Twelve Bright Stars (2 of 3)
Title: Twelve Bright Stars (Part 2)
Characters/Pairings: Jack/Ianto, some Toshiko
Rating: Mature for language and themes
Spoilers: Everything before S1E1, including Doctor Who
Thanks again to adina_atl and peasant_ for the beta.
Part 1
“Good morning, my name is Toshiko Sato, and I am the technical specialist at Torchwood Three in Cardiff.”
Toshiko scanned her audience, who were watching attentively (or not) from London. There were some thirty people on the other side, ranging in age from barely old enough to have a driving licence to a very old woman in a wheelchair. In the centre of the group were a man and a woman she recognized from her trip to London earlier that year, the former the supervisor of the technical research division and the latter somebody who’d been in and out of his office all day but who had never introduced herself.
“I’m here this morning at the request of the Temporal Research subgroup of the Technical Research Division, to discuss a critical research project at Torchwood Three.” Toshiko brushed a strand of hair out of her face. “As I’m sure you are all well aware, there was a large earthquake here last month, one that coincided with one of the biggest Rift flares recorded in the last half-century.”
Was it her imagination, or did the woman next to the technical research director twitch?
“During the earthquake, the part of the Rift Manipulator that monitored and recorded spikes and flares in the Rift was damaged beyond repair,” Toshiko continued, pointing to a picture on the screen behind her. Owen, who had semi-graciously acquiesced to repeated browbeating by Jack and Suzie both to operate the projector, snorted and switched to a before-and-after view. The slagged glass remnants looked obscene next to the arrangement of fine glass tubes and crystals of the intact component.
“Fulgurites,” mumbled somebody in the audience.
“More like Trinitite,” somebody else said.
“Trinitite is a better analogy, for reasons I’m about to explain,” Toshiko said. “Before our instrument failed, we estimate that the total energy output by the Rift flare was 141, 254 terajoules, which is approximately the same amount of energy as an earthquake with a magnitude of 5.4 on the moment-magnitude scale.”
Mr. Carrington, the technical director (she remembered his name in a rush), frowned and said, “The magnitude of the earthquake was registered as 5.1, not 5.4.”
Toshiko didn’t care for his tone of voice or his attitude, aggressive and abrasive. “The seismographs recorded the energy released into the earth,” she said calmly, nodding at Owen to change the slide. “Remember that some of the energy would have been dispersed into the atmosphere, some would have dissipated as heat, light, or sound, and some would have escaped from the Earth entirely.”
“But your instruments are earth-based,” Mr. Carrington retorted. “How can you estimate the entire amount of energy released with an earth-based sensor?”
“Therein lies the problem. Our sensor was mounted into the Rift manipulator itself, thereby directly measuring what was released from the Rift.” Toshiko picked up the hunk of slagged glass again.
Mr. Carrington frowned again. “Your interferometer doesn’t measure the Rift energy.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Toshiko saw Owen pull a face.
“Owen, would you jump ahead to slide 13?” Toshiko asked. While Owen looked for the right one, she Mr. Carrington in the eye and said, “In over 100 years of observations of the Rift, we’ve isolated its position to within meters, along an axis in the air above Cardiff. While the interferometer concept doesn’t come close to the quality of alien technology that we cannot reproduce on this planet, it is an easy way to monitor the Rift, and one we are capable of understanding.”
The blond woman next to Mr. Carrington sat up and said, “Capable of understanding, in what sense?”
Toshiko plastered on a bland smile. “We use the moment magnitude scale because it’s easier for the human mind to comprehend a single small number than an extraordinarily large value.”
“Hey, isn’t it supposed to be the other way around?” somebody asked.
“We’re discussing numbers, thank you, not something you may or may not have that none of the rest of us want to see.” Toshiko ignored the snickers and chuckles and Owen biting his finger to keep from laughing. This was time she could be spending on fine-tuning the software, not spoon-feeding a bunch of children. “The Rift bends time and it bends space. The Rift incursion effectively increased the speed of light by a power of 4.08.”
Into the gasps and whistles and instantly ramrod-straight backs, somebody breathed, “Jesus.”
A hand went up in the back of the room in London. “How is that possible?”
Somebody laughed. “How long have you worked for Torchwood?”
“Incursions of this magnitude have devastating effects on the local population,” Toshiko continued, nodding at Owen and mouthing her thanks when he changed the slide. “An incursion in November of 1963, thought to have been triggered by an isolated temporal anomaly near a school in the north of London, was followed directly by a spate of unusually strong winter gales, one with sustained wind speeds of over 110 kilometres per hour before the anemometer broke.”
“Typical bloody Cardiff,” a male voice mumbled in the back. “Can’t keep their gear working for love nor money.”
“Focus,” called the elderly woman in the wheelchair.
Toshiko gave her a grateful look. “As I was saying, large incursions have devastating effects. The estimated damage to Cardiff as a result of the earthquake is…”
“We know all that,” interrupted Mr. Carrington. “We’re more curious to know why you need the most sophisticated timepiece in all of England.”
“Long-term monitoring of a known time anomaly requires that we measure time as precisely as we can,” Toshiko temporized, thrown by the departure from her carefully-rehearsed speech. “The Rift-if there’s a large incursion, there is usually some kind of warning in advance. Actually, an earthquake is a good analogy to a Rift flare.” She paused, pondering. “Foreshocks and aftershocks occur in conjunction with major seismic activity. We certainly have recorded after-flares, if you will, and on occasion, Torchwood has been able to predict large Rift incursions based on a pattern of increasing magnitude in flares.”
“But you can’t do anything about them,” Mr. Carrington said. “What’s the point?”
Toshiko ground her teeth in annoyance. In the back of the room, Owen snorted. “We can alert emergency management in Cardiff,” she replied calmly. “We can and do go out to the central location of a flare after we record significant Rift activity, and retrieve alien or anachronistic artefacts.”
