A ‘Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons’ story

by Shades

As I lay me down to sleep...

Awareness returned, rising like a cresting wave.

… I pray the Lord my soul to keep...

It hung there for an interminable moment, balanced on the cusp between asleep and awake.

… and should I die before I wake...

Finally, it reached the tipping point and the wave came crashing down, leaving him stranded on the shore as the tide of sleep departed.

… I pray the Lord my soul will take.

His body made itself known – limbs aching from lying immobile too long, a gnawing hunger starting to churn in his belly – he'd been wrapped in the retrometabolic coma yet again.

A medicinal smell came to his attention, the unique combination of disinfectants, ozone and cleansers that was a hallmark in hospitals everywhere. For a moment, hope rose in his heart… then he realised that though the smell was right, the background sounds were not.

Hope came crashing back down.

This was not his Sickbay.

Before he even opened his eyes, Scarlet knew what he was going to see. He had suspected this day would eventually come, human nature being what it is, he just hadn't expected that it would take this long to arrive.

0o0o0

Just over a year earlier...

“Friday... wonderful.” Edward Wilkes, a.k.a Doctor Fawn, CMO of Cloudbase, grimaced at his drawn reflection in the bathroom mirror and ran a hand over his face, feeling the day -old stubble scrape his skin. “I could kill for a proper cup of coffee,” he muttered sourly, groping for the can of shaving foam and spreading a generous amount over his cheeks and jaw. This was a new razor and the last thing he wanted to do was turn up with razor burn and bits of bloody toilet paper dotted over his face.

Once his facial grooming had been attended to and a hasty breakfast of two bananas and coffee (a rather disappointing instant coffee, not the French Press coffee he'd developed a preference for) demolished, he fished out a clean uniform, dressed, ran a comb through his damp hair and glanced once more in the mirror to make sure he was presentable. “Right, game face on,” he told himself, shoulders squared.

Features properly schooled into his 'I'm a doctor and everything is fine' expression, Fawn exited his quarters and made for his domain, mentally prepared for the day and reviewing what he would say should any of the captains, lieutenants or the colonel himself be waiting in ambush along the way.

Though he wasn't an officer in exactly the same sense as the captains or the colonel, Doctor Fawn knew that his word carried quite a lot of weight on Cloudbase – more than just with his authority as their CMO. If he said everything was fine then people tended to believe him because he was a doctor, but not only that, he was a good enough doctor to pass The Old Man's strict muster and be named CMO.

He nodded to a passing technician pushing a cart of boxes down the hall, entered an empty lift and punched the button for the next floor. Here he allowed himself to momentarily drop the mask and frown. The only problem was that he knew everything was not fine. He had a freshly autopsied dead man chilling in his shoebox of a morgue and that man's exact double (who had been just as dead two days ago) was now sitting in the isolation ward – the only ward with a properly securable door that he couldn’t pick his way out of – and meekly submitting to every test that Doctor Fawn and a team of doctors and scientists hand-picked by the World Government approached him with.

But the heart of the entire matter was that no one, not even the ex-dead man himself, could properly explain with any authority at all what in the blue blazes had just happened and why he wasn't keeping his double company in the morgue.

With a cheery ding, the lift announced its arrival and Fawn quickly made sure his mask was back in place. Another two hallways negotiated and he was back in his domain – Sickbay.

Nurse Tarris was waiting for him with the reports from last night. “Good morning, Doctor.” She graced him with a cheery smile and proffered the folder. “We had three admissions last night. A stack of crates wasn't secured properly in one of the cargo planes and fell down on top of three of the deckhands while they were unloading. One has a fractured arm, another a mild concussion and the last a wrenched shoulder. There were minor lacerations and contusions for all three. Doctor Burgundy treated them all and released the fracture and the shoulder with instructions to return today for further treatment, the concussion is in monitoring.”

“Any results back from Doctor Tanner's blood work on Scarlet?” Fawn asked absently, recalling one of the guest doctors’ projects, while he flipped through the scans and patient report forms from last night. It was easier to refer to the double by the codename than the original's name. It allowed some emotional distance, though that was hard to maintain when in the room with the man. He just seemed so human, so normal...

“Yes, Doctor, nothing unusual in the blood chemistry, gasses or cell counts and we're still waiting on the cultures and DNA. Doctor Cinnabar has been in to talk to him but he hasn't been able to make much headway yet.” Tarris paused to frown and lowered her voice a fraction. “But, uh, one of the other guest doctors – Doctor Mills – has been giving strange orders about Scarlet. He's got all the right paperwork and your signature, but he's been in with Scarlet all night...”

“What sort of orders has he been giving?” Fawn interrupted, putting the file down on the nearest flat surface and giving the charge nurse his full attention. He had heard of Mills' reputation of performing borderline unethical experiments before the head honchos groundside had brought him on board, but the less savoury aspects of the rumours had seemed more like the work of jealous rivals than fact. Reputation or not, he was the only available human biochemistry and biology scientist with both the experience and necessary clearance for trying to get to the bottom of something like this, so they hadn't really had much choice but to bring him in on the case. Now it looked like they were about to regret it.

“He's been performing experiments on the rapidity of Scarlet's healing factor, but he hasn't been allowing Scarlet to eat or drink anything.” Tarris reported, her eyes flicking to the two-bed isolation ward and the untouched breakfast tray outside it. “He told me to leave the food outside for later, on your orders.”

“What? I didn't authorize anything like that! Tarris, get security, now!” Fawn didn't give her a chance to reply as he hurried to the ward and its specially assigned guard, beckoning for him to follow. “Franklin, come with me.”

For once the bright yellow warning signs in the scrub/decontamination room were ignored. Fawn simply crossed the painted line that marked the border between sterile and non-sterile territory and cycled the airlock, Franklin a moment behind.

Fawn stepped out of the airlock just as Scarlet almost too casually reached out to the balding Doctor Mills, seized him by the front of his sterile blue over-gown and hauled the protesting man down to his position seated and fettered to the bed. “Doctor Mills,” Scarlet growled, carefully enunciating the words in a deadly quiet voice, “I am extremely hungry. Give me food now.”

In that moment, Edward Wilkie instantly saw the highly trained, highly competent and extremely dangerous warrior that Scarlet carefully concealed behind the normal visage of the personable and friendly officer.

Franklin saw it too and immediately brought up his service pistol, recognising the threat that the man represented far better than Fawn did. Unlike the doctor, he'd trained with the captain, the original one at least, and he had a pretty good idea what he was capable of. But this clone or copy was still an unknown factor and all the more dangerous for it. “Scarlet, let him go!” Franklin ordered sharply.

Scarlet glanced over at them, blue eyes dulled and red-rimmed with exhaustion, his skin sallow and almost jaundiced-looking. At the sight of the gun, he reluctantly released Doctor Mills, but where the sleeve of Scarlet's hospital pyjamas had slipped down, Fawn spotted a series of angry red lines that hadn't been on his arm yesterday. He would bet a week's pay there were more.

“Franklin, leave Scarlet alone and get Mills out of here!” Fawn countered, striding forward and snatching the clipboard from Doctor Mills' pudgy hand. He had to resist the urge to bludgeon the doctor into unconsciousness with it after flipping through several pages and skimming the contents. “He's performing medical experiments without authority or ethical clearance!” Fawn's scowl deepened. “I want him off Cloudbase and in front of the nearest medical tribunal for a good long chat about the ethics of forging signatures, falsifying papers and causing unnecessary pain and suffering to a patient!”

“You can't do this!” Mills' mouth worked for a moment in shock and indignation, his eyes wide and the colour rising in his pasty skin. “These are important experiments that I have to go through! You have to allow me to continue!” the doctor blustered. “I need to establish baselines for further experimentation and this is only the beginning of the groundwork I need to do. You can't interrupt me! You can't even understand what I'm on the verge of discovering!” His thin lips curled in a sneer. “What am I saying, you couldn't possibly comprehend precisely what you have sitting here. You’re just a surgeon.” The last words were pronounced with clear disdain.

Fawn saw red. “Franklin! GET HIM OUT!”

“With pleasure, Doctor.” Franklin holstered his sidearm and moved in. With a little help from the arriving security guards and Captain Magenta, Doctor Mills was frogmarched from the isolation ward to what would probably be an extremely unpleasant audience with Colonel White.

In the meantime, Fawn hit the intercom and issued several instructions to the waiting Nurse Tarris, the first of which was bringing in food for Scarlet. Copy or not, until proven otherwise he was still a man, still a patient with rights and still under Doctor Fawn's care.

Once the nurses and guards were finally gone and Scarlet had wolfed down three plates of food and a jug of water, Fawn turned back to his suddenly quiet patient.

Scarlet was studiously looking down and away, picking at some crumbs on the sheets, the brief flare of fight and fire swallowed by the numb melancholy that had marked him for the past two days, when he had woken up to the realization that he was not the same man who had gotten up that crisp Wednesday morning.

Fawn pulled up a stool and sat down beside the bed, Mills’ clipboard still in hand. “Scarlet?” he asked in the gentle but firm ‘tell me ’ tone cultivated by doctors everywhere.

The captain wordlessly pulled up both sleeves to show several precisely cut wounds in various stages of healing curving across the tops and undersides of both forearms, timestamps written beside each in black ink. Most were fairly vivid. Two were almost completely faded. One was a barely visible white line. Three were still quite wide and crusted with clotted blood. A bin of blood-soaked gauze stood beside the bed and a neat row of used medical instruments rested in a tray on the adjacent table.

Fawn frowned and re-scanned the first page of observations written in an angular, precise hand before looking up at his patient, his brow still furrowed with concern. “Scarlet, why did you let him do this to you?”

When the blue eyes finally met his, they were haunted, dimmed by shadows that Fawn could only guess at. “I don't know who or what I am, Doctor. A monster, a freak or something... worse. This might have helped decide which.” Scarlet looked away again, his fingers worrying at the hem of the blanket. “That, Doctor, is why.”

0o0o0

Present day...

Scarlet gingerly cracked opened one eyelid a slit. When the light didn't send lances of pain shooting into his brain, he opened the other and got his first look around. He'd been stripped to the waist and now wore only the casual jeans he'd put on that morning. The heavy leather restraints securing him by the ankles and waist to the bed and his wrists to a bar above his head were no real surprise. The bed itself was graced with only a thin mattress and inclined at an angle somewhat steeper than 45 degrees, allowing him to get a good look at the room.

Guards, masked and dressed head to toe in black fatigues and body armour, dotted the large room and flanked a stout door set in the far end of the room. All had what looked like the latest generation of Uzi sub machine guns clenched in their fists, perfect for close combat and hosing a room with indiscriminate volleys of hot lead.

Medical equipment was everywhere and the ceiling was of double height, the walls changing from featureless, pristine white paint to the dark-tinted windows of an observation gallery that wrapped around the room. He took careful note of everything. You never knew what would be useful later.

The metal-clad door at the end of the room opened on silent hinges and a pudgy, almost completely bald man in a white coat waddled in. When he saw Scarlet, his pasty face lit up in a wide smile. “Captain Scarlet!” Doctor Mills exclaimed with genuine enthusiasm. “So good to see you again!”

0o0o0

There were occasions when Captain Ochre really hated his job and this, he reflected as he scanned the upturned room in the Capstaff Hotel, was one of those times. He loathed kidnapping cases with a passion, always feeling so powerless with all the control in the hands of the kidnappers. “But,” he grimly consoled himself, “at least now I've got the resources and authority at my back to really do something about it.”

The call had come in during the night on Cloudbase. They'd been keeping station over Kashmir in response to a run-of-the-mill terrorist threat to blow up several India-owned and America-backed factories in the still disputed area. It had been settled surprisingly easily, mostly due to one of the terrorists being stupid enough to use a satellite phone with domestic encryption while within range of Lieutenant Green.

All in all, the mission had been something of a relief for Spectrum. It was normal, familiar and entirely of terrestrial origin. It was funny really, how the horrors of what humans could do to each other paled in comparison to what the Mysterons amused themselves with.

But in any case, it had been just after midnight local time when a priority alert had come through from Spectrum London. Shots had been reported at the Capstaff Hotel, approximately 1940 hours London time, where Scarlet was staying for his first night on leave. As per Spectrum policy a ground agent had been dispatched to make sure the captain was still there and not in the hands of the police, the morgue or the local hospital.

Within the hour, the agent had radioed through with her report. The police had already arrived, corralled the guests, done a headcount and repeated the headcount twice when the numbers didn't match. Scarlet was missing and his room looked like the set from a Spaghetti Western shootout.

Green had tried Scarlet’s Radio Cap and back up communicator as soon as the initial report came in – no reply. Not even the ‘handshake’ that the carrier signal had been received. Even more worryingly when Green remote activated the homing function on Scarlet's communication gear, there was total silence. It had to have been disabled.

Now Ochre was standing in yet another crime scene, passing his practiced eye over the carnage illuminated by the early morning sun. Blood was sprayed on one wall and on the floor – classic gunshot spatter from medium range and injury bleed on the floor – but there was cast-off on the floor that wasn't from the gunshot and was probably from some sort of other wound, most likely a cut. The blood stains had all been roughly sprayed with concentrated bleach – the smell of chlorine was already starting to get overpowering, his eyes watered whenever he went near it, and the surrounding robin's egg blue carpet was slowly bleaching to pale cream. There was only a slim chance of DNA from that but a sample was taken anyway and a Spectrum Intelligence technician was finishing up photographing it before cutting the patches out, just in case some blood had soaked through to the underlay.

