Fall Together

Chapter 1

It hit them just as Virgil dropped down below the low cloud cover across the sea 185 klicks to the north of Scotland.

The rescue had been one of the most brutal Virgil had ever taken part in. A research hut perched on sea ice had slid and fallen down an immense crack that had opened down to the sea below, ending up wedged only a couple of metres above the black waves even as gale conditions pounded it from above. Scott quickly determined that any attempt to lift the hut using grappling lines was doomed to failure; it had been essentially destroyed by the ice gripping and shifting against it, and even if he had been able to free it by lowering himself down there, it would come apart once taken from the ice's grip. So when Thunderbird Two arrived it was decided that Thunderbird Four would be dropped in the open sea and Gordon would navigate his way deep under the ice to come up beneath the suspended hut and rescue the researchers from below.

Virgil didn't know the exact difficulties of such a dive, but he could imagine, and he knew categorically that there was no one else on the planet he would trust to make it except his younger brother. The area of breakaway ice, several kilometres in size, still moved with the forces of wind and waves now battering it. Virgil could only guess at the limited visibility, the hazardous irregularity of the ice, the swirling current. He and Scott were compelled to sit above, resisting the wind in One and Two in order to keep grappling lines as stabilisers on the hut, while Gordon found his way under the ice and up through the crevasse. Once there he exited Four to stand on her roof and cut a hole through the wall of the hut, fighting for balance as the water lifted and fell beneath him.

He reported five scientists, all injured, three ambulant. It took almost two hours in the horrendous conditions to manoeuvre the hover stretcher up to the hut, load it with the worst injured, and bring it back for dry entry as Four, buoyant and resilient, floated between the ice walls, its engines working overtime to keep it in place. The others made it down with help from Gordon below, and then the task of finding his way back out from under the heaving, groaning mass of ice began.

It took almost five hours in total, and if Four was battered and dented and scraped by the end of it, Gordon was not much better. Twice, Four was lifted unexpectedly to smash into ice and hut above, catching Gordon in between and forcing him to slam down where and how he could to avoid being crushed to death.

Still, as Scott said, it was a successful mission. There were five people now, bedded down at research station Zackenberg, who had spent much of the day staring at death and who could now begin to accept they had a future again, thanks to IR. And that was a good feeling, no doubt of it, even if the act of waiting helplessly as his younger brother did all the work was never a part of a mission in which Virgil took satisfaction. The fact he'd spent those five hours keeping Two something like stable in terrifying winds as he secured the hut didn't enter into his calculations of who had done what on this one. Scott left the area first once everyone was secure, heading home across Europe and Asia and then via Sydney to pick up Alan and Kayo, which left Two to rise above the storm and head south to Scotland.

There was just one problem, as Virgil saw it.

Gordon was exhausted.

A tired Scott would have driven him to distraction with a series of questions his mind was too burned through to register as already answered. Had they secured X? Did they remember Y? Had they heard from John? Did they secure X? Virgil? X? And Virgil would answer patiently, by rote, as he switched off most of it and concentrated on getting them home. John, immensely practical as he was, would have been asleep as they took off for home, and Alan would be little different, his fully on button merely the flip side of his equally effective fully off one. Once Alan stopped he stopped completely, and after chattering wildly for a good ten minutes would have suddenly become silent, even in mid-sentence, and then replaced whatever he was going to say with a snore.

But Tired Gordon? Tired Gordon had no filters. No social awareness. And no off switch.

"That woman so had the hots for you, Virge."

"Mmm."

"The way she swooned all over you? May as well have put up a neon sign."

Virgil considered the way he rolled his eyes but refrained from answering as a testament to his own awesome powers of self-control.

"There you were, all muscly he-man, and there she was, damsel in distress. You know you were her fantasy come true, right?"

"She was distressed and cold and needed to get off Four PDQ."

"God, you miss the signals." Gordon shifted as if to put his feet on the console, but at Virgil's laser-like glare simply put one foot over his knee. It was obvious he was uncomfortable- Virgil saw his back when he changed into a dry uniform, and it already looked like a Picasso done with a hangover, and his fingers were red and raw as they tapped on his shin – but he had refused to lie down in back, so Virgil's sympathy battled with annoyance. "You know, I'm bushed. We could have parked Two there at the research station, you and her could be sharing a hot cup of cocoa up here in the boudoir section of Two while you explained the 19th century Bauhaus movement to her in your manliest grunt. And I could be getting all kinds of zeds after tasting the 60 year old scotch that professor dude said he stashed next to the frozen whale meat. It could have been a night to remember. You just don't think things through."

"Firstly, Bauhaus was not 19th century." Virgil ignored Gordon's little snicker at his success in drawing that out. "And secondly, I do think things through. That's why I don't indulge my impulses." Virgil checked his altimeter, adjusted his girl's power rate a little. He glanced below at the gray-black sea, flecked with narrow lines of white that told of cresting breakers far beneath them. "For example, I haven't hit the eject button and sent you jabbering away into the air at nine hundred feet. I would think you'd appreciate that."

"Huh. Yeah, might have expected that kind of abuse." Gordon wriggled on the seat as if he could settle into it deeper, despite the fact the seat's construction wouldn't allow anything of the sort. "Happens to truth tellers everywhere. Oppression. Threats of violence. Grunty lumberjack thugs oppressing people."

"Truth?" Virgil had maintained a calm monotone in response to Gordon's nonsense since they left, but this unmitigated bullshit required a spark of response. "Name one truthful thing you've said in the last thirty minutes."

