Author's notes:
Thanks to Hazel Köhler for beta reading this story, to Hubby, Sineater and JMount74 on Archives of our Own for the idea bouncing and to Chris for yet again hosting the challenge!
Well wrapped up in cold-weather gear, Colonel White ducked his head as he entered the narrow confines of the passenger compartment of the helicopter. The pale light of an alpine dawn slanted through the small windows, illuminating the cluster of lumps that were his Captains and an Angel, snuggled together for warmth under a patchwork quilt of emergency blankets, spare clothes and winter coats.
He could only tell where Rhapsody was by the coppery curl that had escaped the confines of the undershirt that she’d wrapped around her head in lieu of a hat. Scarlet and Magenta were identical tufts of black hair peeping out from under the blankets, their ‘caps having fallen off at some point during the night. He could only differentiate the two because Scarlet was a longer lump than Magenta. Positioned close to Scarlet, Blue’s boot toes stuck out from the silvery cocoon he was wrapped in, but with Grey and Ochre he simply could not tell which shape was which, so well swathed they were.
It would have been a heart-touching scene if not for the drifts of snow around the huddled bodies, the tracery of frost that whitened hair and bedding alike and the utter stillness of the place - the soul-chilling silence of the grave. Grief tearing at him, White doffed his ‘cap, bowed his head and murmured a prayer. He’d held out a faint hope that maybe, possibly, someone might have survived the long night, but clearly they had not.
Coming back from a successful mission defending the European Space Agency’s newest radar tracking station from a Mysteron threat, the helicopter had developed an unexpected mechanical fault and the engine had cut out.
White had deep suspicions about the origin of that fault. The timing of it was far too convenient.
Rhapsody had managed to land them in the Alps, but with a storm closing in and the helicopter wrecked by the hard impact, they’d had to shelter in place. They’d maintained hourly radio contact until just after midnight, then naught but silence had answered Green’s repeated hails. As soon as the storm had cleared, White had taken personal charge of the rescue mission - three helicopters and half a dozen staff from Medical.
But now… now the rescue mission was a recovery mission. Grim-faced, White stood aside to allow the necessary photographs to be taken to document the scene before the medics came in to start carrying out the bodies.
While he knew that one of his officers would return, in the face of this deep loss, it was almost a cruelty that he would.
0o0o0
Two days later, White sat ramrod straight in the hard-backed visitor’s chair. The recovery of the bodies had been textbook, the wreckage of the helicopter was now at a nearby WAAF airbase and being taken apart for the investigation and Fawn was almost through the grim process of autopsying the deceased for the report. White had been writing the letters that would be hand-delivered to the next of kin, for those who had them, when Doctor Burgundy had called to advise him that Scarlet was near waking.
White had immediately come. While the doctors and nurses had kept the watch, the duty and burden of explaining to Scarlet how he’d lost all of his closest friends and the woman he loved in one fell swoop would be his, and his alone.
Burgundy’s timing had been spot on. Within minutes of taking his seat, White saw the signs - the deep breath, feet twitching, hands flexing, and a grimace as Scarlet approached full consciousness. White was preparing what he would say when Scarlet suddenly snapped awake with a strangled noise, pale-faced as he clawed his way up into a sitting position. He gasped for breath, sucking down the ozone-tainted air of Medical, then when the adrenaline had ebbed somewhat he looked around himself to get his bearings.
His eyes wide, Scarlet’s fear was instant and unconcealed when he registered that it was the Colonel who was waiting for him.
“...Sir?”
It was only a single word, rasped out in a voice that was scratchy from disuse, but Charles could clearly hear what was behind it - No, please no, please don’t tell me that what I think has happened has come to pass.
“I am so very, very sorry, Scarlet, but no one else made it.” White tried to break the news as gently as he could, but there was very little he could do to soften this particular blow.
There was a long pause as Paul absorbed the words. When he spoke, his voice was barely above a whisper. "...no one?"
“No one.”
White was looking directly at Scarlet as he made his answer and he saw the moment that it happened. Confronted by one of his deepest fears, something behind the younger man’s eyes broke and left nothing but a yawning emptiness in its wake.