The blonde woman in front said, “Reactive, then.”
“Not at all,” Toshiko said. This was getting tiresome. “We’re limited in what we can do, but we do what we can. Based on monitoring the Rift over a period of sixty years, Torchwood provided extensive engineering advice to the project team of the Cardiff Bay Barrage, particularly with respect to building the second phase of the Senedd and how to isolate its electrical circuitry from variable time, something that physically manifested in terms of flickering lights and blackouts.”
“So the Welsh Assembly is stuck in a time warp?” somebody called from the back. “That makes entirely too much sense.”
Once again, Toshiko ploughed right on through the laughter, pitching her voice higher and raising the volume to where it drowned out the other voices. “The point being that without any way to monitor the Rift, there is no way we can do anything to protect the citizens of the UK as we are required by the Charter. Even if all we can do are desktop engineering studies, provide warnings when we can and clean up the mess when we can’t, we’re at least at the level of the Met Office, with a bare fraction of their infrastructure resources and only four people.”
Silence.
Toshiko permitted herself a brief moment of self-indulgent satisfaction.
“So, why not use one of the small hand-held Rift energy monitors?” Mr. Carrington asked. “Why do you need the comb array and a dedicated receiver network?”
“I’ve discussed that idea in detail in the proposal document sent to you four days ago,” she said, dropping any pretense of patience and letting the full force of her irritation show. “If you refer to pages four to eight of the document I sent you, you’ll find that they are unsuitable on the grounds of nonspecificity. It’s all well and good to have a tool that will tell us that there is Rift energy present, but not where the spike occurred or how strong it was. For us to do anything more than know there is Rift activity in Cardiff, which occurs about as often as ducks quack, we need to have the proper tools for the job.”
Looking rather taken-aback, but also strangely satisfied, the man sat back, as did half the audience. Toshiko stared back with suspicion. Glancing down at the end of the table, she saw Owen miming applause.
Toshiko decided she liked teleconferences much better than person-to-person presentations. If she’d been there in person, she’d have been a tongue-tied, frustrated mess. With a screen and a three hour drive between her and her audience, she was just irritated.
The very old woman said, “Is there any way we could use these predictions to capture the energy discharged by the Rift? Could we use it for power generation?”
Toshiko bit her lip, thinking. “Probably not,” she said.
“But it is possible?” Mr. Carrington asked.
“Theoretically, yes,” Toshiko said, trying to figure out how one could harness such energy. “The problem is that it is neither controllable nor predictable. Assuming it were possible, there is no way it could be used for any kind of sustainable power source.”
“Couldn’t you figure out a way to do a slow open, to release the energy over a longer period of time?” the old woman asked. “Like a slow earthquake?”
Toshiko shook her head. “It's an interesting question,” she added, softening her voice. This woman had been interested and polite through the entire conference, unlike almost everybody else in there. She considered the question with her chin tipped to the ceiling, then dropped it down to look the woman in the face. “And one I hadn't thought of. The problem is thiat all of the energy released by the Rift must come from somewhere else. It may be from elsewhere on the planet, it may be from elsewhere in the spatial universe, or it may be from another time entirely."
"But you admit it is possible?" That was the woman next to Carrington.
Toshiko felt the hair on her neck stand. Warily, she answered, "Possible, yes. Desirable, no. Stupid, highly likely. Without a thorough understanding and absolute control over the process, it would be as irresponsible as setting a forest fire to heat your house."
Several members of the audience looked very disappointed. It was a very odd thought--something they must have been contemplating amongst themselves for some time.
Looking at the clock on the wall behind Owen’s head, Toshiko said, “I have a few minutes left. Are there any other questions?”
The assorted members of the audience shook their heads. Mr. Carrington looked like he wanted to say something, but he was stilled by the blonde woman before he could speak. Toshiko plastered a bland smile on her face, trying to hide her relief. “Well, in that case, thank you ladies and gentlemen. We hope to be testing the prototype soon, and will be happy to show you the results.”
Owen flicked off the camera. “Bugger. Who d’you reckon spiked the punch this morning?”
“I don’t know.” Toshiko ducked her head, wanting out of there. “It’s too early in the day for stroppy people. Excuse me.”
She came down from the conference room brimming with frustration, having forgotten (or mentally blocked out) just how awful proposal presentations were, and very aware that she was inches away from being as stroppy as she’d accused the London crowd of being. If it hadn’t been for Owen’s well-timed comic relief, she might have thrown something at the screen. There she was, stuck in the middle of penny-pinching duelling bureaucrats, with Jack ever so kindly not being about to make an appearance to back her up.
Surprisingly, Owen followed close on her heels. "That was Yvonne Hartman, the top dog of all of Torchwood."
"Really," Tosh grunted. "That's nice."
"If you don't get a call from them next week asking you when you want to transfer, I'll eat my hat," Owen replied. "I've been in London more than you. They don't send their chief honchos for anything."
"I'm not going to London."
"Don't make me eat my hat, princess. I like that hat." Owen wandered off towards his lair. "It'd taste like tanning chemicals."
Toshiko grumbled and steamed her way towards the workbenches. London, indeed. After everything she'd had and lost there, the very thought that she'd pull up sticks to go back there was preposterous.
Then she saw two beautiful eight-pointed stars resting on Suzie’s workbench.
“What’s this?” Toshiko asked, rushing forward to take a closer look. The stars were made of silver metal that had been pierced and punched in a decorative pattern, about a meter in diameter and surprisingly light for their size. The centre of each star was empty, a round hole about the width of her palm.
“That’s how we’re going to put sophisticated technical equipment in the middle of Cardiff without starting the conspiracy theorists going,” Suzie answered. “Here.” She handed Toshiko a small black cylinder.
Toshiko peered at it-in the centre, recessed perhaps the length of her fingertip, was a small black plate overlaying a microprocessor. “It’s a receiver unit.”