The cream-coloured walls had ugly gouges in them from the hurried removal of the bullets that had missed, as well as the one that had connected, and from a first, admittedly rather pessimistic, glance, Ochre already figured that the only fingerprints they were going to find would be those of hotel staff, prior guests and Scarlet himself. Still, it was better to be thorough and check just in case they caught a break and someone left behind something useful.

“What do you think?” Captain Grey came to his shoulder and asked the question quietly, mindful of the Spectrum Intelligence members still crawling over the room taking photographs, samples and working away with fingerprint powder and brushes. He fiddled with an evidence bag in his hand as he waited – it was Scarlet's gun cleaning kit, recovered from the wreckage of what had been a faux oak-burl coffee table. The gun itself was still unaccounted for.

There was a long pause as Ochre measured his words carefully. “These people knew what they were doing, knew who and what they were after. They came fully prepared, expecting to get hurt.” Ochre finally replied, just as quietly. “They brought their own bleach. I already checked with the cleaning staff and theirs isn't nearly as strong; they didn't even have a cleaning cart in the area.

“They had to have worn armour, gloves too; they pulled all the bullets out of the walls, policed the brass and made sure they got everything of theirs before they got out of here with Scarlet. Quick, efficient, well – trained, well – practiced.”

“A professional hit team, you think?” Grey queried.

Ochre waited until a technician had passed them before he spoke. “Yeah. Maybe Mysteronised, lately they've been putting things into action before issuing their little warnings. I've already got Magenta running a report on police and military bulletins for any recent 'accidents'. He should have the initial results back soon.”

Ochre decided to keep the last of his suspicions to himself until they were out of SI earshot. In his opinion, this operation was a little too slick for a private unit and was looking more and more like a government-backed team. They'd be the only ones with the resources to get in, fight and incapacitate Scarlet and get him out this cleanly in a daring evening raid. Not to mention the knowledge of his itinerary and check-in alias. “They messed up when they let Scarlet shoot first,” he continued.

Grey gave him an odd look. “How do you know Scarlet shot first?” he queried, sceptical.

Ochre pointed to the wall beside the door and the neat row of holes in it around chest level, each pair separated by a gap about half an inch wide, barring a fifth hole that stood on its own. “He was sitting at the coffee table before or just after cleaning his gun, back to the door. At least one came in through there. Somehow, they didn't quite get the drop on Scarlet and he swept around to fire. If they'd shot first and caught him by surprise, there'd only be one blood patch and not all this carnage.”

The former policeman and sniper frowned, brows drawing close as he reconstructed the scene. “Lucky for him, he already had his gun out and in one piece. Anyway, Scarlet tends to double tap – shoot two round bursts – when he sweeps and snaps shots at an attacker. One would have been stopped by armour, since there's no blood spatter from a hit.” He swung around and pointed to several holes in the opposite wall and the back of the block-patterned couch. “They shot back and missed. He moved. More came in through the windows; at some point, someone threw a plain smoke grenade that set off the fire alarms; if it was CS gas, we'd already know it from the irritation.” His brow furrowed further and he used a booted toe to nudge one of the splinters of glass and the faint frosting left on it by the chemical 'smoke'. “Then things went hand – to – hand in the smoke.” Ochre pointed to the bleached patches on the pale blue carpet – sharp edged stains browning and fading underneath the chemicals. “Someone had a knife or some sort of sharp object, got someone else, and someone finally shot Scarlet, mid-range and mid-calibre, judging by spatter on the wall and the big blood pool. There would be a lot more blood if he'd managed to kill one or two of them first.”

The former World Police commander scratched his chin in a thinking gesture that had never quite gone away from the days when he wore a beard as he considered the probable end to the scenario. “They then managed to clean up and get their injured and a body out of an inner-city hotel during the early evening without anyone noticing. By now, everyone's trying to evacuate, so although the chaos would have covered them, someone's bound to have seen something. The hard part is finding where they are and what they've seen. Local police are already taking statements from hotel guests and staff, but it's going to take a while to get through them all. I doubt any neighbourhood CCTV cameras were pointed the right way, but Green is uploading everything he can find. The building security footage from the evening was fried, but Magenta’s in the server room trying to see what he can salvage while he’s waiting for his report. And we’re waiting on someone in London HQ to bring us any flight traffic data from the area.”

“Captains!”

The triumphant shout made them both turn to look. A white – suited technician stood up from his position beside an upturned cabinet with a long dark object held carefully between two fingers – a carbon ceramic knife of the kind that Scarlet favoured, and the thin grey strip of the sharp edge was dark with dry blood.

Grey felt a smile grow on his face. “I think that's our first lead, right?”

Ochre's replying grin was decidedly more predatory. “Right. Bag it, tag it and let's hunt these bastards down.”

0o0o0

Elsewhere, other eyes were watching world events with keen interest, picking up data with the ease of a child plucking fruit from a tree.

Gathering information was what they had done for a very long time now and they were extremely good at it. All that had changed was the application of what they knew.

Here, they listened to the supposedly secret communications between Bereznik generals; there, they eavesdropped on latest reports on a new technology being developed by a major software firm, while from over there, came the mutterings down a telephone line between a Mafia Don and his cohort. All available sources were sampled and sorted for their usefulness, no matter what the origin.

The exclusion from some things, such as Spectrum's encrypted communications and some upper echelon World Government communiqués rankled, but that was but a temporary problem that would be solved with time, and they had all the time they needed.

A news report caught their attention: an attack on a hotel in London, possibly by a terrorist group.

Curiosity suitably roused, an adjunct was set to researching this attack and the potential usefulness of the attackers – well-trained replicants were preferable when they were available. It wasn't long before the data was compiled and an anomaly was discovered. One guest of the hotel was missing, Mr Anderson Phillips according to the hotel register. Combing security camera footage from check-in showed a strangely fogged individual but enough height, mass and body language indicators existed for the adjunct to identify him as one Paul J. Metcalfe, formerly Colonel Metcalfe of WAAF, currently Captain Scarlet of Spectrum.

The full weight of the Mysteron Collective was brought to bear once this was reported to them.

This kidnapping perpetrated by agents unknown to them removed one of the players from their intricate War of Nerves. It was an interference in their machinations, a move made without their blessing.

Interference was not tolerated.

0o0o0

Scarlet was watching Doctor Mills with the sort of attention one would give a poisonous snake discovered in one's bed. “What do you want, Doctor?” he growled, resisting the urge to tug at the restraints in the hopes that one was loose.

“Knowledge of course, Captain.” Doctor Mills beamed back at him, quite cheerful. “What else would I want? But my sponsors have a far more defined purpose for you, much better than Spectrum's simple question of 'what are you'.” Mills all but rubbed his hands together with glee and waved one pudgy hand at the wraparound observation gallery. “My sponsors have been quite generous in their preparations. I've even taken the time to expand my field of knowledge and expertise for this, and they’ve provided the best equipment and staff too.”

Scarlet glanced up at the darkened glass, making sure he never let Doctor Mills completely out of his field of vision. “Well?” he asked loudly and somewhat testily. “Is anyone planning on enlightening me?”

“Yes actually, we were,” a man's voice replied over an intercom, his tone sardonic and dry.

Scarlet noted the bland accent, and what it lacked, with interest. He sounded North American; there was a certain shape to the sound of the vowels that was hard to misplace, but that was about it. There was no twang or drawl of regional accent to place him. “Who are you?” Scarlet demanded. “Why have you kidnapped me?”

“We are a coalition of several agencies. You are here because we have grown sick and tired of losing good agents to Bereznik assassins, Titanica fish-people and Mysteron replicants,” American, as Scarlet silently decided to dub him, replied. “With a little cooperation from you, we want to end the meaningless deaths and start preserving the lives of our people so we can protect our world, much the same as you do.”

Paul went cold, grasping the man's implied intent immediately. They wanted to somehow copy his regenerative powers and implant them into normal humans. Despite the man's benevolent words, he knew that the surviving victims would not be used for benevolent intentions.

Not so long ago, he and the other captains had managed to get quite mellow on some alcoholic beverage that was probably illegal everywhere but Russia and Texas and discussed this very possibility at length. None of their conclusions about a theoretical legion of unkillable human agents in the hands of any government were good ones.

“We will, of course, release you once the process has been proven successful and give you a generous compensation for your time and resources – a new name and identity and enough money to live comfortably for the rest of your life.” It was a woman with a thick European accent this time, possibly from the Baltic region. “All that we are wanting to know is what you know about the Mysterons and the process of their retrometabolisation.”

“No. All you get from me is code name, rank and serial number.” Scarlet's eyes narrowed at the blatant lies. They would never let him go; he was a scientist's playground and once he cracked, they would wring every drop of information that they could get. He was a former WAAF Colonel and a Spectrum Colour Captain. Either one of those positions held a wealth of information that agencies would literally kill for.

“That is unfortunate, but perhaps you will change your mind,” Baltic replied without a trace of remorse. “Doctor, you have our permission to begin.”

The intercom clicked off and this time Doctor Mills did rub his hands with glee. “Very good, very good indeed.” He fussed with some papers on a clipboard and scribbled some notes with an expensive-looking fountain pen. “Well, let's get started, shall we?” Mills flipped through his chart. “Our sponsors wish to establish certain baselines upon which to grade the successful graftees…” He paused to peer at Scarlet over the top of his clipboard with watery blue eyes. “Do you like that term, ‘ graftees’? It seemed appropriate, and much easier to say than ‘retrometabolism recipients’. But anyway, we need to establish baselines to grade the restorative abilities of the graftees against. Thanks to your Doctor Fawn's extensive notes over the last year, we have a fairly good idea of what your baselines and recovery times are. He really is quite competent, despite being only a surgeon.” Doctor Mills sniffed derisively at the word ’surgeon’. “It's saved us a great deal of time.”

Scarlet gritted his teeth and remained silent, mentally wishing the man would just get to the point.

“There are however a few gaps that we need to fill in before experimentation can begin in earnest.” Mills half-turned and gestured to one of the black clad guards. “Simon,” he called, “come over here please.”

The guard in question detached himself from the wall, casually lifting a nightstick from a loop at his belt. Scarlet tried to resist the urge to brace himself and made sure his tongue was not in the way of his teeth, guessing at what was about to come.

“Ribs only please to begin with, Simon. And do try to not puncture his lungs. I don't want the data to be compromised,” Mills instructed, pressing a button to tip the bed back into a horizontal position.

His face twisted into an ugly smile behind his mask, Simon lifted the nightstick and brought it down with all of his might.

0o0o0

Hands clasped behind his back, Captain Blue paced yet another circuit around the Amber Room. He'd been held back from the initial ground side investigation by Colonel White on the excuse that the colonel wanted one senior officer still on board in case the Mysterons issued a threat. This was exactly the sort of situation that they would want to capitalize on, if they hadn't already orchestrated the entire thing of course.

Captain Blue agreed with Colonel White completely. This probably was the initial moves of one of the Mysterons’ plans; a fiendishly complex one designed to divide Spectrum's top unit and pick them off, one by one.

Adam Svenson rankled at his exclusion. Paul was his partner, his best friend. After all the times Scarlet had taken a proverbial or literal bullet on his behalf, the least he could do was help find him again! Frowning, Adam executed a perfect parade ground about face and made another circuit of the lounge.

Harmony and Melody watched the captain from their injection seats with concern. It seemed safer to stay seated in the alcove rather than be in the captain's path as he restlessly paced back and forth around the lounge, like a tiger or lion in a too small cage.

“I have never seen him like this,” Harmony murmured softly, her eyes tracking the blonde Bostonian.

“I have,” Melody whispered back. “Just after we got Paul back from the Mysterons last year. I thought he’d wear a hole in the floor with all his pacing.”

“I never thought that Captain Blue would be prone to pacing,” Harmony commented, still tracking the captain's progress around the room. She had counted 97 circuits so far, but then the captain had already been here and pacing when she arrived to replace Destiny. “I do not understand why he would pace here.”

“Nervous energy and frustration, I think. He wants to do something but he can't do anything, so he redirects it.” Melody pursed her lips in thought. “Why here? Well, here he's not alone with his thoughts, that’s bad for him, and he's safe here. There's no lieutenants or technicians as an audience – you know how he hates that. It’s just us, his friends.”

“Ah. I understand now,” The petite Asian pilot murmured sympathetically.

Both women jumped when Captain Blue suddenly stopped and slapped one hand against a wall in a gesture of pure frustration. “Dammit!” he snarled. That was when he seemed to remember their presence. “I'm sorry,” he apologised, rubbing his hand with a barely concealed wince.

The Amber Room door slid open before either woman could reply and Rhapsody stepped in, her flight suit pristine, helmet tucked under her arm and the dark circles under her eyes skilfully concealed by makeup. “I’m here for shift change, Harmony,” she announced, making her way towards the injection seats.

“Are you sure you’re up for this?” Melody asked gently. “I can pull a double if your head isn’t in the game.”