Charles spoke quickly. If he was going to have a chance to stop what he could see hovering on the horizon, he had to get in now, before that void could be filled by something else. “Paul, don’t do it. Please, don’t do it.” He wasn’t quite sure what he was urging, desperately scrambling for something else to say, something that would drag Paul back from the brink of the proverbial precipice that he now stood at, but Paul interrupted him, his voice eerily placid and emotionless as he spoke.
“Don’t do what, sir?”
“Don’t let the despair get you.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that, sir, the despair can’t get me now.” The remark was terrifyingly nonchalant. “After the Mysterons… it left a darkness in me. The others… they were my wayfinders, my beacons, they kept me from getting lost in the darkness.” Scarlet paused, considering his next words. “They’re not there anymore, but I’m not lost.” The corner of his mouth twitched in a ghost of his usual half smile, an expression that didn’t touch the rest of his face. “I’m exactly where I need to be.”
“What do you mean?” White asked carefully, measuring the distance between himself and the emergency button on the wall. Three steps and a stretch and he could hit it. It’d take a matter of moments, seconds at most, and the room would be filled with doctors and nurses ready to assist.
Scarlet glanced away as if listening to someone else, then looked back at him. “I’m sorry sir, but I need to go now. They’re waiting at the hangar for me, Blue says it’s wheels up in two.”
The very matter-of-fact delivery threw White for the split second that Scarlet needed.
There was an explosion of motion from the bed as White pushed himself out of the chair, right hand already reaching out as he lunged for the button. Charles registered an arm locking around his throat in the sleeper hold, pressure, then nothing.
0o0o0
Weeks later, the man once known as Conrad Turner approached a small pub on the outskirts of Bethesda in Wales. It was one of those places that hadn’t changed in a hundred years and wouldn’t change for a hundred more - low-ceilinged with dark-stained beams overhead, it had a cluster of tables in the middle of the room while booths lined walls decorated with framed newspaper clippings and various memorabilia. The ancient linoleum floors were worn through in places and sticky everywhere, and the smell of tobacco smoke was ingrained into every surface. How it held an ‘A’ food safety rating was anyone’s guess.
There was enough of Conrad’s humanity left for his Mysteron masters to feel Black’s sense of trepidation about this meeting and they understood the source of the emotion - the actions of their former agent Captain Scarlet had been unpredictable of late.
Not long after his disappearance from Cloudbase and the subsequent manhunt for him, a Spectrum aircraft technician had been found beaten to death in a seedy hotel in London. The hotel security cameras had captured Scarlet entering, then after an hour he left, making no effort to conceal himself. In the room was sufficient evidence that the technician had been bribed by Bereznik agents to sabotage the helicopter that had been used on Scarlet’s last mission.
Then Scarlet had vanished.
Unconfirmed reports had put a man of his description either at the funerals or visiting the graves of the Captains and Rhapsody Angel, then there was nothing until a potential sighting of him at a nuclear missile site and research complex in a remote area of Kazakhstan that officially didn’t exist. The Russian and Kazakh governments had been quick to deny reports that a rocket had been launched from the complex, a claim aided by the fact that it had completely disappeared from all tracking radar within moments.
Further research had unveiled that at that complex the Russians had been working on something they called ‘Prizrak’ or ‘ghost’ missiles - untraceable and untrackable. It wasn’t the only project at the facility either. They had also been building a nuclear warhead that the designers had dubbed ‘Ragnarok’ - the end of the world. Preliminary reports suggested there was more than enough power contained within the device to live up to the name.
Now, Scarlet had signalled that he wished to meet with Black, leaving a message in a drop box that’d been unused since before Conrad’s mission to Mars.
With this combination of events, only a fool would have been unconcerned, and the Mysterons were not fools.
Black entered the dimly lit pub, pausing just inside the door to check over the main room. It was the lull between the lunch and dinner crowds - there were only two or three patrons at the bar, chatting to one of the staff, and one man at a booth, nursing a drink as he flicked through a newspaper spread out on the table before him. Black recognised the man in the booth immediately and crossed the floor to slide onto the bench seat opposite him.
It was Conrad’s immediate observation that Scarlet looked thin - hollow cheeked and sallow skinned. Then Scarlet looked up and Conrad’s spiking fear was enough to make his Mysteron masters wary. Scarlet was tidy and groomed, but it was in that way that told the non-casual observer that it was just enough to go through the motions and not draw attention to himself by being unkempt. But his eyes… when Scarlet had met his eyes, Conrad’s instinctive fear had skyrocketed. If he had been in control of himself, Conrad would have immediately fled.
