Fic: A Whole Lot Of Yesterday (3/4)
Mar. 9th, 2018 07:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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tli_productionsHeader information and notes contained in Part 1.
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
3
On the other side of the anomaly cold air hits Becker in a single solid wave. He tightens his grip on his EMD and, not for the first time since the anomaly project restarted, wishes he had his Mossberg.
He examines his surroundings. He's in what looks like a quarry, with a high, sharp cliff closing off a decent sized space of flattish ground. It's maybe the size of a football field.
He glances back as the others slowly emerge from the anomaly. Stephen, Connor and Abby immediately fan out, but they're met with the same indistinct yellowish-brown stone that Becker was.
They're in a pit, Becker realises. There's a wall a few metres behind the anomaly that completes the cliff perimeter. Behind him Stephen pivots slowly, his EMD aimed at the tops of the cliffs. And behind Stephen, Claudia and Emily are unarmed but still cautious.
Becker turns back around and walks further out into the pit. There are no access points, no obvious means of climbing up the walls – and no sign of Danny, Jenny or Ethan.
He's stopped from going any further by a hand on his arm. Stephen gives him a warning look, then steps ahead of Becker. Dimly he realises Stephen is looking for tracks.
“Anything?” Becker asks quietly.
Stephen considers the ground. “I've got one pair of shoes running in that direction,” he says, pointing to patches of scuffed dirt.
Becker follows the invisible line. It doesn't lead to anything he can see.
“Another anomaly,” Emily says, coming up alongside Stephen.
“Has to have been,” Connor calls out. “There's literally nothing else here.”
That's one hell of a coincidence, and one Becker doesn't like at all. “Could they have gone up at all?” he asks no one in particular.
To perhaps everyone's surprise it's Claudia who walks over and puts her good hand against the wall. “No,” she says.
Becker tries not to react to Jenny's voice, hoarse as it is.
“Not without help,” Claudia adds.
Becker immediately dismisses the possibility as an option. Ethan hadn't come through this anomaly, which means he couldn't have known what would be on this side of it.
It means he was improvising everything that came up to, and after, finding Danny, and that scares Becker a little. People who wing it are infinitely harder to predict. And at no point had anyone even remotely considered a connection between Ethan Dobrowski and Patrick Quinn. Let alone that they could be the same person.
“Well, there's definitely nothing here now,” Connor says. He waves an anomaly detector around for emphasis. “Aside from the anomaly we just came through, I mean.”
Behind them the original anomaly flickers and pulses but it stays open. Becker looks around the floor of the pit again. At the tracks Stephen had pointed out. “It's no good if we can't follow them.”
Connor looks dejected. “No. I guess not.” Then he brightened up a little. “Unless we could.”
“What do you mean?” Emily asked from the far edge of the pit.
“Stephen,” Connor says quickly. He jabs a finger at him for emphasis. “Stephen brought back an anomaly remote, didn't he?”
“Like the one we used to get back,” Abby says, nodding. “Ours burned out.”
“Mine too,” Claudia adds.
Everyone turns to Stephen. “Not mine – I don't think so.”
“You don't know?” Connor frowns.
Stephen inclines his head. “It worked when I last had it. I don't have it now.”
“So it's back at the ARC somewhere.” Connor doesn't seem bothered dealing with people who don't use as many words as he does. In fact, he's starting to look excited. “And if it's back at the ARC somewhere, we can find it. And when we find it -”
Becker finally catches on. “We can come back and re-open the anomaly Danny, Jenny and Ethan went through.”
Connor jumps up and down a couple of times. “Yes!”
“That's going to take time, though,” Abby says.
Connor grins at her. “Quicker than waiting for it to open on its own. Come on!” He motions back to the open anomaly. “Before this one closes, guys!”
Abby hesitates then nods. “But we come back,” she says firmly, looking around at everyone. “We come back for them.”
