zero point

eight

He was locked inside a van. One of those nondescript white things that the FBI and the NSA and the World Security Patrol favoured, a plain and unmarked box that you could see anytime and anywhere, parked on a street corner with a man leaned back against it with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

Inside, the van was nowhere near as nondescript as the exterior advertised. Once he'd been manhandled into the rear – for his own protection, you understand – and forcibly sat down on a narrow bench, Scott had time to take in the bank of electronics fitted against the wall, and the people he now shared the compact interior with – a short-haired woman who turned back to her monitors with a subtle arch of an eyebrow, and a crew-cut slab of muscle who swivelled intently to face the van's unexpected guest. They'd both barely blinked at the commotion of Scott's entry, though the Slab had tightened his lips and nodded a tacit understanding of Scarlet's command to 'watch him.'

Scott caught a quick glimpse of Scarlet's face – stoic and set and indicating that Scarlet's mind had disposed of one problem and was moving on to the next – as the captain slammed the door shut in his face, and then Scott was alone with his guards, adjusting to the confines of his new environment and rubbing distractedly at his wristcom but not quite in a position to use it. John, he knew, would have him in Five's sights, but what good was that when Gordon had been appropriated by Spectrum. And Virgil… well, Virgil was gone.

It was amazing how Scott's body had responded in that moment, the thought buckling him physically and psychologically so that he found himself leaning forward, doubled over at the gut with his head falling into his hands as he steeled himself against a despair that suddenly, treacherously, welled behind his eyelids. 'Dammit,' he said, pressing his palms against his stinging eyes and refusing to give in to a moment of heartsick and helplessness. He didn't have time for it. There was too much he needed to do.

'Hey,' came a voice. 'No funny stuff.'

Scott inhaled, swallowed snot and dirt and straightened up, leaning back against the wall and swallowing again. There was no air in the van. He felt like he might suffocate, that at any moment he might begin to choke.

'You got any water?' he croaked, wincing as pain sparked through the side of his face that had been mashed into the dirt. His whole body felt bruised and strangely violated, both his skin and his psyche scraped raw from contact with Captain Scarlet and the gravel of the cavern floor.

The Slab appraised him silently, his eyes taking in the dust on Scott's uniform and in his hair, and the dirt that crusted half his face. 'Under your seat,' he rumbled, nodding towards the bench and watching as Scott leaned forward and groped around in the storage space before sitting back up with a bottle.

Scott said nothing, cracking open the seal and swallowing half the contents in one deep draught. He toyed with the idea of asking for a cigarette – anything to get the taste of dirt and helplessness out of his mouth – but settled instead for returning the guard's dark-eyed stare. Some guard, Scott realised – the Slab had a nameplate attached to his uniform that advertised him merely as well-muscled tech support.

'Like I said,' the Slab repeated, just to make sure. 'No funny stuff.'

Scott took another swallow. He looked away from the Slab's nameplate and focussed on the bank of screens, distracted by a monitor that displayed a real-time image of the inside of the cavern. What was left of the lab crawled with Spectrum personnel, silent and somehow sinister as they pointed cameras and scanners at the inner walls of the sphere, and rolled out stretches of cable in a criss-cross pattern across the smooth, glass-like floor.

'Have they found anyone?' Scott asked. He couldn't help it. He'd been forcibly prevented from searching for Virgil himself, which meant that his next best hope hinged on the resources of Spectrum.

The tech looked sideways at her well-muscled support system, and when he shrugged his shoulders noncommittally she turned her full attention to Scott. 'We're monitoring residual radiation across all bands,' she said, 'including – '

'No.' Scott leaned forward. 'Did they find anyone?'

'You mean,' she said, 'did we find a person?'

'Yes,' Scott said. 'My team was in there when – ' He couldn't bring himself to say it. Could barely bring himself to think it.

'You mean there were more of you in there when that thing blew?' she asked.

'Yes.' Scott's fingers tightened around the bottle, the plastic crumpling loudly in the confined space. 'One of them is still missing.'

'Um...' The tech shared a look with the Slab. 'I don't think,' she said, as carefully as she could, 'that they're going to find any people.'

'I must apologise,' Colonel White said as he escorted Jeff back to the hangar deck. The corridors of Cloudbase were white and sterile and quiet, the monotony broken only by the sound of their feet on the polished deck and the sublevel hum of the engines that kept Spectrum's carrier base at constant altitude. 'I couldn't have predicted the outcome would be quite like that.'

