When it comes to the life of your best friend, sometimes there’s only one acceptable choice to be made, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy for you or anyone else, including the person you’re trying to save.
Not by a long shot.
Chapter One
“WHAT THE BLOODY HELL DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?!”
Fawn’s bellow reverberated out from the antechamber of the isolation ward and shattered the focused atmosphere of Sickbay into shards and splinters.
Scarlet, as calm as if he were selecting which biscuits to have with his cup of tea, stirred his right hand through the bright yellow sharps bin one more time before withdrawing it, now scratched and cut and at least three used needles stuck in his fingers. “Saving Blue’s life,” was his answer as he pulled out the needles and dropped them back into the bin he’d just ripped open.
“By infecting yourself?!” The CMO demanded. “What on earth possessed you to do that?”
“Necessity.” Scarlet wrapped his bleeding hand in a towel and waited for the count of ten for the needle sticks to heal. “I don’t see why you’re surprised. It’s a well known fact that I’ll do whatever is necessary to save a mission.”
“But sticking your hand in a sharps container!?”
“This was the easiest route.” Scarlet dropped the towel into the sharps bin and turned to face Fawn, shoulders squared and chin lifted. “We both know I’ll make antibodies faster than you can synthesise them, antibodies that Blue needs as quickly as possible, and you’d have never suggested this course of action.”
Fawn stared at him, jaw unhinged in his astonishment.
Yes, he read the reports, yes, he heard the accounts, and yes, he patched the man up afterwards, but he’d never seen a first hand, right from the outset, in-person example of Scarlet’s complete and utter disregard for his own health and wellbeing when it came to the success of mission or the life of one of his friends. As the man’s physician it was downright frightening to witness, but at the same time it also made a great deal of sense when viewed through the lens of Scarlet’s unique situation. The simple fact of the matter was that Scarlet had always had a bluntly pragmatic attitude of ‘I may not win, but I’m going to make sure that you lose’, and after the Car-Vu it had only gotten worse.
“You… you… you…!” Fawn threw his hands in the air with an exasperated noise and gave up. Damn it all, the man was right. This was genetically engineered orthoebolavirus zairense - ebola. While all the captains had been vaccinated against the base strain, Blue needed the antibodies for this version and he never, ever would have suggested using Scarlet like an antivenom horse, his own morals and code of ethics prevented that. So, with his usual Spec Ops loop-hole-finding cunning, Scarlet had neatly sidestepped him and his Hippocratic Oath and infected himself.
‘Enough,’ Fawn girded himself, already planning out what steps he needed to take next. ‘Right now I’ve got to keep him alive long enough to make those antibodies and save Blue.’ Fawn pointed to the iso ward and put on a scowl and a growl to cover his very real fear at what the coming hours would bring. “Get. In. There. Now.”
“S.I.G.”
Leaving his pistol, watch, ‘cap, tunic and assorted weapons in a neat pile on a wheeled workstation, Scarlet obediently turned and entered the iso ward, the doors opening just long enough to let out Blue’s horrified ‘What the hell did you do?!’ before securely shutting again.
Fawn watched through the observation window as Scarlet shucked off his boots and undershirt before hoisting himself up onto the second bed and sticking the auto nurse’s basic monitoring leads on his chest. He couldn’t hear anything, but going by the expressions and gesturing, Blue was reading him the riot act for this stunt. “Which is going to be nothing compared to the yelling I’m gonna give him later,” Fawn muttered as he turned away from the windows. It was an empty threat, but it made him feel better about this mess. “The Old Man’s going to rake him over the coals after this, that’ll do more than what I can.” That was probably also another empty threat, no one would care about the details as long as both men lived, but again, it made him feel better to imagine it happening.
Shoving those thoughts aside, he strode out into the main area where the shocked staff of Sickbay were waiting for him. “Okay, listen up!” He waited until he had every eye on him and filled them in with three pithy sentences. “Now we’re gonna figure out how to use this to help save Blue. James, volume of plasma we can safely take out of Scarlet in one go?”
A few taps at the computer as James checked Scarlet’s weight against the chart, and he reported back with the answer. “800 mls per session. Going by how quickly he replenishes blood we can probably take it every twelve hours as long as we top him up afterwards with fluids. If we give him plasma or plasma substitute instead we should be able to push it to every eight.”
“Yes to the twelve hours, we’ll hold the eight in reserve.” Fawn nodded, pleased. “Kirimiko, do we have an apheresis unit and someone qualified to drive it?”
“No to the unit, but we do have the equipment for cryodesiccation,” she reported, naming the freeze-drying process used to concentrate the antibodies.
“If you get one, I can drive it,” Doctor Lapis, the base anaesthetist, spoke up. “Phlebotomy got me through college.”
“Which explains why you can IV anything.” Fawn flicked her a tight grin, a moment of much needed humour to soften the seriousness, but dropped it for his next set of orders. “Okay, it’s gonna take him time to start generating antibodies, so we have time to get ourselves ready. Lapis, get on the ‘net, find a unit and tell Logistics so they can get it for you. James, Kirimiko, continue getting everything lined up for treating ebola while we wait for the test results to come back. They’ve both been vaccinated against the base strain so it might not hit too hard, but we’re approaching this from ‘keep the powder dry’, understood?”
A round of affirmatives answered him and Fawn turned on his heel to go to his office and update the Colonel, the last of his concerns weighing heavily on him, concerns that he needed to keep to himself for now. As the in-house ‘expert’ (a term he used with heavy caveats) on retrometabolisim, he knew that for Scarlet to keep producing those life-saving antibodies, he would need to be regularly reinfected with the disease to keep him infected for long enough to make enough to have a clinical effect on Blue. They were copying the process of making antivenom, and it took dozens of litres of plasma to make a single dose of antivenom. It was going to take equal amounts to make a single dose of antibodies to treat Blue. ‘I don’t know how I’m going to facilitate the reinfections,’ Fawn shook his head, ‘but I’m going to have to do something or he’ll just make it happen himself. Again.’ One last headshake, then he was in his office and punching in the intercom code to connect him to Colonel White.
0o0o0
In the isolation ward, Adam could hardly believe what he was hearing as Paul calmly explained his thought process. He could see how it made perfect sense from Paul’s point of view, but this was coming from the guy who made a point of throwing himself in front of certain death so of course ‘stick your hand in the contaminated sharps bin with the intention of catching Ebola 2.0’ was perfectly logical to him and perfectly insane to everyone around him.
“Okay, but the sharps bin? Why?” Adam had to ask. He’d known that Scarlet was up to something the moment he, Harmony and Fawn had come in the medevac helicopter to collect him from Boston - Scarlet had had that familiar, almost abstracted tone to his voice that meant he was figuring something out - but he hadn’t had a clue what it was until Paul had used Fawn’s wake to slip into the iso ward antechamber and ripped the lid off the sharps bin that Fawn had just used.
“Well, I needed to get infected,” Paul explained, very matter-of-fact. “Because it’s ebola the other option was to barge in here and kiss you, but you wouldn’t have liked it, I don’t want to get called out onto the carpet for sexual assault, and our Angels would be honour-bound to kill me for it.” He somehow maintained a completely straight face through all of that and got a bark of laughter out of Adam - which he quickly realised was exactly what the other man had intended.
“Yeah, that’d be a yes to all of the above,” was Adam’s wry agreement, then he sobered. “So what now?”
“Now?” Paul scrubbed a hand over his face and sighed. “It’s not a guarantee that I got infected. Highly likely, but not for certain, and I don’t know if it is to the point I’ll make enough antibodies to help you.”
Adam connected the dots and the sinking feeling in his gut felt like a lead brick. “You want to make sure you’re infected.”
