concession to history and to all the secret organisations that had come before it, an over-large oak table salvaged from the dismantling of Joint Intelligence was the centrepiece of the room, the rich patina of age and tradition incongruous with the unidentifiable colour palette of the walls that surrounded it.

Colonel White's guests were already seated at that table, their cups of coffee half-drunk and resting on the unprotected wood, and a tray of sweet biscuits sat untouched just a few inches out of their reach. White's eyes picked out Oreos among the selection, and he awarded some mental brownie points to the administration officer who had sourced them, no doubt thinking to make their American guests feel more at home. But Colonel White hated the damn things – a six-month stint at White Sands thirty years ago had left him with an unwavering conviction that Oreos were nothing if not the devil's handiwork.

The Tracys turned to look when White walked into the room, Tracy senior rising to his feet to step forward. 'Colonel White,' Jeff Tracy said, slipping his large, warm hand into White's. The handshake was firm but not forceful, though the look in the man's eyes held another kind of force altogether.

'Colonel Tracy,' White returned. 'Thank you for coming.'

'Please,' Tracy senior said. 'I haven't gone by the rank of Colonel for decades.'

'Of course,' White said, meeting the man's gaze. Colonel Jefferson Tracy may no longer have wanted to be referred to by his rank, but the echoes of his military career were still plainly visible in the steel-grey flint of his eyes.

Tracy's son had risen to his feet during this exchange and he now stepped forward, his handshake a copy of his father's, if a bit firmer and perhaps a bit more meaningful. White looked into his intense blue eyes and said: 'I expect you prefer we don't call you Captain.'

'That is correct, sir,' the younger Tracy replied with a crisp military bearing that was USAF through and through and decried his wish to not be formally acknowledged for it.

'Of course,' White said, moving to the chair at the head of the table. 'Well.' He watched as the Tracys resumed their seats. 'That will make it difficult for me to differentiate between the two Mr Tracys in conversation.' It was a weak attempt at flippancy, an attempt to all be friends, but it fell on unfriendly ears.

'I'm sure you'll do your best,' Tracy senior said, smiling wanly and not offering any concessions to informality.

White smiled in return, studying them carefully as he waited for the rest of the participants to arrive – Captains Ochre and Magenta, and the scientists who'd been appointed to the project after the incident at Faulkner's. It had been difficult replacing Masters, but Drs Ainsworth and Mackinnon had proven capable – even if it had taken both their brains to match Masters' singular intellect.

'Ah,' White said as the heavy boardroom door swung silently open. The colour scheme might have been insufferably modern at Spectrum HQ, but there were still concessions to traditional architecture – wooden doors were hung on well-oiled hinges inside a building crafted out of century-old stone, the large, drafty rooms over-arched by far too-high ceilings. Colonel White appreciated the old-school fixtures and the feeling of space the building afforded – they were a welcome relief from the low ceilings and sterile pressed metal of Cloudbase. He motioned the new arrivals to their chairs and returned his attention to his guests.

'Allow me to introduce Dr Lesley Ainsworth and Dr David Mackinnon,' he said by way of introduction. 'Drs Ainsworth and Mackinnon are specialists attached to Spectrum's Research and Development arm.' Colonel White glanced over to the Spectrum agents who had taken their seats at the far end of the table. 'And Captains Ochre and Magenta,' he said. 'Captain Ochre you've already met, of course. Captain's Magenta and Ochre were involved with your son Gordon's situation, and they understand the circumstances well.'

'Gordon's 'situation'?' Scott Tracy turned to look bluntly at the two officers. 'You mean his incarceration.'

Ochre expressionlessly returned Scott's gaze, but Magenta at least had sense enough to look chagrined. 'That wasn't how it was,' Magenta said, his words accented with a faded New York twang. 'He was – '

'Captain,' White cautioned, because Magenta's mouth had an irritating propensity for engaging before his brain did. Magenta was a good officer but he wasn't military, and he had a tendency to struggle with discipline. Colonel White turned his attention back to Scott Tracy – he could see the resentment visible in the clenching of the young man's jaw and wondered if International Rescue's Field Commander was going to give him trouble.

