Thunderbirds
Family Emergency
1
John Tracy was in the middle of an internet video game when the call came through. He didn’t understand the language- it sounded vaguely Slavonic, he thought- but the sender’s desperation got through clearly enough. Hitting the pause button, John reached over and flipped on the control console’s translator. The resulting plea was more than enough to get his attention.
Violet-blue eyes narrowing slightly, he listened closely as Thunderbird Five’s mighty computer system spat out a rapid translation.
“Please,” came the synthesized voice, “They’re trapped! Fifty men, maybe more! There are others missing also, who do not respond! The mine has collapsed in many places, and there are many trapped and wounded! Help us, please! If anyone is listening, for the love of God, call International Rescue!”
A quick trace gave him the sender’s coordinates, pinpointing the source far below him in Eastern Europe. It sounded authentic... but John hesitated, running a language scan instead of immediately putting out the alert. Once or twice a call for help had turned out to be a hoax; some sky-larking kids, say, or a couple of teenaged girls who just wanted a crack at a Thunderbird pilot. The scan checked out, though, matching the speaker’s vocabulary and dialect to the indicated trouble spot.
John drummed his fingers on the console, mentally weighing the evidence. Such judgement calls were a big part of his job, and they never made him happy. Then, coming to a decision, he hit the comm switch, tensing just a bit as he did so.
Tall, blond and slender, with the chiseled face of a male model and the soul of a poet, John was something of an oddity amid the rough-and-tumble Tracy clan; sensitive and silent. He didn’t call home often, or very comfortably, and when he did make contact, he stuck to business.
As John looked on, the center view screen flashed, switching from a transmitted view of Earth’s night side to Jeff Tracy’s teak-paneled study. He was in luck- Scott was at the desk for a change, looking decidedly bored. John relaxed a little, even giving his brother a faint smile.
“Good evening, Scott.”
“It’s afternoon over here, but who’s arguing? Everything okay up there?”
Scott leaned forward, smiling broadly. Like John, he was blue-eyed, but his short hair was almost black rather than John’s moon-lit blond. Heavy dark brows and a cleft chin gave him the sort of rakish good looks that made women warm and foolish... or would have, if he’d spent any time around them. Scott Tracy was die-cast in his father’s mold; a type-A workaholic largely blind to anything but spreadsheets, piloting and coffee.
Responding to his question, John nodded solemnly. “No problems on my end, Scott, but I think I may have something for you.”
“Fire away.”
Nodding once more, John replayed the message for his brother, who listened intently, rubbing at the side of his chin and frowning.
“Yeah...,” he said at last, “sounds serious, alright. I’ll whistle up Virgil, and we’ll go have a look.” Then, as a sudden afterthought, “Do me a favor and leave a message for Father, will you? He’s at corporate HQ in some kind of international teleconference. He’ll be out of touch till the meeting breaks up, but I want to keep him posted. Don’t suppose you could hack past the comm blackout and get ahold of him now, could you?”
John shook his head. “Not in time to do any good. Brains designed TA’s defenses, remember? Too many damn firewalls, countermeasures and spy-bots. Last time I tried, I brought the whole system crashing down.”
Scott hastily changed the subject, wincing as he recalled their father’s reaction to that little escapade and the months of expensive rebuilding that had followed.
“Right. Do what you can, then. We’re on our way.”
“F.A.B., Scott. Good luck...”
His older brother flashed him another quick smile, and then the screen switched back to distant Earth-view. Worried, suddenly, and unable to quite decide why, John rose and went to the space station’s long window; stood looking down upon the slowly rolling planet below.
“...And be careful.”
____________________________________________________
2
Down on the island, Scott watched his brother’s picture fade back into blank stillness.
“Got to get him back down here, some kind of way, and soon,” he mumbled to himself. “Maybe it’s about time Junior did some time in solitary...,” Then, getting briskly to his feet, Scott strode to the door, pausing just a moment to let it open before him. Sticking his head through, he bellowed,
“VIRGIL! Hey, Virge! Get over here!”
He could have buzzed his younger brother on the wrist comm, but he’d always been a dedicated shouter, much to his family’s aspirin-popping chagrin.
