The trio crept along carefully, approaching the large door at the end of the tunnel, followed by Five, who occasionally beeped softly.
"Quiet, Five," Mac whispered.
Off to his side, Jack snickered and said in not quite a whisper. "You sure his name isn't really R2, young Skywalker?"
Mac shook his head, but he couldn't help grinning a little. "I knew you were gonna start."
"Yeah well, I'd rather think about getting eaten by Ewoks than like robot zombie clowns or whatever is down here."
"The Ewoks don't eat people, Jack. I don't know how many times I'm gonna have to explain this to you—"
Dr. Stomski pushed between them. "Are you two seriously arguing about Star Wars right now?"
"No!" Jack said, clearly offended. "We're arguing about Return of the Jedi!" Jack launched into a low-voiced explanation of an argument that went all the way back to Afghanistan. And instead of dismissing it, the lovely scientist weighed in as Devil's advocate.
"Shhh!" Mac interrupted suddenly, holding up a hand. "Do you hear that?"
Once Alice and Jack were quiet, they heard it too. At first when you just listened, it was a low humming. Then you realized you could feel it, too. Kind of vibrating in your chest. It gave off a feeling of unease.
"Place sounds haunted," Jack whispered.
"Hey, Alice?" Mac frowned. "Do you think your ex might have some kind of wireless charging system down here? For the robots?"
"We had a dock system that we designed together, but … He might have done something without telling me after we split. We haven't exactly been on friendly terms. Why?"
"Jack is right. It sounds haunted. Which probably means a high level of certain types of electromagnetic frequencies. Same sort of stuff so-called ghost hunters usually find in supposedly haunted houses."
Jack gave him a familiar look. "You can't prove they aren't really haunted, man. I keep telling you—"
"Jack, you can exactly prove it. That's the whole point of using EMF detectors."
"One of these days, Mac, you're gonna run into something you can't explain and then you'll—"
"Sure, pal." Mac grinned to let him know he was teasing, but also that he still thought Jack's insistence that things like ghosts and chupacabras existed was ridiculous and he had since Jack had brought up something … Jack called it a roo-something … Mac couldn't remember, but only because he'd dismissed it as Jack just being Jack … but he'd meant werewolf, when some mangled bodies had been found outside the village they'd been holed up in after some local color back in Afghanistan.
"Does it matter?" Alice asked, trying to get the pair back on track.
"Well, if that's what it is, I can probably take out all the bots programmed for it all at once. If I can get in there and access the power unit. Any ideas?"
"If he's got them either programmed to do harm or he's piloting Eight or some of the other boys, that's probably a good idea." She paused, thinking about it. "There's the maintenance access tunnel. But it's mostly meant for some smaller repair robots." She squinted at him. "You might be able to squeeze through."
Jack stepped forward. "Good. So we'll go in through the maintenance-whatever and you can guard the door with that cute little pistol of yours if the ex is down here and makes a break for it."
"You're not going to fit through there, big fella." She gave him a look that said that despite the circumstances, she'd slowed down enough to appreciate Jack's broad shoulders. "Your partner might or might not get stuck."
"Well, listen—"
"Jack." It was all Mac had to say. If Mac was almost too big, Jack probably couldn't even get started.
Jack cleared his throat. "So we get Mac access to the wiring junk and when he says go, we breach the door?"
Mac tipped him a grin. "And by me saying go, you mean giving you the signal, old school style?"
"Yeah, exactly."
"Alright, give me a hand with this access panel."
Jack stepped forward to do just that.
As soon as Mac disappeared into the maintenance access, Alice asked, "What's the signal?"
"No idea." Jack shrugged. "I'll know it when I see it."
She rolled her eyes. Based on their banter up to that point, she should have known. "Great."
0-0-0
Mac crawled along through the narrow space. He caught and tore his clothing several times, but did manage not to get stuck. He was estimating the distance in his head, but with the increased vibration in his chest he was pretty confident.
Once he got to a spot where the vibration was damn near unbearable and the sort of anxious feeling it caused started to feel like waking up from a nightmare, he got out his pocket knife and carefully unscrewed the back side of an access panel. He eased it out of his way slowly, wincing at every little whispering scrape it made as he set it aside.