"Uh – that Gudrun had the hots for you?" The level of duh in his brother's voice had blown past irritating right into the high smackability zone.

"Gordon, she was 65!"

"But well-preserved. It's all that whale meat. Don't be so ageist, bro. You're an old man yourself, it's a match made in senility heaven."

"No one would convict me," Virgil muttered. "I'd play back the flight recorder, and no one would convict me. Just – just sit there and give me some peace and quiet, would you?"

"Too tired. Cannot adult." Gordon yawned extravagantly. "Lack all ability to modulate verbal response. Default Obnoxious Mode fully engaged."

A different tack. "You know, Gordo, you're right. We should have stayed." He gave his brother an artificially bright grin. "They had seal burgers they were going to cook for supper."

"There, you see? We could be chowing down on seal burgers and scotch right now, you could be serenading Gudrun." Moodily Gordon taped at his leg. Virgil waited, watching out of the corner of his eye without comment, and gradually a frown formed on Gordon's face. "Wait a minute. No, wait. Seal burgers? I like seals. I don't want to eat seals. Seals are fun. They're awesome. That's a lousy idea, Virgil."

"Which is why we're in descent and heading down to a particular castle in the north of Scotland to meet with Lady Penelope instead."

He had no clear idea why Brains had sent through the message requesting the somewhat clandestine meeting, and he could sincerely wish for it to have come at another time. A barbecue on Tracy Island, the sounds of meat sizzling, gulls singing, and Gordon snoring mingling to create a soundtrack of success – that was all he wished for, right now. Still, Lady P was famous for her hospitality.

To say that Gordon had been fizzing like a faulty electrical wire ever since Brains had asked them to meet her would be an understatement.

He heard the chuckle even before he registered John's avatar suddenly appearing above the console.

"You've been listening."

"It's definitely Gordon's nap time. I don't envy you."

"Hey! I'm right here."

Virgil grinned at John, complicit in big brother solidarity.

"Don't remind me."

"Thunderbird Two - I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings…"

Gordon sighed, dramatically. "Just tell us, John. It's like ripping off a plaster. Better to do it quickly."

"We have a situation. Three kilometres inland from the Newfoundland coast. I'm sending you the new course coordinates."

"I'm not getting my barbecue any time today, am I?"

"Afraid not, Virgil."

Obnoxious Gordon was gone. Instead he was leaning forward, his face already assuming the expression he wore when on a job, something older, a little harder, fully focused. John checked something on his sensors then looked up to meet their inquiring looks. He said, "I'm picking up what I think is the –"

And with a sudden shuddering jolt everything became quiet.

Gordon's eyebrows, previously down in the little quarter frown he wore when concentrating, flew up in surprise.

"Virgil?"

It was at that precise second that Virgil felt the life leave his baby.

It was a tangible thing; only seconds before his 'bird was a living creature, talking to him in her tics and rumbles, her flexing against the wind, the way she slid across the currents and eased her bulk through the sky, all power and confidence. Sometimes Virgil thought he was connected to her physically, the jet fuel flowing through his veins and into her. In this moment, when she fell silent, he felt as if his own heart had stopped along with her.

"Nothing." He sat forward, quickly trying to reboot, checking every indicator his girl possessed. "John, we've lost power. We've got nothing."

The space where John's avatar had been looked worse than empty, as if the air itself had been scooped away with their brother, violently.

"Alright, alright." Virgil spoke half to himself, half to his 'bird. "Come on, girl. Something left for me."

Thunderbird Two dropped.

He tried again, the restart, pulling from backup systems, banging the console. Part of his mind heard Gordon calling on his wrist device, International Rescue Five, International Rescue One, getting nothing.

Nothing. He'd said it to John, and he'd said the truth. There was nothing under his hands or his feet but a corpse.

Everything happened so quickly that his conscious mind struggled to process it even as training kicked in. Thirty seconds beforehand they were readying themselves to fly to the rescue, in control, on target, prepared and professional and confident in their abilities to get the job done.

Less than nine hundred feet above the sea now. No time for Gordon to get to Thunderbird Four. No time.

They were going down. Nine hundred feet at 32 seconds per second per second – that was ten seconds to impact. But something of a glide first, their forward velocity translating into an arc rather than a drop? Twenty seconds, max. At this height, falling this far, they were going to die. And all that filled Virgil's mind was a memory of three year old Gordon, leaping into his almost-overwhelmed arms, crying out in fear, and his own body closing around him, keeping him safe. Keeping his little brother safe.

A muffled bang from the rear. That would be the engine going, its chemical heart needing the constant coolant to stop it from eating itself. Two's hull would be breached. If they had power his control board would be lit up with red, the symbolic wounds of a dying girl.

"Oh, god. I'm sorry." He looked at Gordon, white faced but silent in the co-pilot seat, still with a trace of belief in his eyes, and he watched as that hope, that certainty in his brother's ability to do something miraculous, drained away. "I'm sorry, Gordon. Gords, I'm so sorry."

Gordon swallowed. He breathed in deeply, nostrils flaring, a flicker of something dreadful in his eyes as realisation hit. Briefly, a precious second's grace, he looked out at the gray skies that were discarding them.

Then he did something that hurt more than Virgil thought anything ever could. He turned back to his brother and he smiled, a kind of sad sweetness in it, before shaking his head slightly.

"Nowhere else I wanna be, bro."

