Part 32: Unsavory Plans
November 2nd, 2011 - New York
1 : Liz
No one, absolutely no one was happy with Jake's plan.
"You cannot just suggest declaring Antar's King dead one minute and that he's alive the next," Luke vehemently argued while Michael shook his head.
"This is not a plan, Maxwell. It's a death wish. We don't even know if Khivar is truly capable of doing this."
By her side, Kyle discreetly moved back, clearly having a hard time with everyone's thoughts in the air.
"Here, let's head out," Liz said, extending a hand to her ex-boyfriend and standing up. Max's eyes searched for hers, and for the longest moment, they held each other's gaze.
He had made his decision about this, she knew, even if he didn't like it any more than anyone else here. She just couldn't stay there, agreeing to Jake's idea of saving her husband by killing him first. She just couldn't.
Max nodded and continued their discussion as she and Kyle exited the room.
"I'm—I'm sorry," Kyle said as they walked out of the War Room, searching for as much distance as they could. "Maybe I should ask Jake to put me under a coma…"
"Kyle!" Liz admonished.
"Yeah, you just say that because you're not the one with the headache."
"I—I guess. It's still not right…" she answered, looking back at the closed door.
"Thanks… I mean, for coming out of the room with me and not making me look like the odd man out."
"Sure… I needed to get out, too…" she whispered as Kyle rested the back of his head against the wall, closing his eyes to the ceiling.
"Max wants nothing more than to take your hand and run away from here, never to come back to this place, you know that, right? Some place with a nice chimney and a lake. I mean, I'm not going to tell you all the sexy details I wish I had been spared ten minutes ago, but you get the gist."
She chuckled, blushing. "He wasn't really thinking that…"
"He wasn't not thinking about fleeing this place, that much I can tell you. Michael is thinking that, too, at the back of his mind. Isabel is the only one who wants to remain."
"That's—that's just wrong."
"You don't have to convince me."
They remained silent for a moment, now both looking at the closed door.
"Can you read Van's mind?" she asked out of the blue.
"Not a bleep. I can't hear the shifters either. I would have known they were there years ago otherwise. Now that I think about it, I could totally go live in that world. Being a telepath is not all that's cracked up to be, you know?"
"Would you even go?"
"Yes, in a heartbeat. It's an alien world that is thousands of years ahead of us. I'd be friends with the freaking King. I'm pretty sure I'd get a sweet deal out of it all."
"Oh…" Liz said, nodding.
"But Sybelle is here, so," Kyle added, shrugging. "Can't leave the love of my life behind, you know."
She smiled at that. Kyle Valenti had truly become a great guy. She fleetingly wondered if Future Max had met this version of Kyle, too.
The door opened then, an exodus of everyone but Max and Van coming out. Maria was the last one to get out, narrowing her eyes as she quietly closed the door.
"They asked us to leave the room," she explained, her mind clearly somewhere else.
"Tell him he's being an idiot," Michael told Liz, though there was not that much fire behind his words.
"If he's right, though," Liz said. "I mean, you felt it, Michael. He just completely faded out of our connection. I don't like it any more than you do, but we have to be practical here."
"General, if you don't mind," Luke said. "While they discuss this delicate matter, we still have a compound to defend."
"You have another War Room?" Michael asked as they started walking down the hall, Ray automatically attaching to them.
"We also need to get ready if we're going to follow my plan," Jake said, looking at Liz and then at Rose. "I believe our own War Room must be the medical bay?"
"Are you going to be okay?" Liz asked both Kyle and Maria as Jake and Rose walked behind Michael and Luke.
"Yeah, I'm better now that you people are not mentally shouting at each other. In fact—I have something to discuss with Dave," Kyle said, hurrying to catch up with Dave and Daniel as they left on the opposite direction.
"Oh, I'm staying right here," Maria said, smirking. "You go do your science thing, girl. I have a project of my own."
2 : Kyle
"Mr. Valenti," Dave politely said once he realized Kyle was walking right behind him. "Is there anything we can do for you?"
The tone was neutral, but Kyle could almost, almost detect a geek disdain there, as if Dave had geek genes that naturally sneered at Kyle's jock ones.
"It's about Sybelle."
Dave faltered, but didn't stop. "What about my goddaughter?" he asked, with a slightly dangerous undertone this time.