'If you will allow us to explain,' White said, 'you will understand why it was necessary to quarantine Gordon until we could be satisfied that he was – ' White pursed his lips. He'd been wrestling with this moment for days, ever since he'd decided that the only way to get to the bottom of the Virgil Tracy mystery was to bring his father in. And now that the moment was here…

'Until you were satisfied my son was what?' Jeff Tracy said. He'd sat quietly during the preamble, his eyes moving carefully from one face to the next as he surveyed the people around the table. Colonel White looked shrewdly at him, assessing him, probing him with that indefinable sixth sense that had once seen White negotiate his way around the tables of war, and wondered just how far he could push him. And just how many cards he could safely lay on the table.

White cautiously laid down the first card from his pack. 'Until we were sure that your son was human.'

'What?' The exclamation came from Scott. Jeff Tracy merely sat there, his entire body gone still as he gauged the Colonel with his own sixth sense.

'Earth is at war,' Colonel White told them, deciding to put all his cards on the table. If he wanted cooperation from Jeff Tracy and his son, then it was time to lay down the whole blasted hand.

The noise from the electric shaver was ridiculous. The tiny motor whirred steadily inside its flimsy case, the vibrations transferring directly from the plastic and through to Virgil's fingers as he raised the shaver to his face. He had about three days of growth peppering his chin, and the spinning blades cut into the stubble with all the noise and enthusiasm of a combine harvester attacking a field of full-grown grain. Virgil had a memory, suddenly, of harvest time on his grandfather's farm. The smell of grease and diesel as the harvester powered up in a cloud of blue exhaust, the great blades slicing through sun-ready stalks of wheat and releasing the sticky, sweet smell of chlorophyll to mix with the smoke and the dust.

'Those were the days,' Virgil murmured. He stared at the blank white wall of his cell and slid the shaver across the plane of his cheek, listening as the whiskers died their loud and unexpected deaths. They might even have been screaming as the blades cut them down. Virgil stopped the shaver and stood listening for a while. Nope. The only screaming going on was the screaming inside his head.

The shaver recommenced its whirring and Virgil lifted it again to his cheek. There were other memories there, hidden behind the simple act of taking the hair off his face. The smell of cut grass. The sound of trees falling. The tangle of vines on Tracy Island when the family first arrived on its rocky shores, and how the spines of the creepers sliced your fingers when you tugged at them, and how bad it stung when the sap mixed with the blood from your hands and the sweat got into the cuts in your palms.

The shaver moved methodically across his chin, biting into the stubble with relentless efficiency. Virgil closed his eyes. There was something moving in Virgil's inner jungle. He could see it, out beyond the groves of palms and the creeping vines and the damp, dense undergrowth of ferns and hibiscus, and it was bright, and green, and shining.

To their credit, the Tracy's remained quiet as Colonel White laid out the events of the past few years – Captain Black's mission to Mars and the unintended destruction of the Mysteron city. The commencement of the war between Earth and race of beings who existed outside of three-dimensional space. The relentless cat-and-mouse battle of wits that Spectrum was no closer to ending now than when it had first begun. There had been moments when White was talking, moments when identical frowns had creased across the Tracys' brows because, put bluntly like that, with the war reduced to its simplest and most impossible terms, even Colonel White had to admit to the fantastical, preposterous nature of the situation. And if the Tracys chose not to believe what he was telling them, then Spectrum had taken one more step closer to their inevitable defeat.

Colonel White rose from his chair and straightened his uniform. He needed water after all that talking, and a carafe and glasses were waiting ready on the sideboard. He busied himself pouring, listening to the sound of water funnelling into the glass, and to people breathing and shifting quietly in their seats behind him. A throat cleared. Magenta, probably, because he always had a hard time sitting still. White raised the water to his lips and swallowed – he had yet to explain the device, and Jeff Tracy still needed to know what had happened to his son.

White replaced the glass on the board and turned back to face the table. 'Are there any questions at this point,' he inquired of his audience, because the silence was too profound and it was getting on his nerves.

Scott Tracy laughed. A short, soft bark that expressed very well the ludicrousness of the situation, and how very close to the edge he and his father were skating. 'What you're saying,' Scott Tracy said as he turned his intense gaze on the Colonel, 'is that the world has been under assault by an alien force, by these so-called Mysterons, for what, four years now? And nobody knows about it?'