'A considerable oversight,' Jeff said, 'considering their previous interaction and the type of men that they are.'

'Yes,' said the Colonel, caught out. 'Well. I had hoped that professionalism and civility might override those factors.' He fell quiet as a junior officer entered the corridor, the young woman briefly meeting her commander's gaze and then quickly averting her eyes.

Jeff waited until she'd passed and then turned his attention back to the Colonel. 'And now what?' he asked. 'Now that the veneer of civility has been removed?'

White didn't immediately respond. He appeared to be weighing his words carefully. 'I'll be taking our next step under advisement,' he finally said. 'Spectrum's next course of action remains under consideration.'

The door slid shut behind him and Scott didn't waste time activating the internal lock – he was too preoccupied with dropping to his knees and throwing up into the toilet bowl, his stomach heaving hopelessly on black coffee and bile and the hard, silvery bullet of the edible transmitter. The beacon tapped softly twice against the porcelain, the titanium alloy glinting in the cubicle lights as it sank down beneath the mess that he'd thrown up into the bowl. Scott's stomach heaved again, the tendons in his throat straining as a wave of disgust that was slowly transforming into horror emptied what was left in his stomach.

Captain Scarlet was a Mysteron. Scott groped blindly for the paper. He wasn't even fucking human. What was it the colonel had said? A retro-metabolised simulacrum...

Jesus.

A tremor ran through Scott's body. A deep, bone-shaking shudder that froze the breath in his lungs and made his heart falter in his chest. The thought threatened to cripple him, his hands shaking as he flushed the head and sent the transmitter swirling down into the Cloudbase waste system.

…if Virgil was like that…

'Mr Tracy?' It was the voice of his escort, a Lieutenant Beige, or a Lieutenant Bisque, or a Lieutenant Whatever-The-Fuck-Nondescript-Bullshit-Colour, waiting patiently outside the restroom door.

Scott didn't answer. He lurched to his feet and turned to the tiny hand-bowl, the water cool as it sluiced into his palms and he bent down to splash it against his face. It smelled of plastic and tasted worse, sterile and antiseptic when he used it to rinse his mouth. He glanced at himself in the mirror and was horrified to see Scarlet's blood on his shirt. Scott dabbed at it with the water, but he couldn't get the damn stain out.

'A bit of overkill, don't you think?' Captain Blue stood aside as Scarlet entered the elevator ahead of him. He'd been ordered to escort his partner to the med-deck – a pointless exercise since Scarlet's wound had already healed and the only trace left was the blood that had caked into the creases of his palm. But Doctor Fawn liked to keep track of Scarlet's 'incidents,' both physical and psychological, each event logged on a database so that Fawn could present charts and graphs to the Colonel at their fortnightly meetings. Today's incident would produce a nice pointy spike on the next graph – a physical incident, a self-inflicted wound, and a spectacular security breach. The Colonel had opted to turn a blind eye when Scarlet had gone after Tracy, but none of them could have expected it would turn out quite like that.

Scarlet waited until the doors slid shut behind them, jabbing resentfully at the panel with his fingers to force the lift into motion. 'I had no choice,' he told his partner. 'The Colonel wasn't getting through to him.'

Captain Blue raised an eyebrow. 'And your solution was to beat it into him and then stab yourself in the hand?'

'You're exaggerating.' Scarlet's gaze remained fixed on the elevator door just inches beyond his nose. 'As usual.'

Captain Blue sighed, loud and long and heartfelt. 'There is gonna be so much paperwork for this.' He removed his cap and smoothed a hand through the thick blond of his hair. 'It better be worth it. You think you got through to him?'

'Oh yes.' Scarlet's lips twitched into a smirk as he turned to meet his partner's gaze. 'I definitely got through to him.'

'I must apologise again.' The hangar doors slid apart with a hiss of remnant depressurisation and Colonel White indicated for Jeff to enter first. 'I'll ensure the Captain is disciplined.'

'You apologise a lot,' Jeff said as he stepped over the threshold, 'for man who isn't actually sorry.' Across the deck the Spectrum passenger jet was being prepped for departure, and Jeff watched as Captain Magenta jogged up a short flight of stairs and disappeared into the aircraft.