“Yes.” Scarlet nodded. “And I’ll need to keep reinfecting myself. Best option is to draw off some of your blood and inject myself with it. Fawn won’t do it, but if you permit it, I can handle that myself.”
“... You’ve really thought this through.”
Another nod from Scarlet. “I was running scenarios the entire flight up.” Paul offered a half shrug. “I know I have a reputation for being impulsive, but I do try to give things a good, long look before I leap.” He flicked a quick grin across the ward. “It’s only impulsive if people don’t know that I planned it.”
“Huh. Good point.” Adam laid back on the raised head of his bed to think, at the same time resisting the urge to scratch at either the IV port in his arm or the sticky dots on his chest. ‘If I say no he’ll respect it, but he’ll just stick his hands in the sharps bin again. And,’ Adam hated to admit it, even privately, ‘this is ebola, and it’s ebola made to be even deadlier to boot. I’m way past ‘scared’ and smack bang in ‘terrified’. I need those antibodies. Damn it, I hate this, I hate this so much. For me to live… he’s gonna…’ Memories of the things he’d read about ebola floated to the forefront of his mind, and in response Adam swallowed hard and resolutely put the brakes on that train of thought before his imagination could present him with images of end-stage ebola infection overlaid on his best friend. ‘No. One step at a time. Who knows, it might not get that far.’ He looked back to Paul. “Okay. Do the blood draw thing, but only when it’s necessary.”
“Understood,” Scarlet nodded. “I’d best get onto that now then, you’ve got…” he turned and ducked to peer through the observation window and check the wall clock in the main area, “...three hours of infection on me.”
“S.I.G.”
Adam watched as Paul slid off the bed and took advantage of the long leads on the ‘nurse and close confines of the iso ward to gather up what he needed: a 20ml syringe and an 18g needle. The syringe was screwed onto his IV port with a practised twist, a gentle pull on the plunger filled it, then Paul went back to his bed. There was a bitter, sour taste in Adam’s mouth as he looked away and didn’t watch as Paul unwrapped the needle and attached it to the syringe. He heard the little grunt of pain when the needle went in, but kept his eyes averted until there was the plastic ‘clunk’ of it going into an empty sharps bin and the sounds of Paul getting back into bed and rearranging his leads. He never found it easy to witness one of Paul’s deaths, and to his mind, this act absolutely qualified.
“So,” Paul began, the signal that it was safe to look, “we should probably do a debrief while we can, one of the others will be here soon to take over the investigation since I, ah, can’t.”
“If it’s Ochre, you owe him chocolate,” Adam reminded him. “He took over your last interrupted investigation.”
“Ah yes, thanks for the reminder.” Paul nodded. “So, walk me through what happened. You were visiting at home…”
Chapter Two
‘So far so good…’
Wandering through the Svenson family home on one of his infrequent visits, Adam’s semi-purposeful meanderings led him into the sitting room, a mostly-drunk cup of coffee in hand and dressed warmly in a sports coat, long-sleeved shirt and thick jeans - Cloudbase had a temperate climate and he hadn’t adjusted yet. His father was coming home for lunch with him and Mom today, so he was idly filling in the time between now and then by investigating the changes made to the house since his last trip.
So far he’d found three new cookbooks in the kitchen, one of the alcoves on the main staircase had a little black marble panther statuette he rather liked, the upstairs library had an antique Persian rug in shades of cream, red and purple, there was an abstract canvas in the formal dining that quite simply hurt his brain, and now he’d ended up here. There were two new things here: a wingback chair upholstered in pale green and a fresh addition to the carefully curated collection of photos on the walls.
Adam sighed a little as he looked at the photo: a group shot from the last family Christmas dinner. He and Karen had attended, but they weren’t in this photo. To appease his family there was a photo that included them, but he’d asked that it be kept separate in one of the albums that lived in his mother’s office and not put on public display. With how often the house was used to host business functions it was the safer option.
Of course his father had pursed his lips and snorted at that, but he hadn’t verbally objected for once, so Adam counted that as a win.
‘Maybe, just maybe, we can patch things up one day.’ Adam considered that thought as he sipped his coffee and watched the dust motes sparkle in the late morning sunshine. John Svenson had been softening in his stance recently. It wasn’t by much, but something was better than nothing as John slowly learned that certain comments would mean phone calls ending or visits cut short and then he’d have to deal with the consequences - most notably being his wife Sarah’s ire and the phrase (either spoken or implied) ‘you just had to say something, didn’t you?’.
“Ah, there, you are.” The polished wood door of the sitting room was bumped open by an elbow and his mother came in with an armload of packages. “The postman just came,” she said by way of explanation as she set her collection down on the walnut coffee table in the middle of the room.
“More birthday shopping?” Adam asked with a fond smile as he came over to help keep the boxes and bags confined to the area of the table. The locating, acquiring and squirrelling away of birthday, anniversary and Christmas presents was one of his mother’s favourite things to do, a year-long mission as she surveyed what the various stores and boutiques had on offer and swooped as soon as she found something worthy of her family and friends.
“Of course!” Sarah smiled at him. “The more I can do now, the less I have to fret about later, you know that.”
“I do.” Adam smiled more. He’d missed these little moments where it could be just him and his mother. Yes, he loved his brothers and sister, but he’d always treasured the one on one time made all the more rare by the demands on her time by being a mother of four, the wife of a leading figure in the world of finance and the associated work she did on John’s behalf on the social side of business, her different projects, and the time she needed to herself.
“Want another coffee?” she asked, gesturing at the cup in his hand. “Oh, could you start opening these up and telling me what they are? There’s some packages for your father somewhere in there, I want to hide them before he comes home.”
“Yes, and okay,” Adam nodded, glad to help as he handed over the empty mug. Sarah whisked out the door with a swirl of her bright green dress, while he took a folding knife from the pocket of his coat.
The first package that fell to his hand was a rectangular box the length of his palm, secured with plenty of tape and sturdy brown paper. Adam slid the knife under the tape holding the paper shut, slit it and unwrapped the package. “I found a novelty mug,” he called out through the open door, eyeing the cardboard box with some amusement. The pictured mug had ‘I can go 8 hours without coffee! (It’s called sleeping)’ emblazoned on it. ‘Rick needs this mug.’ Adam turned the box around to find the company name and commit it to memory.
“Oh perfect, I’ve been waiting for that!” Sarah called back. “Get it out for me, would you dear? I want to give it to him at lunch and see if he notices.”
“Okay Mom.” Adam set the box down on the table and got his thumb under the tab holding the lid shut.
The box went ‘click’.
Hard-learned lessons kicked in and he was halfway through stepping back and raising his hands when the lid popped up, a little nozzle poked out and a stinging spray hit him in the face. “Ah!”
“Adam?”
Blue heard the approaching footsteps and immediately reacted. “No! Stay back, it was a trap!” He didn’t like having to use such a harsh tone, but he had to make her obey.
“What?” Sarah’s innocent bafflement was understandable, but she kept coming, her concern for her son overriding everything else.
“STAY BACK!” Blue roared out the command. “GET OUT OF THE HOUSE, NOW!”
A gasp and running footsteps going away were the answer, followed by the front door opening and then slamming shut. So very relieved that she’d listened, Blue grabbed tissues from a handy box nearby and carefully dabbed the liquid from his face. Yes, it was too late and some of it had already gotten up his nose, in his mouth and into his eyes, but it’d reduce his exposure to whatever this was. That done and the tissues wadded up and put in his pocket, Adam pulled his handheld communicator out of the hidden inner jacket pocket he kept it in and turned to the box. “Blue to Cloudbase, Spectrum is Red!”