'Difficult as it must seem,' Colonel White said as he returned to his seat, 'that is correct. It is a war of nerves, played out in secret right across the planet. And until Professor Masters developed his device, it was a war we had no hope of winning.'

'The 'device'.' Scott sat back in his chair. 'So that's what we're calling it. That 'device',' he said, looking at the faces around the table to make sure they were all listening, 'killed my brother. And it maimed another.'

'That was an accident,' Dr Ainsworth interrupted. Until now she'd been all but invisible, blinking her pale eyes beneath a helmet of straight, dark hair. As a physicist Ainsworth actively bucked the stereotype, possessing the short and pillowy body of a fairytale farmer's wife and a face that had started a downward slide into the folds of her neck. But White considered she must have been quite attractive once – back before she sat herself down at a desk and discovered cupcakes and cappuccinos.

'An accident,' Scott said directly to Ainsworth, 'that had the potential to bring down an entire city and kill millions.'

'Which is why we've reconstructed the device in Australia,' Mackinnon told him, 'as far away from a population centre as possible.'

'What?' Scott turned to look at him incredulously. Mackinnon was one of those awkward men whose body had grown too fast and too soon and his motor neurons were still waiting for their chance to catch up. He could have been thirty or he could have been fifty, it was difficult to tell from a face that possessed the kind of pale and pasty pallor that only a lifetime spent avoiding the sun could produce.

'You mean you're still working on that thing?' Scott snapped at Mackinnon, and White was not surprised to see the scientist visibly recoil at Tracy's tone. 'People died!'

'Masters died,' Colonel White corrected. 'We still don't know what happened to Virgil.'

Scott turned to face Colonel White. 'We know exactly what happened to Virgil,' he said. 'It was on the recordings that your agents illegally confiscated. Not to mention the fact that Gordon was there – '

'Gordon said he watched Virgil burn,' Magenta said unexpectedly. White should have known the officer wouldn't be able to keep his mouth shut. 'It was the last thing he remembered.'

Scott spun towards him. 'How do you know that?'

Magenta shrugged blandly in the face of Scott's anger. 'I was there when Gordon remembered it.'

Scott glared across the table as though Magenta was personally responsible for what had happened to his brothers, and White wondered if the man was about to lose control. He could only imagine how the two Tracys must be feeling, and he was acutely aware of the fact that he was about to make things worse.

'Whatever happened to Virgil,' Colonel White said, 'he wasn't burned. He – ' White found himself unexpectedly at a loss for words. These had been secrets he had been keeping for his country, and for his planet, and he'd been quite literally guarding them with his life. It was almost a painful thing to have to admit them – to civilians, no less – and he suddenly found himself wishing for a cup of strong tea. Or a glass of Tanqueray poured generously over ice.

'What are you trying to tell us, Colonel?' It was Jeff Tracy, his voice breaking into the unexpected silence.

Colonel White looked across the table at his officers. Ochre, true to form, sat quietly with no hint of expression visible on his face, but Magenta had straightened in his chair and there was apprehension in his eyes. White felt the same apprehension pass across his own face – once the Tracys understood the true nature of the Mysteron reality, there would be no taking it back.

'Colonel?'

'Of course.' Colonel White smiled a small apology and turned to Ainsworth. 'Doctor. If you would please explain.'

'Yes, sir.' Ainsworth blinked her eyes beneath the heavy fringe of her hair. 'After the incident,' she said with her not-unpleasant voice, 'and with Professor Masters unfortunately deceased, we had no way of understanding what exactly caused the original device to malfunction. Most of Masters' work disappeared along with the laboratory, so we've had to reconstruct his theories almost from scratch.'

She paused for a moment, maybe expecting a question from her audience, but when none were forthcoming she moistened her lips with her tongue and continued on. 'We commenced reconstruction at a new site, but for a long time we were fumbling around in the dark. Spectrum quarantined the original site, of course, but we took the precaution of leaving a security system active and set up an array of monitoring systems around the space that the lab had occupied – video, infra-red, radiation, particle spectrometers… You name it, if a cockroach sneezed in there, we wanted to know about it.' She smiled at her comment, but nobody else was in the mood for it. 'For two years the sphere remained inert with no signs of activity… until just over eight weeks ago, when this happened.'