Colonel White found himself biting down on the inside of his cheek – it wasn't a good look, as his wife had often told him. He was sorry, but he had a duty to his country. And to his planet. And he'd learned early in his career to turn a blind eye to casualties. 'Your son will be here shortly,' he said. 'An officer has been sent to accompany him.'

'And what about my other son?' Jeff turned to face the Colonel. 'The one who's confined to solitary for nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time? The one you're now forcing me to walk away from?'

White calmly returned Jeff's steel-grey stare. They were an equal match in height, and in years, but where White had been built with a wiry layer of muscle sculpted tight across his narrow frame, Jeff Tracy had been constructed out of much sturdier stuff. The contours of Tracy's body were obvious beneath the crisp lines of his clothing, and White had no doubt that the man's muscles were hard beneath the hand-tailored seams of his suit.

'Well, then.' Jeff appeared unsurprised by the Colonel's lack of response. 'I gather our part in this charade is over.' He stared appraisingly at Spectrum's commanding officer. 'I still don't understand what you hoped to get out of this.' He tossed an impatient hand into the air and encompassed the hanger in its sweep, along with the entirety of Cloudbase and the whole pointless and despair-filled day. 'Were we supposed to be the carrot, or the donkey?'

Colonel White's head cocked slightly to one side as he watched Tracy's hand slice angrily through the air, and he wondered if Jeff Tracy was going to prove as volatile as his son. The colonel tensed unconsciously, his abdomen tightening reflexively into a hard, deflective knot.

'Not quite a charade,' White said, 'though I won't insult you any further by lying. Yes. Your part is over – at least for now.' He smiled apologetically. 'To employ your own terminology, you were the carrot. We were hoping that this gesture of goodwill on our behalf would encourage Virgil to cooperate.'

'And what if he doesn't cooperate? What if he can't cooperate?'

'I'm afraid he will have no choice.'

Jeff's gaze hardened, and the colonel realised he'd just made a very bad mistake.

'I won't make this easy,' Jeff told him.

Colonel White nodded his understanding. He had expected nothing less.

Captain Blue leaned affably towards Doctor Fawn's new assistant. She was dark-eyed and cream-skinned and possessed a level of voluptuousness that made a man wonder where she'd been and who she'd been with, and also how proficient she might have become at the carnal arts. None of this speculation was visible on his face, he hoped, because she was looking directly at him and smiling with apparent professional disinterest, and yet that disinterest was strangely, somehow, making him slightly hot under his collar. She blinked at him, a slow, languid shuttering of the eyes that belayed the detachment of her gaze, and the ample bosom stuffed inside her uniform heaved intriguingly as the captain leaned across the desk. He had his hat in his hand, and his blond hair gleamed in the overhead lights as he ramped up the charm.

'We're here,' Captain Blue said, nodding vaguely in the direction of his left elbow where Captain Scarlet lurked unhappily, 'on the Colonel's orders.'

'I see.' An overly-manicured eyebrow arched with interest as the woman – Glenice? Glenda? – appraised his partner. She hadn't been on Cloudbase long, but she'd apparently learned enough about the mysterious Captain Scarlet to already know the drill. 'I'll set up the incident report. The Captain will need to log in to his profile and – '

'Yes.' Blue smiled winningly. Sure, he was enthusiastically bedding Symphony Angel, but a little bit of flirting never did anybody any harm. Besides, Glenice or Glenda was on rotation from the World Security Patrol and wouldn't be around for long. 'We know all about incident reports,' Blue told her with overblown emphasis. 'Believe me.' He turned in time to see Scarlet rolling his eyes towards the ceiling and gamely opted to ignore him. 'Actually,' Captain Blue returned his attention to Glenice or Glenda. 'We need to see Doctor Fawn. There's ah, been an accident.'

The eyebrow raised again. 'I see.' Glenice or Glenda peered again at Scarlet, who dazzled her with a sudden, unexpected smile. 'Well,' she said as a blush crept up from her neck to mottle her cheeks. 'Doctor Fawn isn't here at the moment, but if you don't mind waiting I'm sure he'll be back shortly. Or maybe another doctor could – '

'Not here?' It was Scarlet, about to take the opportunity to abscond.

'Just a minute.' Captain Blue snaked out a hand and grabbed hold of his partner's arm before he could slip away. 'When will the doctor be back?' Blue asked politely, tightening his fingers as Scarlet tested his grip.

