Thunderbirds Rewritten

4: A Bit of Teamwork

Gordon ran faster than he had ever run before. He ran through the corridors keeping his ears sharp for the enemy, hoping not to run into any of them as he hurried to get to the large fish tank that gave him passage to his Thunderbird. All the IR brothers had different entrance points to their birds, but mostly used the lifts in their father's office for convenience. Not only did the lifts provide a more direct route to their ships, but for someone like Virgil who would have to enter his passageway upside down, it was easily the better route to take. The individual passageways became their backup chutes, and they had all hoped to never need to use them.

Skidding in front of his own, Gordon looked around one last time before placing his hand against the glass and allowing the lights to blink and take in the shape of his hand, verifying that he was the real Gordon Tracy. The ground started to move beneath him and quickly was replaced by another patch of ground that made the tank look like it had never been touched.

The lift descended and lights flashed past Gordon as he put on his wetsuit – this entrance to TB4 involved diving into water to enter it. And he had a feeling he would need to get wet anyway.

He dived and looked over his immobile submarine, at least the Hood had no idea that it was here. He knew he had very little time to start it up and get out of the tunnel, even though he would turn on anti-detection nothing could stop the current invaders from hearing her engines if they happened to be close enough in that part of the villa.

'They will still be chasing the kids,' he thought as his heart jumped in his chest at the thought.

He started up the engines, making quick work of speeding up through the narrow tunnel. While Jeff set a strict rule on the speed at which Gordon could leave the tunnel, Gordon had to throw that out the window in order to properly escape the very real danger. Besides, he could do this in his sleep.

"Thunderbird Four is go," Gordon murmured as he left the tunnel. He drove himself into the open waters and evaluated his options. The kids would have been chased into the silos by now, they would be fine with the machines to defend themselves with for a few moments, but they would have to escape quickly. The question was where to? Thunderbird Three was absent, still stranded in space. Alan probably would have avoided going to any of the other ones anyway, out of caution that the bad guys could follow them into one. Thunderbird Two's silo was the best bet though, it was the bird that Virgil used, and it carried every small emergency vehicle they had to rescues, Thunderbird Four especially. Somehow though, Gordon suspected that Alan wouldn't think that way, he would...he would...what would Alan do?

Gordon let out a yell of frustration, since when could he not know what Alan might do in this kind of situation? Oh right, when was he ever thrust into this kind of situation? He never had the training for it! Maybe that was a big mistake on their dad's part. If they live to bring it up to him, then they will. Wait no. They WILL live to bring it up.

All of a sudden the radar picked up a Thunderbird engine starting up, was someone stealing Thunderbird One? Gordon raced to that side of the island, arriving just in time to see the three kids trying to swim to the surface of the water. Fermat couldn't swim and Gordon knew that, so he quickly got his helmet on and dived out of Thunderbird Four to assist him and get all the kids to dry land.

"Gordon!" Alan exclaimed as they all broke the surface.

"Get to land." Gordon commanded as he draped Fermat's arm over his shoulders.

"Alan, p-please warn me n-next time!" Fermat yelled.

"It's just a bit of water, Fermat!" Alan insisted.

"I c-could have drowned!" Fermat shot back.

"Fermat, you mean you cant swim?!" Alan asked as they hit the beach.