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His heart pounding in terror, the boy pushed the door, trying not to make a noise. It was dark in the cupboard where he was hiding, so the light hurt his eyes as he tried to focus, desperate to see where the strange little man had gone.
There he was, standing over the bodies of his dead parents, their blood still dripping from his hands. The boy gasped and the man turned as locked eyes with him. Standing no more than one metre tall, the tall green felt hat on his head made him look taller. Traces of blood were around his mouth, staining his ridiculous, artificial-looking ginger beard. In another context, he might have laughed, but he was far, far too frightened to move never mind laugh. The little man’s mouth opened with an impossibly wide leer revealing sharp angular teeth that could never fit with ease in anyone’s mouth. The boy screamed as the leprechaun pounced, the scream fading in his throat with a strangulated gurgle, ripped asunder as death embraced him...
... Again.
***
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As he struggled towards consciousness, the same thought crossed his mind as had done countless times before: “Eeeeuuugh, I hate dying.” It was all very well being indestructible and God knows, he had shown what he was worth on so many occasions, but it always was a tiresome process coming back to life again. He could hear the gentle splashing of a waterfall as he was coming round... Good old Doctor Fawn, always playing gentle soothing sounds during his resurrection process to soothe the emotional trauma he always felt... but this time, it felt strange... different.
Doctor Fawn was talking to his colleague, Doctor Gold, over at the medical workstation, but the room was bathed in a strange greenish glow. He frowned. That was new... as was the humming and buzzing sound of voices that began to coalesce all around him. A strident voice emerged and he stiffened, overcome with fear.
“This is the Voice of the Mysterons. We know that you can hear us, Paul Metcalfe. Know that we now possess you, body and soul.”
He screamed once again.
***
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He pounded on the control panel in frustration and let out a roar. As there was nobody else in the Engine Room to yell at, he muttered to himself.
“C’mon, Rick. You got this...”
He pressed buttons, pushed levers and released catches and valves, but he could not find anything that worked to switch back on the two faulty anti-gravs that would stop Cloudbase from plummeting out of the sky and making a very large dent in downtown... he glanced up as the scanner... Oh, great, Mumbai.
A sound of hammering at the door made him look away from his frenetic efforts to right the stricken sky-carrier, where he saw a face at the window. He glared with undisguised hatred at the man he had once called friend and colleague. Somehow, the man once known as Conrad Turner had infiltrated Cloudbase and had undertaken a brutal killing spree shooting, slashing, and blowing up everyone he encountered, from Colonel White to the security and engineering staff. There was the taste of stale vomit in his throat: it galled him that it had all happened on his watch. He didn’t know how, where, or why he dropped the ball, but as Security Chief, this whole debacle was on him.
The blast of the door blowing open flung him like a rag doll, the impact breaking his arm and at least a couple of ribs. When he recovered a little, he looked at Turner switching off the third of the anti-gravs. As Cloudbase began to tilt towards the ground, he screamed in anguish as Turner switched off the final antigrav. Rick turned towards the clock to calculate how many minutes he had left to live... again.
***
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He coughed as the acrid smoke cleared from his line of sight. He tried to stand but couldn’t as his legs were trapped in the debris of the controls. He called out to his hydrophone operator, Lieutenant Leroy Griffiths, who did not reply. Peering through the smoke, he could see why. A ceiling strut had detached and had impaled Leroy to the steering column. He wasn’t going to move again anytime soon.
“Aw, no...”
Reaching to the radio controls, he clicked the transmit switch and yelled, “Tower from Stingray. Mayday. Mayday. Please respond.”
An ear-piercing burst of static made him pull his headset off and throw it towards the super-sub’s windscreen, where it landed, just out of his reach. He swore through gritted teeth.
“Fuck!”
Pulling himself together, he checked all of Stingray’s systems that he could from the prison of his seat. He had been with this baby every day of the Stingray Initiative and there was no system he didn’t know inside out. His eye, however, caught the readings for the status of Stingray’s atomic reactor. He groaned to himself as he watched the needle flicker towards the red. She was going to blow and there was damn all he could do about it.