Glenice or Glenda fumbled for a sheaf of papers and used them to fan her blush away. 'Soon. He's collecting samples.' She shrugged suggestively and made her bosom heave, and the distraction – such as it was – was all that it took. A loud slap echoed in the confines of the office as Scarlet batted Blue's hand away and headed for the door.

'Hello,' Doctor Fawn said a bit too loudly as he came into the room. He had brought along a medical kit, the white vinyl of the pack clenched tight in his hand. He had also brought along a chair, hefted awkwardly in the other hand. His fingers were curled uncomfortably around the rim of lightweight plastic, and he only let it go when he placed it squarely in front of his patient. 'How are we today?' he asked, hovering undecided for a millisecond before settling himself down on the chair.

Virgil Tracy watched the doctor silently, his brown eyes moving from Fawn's face to the medical kit clenched between the doctor's suntanned fingers. His lips twitched, a tiny hitch that Fawn interpreted as either disappointment or disgust.

'I'm sorry,' the doctor said, feeling reproached, 'but we need another sample.'

Virgil said nothing, a silence that Fawn had come to consider as reluctant acquiescence – a far cry from Virgil's behaviour in those first confusing days of his incarceration. But time – and persistence – had a way of breaking things down, and even the wild spark of resistance had eventually been eroded from Virgil Tracy's personality. With his edges crumbled and broken by futility, Tracy had passed from an angry refusal to submit – an anger that was not inconsequential from such a powerfully-built man – to the slow-moving silence of recent weeks. Colonel White had maintained that the breaking of Virgil Tracy was necessary evil, but Doctor Fawn wasn't quite so sure. There was a part of him that wondered what the Geneva Convention would have to say about it, and how long it would be before Spectrum found themselves accounting for their actions.

Fawn averted his eyes from Virgil's unrelenting gaze and hid his distractions beneath what he hoped was a cool and professional exterior – an affectation that was destroyed a few seconds later when he extracted a pair of crumpled gloves from his pack and attempted to slide them on. His perspiring fingers struggled against the latex, and the doctor was amazed at how the simplest of tasks became infinitely more difficult under the gaze of a hostile audience. Finally the gloves snapped into place, and Fawn waited patiently for Virgil to expose the bare crook of his elbow to view.

Time slowed as the doctor busied himself with a tourniquet, unsettled by the veins that darkened as the rubber tightened, and by the hardening gleam of Virgil's skin beneath his fingers. The heat of Virgil's body pulsed through the latex of the gloves as Fawn positioned the syringe, the bruises of previous blood-draws a guilty reminder of every time the doctor and his questing needles had been there before. Blood welled unwilling into the vial, languid and dark and mesmerising, and then Fawn withdrew the syringe, watching closely as a thin stream of blood erupted from the puncture wound and the skin failed to immediately seal itself shut.

It was a strangely intimate moment as the doctor held Virgil's unmoving arm, the blood dripping from a wound that was measured in micrometres, and the doctor watching closely for something, anything, that would give a hint of Virgil's suspected Mysteronisation. Finally Fawn gave up the observation. He wiped away the blood and taped a piece of gauze over the still-bleeding wound. He wondered why the Colonel made him continue the charade – repeating the same thing while expecting different results was the definition of insanity according to the old cliché, and if a word of it were true then the entirety of Spectrum had been caught up in the maddening loop that had been labelled 'Virgil Tracy'. Fawn himself could feel a palpable descent into insanity – no matter how many tests he could come up with, the science kept telling him that Virgil Tracy was human. But the science also said that he couldn't possibly be.

Fawn stood up from the chair and looked down at his charge. There was a difference there, as though something inside Virgil Tracy had shifted. He seemed brittle, like glass preparing to shatter. 'How are you feeling?' Fawn asked, not quite knowing what it was that he expected to find out.

Virgil didn't reply, and the doctor wondered what was going on inside the young man's head. Scarlet, at least, had raged against the changes wrought so brutally upon him. He had frantically denied them, furiously insisted that he was the same man despite his death and his subsequent resurrection. But Doctor Fawn was of the opinion that death couldn't help but change you, whether you survived the process or not.

