VS3:12 -- "Point of Impact", Part One
When a ship crashes outside of Cardiff, UNIT and Torchwood join forces again, but they're facing more then they realize. Two alien races with differing agendas -- which one can they trust? With the fate of the Earth in the balance, that's one question they'll need to answer before it's too late.
Point of Impact
by: thaddeusfavour, xtricks
Valiant: 44º 45' N-49º 3' E., Tuesday
"Spit-spot my ass. Who says that anymore?" Gabe hunched his shoulders as a gust of icy, high-atmosphere wind tore across a corner of the Valiant's third port airstrip, unofficially designated as the smokers' paradise.
"It's UNIT; who knows where they dig those officers up from," Ginevra said with the airy disdain only the long-term enlisted could manage. She waved her cigarette, flicking ash that was blown immediately over the inadequate guardrail to disappear into the ice-blue sky, sparking blue and green as it hit the static shield that kept the air pressure in. They were somewhere over the Caspian this week, though the sky all around the Valiant pretty much looked the same everywhere they went.
Ginevra's Italian cigarettes weren't the only reason Gabe had followed her out to the edge of the Valiant's deck. A woman like her, he'd follow anywhere. Still, even with Ginevra's profile to admire - a whip of dark hair escaped from its clip to flutter at the edge of her jaw and give Gabe something to think about later tonight - he couldn't stop glancing over at the long drop to nothing, fidgeting restlessly.
"Niko, get your ass back here - there's plenty that've gone over the edge when the wind picks up!" he yelled. Plenty had gone over the edge before, and not just because of the wind. Gabe would never say, but he was a survivor of the Year and-
A bit of grit or something hit the conning tower at Gabe's shoulder with a sharp little crack, and he flinched.
"It's gorgeous out here!" Niko shouted back, leaning over the rail like a tourist.
"I'll go fetch him," Ginevra sighed, passing the last of her cigarette to Gabe as she stepped out from the shelter of the conning tower, clamping a hand on her cap to keep it from being blown away.
Niko gave a sudden shout, waving his arms wildly. "Bees!" he shouted. "There's bees up here - I'm allergic to bees!"
Niko was flailing at the edge of the landing strip; Gabe couldn't help letting out a bark of laughter at the sight. Rube. "Idiot, we're twenty-seven thousand feet above sea level, no bugs are going to fly up here."
But there was something twisting like smoke in the wind as Niko bolted back towards them. A rapid-fire rattle against the conning tower made Gabe duck as something flicked across the back of his hand, driven by the wind. It was like getting caught in a sudden hailstorm; sharp little blows rained across his face, his neck, and... they were bugs. Gabe pawed at his hair with a shout, then ran for the hatch.
"Get back here!" he yelled. "C'mon, Ginevra, hurry up!" The bugs hit the wall, the door, and his back, the unlucky ones shattering into smears of green goo on impact, others swirling around the three of them as they crowded through the door and slammed it shut. The faint patter of them hitting the tower carried inside, then they flew up, up and the sound faded away.
"Yuck," Niko said with a grimace.
Ginevra shook a bug out of her hair. It was a pretty, pale, iridescent blue, and about the size of a Smartie. Gabe couldn't see any wings, though-
With a squeak of disgust, Ginevra stomped on it, grinding her boot down until it was nothing more than a smear on the floor. "I thought we were too high up for flying things," she said uncertainly.
"Me, too."
"I guess... we should tell the deck officer," Niko said.
"Yeah, but how about we skip the part about being out there, against regs, smoking," Gabe muttered, trailing after them, shaking out his sleeves and wondering, in an itchy moment of panic, if one of the bugs could have got inside his trousers.
"Hey, this could be important; maybe they'll let us off on that," Niko protested.
Ginevra snorted. "You are new."
The Bezel: L2 + 442,000 meters, Thursday
Yna's blood still stained the liftwell and Naz stared blindly at it as ze sank down into the dimmer lower levels.
The communications circuit was empty, hissing in the back of hir mind when it should have been alive with the sounds of hir kin: jokes, games and orders, friends and lovers. Naz even missed the command staff with their painful override codes; they were all dead... or worse. Naz pushed that thought aside, as well as the blue glint of a repair request in the corner of hir eye, the pull of drying, painful skin and the smell of death in the corridors. The request winked out as ze passed beyond the filtration system's range. A flicker of text sputtered across hir vision, a staticky communication error, but nothing ze hadn't been expecting.
Naz slapped the manual override on the lift and slithered out between one floor and the next, gone before the security system had a chance to reboot and notice hir disappearance off the grid. Ze triggered the emergency cut-off their surviving medic had implanted at the base of hir spine and the world went silent.
Naz was alone.
Cut off from the ship's systems, Naz blinked in the darkness, blind without the local positioning overlay to guide hir. All ze had to rely on was a set of whispered instructions and memory and... hope. Bitter hope, as bitter as the smell of their captors, for the hope Naz and hir kin passed from hand to hand, and whisper to whisper, was not for themselves. They were dead. But out there a living world sang in the darkness, a spectrum of signals in an alien tongue, ignorant of the things that lay beyond their birthing waters.
The enemy had scattered scouts across local space; some had returned, riding the energy of a local temporal rift, and Naz's ship had been sent to retrieve them. Horror followed, the mass of scouts like an infestation through the corridors, then the bizarre feeding by the enemy on their own kind. The tiny scouts had been swallowed down, consumed, and somehow passed their reconnaissance onto their fellows. Then the enemy had set course for a small world nearby, no longer hidden in the darkness of the universe.
None of Naz's kin wanted to have a hand in the death of that world. Resistance would cost them all their lives, but that price had shrunk as time passed and their captors had learned how to control more and more parts of the ship. The enemy had a fine sense of 'useful', and those who failed - the wounded, the ill, the unimportant - were taken to be studied or, more mercifully, eaten. Naz knew hir usefulness was coming to an end, so ze crawled through the secret guts of hir ship, determined that hir death name might mean something more than 'snack'.
It took much longer than Naz had thought to reach the tertiary access drop, crawling belly down in the dark, while in hir imagination every noise became the rattling approach of an enemy. When ze finally reached it, ze nearly tumbled into the open drop, shaking with exhaustion. Damp, smelly air blew past hir face and ze paused, hir eyes closed at the draught, full of blessed moisture. Then, hurrying, Naz reached down, fumbling with trembling hands to pry open the tiny maintenance panel using the archaic, makeshift tools that were all ze'd been able to smuggle with hir. From there it was simple enough to regurgitate the jury-rigged sabotage chip ze'd swallowed earlier and activate the appropriate enzymes before releasing them directly into the beloved ship's beautiful, complicated brain.
By the time Naz wiggled back out of the maintenance access, the ship was already dying. The soft-gravity generators were failing, giving a sense of the ship slowly, impossibly, tipping to one side, and Naz had to brace hir arms against the bulkhead as ze hurried to the evacuation point.
Ze was still cut off from the ship's systems, so the sound of running feet and noisy gasping around the corner made Naz flinch back. Ze had no weapons, and the military implants ze depended on for reflexes and targeting had been disabled when they'd surrendered, but when Hyl came around the corner, weeping and spattered with blood, Naz grabbed the first thing to hand, a wrench, and lashed out at the nearest narrow limb when the enemy appeared. Ze missed.
The creature responded with a killer's precision and Naz screamed, biometric alarms dancing across hir vision. Hyl shrieked and ran on, abandoning Naz to the looming enemy. Naz lifted hir wrench, arm trembling, scattering dark blood across the filthy deck plates. "I am not food!" ze yelled defiantly. The enemy reared back, and ze shouted again; this was a better death than many.
The inertial dampers failed in a catastrophic rush as the whole ship collapsed out of FTL , alloys shrieking under the strain, and Naz was thrown onto the deck in a crunch of breaking bones. The enemy shattered before hir eyes, limbs cracking, guts spilling in a steaming mess as the ship bucked and heaved - last-ditch alarms sounded, calling for help, signalling the ship's death in mauve strobes and warbling, audible alerts. Naz kicked free of the enemy's corpse, sobbing in disgust and pain. There were screams rising above the sound of the alarms, and gunfire. Above it all rose the sound of the enemy, rushing through the hallways. Naz had barely a moment to fling hirself back onto the deck, playing dead as a squad of the enemy's soldier caste rattled by, too agitated to notice Naz's life signs.
Naz crept after them, towards the evacuation point and hir hope of escape, as the ship self-destructed around them all. Ahead of hir, the passageway was visibly twisted, but more than that, a firefight between the enemy and the surviving crew had cut Naz off from the evacuation pods. It did not look as if hir people were winning. Wheezing, Naz turned away, stumbling towards the mid-level cargo holds. The pods there had been disregarded as too exposed when hir kin had planned their uprising against the enemy, and they were so far...