“I’m fine,” Rhapsody snapped, waving Harmony out of the chair so she could trade deck watch with Destiny.

Harmony wisely vacated the chair and let her comrade strap herself in. As soon as the Angel was gone, she traded worried glances with Melody and then looked to Captain Blue. “Captain…?”

“I’ll speak to her,” Blue promised. “I don’t think the Old Man knows about them yet but I’ll see what I can do.”

0o0o0

Ochre skimmed through the last of the witness reports in the hotel ball room they'd appropriated and grimaced in frustration. All the reports were the same and all a complete dead end. Fire alarm, shots, smoke, yelling, didn't see anything.

He slapped the last of them down onto the table and squared them into a neat stack before sweeping them into a buff-coloured document wallet and sealing it shut. “Here, take this. I'm going for a walk, need to stretch my legs.” Ochre handed it off to one of the non-colour lieutenants and made for the nearest exit, picking a random direction and moving off with a long-legged, ground-eating stride, thoughts churning through his mind as he burned off the worst of his frustration with physical activity.

He made his way around most of the block and paused at the crest of a hill, tipping his cap up to wipe the sweat off his brow with his sleeve. Not much about this case made any sense. The what and when were already answered. The why and how still nagged at him. The techs were just starting the process of teasing DNA from the knife, so the 'who' might get a name and a face if they were on a database somewhere.

“Mista?”

“Huh?” Shaken out of his thoughts, Captain Ochre looked down at the tug on his trousers into the upturned face of a little boy, his cherubic face framed by a messy tangle of blonde curls. “Hello there.” Ochre smiled and crouched. “Are you lost?” he asked in his most child-friendly tone.

“Nuh uh.” There was a resolute shake of the blonde head at that. “My name is Michael, I live there!” Michael proudly turned and pointed to a block of brick terrace houses just down the street, then looked back up at the captain. “I saw you from the window. Are you looking for the aliens?”

“Out of the mouths of babes,” Ochre wryly mused to himself. “I might be, he admitted. “But it depends on if they're good aliens or bad aliens” He confided with a small grin, humouring the child. It couldn't hurt, and he had a soft spot for kids.

“Bad aliens.” Michael somehow managed to both frown and pout as he corrected the adult who wasn't taking him seriously at all. “I saw them!” he insisted. “They're black and break windows. That's bad.”

“Yep, that's bad alright.” Ochre nodded tolerantly. “What windows did they break, the ones in your house?” he asked, still smiling.

“No! The ones in that house!” Michael turned and unerringly pointed to the Capstaff Hotel, the upper three levels of Neo-Georgian red brick and white framed windows rearing up above a row of short apartment blocks. “They broked the windows and flew away!”

Ochre blinked in surprise. Was this the witness he needed? “Are you sure it was that house?” he asked intently.

Michael nodded. “Yeah, and I saw their spaceship too! It was big and black too, and it didn't make any noise! But it flew like this!” He held his arms out like wings and jumped in place. “It went up and up and up!”

“Michael, if I showed you some pictures, could you tell me which one was the aliens’ ship?” Ochre asked, rising.

“Uh huh!” Michael nodded.

Ochre offered his hand to Michael and he took it without a moment's hesitation. “Take me to your house and I'll show you the pictures. Okay?”

“Okay!”

0o0o0

Ashley Carmichael was more than a little flustered. First there had been all that commotion down the road – police cars, fire engines and helijets roaring around in the earlier hours of the evening and most of last night. It'd been almost impossible to get any sleep. Then today Michael disappeared, the third time this week! Perhaps it was time to seriously consider getting one of those child trackers her sister Janie talked about. She had already turned all his usual hiding spots inside out and was about to start on the rest of the house when her son appeared at the front door dragging a handsome Spectrum officer behind him.

Now the captain was sitting with Michael in the small office space tucked under the stairs, looking at pictures of helijets on the family desktop computer with Michael wriggling with excitement in the chair beside him. She smoothed down her hair and crossed her arms anxiously, watching from the doorway as Michael stared at the different versions of military aircraft.

“So, it looked like these ones?” Asked the captain, Ochre, Ashley remembered him introducing himself as. Such an odd name, but she'd heard that was what Spectrum agent code names were like.

Michael was nodding eagerly, blond curls bouncing. “Yeah, like that one, but it had big things on the back.” He stood up on his chair and stabbed his finger at the tail end, leaving smudges on the screen.

Ochre clicked through some more images. “Did they look like this?” he asked, pointing to what looked like some sort of black military helijet with two big turbine pods on the tail.

“Yeah, but bigger!” Was Michael's enthusiastic response, complete with hand gestures.

“Do you remember anything else about it? Did it have any writing or letters on it?” The captain pressed.

Michael nodded, but looked crestfallen. “It was on the back, but I don't read good,” he admitted, lower lip starting to tremble a little.

The captain smiled. “Hey, it's okay, Michael,” he reassured him. “You've been a really big help to me.”

“Really?” Michael perked up and looked at him shyly. “Are you gonna catch the aliens?”

“Thanks to you, I sure am.” Ochre grinned back and cleared the computer screen, quickly erasing all traces of his search. He then stood and made his way back to Ashley. “Thank you again for your help,” he said, offering her a business card. “If Michael remembers anything else, please don't hesitate to call this number.”

Ashley took the card, noting that it bore only the Spectrum logo, the legend ‘Captain Ochre’ and a nine-digit phone number with a very odd area code. “Uh, all right, I will,” she found herself stammering as she pocketed it.

“Thank you.” He smiled, headed out the door and down the street at almost a jog.

0o0o0

Awareness came back in a rush and Scarlet awoke to burning pain shooting down his chest and arms and dusty, cracked ceiling tiles in institutional cream sliding past his eyes, occasionally interspersed with ancient fluorescent lighting. “No...” he muzzily self-corrected. “I'm sliding past it... being dragged… oh, I hate suffocating, takes so long to wake up properly...”

His captors paused and one of them jostled him as they did something. A still-healing bone grated with the movement and a groan escaped him before he had a chance to smother it.

“He's waking up!” one guard exclaimed in heavily-accented English. “The doctor said he shouldn't yet.”

“Then get the cell open, ya dropkick,” Guard Two snarled back in a thick Australian twang. “You heard the briefing, this guy's some kinda super soldier experiment! I ain't risking anything, even with the chains.”

Guard One muttered something that sounded like an invocation against evil and keys rattled in a lock. Scarlet let himself hang limp as the two men grabbed him under his arms and knees and bodily hauled him into the dark cell. Nor did he resist when they dumped him on a foam pad and quickly made their exit. The more harmless they thought he was post-revival, the better. He let his head loll towards the bars and watched through half-open eyes as one black-armoured and balaclava-wearing guard roughly folded up the body bag they'd used to drag him in on and stuffed it under a folding plastic chair. The hallways seemed too narrow to accommodate a stretcher, at least in this area.

Scarlet quietly tucked that bit of information away. He'd need every scrap of data he could collect to get out of this place. The handcuffs and waist to ankle chains currently securing him didn't worry him. A minute and the bit of wire he kept in the waistband of his jeans would deal with them.

One guard proceeded to post himself diagonal to the cell door – as far away from Scarlet as he could get in the narrow hall, while maintaining a clear line of sight – and the way he held his Uzi, kept his knees slightly bent and didn’t let his gaze lock anywhere for too long told Scarlet that this guy was more competent than the standard goon. The other was out of sight.

His own field of view was woefully restricted for the moment, but it was enough to see the camera dome just past the guard, between him and the door. A support protruding from the opposite wall did provide a potential camera shadow but not much and not very useful from inside the cell.

There was however one piece of information that had him hiding a weak grin. The hallway was well lit, the cell was dark. As soon as he got that back to the Old Man, whoever had leaked Fawn’s data would be gracing the inside of a cell within minutes.

It had been Black’s idea initially, after Conrad read an old spy book. Security leaks bedevilled all agencies. As Spectrum was the newest kid on the block, it was a big unknown to the other agencies of the world so they could get away with things other agencies couldn’t – such as canary trapping quite literally everything possible.

Hidden in all briefing documents allowed out of Spectrum to outside agencies about anything sensitive about Spectrum – such as vehicle features and building facilities – were certain bits of not quite misinformation that if acted upon would immediately reveal who was the proverbial canary that had ‘sung’ and let the information out of their care. ‘Clean’ copies of information without that particular trap were instead tagged with certain information in certain turns of phrase that were so distinctly worded they were very difficult to relay in one’s own particular idiom and had to be reported verbatim, each individual document had its own unique trap. Other pieces of information came with verbal disclaimers for certain statements and were only delivered hand to hand – so if the physical copy strayed, the enemy's actions would show it.

Someone, somewhere along the chain, had gotten a document where Fawn had outlined one of his slightly wilder but still plausible theories from shortly after the event – that without food, Scarlet might be able to absorb solar energy or even light radiation from an incandescent, LED or fluorescent bulb to speed his recovery.

This had been quickly debunked and now came with a verbal disclaimer, but Scarlet still liked to sunbathe on the Promenade far more often than last year – partly because Fawn had told him he needed to for his Vitamin D levels, mostly because it helped desensitise new skin. If he didn’t get a chance to sun himself for a couple of hours after a major injury, he’d spend a good day ‘as jumpy as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs’, as Symphony put it, from the feeling of his clothes rubbing the new skin until everything properly calibrated itself. The hydrotherapy bath in the physio facility on full blast did the same job in a fraction of the time but it felt like being groomed by giant cats until he adjusted.

Scarlet winced and adjusted his position on the foam squab to the least painful one possible. Hunger was starting to gnaw at him; he needed more resources to finish healing, hence the early awakening before he was fully restored. But for now, he’d just have to wait.

Spectrum, however, would not be idle.

0o0o0

“Colonel White, we have a DNA match from the knife at the hotel,” Lieutenant Green called across the command centre, already punching the data up to the main screen in anticipation of his commanding officer’s gruff “Put it on the viewer.”

“Well now, whom do we have here?” White mused to himself, brows drawn low and rubbing his chin as he scrutinised the data. The photo showed a hard-bitten looking European man, perhaps in his early forties, his already salt-and-pepper grey hair cut in a short, conservative fashion. “Thomas Herdekker , 45, Dutch national, served in the European Army, SHEF and a stint in the French Foreign Legion before an honourable discharge. Ran a security consultancy business in London, Gatekeepers Inc, but it went into liquidation last year. No current address, no known living family,” he read out. “A perfect specimen to be recruited for someone else’s dirty work. Skilled, but no doubt also desperate and easily replaceable.”

“And someone who would also know of other skilled and desperate people?” Green ventured from his seat at the computer.

“Exactly.” White nodded. “We may have had a lucky stroke here, Lieutenant. I want a list of all Herdekker’s known associates and employees and their addresses, his last known address, and send that file to all Spectrum bases. Tell them he’s a suspected terrorist.”

“S.I.G.” Green pivoted to enter the relevant commands into the computer. “Incoming reports from Captains Ochre and Magenta as well – Magenta confirms no reported accidents or unexplained bodies to indicate Mysteron involvement but he’ll keep looking. And the hotel security system tapes from the night were physically damaged, nothing from there. Ochre has a possible I.D. for the vehicle they used – a military grade helijet – the Sikorsky Sky-Ranger 286 or 284 with silenced turbine pods, and he suspects it had night-blending anti-radar paint, as Spectrum London reports zero air traffic in the area around the time of the attack, either filed flight plans or on radar.”

“Any reports of recently stolen or crashed Sky-Rangers?” White asked.

A few key-clicks, then a shake of the head. “Negative, sir. But ....” The pause was punctuated by several more clicks. “... Gatekeepers owned a 286, but it doesn’t show up in the liquidation assets.”

“Alert me the moment we have any reports back about Herdekker or his associates,” White ordered, his near permanent frown deepening. “Have Ochre, Grey and Magenta return to Cloudbase on the next flight. I want my officers where I can get my hands on them.”

The subtext of ‘and where I can protect them’ went unspoken. The colonel’s fondness for and protective streak concerning his senior staff – the odd episode of vexing impetuousness aside – was one of many open secrets of Cloudbase.

“S.I.G.”

0o0o0

As he woke to the sterile lab, Scarlet cursed himself for his lapse. At best he could blame his post- retrometabolic hunger and thirst for not being more circumspect, but to make such a rookie error and not test it first?

He’d been wondering how they would get him out of his cell for the next round of tests – a perfect escape opportunity – when food had arrived – a paper cup of water and two military-issue meal bars in plastic wrapping, all on a cardboard tray carefully pushed between the bars by a guard using a broomstick. He’d forced himself to eat the ration bars slowly, the things were made to last for years and had the consistency of compressed sawdust firebricks. Taking sips of water with each bite only made it stick to one’s mouth like peanut butter, so he saved the disappointingly small cup until last.

Washing the sparse meal down with the water, he’d only realised the water actually did taste funny and it wasn’t the aftertaste of the meal bars when a tide of weakness hit him like a wave and knocked him into unconsciousness.

Now he was strapped down to the examination bed yet again with sensors dotted over his chest and head and Mills was puttering about the lab, preparing something.