“Cloudbase receiving, go details.” Green was calm and composed as always, and a reassurance that he very much needed right now.
“I’ve been exposed to an unknown agent, there was a boobytrapped package intended for my parents,” Blue reported. With his free hand he carefully opened the lid all the way, hoping for clues on who or what was behind this. “Item consists of a small sprayer of some sort.” He extracted the little device with thumb and forefinger and put it on the table, then looked into the box again. “There’s a note.”
“What does it say?”
It was a little awkward to unfold the paper one-handed, but he managed it. “ ‘To John Svenson, capitalist and son of Mammon. The Collective send their regards and hopes this gift of genetically enhanced ebola encourages you to reconsider your treatment of your fellow humans.’ Green, who the hell are ‘The Collective’?”
“Standby…” A pause as Green consulted the library of files held in the information centre. “The Collective are radical libertarians with a known prejudice against all forms of capitalism. They’ve been active for three to five years, but several watchdog groups have noted an escalation in their rhetoric in the last nine months.”
“So this could be their next step,” Blue guessed, resolutely not thinking about what would have happened if he hadn’t been here today.
“Affirmative.” Another pause. “Local units are enroute, ETA twenty minutes. Doctor Fawn says to stay where you are and not touch your face. Has anyone else been exposed?”
“Unlikely, I was alone in a separate room and I’ve told my mother to leave the house.”
“Copy that. There’s a medevac helicopter leaving now, ETA sixty minutes, that’s six zero minutes.”
“Understood.” Blue clicked off the communicator and took a slow, controlled breath as he brought his emotions to heel.
Help was on the way.
He held onto that thought as tightly as he could, using it to ward off the terror that loomed large in the corners of his mind.
Help was on the way.
0o0o0
“You know the rest from there,” Adam said as he finished up his recollections.
“I do.” Scarlet nodded. Sarah Svenson’s ashen and tear-stained face was going to linger in his memories for a long time, right alongside John Svenson’s barely disguised panic as he argued with the stone-faced local captain, demanding that he be let into the house to see his son and for them to get out of the way so he could comfort his wife. “There was an update from Green while Fawn was getting you scrubbed and set up in here,” he began. “The sitting room is getting the UV treatment and the house is being sprayed down. It looks like your mother wasn’t affected, but she’s being monitored as a precaution since she handled the package.”
“Thank heavens,” Adam breathed in relief.
“The local unit’s tracking down the courier, they checked at the depot and he was a plant,” Scarlet continued the report. “Green’s hacking into the security system there now to see if we can get his face.”
“Mm.”
Movement outside the ward caught both of their attention: Grey was standing there, doing his best to keep his worry hidden as he poked the intercom with one hand, a notebook in the other. “Hey, you two holding up okay?”
“So far, so good,” Paul answered for them both. “Are you taking over?”
“S.I.G.” He flicked open the hardcover notebook and fished a pen from his tunic pocket. “So, what have you got for me?”
Chapter Three
Usually the deepest hours of the night were when Cloudbase was at its lowest ebb. The halls were empty, the shared spaces either dim or dark and few people were about. Most of the crew was asleep and (aside from the handful of true night owls) those on duty were wishing they could be.
Tonight Sickbay was the exception to the rule. It bustled with activity, computers and other machinery humming or buzzing as they worked to delve into the secrets of the virus and lay them bare. White did his best to be unobtrusive as he checked on things. Yes, he could have gotten reports sent to his desk, and yes, this was well out of his realm of expertise, and yes, what was being discussed might as well have been in a different language, but at his heart he was a ship’s captain, he needed to have eyes on where the trouble was.
Quick chats with persons not currently occupied with a task showed that morale was still good, and when he peered through the half drawn privacy curtains on the observation window, his officers were either asleep or at least resting. Most of the points on his inspection tour ticked off, White girded himself for tackling the hardest one: his Chief Medical Officer, who should have been off duty hours ago.
A tap at the controls beside Fawn’s office gained him entrance, and the door slid open to show the CMO, rumpled and worn, sitting behind his desk and shuffling through a handful of printouts.
“Doctor Fawn.” White strode in and crossed his arms.
“Mm?” The doctor didn’t look up, pulling out a particular page to make an annotation.
“Go to bed.”
“No.”
Finally putting down the pages he’d been staring at, Fawn scrubbed a hand over his eyes and hopefully peered into the depths of the oversized travel mug that he’d gotten in the first base-wide Secret Santa. It had a couple of gulps of coffee left in it, so he knocked it back. With any luck the pinch of calories contained therein would carry him through this conversation. “We’re still waiting on the genome sequencing, the first round of testing on the cultivars of the samples from the house, and the testing for antibodies from Scarlet’s plasma draw,” he informed Colonel White. “I need to be here for the results.”
The CIC of Spectrum heard all of it and was unmoved as he stared down his CMO. “You have the entirety of Spectrum Medical and the relevant departments of Spectrum Research primed to examine that data. You are not an epidemiologist nor an immunologist, let the experts handle things.”
“No, but I am an expert on those two, and specifically I’m the expert on that idiot who isn’t getting better like I thought he would be.” Fawn pushed back from the desk and gave in to the need to stand and stretch. “Scarlet should have been on the mend now, but he’s not. Blue’s in a better shape than he is, and he’s the stock-standard one.”
“What?” That clearly caught the colonel off guard and Fawn knew exactly why. Every time a bug swept the base - a semi-regular problem despite their best efforts to maintain a clean and sanitary environment - at most Scarlet needed a nap and then he’d be fighting fit again. For him to sicken so much faster than Blue was unusual, and for him to stay sick even more so.
“I’ve got theories.” Fawn tried to swallow the yawn but wasn’t entirely successful. “One, pre-existing immune system curveball thing: we already know his TB vax and a couple of other ones didn’t really take. Two, it’s because it’s an engineered bug and his body’s still figuring out how to deal with something new and different. Three, something funky is going on because he’s reinfecting himself.” A pause to force his brain to shove more information together, then he added “or there’s something new and weird in the mix because of any of those factors and/or because we can’t treat him, and/or a psychosomatic ‘he knows he needs to be sick to make antibodies’ thing.”
“But is he making those antibodies?” White pressed the point.
“I don’t know!” Fawn snapped and sat back down, his feet hurt. “I’m still waiting on the test results, remember?”
“How long before they are available?”
Fawn checked his watch. “Two hours until the genetics finish running, another hour at least until the antibody test comes back, and no, I’m not getting off until I know what those results are. The sooner I know the results, the sooner I know if I can tell that idiot that he can go ahead and get better so we can focus 100% on Blue and stop splitting our attention.” The CMO shook his head, ran both hands through his hair, leaned his elbows on the paper-littered desk and sighed wearily. “I just don’t get it Charles, why the bloody hell did he have to go and do that?”
“Because as far as Captain Scarlet was concerned, the only acceptable course of action was the one that increased Captain Blue’s chances of survival,” White informed him. “He’ll have reasoned that the others can take over the investigation and track down whoever ‘The Collective’ are, especially since this does not appear to be Mysteron related - yet. But he’s the only one who can make antibodies for Blue.”
“...you’re right… I hate it but you’re right.” Edward ran both hands through his hair again and slumped back in his chair. “This is taking a toll on my people,” he told the commander, grim. “We’re supposed to be treating him, that’s our job, make sick people better, but all we’re doing are supportive therapies because we need him sick to make Blue better.”
Charles hid his grimace at that. Yes, the only acceptable course of action for one party was to be sick, but the only acceptable course of action for the other party was to make him better and they were being forced to not do that. It was no small wonder this was wearing hard on the CMO. “I will ensure he’s made aware of the situation when he is well,” Charles promised.