Frustration boiled in his veins as he released a guttural, primeval scream as his world turned white and he was vapourised without a sound in a flash of released nuclear fusion... again.
***
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If there was ever a sound that was more desolate, more desperate and more hopeless than the one that had just come out of anybody’s mouth, he had never heard it. Dropping his Spectrum rifle, he ran over to the body of the prone woman lying slumped over the coffee table in the Angel’s Amber Room.
“Karen!!!”
His voice was an unrestrained wail as he turned her over. He usually pristine white Angel flight suit looked like a butcher’s apron. Whoever had done this to her had slashed her with a knife at close quarters and, examining the wounds, he was at a loss to determine which of them had snuffed out her beautiful life.
“Bastard,” he hissed between clenched teeth, as he broke down in tears, cradling her lifeless form in the final act of love that he could give to her.
Deep, breathless sobs eventually stopped as the steely determination for revenge gripped his heart with a fervour he had never known before. Heart pounding, he started to gently lay Symphony Angel on a couch, when a noise at the door drew his attention to the figure of Captain Scarlet entering the Ready Room.
“You!!” he spat as he reached to his empty holster for his sidearm.
Holding up the Spectrum pistol with a blue flash on the butt, Scarlet smiled a cruel smile.
“Looking for this?”
His eyes darted to where he had cast aside the rifle, then back to Scarlet, who had his own Spectrum rifle trained on him.
“I shouldn’t bother,” smirked Scarlet. “You’ll never make it.”
Scarlet’s hands were covered in blood, none of which was his own. With a knowing nod, Scarlet sniggered, “It’s mostly hers, you know.”
Scarlet’s voice was uncharacteristically smarmy and honied. Raising his hand in a deliberate and slow motion towards his mouth, Scarlet licked the blood from the inside of his right index finger. “Hmmm... nice!”
Blue roared as he set Symphony’s body aside and rushed his former friend... and he was cut down without mercy and without a second thought... the guttural sound dying in his throat for what must have been the tenth time as he died... again.
***
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Striding across Sick Bay, Doctor Fawn grabbed the communicator and reported the good news to Lieutenant Green. “Captain Scarlet is fully resuscitated,” declared Doctor Fawn to his colleague. “Please can you advise Colonel White.”
By this stage, Captain Scarlet was sitting up with his head in his hands, gulping oxygen from a tank through a mask beside his bed. Looking at Spectrum’s Chief Medical Officer, as he had done so on many occasions before, he asked, “Was I dead again?”
“Yes, Captain, you were.”
“What was it this time?” He paused, an uncertain look ghosting over his face. “I don’t seem to remember any serious trauma...”
Doctor Fawn picked up a tablet and peered at the details on the screen. “Severe cardiac stress leading to heart failure.” A beat. “I don’t really understand what happened to you this time, Paul. My best professional opinion is that you were scared to death.”
“Scared to death?” It was hard for Scarlet to keep his voice from sounding sceptical.
“I’m inclined to agree.” An arch and authoritative voice sounded from the entrance of Sick Bay. “I think that you will need to do a lot better than that, Doctor.” The voice belonged to Spectrum’s imperious no-nonsense Commander-in-Chief, Colonel White.
Ignoring the barb, Fawn pulled up a seat and sat down beside his patient. “What is the last thing you remember, Captain?”
Scarlet tried to cast his mind back to the past few hours of his life, but he found it hard to grasp hold of any thought that made sense to him. “I don’t know... I can’t remember.”
“Do you remember the last Mysteron threat, Captain?,” interjected Colonel White.
Having that piece of information for guidance, Scarlet’s memories began to tumble back into place. “Yes...they promised to make good their very first threat. They sounded very cocky about it, didn’t they... and they said, this time, they had a master plan...” He blinked before continuing.
“We had a staff meeting...we concluded that, on the balance of probability, they were going to have another go at President Younger.” He took a deep breath then went on. “There was that virtual meeting with the President’s chief-of-staff, wasn’t there?” He scratched the back of neck and screwed up his face, trying to remember something... something important.