“It is,” Suzie said. “Clandestine observations of something that doesn’t exist, courtesy of public art.”
“Gorgeous.” Toshiko put down the receiver and picked up the nearest star, bringing it close to her face for inspection. Inside each little hole in the metal was a glass prism, small and sharp. “What’s the glass for?”
“I told you, it’s going to be public art.” Suzie picked up one of the receiver units and dabbed epoxy into a groove cut along the inside of the cylinder, then daintily fitted a mirror onto the epoxy. “Just plain metal stars aren’t art, they’re kitsch. When these are operational, they look like this.” She plugged a wire dangling from the back of Toshiko’s star.
Light coursed up the arms, sparkling up the centre of each one and forming an iridescent fan near the points. Between the silver of the metal and the light through the prisms, it looked like a rainbow crossed with an icicle. Toshiko felt her lips curve, then break open into a wide smile.
“See?” Suzie said, looking very pleased with herself. “Art. I made the first one and told Jack to make the rest.” She took the star from Toshiko’s unresisting hand and gave her another one. “I hate to say it, but he did better than me.”
Turning the star over in her hand, Toshiko had to agree that this one was superior. The joins where the arms had been welded together were finer, and a mixture of clear and coloured glass formed patterns of spirals and arches along each arm. In the faint light cast by the still-lit star lying on the table, the one in her hand seemed almost liquid.
“When do you think they’ll be ready to set up and test?” Toshiko asked. Her skin prickled with excitement. It was one thing to have a good idea, but seeing that idea turn into reality was fantastic.
“Tomorrow?” Suzie said. “I’m nearly done putting them together. You have the control system finished, right?”
“Since last week,” Toshiko answered. “How tomorrow afternoon we set them up in here for a dry run?”
“Absolutely not. We finish them, put them together, and hang them.” Suzie stared her right in the face, challenging.
Toshiko fidgeted under her gaze. “And if they don’t work? We need to try them in here.”
Suzie stared at her a while longer, and right when Toshiko realized she had walked into a trap yet again, Suzie laughed and said, “Tosh, love, I’m taking the piss. Of course we’ll do a dry run.”
A reply was on the tip of her tongue when the general alarm rang, and Jack raced in, dumped two more stars in front of them, and ran out with Owen, shouting something about a Weevil. Toshiko shrugged, wandered over to her workstation, and pulled up all the necessary tracking systems.
*****
Thursday morning dawned grey and cold, almost exactly the same as every other day that week, except that instead of lying in bed cursing Torchwood for only getting three hours’ sleep and wishing the world would go away, Toshiko sprang out from under the covers and ran into the kitchen. Today, the stars were going up-after only five weeks from conception to reality. That had to be a new record, and what Suzie had told her they couldn’t do. So there.
She didn’t want to start dancing in her kitchen until after the full trials were complete. Toe-tapping didn’t count.
So long as it just stayed overcast, everything would be fine. Rain or fog would interfere with the laser propagation. That was something they’d have to fix with the next iteration, as soon as they got the comb array from London, and enough funding to buy the materials. Suzie may have cannibalized (with Jack’s blessing) the metal and glass for the stars from some tacky Victorian decorations left in the storerooms, but not even she could turn old wineglasses into insulated fibre optic cable for less than the cost of buying it new.
That could be entirely fun to try, if they ever got a free moment.
Speaking of free moments, or more rightly lack thereof, it was time for her to go. Toshiko flung on her coat and clattered down the stairs, shoving keys and phone and a twenty pound note into her pockets as she went, and jumped into Suzie’s little blue Volkswagen.
“You’re all smiles this morning,” Suzie said as Toshiko buckled herself in, somehow managing to avoid getting caught on the ladder that ran between both front seats, across the rear seats, and still poked out the back. “Be careful, somebody might think you’re excited.”
“We can’t be having that.” Toshiko stared at Suzie’s long cherry-red jacket, black jeans, combat boots, and braids, topped off with one of those scarves made in Guatemala and sold at fair-trade shows and a tattered wool hat. “What on earth are you wearing?”
Suzie beamed. “I told you already. I’m hiding the fact that we’re mad scientists by being a mad artist who has a grant from the city to hang public art.” She tossed her head, shaking the braids from side to side. “The stars are in the boot.”
“What about the transmission unit?” Toshiko looked down at her old trousers and bulky sweatshirt and boots, feeling decidedly frumpy. Then again, madness took many forms, and her own madness wore red jumpsuits and slept on the floor, not glitter and Guatemalan scarves.
“Fearless leader installed that in the dead of night last night,” Suzie answered. “Before you ask, he installed it in the place you told him to, and took measurements to a City of Cardiff survey mark so we know the exact position.”
Toshiko blinked. “To what order?”
“Tens of micrometers, he said. He wouldn’t tell me how, but assured me it would be well controlled.” Suzie shrugged. “He’s put mounting brackets up for the receiver stars, as well.”
“Right. Well then,” Toshiko said, smoothing down her hair. A thought occurred to her, one that wasn’t too important in the grand scheme of things, but still something she needed to know. “Do we have something from the city, explaining what we’re doing? I mean, we’re Torchwood…”
“…But the whole point of this is not looking like Torchwood,” Suzie finished. “We do, we do. After we’ve hung them, some administrative monkey at City Hall is going to send out a press release, talking about the stars and the mysterious artist who donated them to the city.” They turned the corner, straight into the rising sun, which drenched Suzie’s face in orange light. “The mayor’s office is still trying to figure out which end is up after the mayor was found dead. This makes for a good distraction. We’ll probably have three or four candidates all showing up for photo ops.”
Toshiko grimaced. She hated being so…so public. Somebody might see her, and recognize her, and question what she was doing. “You can pose for the camera. I don’t want to be anywhere near it.”
“As you wish.” With a flick of her wrist, Suzie stopped the car. “First stop.”