Wales: 51º 33' 16" N. 3º 06' 37" W., Friday
"This is great," Jack said. "Hardly any radiation at all. I'm telling you, wherever these guys are from, they're ecologically conscious." Getting out of the SUV and slamming the door, he began double-checking the readings on his wriststrap while walking slowly toward what appeared to be the centre of the crash site. "These babies must have had some emergency sanitation protocols in case of a crash. Amazing, really. I mean, without them we'd be standing in the middle of a crater the size of Cardiff, filled with radioactive slag."
"Thanks for that image, Jack," Gwen said, stepping up beside him. Ianto and Megan joined them to survey the damage.
The debris was strewn across about a kilometre of the countryside surrounding Cardiff, including part of a farm, some woods, and a good portion of the only road through the area. With the late afternoon sun slanting through the clouds, it could have been a pretty place, but the otherwise peaceful, bucolic setting only served to make the wreckage, the torn earth, and what looked like a few dead sheep even more disturbing. UNIT's military trucks grumbled across the field behind the team, churning up mud. As soon as they halted, soldiers hopped off in quick order to secure the area and set up their mobile command post. The faint smell of smoke hung in the air; they had the damp Welsh climate to thank for the lack of re-entry fires.
"All right, kids. It's safe to explore. Take a buddy and don't go far. Look for anything that might be useful; we'll take it with us. Be careful of anything that might be dangerous; we'll mark it and leave that for UNIT to clean up."
"What about survivors?" Megan asked, holding up a hand against the slanting sunlight as she scanned the wreckage.
Jack looked over at what seemed to be left of the ship. Some of the largest pieces of debris were grouped together in one area, and from there a distress signal was being transmitted.
"Unlikely, but if there are any, you might find them over that way," he said, pointing towards the chunks of twisted beams and metal.
Megan began walking toward them without hesitation. Jack opened his mouth to call her back, but Gwen stopped him.
"I'll be her buddy. You take Ianto and check around," she said.
Jack cocked an eyebrow at Ianto. "Right. Ianto, you're with me," he ordered.
"Right," Ianto said. "Sort of... loses something when Gwen says it first."
"Hey! I'm still in charge." Jack grinned at him. "I've got the coat."
Jack led the way across the debris field, slowly and carefully scanning the wreckage for anything useful or dangerous. Ianto followed, taking readings and sending data and video back to the Hub. Frowning, Jack turned over a bit of metal with his boot. It would be nice if they had someone at the Hub to receive and review the data they were collecting. They really needed to find a new tech person. Damn. Until they did, it meant he'd be spending another late night going over readings and running the data through Tosh's search programs. He crouched down to get a better look at something.
"Jack." Ianto stopped beside him, and he looked up to see Ianto waggling one hand at him. "Gloves."
Jack sighed, but stood up and fished the gloves out of his pocket. They slid smoothly onto his hands, skin-tight - though not a bit confining - and proof against most biological hazards and some radioactive elements, as well as being nearly impenetrable. He had to admit, UNIT usually did a great job of reengineering alien technology to a useful purpose. Ianto had only received these earlier in the week and had already made sure all their kits were stocked with them. Torchwood had learned its lesson from the last alien pathogen they'd encountered. (Not that gloves would have helped them then, but there was no sense in being careless.) Besides, Jack loved the feel of the gloves; he flexed his hands and rubbed them together. He'd never told UNIT that the original technology had been a form of alien condom, designed to protect the wearer from the STIs of the future.
He flipped over the piece of metal that had originally caught his eye. Nothing. Tossing it away, he continued to work the debris field in a loose grid pattern. It didn't seem as if anything had survived the crash intact. When he spotted the tiny, glowing K-7 power pack, he let out a whoop of joy.
"Ianto! Look at this!" Jack carefully lifted the finger-sized K-7 up so Ianto could see it.
"What is it?" Ianto asked.
"A K-7 power pack. With a little work, I can modify it to fit in that pulse rifle we found last year." Jack laughed. "Or, we could use it to power your coffee maker for roughly, oh, two point seven billion years."
"Ah, thanks, but no. Pulse rifle it is, then." Ianto pulled out a secure container, and Jack carefully placed the K-7 inside.
"Any idea what this stuff is?" Ianto asked, gesturing towards a large chunk of something that looked like it might be alien insulation, or foam concrete. There were large, roundish, irregular lumps of it all over the place.
Jack walked over and gently pressed a finger into it. Rubbery, it gave a little, but popped right back. He shook his head. "Not a clue."
Ianto frowned at his scanner. "It seems to be emitting a trace of something-" He broke off and began adjusting the input parameters.
"What?" Jack asked, going to look over Ianto's shoulder.
"Intermittent low-frequency radioactive bursts? Or possibly just static." He sighed and passed the scanner over his shoulder to Jack. "Sorry. I just can't tell."
Jack looked at the readings, then twitched the dials back to where Ianto had had them originally. "No. You're right. They're emitting some kind of intermittent radiation. In the... hah. In the terahertz range. You guys are just starting to figure that one out." He paused, studying the stuff scattered about the crash site. "Maybe they're part of the crash safety systems. You know, something to encase and render radioactive material harmless? Or mostly harmless." He checked the scanner again. "Not enough radiation to be harmful." Jack walked past several of the large chunks of... stuff, watching the readings carefully. "Yup. Safe. Still, we should probably make sure Gwen doesn't mess around with them."
"Jack," Ianto said, a note of warning in his voice.
Jack handed the scanner back to Ianto with a sigh. "I know. I know. She hates it when I worry."
"No," Ianto said. "She hates it when you treat her as if she can't do her job."
"Part of my job is looking out for her, and you." Jack activated his comm unit, but winced and turned it off as static filled his ear. "Damn. Must be interference from these things." He waved a hand at the stuff and started off across the field toward the area Gwen and Megan were searching. "Come on. We're done here anyway."
Ianto trotted to catch up. "Gwen's only just calmed down after you forgot to call her in on the weevil incident. Just don't upset her again, all right?"
"Who me?" Jack asked. He glanced at Ianto. "Seriously, we're done here, and I don't see anything that looks like radioactive doom in their area, so... no need to upset Gwen."
"Lucky for you," Ianto said.
"Lucky for us."
"Right."
They continued towards Muli and Gwen, finally catching the squeal of metal against metal.
"Gwen! Megan! Found anything? Time to go!" Jack called. Ianto shook his head and reached out, giving Jack a small shove. Jack grinned, and was just about to return it, when a call from Gwen interrupted them.
"Jack! Ianto! Hurry!" Her desperate tone had them running the last few yards and skidding around the chunk of bulkhead in their way.
Gwen had her shoulder under a piece of the wreckage, trying to lift it, while Megan was crouched beneath, pulling at a hatch of some kind. Gwen shoved, and the metal sheeting shifted, sliding down the back of the debris pile with a metallic shriek. Gwen stepped back, panting.
"We saw a light and there's blood - we think it's blood anyway," she said, pointing to the ground near the hatch. "Megan thinks we might have a survivor, but we can't get the hatch open. It's been damaged, or it's jammed, or something."
Megan stood, wiping the back of her hand across her forehead. "We tried to call you on these things," she tapped her comm unit, "but they must be defective."
"They're fine," Ianto said. "Some of the debris is interfering with communications." He studied the scanner intently, while Jack dropped down to get a better look at the hatch.
"Good call, Megan," Jack said. "This is an escape pod that didn't manage to escape. They build these things to survive pretty severe conditions, so if anyone made it inside," he paused and looked at the dark fluid - definitely blood - pooling below the hatch, "and it looks like they did - then they might still be alive." He stood up. "It's damaged. The seal is broken, otherwise that," Jack indicated the blood, "wouldn't be there. The main problem is that the locking mechanism that keeps the hatch from opening until it's safely landed doesn't seem to realise that it needs to open. I can help with that." Jack worked the controls on his vortex manipulator. "Get ready," he said. "The hatch is about to open." And it did, a body tumbling out of it and onto the ground with a wet splat.
Megan quickly stripped off her gloves and slipped on new ones as she kneeled beside the alien. It was difficult to recognize the jumble of limbs as a living creature. Despite the protection of the escape pod, it looked like the alien was too badly injured to survive for long. She was carefully straightening the limbs and trying to assess the injuries.
"Gwen. Bring the SUV around," Jack said. "Ianto, see if you can get any useful information from the escape pod's systems. Megan-"
"Unless you have useful information regarding this species," Megan interrupted, "I'm already doing everything that needs to be done."
