Thunderbird Two is a song.

…Is something Virgil never says.

He doesn't say it, because John will roll his eyes, because Scott will say, "Yeah, Virg," in that voice, because it will prompt Gordon to rest his head against the fuselage the next half a dozen times they go out together, and croon Swanee River.

But mainly he doesn't say it, because to Brains the Thunderbirds are instruments, highly specialised, perfectly calibrated, infinitely delicate, amazing machines, fine-tuned for purpose and extremely vulnerable to being put woefully out of alignment by big, stupid Tracy brothers clomping all over them with their big, stupid feet.

Brains doesn't put it like that of course, Brains simply fidgets and peers over his glasses and says in his meekest voice, "G-G-Gordon, why don't you go help Grandma in the kitchen and I'll finish the repairs to T-Thunderbird Four." And that's that.

Only two Tracy brothers are now allowed to perform even supervised maintenance on their crafts. Scott had been banned for kicking an access panel to get it open, Alan for general lack of enthusiasm and Gordon because he had referred to the dive plane actuator as 'the dohickey'. There's not much Brains can do about stop John from tinkering with Five, given the 25,000 kilometres or so of atmosphere, stratosphere and vacuum that separates them – not that Brains hadn't tried the time John's laser cutter slipped during a routine hull patch job – but Brains and Thunderbird Two sleep not two hundred feet from each other. It is perfectly possible that if displeased, he will just lock Virgil out of the hangars.

And Brains mistrusts sentiment when it comes to machines. He twitches every time Scott refers to Thunderbird One as 'her', and is stony eyed, when Alan whines that he doesn't like the new cockpit design for Three, that he likes the old one better. There have been seventeen MAXs to date, and the current one sleeps in the bones of his predecessors. For Brains, as proud as he is of his creations, they are only as good as their next systems' check. Any attempt to romance the machines is suspect.

So Virgil sticks to referring to his 'Bird purely in terms of technical specifications: power outputs, maximum weight loads, thrust vectoring, and gets to keep working on his craft.

But Brains is wrong. Two is more than just inert metal and electrics slotted together like the world's (third) most expensive jigsaw puzzle. Thunderbird Two is a song.

And like all good songs, she's a little bit alive.

It's a song he knows so well now – the roar of her VTOL engines as she blasts off, the creaks and pops of her fuselage at rest, the hum of her avionics – that he knows, before the diagnostics tell him, that the pistons connecting the aft stabilisers are out of alignment.

It's a song that he knows so well that, lying on his back, with a socket wrench in hand, humming Sinatra under his breath, the changes in it are enough to tell him that he's no longer alone.

"I know you're there," he says rolling out from under the console.
He waits but gets no response, and if he didn't know his 'bird so well he might think he was imagining it.

"You can come out, EOS."

Aside from the microcams used to transmit comms, there are only three cameras in the cockpit of Two. They're basic things, used mainly to review his actions in mission debriefings. They don't need to have anything like the functionality of Five's HDEV cameras, used to record the Earth's surface and to film astrobodies thousands of light years away. Besides, they're fixed in place. So instead, EOS manifests as a clock face in his holodisplay, a grey spiral surrounded by a dozen flickering white dots.

This is, he knows, just a polite affectation. EOS isn't connecting through his comms, she's everywhere, entwined like a nervous cat with the ship's electronics.

"Good morning, Virgil Tracy." The lights on the clock face dip and blink.
"EOS, you know you're not really supposed to be here,"

Kayo will not be pleased that the AI has gone roaming unchecked throughout the island and its systems. Brains may have a coronary. The thought of a foreign presence, especially one that has tried to run him into the side of a mountain, bedded down in even one of his precious creations, makes him tetchy. Nominally the latest round of systems upgrades, redoubling firewalls and encryption protocols, are designed to keep The Hood out. Nominally.

"I am sorry. I will leave. Goodbye." The grey spiral fades out, the white dots vanish one after another and the screen goes dead, fooling Virgil not at all.

He sits back on his haunches. "I know you're still there, EOS."

Her display flares back into life. "Oh."

"Is something the matter?"

"No. Nothing is the matter. All my systems are functioning adequately and there have been no reports of category one or two disasters in the last fourteen hours, five minutes and sixteen seconds," she says.

"That's good."

"In fourteen minutes the first perseid meteor shower of the season will be visible from Thunderbird Five."

It had been Alan who had told him that the AI had picked up on some of John's fascination with astronomy, had even shown him a slideshow curated from the collection of photos of star fields and galaxies she had taken with her long range cameras. When Brains had questioned why a learning AI had developed an interest in astronomical photography, Alan had shrugged. "Everyone needs hobbies."

"Really?" he says to EOS. "We won't start to see them here for another thirty-six hours."

He has the date marked on his calendar. When John's in space, Virgil is Alan's next best choice for a stargazing companion, and he's promised him they'll go down to the beach tomorrow night with a thermos of tea and binoculars.

"John wouldn't come to watch it with me," says EOS in a small voice.

Ah.

"He says he is performing an inventory of all health and safety equipment aboard. I have offered to do this for him. It would take me approximately 2.4 seconds. However he says that he wishes to perform it himself."

Suddenly, Virgil is seven years old again, pounding on John's door and begging to be taken skating, since Scott's too cool now to let his stupid little brother drag him to the rink. Except the curtains are drawn in John's room and only the nightlight, projecting pale constellations onto the roof, gives any illumination at all. John lets him in, lets him stay, on condition that there is no talking and that Virgil does nothing to disturb John's carefully honed system of sorting his books.

"John can get like that sometimes."

"Why? It's inefficient. And boring," she adds, a little petulantly.

Explaining to EOS why John sometimes needs that time apart requires an explanation larger and more complex than Virgil is ready to give. "Did something happen in Mississippi?"

He'd heard Scott's return at two AM the night before, had heard the slammed door, but had been too bone weary from fighting bush fires in Victoria all day to get up and check how the rescue had gone. Now he realises that this may have been a mistake.

"John assisted Scott Tracy in rescuing civilians following a flash flood. Their success rate was 97 per cent."

"And the remaining three per cent?"

"John advised Scott Tracy to rescue subject 74-B, an eighty-three year old female, before subject 76-C, an eighteen year old male. This was based on good data. Structural scans of the dwelling 76-C stood on showed that it was sound. The sudden shift in the wind, coupled with the loss of the construction's foundation, could not have been predicted."

Shit.

"I see. I'd leave John to his inventory, EOS."

"But I can perform it more efficiently."

"Sometimes John needs to work through a process. It's a John thing. It's a human thing, really. Think of it as a soft systems reset."

Scott had got up and gone running this morning, but he did that every morning. He'd eaten breakfast. There had been toast crusts and a mug of coffee on the kitchen counter, no warning signs there. He's in Sydney today, attending his yearly medical to renew his pilot's licence. Virgil makes a note to corner him when he gets home. By the sounds of it, there is no point in hailing John for at least another twelve hours either.

"John is rebooting? He needs this time to function optimally in future?"

He nods. "That's a good way of putting it."

"John is unhappy. Is he unhappy with me? I provided him with the datasets to assess the situation. I have cross-checked these datasets. They were correct at the time."

"No EOS, he doesn't blame you. He blames… Blame's a bad word. Reboot's definitely a better word. Allow John time to reboot in his own way."

Unexpectedly his heart goes out to the little thing.

He scratches his head. "Why don't you stay here with me for a while? You can help with repairs."

There's a soft little sigh of relief. "I'd like that, Virgil Tracy."