Chapter Text
The cut on Q’s side was bleeding; he could feel it sticking to his shirt but also sending the occasional warm trickle down his skin. His jacket hid it, however, as was no doubt the intention of the cut’s location.
Everyone else was still listening to the closing scenes of the opera as Rousseau pulled his blind partner along, the music blocked off by the doors when they closed behind them as efficiently as Rousseau’s hands had kept Q from making any further fuss before now. The only noise the blind young man had been allowed to voice was the involuntary, breathless cry he’d emitted when Rousseau had drawn something sharp across his side, slipping under his jacket but easily slicing through the cloth of his button-down and then a layer of skin beneath. By then, Q must have already been dragged far enough that no one listening to the opera was disturbed, although Q’s own confusion precluded his ability to pinpoint his exact location. Blindness combined with surprise and now fear made it nearly impossible to gain his bearings, leaving him feeling like he’d been tossed overboard into a tossing, midnight sea.
His only clue now to what was happening was silence giving way to the muted noise of a city at nighttime. The smell of fresh, outdoor air struck his nose, and the lightest breeze played over his hair when another door swung open and shut near him.
“I don’t like being tricked, you know,” Rousseau hissed, one hand still gripping Q’s upper left arm in a vice-like grip that would undoubtedly leave marks. Despite the firm hold, the danger of falling felt imminently real in Q’s mind, and he began to realize that he’d been spoiled by 007’s careful handling – usually, he was fairly confident in his steps, providing he had someone walking next to him and providing some direction and support. Apparently ‘someone’ really just meant ‘James Bond.’ Rousseau was another story altogether. “And I sure as hell don’t like being made a fool of.”
The last furious sentence was punctuated by a sudden, forward thrust, and Q felt a moment of total panic as Rousseau’s hand left him and he tripped forward through darkness. Barely seconds later and Q was brought up sharply by hard metal and glass – a car-door? – instead of tumbling ignominiously to the ground. He splayed his fingers against the solid textures, trying to ground himself in a world he couldn’t see, and that had gotten monumentally more dangerous the second he’d heard the little warning from his computer informing him of Rousseau’s approach on camera. He hadn’t betted on how fast the man could move when motivated, however, and hadn’t even had time to weigh the pros and cons of distracting 007 before the door was being thrown open behind him and a hand was clamping down over his mouth, an arm locking about his throat, too.
Rousseau’s hands now grabbed his shoulders again and shoved Q carelessly to the side, presumably so that he could get to the door handle. It was a purely cruel gesture, and this time it was pure luck that kept the dark-haired boffin upright, although his body was quivering with the effort of staying alert and balanced.
“My cane,” Q found himself saying, voice shaking but otherwise remarkably stable, considering what he really wanted to do was scream and go into hysterics – the latter options wouldn’t help him as much as calmness would, however. Clearing a throat that felt uncomfortably tight, he forced himself to push onwards, “I know that you’re angry-” More than angry: Rousseau’s light mood had been torn to shreds by the knowledge that Adam Balien and Richard Sterling were actually MI6 employees, operating right under his nose. Clearly Rousseau had never suspected that the man he was trying to bed was a trained spy, and the hacker Rousseau was likewise chatting up relentlessly happened to be said spy’s Quartermaster and handler. Q now had marks of rough-handling to show that he was paying for this discovered deceit, besides the stinging cut on his ribs. All of this proved that Rousseau was absolutely infuriated. “-But if you’re to bring me back to Mercer without me hurting myself, I’ll need my cane,” Q made himself finished logically.
There was a pause as Q heard the door being pulled open, but no further movements for a long moment. Unanchored by anything but the impression of the car at his right, Q stood in petrified, breathless silence, counting the seconds as he felt sweat break out on his skin. It mingled with the blood of his cut, making it sting worse, and he resisted the urge to sweep his hands around. He knew that he’d look bloody stupid waving his hands around, and he was already at enough of a disadvantage. But without his sight, his hands were his eyes, and he wanted to touch something – even if it was only that exasperating cane that he still barely knew how to use.
Finally, Rousseau made a noise, and it was a barking laugh that was almost familiar from friendlier encounters. “I should say no – I should lie and say I didn’t grab it at all, but Mercer didn’t want me to leave anything behind,” he admitted, though snidely.
Q’s right hand flexed on nothing, the edge of his wrist brushing the smooth contours of presumably the car’s back window. He waited in silence, unsure what else to say, what other words to bring up that wouldn’t get him into more trouble. “Please,” was all he could come up with.