"Right." Jack kneeled down to get a better look at the alien. The greenish-grey skin was obviously supple, but it looked tough as well. Jack reached out a hand to investigate the alien's arm.
"Don't touch my patient until you've changed your gloves," Megan said. Her tone was brusque, but Jack didn't object. He could see that all of her attention was focussed on finding out how to keep her patient alive. It was that level of dedication that had convinced him to hire her in the first place.
"Sorry. Could you check hir hands? I think you'll find the fingers are webbed."
Without looking up, she quickly spread the fingers to reveal the webbing. "Do you know what it is?"
"I think so," Jack said. "Semi-aquatic species. More amphibious. They don't need full immersion to stay healthy, but they're more comfortable in a humid atmosphere."
"Useful, long term," Megan said. "Not so useful right now. Either change your gloves or move farther back."
Jack sighed, then got to his feet as the SUV pulled up and Gwen hopped out. "Ianto, finish up with the data. Then load up the salvage Gwen and Megan have collected. Megan, prepare to move your patient. I'll get the stretcher."
"Change your gloves first."
He nearly laughed out loud. He'd expected that, after all. "Gwen! Bring me some clean-"
"Gloves?" Gwen asked, innocently, holding out a new pair in one hand and a hazmat bag in the other.
Jack grinned, deftly stripping off the old gloves and putting on the new ones. "Thanks." Gwen smiled back and they both hauled out the stretcher, positioning it beside Megan and her patient.
"I'll need a few more minutes," Megan said without looking up.
"Okay," Jack said. Glancing around, he noticed Ianto was still working in the escape pod and Gwen was leaning against the SUV. He went to join Gwen, settling back and crossing his arms. "You all right?" he asked.
"My back's a bit sore from all the standing around, but I'm fine."
Jack eyed her critically. She really did look fine. The growl of another heavy engine caught his attention and he looked over towards the growing clump of UNIT vehicles. By now there were three tents set up in a little formation of their own, and a half-dozen soldiers were hoisting a communications tower with well-trained coordination; a van nearby bristled with antennae. "Looks like they're bringing everything but the kitchen sink."
"My guess? They'll have one of those, too." Gwen only took a quick look over her shoulder toward UNIT, before shading her eyes and staring in the direction of the escape pod with the blinking light on top. "Mauve. I just can't get used to that."
Jack laughed. "You people and your red!"
"I honestly thought you were taking the piss about it. Maybe only a couple of alien races got together and used mauve. But, here it is again."
Jack turned his head to grin at her. "You thought maybe there was a 'Mauve Coalition'?"
"More like an agenda, really." She grinned back, bumping him gently with her shoulder. Glancing back at the beacon, she shook her head. "Mauve."
"Mauve for the light end of the spectrum, and the emergency transmitter is broadcasting at 1420.40575 MHz. That's the frequency of hydrogen." Jack paused, watching Megan work and quietly counting seconds to himself. He loved this game.
"Why hydrogen? Isn't it really common?"
Seven. Gwen never held out as long as Ianto. He was more patient and she was more curious.
"Sure. One of the first things every space-faring civilization learns to look for is hydrogen, because it's everywhere. But it only occurs naturally as a steady transmission. Vary it, and folks notice and come running." Jack frowned, considering. "Which means we may get some visitors. Gwen, let UNIT know it's the white chunks of debris that are interfering with communications. Tell them we'll transmit all pertinent data as soon as we get back to the Hub. Tell them-"
"I'm ready," Megan called, cutting him off. "I'll need Ianto's help during the drive."
"Tell them to have fun!" Jack said to Gwen as he pushed himself off the SUV and went to help Megan. "Ianto!"
Ianto pulled himself carefully out of the escape pod. "Done. I'm not sure what was in there, but it's ours now."
"Good. Finish up and stow your equipment. I'll pack the rest of the salvage since Megan needs your help with her patient. And don't forget to change your gloves!"
Sergeant Sweeney watched the black SUV work its way carefully across the uneven ground and around the debris from the crash. Once it hit the road, the driver put his foot down and the sleek vehicle zoomed off, heading back in the direction of Cardiff. They must have found something they didn't want knocked about going over the rough terrain. Probably something useful they picked out of the wreckage, leaving UNIT only the bits likely to explode.
"Allies my arse," Sweeney muttered, looking back down at the map he was holding. Roughly a square kilometre of Welsh countryside was marked out in red as the primary search area. Fields, clumps of trees, a stream, and... damn. Looked like one or two farms were involved. He hated it when civilians got caught up in these messes. At least everything had fallen north of the M4. No major smash-ups, just gawkers wondering what the hell was going on. Those farms were a good place to start his own search.
"Hey, Mac!"
Sweeney looked up as one of his friends called to him. "Tom. Have they assigned search areas yet?"
"Captain said assignments in ten." Tom looked over at the map and grinned, giving a quick nod towards the hastily erected HQ tent. "Old Man got you looking for your two slackers?"
Sweeney grimaced. "Yeah. If those two have turned off their radios..."
Tom laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. "Good luck. I'm gonna grab my team and get ready."
Sweeney shook his head as Tom trotted off. Everyone knew it would be a miracle if his two missing squaddies lasted out the year with UNIT. Besides, if Sweeney found them first, he was gonna kill them.
Wales: 51º 28' N. 3º 11' W., Friday
"There's that kid from UNIT," Gwen said with stubborn cheer. Trapped in the SUV with her, Jack couldn't exactly stalk off and find some other crisis to deal with, though triggering a false alarm was looking tempting. "Matthew... uh, Haynes, wasn't it? The tall one? He's impressionable enough."
"He's got a bit of alien ancestry," Ianto put in from the back and Jack hunched his shoulders, sensing he was being double-teamed. "Fywillian great-grandfather. It's why he's-"
"Six foot nine," Gwen finished as they turned into the public garage that hid Torchwood's vehicle entrance. "You'd need a stepstool to flirt with him."
"No." Jack swung the SUV around in order to back the boot as close to the garage entrance as possible, wincing as he ran over a speed bump, jostling everyone. "He's way too young. Especially if he's part Fywillian." He frowned. "He shouldn't be in the military at all."
"How about Andy? He already knows, pretty much."
He glared past Megan's head at Gwen. "No way," Jack said, hauling on the hand brake and hopping out to pull open the rear of the SUV. Megan was still working, swearing and muttering over her equipment, so the alien was obviously still alive. Jack didn't look closely - the puddles of black blood and the whistling gasps were all he needed to know - just braced the stretcher as Ianto slid it out of the SUV. Megan sidled out alongside it, hands pressed to some critical body part. "Are you kidding me?"
Megan interrupted their personnel meeting, such as it was, not even looking up from her work. "Ianto, find me some medical info on this species, or, if you can't, find out what treatment plans Dr. Harper left regarding diffuse semi-permeable circulatory systems and amphibian trauma care." Ianto hurried ahead, stripping off his protective gloves as he went. "Jack, you help me move it-"
"Hir," Jack interrupted. "I know these folks, the Nwaxan-chu, their sexes are... well, fun, but not much like the classic male-female dimorphism around here."
"Oh? Like Vy, then?" Megan looked up, hopefully. "What do you know about their medical care?"
Jack had to shake his head.
"Jack." Gwen's voice was briefly muffled as she pulled the containment boxes out from behind the seats. Dropping them on a hand truck with a clatter, she propped her hands on her hips and scowled at Jack's back. "Look at me, Jack." He glanced over his shoulder as she pressed her hands to her increasingly convex belly. "Are you going to wait until I'm in labour before you get someone to fill in? Because I'm not going to stuff the baby in a Kevlar bag and go into the field, you know."
Jack turned away. "I know, I know. I'm on it."
"What about DI Swanson?" she said, teasing. "I know you think she's sexy. If that's the hiring criteria..."
"I quite like her; she's competent and knows how to get a job done," Muli added, still mostly absorbed in her work.
"No!"
Racing through the passage to the Hub with an emergency on his heels was pretty much par for the course nowadays. Ianto tugged off his bloody - black, alien blood - gloves as he went, stuffing them into his jacket pocket. The suit was ruined anyway. Behind him, he heard Gwen still doing her bit to wear Jack down and, when he heard the irritated reply, knew it would be his turn later this evening. Dying alien aside, the end of the day looked to be pretty straightforward, and Gwen was right; they needed to get the whole maternity leave thing settled.
Ianto put that aside as soon as he settled at his station, calling up the archives search interface on one monitor while opening up his master file on large-scale cover-ups on the other. He let the UNIT communication stream run in the background, in case something interesting turned up at the crash site.