“The email,” he blurted out. “The last thing I remember is receiving a message from you, Colonel.”
“I didn’t send any message, Captain.”
“It said that it was from you, sir,” countered Scarlet. “And it was marked as urgent. That was why I opened it during the meeting, then... did I fall asleep?” He looked abashed. “I am sorry, sir... I must have fallen asleep and I was dreaming.” A beat. “I dreamt that I fell under the control of the Mysterons.” Looking around Sick Bay, he asked, “How did I get here?”
Doctor Fawn had been with Scarlet so many times like this before. Fixing his gaze on the younger Captain, he spoke in gentle tones. “You fell into a coma... more of a fugue state, really. You were restless... you screamed... and you died. Now you are back, but I fear that the others won’t be as fortunate.”
“The others...?”
Colonel White looked crestfallen. “Yes. All of the colour-coded senior Captains were struck down in the same way. They are all in this... what did you call it, Doctor? A fugue state?” He paused to let Fawn nod in affirmation before continuing. “ And it seems that they will all come to the same fate as you. Unlike you, they won’t come back.” He turned his gaze through an observation window towards his stricken colleagues, “This is a bad day for us all.”
Doctor Fawn spoke up: “You said that you were dreaming, didn’t you?” At Scarlet’s nod, Fawn continued. “The readings on the others show that while they are under terrific cardiac strain, but they also seem to be in REM sleep.”
“So they could be dreaming the way I was... and it will all finish up with them all scared to death?”
Doctor Fawn nodded his agreement. “Yes... it is just a matter of time. There is nothing we can do. Whatever it was you all saw on the screen on that email, has sent you into a fugue state and we can’t bring any of the others out.”
Scarlet stood up and walked over to the observation window beside Colonel White. Lying side by side were his four fellow elite Captains: Magenta, Grey, Ochre and Blue. Seeing Adam lying helpless like that was heartbreaking. But the germ of an idea coalesced in his mind...
“Maybe there is something we can do, Colonel. Or at least something I can do.” At the Colonel’s raised eyebrow, Scarlet continued, “The Mysterons seem to communicate through a kind of hive mind, or telepathy. I have never felt comfortable exploring that particular part of my Mysteron...” He struggled to find the right word. “... heritage.” He smiled lopsidedly.
“Are you saying that you might be able to reach them where they are and bring them out of the fugue state?” ask Colonel White, hope clearly rising in his voice. “Doctor?”
“It would be risky, Colonel. We have no empirical data for what that will do to Captain Scarlet, so I won’t be recommending that particular course of action, sir.” Softening, Fawn turned to Scarlet, he said, “Having said that, Captain, there is no other hope for your colleagues. They will die... but we won’t have the luxury of them returning to life like you any time soon.”
With nothing but determination in his voice, Scarlet said, “We’d better get to it then, hadn’t we?”
Scarlet turned to where Captain Blue, his closest colleague and best friend, was lying. He reached out his hand to touch his face, when Doctor Fawn took hold of his wrist and said, “Not him.”
Scarlet balked at that, snatching his hand out of the Doctor’s strong grip. “I’m sorry, Captain Scarlet, but it’s Captain Magenta who is closest to death.”
Scarlet glared at the Australian doctor, then scanned the readings above the Irishman’s biobed, and understood that Fawn was correct in his diagnosis. He nodded but said nothing. Moving to Captain Magenta’s side he reached his right hand down towards the Irishman’s face. He placed his thumb at the corner of his colleague’s mouth; his index finger at the side of his nose; his middle finger between the eyes; his ring finger at the temple; and his little finger as close to the ear as he could make it.
Breathing steadily and deeply, the antiseptic world of the Cloudbase sickbay faded and...
***
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... Was replaced by a mid-twentieth century manor house. Looking round, Scarlet had no idea where he was. He was certain he had never been there before. He frowned as he heard a commotion as people approached him in a panic. Looking round, he quickly identified that there was a cupboard under the stairs, so he made for it in haste, opened the door and ducked inside.