The mounting bracket turned out to be a circle of alternating bolts and sticky bits, so that something would help anchor each star in place while the bolts were tightened. Toshiko decided Jack was a much better engineer than he let on. She would have put up magnets, except magnets that close to the small processing and transmit units wouldn’t have been a good idea. She tightened the last bolt, uncovered the small protective plate from the mirror, and said, “Two down, nine to go.”
Suzie frowned. “Two? Why…oh, of course, the control.” She pulled a pair of stars from the boot of the Volkswagen. “Ready for the next one?”
“I suppose. Where’s the next one?”
Suzie rifled through the sheaf of papers in her hand. “Ummmm….one hundred meters straight down this road. We don’t go around a corner until the seventh star.”
“I thought it was the second star where we turn,” Toshiko said, hoisting the ladder on to her shoulder. “Not the seventh.”
“We’d have to go back in time a few hours, since it’s already morning, and approach it from the opposite direction so that we go to the right,” Suzie pointed out. “But if you want, we can go hang the seventh star now, and come back.”
Toshiko thought about that and about how flying would make this much more fun, before deciding that the fun of it was literally outweighed by the ladder. “That’s okay, thanks.”
The second and third stars went up quickly, with nothing more than securing the bolts and occasionally brushing her hair from her eyes. On the third, while she carefully peeled off the blue wax paper from the adhesives-which she’d identified as ECG electrode pads, Owen was going to hit the roof when he found out.
All told, it took them the better part of three hours to hang the stars. While Toshiko did the heavy lifting and pretended to be a much-abused city employee, Suzie entertained the occasional passersby with a combination of Shakespearean sonnets and rambling airy discourses on the metaphysical properties of the stars. The poetry was nice to listen to-Suzie had a pleasant way of speaking-but the feathery-voiced descriptions of healing powers of inanimate objects were screamingly hilarious, and Suzie’s delivery was perfect.
“I can’t understand some people,” Suzie complained as Toshiko came down from hanging the final star. “Healing powers of the rainbow rays? Do they really believe that?”
“I liked the bit about spreading warmth and light over Cardiff best,” Toshiko answered.
“The light, at least, is true.” Suzie held open the boot for Toshiko to shove the ladder back in. “Warmth will have to wait until April or so.”
“Unless we go to Spain.” Toshiko tied the little red flag on the ladder and made for the passenger side seat. Taking out her phone, she dialled the Hub with excited, unsteady fingers. “Jack, they’re all up.”
“Excellent!” Jack sounded surprised and pleased. “I figured it would have taken you longer than that. Flip the switch?”
Toshiko took a deep breath. “Go ahead, switch on the starlight.” She shoved her hands in her pockets so that Suzie couldn’t see how they were shaking.
“Starlight, switching on,” Jack said. Moments later, the star closest to them bloomed into iridescent life. “Come on home now.”
“Coming,” Toshiko said. Suzie didn’t wait any longer; she popped the clutch and sped off for the Hub. Normally, Toshiko would have shook her head at the absurdity of peeling out in a decrepit old Volkswagen, but today, she wished it were something faster. A rocket car, perhaps, or at the very least a fighter jet. Anything to get her back to the Hub as quickly as possible.
Suzie looked over, grinned like a wild thing, and accelerated so hard that Toshiko wondered whether the little Volkswagen could handle the pull. “Hold on,” Suzie said.
Toshiko grabbed the handle on the door. And gritted her teeth.
“Here we go!” Suzie went around a roundabout at top speed, swinging the back end out in as impressive a display of squealing tyres and wobbling ladder as one could do in an ancient two-door hatchback. Toshiko kept her eyes on the road, moving only as much as necessary to adjust to the motions, ready to jump out and run for the Hub if she thought it would get her there faster.
When the rounded the final turn to the parking garage, Suzie speed-dialled the Hub and said, “Open up, Harkness, we’re coming in high and hot.”
“Who’s high?” Owen’s voice came into the speaker. “You’d better share.” Up ahead of them, the door to the garage started to open.
“You wish,” Suzie answered. “Tosh’s about to burn a hole in the wind trying to get to her computer. Stay out of her way.” She flipped the phone shut. Toshiko abandoned all pretence of calm and unbuckled her seat belt, ready to jump from the car as soon as it stopped.
Suzie slammed on the brakes. “Out with you!”
Toshiko flew out of the car door and down the passageway, nearly ripping the loose sleeve of her jersey on a door handle in her haste. Good thing it was old. Just as she reached the door to the main Hub, she slowed down to a fast, if dignified walk, or as close as she could come to dignified given that she was impatient to start the program. If Jack and Owen had been watching the CCTV, they’d have seen her get stopped dead in her tracks by that wretched door.
Patting her hair into place, Toshiko walked through the door and up to Jack and Owen. “I’m here,” she said.
“That’s always a good place to start,” Jack said. He stepped aside, letting her pass, and followed her to her workstation. Owen crowded in close behind her.
With her fingers flying across the keyboard, Toshiko started the program running, querying each of the receivers in turn to make sure the telemetry was working properly. Her heart was hammering away in her throat and her hands were damp with sweat, although she was pleased that they didn’t shake too much.
Like clockwork, the receivers responded to the query one by one, each one broadcasting an identification signal followed by the time stamped to hundredths of microseconds.
“Brilliant,” Toshiko breathed. She sent out another round of queries, this time to the receivers in random order. Once again, they responded beautifully. Perfect. “Is Suzie here yet?” she asked.
“I’m here,” Suzie answered.
Toshiko held her hands over the keyboard, ready to go, and hesitated. It would be easy to start second-guessing herself now, even after the successful tests over the last two days and the computer simulations and the weeks of eighteen-hour days before this.
A hand touched her shoulder, and she felt warm breath tickle her neck. It was Owen, standing close as he could to see the screen. Toshiko leaned back incrementally, felt his thumb on her scapula.