“No, don’t. He doesn’t need the guilt trip.” Fawn shook his head. “We’re big boys and girls, we’ll handle it.” A grunt of effort and he shoved himself back from his desk and levered himself to his feet. “I need to do my rounds, do me a favour and make sure those bastards get found and strung up by their toes or something so my two can focus on getting better instead of worrying about what’s happening downstairs.”
“S.I.G.” White nodded, thinking of the three officers he had ‘downstairs’ in Boston. They were all very eager to make sure that The Collective did not get a chance to try again. “And in the meantime,” he took Fawn’s arm and started to walk him in the appropriate direction, “you are going to the Room of Sleep for a nap. Your staff have everything under control, Scarlet and Blue are resting, and reading until you are cross-eyed with exhaustion will not help anyone, much less yourself. That’s an order, Doctor.”
Fawn tried to scrape together enough temper to fight back, he really did, but he just didn’t have the energy and he was exhausted enough that it sounded like a good idea. “Fine, you win,” he grumbled, unable to go without some form of protest.
“Thank you, Doctor,” White nodded, gracious in victory as he escorted Fawn out of Sickbay and into the hands of the technicians in charge of the RoS.
0o0o0
Ignoring the plainclothes Spectrum officer placed to protect Sarah (and probably himself) from any more attempts by The Collective, John Svenson sank into a chair in the waiting room in the infectious disease centre at Massachusetts General Hospital. He rested his aching head in his hands with a groan, completely unable to relax into the vinyl-upholstered chair. Hospitals, he decided, were places he really didn’t like. The air stank of harsh disinfectants and the metallic tang of iodine, the lights were too sharp, everything beeped or warbled, and there was a constant underlying tension in the air that made his spine kink up in knots.
It was also a place that he had next to zero influence.
Give him a conference, a meeting, a dinner, whatever, he could work the room, talk to someone, find someone who knew someone and turn whatever was going on in his favour. But this? There wasn’t anything he could do. There weren’t any markers he could call in, he hadn’t cultivated any relevant contacts, and he didn’t understand half of what was going on. All he could do was keep Sarah company and right now he couldn’t even do that, not really. She was isolated - out of an abundance of caution, the doctors had reassured him - and he could only talk to her through an intercom. Not being able to do a little thing like simply hold her hand… it was killing him in a way he never knew possible.
‘But Sarah’s okay, and we’ll know for sure by morning,’ John reassured himself. He scrubbed his face with his hands, checked his watch, and made a face. Where the hell had all the time gone? ‘I could have sworn we only just got here…’
“Dad!”
Running footsteps, he was on his feet without realising it, and his arms were full with his daughter Katherine. She had her head buried against his chest and was clinging to him with all her strength. It took him right back to when she was a little girl, woken up by nightmares and crawling into bed with him and Sarah for some much needed comforting.
A few minutes of hugging him, then Katherine pulled back a little. “I came as soon as I could,” she told him, “David filled me in on what happened, I’ve got hotel rooms booked, Peter’s flying up from Washington now, and there’s a change of clothes and toiletries coming.” Then her facade of a determined and calm young woman in charge of things cracked and she was his little girl again. “Dad, how’s Mom?”
“She’s…” John had to stop and clear his throat to put on his own facade. “She’s fine, it’s all precautionary. Good work getting things sorted for you and your brothers.”
“Okay.” She looked around, then back to him with a little frown. “Dad, how’s Adam?”
“I…” Realisation struck him like a lightning bolt. Amidst everything that had happened, he’d completely forgotten about Adam! “I don’t know,” he admitted, completely unable to come up with a lie to cover his lapse. “They got him into the medical helicopter and that’s the last I heard.”
“They didn’t give you a contact card or anything?” Katherine asked, her frown deepening.
That sparked off a fragment of memory - he had been given something by one of the Spectrum people, he knew that much - and John let go of her to search his pockets.
Unfortunately his excavations turned up precisely nothing. “It must have fallen out!” Shame as his goad, John turned his full attention to fixing this problem. Fortunately there was an option already to hand: the Spectrum person doing her best to be unobtrusive. “You, miss,” he began, shoulders back and chin lifted, “who do I call to find out what’s happening to my son?”
Chapter Four
Being awake hurt.
Adam was vaguely aware that someone was talking to him - that’s what woke him up - but between the headache, the nausea, and everything else, it took a little bit for the noises to register as words, then for those words to turn into something that he could understand and respond to. That the person was talking to him from inside an orange protective suit added yet another layer of muffling he had to filter through in order to figure out what was going on.
“...Blue?” Burgundy asked gently. “Can you hear me?”
“...Yeah…” he rasped, his mouth feeling like sandpaper. He would have loved a spoonful of ice chips but drinking anything was out of the question, since about midnight he’d thrown up what felt like everything he’d eaten for the past three days. “Wh’ ‘s it?”
“Your father is on the phone, he wants to talk to you,” Burgundy told him. “We’ve been fending him off, but he’s threatening to round up every secretary, intern and PA in his company to tie up the call centre phone lines while he pesters his contacts in the World Government. He even managed to get hold of General Metcalfe. You can imagine how well the general responded to that.” A flicker of a smile crossed her face, but was quickly gone. “If you don’t want to talk to him, we’ll have the colonel run him off.”
Adam considered that.
While there had been days he’d have loved to be a fly on the wall and watch his father get a dressing down from the most terrifying man he’d ever met, it wasn’t just about his father this time. His mom and his brothers and sister would be wanting to know too, and he couldn’t hurt them just to get back at his father. A very, very careful roll of his head told him what Scarlet’s current state was: somehow asleep while hooked up to the machine pulling blood out of him. ‘The morphine pump probably has something to do with that,’ he concluded, trying to squint to see what the readings were, then giving up when his eyes refused to cooperate.
“I’ll talk t’ him,” Adam decided, slowly rolling his head back in the direction of the bedside intercom microphone.
“Just a few minutes, and I’m cutting it if he upsets you,” Burgundy told him, giving his arm a gentle, reassuring pat before reaching out to touch the intercom. “Burgundy to Green, pipe it down.”
“S.I.G.” Green responded.
There were the chirps of a call being connected, then a worried “Adam?”
“Hi Dad.” Adam forced himself to sound a lot better than he felt, but it was taking a lot of effort. “Is Mom okay?”
“Sarah’s fine, she’s just fine,” John reassured him. “Her tests came back clear and she was released this morning.”
“This morning?” Adam tried to do the time zone calculations but immediately gave up. Thinking was painful. “That’s good.”
“How are you?”
“I’ll be okay, we got good docs here,” Adam tried to deflect, swallowing hard against the tickle building up in his throat from all the talking.
“That’s not what I asked, ” and that was the tone he’d heard so often growing up, the parental disapproval leaking around the edges of the concern. “How are you right now?”
“Sick.” He really didn’t want to elaborate, but he was too wrung out to craft a more comforting statement. “I’ll be -” and that was when his throat decided that enough was enough and he broke off into an extended bout of coughing that left him gasping, his auto-nurse warbling a soft alarm as his oxygen sats dropped.
“Adam!”
“He’s okay, it’s just a coughing fit and we have sensitive equipment,” Burgundy stepped in. “Mr Svenson, I’m one of your son’s attending doctors, and I can assure you that we are doing everything we can, but right now what he needs most is rest. You can write a message to him and myself or one of the nurses can read it out and transcribe his response, but maintaining a conversation isn’t the best option for him right now. I’ll request that you be provided with an email address for messages to be sent to. Is that clear?”