"Earthquake," he murmured, scanning the index in his cover story file, "hailstorm, Druid revival ceremony gone wrong - that worked nicely for the Helniaeeansriyaa - weather balloon..." He hesitated then went on. "Airplane... Airbus!"
The clatter of the stretcher being lowered into the med bay made Ianto turn back to the archive search, still chugging along. It had already pulled up a few possibilities; Ianto discarded the Nostrovite option and frowned at the only other biped.
"Does it have an," he grimaced at the display and minimized the archived autopsy images, "absorbed parasitic male along the upper back?"
"No!" Megan called back. "Nothing like that. Black blood... modified book lungs... I'm concerned about getting enough oxygen into it."
"Ze!" Jack said on her heels. "Ze's a Nwaxan-chu," he called out to Ianto, quickly spelling it out, "look that up." And more quietly, though Ianto still heard him. "I've seen road kill that looked healthier than this, Megan."
"Luckily, you're not the doctor," she said briskly, "so why don't you put your hands to work - pressure here, please - and let me worry about the prognosis."
The entry on Nwaxan-chu was barely a paragraph long, a transcription Ianto recognised as one of Jack's tales recorded by an archivist some fifty-odd years ago. Unsurprisingly, there wasn't anything about their physiology or care when injured, and more about what they could do with their tongues than Ianto really wanted to know. He pulled up the scan of the original entry in case anything had been left off, but it was shorthand and almost no one knew how to read that anymore. He certainly didn't.
"Nothing useful." He swung off the stool and went over to the med bay and peered down, then rather wished he hadn't. "We've never had one come through here."
The alien was, well... Ianto wasn't even sure how the alien could still be alive. He sincerely hoped ze was unconscious. Ze had visibly broken bones , a terrible gash on hir belly, and black blood bubbled from hir snub nose. Ianto wondered if the damp mottling on hir grey skin was bruising or normal patterns or something else entirely. All in all, it was quite sickening, honestly. Jack, despite his complaints, was still hands-on with a pressure bandage, scowling as he tried to keep it in place and stay out of Megan's way.
He spared a glance up though, then back to Megan. "At least ze's not puking alien diseases up at us."
"So we hope," Megan murmured and Ianto shifted uneasily. Every time he thought about the emo flu he felt a surge of embarrassment. It was small comfort that Jack had been nearly as ridiculous.
"Good lord," Megan murmured and Ianto straightened up, hand going to his gun, but it wasn't some sudden attack and nothing exploded. She was looking at the gaping wound on hir belly; Ianto saw a flash of something machined, and shuddered.
"Shrapnel from an explosion?" Jack suggested.
Megan tried to edge the end of her forceps under it. "I don't think so. Possibly a medical device, like a pacemaker. Does it look familiar to you?"
Jack peered at it. "Kinda hard to tell when it's inside someone and covered in guts. The Nwaxan-chu were big into gadgets when I knew them, ran the interstellar version of Kwik Fit all over the Imperial Sprawl. And the things they could do with their tongues-"
"It's not the only device in here," Megan muttered, and nudged Jack out of the way, neatly cutting off another bout of inter-species TMI. "And these punctured... lungs? Stomachs? Are more critical. Ianto, is there anything on this type of physiology?"
"I'll see what I can find," Ianto said, withdrawing to his station. He was sorry to hear the desperation in Megan's voice. Jack was probably right after all, and when he heard Jack come up out of the med bay, he was only more sure. Jack measured his dedication to lost causes carefully and stray aliens only rarely made the list.
Gwen was handling the UNIT liaison; he could hear her laughing behind him, and Ianto minimized that data stream with relief. One less thing for him to deal with.
"Lois keeps asking when I'm going to invite the bird with the pretty Welsh accent over for dinner," Lt. Mallory was saying.
"She does not! Wait, have I talked to her on the phone?" Gwen asked.
"A couple of weeks ago when you called my mobile."
"Oh, yes. Oh my God! That was her? You know, when you're busy you probably shouldn't answer the phone." Gwen was using her stern lecturer's tone, but Ianto could hear the grin in her voice.
"When we're busy and the phone rings, it might be someone we can invite to join in. Missed opportunities and all that." Lt. Mallory really was sounding more like Jack every day. Ianto shook his head. Jack Harkness, bad influence in a timeless retro package.
Ianto heard Jack pacing the main level, murmuring something to Gwen, pausing at Tosh's old station - Jack never sat at it anymore - to study the Rift monitor; Ianto watched his shifting reflection in his monitor, frowning a little. A crashed space ship and one dying (therefore helpless and harmless) alien was good news compared to some of the things they dealt with.
Jack circled round and came to a halt, propping a hip against Ianto's station. "Weather balloon?"
Ianto shook his head. "Airbus. Hardly have to do any work, with all the recent accidents around the world."
"Boring," Jack muttered, inspecting Ianto's pen cup and ignoring the steady blink of his PDA.
"Boring is good," Ianto reminded him. "Boring means no reporters-" He winced and made himself go on, "No awkward questions and no more fodder for the conspiracy websites. I'm getting tired of crashing them."
Jack caught sight of the medical search Ianto was doing and scowled. "There's no point," he said gruffly. "The alien's half crushed; ze's not going to live. You're wasting your time and so's Megan."
"It's still worth trying," Ianto said mildly. "Has to be better than dying alone in an airless rescue pod."
"All the best intentions in the world don't mean much when you're suffocating," Jack said sourly, tossing Ianto's pen back on his desk. He scrubbed his hands over his face. "And we'll be putting hir back in a box soon enough."
Ianto studied Jack's reflection for a moment; the drawn-down curve of his mouth and the strain at the corners of his eyes had nothing to do with their fairly simple day. "I've got an idea," he said, sliding off his stool. "Come on, you can lift heavy things."
Jack huffed a brief laugh. "Glad to know I'm good for something."
The storerooms just below the main level were a warren of junk; everything from extra toilet paper to broken furniture ended up down here, and Ianto had only the barest idea of what was squirrelled away in the further rooms. He did, however, remember something that might allow Torchwood to save someone, this time. "I found a record about the Nwaxan-chu and it sounded as if they could absorb oxygen directly through their skin-"
"Yeah..." Jack paused and Ianto imagined him rifling through memories dimmed by 2,000 years of airless, crushing darkness. Suffocating darkness. "Yeah, they can hold their breath for quite a while, which has some really sexy advantages."
"Yes, you mentioned," Ianto said dryly. "Try that shelf, there should be an experimental gel pack somewhere around here."
There was more thick dust than anything else on this level. All jokes aside, Ianto usually didn't have time to clean up the main level anymore, let alone play housewife to the rest of the Hub, and no one came down here often. But his memory was still good and there was the box he'd wondered about more than a year ago, an experiment from the 1970's abandoned when one particular employee had died young.
"What is it?" Jack asked from the other side of the shelving unit where he was struggling to free up the box, while Ianto shoved at it, the ancient cardboard crumbling under his fingers.
"If it's still viable, it could work as supplemental oxygen until the Nwaxan-chu's lungs are in better-" The box slid out of Ianto's hands, tumbling back off the shelf in a cloud of dust and sudden choked gasping from Jack. The whole shelving unit rocked, making Ianto leap back, as Jack shoved his way free, stumbling to his knees in the walkway, face white beneath the dust and grime. Ianto caught him around the waist as he went down; Jack's breathing seemed more impaired by panic than anything else.
"C- can't breathe," Jack panted miserably, pressing his face to Ianto's sleeve. "Can't- couldn't-"
Ianto rubbed his thumb gently at the nape of Jack's neck. "It's an early aero gel experiment," he went on quietly. "I think we can hyper-oxygenate the gel and put it under the Nwaxan-chu, in contact with its skin, and give it - hir - some extra air."
Jack nodded, cheek rubbing against Ianto's bicep. "Probably should get on that, then."
"Yup." Ianto stood and offered Jack a hand.
Jack's glance was rueful as he straightened up, but he brushed off his trousers, squared his shoulders, and edged his way back into the cramped, dark and airless space behind the shelves to fetch the fallen box.
Climbing back up the stairs with Jack at one end of the box and Ianto the other wasn't easy; but as they unrolled the thick blue mat and discovered the gel was still viable, the look on Megan's face was worth it. When they managed to get the pad under the Nwaxan-chu and the sticky gel clinging to its skin, the mottled marking faded as oxygen flowed directly into its bloodstream.
"It's remarkably stubborn," Megan said, sounding pretty pleased with that fact. The wound in the alien's abdomen had been closed and bandaged, broken limbs braced and, in general, ze looked more like a patient now than a movie special effect. "There are already signs of tissue growth and none of the organs - whatever they are - have actually failed."