She started the program running.
Characters/Pairings: Jack/Ianto, some Toshiko
Rating: Mature for language and themes
Spoilers: Everything before S1E1, including Doctor Who
Thanks again to adina_atl and peasant_ for the beta.
Part 1
“Good morning, my name is Toshiko Sato, and I am the technical specialist at Torchwood Three in Cardiff.”
Toshiko scanned her audience, who were watching attentively (or not) from London. There were some thirty people on the other side, ranging in age from barely old enough to have a driving licence to a very old woman in a wheelchair. In the centre of the group were a man and a woman she recognized from her trip to London earlier that year, the former the supervisor of the technical research division and the latter somebody who’d been in and out of his office all day but who had never introduced herself.
“I’m here this morning at the request of the Temporal Research subgroup of the Technical Research Division, to discuss a critical research project at Torchwood Three.” Toshiko brushed a strand of hair out of her face. “As I’m sure you are all well aware, there was a large earthquake here last month, one that coincided with one of the biggest Rift flares recorded in the last half-century.”
Was it her imagination, or did the woman next to the technical research director twitch?
“During the earthquake, the part of the Rift Manipulator that monitored and recorded spikes and flares in the Rift was damaged beyond repair,” Toshiko continued, pointing to a picture on the screen behind her. Owen, who had semi-graciously acquiesced to repeated browbeating by Jack and Suzie both to operate the projector, snorted and switched to a before-and-after view. The slagged glass remnants looked obscene next to the arrangement of fine glass tubes and crystals of the intact component.
“Fulgurites,” mumbled somebody in the audience.
“More like Trinitite,” somebody else said.
“Trinitite is a better analogy, for reasons I’m about to explain,” Toshiko said. “Before our instrument failed, we estimate that the total energy output by the Rift flare was 141, 254 terajoules, which is approximately the same amount of energy as an earthquake with a magnitude of 5.4 on the moment-magnitude scale.”
Mr. Carrington, the technical director (she remembered his name in a rush), frowned and said, “The magnitude of the earthquake was registered as 5.1, not 5.4.”
Toshiko didn’t care for his tone of voice or his attitude, aggressive and abrasive. “The seismographs recorded the energy released into the earth,” she said calmly, nodding at Owen to change the slide. “Remember that some of the energy would have been dispersed into the atmosphere, some would have dissipated as heat, light, or sound, and some would have escaped from the Earth entirely.”
“But your instruments are earth-based,” Mr. Carrington retorted. “How can you estimate the entire amount of energy released with an earth-based sensor?”
“Therein lies the problem. Our sensor was mounted into the Rift manipulator itself, thereby directly measuring what was released from the Rift.” Toshiko picked up the hunk of slagged glass again.
Mr. Carrington frowned again. “Your interferometer doesn’t measure the Rift energy.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Toshiko saw Owen pull a face.
“Owen, would you jump ahead to slide 13?” Toshiko asked. While Owen looked for the right one, she Mr. Carrington in the eye and said, “In over 100 years of observations of the Rift, we’ve isolated its position to within meters, along an axis in the air above Cardiff. While the interferometer concept doesn’t come close to the quality of alien technology that we cannot reproduce on this planet, it is an easy way to monitor the Rift, and one we are capable of understanding.”
The blond woman next to Mr. Carrington sat up and said, “Capable of understanding, in what sense?”
Toshiko plastered on a bland smile. “We use the moment magnitude scale because it’s easier for the human mind to comprehend a single small number than an extraordinarily large value.”
“Hey, isn’t it supposed to be the other way around?” somebody asked.
“We’re discussing numbers, thank you, not something you may or may not have that none of the rest of us want to see.” Toshiko ignored the snickers and chuckles and Owen biting his finger to keep from laughing. This was time she could be spending on fine-tuning the software, not spoon-feeding a bunch of children. “The Rift bends time and it bends space. The Rift incursion effectively increased the speed of light by a power of 4.08.”
Into the gasps and whistles and instantly ramrod-straight backs, somebody breathed, “Jesus.”
A hand went up in the back of the room in London. “How is that possible?”
Somebody laughed. “How long have you worked for Torchwood?”
“Incursions of this magnitude have devastating effects on the local population,” Toshiko continued, nodding at Owen and mouthing her thanks when he changed the slide. “An incursion in November of 1963, thought to have been triggered by an isolated temporal anomaly near a school in the north of London, was followed directly by a spate of unusually strong winter gales, one with sustained wind speeds of over 110 kilometres per hour before the anemometer broke.”
“Typical bloody Cardiff,” a male voice mumbled in the back. “Can’t keep their gear working for love nor money.”
“Focus,” called the elderly woman in the wheelchair.
Toshiko gave her a grateful look. “As I was saying, large incursions have devastating effects. The estimated damage to Cardiff as a result of the earthquake is…”
“We know all that,” interrupted Mr. Carrington. “We’re more curious to know why you need the most sophisticated timepiece in all of England.”
“Long-term monitoring of a known time anomaly requires that we measure time as precisely as we can,” Toshiko temporized, thrown by the departure from her carefully-rehearsed speech. “The Rift-if there’s a large incursion, there is usually some kind of warning in advance. Actually, an earthquake is a good analogy to a Rift flare.” She paused, pondering. “Foreshocks and aftershocks occur in conjunction with major seismic activity. We certainly have recorded after-flares, if you will, and on occasion, Torchwood has been able to predict large Rift incursions based on a pattern of increasing magnitude in flares.”
“But you can’t do anything about them,” Mr. Carrington said. “What’s the point?”
Toshiko ground her teeth in annoyance. In the back of the room, Owen snorted. “We can alert emergency management in Cardiff,” she replied calmly. “We can and do go out to the central location of a flare after we record significant Rift activity, and retrieve alien or anachronistic artefacts.”
The blonde woman in front said, “Reactive, then.”