It was unbearable. Impossible.

"Dammit, dammit. No." Virgil lurched forward in his seat, ripped off the console casing with his bare hands, his mind racing. He needed an idea, because he just couldn't sit here and wait as his baby killed them both.

Seconds only, and his hands moved before his brain caught up to what they were doing. Two lines from the emergency lighting system, xenon-difluoride battery to operate while Thunderbird Two was offline. Huge arc lights that flooded an emergency scene. Insanely powerful batteries.

Switching lines to the VTOL capacitor. Connecting. Reaching up to hit VTOL.

A judder through the body of his bird as the VTOL shocked itself into life for three seconds, one hundred and fifty feet above the waves. A mayfly life, a spark and gone, but their deadly descent had been denied.

Thunderbird Two dropped, but instead of x pounds of pressure, it was y, and the difference was existence itself.

In the three seconds as the VTOL fired she'd travelled to just under sixty feet above the sea's surface. Virgil had time to shout, "Brace!" and begin to bend over into a crash ready position. He should have bent into it fully, but at the last millisecond his mind sent a jolt of alarm that somehow translated into his arm reaching forward to secure the casing panel he had wrenched free, the one that was now a deadly weapon in the imminent crash.

He tried to make it back. From the corner of his eye he saw that Gordon was already braced, tucked down, arms clasped tight around his knees and hands covering the head that was turned towards him, his eyes huge in his face. Virgil's body drew him back, trying to move faster than the twin forces of gravity and disaster, galloping like apocalyptic horsemen to meet him. He began to tuck his head down.

"Virgil!"

And then they hit, flat, and Virgil felt as though every bone in his body was driven into his spine even as it concertinaed into his skull.

Nothingness.

Time slid from him. He couldn't grasp the present. There was a kind of thundering in his mind, something huge that battered at his consciousness even as it took him away from any sense of self. There was only noise and a sensation of pressure. His eyes were open, and he saw what was happening, but it was if he was outside of it, watching events that had no reality, no meaning.

A huge wall of water flew up in front of the windshields and Thunderbird Two yawed backwards and forwards until the weight of the jets in her tail took her down, nose slightly tilted skywards as if to defy her fate even at the last.

No sense of self, but sense of someone else.

Gordon.

Gordon was here. Gordon was in front of him.

Gordon was alive.

Gordon was babbling something, and it had as much reality as the gray water that covered the view where his sky should be.

"Virgil? Oh, wow, you hit your head bad, huh? Tuck it in, Virge, doesn't just mean when you leave the john. Come on, Virgil, hey, look at me. Come on, focus here. I'm too pretty to be ignored."

That voice, those large brown eyes. Something important.

A click, a connection, a downward shift as if he'd dropped from another height back into his own body, and things mattered again. He was back in his 'bird, and he hurt, and Gordon was pulling up his eyelids, peering at him.

"Hey, there you are. Wow, Virgil, some ride." There was sweat on Gordon's face, and he looked sick, but he was grinning. There would be life in Gordon until the universe turned on him for good and all, and Virgil reached towards it, gripping Gordon's arms.

"Took – took a knock," he managed.

"Yep, you sure did, looking out for me, you dope. Hit your hard old knees instead of hugging 'em. Come on, we need to get you up and go."

"Go?"

"Four," and Gordon sounded so sure that Virgil made an effort to rise. The minute he did his stomach reported for emptying duty, and he reeled from Gordon to the bulkhead, holding on to it as he retched, his head thudding with each surge.

"Okay. It's okay." That was Gordon's Soothing Voice, and that was not good. He needed to bring his A game here, because they may have pushed back one sortie but Death had a few more in his arsenal. He pulled himself semi-upright, took several breaths.

"Okay. M 'okay."

"Yeah. You're gorgeous." Gordon pulled away from him, strode as fast as he could on the somewhat canted floor towards the back of the flight deck. "We gotta get my bird outta here Virge, before we hit sea bed. Water's not deep around here, 'bout 300 feet or so, but I don't know what kind of power we'll have, and it's not likely we'll be able to get much upward thrust."

"Can't – " Damn, it was so hard to think, with a thousand hammers pounding in his head. "Can't open module underwater."

"We can, but we gotta get it clear. Thank god for Dad's manual overrides. We can do this, but we gotta go now, Virge."

"Coming." Single words worked a whole lot better, and Virgil staggered across to where Gordon had opened a panel and pulled a lever before working a crank wheel that opened access to the module. He left it only wide enough to squeeze through, and Virgil followed.

A ladder, tight against the wall, in lieu of the lift that was almost certainly not working.

"She's dragging us down. Gotta get this module free." Gordon was all purpose, hurrying down to the floor level and then to Thunderbird Four before disappearing to the rear of it. Somewhere past the hammering in Virgil's head lay another hurt, to hear of his baby as a traitor. She'd done the best she could to keep them alive, and even now he felt as though she was deliberately slow in her sinking. He dreaded to think of the size of the breach in her hull if she was sinking at all.

He fought to rally his thought processes. To get free they'd have to manually disconnect and rise upwards out of the module bay, the design point Scott had insisted upon in order to allow One to lift the pod should Two be incapacitated and on the ground. The manual override was over – there. He climbed down, slowly, haphazard care with each handhold because his vision was lying to him with every attempt to focus, and made his way across the gentle slope that felt more like a pitching deck in a force ten gale to his concussed balance. Reaching the wall allowed him one hand to bolster himself against the swinging spirit level in his mind while the other opened the panel that revealed the release mechanism.