Fawn remembered those first few days of Scarlet's death and resurrection with a stark, eidetic clarity – they were burned into his brain, a succession of singular, defining moments that had irrevocably changed his reality and would continue to define his purpose for as long as he lived. And worse, there was a shame attached, a guilty secret that kept the doctor from looking Scarlet fully in the eye. As chief medical officer, Fawn could come to no solution to the dilemma that Captain Scarlet had become, and suggested instead that the Colonel immediately dispose of the problem. Incinerating Scarlet inside the Cloudbase reactor had seemed like a workable solution, and Doctor Fawn had unhesitatingly recommended it.

They were in the surgical unit when Fawn had bluntly made the suggestion, with the colonel watching impassively as the medtechs worked on Scarlet's comatose body. Scarlet had been retrieved after his fall from the Car-Vue tower, shot and smashed and most definitely dead… until his body started reconstructing itself and his brain sparked back to unexpected life. Keeping him sedated while his anatomy reorganised and the techs tried to obtain their samples had proven more difficult than expected – Scarlet's Mysteron cells worked as effectively against anaesthesia as they did against death. Periodically Scarlet's fingers would twitch as he climbed his way back towards consciousness, the movement causing the technicians to freeze in their activities until the sedation once more took hold. Some of them would go so far as to withdraw to a safe distance until the moment had passed, blinking disbelievingly at each other through their protective gear as though their commanding officer had tasked them with sampling a very dangerous snake.

Which in many ways was what their commanding officer had asked them to do. Captain Scarlet was demonstrably no longer human, the cells of his corpse stolen and copied and animated by an energy that Spectrum had only later come to realise was the same energy that held the universe together. Scarlet was not only alien, he was primordial. Constructed anew from something they had discovered was older, even, than Time.

'Colonel,' Fawn had warned, watching as once more Scarlet struggled towards consciousness and was once more submerged into a chemical void. 'When he wakes up we won't be able to control him. I hate to say it,' because truth was, Captain Scarlet had been Fawn's colleague and a friend, 'but our only recourse may be to destroy him.'

Another slice of flesh was removed from Scarlet's unresponsive body as they watched, a trickle of blood barely escaping before the wound began to knit itself together. The sight made Fawn's skin crawl, but he couldn't bring himself to look away. Scarlet seemed so helpless laid out naked on the table, and so exquisitely vulnerable despite the Mysteron secret that lurked just beneath his skin. And it was now, while Scarlet was defenceless, that Fawn wanted to strike.

'Surely,' Fawn had continued, 'once Scarlet is reduced to atoms and those atoms are scattered to the winds, he won't be able to reconstitute.'

'No, Doctor.' There was no judgement in the colonel's reply – disposal of the problem must many times have already crossed his mind. 'Scarlet is a window into the universe of the Mysterons. We can learn a lot about our enemy from him. Perhaps even how to defeat them.'

'Colonel?' Fawn's brown eyes widened. 'As long as Scarlet's alive he has a connection to whatever it was that made him. He's a threat to our planet, sir. Is that a threat that you're willing to entertain?'

White had turned to face Fawn then, and the doctor had wilted a little under the Colonel's intense gaze.

'What you're suggesting,' White had said, as calmly as if he were ordering a cup of tea with milk, 'is murder.'

'Euthanasia,' Fawn had rapidly countered. He was insulted. Murder went against everything he stood for.

He turned back to the patient, watching as a scalpel cut into Scarlet's exposed abdomen and the wound almost immediately commenced to seal itself shut. It was unnatural, and on some primal level it terrified him. 'I think that Captain Scarlet,' the doctor said, 'the real Captain Scarlet, would have wanted it.'

And besides, Doctor Fawn had secretly reasoned, you couldn't murder what wasn't human.

Northolt Field looked different in sunlight as opposed to rain – no less grey, despite the blue sky and pale air, it simply presented its grey in different hues. The tarmac had dried to a lighter shade of drab, and the weeds were a dusty green where they poked through the cracking edges. Here and there a dandelion also poked through, the vibrant yellow flowers bobbing violently as the Spectrum passenger jet thundered back down the runway and eased herself into the sky. The backwash engulfed Jeff entirely, the sudden rush of air blowing his tie back over his shoulder and forcing its chilly way through the cotton weave of his shirt.

Jeff shivered. He couldn't help it.