Connor's the only one who nods in response, but no one disagrees.
o o o o o
Jenny runs through the second anomaly and swelters. The sudden dry heat almost knocks her flat after the cool of the basement and the chill of the quarry. She stumbles on uneven ground – she looks down, she's on dirt and grass and there's a slope and going up behind the anomaly – and tries to get her bearings.
Her first thought is she's been in forests like this before. Before time travel became an occupational hazard, she'd assumed that one forest was like another.
Now, though, she tries to take stock. The trees look normal. Something out of an Attenborough documentary rather than one of Connor's Powerpoint shows. The air is breathable – for now.
There. Movement.
Jenny shields her eyes, tries to make out the figures.
Then she double-checks her EMD is still in its holster and makes her way up the hill.
o o o o o
“So,” Abby begins, “where's the most likely place the remote is going to be?”
They're in the car park of the stately home. Becker has squashed the uneasy feeling about passing by the still unconscious Matt and the two soldiers, and for sneaking past the office where they'd left Danny and Jenny's wedding guests. And he's not the only one suddenly uncomfortable, it seems. Everyone has congregated around the 4x4 farthest away from the car park's CCTV cameras and are speaking in hushed tones.
He also belatedly realises everyone is waiting for him to answer. “I don't know,” he admits. “I was kept out of the loop on a lot of the details after Stephen came back.”
Connor looks unperturbed. “What about when Abby and I came back? What happened to our stuff then?”
Becker thinks. “Some of it was passed to the labs for examination. Burton took the tech.”
“Burton?” It's Claudia. Everyone turns to look at her. “Philip Burton?”
“Yes,” Stephen says quietly. He doesn't look at Claudia; he doesn't look at anyone.
For the first time today, Becker looks at Claudia – really looks at her, not just Jenny's face and the matted hair and the worn and dirtied clothes. For the first time he wonders if this is the Claudia Stephen left behind, in his original time line.
And if she is, then what has happened to her between then and now?
It's yet another interesting twist in a day that's been full of them, and Claudia's not the first person to react to the mention of Philip Burton.
“Wait until you meet Burton.”
Becker thinks he was aiming for light-hearted, but Stephen hesitates. The tiniest twitch at the corner of Stephen's mouth, and his left eyebrow barely dimples.
It's glaringly obvious if you know what to look for. Becker remembers the signs better than he ever thought he might, no mean feat considering that when he woke up that morning he thought Stephen was dead.
It's also something else they'll have to deal with later. Becker squashes the fresh wave of doubt and uncertainty in his gut and says: “We need to stay on task. Assuming Burton has the anomaly remote, where would he have stored it?”
Connor pulls a face. “Dunno about storage, something like that he'd want to examine it, try to reverse engineer it, even.”
“He hasn't given it to you?” Abby asks, frowning.
Connor looks puzzled for a moment but shakes his head. “It has to be in one of his labs. They're separate to everything else, not many people have access to them.”
“I do,” Becker says. It's one of the few things he refused to back down on during the early days of the new ARC being set up; he and a handful of people retained their unfettered access to the entirety of the facility.
Connor drums his hands on the side of the 4x4. It's not loud but the sound startles both Stephen and Claudia. “Come on! To the ARC!”
Becker glances at Claudia again. Even if he could think of anything to say, it's too late to back out now.
o o o o o
For what is supposed to be a bustling, albeit top secret, facility on continuous security alert, the ARC is very quiet. Lester is rankled on principle. He lasts all of ten minutes hovering at Jess' workstation once the flurry of field activity died down again, and Burton has yet to reappear, assuming the ministerial meetings from that morning have actually concluded.
No word of a lie, Burton's absence is the thing Lester likes the most about today's developments so far.
He retires to his office; much as with his arrival earlier his efforts at nonchalance go unappreciated. It would almost be disappointing if not for everything else happening.
Ah, well. Lester takes the mental hint and steps back outside. He glances one way down the hub then back towards Jess and her many computer screens. He's about to say something, perhaps something about his employees present and past running around, when one of those screens flickers into life.
Jess startles, focuses her attention on it. “Lester?” she calls out loudly. “Oh!”