He edged out into the dim, freezing room. He rapped his head on the lab table in his way and almost swore out loud, but he heard a chair scrape across the floor. Mac slid into the shadow of a nearby cabinet.
He watched from his nearly invisible vantage point. A tall, slender man in glasses and a lab coat, who definitely didn't look like the supervillain type any more than Alice did, moved around the crowded storage room. For an underground storage space there was a lot of extremely high tech equipment down here. And it was very clean.
But some stuff was just cobbled together the way Mac might have done it himself.
There was a refrigeration apparatus built out of styrofoam coolers, and an air conditioning unit with the temperature regulator broken off and there were little charging stations under four robots that resembled Five. It seemed to be thrown together out of homemade solenoids, and some radio parts.
That was a relief. He didn't want to use his improvised solution to the robot problem. If he could cause a surge through the power units, he could probably neutralize the drones. He didn't want to damage any of Alice's tech if he could help it.
He crept around, sending enough power through the devices to overwhelm and therefore drain the batteries. He got around to the last unit, the most dangerous one since it was closest to the desk the man was working at. He accessed the wiring carefully, pulled the critical wire out and moved to snip it.
The wire sparked.
And the whole room went dark.
He heard the rogue scientist swear. Something got knocked over. Then a flashlight was shining directly in his eyes.
"Don't move."
Yeah, that tracks.
0-0-0
Outside the room in the tunnel, things went dark.
Jack stiffened.
Alice turned on her phone's flashlight. "Lemme guess. The signal?"
"I guess maybe."
They tried the door.
Locked.
On closer inspection it appeared to be an electromagnetic lock.
Alice frowned and tried opening it with something from her pocket.
A gunshot echoed from behind the door.
"Stand back, Doc," Jack said as he pushed her out of the way.
"Don't…"
Jack didn't let her finish the warning, he fired his weapon.
The round ricocheted off the bulletproof surface.
"Ah!" Jack recoiled and grimaced. The ricochet had grazed his forearm, a pretty deep gouge, too. Then another shot was fired from behind the door. "Mac!"
0-0-0
Inside the room, Mac struggled with Eric Stomski. He couldn't hear a damn thing over the ringing in his ears from the gun firing in such close quarters. He knew the man was growling things at him, but it's not like anything he said mattered anyway.
Mac managed to knock the gun away. He kept catching brief glimpses of his adversary and the room from half broken flashlight getting kicked around at their feet.
He had just enough time to catch movement out of the corner of his eyes before a painful electric jolt right above his knee caused his leg to buckle.
Welcome to the party, killer robot, he thought, suddenly sympathetic to Jack's dislike of the technology.
He kept his feet, but just barely. But it allowed him to get in a solid elbow on his adversary who'd clearly expected him to go down with the shock.
Stomski got in a solid crack to his cheekbone, but Mac threw himself at the man and moved them further from where the gun had clattered.
A few moments of struggle later, Mac stiffened with a second ZAP, more powerful than the first.
His leg went numb and he went sprawling.
Stomski scrambled for his gun in the near dark.
The robot rolled toward Mac again and he decided that was the bigger immediate threat. He pulled the improvised electromagnetic pulse device he'd constructed in the storeroom earlier out of his jacket, said a momentary prayer of sorts to Nicola Tesla, and triggered the device.
The machine went still, which was good.
But now Stomski was standing over him with his retrieved weapon.
That's … not so good.
Fortunately, his EMP had also disengaged the door lock and Jack and Alice burst in.
Without hesitation, Jack fired, and Stomski's gun went flying, as the man dropped to his knees, clutching his bullet-shattered hand.
Alice moved carefully into the dim room, surveying what her ex-husband had been up to, as Jack zip tied the man's hands. Her phone light had gone dead when the lock disengaged.
"You okay kid?"
Mac couldn't hear distinct words yet, but knew Jack had spoken. Guessing at the content, Mac grinned. "Never better, pal."
His leg was still pretty numb, but the pins and needles zinging up and down it, told him it wouldn't be for very long. He used the table nearest him to pull himself up. Then he fished around in his pockets until he found the lighter he often kept on him on missions for situations just like this one. He flicked it to life for some light.