How strange it all was, to be back on terra firma with the sun shining on planet Earth in the same indifferent way that it always did. The sun didn't care that Jeff Tracy's world had, once again, been shattered into pieces. Except that this time, Jeff wasn't so sure he could reassemble those pieces into anything meaningful. The other times – and there had been other times – he'd somehow found a way to pick himself up. He could throw himself into his work. He could buy an island and build an empire. He could establish International Rescue to make sure that other people didn't have to suffer loss the same way that he had suffered loss. Death did not sit well with Jeff Tracy – all he wanted was for the world to be a better place. A place where people died peacefully at the end of a long and fulfilling life, and weren't snatched away from their loved ones before they'd had a chance to really live.

'Dad.'

Jeff blinked against a sharp, bright pain as he turned his face towards the sun. What did the sun care about the pathetic struggles of humans – or of Mysterons, for that matter?

'Dad.'

Jeff turned. The SPJ had disappeared into the haze and the dandelions had returned to a state of preternatural calm.

'Let's go,' Scott said as he headed across the bitumen. A car waited in front of a shuttered hangar – the same car that had brought them here, though it was a different driver who leaned back against the mirror-finish of the duco and raised a hand to his face to stifle a yawn. He'd probably been waiting here a while, had himself a nap, eaten takeout for lunch or dinner or maybe even breakfast, because what time was it anyway? Jeff glanced reflexively at his watch, but the time never registered in his brain.

The driver hastened to the car door on Scott's approach, and Jeff watched as his son paused to remove his jacket and throw it roughly into the car. Scott lowered himself onto the back seat, turning briefly to meet his father's gaze before the driver closed the door. There was anger in Scott's eyes. Fury. And an unmistakable sense of intent.

The cogs were working feverishly inside Scott's head – Jeff could practically hear them spinning.

The Cloudbase medical deck was a warren of corridors and corners that seemed purpose-built to diminish haste, so it didn't take long for Captain Blue to catch up to Captain Scarlet. Besides, Blue's legs were just that little bit longer. 'You embarrassed me,' he drawled when he sidled up alongside his partner, his voice pitched loud enough for Scarlet's ears but not loud enough for the occupants of the medical bays to hear.

Scarlet didn't even break his stride. 'You've never been embarrassed in your life,' he said, the pithiness of his retort making Adam Svenson laugh. It was true – Svenson's looks and charm and family money had bestowed upon him an indestructibility of quite another kind.

'Still,' Blue persisted, striding ahead of Scarlet and elbowing him in the ribs as he passed by. 'That was no way to behave in front of a lady.'

'Some lady.' Scarlet moved into step beside Blue. 'I thought she was going to crawl across the desk and rip your clothes off while I was watching.'

'Would you have minded?'

'Minded what?'

'Watching.'

Scarlet snorted. 'You're disgusting,' he said.

'I know. You should try being disgusting some time.'

'What makes you think I'm not?'

'You used to be,' Blue chuckled. 'Now you're just – ' Captain Blue closed his mouth.

'Now I'm just what?' Scarlet had come to an abrupt halt behind him, and Blue could feel Scarlet's eyes burning holes through the kevlar of his uniform as he continued a few more steps down the corridor.

Captain Blue stopped and turned around. Yes, there were still secrets between them, but there were precious few these days. 'Tell me, Paul,' he said – no use beating around the bush – 'when was the last time you actually had sex instead of just, you know, thinking about it?'

Scarlet's stare escalated into a glare that lowered the temperature on the medical deck by several bone-chilling degrees. 'You,' he said, careful to articulate every single, pithy syllable, 'are like a dog with a bone.'

Blue paced the few short steps back to his partner. 'Paul… you know what I mean.' He attempted to clap a friendly hand against Scarlet's shoulder but the captain batted it away. 'Look at you,' Blue said as he carried on digging his hole. 'This Tracy business has you wound up tight. The old Paul liked to work out his stress the old-fashioned way.'

'You're right,' Scarlet said, his stone-cold façade never faltering. 'Except the new Paul can't give in to those kinds of feelings. The new Paul isn't exactly human.'

Blue continued digging because he was nearly at the bottom. 'Maybe a good fuck might make the new Paul feel human?'