Virgil Tracy loped into the study a few moments later, looking mildly concerned. Judging from the cake crumbs on his plaid shirt front, he’d been in the refrigerator, again.
“Don’t let Grandma catch you at that,” Scott told him reprovingly. But he might just as well have saved himself the trouble, for all the impact he had.
“What’s up?” Virgil asked, unabashed. “We launching?”
Brown-haired and dark-eyed, he was a big, solid, younger replica of his father, handsome in a blunt, middle-American sort of way.
“Yup. Mine collapse in...um...Macedonia, looks like.” Scott replied, after a brief glance at his PDA. John had already sent along the coordinates, weather hazards and topography, enabling the fastest possible response.
Virgil pondered a moment. “Need the mole, then...” he decided, “...and maybe Firefly. Don’t guess there’s any chance of flooded shafts?”
“Uh-uh,” Scott grunted, “or at least, nobody’s mentioned it so far. I’ll put Gordon on stand by, though, just in case. He’s still over in the EU, with the Olympic swim team. Penelope can keep him up to date, and give him a lift, if necessary.”
“Right. Upload me the info, then, and I’ll meet you at the danger zone.” Striding over to a certain wall panel, Virgil stood with his back against the apparently solid teak, continuing, as Scott pressed a series of buttons on their father’s massive desk, “You know, you’d think Brains could design something a little more conventional for a boarding system. Gantries and elevators, for instance... wave of the future.”
The panel tipped up and backward, lifting Virgil smoothly off his feet and sliding him head-first down a hidden chute, still complaining. Scott grinned boyishly.
“Well,” he called after his grousing brother, “you know Brains. Why settle for simplicity when a Rube Goldberg nightmare ’ll do just as well? Besides,” he added, “it isn’t Hackenbacker’s fault you get motion sick.”
There was another trick access panel for him, though this one pivoted rather than flipped, mercifully. Scott was about to set off when he realized that no-one was minding the desk. With Father occupied elsewhere, and Gordon and Alan off the island, only two choices remained. One, really, as Brains was no doubt down in the cliff-side hangar preparing Thunderbird 2.
Pressed for time, and hating it, Scott stalked out of the room, calling “TinTin!” at the top of his considerable lungs. When three or four window-rattling bellows failed to gain a response, he strode over to the mansion’s family room. No TinTin. She wasn’t in the kitchen, either.
By this time, Scott was becoming angry. Lives were hanging in the balance, and he was wandering around the estate searching for TinTin! In the solarium he nearly collided with Kyrano, his father’s manservant.
Slim and slight of build, Kyrano often seemed, with his greying hair and deeply lined face, to be the calmest, most centered man on the island. He bowed now, saying,
“I believe that you will find my daughter on the pool deck, Mr. Scott.”
“Huh? Oh... thanks, Kyrano. I just need her to watch the desk until Brains is through with the pod.” This last Scott called over his shoulder as he sped through a set of etched sliding glass doors and out into blinding sunshine.
Tracy Island, once known as Kanaho, was beautiful. Bursting everywhere with luxuriant blooms and jewel-toned birds; with things that buzzed, hopped, crawled and climbed. It looked to be the very definition of a tropical paradise. One would never have guessed, seeing it in 2065, that just over a hundred years before it had been an atomic test site. Jeff Tracy had acquired the volcanic island from the U.S. government at a rock bottom price, and had since done everything in his power to encourage the return of native life forms, though the indigenous people had long since died out, laid low in the 1800s by European guns and diseases. In its favor, for Jeff Tracy’s purposes, the island was out of the way, claimed by no-one, and all but forgotten.
Scott strode across the mansion’s colorfully tiled lower pool deck, seething with impatience. A dull rumbling noise had started up, just at the lower edge of detectability. The ‘cliff face’ was opening up...! Virgil would be launching in a matter of minutes!
“TinTin!”
She was lying out by the pool on an ornate chaise lounge, earphones on her head and a calculus text in her hands. No wonder she hadn’t heard him! That noise she was listening to was loud enough to be irritating from fifteen feet away. Or maybe just bad enough...!
Scowling, he bounded over and yanked the headphones off. “TinTin!”