"Leave that." Somehow Gordon was back, with his diving helmet on his head and another one in his hand. He grabbed Virgil's shoulders and gently took him from the panel to lower him onto the deck. "I got this. Just disconnected the module on the other side. Just hang tight for a sec."

There was no argument Virgil could make without another round of stomach gymnastics, so he sat, breathing deeply, focusing on bringing his full consciousness back into play.

Release the module, fine. But the comparative weights of the module and the body of his bird weren't so dissimilar that the module could break free, sink more slowly. Were they? The figures danced in his mind, a carousel of weights and displacement and water pressure. How far down were they, anyway?

"Won't float," he managed, and Gordon spared him a glance even as he pulled first one horizontal lever and then lifted up and locked a vertical one. A distinct clunk of sound, as the module was disconnected on this side, but no sense of lifting free. Then Gordon was crouched in front of him, and there was something like pity in his expression.

"We're gonna have to flood Two's flight deck. Get some more evenly distributed weight into her."

Flood his girl? Her rear was already flooded. It shouldn't matter, shouldn't send such a sharp, hard hurt into his gut, but he couldn't help it when he thought of the seat he had taken so many times, and Gordon reached for his shoulder again, squeezed it in unspoken sympathy.

"Need your laser to drill a hole in her windshields. Need you to be ready to close the access door."

Virgil worked his heels against the floor to scramble upright, Gordon stepping back to allow him, one hand still on his shoulder as a steadier.

"I can drill the hole." It felt right, that he should be the one to take the final action to finish her, but Gordon shook his head.

"I need in and out real quick. You stand by the door, you close it when I come through. That water pressure is gonna to be intense."

Without hesitation, Gordon reached up to unclip the laser on Virgil's shoulder. The light through the access door was getting steadily dimmer as they sank deeper into the sea.

"When I get back in here I need you to wait until we clear Two then use the laser to open a hole in the module. Then you need to get to Four and close the hatches behind you. Get into the cockpit and sit tight. Have you got that?"

"Secure hatches. FAB, Gordon."

"Have you got it, Virgil?" And there was Stern Gordon again, peering into his eyes, and something about his look and his tone pulled Virgil further up into full awareness.

"Yeah, I've got it, Gordo. What's your plan?"

Gordon flexed and straightened his free hand, the only outward sign of his stress.

"Gotta wait for equalisation of pressure before I try to manually lower the ramp. We'll be full of water before I can get back into Four. I'll have to manually pump out the airlock, but that's okay. In the cockpit I need you to divert power from the emergency battery. Should be 12,000 volts, but after that ice grind I was running a diagnostics check on the backup system before that thing hit us and I don't know if anything got drained by that surge."

It was so hard to follow the string of words that Gordon was unspooling to lie in a tangle about them. Virgil clung tight, did his best.

"FAB."

Gordon nodded, crisply, before climbing back up the ladder and squeezing for the last time into the cockpit of Two. Virgil used the straps and struts on the walls to pull himself over to the base of the ladder. The manual override panel on the access door between the module and the cockpit was twelve feet above him beside the access door. Looking up brought his stomach to his mouth; he closed his eyes, breathed fast and shallow, then forced himself to grip each rung and climb in his little brother's wake.

"Ready?"

He knew he reached top of the ladder when his hands grasped at air. Opening his eyes slowly, he brought himself higher to the point where he could stand on the thin lip alongside the access door.

The pain in his head was excruciating.

"Ready," Virgil shouted – that was a shout, wasn't it? An old man's wheeze, but the best he could do, apparently.

A flare of brilliance came through as Gordon used the laser on one windshield, and almost immediately there came a tremendous cracking sound. Water burst through, a torrent that knocked Gordon hard to the deck and gushed on through into the module. Virgil saw Gordon scramble back to his feet, the soles on his IR uniform giving him grip even as the water tore past his knees.

"Coming!" Gordon yelled, and Virgil gripped the crank. A second later Gordon's hand appeared on the edge of the door and he pulled himself through. Virgil began winding, all his strength put into closing the door against the muscle of water pushing it aside.

Another few seconds and the water's power would have been too much. But Virgil swung one more round out of the crank and the door clicked into closed, leaving a trail of water dispiritedly trickling down the join. All light was gone with the closing of the door, and Virgil felt quickly for the illumination from his dual light/ laser, grabbing at nothing as he realised Gordon held it.

Gordon had thrown himself through the gap so heedless of anything else that he had ended up swinging out to dangle from the handrail of the ladder. Virgil heard him whoop. The light on his diving helmet bounced crazily across the space as he slipped and struggled to get his footing on the ladder. Looking up at Virgil, he suddenly laughed.

"And that's how we do that." He found his balance and promptly did the Navy approved ladder descent, feet on the outside of the rungs, hands guiding in one smooth drop, bouncing on his feet at the bottom. "Nice door work, Virge. I can see you moonlighting at night clubs from now on."

"I doubt if your skinny arms would have had the grunt to get that done." Virgil let go of the door and climbed down with deliberation to Gordon's side, arms out a little when he left the railings to help his wayward balance.

Gordon tilted his head, listening.

"Are we clearing, do you think?"

As if in answer, the module gave a jolt. Another bump, another, and the floor lurched beneath them, sending Virgil's light shooting at crazy angles across the walls and deck.