"And that means?" Jack sounded as if he knew already.
"I think ze will live."
"Ah. What about any others?" Jack said, and caught Ianto's eye.
Ianto nodded back. "Containment facility. One that can get wet." He fished out his PDA to check his supply lists and wondered if he'd be able to get a paddling pool this time of year, and if it would do for the alien's needs. He also wondered what they were going to do with an obviously alien refugee. They'd been lucky last time with Vy, and he didn't bet on luck striking twice. At least they'd be able to add something besides porn to the Nwaxan-chu entry on the archives. Ianto prided himself on the fact that over fifty percent of the alien information entries under his tenure didn't involve any form of porn whatsoever. It was nearly a record, in Torchwood Three.
"I can't really say," Megan admitted as Ianto turned away. "If they were human, I wouldn't have expected this one to live, honestly. If there were other escape pods... there could be other survivors. Possibly."
"UNIT needs to know," Jack said. "Just in case."
"Get in touch with their medics," Megan called. "I can transfer my initial findings to them."
"I meant their soldiers."
Ianto quickly ducked behind his monitors - that was an argument he had no interest in joining. Jack ended it by simply walking away from Megan, who couldn't leave her patient. Ianto sighed. That used to work on Owen, but Megan, Ianto was quite sure by now, wasn't the sort of person to leave things alone. Jack would hear from her again.
"Still flirting with Lt. Mallory?" Jack leant over Gwen's shoulder to peer at her screen. "Can I join in?"
"I'm not flirting, Jack," Gwen said, pushing him away with a laugh. "Besides, Erin has a girlfriend already."
"Hey, the more the better, right?" He laughed, then sobered. "Listen up. Tell them they should keep an eye open for survivors. The aliens are tougher than they look."
"What's the risk? Are they toxic?" Gwen asked, returning quickly to business as she reconnected to their UNIT liaison. "Parasitic? Telepathic? Please, not that again."
"Nothing like that," Jack said. "Nwaxan-chu aren't so common this end of the spiral, but they're nothing unusual. Standard-issue technological species, not too different from humans, really."
"If that was their ship, with the emergency sanitation process you mentioned," Ianto put in, on Dr. Muli's behalf as much as anything. "It implies they're not totally hostile to other species. UNIT's shoot on sight policy might not be as... enlightened as it could be in this case. Isn't it going to start looking a little bad to our galactic neighbours if all we do is kill everyone?"
Jack sighed, bowing his head for a moment. "Sure, sure. Just tell them there might be survivors... who need help. Dr. Muli's got some initial trauma findings to send to their medical team."
Gwen nodded, then smiled into her video feed. "Hi, Erin. Hey, I've got an update on our salvaged alien. Listen, there's a possibility you'll find other survivors on site."
Wales: 51º 33' 16" N. 3º 06' 37" W., Friday
"Major! Sergeant Farley's team has just reported in. Section two seems to be clear." Corporal Weatherly pointed at a forested area on the map, west of the command centre. "But there's still no sign of our missing Privates."
Major Everett Hopps raised an eyebrow and fixed Corporal Weatherly with a gimlet eye. He waited. It only took the young fellow a moment to realize what he'd said and begin stammering an explanation. The Major put up a hand to halt him. "Never backtrack. Apologise; get your foot out of your mouth; move on."
"Yes, sir. Sorry, sir."
"Anything else to report?"
"No, sir. Two sections cleared, and the search teams reassigned to keep watch."
"Are we still having trouble with the communications?"
"Yes, sir."
Major Hopps frowned. That made him nervous. Very nervous. "Make sure we continue to keep the lines open to our field units in case one of them can get through," he ordered.
"Yes, sir."
"And-" Major Hopps paused. He could order some of the search teams back and have them man some of the heavy weapons, but then the search would take longer. Still, if there was a threat...
"Sir?" Lt. Mallory saluted him. "I've got a message from Torchwood. They report that it's possible there might be more survivors than just the one they found."
"Right. Anything else?"
"They suspect any other survivors will be badly injured and in need of help. They're sending over the data their doctor has so far."
"Thank them for the intel. Corporal Weatherly?"
"Yes, sir!"
"Call in one third of the search teams - here, here, and here," he said indicating the units on the map. "Have them man the heavy weapons."
"Yes, sir. We'll need to send runners if we can't reach them over the radios."
Major Hopps frowned at the unnecessary information. "I'm aware of that, Corporal. I don't require you to tell me how you do your job. Carry out your orders."
"Yes, sir!"
As Corporal Weatherly hurried off, another comm tech looked up from her equipment and called him over. "Major? We're picking up chatter from one of our teams; it's as if whatever was causing the interference just... suddenly stopped, at least in their area. We're still getting only sporadic communications from everyone else."
"Amplify that," Major Hopps ordered.
"Yes, sir."
There was a sudden burst of sound from one of the radios, and the voices of one of his search teams filled the small tent.
"-don't know why we need to pick up samples. That's the tech's job. Or some scientists."
"They don't send scientists out to slog through the mud. That's our job."
"Yeah, but that's my point. Taking samples isn't. What the hell is this stuff anyway? It looks like Styrofoam, but it's sticky."
"No idea. Just get the sample so we can get moving."
"Piss off. You think this is easy? Gimme a minute."
It sounded like they were right on top of some of the white material that Torchwood had told them was interfering with communications; why was their signal getting through?
"Ask them-" Major Hopps began, but a surprised shout over the radio interrupted him.
"Christ! It's moving! Jesus!"
"What did you do?"
"Just scraped some of the stuff into the- Fuck!"
"Get back! Get-"
Hopps could hear the chatter of automatic fire, one continuous, drawn-out stream, as if the shooter had forgotten basic training and was clinging to the trigger. A burst of static ended the transmission, but the sound of gunfire could still be heard from outside.
Bugger! Major Hopps drew his sidearm and peered out of the tent flap.
The sounds of gunfire were closer now, and had been joined by shouting coming from the opposite direction. It took Hopps a moment to sift through the confusion of noise, but then he could hear it: the cadence of orders being issued, and the refrain of the lower ranks' responses as they ran to carry them out. The snap of a female voice nearby doubled the guard around HQ, while a drill-yard bellow of "Halt!" in deeper tones had one group of men skidding to attention by the tent before sending them off again. No sign of the enemy yet, but...
More weapons fire from two new directions. Damn! He hated being right.
"You!" Hopps turned back, pointing to one of the comm techs. "Call command. Tell them we've got trouble. Mallory, call Torchwood. Tell them their bloody crash site isn't secure." He held up a hand to forestall any questions. "I know you might not get through. Keep trying until you do. You three!" He motioned to the last comm techs. "Grab your weapons and guard the tent," Major Hopps ordered, before checking his sidearm and finally ducking outside. He trotted towards the nearest gunfire, halting in shock as he arrived. The confusion of the battlefield was familiar to him; the enemy was not.
"Oh my God."
Point of Impact: Part Two
Point of Impact
by: thaddeusfavour, xtricks
Valiant: 44º 45' N-49º 3' E., Tuesday
"Spit-spot my ass. Who says that anymore?" Gabe hunched his shoulders as a gust of icy, high-atmosphere wind tore across a corner of the Valiant's third port airstrip, unofficially designated as the smokers' paradise.
"It's UNIT; who knows where they dig those officers up from," Ginevra said with the airy disdain only the long-term enlisted could manage. She waved her cigarette, flicking ash that was blown immediately over the inadequate guardrail to disappear into the ice-blue sky, sparking blue and green as it hit the static shield that kept the air pressure in. They were somewhere over the Caspian this week, though the sky all around the Valiant pretty much looked the same everywhere they went.
Ginevra's Italian cigarettes weren't the only reason Gabe had followed her out to the edge of the Valiant's deck. A woman like her, he'd follow anywhere. Still, even with Ginevra's profile to admire - a whip of dark hair escaped from its clip to flutter at the edge of her jaw and give Gabe something to think about later tonight - he couldn't stop glancing over at the long drop to nothing, fidgeting restlessly.
"Niko, get your ass back here - there's plenty that've gone over the edge when the wind picks up!" he yelled. Plenty had gone over the edge before, and not just because of the wind. Gabe would never say, but he was a survivor of the Year and-
A bit of grit or something hit the conning tower at Gabe's shoulder with a sharp little crack, and he flinched.
"It's gorgeous out here!" Niko shouted back, leaning over the rail like a tourist.
"I'll go fetch him," Ginevra sighed, passing the last of her cigarette to Gabe as she stepped out from the shelter of the conning tower, clamping a hand on her cap to keep it from being blown away.