She had a remote control gripped between her fingers, and a projector in the ceiling activated with a muted hum and threw a darkened image against the far wall. All eyes turned to look as the video displayed the pitch-black interior of the Faulkner sphere, the image pixelated and grainy as the infra-red cameras struggled to focus and the light sensors adjusted and readjusted to the darkness.

There was an abrupt explosion of light, and the screen blanked out.

'At that point,' Ainsworth said, 'the infra-red cameras overloaded. But fortunately the motion-sensors tripped the arc-lights and the closed-circuit cameras were able to capture this sequence.'

The feed changed, the image displaying a crumpled white form resting at the bottom of the sphere. White remembered the first time he'd seen that footage, and how long it had taken him to realise that the crumpled heap was actually a man. White's eyes slid to watch Jeff Tracy as he viewed the footage, and he recognised the same sense of dawning on his face, both Tracys leaning forward as the figure on the screen moved and the IR hazard suit became suddenly recognisable.

'What the hell…' Scott Tracy breathed.

The figure on the screen moved again, sluggishly, painfully, and White watched as Jeff Tracy's lips parted, his features creasing in confusion and shock and what White recognised as the faint, first glimmerings of hope. Jeff Tracy been a closed book until now, but it looked as though his stony façade was about to crack.

The figure moved again. Rolled over. Pushed itself laboriously into sitting, the gloved hands rising suddenly to the helmet. Now there was no mistaking the hazard suit, with the helping hand of the IR logo stamped in blue across the chest.

'My God,' Jeff Tracy said, believing it and not believing it all at the same time. 'How is this possible?'

The boardroom was filled with tense watchfulness, all eyes fixed on what was happening on the screen. Even Colonel White found himself with the air stilled in his chest, not wanting to destroy the unfolding of a miracle as the Tracys stared at the screen. White looked away. He was uncomfortable with what came next, and he would have liked to put his hands over his ears to block out the sound.

The figure on the screen fumbled at the fastenings on the helmet, but the gloves were too unwieldy, the seals too tight, and the panic was palpable in the frantic, jerky movements of the man on the screen. Finally the helmet slipped free in a moment of visible relief, the face now plainly visible to the lights and the cameras and to the audience watching in the boardroom. It was Virgil Tracy, unmistakably, and he gulped at the air the same way a parched man gulped down water, inhaling great draughts of it in painful heaving gasps as his fingers moved to the collar of the hazard suit, tearing it frantically away from his neck and his chest. And when he was done, when he had set himself free, and when he'd finally gulped down enough air, Virgil Tracy opened his mouth and screamed.

'I'll take over,' Captain Scarlet told the lieutenant who had taken the morning watch. He smiled at her from where he stood in the open doorway, trying to be friendly – but not too friendly. Scarlet wasn't in the market for entanglements. And besides, with her utilitarian haircut and her rough-around-the-edges demeanour, the lieutenant wasn't exactly his type.

'Yes, sir.' Lieutenant Indigo got up from her chair – she'd been assigned the colour-code after the second Indigo had been killed in action, and Scarlet hoped that no-one had been insensitive enough to point out to her that bad luck always came in threes.

Indigo had the electronic logbook in her hand and she busied herself logging out so that Scarlet could log in. 'Here you are, sir,' she said, handing him the tablet and making eye-contact as she did. Indigo matched him for height and her direct gaze was disarming – grey eyes so pale they were almost white looked levelly at him from beneath precisely plucked eyebrows, and at this distance she exuded a faint scent of peony, hinting that beneath the uniform she might not have been so utilitarian after all. Scarlet's mind threw up a vision of black lace panties and suspenders hiding under all that indigo kevlar, along with a high-riding balconette brassiere.

'Thank you,' he said, taking the tablet as she proffered it. 'Anything to report?'

'Everything's on the log, sir. The only event of note was while the subject was shaving. At 11:47 he said out loud 'those were the days', and at 11:49 he paused in his shaving and stared at the wall for almost fifteen minutes before recommencing the activity.'

'I see,' Scarlet said and stepped aside as she moved past, smiling at him and displaying a row of neat white teeth accentuated by a pair of pretty canines. Okay. Maybe. If Indigo should ever give him the chance he might make a move on her. She seemed like she might be mildly… boisterous.