A child was shouting, his voice getting more shrill with each word. “Da, what is it? What is it?”
“I don’t know, son, but if we can hide you in that cupboard, your Mammy and I will lead it away.”
“No, Da, don’t leave me!”
“You’ll be safe in there, son. Now do as you’re bid!”
The child was bundled into the cupboard and yelled in terror as he collided with the hiding Spectrum agent. Scarlet covered the child’s mouth as he wrestled to get out of the older man’s grip.
The child froze as outside the door, piercing human screams were interspersed with the sound of slashing, as flesh was rent asunder and the blood of the child’s parents squelched amid the maniacal laughter of the assailant.
Silence. The assailant sniffed the air. “Now, me bucko... now where do ye be?”
The assailant pulled a quizzical expression as he was fully expecting the cupboard door to open and for young Pat Donaghue to expose his hiding place. This was not the same as the... how many other times was it... ten?
He moved towards the cupboard, step by step, speaking in a sing-song voice, a word with each step: “Oh... Pa-a-at... I’m... coming... to... get...”
Scarlet kicked the door open and emptied a full clip of bullets from his weapon into what looked like a leprechaun. The strike of each bullet forced the strange creature dressed in green back, back towards the wall. It slammed into the wall and there was trail of blood and ichor as it slid down to the wall towards the floor.
The boy gaped at his saviour with eyes as wide as dinner plates. “You’re... you’re... Captain Scarlet...”
“Yes, Pat,” came the gentle reply, “and you are Captain Magenta. Take my hand and follow the sound of my voice. “Let’s go home...”
***
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“Aaaaaargh”. Captain Magenta was shocked when he opened his eyes to see Captain Scarlet looming over him, looking if anything that he was going to fall on top of him. Lieutenant Azure, one of the nurses, steadied Captain Scarlet and led him to a seat. He gulped air, filling his lungs and exhaling slowly.
“Who’s next? Adam?” He look over to Colonel White who deferred to Doctor Fawn, who shook his head and indicated that Captain Grey’s vitals were dropping dramatically.
With a deep sigh of resignation, Scarlet nodded his assent and stumbled over to Captain Grey’s side, and as he had done with Captain Magenta, placed his right hand against his ashen colleague’s face. Knowing what to expect this time, Cloudbase faded around him...
***
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... And he found himself in a room filled with smoke and what sounded like critical alarms bleeping.
He coughed at the effects of the acrid smoke and Captain Holden craned his neck round at the noise, reaching for his side arm.
“How did you get in here? Is this your doing?” He peered through the smoke and when he saw movement towards him, he brandished his weapon. “Don’t come any closer!”
“Hold on, Brad,” he spluttered, “it’s me, Captain Scarlet.”
“Captain Scarlet? What are you doing here?” A wave of confusion passed over Holden’s face. “What are you doing here? What’s going on?” Not waiting for an answer, the gravity of the current situation overwhelmed him. “Here... help me get out. I’m stuck.”
By this time, Scarlet had reached Captain Holden’s side and grabbing him by the shoulders, fixed his gaze on him. “Listen, Brad. This isn’t real. You’ve been trapped by the Mysterons in a fugue state... if you want to get out of here in one piece, take my hand and follow the sound of my voice...”
***
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The next thing Captain Grey knew was that he was lying flat on his back and the prone form of Captain Scarlet slumped across him was being lifted off him by Lieutenant Azure and Doctor Fawn. Scarlet greedily gulped down the glass of water thrust under his nose by Lieutenant Azure.
“I’m all right,” he said shaking himself into action. “Who’s next?” He showed nothing of the disappointment he felt in his heart when Doctor Fawn motioned towards Captain Ochre. Half raising his arms and arching his back, he stretched. Feeling slightly better, he said, “I’m ready.”
He was becoming used to the process and as his hand took up position across Captain Ochre’s face, it felt much easier as Sick Bay faded away...