“Yes, Doctor.” John sounded cowed. Evidently the seriousness of the situation - and that if it hadn’t been for Adam, it would have been his wife or himself in a hospital bed right now - was sinking in. “Adam… Adam, I’m sorry, I love you.”
“Love… too…” Adam croaked back, then put his focus on making his lungs happy again.
Burgundy cut the call, checked the ‘nurse, brought the head of the bed up a little more and hooked a nasal cannula up to his face. The additional oxygen was a blessed relief, easing some of the tightness in his chest and letting him breathe more easily.
Once everything had settled, Adam watched the doctor. She was worried, he could see that, and she was tutting as she moved over to Paul’s bed, checking on the plasma being collected. ‘Whatever she’s seeing, she doesn’t like it,’ Adam realised. “Doc?”
Burgundy came back to his bedside. “Blue, I’m going to be blunt. Something weird is happening. Scarlet shouldn’t be this sick. We know that he infected himself at least once. How many times has he ‘topped off’ his level of infection?”
“Three,” Blue reported after a quick search of his foggy memory. “The sharps, an’ he got some blood when he got sent in… an’ again, a few hours after.”
“No other times?” Burgundy pressed.
He started to shake his head and regretted it. “No. Too sick. Why?”
“He should be getting better.” Burgundy’s lips were pressed together in a thin line. “Lapis will be in shortly to check on the apheresis machine and discuss with you both about nasogastric feeding, but we’re going to try some more meds first.” She patted his arm again, careful of the IVs in his elbow. “Rest, that’s an order, Captain.”
“Yes’m,” Adam managed, getting another brief smile from the doctor before she headed out.
He waited until the inner door clicked shut and the viewport fogged up from the decontamination mist. “How much did y’ hear?”
“...All of it.” The softly worded admission floated over from Paul’s bed.
“Any idea why…?” Adam felt another cough coming on and made a vague gesture in Paul’s direction while he tried to fend it off.
“No.”
“Hn.” Adam let his head sag onto the pillow and shut his eyes, it was less painful. The whirring of the apheresis machine doing another centrifuge cycle filled the space between them, then he heard the outer airlock doors clunk open - Doctor Lapis was coming to collect the plasma and precious antibodies it contained. The testing had finally confirmed that Scarlet was making them and everyone in Medical had breathed a huge sigh of relief. That thought connected to another, and he ventured a hoarse “Paul?”
“Yeah?”
“You, by th’ way,” Adam wheezed, “are an idiot. Thank you.”
“Yes, I am,” Paul croaked back. “You’re welcome.”
Then Lapis was entering, a box of equipment in hand and a worried look on her face.
“Scarlet, Blue,” she began, “we’ve got some things to discuss.”
0o0o0
Topics of discussion were also on Grey’s mind as he leaned against the inner wall of the interrogation room, arms crossed over his chest, and stared at their prisoner - Thomas Gill, the courier driver who’d delivered the rigged package to the Svenson house. The guy looked like just another broke college student doing part time jobs between classes: skinny, younger side of twenty, messy brown hair, thrifted clothes in an approximation of today’s fashion trends for young people, and, going by the contents of his apartment, a bad caffeine addiction.
They’d tracked him to his one bedroom apartment, carefully cased it, then burst in. The guy had tried to run - a bad idea that got him tackled into a bush - and he spouted off all sorts of ideology on the frog-march back to the Saloon Car. That stream of ideology faltered as soon as he got shoved into the back of the ‘Car and stopped completely when they brought him into the Boston office interrogation room. Right now he was still in his dirty clothes, handcuffed and seated at the steel table, blinking rapidly and showing all the other classic signs of nervousness.
‘Everyone’s a true believer until consequences kick in, ’ Grey mused, quite content to let the silence stretch on. Ochre had wanted the three of them to do the ‘good cop, bad cop, scary not-a-cop’ routine with Magenta taking the ‘not-a-cop’ role that Scarlet usually played, but he was pretty sure they didn’t need to take those measures. This was a kid from a background privileged enough to believe that people didn’t need authority above them and society could function without rules around them, a wannabe crusader with his head stuffed full of ideals and his thinking still structured around the black and white format most teenagers had, and at the same time he was well aware that he’d participated in doing a Very Bad Thing. All they had to do was wait.
“I want a lawyer,” Thomas squeaked out the words, trying to be brave. “I know my rights.”
“Terrorist. Rules are different,” Grey informed him, idly checking the nails of his left hand when something caught on his sleeve and noting he had a hangnail. That was annoying, so he picked at it to see if he could break it off.
“What?” Thomas stared at him, his eyes wide.
Grey spared a look at the kid, one eyebrow curved into a sceptical arc, then turned his attention back to the hangnail, he almost had it. “You delivered a box of genetically modified ebola to a guy’s house and infected one of his kids. What were you expecting? A medal?”
“It was ebola?” Thomas asked, surprise twisting into confusion.
“Yep.” Grey maintained his nonchalance, but behind the mask his mind was racing. This wasn’t tracking like he expected and he knew the other two would be watching and listening on the cameras.
The kid went chalk white, which was quite impressive with his olive complexion. “Am I gonna die?” The terrified quaver in his voice might have tugged at his heartstrings, but the guy had put two of his friends into Sickbay, so Grey had very little sympathy for him.
“You’re not hocking up blood, so no. Whoever gave you that package was careful enough about that,” Grey remarked. “What did they tell you it was?”
“... Glitter bomb…” Thomas was squeaking again, but for a different reason. “Eco-friendly glitter,” he added, as if that was supposed to make a difference. “It… they didn’t tell me they were going to hurt people…”
Grey abandoned the hangnail, raised his head and looked at the kid, weighing up what he was seeing and testing it to see if it rang true. ‘... he was cleared by the C-38, and if he’s acting, he deserves a whole cabinet of Oscars for it,’ Grey decided. ‘Let’s see where this leads.’ He pushed off the wall with a grunt, came over to the table, drew out the second chair and sat down with a certain measure of deliberateness about it. “Okay Thomas, walk me through. What happened yesterday?”
Chapter Five
‘There are times I really, really hate the sentiment of ‘keep calm and carry on’, but it’s all I can do right now. ’
Her audience lost to the land of Morpheus, Dianne shut the book she’d been reading over the intercom to the men and turned it off so they could sleep without the noise from this side of Sickbay. Sagging into one of the two chairs that’d been moved into the antechamber for visitors, Dianne did her best to fight down her fears. Adam and Paul had sickened frighteningly quickly. On average ebola had an incubation period of eight to ten days, but they’d both been symptomatic within hours and gone downhill from there.
Adam was still in the early-to-middle stages, racked with fever, nausea and vomiting, body aches, headache, and a sore throat that had him violently coughing at the slightest provocation. A nebuliser of something, she didn’t know what, kept the last two sort-of controlled, he’d finally gone onto a morphine pump to keep the middle two managed, and the doctors and nurses were doing what they could with the rest.
Paul was much worse. As well as all of that, the whites of his eyes were pink and what she could see of his skin was mottled with a rash and bruises - something that wasn’t helped by the IVs and apheresis machine. At some point in the past few hours he’d also been given a nasogastric feeding tube because the anti-nausea meds simply weren’t having an effect. That Paul was dipping in and out of consciousness and never was fully awake was a blessing, because what they were taking out of him was going to Adam, they had to pick and choose what medications to give him based on either what could be filtered out or destroyed by the concentration process or what wouldn’t negatively affect Adam.