“Sorry,” he says. He's right behind her now. “What is it?”
She points up at the far corner of a monitor. A 4x4 with ARC-issued license plates rolls into view and then out of the bottom of the frame.
Lester offers Jess a quizzical glance.
“That's the vehicle Becker's team took earlier,” she explains, then frowns. “The anomaly's still active; nobody notified me they were coming back.”
The unspoken I don't like this echoes, and Lester can only agree with the sentiment. More fortunately it also offers him an opportunity to involve himself properly in this increasingly interesting day.
“I'll go and find out why,” he tells her. He nods, decisively, to add to the illusion he either has any idea of what's going on or that he's actually in charge of anything any more.
Jess flashes him a quick grin then turns back to her workstation.
Down at the internal exit to the car park, whatever Lester had been expecting when the lift doors slid open, it wasn't the sight of half a dozen supposed professionals ducking behind a Ford Transit van.
First the black boxes, now... this. He walks over towards the van and sighs loudly. “You do realise the cameras aren't actually pointed in your direction.”
Someone lets out an ungainly yelp, followed quickly by the sound of someone stumbling.
Lester allows himself the tiniest fleeting smirk. Then something else occurs to him. “Not that it matters, of course. The bio-tags won't allow for whatever subterfuge you might have been thinking about.”
Becker, now the closest of this motley lot to Lester, lets out a loud breath and his shoulders sag. “Come on,” he mutters over his shoulder.
Stephen slowly emerges from behind the van, followed closely by Abby, Connor, Emily and Jenny.
Lester desperately tries to remember the quip about hiring policies he'd nearly used earlier, but something in Jenny's expression makes him pause.
“She's not Jenny,” Stephen says.
“Claudia Brown, then.” Lester inclines his head slightly, hoping his shock isn't showing. “I presume?”
The woman nods slowly.
“Now the sneaking around makes sense,” Lester continues, as blithely as he can manage. “Come with me.”
He turns back to the lift. “Yes, all of you.”
“But -” It's Connor this time.
Lester sighs again. “I know rather a lot's been happening today. I also know that this -” he waves a hand at the concreted, vehicle-filled privacy nightmare around them, “- is not the place to do anything about any of it. Whoever you're trying to hide from, for whatever conceivable reason, Miss Parker and I should be the very last people on that list.”
Suitably chastened, the team troop past him and file into the lift. Lester mentally pats himself on the back, and too late realises that the lift was not designed to take quite this many people in one journey.
Fortunately he's not the only one. The short trip upstairs is taken with flattened shoulders and sucked-in stomachs, and in complete silence.
As soon as the lift stops someone reaches behind Lester's back to stop the doors from opening.
Lester sighs. “Two things. One, we are all on the same side,” he says with as much emphasis as he can muster at short notice. “Two, the same person who can hide your bio-tag data can also hide the camera footage.”
“Oh yeah,” Connor says.
It takes every scrap of self-control Lester possesses to not bury his face in his hands and cry. Instead he leads his motley crew of supposed professionals through the ARC. After a couple of turns, Stephen nudges his elbow and indicates a different corridor.
They end up in Stephen's lab. Lester tries not to gawk, and again he's not the only one. Half of the room is taken up with a near carbon copy of Cutter's anomaly model, and across the far wall is a makeshift paper montage of the same model. Dotted around its edges are dozens of differently coloured post-it notes covered in tiny handwriting. Claudia and Connor peer at a few of them, and Abby looks briefly emotional before closing herself off.
“So,” Lester says eventually, when it becomes clear no one else will say anything. “What are you all doing here?”
“We need the anomaly remote,” Becker replies. “The one Stephen brought back with him. We think we can use it to track Danny and Jenny.”
Lester raises his eyebrows. “Elaborate.”
Becker does, using less than five sentences where most would exceed five paragraphs. Lester has never appreciated that more than now.
“It should be in Burton's laboratory,” he confirms. “Who is neither here nor supposed to be for the rest of the day. Are you sure it will do what you want it to?”