Niko gave a sudden shout, waving his arms wildly. "Bees!" he shouted. "There's bees up here - I'm allergic to bees!"
Niko was flailing at the edge of the landing strip; Gabe couldn't help letting out a bark of laughter at the sight. Rube. "Idiot, we're twenty-seven thousand feet above sea level, no bugs are going to fly up here."
But there was something twisting like smoke in the wind as Niko bolted back towards them. A rapid-fire rattle against the conning tower made Gabe duck as something flicked across the back of his hand, driven by the wind. It was like getting caught in a sudden hailstorm; sharp little blows rained across his face, his neck, and... they were bugs. Gabe pawed at his hair with a shout, then ran for the hatch.
"Get back here!" he yelled. "C'mon, Ginevra, hurry up!" The bugs hit the wall, the door, and his back, the unlucky ones shattering into smears of green goo on impact, others swirling around the three of them as they crowded through the door and slammed it shut. The faint patter of them hitting the tower carried inside, then they flew up, up and the sound faded away.
"Yuck," Niko said with a grimace.
Ginevra shook a bug out of her hair. It was a pretty, pale, iridescent blue, and about the size of a Smartie. Gabe couldn't see any wings, though-
With a squeak of disgust, Ginevra stomped on it, grinding her boot down until it was nothing more than a smear on the floor. "I thought we were too high up for flying things," she said uncertainly.
"Me, too."
"I guess... we should tell the deck officer," Niko said.
"Yeah, but how about we skip the part about being out there, against regs, smoking," Gabe muttered, trailing after them, shaking out his sleeves and wondering, in an itchy moment of panic, if one of the bugs could have got inside his trousers.
"Hey, this could be important; maybe they'll let us off on that," Niko protested.
Ginevra snorted. "You are new."
The Bezel: L2 + 442,000 meters, Thursday
Yna's blood still stained the liftwell and Naz stared blindly at it as ze sank down into the dimmer lower levels.
The communications circuit was empty, hissing in the back of hir mind when it should have been alive with the sounds of hir kin: jokes, games and orders, friends and lovers. Naz even missed the command staff with their painful override codes; they were all dead... or worse. Naz pushed that thought aside, as well as the blue glint of a repair request in the corner of hir eye, the pull of drying, painful skin and the smell of death in the corridors. The request winked out as ze passed beyond the filtration system's range. A flicker of text sputtered across hir vision, a staticky communication error, but nothing ze hadn't been expecting.
Naz slapped the manual override on the lift and slithered out between one floor and the next, gone before the security system had a chance to reboot and notice hir disappearance off the grid. Ze triggered the emergency cut-off their surviving medic had implanted at the base of hir spine and the world went silent.
Naz was alone.
Cut off from the ship's systems, Naz blinked in the darkness, blind without the local positioning overlay to guide hir. All ze had to rely on was a set of whispered instructions and memory and... hope. Bitter hope, as bitter as the smell of their captors, for the hope Naz and hir kin passed from hand to hand, and whisper to whisper, was not for themselves. They were dead. But out there a living world sang in the darkness, a spectrum of signals in an alien tongue, ignorant of the things that lay beyond their birthing waters.
The enemy had scattered scouts across local space; some had returned, riding the energy of a local temporal rift, and Naz's ship had been sent to retrieve them. Horror followed, the mass of scouts like an infestation through the corridors, then the bizarre feeding by the enemy on their own kind. The tiny scouts had been swallowed down, consumed, and somehow passed their reconnaissance onto their fellows. Then the enemy had set course for a small world nearby, no longer hidden in the darkness of the universe.
None of Naz's kin wanted to have a hand in the death of that world. Resistance would cost them all their lives, but that price had shrunk as time passed and their captors had learned how to control more and more parts of the ship. The enemy had a fine sense of 'useful', and those who failed - the wounded, the ill, the unimportant - were taken to be studied or, more mercifully, eaten. Naz knew hir usefulness was coming to an end, so ze crawled through the secret guts of hir ship, determined that hir death name might mean something more than 'snack'.
It took much longer than Naz had thought to reach the tertiary access drop, crawling belly down in the dark, while in hir imagination every noise became the rattling approach of an enemy. When ze finally reached it, ze nearly tumbled into the open drop, shaking with exhaustion. Damp, smelly air blew past hir face and ze paused, hir eyes closed at the draught, full of blessed moisture. Then, hurrying, Naz reached down, fumbling with trembling hands to pry open the tiny maintenance panel using the archaic, makeshift tools that were all ze'd been able to smuggle with hir. From there it was simple enough to regurgitate the jury-rigged sabotage chip ze'd swallowed earlier and activate the appropriate enzymes before releasing them directly into the beloved ship's beautiful, complicated brain.
By the time Naz wiggled back out of the maintenance access, the ship was already dying. The soft-gravity generators were failing, giving a sense of the ship slowly, impossibly, tipping to one side, and Naz had to brace hir arms against the bulkhead as ze hurried to the evacuation point.
Ze was still cut off from the ship's systems, so the sound of running feet and noisy gasping around the corner made Naz flinch back. Ze had no weapons, and the military implants ze depended on for reflexes and targeting had been disabled when they'd surrendered, but when Hyl came around the corner, weeping and spattered with blood, Naz grabbed the first thing to hand, a wrench, and lashed out at the nearest narrow limb when the enemy appeared. Ze missed.
The creature responded with a killer's precision and Naz screamed, biometric alarms dancing across hir vision. Hyl shrieked and ran on, abandoning Naz to the looming enemy. Naz lifted hir wrench, arm trembling, scattering dark blood across the filthy deck plates. "I am not food!" ze yelled defiantly. The enemy reared back, and ze shouted again; this was a better death than many.
The inertial dampers failed in a catastrophic rush as the whole ship collapsed out of FTL , alloys shrieking under the strain, and Naz was thrown onto the deck in a crunch of breaking bones. The enemy shattered before hir eyes, limbs cracking, guts spilling in a steaming mess as the ship bucked and heaved - last-ditch alarms sounded, calling for help, signalling the ship's death in mauve strobes and warbling, audible alerts. Naz kicked free of the enemy's corpse, sobbing in disgust and pain. There were screams rising above the sound of the alarms, and gunfire. Above it all rose the sound of the enemy, rushing through the hallways. Naz had barely a moment to fling hirself back onto the deck, playing dead as a squad of the enemy's soldier caste rattled by, too agitated to notice Naz's life signs.
Naz crept after them, towards the evacuation point and hir hope of escape, as the ship self-destructed around them all. Ahead of hir, the passageway was visibly twisted, but more than that, a firefight between the enemy and the surviving crew had cut Naz off from the evacuation pods. It did not look as if hir people were winning. Wheezing, Naz turned away, stumbling towards the mid-level cargo holds. The pods there had been disregarded as too exposed when hir kin had planned their uprising against the enemy, and they were so far...
Wales: 51º 33' 16" N. 3º 06' 37" W., Friday
"This is great," Jack said. "Hardly any radiation at all. I'm telling you, wherever these guys are from, they're ecologically conscious." Getting out of the SUV and slamming the door, he began double-checking the readings on his wriststrap while walking slowly toward what appeared to be the centre of the crash site. "These babies must have had some emergency sanitation protocols in case of a crash. Amazing, really. I mean, without them we'd be standing in the middle of a crater the size of Cardiff, filled with radioactive slag."
"Thanks for that image, Jack," Gwen said, stepping up beside him. Ianto and Megan joined them to survey the damage.
The debris was strewn across about a kilometre of the countryside surrounding Cardiff, including part of a farm, some woods, and a good portion of the only road through the area. With the late afternoon sun slanting through the clouds, it could have been a pretty place, but the otherwise peaceful, bucolic setting only served to make the wreckage, the torn earth, and what looked like a few dead sheep even more disturbing. UNIT's military trucks grumbled across the field behind the team, churning up mud. As soon as they halted, soldiers hopped off in quick order to secure the area and set up their mobile command post. The faint smell of smoke hung in the air; they had the damp Welsh climate to thank for the lack of re-entry fires.
"All right, kids. It's safe to explore. Take a buddy and don't go far. Look for anything that might be useful; we'll take it with us. Be careful of anything that might be dangerous; we'll mark it and leave that for UNIT to clean up."
"What about survivors?" Megan asked, holding up a hand against the slanting sunlight as she scanned the wreckage.
Jack looked over at what seemed to be left of the ship. Some of the largest pieces of debris were grouped together in one area, and from there a distress signal was being transmitted.
"Unlikely, but if there are any, you might find them over that way," he said, pointing towards the chunks of twisted beams and metal.