Dianne rubbed the bridge of her nose as she mulled over everything else that had developed since this morning. Fawn and Burgundy had conferred with the head doctors at Spectrum Medical and some ebola specialists and reluctantly concluded that with how quickly the disease was progressing they needed to be even more aggressive than they’d originally planned. Blue was on a brutal cocktail of antivirals, steroids and antibiotics to keep the primary infection under control and fend off secondary infections while they collected enough antibodies to make an effective dose, and to get that dose as quickly as possible, Scarlet now had the apheresis machine permanently on one arm and fresh plasma running into the other.
“I just feel so bloody useless,” Dianne sighed. Yes, granted, she couldn’t really do much for Paul when he was recovering under normal circumstances, but she could at least touch him, brush his hair out of his eyes and flip the blankets back over his feet when he inevitably kicked them off, but it was something and he knew she was there. But separated like this? Reading to him was all she could do and it felt quite paltry in comparison.
“Hey.”
She turned at the soft voice to see Karen standing behind her, a steaming cup in each hand and a plate of biscuits balanced on her left wrist. “Karen, thank you!” She quickly took the plate and set it down on the armrest of her chair, then the offered cup of tea.
“You’re welcome.” Karen sank into the other chair, both hands wrapped around her coffee and looking like she’d aged ten years overnight.
Dianne considered the other woman. Karen wasn’t in here half as much as she was because of the simple fact that when Adam was in here, he usually wasn’t a patient. ‘And Adam won’t get better as easily as Paul will…’ Dianne remembered, pushing aside the lurking worries she had with how sick Paul was. ‘I must remember that. It’s frighteningly easy to lose perspective on things, I’m so used to Paul being brought back in a terrible state at lunchtime and by dinner he’s gotten well enough to be teasing the nurses.’ “How are you holding up?” she asked gently.
“Managing, so far.” Karen rubbed her forehead. “Last I checked I had seven messages from the Svensons on my phone and five emails, all wanting to know how he’s doing.” She made a face. “I really want to write that man a long email starting with ‘so when did you start caring?’.”
Dianne nodded, having been witness to several of Paul’s rants as he vented about something that John Svenson or one of Adam’s brothers had said or done and how much it had hurt Adam. “Maybe you could write a letter along those lines and burn it? As a safe way to get those feelings out?” she suggested. “It’s helped me with a few things.”
“Yeah, maybe,” was Karen’s absent reply. She stared blankly at the observation window and the two figures inside. “...I hate this. I really, really hate this.”
“Me too, Karen, me too.” Dianne sipped her tea. “They’ll be okay, you’ll see.”
“Mm.” Karen took a mouthful of her coffee and said no more.
They sat in (relative, Sickbay was busy) silence for a time, their drinks cooling and the biscuits untouched, then there was a step behind them. Both women turned to look, seeing Burgundy standing there in the scrubs and grippy socks the medics donned before putting on the protective suits so necessary for entering the isolation ward. She was midway through tying on the scrubs cap that would keep her hair out of her face, then she stopped, considered them with a thoughtful expression, and finished knotting the ties. “Rhapsody, Symphony, you’ve done your biohaz refresher training recently, haven’t you?” she asked as she came closer.
Dianne and Karen exchanged a look, wondering where the doctor was going with a question like that, and Dianne answered for them both. “Yes.”
“Perfect. There’s scrubs and socks in the physio room linens cupboard and I’ll tell Kirimiko to help you suit up,” she told them. “Talk to them, keep them company, that sort of thing. They might not wake up, but they’ll know you’ve visited, I’ll bet on it.”
Dianne was already out of her chair. “S.I.G!”
0o0o0
Twilight was settling over Cloudbase when the update from Boston came in. Elbows on the edge of his desk and hands clasped before his face, Colonel White listened intently.
“Good news is the kid we picked up really wasn’t happy he got used and ditched like that, ” Ochre reported. “He’s given us everything from phone numbers to where to find The Collective’s online message boards and forums. Magenta’s called in a team from Spectrum Intelligence and they’re doing a deep dive into the online stuff, and we’re sending local units around to pick up everyone we can before word spreads.” A pause to draw a breath, then Ochre went on. “There absolutely was a plan in the works to send glitter bombs to different people The Collective have a beef with. Someone wanted to send something called thioacetone instead but they pulled their head in when someone else pointed out how hard that’d be without the proper equipment and it’d be pretty hard to get away with, so the group consensus was to stick with glitter bombs - that’s how Thomas was recruited. The usual driver got blackmailed to steal the original package last week and then let Thomas take his truck for the delivery.”
“Have you discovered how or why they made the leap from nuisance to germ warfare?” White asked.
“Yes sir, that’s the bad news.” The radio connection between Cloudbase and Boston crackled as Ochre drew in another deep breath. “One of the SI people cracked some pretty heavily encrypted messages between the local ‘cell’ leaders in Boston and a third party. Sir, this is a Bereznik op.”
“... What?” A glance at Green confirmed that yes, he had just heard what he thought he’d heard. “Explain, Captain Ochre.”
“Short version, the Bereznik intelligence agency has been infiltrating groups like The Collective to use them as catspaws. The SI tech made the connection, she’s been on one of SI’s teams trying to track this activity and recognised some of the turns of phrase the Bereznik people were using when they were cultivating their contacts in The Collective,” Ochre told him. “They slipped up though. They assumed we’d react just like they would - locate and eliminate The Collective - which would cover their tracks. Dead men tell no tales.”
“Indeed.” White nodded, even though Ochre couldn’t see it. He was about to say more, but Ochre jumped in before he could.
“We’re still tracing the who and how of the logistics and who exactly Bereznik was talking to, but there’s something else. Sir, I’m 90% sure this was actually aimed at Blue, not at John Svenson, the note was misdirection, ” Ochre went on. “There’s been deliveries at the Svenson house four times over the past two weeks, but Thomas wasn’t set up with the package until the day of the attack - the day Blue was home on leave. Grey’s already talked to all the Svensons about their schedules, John Svenson was home on two other occasions.”
“Have you been able to confirm if it was ready before the attack?” White queried.
“Still working on it, sir.”
Colonel White sat back in his chair and rubbed his chin. This was a new and worrying development. While Blue was leading the counter-intelligence arm of the World Aeronautical Society, Bereznik High Command had attempted to assassinate Blue on three occasions, but that was years ago, that they were retargeting him now was deeply concerning. ‘Adam Svenson has been completely off the radar for years as far as the world is concerned. I need to contact W.A.S. If Ochre is correct, there is a non-zero chance that there is a connection between that organisation and Bereznik’s renewed interest in him.’ “Put out a general alert,” he ordered, “whoever delivered the device has most likely already flown the coop, but we may be able to backtrack their movements.”
“Yes sir.”
“Cloudbase out.” White tapped the appropriate button and drummed his fingers on the desk, eyes lost in thought as he considered the implications and what it all meant. ‘What on earth could the W.A.S. be up to that Bereznik would consider this an appropriate course of action? And why now? Blue hasn’t been associated with W.A.S. in a very long time.’ Another thought occurred to him and he lifted his head. “Lieutenant Green.”
Green turned in his chair. “Yessir?”
“If I recall correctly, Captain Blue was leading a team of twenty individuals when Bereznik tried to assassinate him. Find out what’s happened to them and get me a call to W.A.S.’ commander.”
“S.I.G.”
White sat back in his chair again as Green went to work, mentally drafting up his questions - and just importantly, how to phrase them. He didn’t want to put the wind up, nor did he want to tip their hand, but he needed information, and quickly. The more possibilities he could eliminate, the quicker he could find his way to the truth.
Chapter Six
An hour later the colonel found his investigation stymied by a thunderous “Absolutely not!”