“Hey!” Her textbook crashed to the ground and she came up swinging, too long accustomed to roughhousing with Alan and Gordon to go down without a fight. Suddenly catching sight of Scott, she cried out, “Oh!” and pulled her punch, barely grazing his jaw rather than loosening half his teeth. “Hi, Scott! Sorry! Is something the matter?”
TinTin Kyrano had a sweet voice, and a sweeter face. She was beautiful, smart and spirited, with long, dark hair, big almond eyes, and a soft, dusky mouth... full of chewing gum, which she inflated just then into a vast pink bubble and expertly snapped.
Hearing Virgil running up the engines, Scott hurriedly made his request.
“TinTin, I need you at the desk until Brains wraps things up in Hangar 2.” Indicating her disc player, he added, “leave ‘Funky Dan and the Noisy Bunch’, there, off so that you can...”
“Toxic Scream,” the girl informed him loftily, “not ‘Funky Dan’.”
“Whatever. Just keep ‘Toxic Phlegm’ down to a dull roar so...,”
“Toxic Scream,” she repeated slowly, as if speaking to an utter social cripple. “They’re everyone’s favorite group this year. Tune in, sometime, Scott, and join the rest of humanity.”
With an expression that suggested he’d rather be flash-fried in peanut oil, Scott grunted,
“Yeah. I’ll give it some thought. Now, mind the desk, keep the volume down, and listen for John. This should be a quick one, but it never hurts to be careful.”
She smiled. “Got it, Scott. No panic, I’m on the job!”
Nodding once, Scott turned and sprinted for the door as, with a deepening roar, Thunderbird 2 nosed slowly out of its hangar.
“Nice try, Virge,” he muttered, “but you’re not beating me to the danger zone. I’m right beh...” His wrist comm went off before he could complete the thought.
“What is it?!” Scott demanded testily, almost breaking the thing, he hit it so hard.
Brains- alias Mr. Hackenbacker, Mr. X, Dr. Honecker, and several dozen less frequent identities- peered out at him from the comm’s little screen. He was a nervous, thin-faced man in his mid-thirties, with thick spectacles and dusty brown hair like a rabbit-gnawed lawn.
“S-Scott,” he inquired, sounding really perplexed, “why are you, ah... are you s-still out on th-the pool deck? Ah... Virgil’s ready to go.”
Controlling himself with a visible effort, Scott paused, took a deep breath, and said,
“I’m on my way, Brains. TinTin’s got the desk. Help her hold the fort, and tell Gordon he’s got twenty-four hours to get his butt back over here. I don’t care if he has to hitch-hike. I hate being short handed.”
“Ah... alright, S-Scott. I’ll t-tell him. B-but he just, ah,,, just left for Europe the ... the other day.”
“Yeah, well...,” Scott had started moving again. “We all have our crosses to bear. Mine’s dealing with perpetual chaos. Gordon can suck it up and miss a week of training. He’ll live.” And with that, he tapped off the wrist comm and stalked back inside.
Meanwhile, Virgil was ready to launch. The pre-flight checks were complete and the heads-up display indicated reactors at full power. Brains’ latest modification, the dark energy impeller field that allowed Thunderbird 2 to hover in mid-air and settle to the ground as lightly as a dragonfly, was charged up and ready. Triggering the launch sequence, he gave Two’s instrument panel a loving pat.
“Okay, Big Girl,” he told her softly, as systems blinked on and the secondary engines screamed to full life beneath him. “Let’s go save the day.”
The fake palm trees- Penelope preferred the term ‘faux foliage’- bent away on either side of the runway, providing clearance for Thunderbird 2's stubby, forward swept wings. She rolled slowly out of her hangar as Virgil throttled up, for all the world like some massive prehistoric beast climbing from its lair. At the end of the launch ramp she came to a booming halt, seemed to gather herself. Now the ramp began tilting upward. Strapped into the pilot’s seat, Virgil watched the horizon drop out of sight as runway and ocean were replaced by cloud-flecked blue skies. After a moment, the motion ceased. Throttling all the way forward, he pulled sharply back on the yoke. Two mighty engines, equivalent in power to old-style Saturn Five rockets, woke with an earth-shaking roar. Seconds later, Thunderbird 2 lunged into the sky.