"Jack! You're bleeding!" His own voice still sounded underwater but his hearing was coming back.
"Aw, this? This ain't—"
"Hardly a mosquito bite. I know." He raised an eyebrow. "Hey, doc? Can I get you to part with that lab coat?"
She stripped it off. "Sure. What're you going to do with it?"
"Well, first I'm gonna make a torch with some of the lubricant oil on this table. Then I'm gonna bandage my partner so we can get outta here and find our analyst." He handed her the lighter and she flicked it back to life so he could see to work.
"Maybe there's a signal somewhere down here and we could just call for the cavalry," Jack said hopefully.
Mac shook his head, but kept working. "Even if there were, my EMP device fried our phones."
"Dammit, Mac! You've already wrecked like four of my phones for your little doohickeys on one op or another. Now you've figured out how to do it without even touching it!"
"Sorry, Jack," he said, not especially sounding it. He'd done what he needed to do. And everybody was still alive. He grinned as they got his torch lit. He handed it to Alice. "How about I'll buy you a bottle of whatever hard stuff you want to make it up to you."
"And a new phone!"
"And a new phone … Now, lemme see that arm."
He stepped toward Jack and his leg buckled just a little. Jack jumped to keep him from going over, but Mac had already steadied himself. "What the hell happened to you?" Jack demanded, but let Mac begin bandaging his bullet graze.
"One of Stomski's bots zapped me. A couple of times. That's why I had to zap everything else."
Jack was about to respond, but Alice exclaimed, "Five!" and that was followed almost immediately by Mac swearing a Jack worthy curse. "The containment unit!"
Alice ran into the hallway and Mac half-ran, half-limped across the room toward the now still and silent cooling unit he'd noticed earlier.
"Great move, Junior," Stomski said snarkily from his position on the floor where Jack had zip tied him to the desk.
Mac tossed a glare at him. "Don't suppose you've got a back up kinetic battery charger floating around down here?"
The man's expression lost some of its defiant, angry edge. "If I did I'd tell you. I'm not looking to die down here."
Mac swallowed hard. "I'm not looking to let out whatever you were chilling there."
"If I help, I want a deal."
Mac wasn't sure what he was going to say, but he opened his mouth anyway.
Alice strode back in, interrupting, and she had her small handgun drawn and pointed at her ex-husband's head. "No deals for you, Eric!" She could barely look at him. She did look at Mac and there was pain in her eyes. "There's liquid nitrogen down here somewhere. I know the surplus is in storage."
"No! You can't destroy my research!" Eric shouted.
Mac ignored him. "Where?"
"One of the two rooms further down the hall. I don't know which."
"I'll be back." He grabbed the torch and took off.
Now Mac's leg was waking up a little. It didn't feel great. It felt kind of like you'd expect it to if Hulk decided to give you a Charlie horse for saying something about his mom. But he could run again halfway decently. He skidded to a stop in the hallway. "Oh, Five. I'm sorry," he said quietly when he saw the dark screen on the little robot's face. Then he took off down the hall.
When he got back about fifteen minutes later, wearing heavy gloves and lugging a surprisingly heavy tank, the torch was burning out, but someone had made a lantern of sorts with some of the oil. Jack was pacing and mumbling about being caught underground with a zombie virus and a chick named Alice and how devil dogs were probably going to chase them any minute, and Alice and her ex were arguing.
Mac dropped the almost extinguished torch on top of one of the fried robots so as not to accidentally light the whole damn building on fire, Then he did his best to just stay focused. Ideally, he'd introduce the liquid nitrogen without really opening the unit. He looked it over and realized there was no way to do it as safely as he wanted to. "Jack! I need extra hands," he called.
Mac used a letter opener from the desk to drill a hole in the styrofoam while Jack handled the tank.
As he felt the last bit of styrofoam about to give way, he said, "Now!"
Jack carefully dumped the contents into the box where Stomski had been storing his engineered virus just as Mac forced the letter opener through. When the vapor poured out of the hole as the liquid nitrogen froze everything it touched, Jack yelped and jumped back.
"It's the chemical, Jack, not the virus escaping or whatever." He grabbed the tank and dumped the rest of the contents in.