Scarlet’s eyes weren’t dead.
They were empty, devoid of all things that make someone human - including sanity.
“You wished to meet me.” The Mysterons speaking through Black were cautious. Through their studies they knew what a human absent of reason could be capable of. This was an unsettling development.
“Yes.” Scarlet set his newspaper aside to reveal a plain white file folder on the greasy table, but he kept his hand on it for the moment. “The war. End it. Or I will.”
“Elaborate.”
In reply, Scarlet shoved the folder across to him. Black opened it and flicked through page after page of Cyrillic writing - technical data - then looked up at Scarlet. “So, you did launch the ghost missile.”
“Yes, with the Ragnarok warhead. It’s a planet-killer, and you’ll never see it coming. At the moment it’s dormant and waiting. But one signal from me and it’ll split your precious planet in two.” A faint, sardonic smile tugged at Scarlet’s mouth but didn’t touch those empty eyes. “And before you get any ideas, I’ve rigged it with a dead man’s switch.” He pulled down the collar of the wine red tee shirt he wore to show the edge of a crude device sunk into his right pectoral muscle. “If my heart stops, it goes off. If you attack Earth, it goes off. If you attack me, it goes off.”
“You wouldn’t,” the Mysterons started, “the disruptions to the balance of the solar system…”
“I would,” Scarlet interrupted, his chilling smile growing. “Ask your puppet about me, if there’s anything left of him in there to ask. You Mysterons have tortured me for years, and now I have no one holding me back and nothing to lose. Even if I do blow up Mars, Earth won’t suffer as much as it will if the war continues on. Long story short, I have you in check. It’s ending today, but you get to pick how.”
Black stilled as the Mysteron Consciousness conferred. According to the specifications that Scarlet had given them and the other information available to them, the missile and warhead were more than ample to accomplish the job. According to their files on Spectrum and the information they’d ripped from the minds of Scarlet, Brown, Black, Indigo and other Spectrum staff that they’d retrometabolised over the years, Scarlet was certainly capable of actions like this, but if he was sane, his moral code would have stopped this before it even started. Under normal circumstances, they would have confidently concluded that this was a bluff and called him on it.
However, these were not normal circumstances.
What threw their calculations into disarray was the element of chaos that Scarlet’s lack of sanity posed. Sane, rational humans performed sane, rational actions. But a human without rational thought, who no longer cared for his personal safety, whose life now no longer held meaning or value beyond the desire for revenge… they could not take the chance that he was speaking the truth. Whilst he did not care for his own survival and was willing to gamble with the lives of others, they certainly did not wish to gamble with their own.
“...we shall no longer act against Earth,” Black intoned. “The War of Nerves is ended.”
“Thank you.” Scarlet politely nodded to him, took a black leather jacket from the bench seat, placed a handful of coins on the table and left.
Outside, Scarlet dug through his jeans pocket for the burner phone that he’d picked up in a store around the corner and dialled the memorised number as he walked. The light was good, he’d be back in the cottage deep in Snowdonia National Park within a couple of hours if he could keep up this pace.
On the second ring, there was an answer. “Colonel White speaking, who is this?”
“Colonel, it’s me.”
“Scarlet! What the devil is going on? Where are you?”
“The war is over. We’ve fixed things with the Mysterons. As long as I have a heartbeat, they won’t touch Earth. Goodbye, Colonel.”
“Scar-!”
Paul turned off the phone, dropped it in a bin and continued on his way, listening to voices that only he could hear as his friends talked over what they’d do now. Blue and Grey were arguing for the cautious approach, while Ochre reiterated that they couldn’t trust the Mysterons to keep their word. Magenta agreed, and rightfully so in Scarlet’s opinion, stating that they needed proof of some kind that the war was indeed over and they’d need to keep an eye on things to make sure they weren’t being played for fools. Dianne also advocated care, with the potential for reaching out to trusted friends for information that they couldn’t get through newspapers and radios.
The eventual group consensus was that they’d have to remain vigilant, there was no way the Mysterons wouldn’t try and find a way to kill him without triggering the nuke. It’d be best if Scarlet continued to lie low, they decided, and he heartily agreed. He’d move to a new hideaway in the morning, he had several scattered about.
But for now they could revel in the simple joy that the war was finally over.
They’d won.