"I think we're getting there," Virgil said. The thought of disconnecting from his girl, of leaving her to slowly die of wounds taken in battle together, brought a sense of numbness to his heart.

"Okay. So. Now you get to vandalise my module." Gordon handed the laser back to Virgil then left him to sweep his hand in a circle at a point high up on the ramp and to the left of Thunderbird Four's position. "Need you to burn a hole here so we can flood this and I can get the ramp down. Oh, wait." He jogged back through the ankle high water to kneel by Four's rails. "We need to release three of these. I'll take out the fourth one when I'm coming back."

"On it." Virgil plodded to a locker on the wall and retrieved two wrenches. Gordon took one and they each began unlocking the clips that held Four in place on the launch frame before she powered up and slid down the ramp. Bending over brought a special kind of hell to the pounding behind Virgil's eyes, but he ignored it and kept going, freeing first the front and then the rear clip. He used Four to help pull himself up.

"Gotta think we're clear," Gordon muttered, leaning one hand against the module's wall as if to check its heartbeat.

Virgil swallowed his nausea, twice, before being able to speak. "This is your territory, Gordon. You know this stuff. Displacement of water, lift – I'm going with your call."

Gordon cast an appreciative look his way, barely discernible in the darkness, before nodding.

"The Atlantic current will take us north, and we don't want that. Need to get easterly, get the current into the North Sea. The module will float faster than Two, so if we're clear at all we shouldn't drop back inside her even once we start filling up." A ghost of a grin towards Virgil. "This is gonna be fun."

Gordon, Vigil knew, liked his lies big and bold and unblushing.

"We need to work on your definitions," Virgil said. The thought of deliberately filling the module with water wasn't one that gave him any comfort, but sinking to lie trapped on the seabed was a particular horror. He hefted the laser onto his strap at his shoulder and stood to the side of the point Gordon had identified.

"Here." Gordon lifted the second diving helmet towards him. "In case you get caught before you get back into Four."

Virgil accepted it, settled it on his head.

"Oh, and there are two survival packs by the exit hatch on Four. Toss 'em inside when you get there."

"Will do. You ready?"

"FAB." Gordon took his place by the ramp deployment manual override. Virgil nodded, then turned and aimed towards the wall. The light from the laser was almost painfully bright, and did Virgil's headache no good at all, but he stayed steady and followed a circular path until he had almost completed a full circle. He switched off the laser and braced himself again.

"Now?"

Gordon adjusted his hold on the override lever. "Go for it."

A single burst from the laser, and the circular cut was complete. At once the circle of metal burst inwards, followed by a roar of water, dark and terrifying in the confined space.

"Go!" yelled Gordon, but Virgil had already turned and begun to stagger as fast as he could towards the back hatch on Thunderbird Four. The water smashed into the nose of Four and rocked her on the launch frame, but the final clip held. Virgil grabbed the edge of the back fin and swung himself around to the open airlock. Quickly he grabbed the survival packs and scrambled in, through to the second set of doors, and used the manual lever to close them behind him. Water surged against the glass as he stood there, breathing heavily.

He opened the access to the cockpit, and again closed it carefully. This would be their escape pod. His light showed him the cockpit controls, and outside, hanging on tight to a strut by the edge of the ramp, his brother, his yellow hair looking white against the darkness that surrounded them. The water was already to his waist.

It felt all kinds of wrong to be safe and sitting in a contoured seat while his brother clung to a strut in a rising swirl of arctic water, but Virgil knew there was no other way. And everything's relative. The chance of either one of them dying remained high and equally likely, so, you know, they were playing nicely and sharing their game.

He knelt by the control panel and pried it off. The circuits that appeared were not as familiar as those in his beloved 'bird – and that brought another little jab of pain as he thought of them underwater – but he had acquainted himself with Thunderbird Four's schematics on many occasions, and Brains tried to design the hardware of each Thunderbird along similar lines for just such eventualities as this. Virgil could see where Brains had tucked the fuel feed more tightly to the alternator than in Two, and where Four's particular requirements were highlighted in a separate, easily identifiable section. He followed the power line back to where it diverged to the chemical reactor that gave Four its thrust, and looked beyond it for the backup battery.

He rerouted the leads, and unconsciously clenched his jaw as he hit the start up. The screens flickered into life – more dull than usual, but just the sight of a powered console brought a fierce, "Yes!" under his breath. The celebration was brief; the power reading showed less than 200 volts.

"Oh, come on," he muttered. Water rose above the level of his eye-line outside Four, surging against the forward port in ferocious swirls. He could no longer see Gordon, could only hope his grip held, that he was ready to deploy the ramp.

He switched off the console to conserve what little power they had, leaving the little cockpit lit only by the light on his helmet. His own breathing sounded loud and lonely, all noise from the violent incursion of the water in the module muffled inside Four's watertight compartments. If he stopped to think about their predicament for too long the fear would rise as urgently as the water; Virgil knew about he had to rein in his thoughts, keep focused on each task as it presented itself. The hardest thing was that the task he had now was to wait, calmly, as Four shifted on the launch frame, as the module lurched and groaned and cracked with its flooding.

The water closed over the roof and his entrapment was complete.

"Come on, Gordon." When your own voice is your sole comfort, best to make it sound brisk. He ignored his weakness, the absurdity of addressing the console as if it was his brother, and kept it light but firm. "Time to get your ass back in here."