“Not at all,” Toshiko said. This was getting tiresome. “We’re limited in what we can do, but we do what we can. Based on monitoring the Rift over a period of sixty years, Torchwood provided extensive engineering advice to the project team of the Cardiff Bay Barrage, particularly with respect to building the second phase of the Senedd and how to isolate its electrical circuitry from variable time, something that physically manifested in terms of flickering lights and blackouts.”
“So the Welsh Assembly is stuck in a time warp?” somebody called from the back. “That makes entirely too much sense.”
Once again, Toshiko ploughed right on through the laughter, pitching her voice higher and raising the volume to where it drowned out the other voices. “The point being that without any way to monitor the Rift, there is no way we can do anything to protect the citizens of the UK as we are required by the Charter. Even if all we can do are desktop engineering studies, provide warnings when we can and clean up the mess when we can’t, we’re at least at the level of the Met Office, with a bare fraction of their infrastructure resources and only four people.”
Silence.
Toshiko permitted herself a brief moment of self-indulgent satisfaction.
“So, why not use one of the small hand-held Rift energy monitors?” Mr. Carrington asked. “Why do you need the comb array and a dedicated receiver network?”
“I’ve discussed that idea in detail in the proposal document sent to you four days ago,” she said, dropping any pretense of patience and letting the full force of her irritation show. “If you refer to pages four to eight of the document I sent you, you’ll find that they are unsuitable on the grounds of nonspecificity. It’s all well and good to have a tool that will tell us that there is Rift energy present, but not where the spike occurred or how strong it was. For us to do anything more than know there is Rift activity in Cardiff, which occurs about as often as ducks quack, we need to have the proper tools for the job.”
Looking rather taken-aback, but also strangely satisfied, the man sat back, as did half the audience. Toshiko stared back with suspicion. Glancing down at the end of the table, she saw Owen miming applause.
Toshiko decided she liked teleconferences much better than person-to-person presentations. If she’d been there in person, she’d have been a tongue-tied, frustrated mess. With a screen and a three hour drive between her and her audience, she was just irritated.
The very old woman said, “Is there any way we could use these predictions to capture the energy discharged by the Rift? Could we use it for power generation?”
Toshiko bit her lip, thinking. “Probably not,” she said.
“But it is possible?” Mr. Carrington asked.
“Theoretically, yes,” Toshiko said, trying to figure out how one could harness such energy. “The problem is that it is neither controllable nor predictable. Assuming it were possible, there is no way it could be used for any kind of sustainable power source.”
“Couldn’t you figure out a way to do a slow open, to release the energy over a longer period of time?” the old woman asked. “Like a slow earthquake?”
Toshiko shook her head. “It's an interesting question,” she added, softening her voice. This woman had been interested and polite through the entire conference, unlike almost everybody else in there. She considered the question with her chin tipped to the ceiling, then dropped it down to look the woman in the face. “And one I hadn't thought of. The problem is thiat all of the energy released by the Rift must come from somewhere else. It may be from elsewhere on the planet, it may be from elsewhere in the spatial universe, or it may be from another time entirely."
"But you admit it is possible?" That was the woman next to Carrington.
Toshiko felt the hair on her neck stand. Warily, she answered, "Possible, yes. Desirable, no. Stupid, highly likely. Without a thorough understanding and absolute control over the process, it would be as irresponsible as setting a forest fire to heat your house."
Several members of the audience looked very disappointed. It was a very odd thought--something they must have been contemplating amongst themselves for some time.
Looking at the clock on the wall behind Owen’s head, Toshiko said, “I have a few minutes left. Are there any other questions?”
The assorted members of the audience shook their heads. Mr. Carrington looked like he wanted to say something, but he was stilled by the blonde woman before he could speak. Toshiko plastered a bland smile on her face, trying to hide her relief. “Well, in that case, thank you ladies and gentlemen. We hope to be testing the prototype soon, and will be happy to show you the results.”
Owen flicked off the camera. “Bugger. Who d’you reckon spiked the punch this morning?”
“I don’t know.” Toshiko ducked her head, wanting out of there. “It’s too early in the day for stroppy people. Excuse me.”
She came down from the conference room brimming with frustration, having forgotten (or mentally blocked out) just how awful proposal presentations were, and very aware that she was inches away from being as stroppy as she’d accused the London crowd of being. If it hadn’t been for Owen’s well-timed comic relief, she might have thrown something at the screen. There she was, stuck in the middle of penny-pinching duelling bureaucrats, with Jack ever so kindly not being about to make an appearance to back her up.
Surprisingly, Owen followed close on her heels. "That was Yvonne Hartman, the top dog of all of Torchwood."
"Really," Tosh grunted. "That's nice."
"If you don't get a call from them next week asking you when you want to transfer, I'll eat my hat," Owen replied. "I've been in London more than you. They don't send their chief honchos for anything."
"I'm not going to London."
"Don't make me eat my hat, princess. I like that hat." Owen wandered off towards his lair. "It'd taste like tanning chemicals."
Toshiko grumbled and steamed her way towards the workbenches. London, indeed. After everything she'd had and lost there, the very thought that she'd pull up sticks to go back there was preposterous.
Then she saw two beautiful eight-pointed stars resting on Suzie’s workbench.
“What’s this?” Toshiko asked, rushing forward to take a closer look. The stars were made of silver metal that had been pierced and punched in a decorative pattern, about a meter in diameter and surprisingly light for their size. The centre of each star was empty, a round hole about the width of her palm.
“That’s how we’re going to put sophisticated technical equipment in the middle of Cardiff without starting the conspiracy theorists going,” Suzie answered. “Here.” She handed Toshiko a small black cylinder.
Toshiko peered at it-in the centre, recessed perhaps the length of her fingertip, was a small black plate overlaying a microprocessor. “It’s a receiver unit.”