Megan began walking toward them without hesitation. Jack opened his mouth to call her back, but Gwen stopped him.
"I'll be her buddy. You take Ianto and check around," she said.
Jack cocked an eyebrow at Ianto. "Right. Ianto, you're with me," he ordered.
"Right," Ianto said. "Sort of... loses something when Gwen says it first."
"Hey! I'm still in charge." Jack grinned at him. "I've got the coat."
Jack led the way across the debris field, slowly and carefully scanning the wreckage for anything useful or dangerous. Ianto followed, taking readings and sending data and video back to the Hub. Frowning, Jack turned over a bit of metal with his boot. It would be nice if they had someone at the Hub to receive and review the data they were collecting. They really needed to find a new tech person. Damn. Until they did, it meant he'd be spending another late night going over readings and running the data through Tosh's search programs. He crouched down to get a better look at something.
"Jack." Ianto stopped beside him, and he looked up to see Ianto waggling one hand at him. "Gloves."
Jack sighed, but stood up and fished the gloves out of his pocket. They slid smoothly onto his hands, skin-tight - though not a bit confining - and proof against most biological hazards and some radioactive elements, as well as being nearly impenetrable. He had to admit, UNIT usually did a great job of reengineering alien technology to a useful purpose. Ianto had only received these earlier in the week and had already made sure all their kits were stocked with them. Torchwood had learned its lesson from the last alien pathogen they'd encountered. (Not that gloves would have helped them then, but there was no sense in being careless.) Besides, Jack loved the feel of the gloves; he flexed his hands and rubbed them together. He'd never told UNIT that the original technology had been a form of alien condom, designed to protect the wearer from the STIs of the future.
He flipped over the piece of metal that had originally caught his eye. Nothing. Tossing it away, he continued to work the debris field in a loose grid pattern. It didn't seem as if anything had survived the crash intact. When he spotted the tiny, glowing K-7 power pack, he let out a whoop of joy.
"Ianto! Look at this!" Jack carefully lifted the finger-sized K-7 up so Ianto could see it.
"What is it?" Ianto asked.
"A K-7 power pack. With a little work, I can modify it to fit in that pulse rifle we found last year." Jack laughed. "Or, we could use it to power your coffee maker for roughly, oh, two point seven billion years."
"Ah, thanks, but no. Pulse rifle it is, then." Ianto pulled out a secure container, and Jack carefully placed the K-7 inside.
"Any idea what this stuff is?" Ianto asked, gesturing towards a large chunk of something that looked like it might be alien insulation, or foam concrete. There were large, roundish, irregular lumps of it all over the place.
Jack walked over and gently pressed a finger into it. Rubbery, it gave a little, but popped right back. He shook his head. "Not a clue."
Ianto frowned at his scanner. "It seems to be emitting a trace of something-" He broke off and began adjusting the input parameters.
"What?" Jack asked, going to look over Ianto's shoulder.
"Intermittent low-frequency radioactive bursts? Or possibly just static." He sighed and passed the scanner over his shoulder to Jack. "Sorry. I just can't tell."
Jack looked at the readings, then twitched the dials back to where Ianto had had them originally. "No. You're right. They're emitting some kind of intermittent radiation. In the... hah. In the terahertz range. You guys are just starting to figure that one out." He paused, studying the stuff scattered about the crash site. "Maybe they're part of the crash safety systems. You know, something to encase and render radioactive material harmless? Or mostly harmless." He checked the scanner again. "Not enough radiation to be harmful." Jack walked past several of the large chunks of... stuff, watching the readings carefully. "Yup. Safe. Still, we should probably make sure Gwen doesn't mess around with them."
"Jack," Ianto said, a note of warning in his voice.
Jack handed the scanner back to Ianto with a sigh. "I know. I know. She hates it when I worry."
"No," Ianto said. "She hates it when you treat her as if she can't do her job."
"Part of my job is looking out for her, and you." Jack activated his comm unit, but winced and turned it off as static filled his ear. "Damn. Must be interference from these things." He waved a hand at the stuff and started off across the field toward the area Gwen and Megan were searching. "Come on. We're done here anyway."
Ianto trotted to catch up. "Gwen's only just calmed down after you forgot to call her in on the weevil incident. Just don't upset her again, all right?"
"Who me?" Jack asked. He glanced at Ianto. "Seriously, we're done here, and I don't see anything that looks like radioactive doom in their area, so... no need to upset Gwen."
"Lucky for you," Ianto said.
"Lucky for us."
"Right."
They continued towards Muli and Gwen, finally catching the squeal of metal against metal.
"Gwen! Megan! Found anything? Time to go!" Jack called. Ianto shook his head and reached out, giving Jack a small shove. Jack grinned, and was just about to return it, when a call from Gwen interrupted them.
"Jack! Ianto! Hurry!" Her desperate tone had them running the last few yards and skidding around the chunk of bulkhead in their way.
Gwen had her shoulder under a piece of the wreckage, trying to lift it, while Megan was crouched beneath, pulling at a hatch of some kind. Gwen shoved, and the metal sheeting shifted, sliding down the back of the debris pile with a metallic shriek. Gwen stepped back, panting.
"We saw a light and there's blood - we think it's blood anyway," she said, pointing to the ground near the hatch. "Megan thinks we might have a survivor, but we can't get the hatch open. It's been damaged, or it's jammed, or something."
Megan stood, wiping the back of her hand across her forehead. "We tried to call you on these things," she tapped her comm unit, "but they must be defective."
"They're fine," Ianto said. "Some of the debris is interfering with communications." He studied the scanner intently, while Jack dropped down to get a better look at the hatch.
"Good call, Megan," Jack said. "This is an escape pod that didn't manage to escape. They build these things to survive pretty severe conditions, so if anyone made it inside," he paused and looked at the dark fluid - definitely blood - pooling below the hatch, "and it looks like they did - then they might still be alive." He stood up. "It's damaged. The seal is broken, otherwise that," Jack indicated the blood, "wouldn't be there. The main problem is that the locking mechanism that keeps the hatch from opening until it's safely landed doesn't seem to realise that it needs to open. I can help with that." Jack worked the controls on his vortex manipulator. "Get ready," he said. "The hatch is about to open." And it did, a body tumbling out of it and onto the ground with a wet splat.
Megan quickly stripped off her gloves and slipped on new ones as she kneeled beside the alien. It was difficult to recognize the jumble of limbs as a living creature. Despite the protection of the escape pod, it looked like the alien was too badly injured to survive for long. She was carefully straightening the limbs and trying to assess the injuries.
"Gwen. Bring the SUV around," Jack said. "Ianto, see if you can get any useful information from the escape pod's systems. Megan-"
"Unless you have useful information regarding this species," Megan interrupted, "I'm already doing everything that needs to be done."
"Right." Jack kneeled down to get a better look at the alien. The greenish-grey skin was obviously supple, but it looked tough as well. Jack reached out a hand to investigate the alien's arm.
"Don't touch my patient until you've changed your gloves," Megan said. Her tone was brusque, but Jack didn't object. He could see that all of her attention was focussed on finding out how to keep her patient alive. It was that level of dedication that had convinced him to hire her in the first place.
"Sorry. Could you check hir hands? I think you'll find the fingers are webbed."
Without looking up, she quickly spread the fingers to reveal the webbing. "Do you know what it is?"
"I think so," Jack said. "Semi-aquatic species. More amphibious. They don't need full immersion to stay healthy, but they're more comfortable in a humid atmosphere."
"Useful, long term," Megan said. "Not so useful right now. Either change your gloves or move farther back."
Jack sighed, then got to his feet as the SUV pulled up and Gwen hopped out. "Ianto, finish up with the data. Then load up the salvage Gwen and Megan have collected. Megan, prepare to move your patient. I'll get the stretcher."
"Change your gloves first."
He nearly laughed out loud. He'd expected that, after all. "Gwen! Bring me some clean-"
"Gloves?" Gwen asked, innocently, holding out a new pair in one hand and a hazmat bag in the other.
Jack grinned, deftly stripping off the old gloves and putting on the new ones. "Thanks." Gwen smiled back and they both hauled out the stretcher, positioning it beside Megan and her patient.
"I'll need a few more minutes," Megan said without looking up.
"Okay," Jack said. Glancing around, he noticed Ianto was still working in the escape pod and Gwen was leaning against the SUV. He went to join Gwen, settling back and crossing his arms. "You all right?" he asked.
"My back's a bit sore from all the standing around, but I'm fine."