Suddenly he was being slammed backwards, hard bone wrapped in lean muscle the only input his senses had besides the hard shape of the back of the car suddenly catching his weight. Q panicked, thrashing and flailing, although his fearful, reflexive pleas for help only lasted a second before Rousseau’s palm was across his mouth again, fingers digging into Q’s cheeks and jaw. Bent almost over backwards against the vehicle with Rousseau pressed against him like an angry deerhound, Q felt his own helplessness biting into him like thousands of needle teeth. “You’re pathetic,” Rousseau snarled, close enough that Q could smell his breath, feel the warm heat of it against his face, “I can’t even imagine why Mercer would want you, but what the boss wants, the boss gets. You’re going to pay for making me look like an idiot, though. I can’t hurt you anymore without orders, but I’m flexible.” The pause was almost as torturous as the vicious words, as Q wriggled without success. He thought he had a grip on one of Rousseau’s sleeves, but he couldn’t tell, and even if he weren’t blind, the Quartermaster of MI6 wasn’t exactly trained for combat. There was literally nothing that he could do that had more than a snowball’s chance in hell of succeeding.
“Beg,” demanded Rousseau silkily and unexpectedly, loosening the squeeze of his hand across the lower half of Q’s face while Q blinked blind eyes, “You want that walking stick of yours? Beg for it. That’ll just about make my day right now!” Laughter spilled across Q’s nose and cheekbones, even as he felt it through the proximity of Rousseau’s body to his. The man went on sneeringly, “I’m willing to bet you can barely walk with it – I’ve seen how you cling to that bodyguard of yours. Excuse me – that agent of yours. And Mercer tells me you haven’t even been blind for a month. No wonder you always looked like a landed fish when your companion left you!”
Rousseau’s hand dropped, and briefly Q considered just gritting his teeth and refusing the demands. But he really did need that cane, and for more reasons than Rousseau knew – besides the fact that Rousseau was entirely right, and Q may as well have no legs at all, considering how little he could walk without assistance on unfamiliar terrain. If there was one thing that Q was also slowly learning, it was that his pride was far less valuable than his life. So he licked his lips and cleared his throat again, repeating in a voice already shaken by fear, “Please. Please, Rousseau, let me have my cane.” Humiliation burned through him, hot and acidic.
“Are you going to try and hit me with it?” came the almost playful reply. Clearly, Rousseau was enjoying this. He’d pulled back enough that he wasn’t touching Q anymore, which allowed the blind young man to straighten gingerly, hands on the car for support and spine aching.
“No,” Q answered with muted obedience, shaking his head a little and trying not to grimace as he forced the word out.
“Good decision.” The hand patting Q’s cheek startled him, and Rousseau once more laughed as his fellow hacker flinched hard. “Because I think that I could get away with stabbing you if it was self-defense, so using that stick of yours for anything but walking would end far better for me than for you.” The ease with which Rousseau spoke of violence made Q shiver again and lift a hand involuntarily to his side, just touching the wound beneath his jacket and pulling back when he was rewarded by a flash of pain and the sickly texture of tacky, drying blood on cloth. Rousseau kept on talking, the trajectory of his voice indicating that he’d moved away a bit more, “I’ve unlocked the car, so how about I give you your cane and you show that you can be a good dog and walk around to the other side without causing a fuss, okay?”
Oh, this was going to be demeaning… Rousseau was entirely correct that Q could barely walk with the thing. He’d gotten pretty good in the hotel room, but even when he had everything mapped out in his head, he preferred to walk either with Bond’s aid or with no aid at all. But at least it seemed that Rousseau was acquiescing, be it from a desire to seem falsely benevolent (giving a man in the desert a thimble-full of water, in essence), or because he had realized that having Q stumble half-competently with his cane was more efficient than leading him around as Bond did. Q spent a moment to be thankful that Rousseau was not as patient as 007 was.
Rousseau backed off and there were only the sounds of rustling clothing and gravel under shuffling feet for a moment, before Q’s wrist was being cruelly gripped and dragged forward. His hand found a familiar rod even as he instinctively tried to pull free and not hyperventilate in surprise.
It wasn’t really heavy or sturdy enough to be used as a weapon, even if Q did have the coordination and aim, and Rousseau must have realized that. The Quartermaster fought the urge to frown as he weighed the thing in his hand, deciding that if they got out of this, he was going to order his own cane – and it was going to be made of sterner stuff. Seeing no point in attempting to break his walking stick over the head of a man he couldn’t even properly pinpoint, Q settled his grip and twitched the cane’s tip across the ground, getting a crude sense of things.