“Well, at least my ribs have healed,” Scarlet groused to himself sourly. One of the guards waved at Mills and pointed at him. “Damn. They noticed.”

“Ah, Captain, you’re awake!” Mills beamed like a benevolent uncle and checked his watch. “And a half hour sooner than I expected, excellent. I take it you’ve fully recovered from yest…” Mills paused and checked himself… “From the initial experiment?”

Scarlet just glowered at him, blue eyes flinty and narrowed, clenching and unclenching his fists in irritation. “Why do they want to keep the time from me?” He considered the thought. “Ah, time disorientation. Interrogation techniques too, hm? Must be the sponsors’ idea, confuse me and make me easier to break.”

“Well, since you don’t seem to be in a conversational mood, I’ll just find out for myself.” Mills bustled over to the machines and consulted the numbers, tutting to himself. “You appear to be fully healed. Good.” He made more notes on his ever-present clipboard and peered at Scarlet myopically. “You will be happy to know that I have all the baseline data that I need, now we can begin the grafting process in earnest. I’ll start with bone marrow, that should be the easiest to extract. Hold still now, please.”

0o0o0

Despite being in an age when different agencies were more connected than ever before and screeds of information could be transmitted almost instantaneously, time still made life difficult. Contacting the right people, getting the right information, sending out the right people and reporting back took time, even though they were station-keeping over London where most of the investigating was happening. Getting the information back from the far-flung countries where Gatekeepers recruited from just compounded the issue.

So, it was a full two days after the attack when Colonel White was able to convene a conference with all of his senior staff, including Doctor Fawn and the Angels not on duty – Destiny and Rhapsody – to go over what they had and hadn’t found out yet.

White listened with half an ear as Green reported to the group what they’d accumulated on Herdekker – he’d vanished into the ether about six months ago, along with five of his senior staff from Gatekeepers and quite a few lower-level ones. White already knew all this; he was more interested in the condition of his own staff and assessing their state.

Blue, as to be expected, was looking drawn and haggard with deep bags under his eyes – he'd only just come back from chasing up a futile lead in Bruges. A muscle in his jaw twitched, but that was the only outward sign of stress the Boston-born officer allowed himself as he sat ramrod straight in his chair.

Rhapsody, with the assistance of makeup, was looking slightly better, but not by much. That she had a strong personal interest in Scarlet’s wellbeing was only a slightly better kept secret than Blue and Symphony’s personal interest in each other. White knew, but he knew that they didn’t know that he knew. Still, he made a prudent mental note to not send Rhapsody as the pilot for the next investigation, just in case she got the wild hair to race off and go and hunt down Scarlet herself. She was very good, but her head wasn't in the right place just now.

Ochre was possibly in the best shape of the lot, accustomed as he was to the realities of police work and investigations. He wasn't hiding his frustration as well as he thought, though – cracking his knuckles under the table in a nervous gesture, and he glowered sourly at his empty coffee cup as if through sheer force of will he could make it refill itself.

Fawn, Magenta, Grey, Destiny and Green were looking slightly better than Blue, but not by much. “I imagine there are similar feelings across the base by now,” White mused to himself, knowing how much Scarlet was liked and respected by his peers and subordinates.

“So, we have suspects, their photos have gone out, we’re looking for them and waiting for someone to get back to us?” Ochre summed up as Green finished and looked around at the rest of the conference room.

“In a word, yes.” White nodded, not missing the wave of grimaces and dismayed mutterings that the statement provoked.

“Any ransom demands?” Fawn ventured. “Or sightings of Captain Black?”

“None,” White replied shortly. “Ladies and gentlemen, I know you are people of action and having to wait like this is trying everyone’s nerves. But while we wait, Spectrum is far from idle – we have every eye and ear available to us running down every clue, investigating every lead.” He swept his gaze over his staff, seeing the worry etched on every face. “For the moment I need you at full readiness – rested and sharp. Should you need assistance with sleep and do not wish to make use of the Room of Sleep, see Doctor Fawn. If you need someone to speak to, see Doctor Cinnabar and the chaplains. I believe Pastor Juniper is in this week and of course, the others are all available by videophone.”

“I know this is hard, but we will find him,” White repeated, sensing the need for reassurance in his staff. “Right now, all I ask of you is patience while we wait. When the next breakthrough occurs, we will act and I need you at your best when that moment arrives.”

As if on cue the conference room tannoy crackled into life.

“This is the voice of the Mysterons. We know that you can hear us, Earthmen.”

The dreaded voice droned out of every speaker on Cloudbase, flat and hollow.

“The capture of Captain Scarlet, this outside interference in our War of Nerves, will not be tolerated. The miller will not succeed in his machinations and our secrets shall not be revealed to inferiors. Our revenge shall be swift, it shall be effective and they shall fall prey to the doom they have created for themselves.”

Colonel White frowned as the base's speakers fell silent again. “Well, at least the Mysterons do not have Captain Scarlet,” he mused aloud, voicing the fear that they'd all silently held. “But why is his capture bothering them so?”

“ Sir?” Fawn frowned, confused.

“If I didn't know better, I would say that the Mysterons are angered by what happened.” White's brow furrowed deeper, suspicious. “But why? One would think that this is the perfect opportunity for them to launch yet another one of their plots against us while we are distracted and one man short, so why would they instead announce their intentions to... well... rescue him.”

“ Sir... I think I might know why.” Lieutenant Green looked up from his file to face the commander. “It's just an idea though.”

“Go on.” White made a carry-on gesture.

“ Well sir, I've been thinking,” Green began to explain. “With all of the manned satellites and space stations and the moon colony, it would have been easy for the Mysterons to simply broadcast their messages in a general direction of Earth and everyone would pick them up, but they haven't. They tight-beamed their messages directly to us, leaving us to disseminate the information to the various other agencies.”

The young lieutenant paused to take a breath. “It didn't make sense – why decide that you are going to destroy a world and only tell a single group what you are doing? It couldn't be just because Spectrum were on the Zero-X mission and Captain Black ordered the fatal shot; the World Space Patrol had two men there, and one of them pushed the button but the Mysterons ignore them. Then I started thinking about Spectrum itself. Spectrum has the best of the best in almost every field and collectively, we represent much of the best that humanity has to offer, so I think the Mysterons have decided that we'd make the best opponents for them.” He frowned as he ordered his next thought and then continued:

“ They seem to have some kind of rules of engagement. They make a plan and then give us a chance to beat them with their cryptic warnings and riddles. It's like it's a kind of game to them... they set us a challenge to overcome and wait for us to fail or succeed, almost like we're proving our right to live a little longer and hold off what to them is inevitable. Whoever kidnapped Captain Scarlet has interfered with that game... and the Mysterons won't stand for it.”

White nodded slowly, mulling over the junior officer's theory. “Your reasoning is sound, Lieutenant,” he said at last. “It seems like the Mysterons will, in a way, be on our side in this one.”

“Yeah, but what did they mean by 'the miller' and 'inferiors'?” Fawn queried. He grimaced. “I hate their riddles.”

“I don't think this is intended to be a very complicated riddle,” Green pointed out. “If the Mysterons want whoever it is caught, they'll want us to find them without too much trouble.”

“Agreed.” White nodded. “Lieutenant, go through our records for anyone with any connection to the reference 'miller'.”

“ S.I.G.”

“ Wait, Colonel, I think I know who they're talking about,” Fawn spoke up, his eyes widening. “It just came to me. I should have remembered it straight away!”

“ Then spit it out, man!” White ordered.

Fawn looked grim. “Remember that doctor you kicked off Cloudbase for unauthorized experiments on Scarlet last year?”

“ Yes, I still remind Spectrum Intelligence about how he vanished before they could secure him in Geneva.”

“ His name was Anthony Mills.”

0o0o0

The meeting broke up shortly after that, officers scattering in all directions to hunt out the new lead and work on new angles on the theory that Scarlet had been taken for medical experiments.

At a bit of a loose end, Rhapsody found herself following Doctor Fawn to his office, the CMO muttering under his breath about files somewhere in his overstuffed office space.

Rhapsody frowned as she tailed Fawn into the cramped but tidy space, lined with filing cabinets on two walls and a bank of computer units on the third, his desk parked squarely in the middle. “Doctor, who is Doctor Mills?” she asked.

“One of the specialists that got shipped up here after Scarlet's ‘accident’,” Fawn replied. “He got shipped right back down after he started doing his own little experiments on Paul. He was supposed to go in front of a medico-military tribunal for a ‘please explain’ as soon as he was groundside but he hopped on another plane out of town before they got their asses into gear to pick him up. Spectrum Intelligence has taken it as a bit of a personal insult that they still haven’t found him yet and the Old Man sends a rocket up at them every few weeks to keep on it. That’s the last I heard of it.” Fawn sifted through a sheaf of papers and colour coded files. “Where the bloody hell is that thing?” he muttered to himself, trying to get into one of his filing cabinets, finding it locked, and turning to his desk to try and unearth the key.

“What are you looking for?” Rhapsody queried, moving to help. She relieved him of an armload of files, setting them safely aside while Fawn exclaimed in triumph when he found the key, unlocked the cabinet and dug deeper into his archives.

“Mills' notes from his experiments. I put them in there somewhere, since he only made paper notes and didn't commit anything to electronic record. He's a bit of a Luddite apparently. If we know exactly what he was looking for, we can track the equipment he’d need. I didn’t read too much of his notes at the time; made me sick what he was doing to Scarlet.” Fawn frowned at the stacks of print outs and hard copies that he'd pulled from one of his filing cabinets. “I made scans of the notes of course, but there's nothing better than having the original right in front of you.”

“What sort of personal information do you have on Mills?” Rhapsody inquired as innocently as possible.

Fawn, however, had been around the Angels, the captains and general military types for far too long to be fooled. He turned and gave the redhead an assessing, suspicious look. “Why?” he asked bluntly. “The colonel already has them and SI’s been looking for a year.”

“You know my background, Edward,” Rhapsody replied, one eyebrow arching ever so elegantly to subtly nudge along the hint. “I know people who could help.”

“Yes, I do know you know people, Dianne,” Fawn shot back. “I also know you're the type to hare off after Scarlet on the slimmest of leads. He'll throttle me if I give you that information and you get into trouble, and then I’ll have the colonel on my back about it too. Not to mention what the Old Man will do if you go AWOL.”

“No, he wouldn't. Paul likes you far too much for that, even if you do harass him with tests and suchlike.” Rhapsody tried to both dismiss his concerns with an elegant wave of her hand and inject a little levity into the conversation to distract him. “And the colonel likes results, even if the methodology is atypical.”

“Scarlet is Special Ops and he’s very attached to you, Dianne. He would.” Fawn narrowed his eyes slightly, weighing up the risks of giving a headstrong, intelligent, capable and very much in love woman a target to go after, versus the chance to tap into the network of old friends and allies that she undoubtedly still had from her spycraft days. “Promise me that if you turn up anything, you'll hand it over to the colonel and wait for his orders,” he said at last.

“I promise,” Rhapsody replied, not a trace of guile in her voice or manner.

Fawn grunted in that strangely expressive manner that only men can manage, entered a few commands into his computer terminal and removed the resulting slip of paper from the printer as soon as it was spat out, handing it to the Angel. “I didn't give you this,” he instructed.

“SIG.” Rhapsody took it and swiftly folded it, slipping it into a pocket. She nodded her thanks and strode out of the office, already mentally combing through a list of people she could contact, starting of course with her former mentor, Lady Penelope.

0o0o0

“Damn it all, we have the latest technology and the most up-to-date information, yet we still cannot find one man!” Colonel White muttered under his breath later that afternoon, as he reviewed the information they had so far on Doctor Anthony Joseph Mills. There was plenty of historical data but nothing current; nothing in fact, since he got on a plane to Geneva within minutes of being delivered groundside. The members of the review board he had been about to face were almost apoplectic with rage when both they and SI sent agents to Geneva had realised he was missing without a trace. It was almost like Mills had been tucked away in a hidden cupboard.

White frowned, greying brows drawing close together. It had to have been planned out in advance for Mills to get away so cleanly. He'd done something similar to that in his time, taking certain persons and making them vanish into places of safety or concealment for various reasons. With the right attention to detail and clean up afterwards, it was almost impossible to find someone again without inside help or a major cock-up on their half.

He'd put the word out amongst his contacts as soon as Fawn had given him the name. It shouldn't have surprised him when he received a call only half an hour ago from a certain titled English lady with whom he shared a common acquaintance – namely Rhapsody Angel. Information was slowly starting to feed back to him but most of it was what they already knew.

White drew in a breath, held it for a heartbeat and slowly let it out. He had to be patient. He was hunting this man and his allies and that took a certain mindset, an ice-cold calm that he needed to maintain. A good hunter never let his quarry be aware that it was being chased. The desperate hunter made mistakes, rattled the bushes, stood upwind, missed the shot or shot the wrong target all together. The calm hunter bagged his prize each time.

“Colonel White!” The loud salutation broke his musings and he glanced up from the files.

Captain Magenta strode into the command centre, a piece of paper in his hand and a very satisfied grin on his face. “A Mr G. Donnoley just had a very interesting conversation with a gentleman from New York,” he smirked, name-dropping one of his many aliases for contacting associates from his former occupation.