“It is,” Suzie said. “Clandestine observations of something that doesn’t exist, courtesy of public art.”
“Gorgeous.” Toshiko put down the receiver and picked up the nearest star, bringing it close to her face for inspection. Inside each little hole in the metal was a glass prism, small and sharp. “What’s the glass for?”
“I told you, it’s going to be public art.” Suzie picked up one of the receiver units and dabbed epoxy into a groove cut along the inside of the cylinder, then daintily fitted a mirror onto the epoxy. “Just plain metal stars aren’t art, they’re kitsch. When these are operational, they look like this.” She plugged a wire dangling from the back of Toshiko’s star.
Light coursed up the arms, sparkling up the centre of each one and forming an iridescent fan near the points. Between the silver of the metal and the light through the prisms, it looked like a rainbow crossed with an icicle. Toshiko felt her lips curve, then break open into a wide smile.
“See?” Suzie said, looking very pleased with herself. “Art. I made the first one and told Jack to make the rest.” She took the star from Toshiko’s unresisting hand and gave her another one. “I hate to say it, but he did better than me.”
Turning the star over in her hand, Toshiko had to agree that this one was superior. The joins where the arms had been welded together were finer, and a mixture of clear and coloured glass formed patterns of spirals and arches along each arm. In the faint light cast by the still-lit star lying on the table, the one in her hand seemed almost liquid.
“When do you think they’ll be ready to set up and test?” Toshiko asked. Her skin prickled with excitement. It was one thing to have a good idea, but seeing that idea turn into reality was fantastic.
“Tomorrow?” Suzie said. “I’m nearly done putting them together. You have the control system finished, right?”
“Since last week,” Toshiko answered. “How tomorrow afternoon we set them up in here for a dry run?”
“Absolutely not. We finish them, put them together, and hang them.” Suzie stared her right in the face, challenging.
Toshiko fidgeted under her gaze. “And if they don’t work? We need to try them in here.”
Suzie stared at her a while longer, and right when Toshiko realized she had walked into a trap yet again, Suzie laughed and said, “Tosh, love, I’m taking the piss. Of course we’ll do a dry run.”
A reply was on the tip of her tongue when the general alarm rang, and Jack raced in, dumped two more stars in front of them, and ran out with Owen, shouting something about a Weevil. Toshiko shrugged, wandered over to her workstation, and pulled up all the necessary tracking systems.
*****
Thursday morning dawned grey and cold, almost exactly the same as every other day that week, except that instead of lying in bed cursing Torchwood for only getting three hours’ sleep and wishing the world would go away, Toshiko sprang out from under the covers and ran into the kitchen. Today, the stars were going up-after only five weeks from conception to reality. That had to be a new record, and what Suzie had told her they couldn’t do. So there.
She didn’t want to start dancing in her kitchen until after the full trials were complete. Toe-tapping didn’t count.
So long as it just stayed overcast, everything would be fine. Rain or fog would interfere with the laser propagation. That was something they’d have to fix with the next iteration, as soon as they got the comb array from London, and enough funding to buy the materials. Suzie may have cannibalized (with Jack’s blessing) the metal and glass for the stars from some tacky Victorian decorations left in the storerooms, but not even she could turn old wineglasses into insulated fibre optic cable for less than the cost of buying it new.
That could be entirely fun to try, if they ever got a free moment.
Speaking of free moments, or more rightly lack thereof, it was time for her to go. Toshiko flung on her coat and clattered down the stairs, shoving keys and phone and a twenty pound note into her pockets as she went, and jumped into Suzie’s little blue Volkswagen.
“You’re all smiles this morning,” Suzie said as Toshiko buckled herself in, somehow managing to avoid getting caught on the ladder that ran between both front seats, across the rear seats, and still poked out the back. “Be careful, somebody might think you’re excited.”
“We can’t be having that.” Toshiko stared at Suzie’s long cherry-red jacket, black jeans, combat boots, and braids, topped off with one of those scarves made in Guatemala and sold at fair-trade shows and a tattered wool hat. “What on earth are you wearing?”
Suzie beamed. “I told you already. I’m hiding the fact that we’re mad scientists by being a mad artist who has a grant from the city to hang public art.” She tossed her head, shaking the braids from side to side. “The stars are in the boot.”
“What about the transmission unit?” Toshiko looked down at her old trousers and bulky sweatshirt and boots, feeling decidedly frumpy. Then again, madness took many forms, and her own madness wore red jumpsuits and slept on the floor, not glitter and Guatemalan scarves.
“Fearless leader installed that in the dead of night last night,” Suzie answered. “Before you ask, he installed it in the place you told him to, and took measurements to a City of Cardiff survey mark so we know the exact position.”
Toshiko blinked. “To what order?”
“Tens of micrometers, he said. He wouldn’t tell me how, but assured me it would be well controlled.” Suzie shrugged. “He’s put mounting brackets up for the receiver stars, as well.”
“Right. Well then,” Toshiko said, smoothing down her hair. A thought occurred to her, one that wasn’t too important in the grand scheme of things, but still something she needed to know. “Do we have something from the city, explaining what we’re doing? I mean, we’re Torchwood…”
“…But the whole point of this is not looking like Torchwood,” Suzie finished. “We do, we do. After we’ve hung them, some administrative monkey at City Hall is going to send out a press release, talking about the stars and the mysterious artist who donated them to the city.” They turned the corner, straight into the rising sun, which drenched Suzie’s face in orange light. “The mayor’s office is still trying to figure out which end is up after the mayor was found dead. This makes for a good distraction. We’ll probably have three or four candidates all showing up for photo ops.”
Toshiko grimaced. She hated being so…so public. Somebody might see her, and recognize her, and question what she was doing. “You can pose for the camera. I don’t want to be anywhere near it.”
“As you wish.” With a flick of her wrist, Suzie stopped the car. “First stop.”