The door slid shut, leaving him alone with the thought of her teeth clamping onto his tongue and his hands freeing her breasts from the black balconette, and he quickly buried that crazy idea away someplace where he hoped nobody would ever find it.

Scarlet lifted the tablet in his hand and logged himself in. '11.47,' he murmured, scrolling through the stored feed to the moment when Indigo said Tracy had spoken out loud. And there it was, the vidfile small on the screen and Tracy's distant, tinny voice saying 'those were the days.'

Scarlet looked up and stared through the two-way mirror that separated him from Virgil Tracy. What the hell does that mean? he wondered, watching as Tracy lifted a hand to scratch at his cleanly-shaven chin.

He watched the sequence again – he could have looked at that footage from five other angles if he wanted to, because there wasn't one moment of Virgil Tracy's movements that hadn't been recorded these last two months. And when Scarlet wasn't parked in the observation room he was reviewing what had been saved to the Cloudbase servers, looking for something, anything, no matter how infinitesimal or indefinable, that would mark Virgil Tracy out as a Mysteron.

Solving the mystery of Virgil Tracy had so far been futile, but Scarlet couldn't bring himself to let it go. He lowered himself to a chair and tossed the tablet onto the seat next to him, followed in short order by his hat. Adam was right – he was obsessed. Tracy had a tangible aura, a frisson of electric ozone that put all of Scarlet's senses on edge, but every Mysteron test so far devised had come back negative – short of shooting him dead to see if he came back to life – and the results were so persistent that even Doctor Fawn was having a change of heart. Fawn's professional opinion now was that Tracy was suffering some kind of psychological break, that most probably he was human but whatever he'd seen on the other side had tipped him over some indefinable edge. And when pentothal hadn't been able to crack through Tracy's barriers, Fawn suggested they bring in a psychiatrist, because an expert might be able to worm a way through Tracy's formidable blockade. Scarlet could do nothing but laugh at that suggestion – as if a shrink would be able to make a dent in the Mysteron mind.

Scarlet leaned back in the chair and stretched his legs out in front of him. Maybe he was overthinking it. Maybe they all were. Maybe it was as simple as something Adam had said one night over that shitty Pappy Van Winkle he occasionally smuggled on board. 'Maybe,' Adam had said as he licked his lips and knocked back the thin film of Pappy that was left in the bottom of his glass, 'Tracy is like you.'

'I don't think so,' Scarlet had replied, leaning his chair back on two legs.

'Quit it.' Blue used his foot to bring Scarlet's chair clattering back onto all fours. 'Are you drunk?' Blue asked. And then he grinned with great mirth.

'On this weak-as-water piss?' Scarlet helped himself to another round from the bottle. Truth was he hadn't been able to get drunk since he'd been retro-metabolised, and retro-metabolism never took a night off work. 'Not on your life,' he said, 'but I would like to know why you've brought me to your room and are plying me with contraband, since I've told you a thousand times already that you are too flat-chested for my liking.'

'Hey,' Blue said. 'A boob is a boob, whether it's a handful or a mouthful.'

'Lo,' Scarlet laughed. 'The oracle speaks truly.'

'Yeah,' Blue laughed back. 'And when the oracle speaks, the people must listen.'

'Well then.' Scarlet smiled indulgently at his friend. 'What words of wisdom do you have for this poor petitioner? Bearing in mind,' he added, 'that my father has already given me the talk.'

'Oh yeah,' Blue said as he drained another glass. 'I know you know what your penis is for.' He winked in the face of Scarlet's rising eyebrows. 'I know that, okay? I know.' He nodded sagely and then smiled lopsidedly. 'I know.' He sighed. 'I just wish,' he said, 'I just wish you would, you know, I wish you would use it, or something. You need an outlet. Because this obsessing, this obsessing is just not healthy.'

'What obsessing?' The smile was melting slowly from Scarlet's face.

'What the fuck?' Blue's eyes opened wide. 'Paul! What were we just talking about? Tracy! Virgil Tracy! The V-man! The man who disappeared in a puff of green smoke! Poof! Tracy!'