“What sort of conversation?” White asked and tapped a button on his desk to raise one of the stools, feeling genial enough to allow Magenta his chance to show off. “You look like the cat that got the canary.”

“Not just the canary but the cream too.” Magenta smirked. “Mr Donnoley and the gentleman from New York had a conversation about how one might get information from Spectrum Intelligence in London,” he continued as he sat down. “Little things like the movements of top flight officers. Mr Donnoley put the word out yesterday that he was interested in knowing said movements to get warnings about when to move supplies and one of his friends got in touch today and mentioned a SI communications officer who is heavily into debt with a mobster-linked gambling ring.” He laid the folded piece of paper down on the colonel's desk. “With the right pressure he hands over all sorts of interesting titbits.” His smirk broadened. “Odds are he's kept a list of people he's been in contact with to stay out of deWitt penitentiary if he gets caught, or a dead man’s switch to burn every last one of them if he gets in trouble.”

White picked up and perused the paper. “Very good, Captain. Very, very good.” He set the paper down and asked with a completely straight face: “Will I be authorizing a payment from the ‘For Nefarious Purposes Only’ account?”

Magenta blinked, then laughed aloud when he realised Colonel White had somehow found out about his nickname for the account used to grease the palms of various people his aliases communicated with. “Yes sir, just 5k US for him. He gave it to Mr Donnoley as a favour, but tipping people keeps them feeling favourable the next time I come asking. I'll give the details to Accounts and tell them who to wash the money through.”

“Good. Do so, then take a few security staff with you and go fetch this communications officer for me,” White ordered, handing the paper back. “I want to have a little chat with him.”

“S.I.G.” Magenta’s replying grin was tempered by the frost in Colonel White’s expression. He did not want to ever find himself on the receiving end of that particular glare.

0o0o0

Less than three hours later, a very scared man was ushered into the brig and sat at the steel table where Colonel White was waiting for him.

“Derrek James Makenzie.” White enunciated each syllable precisely, idly flicking through the aforementioned’s personal file. “Senior Communications Lieutenant, Spectrum Intelligence, coming up on three years-service. Previously employed at various British embassies as a communications specialist. Bachelor with a string of past relationships, 34 years old, renting a one-bedroom flat in Whitechapel, Chelsea fan, with an unfortunate choice in poker dens and a lot of off-the-books debt in said poker dens. Practically a case study for why gambling is strictly forbidden for Spectrum personnel.” He snapped the file shut and looked at the quaking man handcuffed to the table and sweating bullets.

White could see why he could attract so many girlfriends for short term flings – conventionally attractive with a movie-star jaw, grey eyes and light brown hair, he obviously cared about his appearance and took some pains to maintain it. But nothing in his history gave any indications of personal strength, strength of character or resilience. How he slipped into Spectrum without it was a question for later. Right now, Derrek was terrified, panicking and frantic. White paused for a moment as he decided how best to further stoke that fear.

“You know, with what you’ve done, I am well within my rights to shove you out the nearest airlock,” White mused, tapping a capped pen on the closed file. “We’re over the English Channel right now so it won’t even make a mess on the ground,” The colonel continued in a conversational fashion. “What is even better is you know that I can do that. You know a lot of things, like what is waiting for you in deWitt penitentiary, which is where you’re going, once we’re done here. Provided there is anything left of you to send there.”

Derrek turned even paler than White had thought someone could be. “Aha, there’s the angle.”

“Let me make one thing clear.” White laid down the pen and stood, bracing his weight on his fists as he leaned forward and glowered at the trembling communications officer. “Your actions have put the world in danger.” The words came out in a low growl. “Cooperate and you’ll be allowed to live. Fail to cooperate willingly and your cooperation will be secured by whatever means I deem necessary, after which point, you will cease to exist. I control the cameras here and I have a base full of very angry people who will swear you were never on board. Am I making myself perfectly clear?”

Derrek nodded so hard he might have sprained his neck had he kept it up for long.

“Hand over the information, and you get to go back to your Whitechapel flat but this time as a double agent for us,” White dangled the bait. “A few years of that with good results and you’ll have a new name and a new face, you’ll get to keep your pension, move somewhere nice and retire. Understood?”

“Yes sir,” Derrek squeaked out.

“Good.” Colonel White sat and allowed himself the smallest of smirks, the one that he had been reliably informed was ‘the scary smirk’. “We’ll start with the most important question first. Captain Magenta will be along shortly for the rest.” He took a sheet of blank paper from the folder and uncapped his pen. “Who requested the information on Captain Scarlet?”

0o0o0

Scarlet was back in the cell again when he next revived. “Mills must have hit a femoral artery while harvesting bone marrow,” was the first coherent thought to eventually surface. “Judging by the amount of dried blood on me.”

He licked cracked and dry lips with a leathery tongue and longingly thought of the spoonful of ice chips, damp cloth and friendly faces that he would have awoken to, back on Cloudbase.

Usually, Adam took point on watching over him while in Medical, talking to him about the mission, updating him on Cloudbase gossip or giving a running commentary of the latest book he was reading. But no matter how much he relied on the reassurance of his partner, more than anything, he dearly wanted Dianne right now – to wrap his arms around her, bury his face in her hair and hide from the world in her embrace.

“Okay… enough daydreaming for now…” Scarlet reluctantly turned his focus back to the world around him. He couldn’t afford to indulge in maudlin self-pity; down that path lay the numb melancholia that had crippled him last year.

Categorising his own condition, Scarlet didn’t like the short list of issues. His legs ached, his head throbbed and the peculiar sharp ache in his belly was familiar to him – he didn't have the resources left to complete his recovery, so he'd again been roused prematurely to go and take on those resources.

Unfortunately, he simply could not comply because there were no resources to be had. Not even a cockroach to snatch up and eat. And yes, he’d eaten bugs before. Standard feature of survival training – if it’s not going to kill you, eat it.

The door clicked open and Scarlet rolled his head towards the sound, frowning when he realised four goons had entered the cell.

“The doctor doesn’t need you for a while,” the leader announced, an older sounding man with a broadly Euro accent that Scarlet just couldn’t place. “And the bosses want to know if you’re feeling up to talking. There’s a nice steak dinner in it for you if you cough up some data, pain if you don’t.”

Scarlet curled his lip in a sneer and extended one finger in a nearly universal gesture.

The breath whooshed out of him when the boot connected, the leather and steel toe making direct contact with his solar plexus. Hoarse laughter sounded up above, while he curled up and gasped for breath, too winded to do anything more.

“What a pansy,” someone sneered, and something wet landed on his cheek with a gooey splat.

Scarlet's eyes narrowed as he brought his breathing back under control and his famously short fuse started to burn out – his temper switching from the red-hot flare of anger to the clinical, focused, white-hot rage.

He could kill them all easily enough; they’d left off the waist and ankle chains this time.

One move and he would be on his feet with the element of surprise. A palm strike to the nose to kill the leader. A reverse elbow strike to the solar plexus and back kick to the groin would disable the one behind him. Quarter turn left and a panther punch at the throat to crush the hyoid bone and larynx. Twist around again, using the motion to deliver a backfist to stun, then grab the head and slam the face into the upraised knee. One more turn, this time to finish off the one he elbowed. Probably snap his neck, just to make it quick.

“... No.” It took every scrap of self-control Scarlet had to let himself go limp under the assault as the rest of the guards joined in on softening him up with kicks and blows, allowing the deadly plan to go to waste. There were cameras and a big steel door at the end of the hall and these guards carried no keys or weapons. He could kill four guards in less than a minute but then he'd bring many more down on top of himself with little chance of escape, not to mention that they'd watch him far more closely once they got a taste of exactly how dangerous he was.

Once the guards tired of their sport and meandered back to their usual duties, shutting the cell door behind them, Scarlet painfully hauled himself back to his foam squab and laid himself down, tasting blood in his mouth. The words of a sergeant he’d met once came back to him in a rush, bringing with them the half-forgotten smell of a musty, damp cave packed with dirty, sweaty bodies and orders barked out in heavily-accented English...

…They'd just brought Tommy back from the interrogation chamber. He was a mess, the splint they'd painstakingly bound around his fractured right arm hanging in scraps. The two guards dumped him on the filthy floor, then while one opened the cage the other took the time to aim a deliberate kick at his wounded arm and laughed when Tommy let out a shriek of agony and knotted up into a ball to try and protect himself.

Paul had surged to his feet at the act of cruelty, fists clenched. But an American sergeant captured two days before them had grabbed him by the back of his shirt and yanked him back down with a hissed ‘Sit and zip!’

“What?” Paul had turned incredulous eyes on the older man. “Look what they're doing to him!”

“I know,” the sergeant had replied in a murmur. But you gotta be smart about this, kid.” He held up two fingers, aware of the other soldiers leaning in to listen. “There's two states a' rabies back home. First, the animal goes nuts an' does the whole 'foam at the mouth' and snarling. People see it and simply shoot the poor critter. They recognise the danger. Then they go quiet, looks sick an' confused. People don't know it's got rabies; they just think it's hurt or lost. They go on up to it and get bit.” Here the sergeant paused, glancing around at the other men. “We gotta be the quiet kinda rabies, make the bastards think we've been broken by all this and ain't a threat, all Stockholm Syndrome like. If they don't suspect we're dangerous, they'll relax so when we do go mad dog on ' em , they get taken by surprise.”

One by one, the other men had muttered their agreement and a plan was formed.

Three weeks later, they staged a mass break out and scattered into the jungle in groups of four or five, the hidden base burning behind them.

Scarlet curled himself up and grimaced, feeling the dull throb and prickle of healing bruises and the familiar gnaw of hunger renewing itself in his belly. His opportunity would come. But he had to wait for the right moment to throw off his act and attack.

0o0o0

“Anything?”

The question from Ochre came as a soft murmur inside the Spectrum Pursuit Vehicle hidden in an empty warehouse on the western docks of London.

Three days ago, Colonel White had sent them out with a name and orders to ‘turn that city upside down, give it a good shake and see what falls out’. Two days ago, Fawn's report of 'I think Mills wants to transplant Scarlet's retrometabolism into other people' had only spurred them on.

Derrek had given them the name of a woman who had been the intermediary. She’d led them to a back-alley lawyer who usually spent his time getting sentences reduced on technicalities for hoodlums and lowlifes caught in the act. He’d handled the money for the next tier up, a gang that had a recently founded ‘legitimate’ business of providing security guards and heavies for hire – most of whom were formerly Gatekeepers staff.

That had given them the connection to the three ex-employees of Gatekeepers Inc cooling their heels in the warehouse across the road that had been fitted with an expensive retractable roof last month. The official reason for their presence was to guard a Sikorsky Sky-Ranger 286 while a wealthy Emir sorted out customs and shipping for his new toy. A little digging into deeds and titles showed both it and the warehouse were owned by a shell company that, after some electronic sleuthing, turned out to be under the guiding hand of Thomas Herdekker .

At two in the morning, Ochre had gone onto the roof of the warehouse Spectrum had appropriated for the stake out and used a modified sniper rifle to plant sticky electronic listening devices next to the windows closest to the mezzanine offices their targets lived in.

Now, at just after nine, they were reaping the first harvest of their hunt.

Captain Blue pulled a disgusted face and took off one cuff of the headphones he’d been using to eavesdrop on the target warehouse. “Nothing useful unless you’d like a detailed debate on the merits of the Spring Playboy centrefold versus the Autumn centrefold,” he reported.

Ochre snorted. “Ho boy. SI’s going to love listening to that part of the tape in the after-action report where they pick apart everything we did and try to tell us how they’d do it better.”

That quip got the quirk of the lips he’d been hoping for, but it was gone as Blue put the headphones back on. “Okay, discussing lunch now, dishes duty… Steve is arguing it's not his turn to clean the bathroom... Hold on, someone’s taking a phone call.”

“Captain Ochre to Lieutenant Green, targets receiving phone call,” Ochre quickly relayed into his cap mic.

“S.I.G. Tracing and recording now…” came the reply.

After a moment, Captain Blue whipped off the headset and punched the start button for the SPV, activating his RadioCap with his other hand. “Captain Blue to all units. They’ve been ordered to clean out the warehouse, destroy any evidence and leave in the Sikorsky! All units move in. Angels, prepare to intercept.”

Affirmatives poured in as the three ground teams burst out of cover. Blue didn’t even give the door a chance to open as he rammed out of their warehouse and shot across the road to block the target warehouse’s main door with the bulk of the SPV. Seconds later, Magenta’s SPV did the same for the rear entrance and Grey led a team of commandos to the external fire escape. Rhapsody’s helijet swooped in from hiding to hover and allow another half-dozen Cloudbase commandos to rappel onto the roof and drop flash bangs and smoke grenades through the skylights. The four other Angel interceptors screamed overhead to circle the warehouse just in case someone got to their helijet .

Blue could hear the door charge go off on the upstairs emergency exit and Grey hollering “Spectrum! On the ground, now!” At the same time, he kicked his way through the front door, gun in hand and Ochre at his back as they swept through the ground floor – a tangle of broken packing crates, crumpled tarps and assorted rubbish. The Skiorsky helijet was hidden behind a line of shipping containers, obviously to keep it from the view of the casual observer. Blue thoughtfully put a bullet through the main control panel just in case they missed someone hiding downstairs before pushing forward, deeper into the dimly lit warehouse.