Connor nods. “We're not completely sure, but we still need to try.”
Lester nods. He pulls his phone out of his pocket and calls Jess. She answers on the second ring.
“Hypothetically, Jess,” he says slowly as everyone turns to watch him, “how long would it take your computers to reboot if the ARC's internal surveillance systems were to suddenly crash?”
“That's not how it works, and you know it,” she replies cheerfully, “but... ten minutes, maybe fifteen if the servers are slow for any reason?”
“Ten minutes,” Lester repeats. He glances at Becker, who pauses then nods. “I do appreciate how resourceful you can be, have I ever told you that?”
“Not that I can recall, but I'll be happy to remind you about this conversation.” Jess sounds distracted now. “Oh, look. Computer issues. You know how it is.”
“I do.” Lester hangs up and pockets the phone. He looks over at Becker again, who is closest to the door. “There's a security camera on the other side of the corridor. You should be able to see it from in here. Check and see if there's a green light visible, would you?”
Becker angles himself against the door and squints a little. “Yep, I can see it,” he says.
“Once it disappears you'll have ten minutes to find the lab and remote and get out of the ARC,” Lester says. “Maybe fifteen, but that's not a safe margin.”
“We can do ten,” Abby says quietly.
Of that, Lester has no doubt. Mostly because they have no choice, and for all that they seem frighteningly incompetent most of the time, the ARC teams have a well-versed history of fighting difficult odds.
It might just be why he's remained so attached to them after all this time.
“What about the black boxes?” Connor asks.
“I believe Matt asked for them to be switched off,” Lester replies. “I see no reason to countermand that right now.”
“Light's off,” Becker reports. He quickly opens the door.
“Good luck,” Lester murmurs.
Stephen's the last one out of the door. He hesitates and looks back at Lester. “I – thank you.”
“We'll talk about this later,” Lester says. “Go!”
Stephen nods, but goes.
o o o o o
Onto: Part 4
o o o o o
3
On the other side of the anomaly cold air hits Becker in a single solid wave. He tightens his grip on his EMD and, not for the first time since the anomaly project restarted, wishes he had his Mossberg.
He examines his surroundings. He's in what looks like a quarry, with a high, sharp cliff closing off a decent sized space of flattish ground. It's maybe the size of a football field.
He glances back as the others slowly emerge from the anomaly. Stephen, Connor and Abby immediately fan out, but they're met with the same indistinct yellowish-brown stone that Becker was.
They're in a pit, Becker realises. There's a wall a few metres behind the anomaly that completes the cliff perimeter. Behind him Stephen pivots slowly, his EMD aimed at the tops of the cliffs. And behind Stephen, Claudia and Emily are unarmed but still cautious.
Becker turns back around and walks further out into the pit. There are no access points, no obvious means of climbing up the walls – and no sign of Danny, Jenny or Ethan.
He's stopped from going any further by a hand on his arm. Stephen gives him a warning look, then steps ahead of Becker. Dimly he realises Stephen is looking for tracks.
“Anything?” Becker asks quietly.
Stephen considers the ground. “I've got one pair of shoes running in that direction,” he says, pointing to patches of scuffed dirt.
Becker follows the invisible line. It doesn't lead to anything he can see.
“Another anomaly,” Emily says, coming up alongside Stephen.
“Has to have been,” Connor calls out. “There's literally nothing else here.”
That's one hell of a coincidence, and one Becker doesn't like at all. “Could they have gone up at all?” he asks no one in particular.
To perhaps everyone's surprise it's Claudia who walks over and puts her good hand against the wall. “No,” she says.
Becker tries not to react to Jenny's voice, hoarse as it is.
“Not without help,” Claudia adds.
Becker immediately dismisses the possibility as an option. Ethan hadn't come through this anomaly, which means he couldn't have known what would be on this side of it.