The thought of the water sucking Gordon's legs from under him, of it disappearing him into the darkness beyond came to Virgil so suddenly that he gave a little gasp of inward breath. He peered forward, listening, aching to see or hear a sign that Gordon was still with him.

Another crack, and then muffled banging to the right. That had to be Gordon releasing the final clamp! He strained again to hear – there, the sound of the airlock, the rear hatch. Another long pause as the manual pump was engaged.

More bangs, and then the hatch behind him was cranked open and Gordon was there, water flying from him, his eyes wild.

"Wow. That was awesome. I was awesome."

"I acknowledge your awesome."

"Move," he said, and Virgil hastily did so, squeezing himself against the bulkhead beside Gordon's seat. Gordon slid straight into command position, using his flashlight to check the rerouting, nodding his approval.

"You tried her?"

No point in sugar-coating it. "Under 200 volts."

"Shit. Okay. Seat's there," and Gordon pointed to his right where Virgil could just make out the release clamp for a small jump seat, even as Four tipped and slewed sideways under the pressure of the water. Fumbling, he pulled the seat down and strapped in.

"Got it open but couldn't get the ramp locked. Must've been damaged when we dropped." Gordon's voice was terse but calm. He was switching on power, frowning at the voltage but continuing to work through pre-launch. "We need to get out of here fast before we hit seabed or Two. Shine your light forward." Without another word he hit the impulsion drive button and Thunderbird Four started out.

They almost made it.

They'd had all kinds of luck since whatever felled them from the sky wrenched their lives off track, and most of it could safely be classed as bad. But this was the worst. As Four tried to clear the module their descent was finally stopped by Two almost directly beneath them hitting the seabed. The module, slightly further astern, crashed down into Two a second later and tipped forward into the empty module bay; and the ramp, unable to be secured, caught hard on Two's upper frame and came slamming back upwards just as Four tried to slide past it.

There was a tremendous crash, then Four skewed off to starboard. Gordon gave it another burst of power and she surged forwards and upwards, almost as if she arched her back to avoid the touch of the ramp in a monstrous game of tag. He set her nose slightly upwards and then shut down her power again almost immediately, before scrambling from his seat to get through the hatch and see the damage. Virgil followed him, his heart thumping in his throat.

There was water streaming in through a crack across the top of the 'bird, and although Virgil almost cried out when he saw it, Gordon didn't let his expression change. He was bending down to retrieve the emergency repair kit similar to ones in the other Thunderbirds. It spread an instantly setting polymer across tears in metal, and it took Gordon less than a minute to seal the damage and head back for his command seat.

"Don't wanna run diagnostics but we've got no choice." Gordon busily worked at the console, closing down what he could, leaving the system running where he had to. "Hoo boy. We've lost starboard rudder control. That's okay, that's not too bad. I can just adjust, use the trim." He scanned every indicator he could, calculating quickly, then closed down diagnostics so the only thing on the console showing any light at all was the proximity alarm and the power indicator, now flickering at 120 volts.

"Minimum drive," he muttered to himself. "No ballast control. We'll be okay. Just take it easy, get her into the southern flow. It'll be okay, Virgil."

"Maybe we should just surface?" Virgil said, jamming himself once more onto the jump-seat. He liked to believe he was thinking strategically, but the truth was one he could acknowledge to himself; he hated this gluey darkness, the way scraps of dead things, live things, sediment and sea spawn floated into view and then past them, coming from even greater depths, silently. He hated this sense of thousands of tonnes of water over their heads.

But Gordon was shaking his head.

"This far north there's too much disturbance up there. Thirty, forty foot waves, even ice coming down from the Arctic. It's goo. We're safer down below." He spared Virgil a quick, sympathetic glance. "Not your thing, huh?"

"You could say that."

"You're doing good, Virge. We'll make a submariner out of you yet."

Virgil choked out a laugh. "I can't say I see the appeal."

"No." Gordon looked back at the controls, frowning slightly. "Not the greatest of conditions, I'll give you that."

"It's consistent."

"True." He brightened. "One day I'll take you down along the Great Barrier Reef. What's left of it. Or the Caribbean – now there's some cool diving."

That was the thing about Gordon, Virgil thought with sudden affection. He got down, same as the rest of them; but it was like pushing down a cork in a sink of water – the slightest release of pressure and it bobbed up again, past whatever the hell was trying to keep it below. Scott's relentless determination was unrivalled, and John might as well have invented coolness in crisis. But for sheer buoyancy in the face of impenetrable odds, Virgil kind of thought he would choose Gordon to be at his side as he'd been so many times in the past. Whatever happens, we'll die cheerful.

"How are we, really?"

"Really? Just gotta keep our eyes open – I've set the proximity scanner to minimum to conserve energy, we get about five metres warning. And we just gotta head south. There's land down there, we weren't that far out from the Orkneys. So long as we keep going south, get out of the drift towards the north, we'll do fine." Again Gordon worked to find the balance. He flicked a quick look towards Virgil, and there was something reluctant in his face. "So, uh – that thing that happened?" He shifted his gaze away to stare straight ahead, although there didn't seem to be anything to look for, and Virgil had the distinct sense he didn't want to look at his brother just now. "The whole 'look, no engine' thing? Not denying it was fun and all but - what do you think it was?"

Virgil had been avoiding that question in their rush for survival. Now he found himself staring into the abyssal darkness alongside his brother, as if the answer was going to magically loom forward into the relative brightness of his sash light.

"I don't know. But to get that kind of effect – my guess is a modified EMF, an electromagnetic flux."