Rousseau kept his promise to make Q prove his own incompetency, unfortunately. The simple walk around the car to the assigned passenger door was just about the longest stretch of torture Q could imagine. He actually tripped on the cane itself twice, and the parking lot was old enough that bits of broken gravel or upstart plants foiled his movements at every step, despite how the cane was supposed to alert him to things like that. Rousseau was doing a poor job of stifling laughter by the time Q was actually at the indicated door, and if there had been anyone else outside, they would have probably thought Q drunk and his friend rather amusingly unhelpful. Q literally couldn’t make it any farther, helplessness and frightened frustration climbing up his throat to strangle his calm, and he didn’t think to fight as a giggling Rousseau came up behind him and gripped a handful of the collar of his shirt before reaching past to jerk the door open. Q flinched at the noise, and hunched in on himself as he felt his captor roughly fold him into the seat. Fortunately, Q’s fear of having his skull smack against the rim of the door was never realized, although the edges of a panic attack felt like they were burning at the back of his mind.
“Mercer might think you’re a genius,” was Rousseau’s smug remark as he himself slid into the driver’s side a moment later and turned on the car with a click of keys and a grumble of the engine, “but I’ve been watching you be an uncoordinated cripple for days, so don’t think that I’m impressed.”
‘You don’t have to be impressed,’ Q thought to himself with a bit of vicious fury of his own. His hands gripped his cane where it rested between his knees and his anger pushed down the anxiety threatening to constrict his ribs. The walking stick in his hands wasn’t retractable like some were, so the confines of the car rendered it inoperable as a weapon. Rousseau had also no doubt checked over the slim, tapered rod for any modifications, but it had no buttons or secret compartments. In fact, Q had heard the man’s palms slipping as he tried to twist it in half, as if looking for a blade waiting to slide out of its innocuous sheath. Beneath his fear and humiliation, Q had actually had to try not to snort at the idea.
Then again, the only thing more ridiculous than thinking that Q could or would be able to wield a sword-cane was the thought that a half-bit hacker like Rousseau would be able to find any modifications made by the Quartermaster of MI6. The only reason Q was behaving so well right now was only partially due to his own blindness and Rousseau’s intimidation tactics. If Q weren’t so worried about 007 right now, and aware that he was right now being brought not only to where Mercer was but to where James was, Q was fairly certain that he would have had enough bravery to do something reckless and stupid. If nothing else, he knew that fear could actually motivate him to do quite a lot of things, like sinking a sliver of wood into Bond’s arm when the man had first startled him after that terrible explosion in Q-branch.
No, right now, Q was behaving because he needed to get to James. Bond had helped him and kept him safe this whole time, and Q would be damned before he failed to return that favor however he could. Besides that, Rousseau had just reminded Q how helpless he was on his own, and that terrible truth made it hard for Q to bite back furious tears even as he fervently hoped to have his agent back soon.
Bond was more than Q’s agent, and perhaps even more than a tentative friend right now: he was Q’s eyes. Q’s biological eyes, right now, were aching terribly as if they’d turned to orbs of molten lead, and were just as useless for seeing the world around him.
If it hadn’t been so dark inside the car, with night having settled in the world around them, he might have noticed the faintest fogginess to his previously pitch-black vision.
~^~
Q’s entire focus was used up trying to move one foot in front of the other, and it didn’t help that Rousseau took perverse pleasure in rushing him now that they were out of the car and inside another building. “You can try and call for help again. We’re away from anyone who will care now,” Rousseau had chirruped pleasantly after hauling Q out of the car and propelling him forward. Q’s cane was saving him more by acting as a brief crutch than by actually assisting his sensory input, and he felt the roots of panic sinking into him again. The sheer weight of the unknowns populating the world around him was crushing, so much so that even brief shoves were almost welcome, because at least it told him where Rousseau was.
“Caspian,” came a male but unfamiliar voice, and Q shied away from an amorphous sense of something near him. He couldn’t retreat far, however, as Rousseau caught a fist-full of his jacket again to reel him back in. Head turning away stiffly as he felt air – breath – against his hair, Q gritted his teeth and tried to remain calm as the speaker continued from far too close, “Nice catch you brought in.”
“Where’s his partner? Did Sergei bring him in, too?” Caspian replied, the sharpness of his voice giving away his emotions. 007’s betrayal of his trust clearly stung.