“Not the tidiest bunch here, are they?” Magenta drawled as his team linked up with Blue and Ochre, his commando team borrowed from Spectrum London spreading out to make sure no stone was left unturned. “Not a soul down here, Grey must have them all bottled up in the office.” He indicated the internal staircase with a jerk of his head. “Shall we?”

“Yes.” Blue nodded, his expression grim. He led the other three to the somewhat rickety internal staircase.

When they got there, they found organised chaos. Grey had the three targets handcuffed and lying face-down on the greasy industrial carpet while they were quickly and efficiently frisked. In the far corner, a pile of smouldering papers was being doused with a fire extinguisher by one of the Cloudbase commandos, while another was bringing a smoking microwave to the captains.

“Sorry, sirs,” the female officer apologised. “They had the one phone and managed to fry it in the microwave before we could stop them. No other electronics in the place. They also set a box of papers on fire but I think we got to it in time.”

“Good work, Barrets. Maybe Green can pull something from the phone anyway?” Grey asked hopefully as he took the microwave with a nod, setting it on a nearby table to cool before he chanced picking out the electronic remains from inside.

In the meantime, Magenta had gone over to the papers and with the commandos’ help started sorting through what could be salvaged. “Hello... what do we have here?” He picked up a wad of singed paper – a stack of shipping receipts showing lists of what looked like medical equipment – and activated his RadioCap . “Captain Magenta to Doctor Fawn.”

“Fawn here, what’s happened?” the doctor’s slightly startled voice came back.

“No one’s hurt, but I’ve found a list. Is this medical stuff?” Magenta reeled off the list of names, words and numbers, spelling out the occasional one that got stuck in his teeth.

“That’s not just ‘medical stuff’, that’s high-end genetics equipment, supplies for tissue sampling, even the monitoring equipment is almost on par with what I use,” Fawn explained.

“The kind to set up an experimental lab to work on someone like Scarlet?”

“And then some,” came the slightly tinny reply.

“Thanks for the help doc, Magenta out.” He signed off with a grin.

“Got the next link in the chain! Meet me at the London office!” Magenta called out to the others. He turned and made for his SPV. Spectrum London was just a few blocks away. Ten minutes and an internet connection and he’d be in the mainframe of ‘Redbird Shipping’, finding out exactly where this stuff was going.

0o0o0

Quite a block of time passed before Scarlet woke up in the lab once again, interrupting a very soothing dream he'd been having about relaxing in the Amber Room with Dianne. She had been reading a book aloud to him while he sprawled comfortably on the couch, his head on her lap as she idly ran her fingers through his hair.

He groaned softly and elected to ignore the world in general for the moment. It was much too unpleasant to bother with right now.

Since he’d wised up to their trick with the water and checked his food – the same unappetizing fare as the first meal – with a little sip or nibble first, this time they'd sniped at him with a tranq gun while he was dozing and whatever drug they used left him with a hell of a hangover.

But this time, there was someone new in the room, dressed in green medical scrubs and lying semi-reclined on an adjacent bed, looking nervous. Scarlet flicked his gaze over the man from under mostly closed eyelids, trying to gain some information on the situation while making himself look as harmless as possible.

Whoever the man was, he was pale and thin without being scrawny – all cabled muscles and wide eyes that tried to take in everything at once, crowned with a shaggy mop of brown hair. He was scratching every once-in-a-while at the needle in his arm feeding an amber-tinted fluid into his veins. “Probably someone plucked from some back alley, promised a job and lured here,” Paul mused to himself. “Hello... here comes Mills.”

“Just a few initial tests, Yacov,” Mills assured his patient, disconnected the IV and lifted a scalpel from an instrument tray. “Hold still.” He drew the blade across the flesh of Yacov's arm with a quick, practiced movement. Yacov yelped something unflattering in Russian, jerking his arm back and clutching it to his chest as bright red blood welled up from between his fingers.

As Scarlet watched in horror, the flow of blood slowly petered out like a tap being shut off. Yacov noticed it too, cautiously peeling his bloodied fingers away to inspect the wound. Before the eyes of all who watched, the cut crusted over and blood congealed into a dark red scab. Minutes crawled by as the reddened skin returned to its normal pale pink and the scab flaked away to reveal a deep red scar. Slowly, that too began to fade, turning white, then shrinking until there was no trace of it left but the dried blood that had surrounded the wound.

Yacov probed the spot with careful fingers, then clenched his hand. “Is healed!” he exclaimed in broken English, shoving the limb at Doctor Mills. “Is healed, like said, healed!”

“Indeed,” Doctor Mills clucked with approval. “A very successful first test.” He caught the excited man and managed to hold him still long enough to draw three vials of blood, scribbling something on the labels and setting them aside. “Now for the next test,” Mills announced, stepping well back from Yacov. “Thomas,” he called, “make it tidy.”

The summoned guard stepped away from the wall, drew a pistol from his hip holster and screwed on a silencer to reduce the range and noise. “Hey!” he called out sharply in a broad Euro accent Scarlet recognised immediately. “Thomas, I'll remember that.”

Yacov looked over automatically, eyes widening at the sight of the gun. Thomas fired once, putting the bullet between the young man's eyes. The body dropped like a sack of potatoes, slumped onto the bed.

“Very good Thomas.” Mills nodded once in approval and noted something down on a clipboard. He then bent and counted ribs on the left-hand side until he found the spot he was looking for, four ribs down and towards the sternum. “There we go,” he announced, selecting a pre-loaded syringe and inserting the long needle into the intercostal spaces between the ribs to introduce the contents to Yacov's heart. “Now to observe, the addition of adrenaline should speed up the process.” Doctor Mills wrote something else down, then peered over the edge of his clipboard at Scarlet. “Your record for recovery from a similar wound was well over seven hours under optimal conditions. With the adrenaline, and having eaten a high protein meal before-hand, we should see a much faster recovery time.”

Scarlet resolutely kept his silence as Mills bustled about, attaching various monitors and taking regular readings. The timer on the wall slowly ticked through an hour, then two, then three. Yacov's skin slowly regained a pinkish cast and his chest began to rise and fall as the fourth hour slowly clicked over.

But something was off. Scarlet frowned, blue eyes narrowing. Yacov's mouth puckered like a landed fish, his chest and belly jerking up and down in gasping, uneven breaths – the agonal breathing of someone who's body is trying to operate but their soul is long gone. The skin on his forehead was too pink... almost flushed. The hole left by the 9mm round scabbed over and was filled in... and then began to bulge out. “What...?” Doctor Mills bent in to examine the phenomenon.

The little bulge grew bigger, spreading out across Yacov's brow. Veins started to show through the stretched skin like the dark roots of some evil tree. Yacov's eyes snapped open and he sucked in a breath, only to arch his back and scream in agony, his hands clawing at the bed.

Mills stepped back in alarm, the guards leaping into action and holding Yacov down. The little bulge had swollen to the size of a tennis ball before the black-clad bodies blocked Scarlet's view of the macabre scene. He tugged at his restraints and growled in frustration when they didn't give in the slightest; with this distraction, it was the perfect opportunity for him to escape!

The screaming on the other side of the room had risen in crescendo, more animalistic than anything else – the mindless howls of a creature responding to stimulus, not the cries of a sentient being.

“It's too late!” Mills’ voice rose above the cacophony, eerily calm and sounding almost resigned to failure. “Samuel, if you please.”

“Everyone, clear!” A voice barked out. The black-clad bodies jumped back and Scarlet caught sight of a flailing hand reaching for the ceiling. There was a sharp crack of discharging electricity and the stink of burnt hair and ozone. The hand that had been reaching up in apparent supplication stiffened and fell slack, the screaming finally stopped in mid-cry.

“Oh hell, they have a Mysteron gun too. White is going to have literal heads lined up on his desk after this,” Paul concluded glumly, then turned his attention back to the other bed and its attendants.

“Dear me, how discouraging,” Mills tsked from somewhere inside the crowd. “Thomas, make a note please. Subject 4 deceased after what appears to be a runaway retrometabolic reaction to a fatal injury, with little to no sign of personality recovery. Have him delivered to Autopsy and I'll look him over later. Then send in Subject 5 once everything is cleaned up.”

The guards shifted and set about their tasks, while Mills fetched a white plastic box and came to the side of Scarlet's bed, clipboard tucked under his arm. “Well, that was a disappointment, I must admit.” Mills sighed. “I was quite sure we had the rejection issue fixed this time, but no matter.” Mills snapped on a pair of gloves and retrieved an object from the box – a surgical drill. “I'm afraid this means we need more of that miraculous bone marrow of yours, Captain.”

0o0o0

It was decided to take the prisoners to Spectrum London to deal with, rather than shipping them up to Cloudbase first then shuttling them off to whatever their eventual fate would be.

Lined up in the interrogation room in prisoner jumpsuits, handcuffed to the table and not a little roughly-handled, it was Ochre’s conclusion they made a sorry lot. From the bundle of commando gear they’d found stashed in a back room and the weekish old ‘Kevlar stopped a bullet but still left a mark’ wound on the chest of the oldest one, it was the general consensus amongst the captains that they’d found some of the kidnapping team.

It was also the general consensus that if all else failed, they’d just send Blue and Rhapsody in, shut the door and claim plausible deniability – their second, unspoken reason for keeping things off Cloudbase.

With that in mind, Ochre led his brother captains into the institutional green interrogation room and very pointedly yanked the power cables from the cameras in each corner, while Grey took a spare chair and used it to wedge the door shut.

The ambient level of fear in the room shot up palpably when that happened.

“I’m going to make this quick.” Ochre placed a tape recorder on the table, his face a thundercloud. “We have your records and we know everything we need to know about you three – all served in the various branches of the military, all dishonourably discharged for bullying, harassment and dishonourable conduct, all picked up by Herdekker for doing dirty work. That helijet was used to transport Captain Scarlet. We found the blood stains in the cargo compartment. You,” he pointed to the one with the bullet-into-Kevlar wound, “were there. You two, I’m sure forensics will match you to being there. Long story short, we want to know where our friend is and we’re all short on patience. Talk or else.”

“Or else what?” The youngest of the trio sneered, attempting bravado that would have been far more effective if it wasn’t for the broken nose and streaming, bloodshot eyes from the smoke grenades.

Ochre grinned nastily. “I was hoping you’d ask.” He walked back to where Blue was looming, arms folded across his chest and looking as grim as death. “This is Captain Blue, Captain Scarlet's best friend. He is not a happy man,” Ochre introduced him, clapping the taller man on the shoulder in a friendly fashion. “If you don’t talk, the rest of us will leave and he’ll get to stay here with you three and instructions to be creative. Once he's done with you, I know a very angry woman with a helijet and deep desire to kick you out of that helijet over the Atlantic.”

“I say start with loudmouth over there,” Grey chimed in from his post at the door. “Doubt he knows anything useful, Blue can get a nice warmup, the other two get an object lesson and Rhapsody will feel so much better if she gets to dump someone into the ocean.”

“And they’re terrorists too, according to the law.” That was Magenta, leaning against the observation window with a nonchalant air. “Do you have any idea how much of a pain-in-the-ass the terrorist paperwork for deWitt penitentiary is? If one’s dead, that’s one less set of paperwork.”

“So, there’s your options.” Ochre picked up the tape recorder, thumb over the ‘record’ button. “Start talking or start screaming, you pick.”

0o0o0

“... Ugh… not the tranq gun again…”

Once again waking in the lab and his legs still aching and bloodied from the latest round of bone marrow harvesting – Mills seemed to have an unerring aim for femoral arteries, not femurs – Scarlet rolled his head to the side to see what was going on and tried to keep from retching when he saw what was left of the most recent victim. He couldn't waste food right now, no matter how sickened he was.

The head and torso of the charred body was occupied by a large tumour-like mass threaded with dark veins, the now all-too-familiar result of the runaway retrometabolic process. “... How many? Why?” he rasped, swallowing thickly. He didn't have to work very hard to feign weakness anymore – regular injuries and a fixed diet were steadily taking their toll. He was able to count his ribs and the bones in his arms were painfully clear as his body cannibalised itself for the resources it needed to repair vital organs.

“Twenty-two test subjects thus far, all never making it past the second test.” Mills frowned and made more notes on his clipboard. “This would be so much easier if you would assist me, perhaps even advise me on one or two little things?” he asked hopefully, peering at Scarlet with his watery blue eyes.

“Forget it.”

“Very well.” Mills heaved a sigh and jotted something down on his ever-present clipboard. “It appears that the reason behind these adverse reactions is that there is a fault in the 'programming' and the retrometabolism simply does not know when to stop, not unlike what happens in cancerous cells. I'll have to examine the pre and post graft DNA samples to see if there is a correlation.” He paused to frown and tap the nib of the expensive fountain pen on his chin, leaving a smear of ink there. “I do wish I knew why the graftees appear to lose all of their personality and self. Unlike you, they simply do not recover themselves. Perhaps it's true that humans possess a spirit or soul after all, though how you retained yours is a mystery.”