"You sure? Cuz I don't wanna get home and realize I'm the reason Captain Tripps infects Southern California."
"I don't know what that is, but trust me, you won't go home infected."
"Yeah? You're that sure this'll work?"
Mac shrugged, putting down the tank and peeling off his flannel shirt to make another torch they could use to get out of here. "Well, I'm at least sure that once we get topside and call this in, in addition to the Feds, Thornton's going to have this place crawling with infectious disease people. We won't get to go anywhere until we're in the clear. I learned that much at field school."
"Aw, man."
"Don't start freaking out. You need a medic anyway. How did you get shot? I didn't think Stomski got a shot off at you."
Alice had stopped lining out her husband and joined them. "Jack tried shooting the lock when he heard shots from in here."
"Bulletproof?"
"Yup."
"Damn."
"And we're leaving that out of the report," Jack demanded
Mac tipped him a grin. "Okay by me. So long as you write up the whole thing and I don't have to do any of the paperwork on this one."
"Rock, paper, scissors?"
"Not a chance. Not even Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock, man."
Jack shook his head with a grin. If Mac could cobble together an EMP, he could do the same with some paperwork. That kid hated paperwork worse than he hated bleeding. "Alright. Let's grab the mad scientist and get the hell out of here."
"The sooner the better." Mac picked up the improvised lantern. "Is there a staircase or something we can use to get topside?" he asked Alice.
She shook her head. "Just the elevator. And I'm guessing that's fried, too." She shrugged. "There's the access ladder. We can climb up and get whoever you call in to come back down here to retrieve Eric once we reboot the system from up top."
"It's gotta be better than the climb down," Jack said, knowing it really wasn't.
"Yeah," Mac sighed, thinking he hoped his leg would stop tingling by the time they found the ladder. "I guess."
0-0-0
Mac shifted the ice pack the medic had given him for the swelling under his eye to the burn behind his ear. "Sssst." He moved it to his knuckles instead. It didn't hurt nearly as much as either the burn or his face, but it would still probably do some good.
Jack looked at him but didn't say anything. He just shifted in his seat, then after a minute he shifted again.
Mac grinned and shook his head. "You're fine, Jack."
Jack shifted a little closer. "You sure, man? Because, we kinda broke that guy's apocalypse containment thingy."
"I appreciate you not just yelling at me for frying it," Mac said with an apologetic grin. "But yeah, I'm sure. These infectious disease people look way too calm for us to be worried."
Jack frowned. "Then how come y'all still look so stressed out?"
Mac frowned. "Do I? I…" Then he darted a glance at Alice, who was talking to someone in full protective gear, and sighed. "I'm feeling bad about frying Five, I guess."
"But not my phone?" Jack asked and Mac couldn't tell if he was teasing or not.
He huffed another sigh, this one a little irritated. "I already said I'd replace it."
Jack's eyebrows went up, but he didn't comment on Mac's tone. "I guess Five was pretty cool?" he said, smoothly edging the subject to one Mac found himself immediately distracted by.
"Really cool." His face brightened. "Even without audible speech software, his speech recognition and expressive language was pretty sophisticated. Decision making programming was like nothing I've ever seen. I've always…"
"Always what, kid?"
Mac grinned sheepishly. "I've always wanted to build something like that. My programming skills are awful though."
"Well, now. Seems to me you share a bed at least every weekend with somebody who could maybe help out with that."
Mac frowned. "Nikki thinks it's dumb. A waste of time." Then he grinned. "Not that she complained when I built her her own robot vacuum cleaner."
Jack didn't comment on that particular relationship wrinkle. Jack had always liked Nikki well enough, but he definitely didn't like her with Mac. She was constantly making the dude blush, and not in that accidental way anyone could with Mac. It seemed calculated. He hadn't been surfing since they'd started dating, nor had he cracked out his skateboard. He seemed more … distracted … if such a thing were possible. But not happier. He figured now wasn't the time to bring it up though. Because a couple of the staff were looking their way again. "How come those guys in space suits keep lookin' over here if we're as fine as you say?"
Mac frowned across the room. He'd noticed it too. "I dunno. But I'll find out."
Mac put down his ice pack, rose, and strode across the room.