'I see.' Scarlet looked down at the dregs in his glass, the ice having long-since melted into tiny little prisms. 'You think I'm obsessing?'

'Oh man.' Blue appraised Scarlet with as much seriousness as his lack of sobriety allowed. 'Yes, you are obsessing. You are obsessed. And I think,' he said as he swallowed back a belch, 'I think that it's because Virgil Tracy is like you.'

Scarlet carefully put his glass down on the bureau. 'Virgil Tracy is not like me.'

'Yes he is. He is. In a way.'

Scarlet stared unblinking at his friend. 'In what way?'

'Because he went to the other side, Paul. And he somehow, he somehow, got out of it alive.'

It was surreal, the way the Tracys sat silent in their seats with their eyes locked on the image of Virgil Tracy that had been frozen on the screen, and their faces wrought with the same kind of stunned expression that mourners at a graveside sometimes wore. Colonel White wondered if the Apostles had worn the same expressions when Jesus had rolled aside the boulder of his tomb. Probably not. Jesus was destined to be reborn, after all, and Virgil Tracy's resurrection had been entirely unexpected.

Well.

White inhaled deep through his nose, the air laden with the scent of carpet cleaner and furniture polish and coffee cooling untouched on the oak of the table.

'When can we see him?'

White looked at Jeff Tracy and saw a father about to be devastated all over again, and hated himself for doing it. 'He's being held in containment on Cloudbase,' he said. 'We'll take you there as soon as you've been thoroughly briefed.'

'I thought we were finished here.'

'There is more you need to know.'

'I don't understand,' Jeff said. He looked piercingly at Colonel White. 'I don't understand,' he said again, and White felt the full force of Tracy's personality coming to bear. 'And it is pissing me off that I have to keep telling you that I don't understand. So far you have explained nothing. All you've done is tell us about Mars and Mysterons and expected us to believe it.'

'Do you believe it?' White interrupted. He glanced across at Scott, but the younger man stared single-mindedly at the screen, the muscles of his jaw twitching as he clenched and relaxed. Clenched and relaxed. White recognised all the signs – Tracy was thinking. Considering. Planning.

'I don't know if I believe it,' Jeff Tracy told him. 'I don't even know if I care. But I can tell you one thing – ' his finger pointed forcefully towards the screen, ' – that man is my son. And that is something I do care about.' It was clear he didn't need more convincing about Virgil Tracy's veracity – the image on the screen was proof enough.

White nodded thoughtfully. 'It does look like your son.'

'Colonel.' Tracy said, his temper running thin. 'You are still not making sense. That doesn't just 'look like' my son. That is my son. I know it. And I want to see him. Now.'

'I'm afraid it's not going to be that simple – '

'Colonel,' Jeff interrupted, his tone changing from impatience and anger and into something colder and much less definable. 'It's time you came clean about what exactly is going on, or as soon as I leave this meeting I will instigate legal proceedings to have my son released from your custody. I can't imagine that public proceedings will sit well with Spectrum Command.'

'It won't sit well with anybody,' Scott Tracy said. He turned to look at Colonel White. 'Not once the world finds out about Spectrum's methods, and how casually they overstep the law and the legal rights of citizens.'

'Mr Tracy,' White said. 'As an ex-Airforce officer you are no doubt aware of Spectrum's remit. As a global security organisation we are not accountable to any one country's legal jurisdiction.'

'You think you have no accountability?' Scott asked.

'This is not a case of accountability – '

'That's exactly what it is,' Scott told him. 'And unless we start getting some answers, I will see to it that you are made accountable.'

'Mr Tracy.' There was no raised voice, no increase in pitch, no urgency or anger in Colonel White's words, but none-the-less the tone shut Scott down. The young man sat back in his chair and glared, his jaw working as he ground his teeth together.

'The circumstances are difficult, I agree.' White gave them what he hoped was a placating smile. It didn't seem to help. 'If you could be patient for a little longer we will explain.'

'Alright,' Jeff said calmly, though it was obvious that the calm was as thin as oil on boiling water. 'Why don't you try.'

White's lips pursed together. He felt as though the tables were turning on him, that the Tracys had found their bearing now that they had something to work towards, and that nothing was out of their reach once they put their minds to it. They were a formidable pair, and White had no desire to turn them against him. 'Of course.' White turned to the scientists. 'Doctor Mackinnon,' he said. 'If you would please.'