“I'm too stubborn to let it go!” Scarlet snarled with as much venom as he could muster, incensed by the man's callous indifference. He had killed plenty of times himself, but never was the decision made lightly. He killed because he had to. But Mills... Scarlet shivered. Mills just shrugged it off as an incidental occurrence, a minor inconvenience, a by-product of scientific process. The man had no humanity.

“Temper, temper,” Mills chided, unaware of the growing hatred being directed at him. “You know that it throws off your readings.” He fussed with more papers on a table nearby and took a packet of sterilized instruments from a cabinet. “As it appears that a bone marrow transplant is simply not enough, I shall have to resort to growing stem cells and injecting them into each organ of the graftees . Perhaps then the ‘stop’ command of the healing factor will take. If not that, then perhaps outright cloning and transplanting most major organs will have to be explored, perhaps even cloning you in your entirety, Captain. Wouldn't that be interesting?” he asked with almost child-like enthusiasm. “I wonder if they would have their own personalities or if they would all develop yours? I hope our sponsors will allow it, even if the grafting takes effect. I must admit I am very curious.”

Scarlet gritted his teeth against the rising bile as Mills pulled on gloves then advanced with what looked like an oversized metal syringe. He'd seen one before; Fawn had done several tissue biopsies on him with something like that, only this one was much larger and Fawn had had the courtesy to ask permission and knock him out first. “Vital organs first, then I'll move on to muscle tissue,” Mills cheerily announced as he counted his way to the fourth intercostal space between the ribs on the left-hand side, then thrust the device down.

0o0o0

“... So combined with the reports from the Gatekeepers prisoners, the phone call that Green traced and Magenta’s sleuthing through the trucking company's records and GPS trackers, we know they took Scarlet to a place called St Dogwells Farm, in Wales,” Ochre explained, laying out an ordinance map of the area on the conference room table, the others clustered behind him as they briefed their commander on their latest findings. “There’s an old teaching hospital on the outskirts. The cover story is that they’re refitting the hospital as a specialised research facility to explain all the fancy equipment and guards. Green found the building plans for us; it’s got an extensive underground area that would be perfect for keeping a prisoner in,” he went on, unrolling the print out of the building blueprints and appropriating several coffee cups to keep it flat.

“Now for the bad news, sir: the goons we picked up are expected at the facility no later than 2200, local time. If they don’t show, the SOP is to assume cover is blown, pick up and move and they have no idea where the new place will be. It’s after 1600 London time now. We’ll have to hustle to put together a raiding party.”

White considered the new information, brows drawn close and fingers tented before his face. “Would I be correct in assuming you and the others have already drafted a plan of attack?” he asked at length.

“Yes, sir,” Blue spoke up. “It’ll need every commando and helijet we have and can borrow from Spectrum London and Wales. The place is huge, but we have a plan.”

“Gentlemen,” White finally spoke after a long, thoughtful pause, “I do hope that despite your anger, your plan does include the taking of prisoners and not simply going in, guns blazing? You have done admirably and shown great restraint in dealing with the prisoners we have taken thus far, but I cannot condone wholesale murder and summary execution. Such a thing coarsens the soul, no matter how good your intentions or how just your cause is.”

There was a moment's pause as the four men glanced at each other, before Grey spoke for them all:

“We’re doing this to get Scarlet back,” he firmly declared. “Not revenge. That’s the Mysterons’ deal, not ours. Besides, this thing needed a lot of money and influence behind it. We can't get to the top of the tree without people to question.”

“What is your plan then?” White sat back, listening as his officers outlined their strategy, throwing questions and scenarios at them to test their reasoning and make sure it was sound.

“Very well,” he said at length. “You have my approval, but with one modification. Take Fawn with you and have a full portable clinic with medics flown up from Spectrum Wales, who knows what condition Scarlet will be in. And I doubt Herdekker’s key men will go down easily, even with your tactics. Dismissed.”

Nods and ‘S.I.G.s’ chorused from the officers as they left to make their preparations.

0o0o0

Perhaps half an hour after the first helijets lifted up from Cloudbase, the Mysteron Collective deemed now was the appropriate time to make their move.

Silently, two green rings of light slipped across the water-stained ceiling tiles of the former hospital and down the cream-coloured wall of the cell area. The carelessly dozing guard, lulled into a false sense of security by Scarlet’s weakness, didn't even twitch as the rings slid across his form, reaching in with arcane powers to gently reinforce his light sleep into a deep slumber that verged on a coma. It was a very efficient trick that had allowed Mysteron agents access into all sorts of places when they didn't want to risk leaving a body to alert people, nor spend energy on retrometabolising a subject.

That task completed, the paired rings waited until the camera had tracked away and rippled over the cell bars, throwing eerie shadows across the darkened interior of the room, before they faded back into nothingness.

The cell lock gave a quiet snick.

The sudden surge of Mysteron-induced nausea had been enough to rouse Scarlet from a dreamless sleep just in time to see the rings leave the guard and glow over the lock.

Though the whys and wherefores of the Mysterons’ actions were as yet unclear, the unlocked door was clear enough.

Except he had not been released. He had been unleashed.

A few moments of work and the cuffs were cast aside. The comatose guard was quickly searched, turning up a 9mm Glock, an Uzi, half a packet of Camel brand cigarettes, a lighter, a set of pass keys and a K-bar knife. Scarlet tucked them all about his person and moved on, bare feet making no sound as he dodged around cameras and towards the big steel door designed to keep him separated from the rest of the facility.

He had three objectives: find Mills, escape, and destroy this place on his way out.

Three hallways down and around several corners, Scarlet came across a guard leaning against an airlock, apparently bored stiff and looking at his phone with his shoulder against the glass door. Whatever he was looking at was his last sight, as Scarlet slipped up behind him and snapped his neck with a sharp twist, lowering his body to the ground.

A wealth of medical equipment hummed and beeped behind the glass double doors of the airlock, ‘Specimen Lab’ emblazoned on the wall beside it. Scarlet spied several vials of blood and petri dishes in the refrigerator, and something that looked like an incubator. That place had to go. He fumbled for the pass keys and swiped several of them over the lock before one finally worked and the doors hissed open, internal positive air pressure inside preventing any outside air from seeping in.

He slipped in and set to work. There was no way that this room could be allowed to survive intact. Scarlet methodically trashed it, emptied every fridge, freezer and container of biological samples, and piled it all in the centre of the floor. Two flasks of hydrochloric acid were put to immediate use, poured into and over every machine there, then the remainder dumped over the samples.

He then pawed through the shelves, searching for something flammable to make sure it was dealt with permanently.

In the back of the refrigerator, a large glass bottle caught his eye. “100% Denatured Ethanol. Perfect.” He gave a grim smile and searched for the rest of the supplies he'd need for an improvised Molotov Cocktail. A first aid kit yielded a cotton triangular bandage, which was twisted into a wick and stuffed into the bottle. He also turned on the gas tap for a Bunsen burner for good measure. Scarlet backed up until he was in the inner doors of the airlock, lit the wick with the stolen lighter and tossed the burning bottle onto the pile as he dove through the outer doors.

In the first moment, the glass shattered and burning alcohol sprayed across the room. In the second moment, the gas ignited. A very satisfying fireball filled the room and shattered the inner doors with a whoomph of expanding gas. The outer ones thankfully held the blast in. The temperature in the room shot up several hundred degrees, cooking everything organic before the fire suppressant systems had a chance to switch on and smother the flames with plumes of foam.

Scarlet didn't stay to watch. There would have to be alarms going off in the control centre; it was time to make himself scarce.

0o0o0

Outside, a muffled cough-like sound was all the warning the perimeter guard got, before Ochre dropped him a split second later with a silenced sniper rifle. “Centre mass,” his borrowed spotter reported, lining up on the next target with his night-vision scope. “Distance, 134 meters; wind, one knot from the east; elevation, two meters.” Ochre adjusted his aim ever so slightly, squeezed the trigger again and dropped the second guard. “Centre mass, both targets down,” the spotter reported.

“North and East perimeter cleared,” Ochre murmured into his RadioCap .

“S.I.G. South and West cleared. Security system neutralised,” Blue’s voice whispered back. “All units, move in, now!”

Shock and awe was the main tactic the captains had advocated: attack after nightfall, helijets dropping from altitude to disgorge their passengers on the roof, and sweep close to the building with their powerful spotlights to blind and disorient with light and noise, as well as overload any night vision gear the enemy had, and ruin any sniper's aim with the rotor wash. Commandos rappelled down from the roof to smash windows and lob flashbangs; others worked from the perimeter to establish a cordon to catch anyone who was missed, while a third team fitted breaching charges to the main, side and emergency doors to force a way through. Each captain had a commando team with them as they entered the building from all sides at once and started the slow, dangerous process of searching the sprawling facility room by room.

0o0o0

Deep in the bowels of the building, Scarlet looked up and allowed himself a grin as a siren started to wail then abruptly cut off; the lights flickered as backup generators kicked in and the faint chatter of a Spectrum issue semi-automatic rifle echoed down the hallway he was traversing. They’d come.

Finally.

But hardly one to sit on his hands and await rescue, Scarlet clutched his acquired weaponry closer and went hunting in the direction of the closest panicked shouting.

0o0o0

“Come on, Doctor, quickly! We have to evacuate!” Thomas Herdekker banged on Mills’ bedroom door, shouting orders to his men and fighting his own rising panic. How had Spectrum found them?

“What is it? What’s going on?” Mills blubbered as he came to the door, confused and disoriented by the noise and chaos.

“Spectrum’s here!” The mercenary roughly dragged Mills out of his room and into the hallway. “The prisoner’s escaped, the specimen lab is on fire and we must go!”

“But my research…!”

“Will only continue if you’re alive!” Herdekker snarled, not mentioning how his pay was also tied to the good doctor's continued existence. That was the greater concern for Herdekker , not some crazy Doctor Frankenstein experiments. He shoved the doctor in the approximate direction of the nearest exit. “Move!”

Rifle in one hand, hustling the good doctor along with the other and his attention everywhere except where it really should have been, Herdekker shouted into the radio for his mercenaries to fall back and establish a defensive line, while he made for the exit one level up with Mills.

He didn’t notice the figure that emerged from a connecting hallway and started stalking them, silent on his bare feet as they hurried away from the main cluster of mercenaries and up a broad concrete staircase to an empty level of the hospital.

The blubbering, protesting Mills' first clue was when Herdekker suddenly stopped shouting into his radio and instead made a kind of strangled gurgle, his grip going slack and his Uzi clattering to the ground. He turned to ask what was wrong. The words stuck in his throat when he saw Herdekker clutching at the knife that had quite suddenly appeared in the side of his neck, blood fountaining down his front. The mercenary croaked something indecipherable, his eyes wide in fear, then he crumpled to the ground, quite dead.

“You!” The venomous hatred in the low snarl promised terrible, terrible things for Doctor Anthony Joseph Mills.

“Oh dear, oh no!” Mills shrilled in terror as Captain Scarlet, filthy and furious, stepped over Herdekker’s body and stalked towards his tormentor. Mills tried to back away, to run from the grim apparition, but tripped on Herdekker’s fallen gun and went sprawling on the floor. With a wordless snarl, Scarlet pounced, his broad hands locking around Mills’ neck.

Mills opened his mouth to scream but Scarlet tightened his grip in warning, thumbs pressing down on the arch of the hyoid bone. One wrong move and he'd be left to slowly suffocate to death. The pudgy scientist froze, fixated by the ice in the blue eyes that were locked on his. But the ice was nothing compared to the fire that fuelled the almost skeletal man who pinned him, a temper that had been held in careful check, deliberately channelled in such a way as to hamper and frustrate the ones who had held him.

It was with a deepening sense of horror that Mills realised that that self-same fury, wielded as skilfully as a physical weapon, was now solely directed at him.

For his part, Scarlet found himself caught in a strange quandary. Killing the armed goon had been a straightforward decision – Scarlet knew that broad Euro accent. No more shooting innocent people in the head or beating up captives for Thomas. Ending that particular threat had satisfied the very primal part of his psyche concerned with threat/harm/danger.

But Mills…? It would be so easy, just a little bit more pressure on the delicate bone and another threat would be ended. The primal part of him – wounded and hurting – wanted the monster dead and the danger dealt to. But the soldier in him balked at killing an unarmed man.

“Scarlet!”

The clatter of boots preceded Captain Blue's arrival, a good half a dozen charcoal-tunicked commandos at his back. Adam sized up the situation at a glance and carefully lowered his service pistol, eyes widening when he realised exactly how many bones he could see and how far they stood out under the tightly stretched, jaundiced skin of his gaunt and angry partner. “Scarlet, let him go,” he tried to coax, holstering his gun and holding out one hand to his partner. “Let him go and come with me.”

“This is Doctor Mills.” Paul glanced back at his friend, the words coming out in a growl, punctuated by a squeak from the captive when Scarlet's hands tightened a fraction. “He killed me, Adam. Killed me again and again and again. He ripped pieces out of me while he took notes and crowed about scientific discovery. And he's killed dozens more trying to make them like me... Now I’m going to stop him. No one will judge me for this.”