Jack half-grinned. Jack knew he had swagger, style, game. But Mac, who really didn't seem to have any of those things, could walk with authority a five star general would envy. It was an air of command that couldn't be taught, in Jack's experience. And while he often gave MacGyver a hard time about his lack of effort in the romance department, he sort of wanted to point out that when Mac decided to be in control of something, every female head in the place would turn.
Jack frowned when the space suit set shifted aside and he saw that Nikki had been talking with them the whole time, holding her open laptop. She saw Mac coming and waved him over with an urgent gesture. Mac picked up his pace and joined the group. Jack couldn't hear them and wasn't sure he wanted to know what they were saying anyway, so he shifted his gaze to where Alice was talking to someone who looked awfully important on the other side of the room.
"Hey, guys, what's up?"
Instead of answering, Nikki spun her computer around for him to see.
"Ah, MacGyver, excellent. You should be able to move things along for us."
"Director Thornton," Mac said with almost total neutrality. He was pretty pleased with himself that his surprise at having the director of DXS communicate with their analyst and not with him stayed off his face. Then he remembered that she couldn't have reached him directly anyway because when he'd fried those robots (including Five, he chided himself), he'd also fried all their tech, including his phone, right along with the one Jack was still complaining about. "What am I moving along?"
"I need you all back at the office ASAP."
"Yes, ma'am. What's the hold up?" Mac glanced at the techs around him, keeping his concern out of his voice and expression, pretty convincingly, he thought.
She widened her eyes, almost too slightly for Mac to even notice it, when he got closer to the laptop. "Are you injured?"
"No ma'am. Not really. Got in a little fight getting things locked down."
She dipped her head in what he could only interpret as an approving nod. "Good."
Pleased to have moved the conversation off his slight black eye, he looked between Thornton and the techs. "Is there an issue with the containment of the virus?"
"No, sir. The sample appears totally destroyed and based on your description of events, that everyone, including the suspect has confirmed, you probably don't have anything to worry about," came the muffled reply. "However, we normally observe a twelve hour protocol for this type of possible exposure, as a precaution. You understand."
He had no idea what standard operating procedure was for this sort of thing, but the way they said 'sir' led him to believe Thornton had indicated he had some sort of authority here, so he decided to just roll with it. He glanced back at Nikki, then at Thornton. "It's already been four hours. Is whatever you need urgent, ma'am?"
"I believe you'll think so," Thornton replied.
Mac felt his heart rate pick up. O'Neil. Whatever she had on tap for them had to be related to O'Neil, or else why would she put it like that. I wonder if DXS found him on another camera or … Focus up, Mac, he admonished himself. You've got to get out of here to find out.
"Understood," was what he said instead of launching into an interrogation of their boss. He looked at the nearest tyvek suit-clad tech, attempting to make eye contact, but mostly seeing his own reflection in the face shield on the suit. "Is there anything we can do to move up this protocol? Instead of half a day's worth of observation?" He paused, then he indicated Jack with a tip of his chin. "Because my partner over there is already getting antsy. When Jack gets antsy, he's prone to accidentally damaging expensive equipment. Potentially with bullets."
The tech laughed. "He does have that look about him, sir."
Nikki jumped in. "He's not trying to be funny. Dalton gets … funny … around stuff like this. For a guy who risks his neck as often and as willingly as Jack does, the prospect of infectious diseases turns him into a well-armed nine year old who just woke up from a nightmare with parents nowhere in sight."
A ripple of disquiet at the tone she used tugged at Mac's attention. He didn't love her particular phrasing with people who didn't know them either. But he didn't want to say anything. He figured he was already getting off light that she hadn't brought up his flimsy excuse for not going out of town with her this weekend anyway. What he offered was, "Jack just doesn't have much experience with this kind of thing."
Thornton spoke from the computer. "He's also probably bored. When Jack Dalton was training with our multi-agency program when he first came to work for me, he blew up the entire septic system because he got bored."
One of the other techs shrugged. "I guess we could just run the blood test from the mad scientist's notes."
"How long will that take?" Mac asked.
"You mean after the two hours it'll take you to get Jack to roll up his sleeve?" Nikki snickered.