For a moment Captain Blue thought Scarlet was going to haul back and punch him, and maybe Blue flinched, or maybe some subtle expression in his eyes gave the game away. But in the end it was Scarlet who flinched, drawing back from his partner by imperceptible degrees until he was safely back inside his shell, his anger cocooned carefully behind his smooth exterior. From Day Zero Scarlet had systematically alienated himself from his friends and his family, his world narrowed down by necessity to the Spectrum personnel with the security clearance to understand who he had been and what he had become. Blue knew he didn't like it. Hated it, in fact. Hated seeing the mistrust in people's eyes, and knowing that his fellow officers were always on guard, forever wondering if today was the day that Captain Scarlet would shed his clever, human skin.

'Paul,' Adam said, his hand coming to rest reassuringly on Scarlet's shoulder, and this time Scarlet didn't bat it away. 'You know I'm only trying to help.'

Scarlet flashed his partner a tight smile. 'And you're the only person who can get away with it.'

Ironic, considering how Captain Scarlet had once tried to kill Captain Blue, and Captain Blue had once shot Captain Scarlet point-blank in the heart.

Maybe that's what drew them together and kept them together, forever orbiting each other in a gravity wave of guilt.

To Jeff Tracy, seated beside his son in the cockpit of Tracy One, the sky around them appeared motionless, the planet below as pale and distant as a faintly-remembered dream. Scott also had never seemed more distant from Jeff than he did right now, despite being buckled securely into the pilot seat and only thirty inches away from him.

'Scott,' Jeff said into the void. 'Son – '

'I have never needed a drink so much in my life,' Scott said.

Jeff smiled, wan and distracted. 'You and me both.' He stared out at the too-blue sky. 'I need to contact Base. I'll ask Tin-Tin to get everybody back and – '

'And what?' Scott's frustration abruptly vented itself. 'And tell them what?'

'I don't know what I'll tell them, but they need to know that Virgil has been found. And that your brother is alive.'

'If you call that living,' Scott said. He glared into the haze of 40,000 feet and said, 'I can't stand it, Dad. Thinking about what they're doing to him. What they've already done. Did you see him? Did you see the look in his eyes?'

Jeff had seen it. And it had broken his heart.

'We have to do something,' Scott was saying. 'We have to get him out of there.'

'We will.' Jeff said. 'We'll pursue it through legal channels – '

'You've got to be joking, Dad! Spectrum is untouchable – pursuing them legally would be like trying to sue the goddamned CIA. It could take a year – years! – before we get a hearing. We could take it all the way to Congress and still never make anything stick. And by the time we've finished clearing all the roadblocks they'll put in our way, they'll have Virgil locked down in some off-the-grid bolthole where we'll never find him!'

Jeff disagreed. 'We have names now, and places, and I'll throw everything I've got at it. I'll go public if I have to.'

Scott snorted. 'You'd be wasting your money and destroying your reputation into the bargain. I say we fight fire with fire.'

Jeff turned to stare at his eldest. 'Please don't do anything stupid, son.'

Scott's lips twitched, the muscles of his jaw working in what Jeff well-knew was defiance.

'Whatever you think you're going to do, I forbid it,' Jeff said. 'Scott? Do you hear me?'

The jaw clenched, unclenched, and then finally relaxed. 'Yeah.' Scott turned to look at his father, but his eyes were hidden behind the mirrored lenses of his sunglasses. 'I hear you.'

It was dark down here, the sea tainted grey by cyclone-churned waves that swirled metres above their heads.

Cameron knew about the swirling, because he'd been with Gordon when the pod had made the drop and splashed hard into the water. In an instant they'd been swept up in the waves and spun around in a violent three-sixty, and it had been a gut-churning age before Gordon had been able to get Thunderbird 4 out of the pod and down into the relative safety of the depths. Relative being the operative word, since little sub now found herself at the mercy of submerged currents, invisible serpents that shimmered towards them from every direction and buffeted against the hull as Thunderbird 4 powered her way down.

Cameron crowded himself into the sub's tiny cockpit, a steadying hand on the back of the pilot's seat and the upright buzz of his hair scraping against the ceiling with every liquid jolt. He leaned close to the forward screen and peered out into the murk, legs braced against the turbulence that continued to buffet the tiny submarine. 'I can't see shit,' he said as one of those buffets bumped his skull hard against the ceiling. He touched a hand to the affront and ruffled his hair back into an upright position.

Gordon ignored the griping of his teammate and activated the floodlights as Thunderbird 4 sank deeper into the gloom, the sub's illumination array barely able to pierce the swirling murk. The harbour was a mess, the water churned up with sand and debris and the listing hulks of freighters as they released the contents of their holds into the sea.