The dark head rose, deep sunk eyes finding Adam's. Paul's expression flickered for a moment from grim determination to pleading, almost as if looking for permission, for Adam’s approval of the act that he so dearly wanted to commit. “I should kill him,” he announced.

Blue let the statement hang there for a moment, all too aware of what he should do, but not entirely sure of the best path to get there; even though he would have much rather allowed Scarlet to exact his revenge.

Moving slowly, Blue unslung his rifle from across his back and handed it off to one of his commandos. Paul tracked his every movement, clearly on edge. A discreet gesture had the others back off to a safe distance, then Blue folded his tall frame down to Scarlet's eye level and knelt, one hand braced on the cracked green linoleum. Not once did his eyes leave those of his friend.

“You could kill him, Paul,” Blue said at last. “But it won't make you feel better.”

“It'll keep him from doing to anyone else what he did to me!” Scarlet flared back, eyes narrowing down to slits. “He murdered them, Adam! Innocent people, dozens of them, and all of them died horribly!”

“But will it get you the people who made all this happen?” Blue countered, eyes gentle and voice firm. “Will it stop them from finding another scientist and more victims, or will it just make you feel better for about five minutes? Besides, death is him getting off easy.” Blue stood and offered his hand to his friend. “You're a soldier, not a murderer like him. He's not worth it. C'mon, let's get you out of here.”

Paul stared at the proffered hand, then turned back to the terrified man he held pinned. “Never let me catch you again,” he growled and got up, using both Blue's hand and the wall for support as he levered himself to his feet.

Blue slung Scarlet's arm around his shoulders and wrapped his free hand around the shockingly thin waist. “Lean on me,” he instructed. He then caught the eyes of one of the non-colour-coded officers and jerked his head back at Doctor Mills. “Get that into custody,” he ordered. “Then keep searching the rest of this complex. I want everyone not Spectrum arrested.”

0o0o0

Outside, it was organised chaos as helijets circled the area and the first of the prisoners were marched out of the facility. Spectrum Intelligence had finally caught up and the first of their teams were making their way in to scour the building.

The Spectrum after action report to SI would certainly not mention that Ochre – upon Fawn's recommendation – had casually tossed an incendiary grenade into each of the body freezers in the morgue he'd found, rather than leave it intact for SI to inventory and do who-knew-what with the corpses. That little detail would be for Colonel White's ears only. As far as Spectrum was concerned, the official line was 'it was like that when we got there.'

Careful to shield him from gawkers and onlookers, Blue guided his partner away from the main hub of activity to the side area where the medical team had set up their clinic.

“Scarlet!” Fawn almost dropped his field kit in shock, aghast at the sight of the British Captain. “What happened to you? Wait, no, don't say anything, just lie down and you can tell me later.” He hurried over to the closest stretcher, collapsed it and unlocked the safety belts, brushing them out of the way.

“Take it easy on him, Doc,” Blue murmured to Fawn when Scarlet shook his helping hand off and made his own way to the stretcher, picking his way gingerly over the rough ground. “He's had a rough time with doctors and medical tests, don't get tempted.”

Fawn glared at the taller man. “What kind of nut do you take me for?” he snapped, “There's a time and place for that, and I know that this is not it, thank you very much!” He then turned back to Scarlet and crouched next to him, opening his bag. “I need to start an IV, Captain. Actually two. You’ll need lots of fluids and glucose. Is that all right? I'll have to poke and prod a bit to find a good vein though,” he added, frowning at the condition of Scarlet’s arms – spindly and heavily pockmarked with partially healed track marks.

“It's fine, Doctor.” Scarlet carefully made himself comfortable on the semi-reclined stretcher and offered his left arm; it was in far better condition than his right. He watched, tension radiating off him as Fawn tied a tourniquet around his arm and searched for a vein that could handle a needle. Even with his miraculous healing powers, his body had to prioritise damage. Minor scar tissue could wait when vital organs were under threat.

“It looks like they've stuck you like a pin-cushion. I can't get any viable veins in your elbow or in the back of your hand.” Fawn frowned after a few unsuccessful needle sticks and untied the tourniquet. “Until we get you plumped up a bit, I want to try the veins in your ankles. Intra-osseous would normally be a sure bet, but I just don't know the condition of your bones right now, and jugular is only if that doesn’t work. Is that okay?”

“Do it.” Scarlet laid his head on the pillow, searching for the reassuring presence of Captain Blue before allowing Doctor Fawn access to his feet. The all too familiar gnaw of hunger was starting again, now that the adrenaline had run its course. He'd agree to almost anything if it got him the nutrients he needed.

“I'll start you on IV glucose and saline first and get a naso -gastric feeding tube in. Then I want to do a round of bloods back at Cloudbase to see what else you need,” Fawn explained, as he carefully cleaned a patch of skin with an alcohol swab and laid out his equipment. “Aha, got a good one here. Let yourself go into the coma as soon as you can, all right?”

“All right.” Scarlet forced himself to relax and unclench his fists when Fawn warned ‘sharp scratch’ and pressed the needle to his skin. “This is Doctor Fawn”, he reminded himself as the needle went in. “He's safe. He won't hurt me.”

There was some fussing with tape and tubing, a ‘Hold this’ directed at someone else, and something cool began to flow into his bloodstream. His retrometabolic systems all but pounced on the influx of raw energy, shoving his consciousness aside and shutting him down to allow it free reign to repair the damage done. He was unconscious before Fawn even had a chance to set up the next IV, wrapped deep in a dreamless sleep.

0o0o0

“Well done. A very good night's work by everyone,” White congratulated his senior staff gathered in the conference room, barring of course Captain Scarlet in recovery, and Symphony who was on duty in Angel One. Fawn had stuck his head into the room long enough to report that Scarlet was recovering well and would potentially be up for visitors ‘at some point in the afternoon’ before heading back to Sickbay to prepare the next round of nutrient, electrolyte and mineral cocktails for his most unusual patient.

“Thanks to your diligent work, we have not only rescued Captain Scarlet, we have also sealed a leak in Spectrum Intelligence, secured a dangerous loose end in Doctor Mills, and we shall hopefully soon have the ‘sponsors’ of this entire ordeal lined up for trial. All with only a handful of minor injuries.” Colonel White went on. “You should all be very proud of your work tonight, and I will ensure it is properly recognised in the official channels. But for now, get some rest. I'll expect your final reports by 1600 hours tomorrow.”

Magenta raised a hand and somewhat cheekily asked: “Sir, just to clarify, seeing as it’s 0423 hours, is '1600 tomorrow' meaning 1600 today or 1600 tomorrow tomorrow ?”

The surreptitious chuckle amongst the officers and Angels served to break the last shards of the tension they'd all been carrying since the beginning of the mission.

“Considering how the quality of your report writing decreases in proportion to how little sleep you've had, I will have to make it tomorrow tomorrow if I am to have a hope of reading it,” White remarked dryly, enjoying the round of actual laughter he managed to provoke. “You are all dismissed.”

0o0o0

He awoke with a start, the tang of disinfectants and cleaners heavy in his nostrils. Machinery hummed and beeped in the background and the dull ache in his arms told him where the IV needles were. Despite the deep-set grogginess, his finely honed combat instincts were still active. They put two and two together and screamed a warning: Medical lab! Not safe! Get out!

With a grunt, Scarlet fought off the urge to give into his body's demand to sleep, and carefully worked his way up to a sitting position, eyes narrowed against the bright lights of the machines flanking his bed in the dim room. He could feel that he wasn't running at full capacity yet, probably not even 50% capacity, judging by the leaden feeling in his limbs, but that didn't matter. He was mobile and this was a medical lab. He wasn't going to stay put.

He scanned the area, spotting no one else in the double bed room.

Good.

The machines were easily switched off and their sensors removed, though the thought that they seemed strangely familiar was dismissed into the fog of exhaustion currently clouding his mind. He'd seen enough blasted medical devices to recognise most of them, that had to be it. A quick tug and the IV needles were removed. He groped at his face, feeling the itch of surgical tape and a naso -gastric feeding tube running into his nose. After a couple of false tries and a momentary fight with his gag reflex, it too was carefully drawn out and left hanging.

A quick examination of himself found no obvious tracking devices, not even a restraint, but he was clean and glad to find his tattered and bloodied jeans had been replaced with a clean set of paisley pyjamas. Scarlet glanced around again and slithered off the bed, muffling a hiss when his bare feet touched the cold floor.

One last, wary glance around, and he slipped out the door and into the hall, searching for a safe place to sleep and recover from the horrors he had endured.

0o0o0

Boots tossed carelessly on the floor, Rhapsody sighed, ran her fingers through her wealth of copper red hair and flopped down on the couch in her apartment, staring up at the dim shadows cast on the ceiling by the waning moon outside. “I can almost hear my mother now,” The English Angel mused to herself. “Don't flop on the couch, dearest. Ladies do not flop. Nor,” she smiled to herself as she swung her legs up onto the squabs and curled into their embrace, “do they lie on the couch. That is what you have a bed for.”

She sighed again and dragged one of the cushions under her head for a pillow. “Ladies, however,” she murmured in rebuttal, “do not spend night after night either fretting about their missing beloved or imagining what they're going to do to the people who kidnapped him.” Dianne smirked into the dark, picturing what her former mentor in spycraft , Lady Penelope, would have done. Though the elegant aristocrat would have never dreamed of resorting to the use of physical violence against someone in revenge, she did however know of several ways in which to make life exceedingly uncomfortable for them.

Much more uncomfortable than the fate that awaited Doctor Mills at deWitt , not to mention the ‘sponsors’ that Spectrum Intelligence was busy tracking down. Doctor Mills was a meticulous note-taker and SI had collected every scrap of paper from the labs. Life was about to become very unpleasant for certain people.

With that happy thought in mind, Rhapsody dozed off and slept peacefully for the first time in days.

0o0o0

Scarlet was running on autopilot now, instinct and training driving him on as he sought out the lesser used halls and ducked around cameras without a second thought, stumbling in that painfully aware yet half-numb state produced by adrenaline and exhaustion. They were bound to notice his absence soon and he had to find a safe place before his own body mutinied and made him completely vulnerable.

He could feel the peculiar lethargy of reactivating retrometabolisim sneaking up on him again, now that he had a full belly and the energy to spend on it. His feet were starting to drag and his eyelids drooped as that prickling, creeping sensation spread out from his spine. But sleep was dangerous. It made him too vulnerable. He needed a safe place first. “Got to stay awake...” Scarlet grimaced and shook himself, looking down a turn off that terminated in a lift shaft. He knew that somewhere in that direction was a room designated as his.

“No...” He frowned and turned away. “... Too easy... first place to look.” Fighting to stay awake now, he grasped an exposed beam for support and scanned the intersection again, searching for a way to safety. Another hall caught his attention. “Wait... that way...” The captain forced himself into motion with a grunt and stumbled down the carpeted hall. He knew there was a safe place this way; a place they wouldn't think to check, a place where he wouldn't be hurt. He could sleep safely there.

0o0o0

“Good morning, Captain!” Nurse Tarris sang out from behind a stack of linens and extra pillows as she backed into the room marked off as 'Scarlet's Ward'. They'd all learned from O’Brian's mistake of not giving a highly-trained and groggy soldier adequate warning of what was going on. Since the captain had also shown the proclivity to occasionally wake up earlier than expected from retrometabolism, they all called out before entering, no matter what state he was in. “I'm just here to check your vitals and roll you over.”

She set down the linens on a workstation, rolled up her sleeves in a brisk fashion and turned to face the bed... only to find the captain absent, leads and IV lines dangling uselessly. Nurse Tarris stared for a moment at the unexpected tableau. “... Oh dear...” Her jaw tightened and she reached for the intercom button beside the bed. “Medical to Security. Captain Scarlet is missing.”

0o0o0

Awareness slowly returned, balancing on the cusp of asleep and awake for an interminable moment before slipping over the tipping point and prompting her to awaken. Her body made itself known, legs tingling with the familiar sensation of pins and needles when she tried to move and a heavy but warm something covering her from the chest down.

Rhapsody stirred and opened her eyes, drowsily glancing down at herself to see what had disturbed her. All lingering traces of sleep very quickly deserted her when she realised that the mysterious weight was none other than one Paul Metcalfe – looking much better but still quite thin, deep asleep and using her as a body pillow with his head atop her chest and his arms and one leg wrapped securely around her. “Paul?” She squirmed a bit to relieve the pressure of his bony hip on her right leg and equally bony knee on her left. The couch had never really been designed for one person to sleep on, much less two.

There was a muffled grumble of protest at the movement and the dark head lifted, sleep-clouded blue eyes meeting hers. “Dianne,” he murmured, lips curving into a faint smile. Paul reached up and caressed her cheek with a gentle hand. “Sleep...” He brushed one coppery curl away from her face and smiled drowsily. “Safe here... sleep...” He laid his head down again with a contented sigh, curling his tall frame closer to hers.

Despite herself, Dianne relaxed into the somewhat awkward embrace, wriggling her right arm free to drape it across his back. Paul hmmd drowsily in approval and within the space of a few breaths, she joined him in peaceful slumber.

Footnotes:

I would like to make a special thank you to Chris for running the website and setting the challenge, for very kindly beta-reading this for me and I was directly inspired by her work 'Heartless' to make this story happen.

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