This time Mac did give her a look that said to knock it off, but she just smiled back, almost daring him to say something. Mac gave his attention to the tech. "If our Director says us getting back to our HQ is urgent, it's—"
"A matter of national security," Thornton supplied helpfully.
Another shrug from the tech … or was it a different tech? They were all in blue tyvek suits and sort of milling around, so Mac was starting to lose track of them. "Just long enough to do the draw and run it. Half-hour, forty-five minutes, maybe?"
"Excellent," Thornton said crisply. "Mac?"
"Yes, ma'am?"
"See this happens ASAP. Tell Jack I'll even upgrade his phone."
"Yes, ma'am," Mac nodded and turned to head toward where Alice was talking to another group of techs and someone in a suit.
"Where are you going?" Nikki called. "You should go grab Jack before he figures out what's up and finds a bathroom to hide in."
Mac made himself give her a grin. Maybe if he didn't play into it, she'd stop giving Jack a hard time. If he and Jack wanted to give each other shit, that was one thing. They'd known each other for years now, and been through a lot already. Nikki joining in was something else. He didn't like it. But he didn't want to fight with her. Not at the moment, at least. "I'm going to see if the lovely and talented Dr. Stomski is willing to part with her phone number so I can add that to Thornton's incentive of a tech upgrade."
"Incentive? You mean bribe, like a little kid with a lollipop."
Mac chuckled like he thought it was funny. "I'm not above a little blackmail to get my partner headed to where we need to go."
Nikki laughed. "Not a bad plan."
By the time he made his way back over to Jack, Nikki had already broken the good news.
"Ah, man. Isn't the damn bullet graze enough torture for one day?" he groaned, gesturing at his bandaged arm.
"Don't be a baby," she said mildly.
"I'm not bein' a … Mac … is she always this mean?"
Mac raised his eyebrows. "Not to me," he said pointedly, this time letting Nikki know for sure he didn't appreciate her hassling Jack. He gave Jack his full attention and held up a slip of paper between two fingers. "I think she was just making sure you didn't find somewhere else to be while I got you some motivation."
Jack actually grinned. "Are those the digits I think they are?"
"You better believe it, pal. And I might have asked her for you just because I kind of like the idea of you going out with a scientist so I'm not the only one you yell at for talking like an adult."
"Oh, I talk like an adult."
"Swearing doesn't count, Jack."
Nikki laughed.
"Well, we'll have to wait and see if Dr. Alice counts it," Jack said, giving the doctor a friendly wave, which she returned with a smile that made Jack's cheeks color as though he'd adopted his young partner's sensibilities. He was suddenly a lot less bummed that he was going to have to cancel his dinner with the cute waitress.
Mac flashed Jack an approving grin, since it seemed like he wasn't going to argue for the next twenty minutes to delay the inevitable. "And Thornton offered to be the one to pay for your phone if we get back to the office on the hop. She even said she'd give you an upgrade. She's got important intel and I think it's about," he glanced around, noting some of the techs were fairly nearby. "You-know-who."
Jack widened his eyes at that little piece of information that Nikki had not thought it pertinent to share while she was giving him a hard time. Jack gave Mac another grin. "Alright. I'm in. 'Specially if it gets us out of here in a hurry to find out. But you go first. I wanna know they know what they're doin' before I offer my own arm for sacrifice, phone numbers from pretty girls in lab coats notwithstanding."
Mac simply tugged his sleeve up to reveal the folded gauze already secured to the crook of his arm with medical tape. "Done. And even though they absolutely ignored where I told them they should do it, they didn't take five tries, which puts them way up on any of the staff at Medical."
Jack grinned at that. "That reminds me, I am so damn glad that head nurse whatshername is retiring, I can't even tell ya."
Mac nodded absently, his mind already back at the office and turning over possible scenarios about what Thornton might have to tell them. Then he made himself meet Jack's eyes and give him an encouraging grin. "Me, too. So, go do the thing."
Mac realized he must've looked more wound up about getting back to the office than he'd intended to let himself, because Jack just got up with a nod. "Alright, kid, I'm on it."
By the time they got the thumbs up from the infectious disease people, Thornton said things were developing quickly and she was ready to brief them via laptop and send them directly to the airport where the DXS jet was already waiting.