"Huh." Gordon carefully adjusted the trim with the tiniest burst of power. They were travelling so slowly that a large piece of seaweed drifted onto the clear Perspex of Thunderbird Four's nose and hung there, trapped with the pressure of the water ahead of them. "So do you think we were targeted?"

"Someone fired an EMF at us?" Virgil tensed his jaw. "I hope so."

"What?" Gordon was startled enough to turn towards him, leaving the mesmeric display of tiny sea life unobserved. "Why would you say that?"

Virgil shrugged slightly. "The alternative is worse. A solar flare, passing through the earth, knocking out every plane, every computer, every piece of electrical equipment on the planet. Everything, Gordon."

"Scott!" Gordon breathed. Virgil nodded, grimly.

"Scotty, John. I know we're designed to be solar flare-proof, but that's always a shifting parameter, always dependent on just what gets sent our way. Given how Two was affected, they could both be down. John has backup, and his survival suit. He wouldn't suffocate. But without power, if the station loses height and gathers momentum towards Earth…"

"God, Virgil, no!"

"And you know how many planes are in the sky at any one time? How many passengers? What about people in hospitals, or in surgery when it struck."

"I can't even – hell, it would be a catastrophe."

"Yeah." He found himself shaking his head slowly. "I gotta believe this was just a deliberate attack on us alone."

"Huh. How weird is that? Hoping you've been shot down on purpose." Gordon gave him a sudden tight grin. "You know what? I can buy that. We Tracys have a gift for attracting loonies. My bet's on a lone gunman with the hots for The Hood."

"Always thinking positively, right?" He returned the smile.

"You bet. Can you imagine his face when we pop up in Four and say, 'Surprise, sucker!' from behind him?"

"Something to look forward to," Virgil agreed, wearily. He leant his head back against the bulkhead and closed his eyes briefly. The sense of movement in Four was so different to his own 'bird, a constant, almost unnoticeable rise and fall with the current, the occasional list left or right that Gordon kept adjusting for, subtle movements of his eyes and hands the only indicator that he was actually working constantly to keep them upright and facing in the right direction. The motion was gentle, but enough to prod his already queasy stomach into further protest. Closing his eyes helped.

He kept them closed, kept the strident thumping in his head as background noise, nothing more. He focused on his breathing, on holding back the nightmare visions of Scott and John plummeting to their deaths out of his inner eye's view.

He could have sworn that he closed his eyes for a few minutes only. But when he opened them again, he was propped up with a life preserver placed between his shoulder and the bulkhead, supporting his head. Quickly he glanced at his watch, and to his amazement found that five hours had passed.

Gordon was still at the controls, still peering forward. But Virgil noted with sudden concern that his eyes had become glazed, that starey-eyed look that came to pilots who had fought too long to keep their bird in flight when endless skies and artful winds conspired to bring her down. He was still feeling for their balance in the water, still eking out every flicker of power.

"Gordon." Virgil's voice was croaky; he cleared his throat. "Hey, buddy, you should have woken me."

Gordon blinked several times as if recalibrating his awareness before glancing towards him.

"Oh. Hey. You're awake." He returned to staring into the blackness. "I poked you a few times. You told me to get lost. Figured that was as good a concussion test as any."

"Does patient express annoyance with Gordon?" Virgil managed a chuckle. "Yeah, I guess that works." He made an effort to sit upright and dropped the preserver to the floor. "So do you know where we are?"

Gordon did what he always did when excited or nervous; he danced in place. First he touched the controls in front of him, hummingbird –light movements as his eyes twitched from one gauge to another, before he reached up to toggle something above his head – and then began the whole round of touching again.

"I dunno. Not sure. How far did we travel once we decided to do it vertically?"

"I couldn't tell you. Was kinda busy at the time."

"Yeah. Yeah, I know. Kinda busy." Around he went again, touching, tapping, constant movement in a way that Virgil knew was fundamentally unnecessary. And he knew something else, after so many years of growing and playing and working beside his brother; he knew the signs.

Gordon Cooper Tracy was running on the hard edge of nothing left.

"You don't think we'll make it."

A flinch, and there really wasn't any kind of satisfaction in calling such a spectacularly incompetent bluff.

"No, we'll make it. We'll make it." Gordon refused to look at him. "I'm just not sure what we'll be making. There's no land until the Orkneys. We could have tried for a more desolate tract of water but I don't think we'd have nailed it."

"How far?" Virgil put one hand on Gordon's arm, anchoring him. "I need some numbers to work. How far to land, hypothetically?"

"I don't know." Gordon waved a hand at the console. "I could use the satnav, but that would drain the last power we've got, and we need that for surfacing. It's been hard to keep track of our progress – I mean, I should have a handle on it, but…"

"Best guess?"

"I don't know!" Frustration and anger, sure, maybe impatience with Virgil, but underneath it all the tom toms of fear, building. "I should be able to reckon it close, but there's no current and we're barely doing 0.3 knots. I can't be sure of our starting point. Best guess? We're still a hundred klicks or more from the Orkneys, in the middle of nothing."

"Okay." Virgil made his voice as non-committal as he could. "So we just keep doing what we're doing until we get as close as we can. Right?"

Gordon said nothing, his face set.

"I mean," Virgil continued, "We've got supplies. Air, right? We just need to stay calm and ride along. Right?"

"Sure. Yeah, I know." Gordon cut himself off. He bit his lip, eyes ceaselessly scanning the ever-circling murk that was their world now. "Anyway, nothing for you to worry about. I've got this."