'Yes, sir.' Mackinnon moved his gaze to the Tracys, his brown eyes dark in the pasty moon of his face. 'The vacuum of space,' he said as though commencing a lecture he'd been rehearsing the night before, 'is not entirely empty. It contains something researchers call zero point energy.'

'Very interesting,' Jeff Tracy said with barely controlled patience. 'What does this have to do with what happened to my son?'

'I'm getting to that.' Mackinnon took a breath. He wasn't used to a hostile audience and he started talking faster in his haste to get it over with. 'A zero point field is a, well, a field of zero point energy, and so far as we can tell these fields exist at every point in space and time. The universe,' he said, looking around the table to make sure everyone was paying attention, 'isn't exactly a vacuum. It's made up of fields of zero point energy, and it's been posited that if we could harness that energy we could not only power our entire planet indefinitely, but it would open up the entire universe.' Mackinnon was warming to his subject 'If we could tap into just the smallest fraction of it, we could travel to any place in the galaxy just by accessing the zero point energy we scoop up along the way.'

'This still doesn't explain what happened to my son,' Jeff said.

Dr Ainsworth cleared her throat. 'Masters was working on a zero point energy device when the incident occurred,' she said. 'He had calculated he could contain it in a neutrino field but – ' Her small eyes darted from the Tracys to White and back again. 'You know what happened after that.'

Jeff carefully appraised the two scientists. 'What you're saying is that Masters was attempting to create a zero point field inside the laboratory,' he summarised. 'What for?'

'Well.' Mackinnon cleared his throat. 'As I said, for the energy potential.'

'That's not entirely correct.' Colonel White looked slowly around the table. 'Spectrum provided the funding for the zero point device because it wasn't only about a search for new energy. We were hoping we would be able to use the device to access the Mysterons' continuum and defeat them.'

'Defeat them?' Scott said. 'You told us earlier that these beings don't exist in our time and space. How the hell were you planning to defeat them?'

'By meeting them on their level,' White told him. 'By using the zero point device to access their non-physical paradigm. By weaponising zero point energy and using it against them.'

'The best that we can understand,' Ainsworth continued, 'the Mysterons can occupy the third and fourth dimensions simultaneously. Thanks to the malfunction of the zero point device we may now have a doorway into the Mysterons' plane of existence. And thanks to Masters' experiment, we're one step closer to understanding – maybe even replicating – their abilities.'

'And what exactly are those abilities?' Jeff asked. He was still looking for answers, and they were painfully slow in coming.

'It seems,' Ainsworth said, 'that the Mysterons are able to use zero point energy to manipulate the fabric of the universe. They can travel instantaneously to any location in space, and, we suspect, to any location in time. They can create matter according to their whims. Their city on Mars was destroyed and then rebuilt as quickly as it was brought down.'

Mackinnon weighed in. 'When a particle, or a group of particles, an object, say, like a cat or a car, is absorbed by the zero point field, it is annihilated and then recreated out of the zero point state. The Mysterons are able to manipulate the matter absorbed into the field and bring any kind of object, animate or inanimate, into existence on our plane.'

'In simple terms?' Jeff asked. It was clear he was struggling, but since he had just seen footage of his son materialising out of thin air it was becoming obvious that he had no choice other than to accept what Ainsworth and Mackinnon were telling him.

'To put it plainly,' Mackinnon said, 'the Mysterons are able to absorb an object, or an individual, into the zero point field and then spit a replicated version of them back out again. We don't exactly understand how the process works, but we do know that it works better on organics if the organics are already dead. If the organics are still alive during the process then the results can be… unpredictable.'

'What do you mean 'unpredictable'?' Scott asked.

'I'm afraid that information is classified,' White replied before Mackinnon could put his foot in it.

'You've made a mistake,' Jeff told them as he looked around the table. 'Gordon's hands were inside the field,' he pointed out. 'He wasn't transformed. He was burned. Badly.'