It means he was improvising everything that came up to, and after, finding Danny, and that scares Becker a little. People who wing it are infinitely harder to predict. And at no point had anyone even remotely considered a connection between Ethan Dobrowski and Patrick Quinn. Let alone that they could be the same person.
“Well, there's definitely nothing here now,” Connor says. He waves an anomaly detector around for emphasis. “Aside from the anomaly we just came through, I mean.”
Behind them the original anomaly flickers and pulses but it stays open. Becker looks around the floor of the pit again. At the tracks Stephen had pointed out. “It's no good if we can't follow them.”
Connor looks dejected. “No. I guess not.” Then he brightened up a little. “Unless we could.”
“What do you mean?” Emily asked from the far edge of the pit.
“Stephen,” Connor says quickly. He jabs a finger at him for emphasis. “Stephen brought back an anomaly remote, didn't he?”
“Like the one we used to get back,” Abby says, nodding. “Ours burned out.”
“Mine too,” Claudia adds.
Everyone turns to Stephen. “Not mine – I don't think so.”
“You don't know?” Connor frowns.
Stephen inclines his head. “It worked when I last had it. I don't have it now.”
“So it's back at the ARC somewhere.” Connor doesn't seem bothered dealing with people who don't use as many words as he does. In fact, he's starting to look excited. “And if it's back at the ARC somewhere, we can find it. And when we find it -”
Becker finally catches on. “We can come back and re-open the anomaly Danny, Jenny and Ethan went through.”
Connor jumps up and down a couple of times. “Yes!”
“That's going to take time, though,” Abby says.
Connor grins at her. “Quicker than waiting for it to open on its own. Come on!” He motions back to the open anomaly. “Before this one closes, guys!”
Abby hesitates then nods. “But we come back,” she says firmly, looking around at everyone. “We come back for them.”
Connor's the only one who nods in response, but no one disagrees.
Jenny runs through the second anomaly and swelters. The sudden dry heat almost knocks her flat after the cool of the basement and the chill of the quarry. She stumbles on uneven ground – she looks down, she's on dirt and grass and there's a slope and going up behind the anomaly – and tries to get her bearings.
Her first thought is she's been in forests like this before. Before time travel became an occupational hazard, she'd assumed that one forest was like another.
Now, though, she tries to take stock. The trees look normal. Something out of an Attenborough documentary rather than one of Connor's Powerpoint shows. The air is breathable – for now.
There. Movement.
Jenny shields her eyes, tries to make out the figures.
Then she double-checks her EMD is still in its holster and makes her way up the hill.
“So,” Abby begins, “where's the most likely place the remote is going to be?”
They're in the car park of the stately home. Becker has squashed the uneasy feeling about passing by the still unconscious Matt and the two soldiers, and for sneaking past the office where they'd left Danny and Jenny's wedding guests. And he's not the only one suddenly uncomfortable, it seems. Everyone has congregated around the 4x4 farthest away from the car park's CCTV cameras and are speaking in hushed tones.
He also belatedly realises everyone is waiting for him to answer. “I don't know,” he admits. “I was kept out of the loop on a lot of the details after Stephen came back.”
Connor looks unperturbed. “What about when Abby and I came back? What happened to our stuff then?”
Becker thinks. “Some of it was passed to the labs for examination. Burton took the tech.”
“Burton?” It's Claudia. Everyone turns to look at her. “Philip Burton?”
“Yes,” Stephen says quietly. He doesn't look at Claudia; he doesn't look at anyone.
For the first time today, Becker looks at Claudia – really looks at her, not just Jenny's face and the matted hair and the worn and dirtied clothes. For the first time he wonders if this is the Claudia Stephen left behind, in his original time line.
And if she is, then what has happened to her between then and now?
It's yet another interesting twist in a day that's been full of them, and Claudia's not the first person to react to the mention of Philip Burton.
“Wait until you meet Burton.”
Becker thinks he was aiming for light-hearted, but Stephen hesitates. The tiniest twitch at the corner of Stephen's mouth, and his left eyebrow barely dimples.