***
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... And coalesced into another part of the mighty aircraft carrier. Recognising that he was in the Engine Room, he lost all equilibrium when the room tilted 90 degrees and Scarlet realised that Cloudbase was beginning to fall out of the sky.
He heard an anguished voice. “Captain Scarlet! You’re OK!! I heard that Black took you out with an electron gun.” A steely determination took over. “We all thought you were finished. Quick... help me get this bird stabilised.”
“Leave it, Rick. Whatever this is... it isn’t real.” Ochre threw him a puzzled look. Scarlet waved for him not to speak as he continued. “The Mysterons put us into a fugue state, and it’s killing us.”
“But... Mumbai...” Ochre looked completely lost and confused.
Scarlet was firm and authoritative. “Rick... look... we don’t have time. Breathe deeply... we can save ourselves and we can save the people of Mumbai. Take my hand and follow the sound of voice. Let’s get out of here...”
***
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Scarlet opened his eyes with a start. Glancing over at Captain Ochre, he saw that he was looking a lot better thanks to the gentle ministrations of Lieutenant Azure. The room swam as he stood up, but he pushed Doctor Fawn away. “No... I have to get to Adam.”
Fawn looked over at Colonel White, a concerned but impassive spectator to all of Captain Scarlet’s selfless heroics. He would not have been more proud of his officer if he had been his own son. White reflected that he looked upon all his Captains as his sons... which was why the prospect of losing them as he had lost Conrad was an outcome he did not feel that he could bear. White nodded and Fawn let Scarlet stumble to his friend’s bedside.
Scarlet placed his fingers on Captain Blue’s face...
***
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... And, as expected, Sickbay faded away, but once again, he found himself in another part of Cloudbase: this time it was the Angels’ Amber Room. He saw that Captain Blue was cradling the clearly deceased body of Symphony Angel and was being taunted by... himself!
Blue set Symphony’s body aside and let out a roar, starting to rush the faux Scarlet, who took aim. Acting on instinct, Scarlet drew his pistol and fired off eight or nine rounds, all of which hit the target with the desired effect. The idle thought that his weapon must have automatically reloaded following the altercation with the creepy leprechaun passed through his mind without registering. However, the faux Scarlet had got a few rounds off himself, all of which had found their mark in Captain Blue’s abdomen.
Bounding over the couch in one go, Scarlet reached his friend and cradled him in his arms. “Adam... this isn’t real... Symphony’s all right.” Rocking him to and fro, Scarlet spoke gently but firmly. “C’mon, Adam... You’re going to be all right... follow the sound of my voice... I’m going to get you out of here...”
A solitary tear ran down Scarlet’s face as he realised that his friend was really gone...
***
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Back in sick bay, Captain Scarlet was placed on a bio-bed. Doctor Fawn knew that he would recover, but Captain Blue would not be so fortunate. Turning his head, he watched numbly as Lieutenant Azure drew a cover over Captain Blue’s face.
As Scarlet struggled towards consciousness, he felt strangely without emotion. He absently thought that it must be shock... but no... it wasn’t that... this time, it felt strange... different.
Doctor Fawn was talking to Colonel White, over at the medical workstation, while the room was bathed in a strange greenish glow. He frowned. That was new... as was the humming and buzzing sound of voices that began to coalesce all around him. A strident voice emerged and he stiffened, with a new emotion. Not fear... rather it was... anticipation. Anticipation of what? His thoughts were interrupted as the strident voice spoke in his mind.
“This is the Voice of the Mysterons. We know that you can hear us, Paul Metcalfe. We failed to recognise your potential when we first recruited you. A mistake we intended to rectify. The Mysterons’ master plan has been successful. Know that the Mysterons now possess you, Paul Metcalfe, body and soul.”
Scarlet made no reaction when the strident voice faded back into the cacophony of voices around him as another, more cruel and mechanical voice became dominant within the Mysteron hive that had taken root in his mind.
“This is Captain Black relaying instructions from the Mysterons. You know what to do...”