Ainsworth leaned forward and looked directly at Jeff. 'Gordon wasn't burned at all. Your son's hands were immersed in the field while it was in a state of flux. We believe that his hands may have been partially disassembled by the field, and then reassembled again – the marks that remain on his skin may represent the demarcation between the two matter states.' She sat contemplatively back in her chair. 'The pain must have been beyond imagining.'

Jeff stared down at the grain of the table. 'He still feels that pain.'

'It's a unique situation,' Mackinnon said. 'I wish I could have had a chance to study him.'

Jeff looked up sharply. 'My son,' he said, 'is not a specimen to be put under a microscope.'

'Of course not,' Ainsworth said. 'He only meant – '

'I know what he meant.'

'But think how much we might have learned,' Mackinnon persisted.

'Doctor,' Colonel White said. 'Please.' He turned to Jeff. 'What we know for certain is that your son, Virgil, was absorbed entirely and wholly by the field. Since we know what happens inside a field, it means that the man we have in custody cannot, strictly speaking, be your son.' There was no way that White could put this gently. 'The man we have in custody must be a replica. A simulacrum. Matter that has somehow been reconfigured and made to look human.'

'Do you hear what you're saying?' Scott said. 'Do you have any idea how crazy this sounds? That's my brother you're talking about!'

'Nevertheless,' White continued, 'Virgil Tracy was absorbed by a zero point field. For a time he was part of that field. Part of the fabric of space and time.' He looked penetratingly around the table. 'The question we are now faced with is whether Virgil's matter has been recompiled in the same configuration or not – if he is something approximating a human, or if he has become something else.'

'What the hell do you mean, 'something else'?' Scott snapped.

'Something not human.' White swivelled his head to look at him. 'A Mysteron.'

'I can't believe this. How can he not be human?' Scott pointed at the screen and the frozen image of Virgil displayed on it. 'Look at him.'

White's lips pursed together. The explanations didn't seem to be helping, and he would never have imagined these men to be so single-minded and stubborn. 'The Mysteron process is called 'retro-metabolism,' he explained, 'but it's far more complex than that. It is literally the creation of matter out of energy.'

'Or,' Mackinnon interjected, 'to take it to the next phase, since thoughts themselves are energy, then retro-metabolism is the holy grail of the quantum mystery – the creation of matter out of thought.'

'And since thought, or consciousness, exists at a quantum level,' Ainsworth added, 'and since the Mysterons appear to be composed of consciousness only, then that means the Mysterons are everywhere and nowhere at once. And if they can make themselves corporeal according to their will, and if they are capable of assuming the energetic skins of whoever they may have absorbed into the field – ' She looked slowly around the boardroom, scrutinising each face individually. 'That means that any one of us could be one of them, and nobody would know it.'

'The Mysterons make soldiers out of our own people,' White said bitterly. 'They take good men and women and they change them on the subatomic level into drones working for their own, evil cause. They turn friend against friend and brother against brother, and they do not care how much human blood is shed in that process.'

He looked penetratingly at Jeff Tracy. At Scott Tracy. Because if they didn't see the danger now, and if they didn't agree to help him… White suddenly felt old. Worn down and wearied by all the years of fighting. 'You see our dilemma,' he said. 'And you see why we have called this clandestine war, perhaps humanity's greatest war, a war of nerves.'

White sat back in his chair and contemplated his guests. The genetic line was clear – the same strength of character, the same clear eyes, and the same determined cast of the jaw. White wondered what chain of events had influenced the Tracys so profoundly – what had made them love humanity so much that they dedicated their minds and their bodies and their fortune to keeping the human race safe, to keeping the indefinable spark of man burning in a universe that was chipping away at it one atom at a time.

'What do you want us to do,' Jeff said, and White felt a glimmer of hope kindle at his words.

'We want you to talk to him,' White said. 'If he can tell you where he's been, and if he can satisfy you that he is your son and that he still possesses some humanity, and if it can be ascertained for absolute certain that he is not under Mysteron control, then he may be our best hope in this war of nerves.'

Jeff inhaled. A deep and thoughtful breath, because Colonel White was asking him for more than he might be able to provide. 'And if we can't?'

White exhaled wearily, feeling like a bastard because he'd dangled hope in their faces and now he was taking it away. 'Then we will have no alternative but to assume that Virgil Tracy is a Mysteron agent, and we will eliminate him.'