In the great scheme of things, having Dave as a potential father-in-law should be a scary proposition. In reality though, after the things Kyle had lived through and knew about the universe, he thought it was a small price to pay. Granted, Sybelle idolized Dave to the highest degree, but Kyle also knew she loved him. A compromise would have to be reached at some point.
"I haven't been able to contact her since we arrived in New York this morning."
"Since the Network was down you wouldn't have been able to contact her at all," the kid walking beside Dave said, Dante-Dandy-Danny or something said, frowning at the logic Kyle hadn't seen.
"I know my phone was out of order, and I suspect you didn't have one either," he said, looking at Dave while studiously ignoring the brat. "Look, all I want is for you to tell me she's okay and I'll be okay. Like, you talked to her before this whole day became a mess."
"I talked to her two days ago," Dave answered, frowning even deeper.
"Is there any way we both can know if she's okay right now?"
A thousand answers crossed Dave's mind, all flashing without really sticking in his mind so all Kyle got was a train of thought that was going at light speed.
"There should be a way by now," Dave said, a plan consolidating in his mind. "The Network is back in much of Asia, and Europe must have done some progress by this point."
"Yeah, that's what I had in mind," Kyle said, as they both walked faster towards Dave's computer, making the brat scramble to keep up with them. "I don't even need her to know we're in this place—"
Dave turned so fast on him, Kyle almost collided with the man. "Never. You hear me, never put her in a position that she has to worry about you because you're on an underground base somewhere, dreading that armed FBI agents and shapeshifting aliens might kill each other any minute now."
In Dave's mind, Sybelle's adorable six-year-old self was smiling at him, as if he was the best thing in the universe. She really was a daughter to him.
Kyle raised his hands in a sign of never. Dave's worries flashed in his eyes again, and then he just started running towards his codes, his network and, hopefully, his daughter's current location.
3 : Jake
While Max and Van argued over the fine points of letting Max die and come back, Jake and Liz had followed Rose, the resident medic, into her clinic. It was impressively well stocked for a place that usually had no humans around.
"We always knew this day would come," she said as Liz's eyes went to the equipment and Jake's to the drug cabinet. "So we prepared in case Zan or his company would be treated here."
"I can imagine a life as a rebel has made you incredibly resourceful," Liz said.
"For what I've heard," Rose said as she eyed Jake, "His Majesty and you have learned to live with that kind of fear as well. The fear of the what ifs."
By the corner, Jake opened the cabinet doors and inspected each drug label with the ease of someone used to be around needles, scalpels, and aliens.
"You honestly will risk his life?" Rose asked. The shapeshifter was a puzzling one. Not only had she chosen to be female, but an old female at that. He wondered if her aim was to put people at ease in rooms like this.
"You honestly think he will survive on his own?" Jake asked back, finding what he wanted.
"Khivar is clearly working with an incomplete set of his brain waves, or he would have killed Zan already. It might take him days, weeks, even months before he's got the exact pattern. We might be able to find a different solution to this problem."
"Or he might be just toying with Zan," Jake said, and then turned to look at a very concerned Liz. "You've worked with his biology for the better part of a decade. Do you think we might be able to induce a deep enough coma? We'll have to take him as close to the edge as we can."
Liz opened her mouth and then closed it. It was clear to him that her mind wanted to say 'yes' while her heart 'no'. Jake had worked closely with their biology as well, yet Liz had gone to the cellular level along with her boss. It was just a safety check, and they both knew it.
"He's going to metabolize the drugs way faster than a regular person. How long are you planning on keeping him under?"
"How long do you think it would take Khivar to be satisfied?" Jake asked Rose, who pressed her lips into a thin line.
"We'll have to wait until the Rebellion destroys the last machine. Khivar will claim victory as soon as he can, but they'll be monitoring to make sure is not a fluke. Zan will not survive for long if Khivar finds out he came to life—again."
There's a thought, Jake fleetingly noted. It had to suck to be Khivar, never being able to shake Zan's commitment to stick to the living, in whatever form he could find. Even on an alien planet, inside an alien body.
Letting the thought go, Jake did a quick calculation as he looked at the tiny bottles in his hand. Liz was right, Max was going to metabolize this way faster than a human body would. "We might have about four hours. Do you think that might be enough?"