Secure in the privacy of his office and the freedom it gave him to chew out the CIC, Fawn drew himself up to his full height and levelled the colonel with the glare that made even Scarlet stop in his tracks. “Yes, Blue’s on the mend, but the guy’s barely conscious, yew are NOT going to go in there and stress him with questions like that.”
Colonel White did his best impression of a granite monolith. “Unfortunately our other avenues are currently blocked or have come to a dead end, Doctor,” he tried, only for Fawn to cut him off.
“Which is what he could be if you stress him!” was the snapped response. “I know that idiot, he’ll make himself function if it’ll help the mission, he’ll burn what resources he’s got left and be in worse shape afterwards!”
White absently noted Blue’s ‘promotion’ to the rank of ‘idiot’ and everything that that entailed, then set it aside. “Be that as it may, I...”
“No.” Fawn leaned his fists on his desk. “Tomorrow. Maybe. I have two very sick men to look after. I’ll let you know in the morning.”
Charles knew a dismissal when he saw one and nodded his acceptance. He knew far better than to push things. “Understood, doctor.”
Edward watched him go, then as soon as the door clicked shut he sank down into his chair and rocked back, staring up at the ceiling as he let the chair hold him. “Bereznik? They’re the ones behind this? Damn.”
“Fawn?”
Startled, Edward flailed in an approximation of a surprised octopus doing a ‘don’t eat me’ dance and rocked forward into a more stable position as he tried to pick up the shards of his dignity. “Uh, yes?” He cleared his throat and tried again. “What is it?”
Fresh from the iso-ward, going by her scrub-cap hair but a new set of scrubs, Burgundy, bless her, didn’t comment at all on what she’d just witnessed as she came forward and keyed up the latest information from the robot nurses on Fawn’s personal display. “I’m cautiously optimistic, but it’s confirmed, Blue’s starting to respond to treatment. His fever is going down, bloods are improving, and his sats are going up so I’ve taken him off the nebuliser and put him back on nasal O2.”
“That’s brilliant.” Cautiously excited as well, because they both knew how a patient could make a sudden turn for the worse - especially when other infections took advantage of a ravaged immune system - Fawn scrolled through the data, nodding to himself. “This is great news.” He steeled himself. “What about Scarlet?”
Burgundy shook her head. “Still the same. He’s still fighting but…”
Edward switched over to Scarlet’s data, thin-lipped as he read through the results. So much depended on a patient’s attitude to their sickness, more than a lot of doctors liked to admit, but a patient could only fight for so long. And yes, if he did stop fighting, if he let go and let himself die… well, there were concerns. So far all of Scarlet’s deaths and revivals had been because of trauma, not illness. Poisoning, gunshot, radiation, exsanguination, burns, suffocation and so many more, but never illness. That was an unknown, and Fawn didn’t like those. And yes, while Scarlet recovered from illness in a matter of minutes, he just didn’t have enough data to absolutely say for certain that if Scarlet died from an illness that his retrometabolisation would still kick in, the process of disease and the damage it inflicted was different to that of trauma.
“I just wish we knew why he isn’t getting better,” Burgundy sighed, arms wrapped around herself and worried.
“Me too,” Fawn admitted, rubbing his eyes with his forefinger and thumb to try and force some clarity into his brain. “It just doesn’t make any…” he stopped, groaned, and let his head hit the desk with a soft thump. His rueful ‘I’m an idiot’ was muffled by the blotter, then he sat back up again to clue in his baffled 2IC. “Of course he’s not getting any better, we’re pulling the antibodies out of him almost as soon as he makes them. He hasn’t had a chance to use them himself.”
The smack of Burgundy’s facepalm made him feel a little better about his oversight. “Of course. Duh.” She shook her head. “As soon as we stop the plasma draw he’ll be able to start recovering, but…”
“But can we stop it yet?” Fawn completed the thought. “Is Blue stable enough to continue recovering without the antibodies?”
“I don’t know,” Burgundy shook her head, drew out the visitor’s chair and sat down. “If we weren’t using Scarlet as a donor, I’d advocate keeping Blue on the treatment, he’s only just starting to improve. But with Scarlet’s condition…” she grimaced. “Edward, I hate this. Yes, Scarlet consented, hell, he forced our hand with that stunt he pulled, but the ethics are muddy and only getting muddier.”
“Yeah, I hear you, Tanja,” Edward nodded, equally unhappy. That they were having to hurt one to heal another had been a big factor in how little sleep he’d been getting lately, a burden of guilt that’d only increased with how sick Scarlet had gotten. After spending half his rest breaks tossing and turning, he’d gone to visit Lieutenant Bay and the Room of Sleep twice more since White marched him over there, needing a shut down that didn’t involve drugs. “...we’re going to have to keep going,” he said at last. “The minute we’re certain Blue is stable, we stop the plasma so Scarlet can recover, but right now Blue still needs it.”
“And if Scarlet doesn’t start to recover on his own?” Burgundy’s question was quietly voiced in a tone that Fawn hated to hear and hated to use. “Fawn, even now there’s precious little we can do to treat ebola, especially when it reaches the point he’s at.”
They’d had this conversation in bits and pieces over the years, one they’d started shortly after the Car-Vu and the scope of Scarlet’s powers of recovery started to unfold.
To be more precise, they’d started it after Scarlet was brought back dead after a mission with Grey and Blue, and when they were getting his uniform off him, Kirimiko had found a knife wound in Scarlet’s back, a lethal kidney strike that didn’t track with the injuries he had from the gut shot or the captains’ account of what had happened. Kirimiko, a military-trained nurse, had cleared up the confusion for the two civilian doctors: it was a mercy cut to end pain that the morphine in their field kits couldn’t touch.
Afterwards, he, Lapis and Burgundy had discussed the matter and if they could do it themselves, ending a life so it could restart again, and wrapping it up in terms like ‘forcing a system reset’ and other euphemisms that made such a difficult and raw topic so much easier to discuss.
“...I’ll cross that bridge if and when we get there,” Fawn declared as he stood up, Spectrum’s CMO taking responsibility for that decision away from his 2IC. “I’ll welcome your input, but the call is mine.”
Burgundy looked at him for a long moment, then nodded once. “Understood.”
“Good.” Fawn checked his watch, then made himself soften as he gestured in the direction of the door. “You’re off duty Tanja, go, I’ve got this.”
“S.I.G.,” Burgundy told him, “but I don’t want a word of complaint out of you when I come to relieve you.”
“There won’t be,” Fawn promised, and injected some much needed levity into the moment with “now get, or I’ll have the nurses chase you out.”
“I’m going, I’m going,” she smiled, turning and heading out.
Just like his last visitor, Fawn watched her go, then when the door shut he again sagged into his chair and rocked back, feeling so very spent. ‘Please… please don’t make me have to do that…’ he silently asked, hoping that someone was listening and the fates were feeling kind. He sat up with a groan, set a timer on his desk computer and settled back into his chair again. Fifteen minutes. He’d take fifteen minutes to be human, to doze, to recover just a little, then he’d paste his ‘doctor’ face back on and head out there.
But not yet.
He needed a moment first, a moment to be weak and tired, to be weary and worn and so very human and full of doubt. Once he’d had that then he could pretend to be strong again, to be who his team and his patients needed him to be.
But this moment had to come first, to let the pressure off before he crumpled under the strain of holding other peoples’ lives in his hands.
Chapter Seven
The steely light of dawn was staining the sky as White sat at his desk in the Control Room and scanned through the information that had been compiled and collated overnight: dossiers on the team of twenty ‘Untouchables’ that Blue had assembled six years ago to help him clean house at the World Aeronautical Society, and what they had been up to since.
It wasn’t exactly light reading.