Right. A child dismissing a tornado might be less convincing, but not by much.

Virgil's heart began its own backbeat of fear, but seeing his little brother like this kept his voice strong and calm.

"I get it. So – all that stuff in the module, that was just to fuck with me?"

Gordon gave him a glare, made more impressive by the deep shadow that captured half his face.

"What are you raving about?"

"You saved my life, you saved your life, you got us this far but now you're thinking we may as well have sat it out in Two?"

"No, of course not." He paused, worked the instruments again, and Virgil could almost see the effort it took to reclaim that neutral expression. "I'm just going through our options. Just not exactly sure what the best thing to do is here."

"Okay. That happens." Virgil unclipped his seatbelt in preparation for standing up. The thought of that action brought him no joy whatsoever. "Mostly when we're so tired we can't think. Gordon, you're exhausted. Why don't we set Four down for a bit, get some rest, come at it again in a few hours?"

Gordon shook his head, his hands busily working to keep Four's nose up and straight.

"Can't set her down, don't know that we'd have the power to get back up again. We're riding between the currents just now. I'm reckoning on feel, pretty much. She's giving me nothing – I gotta do everything. We've got to find that easterly drift, take us into the North Sea. We head north again – we're not gonna make it. I can't rest."

"Then neither do I. You need to eat and rehydrate. And then I am going to tell you all about the Bauhaus movement of the 20th century and its influence on architecture. After that we'll visit the Freestyle Furies movement of the 2040s, and then the art-deco masters of the 1920s. At which point you'll have found the North Sea and we'll have a chance to find some kind of land, somewhere. Okay?"

Gordon stared at him set-faced for a minute, then he shook his head.

"You're seriously weird, you know that?" He turned back to the monotonous view, but there was something in the corner of his mouth, the crinkle of his eyes, that told Virgil he had found his balance again.

"Says the man with the squid tattoo."

Taking a deep breath, Virgil forced himself to stand. Immediately his back and neck seized, and he gasped a futile protest against the fact that his body had been pretzeled at high pressure all too recently without any kind of care since.

"Virge?"

"I'm good. Supply run. Think happy thoughts while I'm gone."

"Ha." Gordon gave him the merest hint of a smile. "Scott in drag. John at a pop concert. Alan with a flat tire. You in the great flannel drought, 2063."

Damn, he felt like an old man, unable to straighten, thighs trembling, his head splitting in two as he shuffled into the rear. The supplies were in the overhead locker, he knew, but as he reached for them his back spasmed and he bit into his fist to stop from yelling out loud.

Pain, so much pain, and he would have whimpered had he been alone.

This was bullshit. Gordon was running on his second adrenalin crash following the rescue then the attack, and all Virgil had done was bang his head slightly, right? Time to suck on some concrete and toughen the fuck up.

He reached up again, and this time the cry was torn from him.

"Virgil? You okay?"

Words were somewhere floating around in that darkness outside. He managed an "Mm-mm" as he closed his eyes and swore, softly, violently, against the rending of his body from inside.

No good. The lockers were out of reach. Staying in his half crouch he reached into one of the survival packs and rummaged until he found two protein bars and two bottles of water.

Then the agonising trip of five feet back into the cockpit to lower onto the jump-seat and wait for his muscles to stop screaming.

"Mmm, dead donkey, my favourite. Thanks, bro." Gordon took a bar from him and began busily chewing, his eyes back to staring at the blackness beyond their tiny bubble of light, hands keeping to their intricate pattern that meant Four stayed steady. "So – Virgil Grissom Tracy's tour of the art world?"

"Right. Yeah." Breathe through the pain, relax muscles twisted into knots, and summon up words to keep your brother awake in the face of exhaustion and the abyss. "So, Bauhaus…"

Another endless hour went by, Virgil's voice getting hoarse as he trawled through his considerable knowledge of art history, occasionally leavened by incorrect pop references to keep Gordon awake.

"Kosimoto redefined the use of colour and texture with his Freestyle Fury work in Kobe. Of course, that's when it was revealed Kylo Ren was in fact the long-lost grandmother of Jia'Lam."

No response from Gordon, and Virgil looked up, carefully.

"Gords?"

"Shhh."

Virgil's eyebrows raised. He couldn't recall the last time it was Gordon telling him to be quiet. But Gordon's head was tilted slightly, his eyes inward-looking, intent.

Four gave a minor tilt as if matching Gordon's head position, then bumped, slightly, as if she'd come up against a feather pillow. And then she dipped hard, sideways, Gordon wrestling the controls, bringing her back up as she sidled like a nervous horse, the motion getting worse until Virgil had to grab on to the bulkhead to stop from splaying into his brother.

"Easy girl, easy babe. It's okay, I got you." And Gordon was laughing, even as he worked, a sound so hollow with exhaustion that Virgil winced to hear it. "There's the current. We're heading south, into the North Sea." After a long minute of sickening see-sawing, Four settled, and Gordon slumped back, his breath leaving him in a whoosh.

"Okay. That's it. That's it." He reached up to adjust something Virgil couldn't see but knew to be the ballast control. "We just need to keep going south now. Virge, our ride's arrived."

A ride into darkness, 300 feet down in a dying sub, with an exhausted pilot and a crippled passenger. But something about that had Gordon grinning again, and for the moment, that was enough to bring the merest wisp of hope back into Virgil's heart.