"Only time will tell," Rose said.
And that's assuming Max will survive as well. By the way Liz's eyes shone with unshed tears, he knew she was thinking about that as well.
"We do have more practical matters to resolve," Jake pointed out as he looked around the clinic. "We need to keep Max's lungs breathing and his heart beating while we turned off his brain for a little while."
In a hospital setting, inducing a coma was a last resort to treat traumatic brain injuries, allowing the body time to rest without worrying about anything else. But that also meant intubating and other dangerous procedures, besides the drugs themselves.
"What do you need?" Rose asked, knowing full well her clinic was not an ICU but was well stocked.
"I need Isabel."
"What? Why?" Rose asked, looking at him and then at Liz, suddenly suspicious of their motives.
"She has the skill and the finesse to keep her brother breathing. All three of us want to avoid putting Zan's body under any more pressure than it already is. She's as safe as if he were breathing himself."
"She's the reason they all died," Rose whispered in anger, as if they should understand some deeper truth as to why Isabel was not to be trusted.
"She might be the reason why your Rebellion survives," Liz said, knowing full well that Isabel was a far better choice than any machine—and than Michael himself.
"No."
"Look," Liz said, "Max is going to agree to do this whether you like it or not. But you want him to survive, right? She's the safest choice you'll ever find. Let her help him go through this. Let her dreamwalk Max if he's uncapable of finding his way home. She's the only one capable to do all of this and so much more."
She looked unmoved.
"You can walk her back to her jail afterwards," Jake offered.
"If she fails him," Rose said in the coldest voice ever, "I'll kill you."
He had absolutely no doubt she would.
4 : McKay
The thing about the word alien was that in law enforcement, no one ever thought about them being space aliens. Good thing that the word terrorist meant the same, no matter the context.
And make no mistake, these beings are here to instill terror in us.
The story as far as the NYPD and FBI non-Unit agents knew was that the terrorists that had blown up a car in the middle of Manhattan had taken refuge in the warehouse. They were not aware of the complex compound housed inside, and only knew the FBI Unit that had uncovered it were doing terrain surveillance right now.
Everybody wanted to go in and shoot some aliens, even if they thought these were of the human variety.
In truth, McKay needed the cover. The SWAT team could be helpful, but against alien technology and alien capabilities, there was a good chance they were outmatched if not outnumbered. And if he could level the field by throwing numbers at the problem, so be it.
"Sir! I've pinpointed a secondary exit," his tech savvy agent Andrews said, looking ready to blaze into the whole thing.
"Chances are someone's already used it," McKay said, looking at the sonar readings and a digital render of what the compound might actually look like. A SWAT team was already trying to breach the main entrance and were about to use some heavy caliber explosives any minute now. Anything to blow that thing open.
Jake's down there, and most likely Dave. But these two little rats are smart ones. Where would I go if I were in a hurry to get far, far away from here.
"We cannot penetrate the structure with thermal reading," Andrews said, eager to be more useful than he already was.
The explosion echoed a moment later, slightly shaking the van. When McKay looked at the monitor, gasped could be heard all around from the NYPD.
The depilated, broken warehouse with the steel stains and one-inch dust cover had vanished, like a spell suddenly broken by the ire of the bomb, and in its place, a pristine, white warehouse stood. All windows were intact, all spiderwebs gone. It wouldn't look misplaced in any university campus.
It had been an illusion, in the same way McKay thought he could deal with aliens by mere force. Not that he would ever acknowledge that, not even to himself.
"What kind of terrorists are these?" a police officer asked, still looking at the sudden new building he had in front.
"Well-funded ones," one of the Unit Agents answered, as the SWAT leader came out.
"There's a vertical ladder leading all the way down, some six feet. No one seems to be around, sir," he reported to McKay, the de facto leader of the operation. Up in the air, a news helicopter passed, trying to sniff where all the action was.
"Let's bring the cameras," McKay said, knowing he would have a bigger mess to cover if the News suddenly found itself in the middle of this operation. New York City was already in high alert from the car explosion earlier. He didn't need trigger-happy cops dying on prime TV. "Let's see what's down there."
And while the technical team got its gear in place, McKay looked back at the dazzling city in front of him. If Jake and Dave are going to escape, that's where they're going.
And to catch rats, all they needed was good bait.