It's glaringly obvious if you know what to look for. Becker remembers the signs better than he ever thought he might, no mean feat considering that when he woke up that morning he thought Stephen was dead.
It's also something else they'll have to deal with later. Becker squashes the fresh wave of doubt and uncertainty in his gut and says: “We need to stay on task. Assuming Burton has the anomaly remote, where would he have stored it?”
Connor pulls a face. “Dunno about storage, something like that he'd want to examine it, try to reverse engineer it, even.”
“He hasn't given it to you?” Abby asks, frowning.
Connor looks puzzled for a moment but shakes his head. “It has to be in one of his labs. They're separate to everything else, not many people have access to them.”
“I do,” Becker says. It's one of the few things he refused to back down on during the early days of the new ARC being set up; he and a handful of people retained their unfettered access to the entirety of the facility.
Connor drums his hands on the side of the 4x4. It's not loud but the sound startles both Stephen and Claudia. “Come on! To the ARC!”
Becker glances at Claudia again. Even if he could think of anything to say, it's too late to back out now.
For what is supposed to be a bustling, albeit top secret, facility on continuous security alert, the ARC is very quiet. Lester is rankled on principle. He lasts all of ten minutes hovering at Jess' workstation once the flurry of field activity died down again, and Burton has yet to reappear, assuming the ministerial meetings from that morning have actually concluded.
No word of a lie, Burton's absence is the thing Lester likes the most about today's developments so far.
He retires to his office; much as with his arrival earlier his efforts at nonchalance go unappreciated. It would almost be disappointing if not for everything else happening.
Ah, well. Lester takes the mental hint and steps back outside. He glances one way down the hub then back towards Jess and her many computer screens. He's about to say something, perhaps something about his employees present and past running around, when one of those screens flickers into life.
Jess startles, focuses her attention on it. “Lester?” she calls out loudly. “Oh!”
“Sorry,” he says. He's right behind her now. “What is it?”
She points up at the far corner of a monitor. A 4x4 with ARC-issued license plates rolls into view and then out of the bottom of the frame.
Lester offers Jess a quizzical glance.
“That's the vehicle Becker's team took earlier,” she explains, then frowns. “The anomaly's still active; nobody notified me they were coming back.”
The unspoken I don't like this echoes, and Lester can only agree with the sentiment. More fortunately it also offers him an opportunity to involve himself properly in this increasingly interesting day.
“I'll go and find out why,” he tells her. He nods, decisively, to add to the illusion he either has any idea of what's going on or that he's actually in charge of anything any more.
Jess flashes him a quick grin then turns back to her workstation.
Down at the internal exit to the car park, whatever Lester had been expecting when the lift doors slid open, it wasn't the sight of half a dozen supposed professionals ducking behind a Ford Transit van.
First the black boxes, now... this. He walks over towards the van and sighs loudly. “You do realise the cameras aren't actually pointed in your direction.”
Someone lets out an ungainly yelp, followed quickly by the sound of someone stumbling.
Lester allows himself the tiniest fleeting smirk. Then something else occurs to him. “Not that it matters, of course. The bio-tags won't allow for whatever subterfuge you might have been thinking about.”
Becker, now the closest of this motley lot to Lester, lets out a loud breath and his shoulders sag. “Come on,” he mutters over his shoulder.
Stephen slowly emerges from behind the van, followed closely by Abby, Connor, Emily and Jenny.
Lester desperately tries to remember the quip about hiring policies he'd nearly used earlier, but something in Jenny's expression makes him pause.
“She's not Jenny,” Stephen says.
“Claudia Brown, then.” Lester inclines his head slightly, hoping his shock isn't showing. “I presume?”
The woman nods slowly.
“Now the sneaking around makes sense,” Lester continues, as blithely as he can manage. “Come with me.”
He turns back to the lift. “Yes, all of you.”
“But -” It's Connor this time.
Lester sighs again. “I know rather a lot's been happening today. I also know that this -” he waves a hand at the concreted, vehicle-filled privacy nightmare around them, “- is not the place to do anything about any of it. Whoever you're trying to hide from, for whatever conceivable reason, Miss Parker and I should be the very last people on that list.”