Four agents had been killed during the mission - two by bombs intended for Blue, the other two by enemy agents resisting arrest. One died in an experimental aircraft crash shortly after the mission wrapped up, and by the time Blue left the organisation, five were still employed at W.A.S. and the remaining ten had scattered to the winds.
In the intervening years, illness and accidents had taken six more, tragedies yes, but nothing that pricked him as suspicious. ‘But three months ago is when things do become suspicious,’ White mused, turning another page in the file. It started with a car crash in Australia, then a skydiving accident in Brazil, and last month anaphylaxis and what the coroner had declared as septic shock had taken two in the United States. Last week had seen the deaths of another three - a mugging gone wrong, a heart attack (in a fit and healthy thirty four year old, why that hadn’t triggered any questions, he just didn’t know), and another car accident, the unfortunate woman being run off the road by a truck that was later found abandoned (again, he questioned why no one dug deeper, it screamed ‘enemy action’ to his eyes). ‘That leaves two survivors, three if I include Blue,’ White turned another page, ‘one in W.A.S. - Gary York, now head of counterintelligence, Blue’s old position - and the other - Aggie Graves - is heavens knows where. Something or someone has spooked her and she’s gone to ground. Smart. I can see why Blue picked her for his team.’
He shut the file, stood, and strode out to the Observation Tube. He put himself in his favourite spot to watch the world go by and stood with hands clasped behind his back, half an eye on the changing colours of the sky as he mulled things over.
It was becoming more and more obvious that the radiux mallorum - the root of this evil - lay in the World Aeronautical Society, but so far they were proving a tough nut to crack.
The sun was well over the horizon when the CIC turned to the communications board, currently manned by one of Green’s acolytes - the lieutenant was still off duty. “Lieutenant Clay.”
“Sir?” The younger woman swivelled the chair around to face him.
“Is W.A.S. still stonewalling us?” W.A.S. Commander Phillip’s extreme reluctance to communicate, much less cooperate, was becoming irritating - and suspicious - and unfortunately all they had was suspicions, not the hard evidence needed to make the commander start talking to them. It was getting increasingly tempting to order Green and Magenta to find their way into the other organisation’s databanks and have a good fossick, but no, it wasn’t urgent enough to justify that just yet. ‘But it will be shortly if that man doesn’t start talking…I just hope he has an organisation left to command once all is said and done. W.A.S. do good work, it would be a shame for them to be shut down because of this.’
A check of the message logs and Clay reluctantly nodded. “Yessir, the last message states that the commander is unavailable, nothing further.”
“Well, we’ll see about that.” White strode back to his desk, a plan of action clicking into place. He was drawing in a breath to order a call with the World President as soon as it was a reasonable hour in Bermuda, when a light blinked on his desk.
“Incoming from Captain Grey,” Clay sang out.
White hit the corresponding button. “Report, Captain Grey.”
“Sir, we just found out who it was and she’s long gone,” Grey answered, a barely hidden frustration licking around the edges of his words.
“Who was it, Captain?”
“Colonel Svetlana Bugayev, a.k.a. ‘Cobra’, head of the Special Missions arm of the Bereznik External Security Agency. She flew in on the day on the 0600 Fireflash from London, flew out on the 1745 to Belgium, and Homeland Security only just got around to telling us.” The captain’s tone promised a very uncomfortable conversation with whoever was in charge of the person responsible for the lapse in inter-agency communications.
Clay had the computer file up for him before White could form the order.
White studied the attached image. It wasn’t the best - a photo taken at a cafe and obviously at long range - but it was enough to identify her. She had youthful features, a heart-shaped face, large hazel eyes, loosely curled chestnut brown hair that tumbled around her shoulders, and a generous mouth that lent itself to smiling. ‘Cobra’ seemed like a misnomer until one looked at the list of missions she was either known or suspected to have organised or participated in. ‘Quite apt really, she strikes from cover and vanishes’, White mused, ‘and she rarely misses her mark. It also makes sense why she would have picked such a dramatic strategy for her attempt on Blue, out of all of them he would have been the hardest to get at.’ “Captain Grey, I want Captain Magenta to continue liaising with SI to wrap up ‘The Collective’, I will be meeting yourself and Captain Ochre at the Boston office.”
“Sir?”
“We are going to meet with Commander Phillips of the World Aeronautic Society - in person. He has thus far been avoiding me, but if Cobra is involved, this requires an escalation.”
“Yessir.”
A flick of a switch cut the call, and White stood again to retrieve his ‘cap from its hook and his gun from the locker built into the desk. “Lieutenant, have a jet, pilot, and Angel escort organised, departing in one hour. Green will have temporary command of the base until myself or a senior officer returns. I’ll be in my cabin, then in Medical.”
“S.I.G.”
Clay was already working her board to issue the orders as he scooped up the file and strode to the private lift that connected him to his quarters, his thoughts churning as he considered and discarded the possibilities and maybes of the challenge that faced them - and dearly hoped that the Mysterons didn’t notice and deign to muddy the waters even more.
0o0o0
Being awake was not fun.
Everything ached, he had that familiar fuzziness of opiates, and there was a foul taste in his mouth and a sticky feeling to his skin from not being able to shower and brush his teeth in… he had no idea how long, which was a problem in and of itself. Losing track of multiple days was bad.
Moving very carefully (and so very glad it didn’t make his brain ache like last time) he turned his head to check on his friend… and the auto-nurse shrilled an alert as his heart rate shot up.
The other bed was empty!
“Easy, Blue, easy now…”
A hand was on his shoulder, trying to keep him in the bed he was struggling to get out of.
“Oi! Get out!”
“Bugger off!”
Two more hands ruthlessly shoved him back onto the soft surface. “Blue! Stand down!” The sharp command cut through his panic like a knife. “It’s okay, I’m okay, look at me, I’m okay, lie down, I’m okay.”
Adam ignored the background snarl of ‘You just earned yourself another hour sitting in the decontamination chamber!’, all his attention on Paul. He looked haggard and was clearly still recovering, but he was very much alive. “You’re…?”
“I’m fine, Adam, I’m fine,” Paul reassured him. “You’re finally responding to treatment so it was deemed safe to unhook me so I could recover. They’re wanting to move me out of here so you don’t reinfect me while I finish getting better.”
That was when it registered that Fawn and Burgundy were also in the room, but they were wearing orange protective suits and Paul wasn’t - he had a towel wrapped around his waist and was dripping water and suds everywhere, obviously having been mid-wash when the ‘bot nurse shrieked the alarm. Vaguely glad that Paul had remembered to grab a towel along the way (because when it was an emergency Scarlet just didn’t register niceties like that) Adam let himself be pushed back into the bed. “Family?” he croaked out the question.
“All fine,” Paul reassured him, pulling the blankets back into position over his legs.
“Mission?”
“I don’t know yet.” A glance was flicked at the two doctors, who gave almost identical eyebrows back: Medical had a policy about insulating patients from ongoing missions for very good reasons (which were 50% keep-Scarlet-in-bed related, 30% keep-the-rest-of-them-in-bed related and 20% don’t-stress-the-patients related).
The intercom crackled. “That is what I am here about, Captains, Doctors.”
All four of them looked over to see White at the observation window, a file in hand. “Captain Blue, I need to talk to you about your task force in the W.A.S. Yes, Doctor Fawn, I know he is unwell, but I promise, it is indeed that urgent.”
Scarlet, after a nod from Fawn, helped Blue to sit up more and brought over a cup of water so he could wet his throat.
“What is it, sir?” Blue asked after a careful sip of water.
The colonel opened the file in his hand. “Bereznik are behind what happened to you, and it appears they have also targeted your team….”
End Part 1…