“Oh, the blond bastard was brought in all right – but we had to carry Sergei, too, on account of his useless arse being laid out on the pavement,” was the answer, which made Q swell with pride even as he swallowed the embarrassment of being talked over like a piece of furniture, “That blond bastard did a number on Sergei that he’s not likely to forget soon.” Then attention turned, regrettably, back to Q. “This his partner? He’s seriously blind?”
“Yes, I’m seriously blind-” Q couldn’t keep his mouth from replying for himself with bored flippantness, and therefore earned an even harsher tug against his clothing that had almost all of Rousseau’s weight behind it. Q was sent staggering to the right, shoulder colliding with a wall and pain shooting down his right side in an agonizing flash as the laceration connected, too. Q’s mouth opened in an involuntary gasp that would probably have been a scream if the pain hadn’t been so sudden and shocking, pushing the air out of him. He could only lean there, every muscle taut enough to snap (probably keeping him from crumpling to the floor), as he tried to swallow down the sudden burst of pain. He missed the next few things that were said, but had rallied himself again by the time Rousseau gripped his elbow and dragged him roughly away from the wall and forward again.
“You have no idea how much better I liked you as Adam Balien,” Rousseau griped, “You were quieter, for one. Although I’d like to see you mouth off against Shaw Mercer – I’ll bet that he won’t have any trouble beating on a blind person.”
“Rousseau,” came a voice that Q had honestly hoped never to hear again, drawing him up short even though his cane had struck nothing in front of him, “I’d like it if you could keep from defaming my good name.” He sounded incredibly irritated and resigned, like a man who’d had it up to his ears in trouble for days now – which he very likely had, and the revelation of Q’s survival and 007’s presence couldn’t be helping that.
“Sure thing, boss,” the hacker replied cheerily, then gave Q a little shove between the shoulder-blades. Q resisted the urge to spin around and take a swing at him only because he knew that the effort would be embarrassing and fruitless. “One spy in our midst, just like you ordered.”
Q froze and tried not to shake too obviously as he heard footsteps moving towards him.
~^~
The room was simple, especially by the standards of scientists, whose labs had a tendency to collect clutter instead of the answers they sought. Computers lined the back wall, and a center table was occupied by little more than a small latched case, newly deposited. Mercer himself stood next to it, murderously eyeing the dark-haired waif of a man who’d just been pushed into the room. Large hazel eyes slid in an unfocused way across the space over Mercer’s left shoulder, the only mark of blindness on an otherwise familiar, very alive visage. Rousseau smirked as he crossed is arms and leaned against the doorway, doing a very poor job of hiding his hurt and anger behind the mean, upward curve of his lips.
Behind the central bench was another figure, large and out of place, unguarded but also terribly still. An unconscious 00-agent was decidedly less terrifying than an active, deadly one.
“You’re supposed to be dead,” Mercer finally grated out into the silence, because that was the biggest thought in his head, and nothing else would come out before it.
“Hopefully this will convince you to stay in the science business instead of switching to assassination for your income,” the blind, captured Quartermaster had the sass to say back thinly.
Mercer growled, “Watch your mouth. I’ve got your pet assassin right here, and since I’m pretty sure that I’m his target, and I’m still breathing, then he’s failed, too.”
That beat Q into silence. His lips compressed into a thin, bloodless line, and his paleness revealed his fear and worry more than any words would have. As Q shifted his weight slightly, looking stiff and adrift between Rousseau and Mercer, he winced. Instantly Mercer’s eyes seemed drawn to an extra wedge of darkness tucked beneath the edges of Q’s jacket.
Rousseau straightened enough from his post at the door to raise his hands innocently, defending before Mercer could ask, “I just cut him a little – you wanted him to make some noise, so I gave him some incentive. It’s barely a paper-cut.”
The way Q’s mouth thinned again even as his sightless eyes grew flinty said that he disagreed, but the Quartermaster also didn’t look like he was about to collapse from pain or blood-loss any time soon. Mercer nodded to show he accepted the explanation. “Fine then. Rousseau, if you could kindly-”
Q surprised everyone by interrupting in a hard, forceful voice usually heard only in the depths of MI6, “I want to see Bond.” Realizing that ‘see’ wasn’t the best choice of words but refusing to back down, Q flushed but added, “I want proof of his condition. If he’s dead, I won’t cooperate, and I know that you want my expertise.”
“You really don’t know anything at all,” Mercer retorted, causing the Quartermaster to twitch a little in surprise.