The mounting bracket turned out to be a circle of alternating bolts and sticky bits, so that something would help anchor each star in place while the bolts were tightened. Toshiko decided Jack was a much better engineer than he let on. She would have put up magnets, except magnets that close to the small processing and transmit units wouldn’t have been a good idea. She tightened the last bolt, uncovered the small protective plate from the mirror, and said, “Two down, nine to go.”
Suzie frowned. “Two? Why…oh, of course, the control.” She pulled a pair of stars from the boot of the Volkswagen. “Ready for the next one?”
“I suppose. Where’s the next one?”
Suzie rifled through the sheaf of papers in her hand. “Ummmm….one hundred meters straight down this road. We don’t go around a corner until the seventh star.”
“I thought it was the second star where we turn,” Toshiko said, hoisting the ladder on to her shoulder. “Not the seventh.”
“We’d have to go back in time a few hours, since it’s already morning, and approach it from the opposite direction so that we go to the right,” Suzie pointed out. “But if you want, we can go hang the seventh star now, and come back.”
Toshiko thought about that and about how flying would make this much more fun, before deciding that the fun of it was literally outweighed by the ladder. “That’s okay, thanks.”
The second and third stars went up quickly, with nothing more than securing the bolts and occasionally brushing her hair from her eyes. On the third, while she carefully peeled off the blue wax paper from the adhesives-which she’d identified as ECG electrode pads, Owen was going to hit the roof when he found out.
All told, it took them the better part of three hours to hang the stars. While Toshiko did the heavy lifting and pretended to be a much-abused city employee, Suzie entertained the occasional passersby with a combination of Shakespearean sonnets and rambling airy discourses on the metaphysical properties of the stars. The poetry was nice to listen to-Suzie had a pleasant way of speaking-but the feathery-voiced descriptions of healing powers of inanimate objects were screamingly hilarious, and Suzie’s delivery was perfect.
“I can’t understand some people,” Suzie complained as Toshiko came down from hanging the final star. “Healing powers of the rainbow rays? Do they really believe that?”
“I liked the bit about spreading warmth and light over Cardiff best,” Toshiko answered.
“The light, at least, is true.” Suzie held open the boot for Toshiko to shove the ladder back in. “Warmth will have to wait until April or so.”
“Unless we go to Spain.” Toshiko tied the little red flag on the ladder and made for the passenger side seat. Taking out her phone, she dialled the Hub with excited, unsteady fingers. “Jack, they’re all up.”
“Excellent!” Jack sounded surprised and pleased. “I figured it would have taken you longer than that. Flip the switch?”
Toshiko took a deep breath. “Go ahead, switch on the starlight.” She shoved her hands in her pockets so that Suzie couldn’t see how they were shaking.
“Starlight, switching on,” Jack said. Moments later, the star closest to them bloomed into iridescent life. “Come on home now.”
“Coming,” Toshiko said. Suzie didn’t wait any longer; she popped the clutch and sped off for the Hub. Normally, Toshiko would have shook her head at the absurdity of peeling out in a decrepit old Volkswagen, but today, she wished it were something faster. A rocket car, perhaps, or at the very least a fighter jet. Anything to get her back to the Hub as quickly as possible.
Suzie looked over, grinned like a wild thing, and accelerated so hard that Toshiko wondered whether the little Volkswagen could handle the pull. “Hold on,” Suzie said.
Toshiko grabbed the handle on the door. And gritted her teeth.
“Here we go!” Suzie went around a roundabout at top speed, swinging the back end out in as impressive a display of squealing tyres and wobbling ladder as one could do in an ancient two-door hatchback. Toshiko kept her eyes on the road, moving only as much as necessary to adjust to the motions, ready to jump out and run for the Hub if she thought it would get her there faster.
When the rounded the final turn to the parking garage, Suzie speed-dialled the Hub and said, “Open up, Harkness, we’re coming in high and hot.”
“Who’s high?” Owen’s voice came into the speaker. “You’d better share.” Up ahead of them, the door to the garage started to open.
“You wish,” Suzie answered. “Tosh’s about to burn a hole in the wind trying to get to her computer. Stay out of her way.” She flipped the phone shut. Toshiko abandoned all pretence of calm and unbuckled her seat belt, ready to jump from the car as soon as it stopped.
Suzie slammed on the brakes. “Out with you!”
Toshiko flew out of the car door and down the passageway, nearly ripping the loose sleeve of her jersey on a door handle in her haste. Good thing it was old. Just as she reached the door to the main Hub, she slowed down to a fast, if dignified walk, or as close as she could come to dignified given that she was impatient to start the program. If Jack and Owen had been watching the CCTV, they’d have seen her get stopped dead in her tracks by that wretched door.
Patting her hair into place, Toshiko walked through the door and up to Jack and Owen. “I’m here,” she said.
“That’s always a good place to start,” Jack said. He stepped aside, letting her pass, and followed her to her workstation. Owen crowded in close behind her.
With her fingers flying across the keyboard, Toshiko started the program running, querying each of the receivers in turn to make sure the telemetry was working properly. Her heart was hammering away in her throat and her hands were damp with sweat, although she was pleased that they didn’t shake too much.
Like clockwork, the receivers responded to the query one by one, each one broadcasting an identification signal followed by the time stamped to hundredths of microseconds.
“Brilliant,” Toshiko breathed. She sent out another round of queries, this time to the receivers in random order. Once again, they responded beautifully. Perfect. “Is Suzie here yet?” she asked.
“I’m here,” Suzie answered.
Toshiko held her hands over the keyboard, ready to go, and hesitated. It would be easy to start second-guessing herself now, even after the successful tests over the last two days and the computer simulations and the weeks of eighteen-hour days before this.
A hand touched her shoulder, and she felt warm breath tickle her neck. It was Owen, standing close as he could to see the screen. Toshiko leaned back incrementally, felt his thumb on her scapula.
She started the program running.