Suitably chastened, the team troop past him and file into the lift. Lester mentally pats himself on the back, and too late realises that the lift was not designed to take quite this many people in one journey.
Fortunately he's not the only one. The short trip upstairs is taken with flattened shoulders and sucked-in stomachs, and in complete silence.
As soon as the lift stops someone reaches behind Lester's back to stop the doors from opening.
Lester sighs. “Two things. One, we are all on the same side,” he says with as much emphasis as he can muster at short notice. “Two, the same person who can hide your bio-tag data can also hide the camera footage.”
“Oh yeah,” Connor says.
It takes every scrap of self-control Lester possesses to not bury his face in his hands and cry. Instead he leads his motley crew of supposed professionals through the ARC. After a couple of turns, Stephen nudges his elbow and indicates a different corridor.
They end up in Stephen's lab. Lester tries not to gawk, and again he's not the only one. Half of the room is taken up with a near carbon copy of Cutter's anomaly model, and across the far wall is a makeshift paper montage of the same model. Dotted around its edges are dozens of differently coloured post-it notes covered in tiny handwriting. Claudia and Connor peer at a few of them, and Abby looks briefly emotional before closing herself off.
“So,” Lester says eventually, when it becomes clear no one else will say anything. “What are you all doing here?”
“We need the anomaly remote,” Becker replies. “The one Stephen brought back with him. We think we can use it to track Danny and Jenny.”
Lester raises his eyebrows. “Elaborate.”
Becker does, using less than five sentences where most would exceed five paragraphs. Lester has never appreciated that more than now.
“It should be in Burton's laboratory,” he confirms. “Who is neither here nor supposed to be for the rest of the day. Are you sure it will do what you want it to?”
Connor nods. “We're not completely sure, but we still need to try.”
Lester nods. He pulls his phone out of his pocket and calls Jess. She answers on the second ring.
“Hypothetically, Jess,” he says slowly as everyone turns to watch him, “how long would it take your computers to reboot if the ARC's internal surveillance systems were to suddenly crash?”
“That's not how it works, and you know it,” she replies cheerfully, “but... ten minutes, maybe fifteen if the servers are slow for any reason?”
“Ten minutes,” Lester repeats. He glances at Becker, who pauses then nods. “I do appreciate how resourceful you can be, have I ever told you that?”
“Not that I can recall, but I'll be happy to remind you about this conversation.” Jess sounds distracted now. “Oh, look. Computer issues. You know how it is.”
“I do.” Lester hangs up and pockets the phone. He looks over at Becker again, who is closest to the door. “There's a security camera on the other side of the corridor. You should be able to see it from in here. Check and see if there's a green light visible, would you?”
Becker angles himself against the door and squints a little. “Yep, I can see it,” he says.
“Once it disappears you'll have ten minutes to find the lab and remote and get out of the ARC,” Lester says. “Maybe fifteen, but that's not a safe margin.”
“We can do ten,” Abby says quietly.
Of that, Lester has no doubt. Mostly because they have no choice, and for all that they seem frighteningly incompetent most of the time, the ARC teams have a well-versed history of fighting difficult odds.
It might just be why he's remained so attached to them after all this time.
“What about the black boxes?” Connor asks.
“I believe Matt asked for them to be switched off,” Lester replies. “I see no reason to countermand that right now.”
“Light's off,” Becker reports. He quickly opens the door.
“Good luck,” Lester murmurs.
Stephen's the last one out of the door. He hesitates and looks back at Lester. “I – thank you.”
“We'll talk about this later,” Lester says. “Go!”
Stephen nods, but goes.
Onto: Part 4
o o o o o
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2018-03-11 06:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-03-12 09:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-03-12 08:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-03-14 08:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-03-17 02:27 pm (UTC)LOL, nice one. The scenes in the lab were very tense.
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Date: 2018-03-18 03:06 pm (UTC)