“Take me to my companion,” Q refused to budge or be distracted.
“I could have killed him already. After all, he’s of no use to me – you are, which annoys me to no end, but at least makes me grudgingly glad that that explosion merely blinded you.”
“Take me-”
“You don’t get to give orders here!” Mercer roared, suddenly coming forward and into Q’s space, in a rush that had the hapless Quartermaster tensing and flinching, knowing on a visceral level that he didn’t have the means by which to escape – just like he’d never had the option of fleeing the opera house without 007 there. He was like a genie in a bottle: vast amounts of knowledge and power, but quite without the power to do anything with it unless he had a bit of outside help. Right now, that help was gone, and Q’s cane twitched against Mercer’s leg even as the scientist’s hands bunched in Q’s collar and dragged him forward and off-balance. “Just because I’m in need of your expertise doesn’t mean you have any leverage. I may not want to hurt you, but believe me when I say I have no patience for you either.” Mercer paused, eyes wild with anger and a mounting stress that looked like it had been eating at him from the inside and was swiftly becoming visible from the outside as well – acid gnawing through a container. “Fine.” Suddenly Mercer was hauling Q along, just as everyone seemed to be doing today. “You want to see your agent? Here he is.” He thrust the smaller man forward, some beast being sated in Mercer as he saw the Quartermaster stumble, and then trip, cane helping not at all as his legs were fouled up by the very presence of Bond himself. Mercer smirked coldly as he heard the cane clatter on the floor and saw Q go sprawling across the agent’s torso. “Reacquaint yourself with your partner in crime. Then you’re going to sit, behave, and listen to what I tell you – and then you’re going to do exactly as I tell you, or I’ll kill your agent slowly so that you can hear the life coming out of him.
~^~
Q was getting really tired of being manhandled, and panicked a little as he felt his cane fly out of his grip. He needed that! Then he was suddenly more preoccupied by the give of flesh beneath the texture of cloth beneath his hands, having landed heavily on something that was very clearly alive… or at least once had been. He instinctively recoiled, terrified and sickened, the unique resistance of a body for a moment being too much for him to handle when his brain had been expecting hard floor. As he scrambled to push himself up and away, however, his hand brushed past the edges of a lapel and he pushed down harder on what must have been a chest, because there was a soft rush of air being pushed out. Then, belatedly, Q realized that the body he’d fallen on was warm, and he spent a second frozen with his right hand underneath the heavy weight of a suit-jacket, pressed against the texture of the expensive cotton that 007 favored in his button-downs.
Suddenly Mercer and Rousseau’s presence didn’t matter, and Q got his knees under him, his brain reflexively orienting itself so that he figured he was next to the body’s left side, having fallen next to the man’s hip. Now he just needed desperately to know that this man was James, and that he really was okay.
Why was he so still? All Q could think was that 00-agents hated to be still when danger was so close around them.
Q’s finger’s ghosted upwards, shaking and light over the wrinkles of cloth and the smooth, tiny islands that were buttons, finding a stubbled, hot throat that he immediately curled the rest of his hand around. With a rush of relieved air, Q found what was, without a doubt, a strong and steady pulse, albeit a very slow one. Q’s fingers moved up further until they were mapping out a strong jaw and cheekbone, finding the feathery fan of lashes from closed eyes, finally finding short hair that was surprisingly soft against his fingers.
It was Q’s other hand that asserted that this was truly James Bond, however, finding its way past the collar of James’s shirt and along the skin of his collarbone. There. Q knew that scar. Spies like 007 could be chameleons if they wanted to, changing as they wished to fit into situations, but scars were things the body didn’t like to give up. Q had read about this one in files, and had even seen it on a few occasions when missions had lead to shirtlessness within sight of cameras. Apparently Eve had shot him at one point, and the reminder of 007’s intense will to survive – and that 007 was literally so annoying that even friends shot him from time to time – nearly made Q smile. He withdrew his hand respectfully until it was resting on top of Bond’s shirt, where he could still feel the rise and fall of the agent’s chest and the steady throb of his heart. Running his other hand down 007’s body in the vague hope of not finding any life-threatening injuries, Q instead came upon the fact that 007’s arms disappeared beneath him where he lay on his back. It didn’t take a genius to realize that Mercer had been smart enough to tie Bond up in the event that he awoke.