'There,' Cameron suddenly said. He took his hand from his head and jabbed a finger towards ten o'clock. 'There she is. There. You see her?'

'In my sights.' Gordon angled the sub gently to port and opened the comms. 'Thunderbird 4 to Thunderbird 2. You copy?'

A moment of faint static, and then Brains' voice filtered through the speakers. 'FAB. Tracking indicates that you are, uh, almost on top of the, uh, Tramontane.'

'We have a visual,' Gordon confirmed. 'She's upside down but relatively intact. Hopefully anybody still alive has enough air to breathe.'

'We'll find out soon enough,' Cameron murmured as he dragged the zipper of his wetsuit all the way up to his throat.

'FAB,' Brains was saying. 'I'm returning to the, ah, the docking yard. Some cranes have, ah, collapsed, and the Port Authority are requesting a-assistance with heavy lifting.'

'Understood,' Gordon replied. 'We'll make contact when we're ready for pickup.'

The connection cut out and Cameron stretched inside his wetsuit. 'Brains is getting good at this. If he gets any better I'll be out of a job.'

'That's the plan,' Gordon replied absently, his mind otherwise occupied as he assayed the slowly sinking hulk ahead of them. 'Alan has the whole deal on fast-track.'

'Ha-haaah,' Cameron responded mirthlessly as he inspected the seals of his suit. 'Changing the subject, make sure you cut the hole big enough this time,' he said.

'That's right.' Gordon engaged Four's propulsors and carefully nudged the sub towards Tramontane's drifting hull. 'Last time your fat ass didn't fit. I took pictures, remember?'

'Oh, I remember.' Cameron considered launching a backhand at Four's unsuspecting pilot, but opted instead for a few choice epithets. He was just reaching his zenith when Four's comms activated and his mouth snapped shut. It was the island, unexpectedly routing through Thunderbird 2's array.

'Base to Thunderbird 4.' Tin-Tin said. 'Gordon,' she said. 'Do you copy?'

'We copy,' Gordon said. He leaned in to increase the gain – Tin-Tin had routed through Two for better signal strength, but there was still a hurricane and an ocean churning up the space between them. 'What's up? Is there a problem?'

'No,' Tin-Tin replied. 'Just that…' The comms fell silent for long enough that Gordon wondered if the connection had been lost, and then she said, 'How long will you be?'

Gordon shared a glance with Cam and the ex-marine shrugged his broad shoulders. The movement made the neoprene of his wetsuit ride up under his balls and he fished around with his fingers to dig it back out. Beats me, he mouthed as he tugged at the rubber. They'd never been hurried along in a rescue before. Well, if you didn't count Scott's constant urgings to 'hurry it up'.

'I don't have a time estimate,' Gordon told her. 'I'm about to cut a hole in the side of a sinking ship and Cam is going in to extract any survivors. Could you hurry it up,' he said in fair imitation of his eldest brother, 'because anybody still alive inside that ship doesn't have time for you to beat around the bush.'

'Of course,' Tin-Tin said. 'It's just that – '

Another hesitant silence made Cameron nudge Gordon's elbow and point to the sinking hulk ahead of them. He nodded towards the cutter controls and then turned to exit the cockpit. He could be getting into his tank and flooding the compartment while Tin-Tin got to the point.

'Your father's on his way home,' Tin-Tin finally said. 'He says he would like everybody back on the island as soon as possible.'

'Okay,' Gordon said distractedly as he positioned Thunderbird 4 a few meters from the Tramontane's hull and brought the laser cutters online. 'But we're nowhere near done yet so he's going to have to wait.'

'He has news,' Tin-Tin told him.

'About?' The little sub drifted closer to the sinking ship, a dull grey hulk in the midst of a murky gloom.

'About Virgil,' Tin-Tin said.

Gordon's fingers tightened on the helm, and he glanced back to see Cameron watching from just inside the hatch. Their eyes met, and the ex-marine's forehead furrowed deep in puzzlement.

Gordon turned back to the console. 'They found something?' he asked as the churning weight of the ocean pressed down upon him. 'A body?'

'No,' Tin-Tin said, her voice small and far away. '…your father will explain...'

She was fading away, but whether from static or from something else Gordon couldn't rightly say, and he found himself leaning closer to the console to listen.

'...when everybody is back on the island…'