“For now, he’s just suffering from a knock to the head and a heavy sedative,” Mercer was at least nice enough to clarify, making Q tense again as his focus was torn away from Bond. He huddled instinctively closer to the agent’s side, as if the mere presence of a familiar shape could somehow protect him, although he knew that that was ludicrous.
Turning his head a little over his shoulder even though he knew that he had no hope of meeting Mercer’s eyes, Q steeled himself to face the problem at hand. He couldn’t depend on Bond to get him out of this one, because Bond was out for the count. “Tell me what you want, Mercer.”
“I want Genecode.”
“You have it,” Q played dumb, fishing for more information but also stalling as he tried to come up with a plan.
Even blind, Q could feel the frustration coming off Mercer, if only in the small growls the man was actually emitting. To be fair, it wasn’t a very intimidating growl, but Q was used to hearing the noise amplified and deepened in 007’s throat, so he was probably desensitized. The threatening noises 00-agents made under their breath made Mercer sound pathetic by comparison, and it made Q feel a little better even as the scientist got talking again, “That’s what I’ve told the auction house, yes, but I’ve gotten rather good at lying as the years have gone by. I’d be embarrassed to say this, but since I’ve got you here under my thumb, I suppose I may as well just say it.” Mercer let out a giggle that had just enough of a manic edge that Q flinched, kneeling a bit closer to Bond and wishing he could reach his bound wrists. Trying to untie them would at least have made his fingers feel useful, no matter how pointless the endeavor.
“You see, Q, the explosion in MI6 was supposed to leave me as the only person with all of the data on Genecode. I had everything: the genetic research as well as the prototype for the decoding algorithm that you had worked on.”
“But you couldn’t complete the prototype on your own,” Q finished with wary certainty.
“No one can, it seems,” Mercer muttered, and an uneasy shuffling by the door reminded Q of Rousseau, who was no doubt quite technologically savvy, but nowhere near Q’s level. Virtually no one was. “And it turns out that Bram wasn’t a complete imbecile either.” This caused Q to perk up, sensing new information. “He must have suspected me, the cheeky bastard, because as soon as I tried to withdraw the information from the systems, everything began to shut down.”
Suddenly Q recalled a conversation with Bram Auden, the unfortunate head of this whole operation – the man who’d had the foresight to see how science and technology could mesh. While Auden had not appeared suspicious of his compatriot at all, working with MI6 had reminded him of the necessity of security – he’d talked to Q, , about programs that could be installed to prevent the theft of information. Neither of them expecting the theft to be instigated by someone so close to home, Q and Auden had talked amicably for hours on various codes and programs. Q could name scores of such programs just off the top of his head that would react unfavorably to someone suddenly removing information from its secured location, as Mercer had tried to do. Mercer had tried to take the golden goose from its nest, only to find that a wolf lay in waiting, a wolf with orders to eat the goose instead of letting anyone get his or her hands on the wealth it contained.
Flooded with this realization, Q asked with blank shock, “So you don’t have any of the Genecode data?”
“I do!” Mercer shot back defensively, backing off to a frustrated snark, “Bits and pieces were saved on a back-up server, and I managed to get your prototype program out intact, but it was tricky. Bloody Bram had set the entire memory to wipe itself apparently, should anyone try to remove Genecode without his personal codes.” Sounding almost hurt, and definitely furious, Mercer said more softly, “My codes should have been enough. It should have worked.”
Apparently Auden had suspected something about Mercer long before they’d all seen proof of Mercer’s betrayal in MI6. Q just wished that Auden had done something more about that knowledge like, say, arrested the man before he could unleash a bomb that had killed one man and blinded another. But Bram Auden had always had an trusting streak, preferring to hope for the best in people. At least he’d been pessimistically prepared beneath it all.
Mercer had gained control of his emotions again, and sounded more tired as he continued, “There was one outlet that Bram hadn’t counted on – my area of expertise.” Q’s ears twitched as he heard a noise, something shifting on the table, a few faint snapping noises before Mercer continued, “I was able to download the Genecode program into a genetic format before everything went to hell. This syringe contains the only copy of Genecode, and I had been depending on your program to decode it so that I could make a pretty penny of it. But the copy of your program that I have is only half-finished, and I can’t find anyone else who can get it up and running. So now, I’m depending on you, Quartermaster.”
Q felt his chest constrict, and the throbbing start up around his eyes again as the pure scope of the situation finally unfolded before him. His shifting foot bumped his cane, rolling loose on the floor; beneath his hands, 007 was still unconscious, not only useless at the moment but helpless. Q’s options were shrinking swiftly down to nothing.