Jack eyed her critically. She really did look fine. The growl of another heavy engine caught his attention and he looked over towards the growing clump of UNIT vehicles. By now there were three tents set up in a little formation of their own, and a half-dozen soldiers were hoisting a communications tower with well-trained coordination; a van nearby bristled with antennae. "Looks like they're bringing everything but the kitchen sink."
"My guess? They'll have one of those, too." Gwen only took a quick look over her shoulder toward UNIT, before shading her eyes and staring in the direction of the escape pod with the blinking light on top. "Mauve. I just can't get used to that."
Jack laughed. "You people and your red!"
"I honestly thought you were taking the piss about it. Maybe only a couple of alien races got together and used mauve. But, here it is again."
Jack turned his head to grin at her. "You thought maybe there was a 'Mauve Coalition'?"
"More like an agenda, really." She grinned back, bumping him gently with her shoulder. Glancing back at the beacon, she shook her head. "Mauve."
"Mauve for the light end of the spectrum, and the emergency transmitter is broadcasting at 1420.40575 MHz. That's the frequency of hydrogen." Jack paused, watching Megan work and quietly counting seconds to himself. He loved this game.
"Why hydrogen? Isn't it really common?"
Seven. Gwen never held out as long as Ianto. He was more patient and she was more curious.
"Sure. One of the first things every space-faring civilization learns to look for is hydrogen, because it's everywhere. But it only occurs naturally as a steady transmission. Vary it, and folks notice and come running." Jack frowned, considering. "Which means we may get some visitors. Gwen, let UNIT know it's the white chunks of debris that are interfering with communications. Tell them we'll transmit all pertinent data as soon as we get back to the Hub. Tell them-"
"I'm ready," Megan called, cutting him off. "I'll need Ianto's help during the drive."
"Tell them to have fun!" Jack said to Gwen as he pushed himself off the SUV and went to help Megan. "Ianto!"
Ianto pulled himself carefully out of the escape pod. "Done. I'm not sure what was in there, but it's ours now."
"Good. Finish up and stow your equipment. I'll pack the rest of the salvage since Megan needs your help with her patient. And don't forget to change your gloves!"
Sergeant Sweeney watched the black SUV work its way carefully across the uneven ground and around the debris from the crash. Once it hit the road, the driver put his foot down and the sleek vehicle zoomed off, heading back in the direction of Cardiff. They must have found something they didn't want knocked about going over the rough terrain. Probably something useful they picked out of the wreckage, leaving UNIT only the bits likely to explode.
"Allies my arse," Sweeney muttered, looking back down at the map he was holding. Roughly a square kilometre of Welsh countryside was marked out in red as the primary search area. Fields, clumps of trees, a stream, and... damn. Looked like one or two farms were involved. He hated it when civilians got caught up in these messes. At least everything had fallen north of the M4. No major smash-ups, just gawkers wondering what the hell was going on. Those farms were a good place to start his own search.
"Hey, Mac!"
Sweeney looked up as one of his friends called to him. "Tom. Have they assigned search areas yet?"
"Captain said assignments in ten." Tom looked over at the map and grinned, giving a quick nod towards the hastily erected HQ tent. "Old Man got you looking for your two slackers?"
Sweeney grimaced. "Yeah. If those two have turned off their radios..."
Tom laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. "Good luck. I'm gonna grab my team and get ready."
Sweeney shook his head as Tom trotted off. Everyone knew it would be a miracle if his two missing squaddies lasted out the year with UNIT. Besides, if Sweeney found them first, he was gonna kill them.
Wales: 51º 28' N. 3º 11' W., Friday
"There's that kid from UNIT," Gwen said with stubborn cheer. Trapped in the SUV with her, Jack couldn't exactly stalk off and find some other crisis to deal with, though triggering a false alarm was looking tempting. "Matthew... uh, Haynes, wasn't it? The tall one? He's impressionable enough."
"He's got a bit of alien ancestry," Ianto put in from the back and Jack hunched his shoulders, sensing he was being double-teamed. "Fywillian great-grandfather. It's why he's-"
"Six foot nine," Gwen finished as they turned into the public garage that hid Torchwood's vehicle entrance. "You'd need a stepstool to flirt with him."
"No." Jack swung the SUV around in order to back the boot as close to the garage entrance as possible, wincing as he ran over a speed bump, jostling everyone. "He's way too young. Especially if he's part Fywillian." He frowned. "He shouldn't be in the military at all."
"How about Andy? He already knows, pretty much."
He glared past Megan's head at Gwen. "No way," Jack said, hauling on the hand brake and hopping out to pull open the rear of the SUV. Megan was still working, swearing and muttering over her equipment, so the alien was obviously still alive. Jack didn't look closely - the puddles of black blood and the whistling gasps were all he needed to know - just braced the stretcher as Ianto slid it out of the SUV. Megan sidled out alongside it, hands pressed to some critical body part. "Are you kidding me?"
Megan interrupted their personnel meeting, such as it was, not even looking up from her work. "Ianto, find me some medical info on this species, or, if you can't, find out what treatment plans Dr. Harper left regarding diffuse semi-permeable circulatory systems and amphibian trauma care." Ianto hurried ahead, stripping off his protective gloves as he went. "Jack, you help me move it-"
"Hir," Jack interrupted. "I know these folks, the Nwaxan-chu, their sexes are... well, fun, but not much like the classic male-female dimorphism around here."
"Oh? Like Vy, then?" Megan looked up, hopefully. "What do you know about their medical care?"
Jack had to shake his head.
"Jack." Gwen's voice was briefly muffled as she pulled the containment boxes out from behind the seats. Dropping them on a hand truck with a clatter, she propped her hands on her hips and scowled at Jack's back. "Look at me, Jack." He glanced over his shoulder as she pressed her hands to her increasingly convex belly. "Are you going to wait until I'm in labour before you get someone to fill in? Because I'm not going to stuff the baby in a Kevlar bag and go into the field, you know."
Jack turned away. "I know, I know. I'm on it."
"What about DI Swanson?" she said, teasing. "I know you think she's sexy. If that's the hiring criteria..."
"I quite like her; she's competent and knows how to get a job done," Muli added, still mostly absorbed in her work.
"No!"
Racing through the passage to the Hub with an emergency on his heels was pretty much par for the course nowadays. Ianto tugged off his bloody - black, alien blood - gloves as he went, stuffing them into his jacket pocket. The suit was ruined anyway. Behind him, he heard Gwen still doing her bit to wear Jack down and, when he heard the irritated reply, knew it would be his turn later this evening. Dying alien aside, the end of the day looked to be pretty straightforward, and Gwen was right; they needed to get the whole maternity leave thing settled.
Ianto put that aside as soon as he settled at his station, calling up the archives search interface on one monitor while opening up his master file on large-scale cover-ups on the other. He let the UNIT communication stream run in the background, in case something interesting turned up at the crash site.
"Earthquake," he murmured, scanning the index in his cover story file, "hailstorm, Druid revival ceremony gone wrong - that worked nicely for the Helniaeeansriyaa - weather balloon..." He hesitated then went on. "Airplane... Airbus!"
The clatter of the stretcher being lowered into the med bay made Ianto turn back to the archive search, still chugging along. It had already pulled up a few possibilities; Ianto discarded the Nostrovite option and frowned at the only other biped.
"Does it have an," he grimaced at the display and minimized the archived autopsy images, "absorbed parasitic male along the upper back?"
"No!" Megan called back. "Nothing like that. Black blood... modified book lungs... I'm concerned about getting enough oxygen into it."
"Ze!" Jack said on her heels. "Ze's a Nwaxan-chu," he called out to Ianto, quickly spelling it out, "look that up." And more quietly, though Ianto still heard him. "I've seen road kill that looked healthier than this, Megan."
"Luckily, you're not the doctor," she said briskly, "so why don't you put your hands to work - pressure here, please - and let me worry about the prognosis."
The entry on Nwaxan-chu was barely a paragraph long, a transcription Ianto recognised as one of Jack's tales recorded by an archivist some fifty-odd years ago. Unsurprisingly, there wasn't anything about their physiology or care when injured, and more about what they could do with their tongues than Ianto really wanted to know. He pulled up the scan of the original entry in case anything had been left off, but it was shorthand and almost no one knew how to read that anymore. He certainly didn't.
"Nothing useful." He swung off the stool and went over to the med bay and peered down, then rather wished he hadn't. "We've never had one come through here."
The alien was, well... Ianto wasn't even sure how the alien could still be alive. He sincerely hoped ze was unconscious. Ze had visibly broken bones , a terrible gash on hir belly, and black blood bubbled from hir snub nose. Ianto wondered if the damp mottling on hir grey skin was bruising or normal patterns or something else entirely. All in all, it was quite sickening, honestly. Jack, despite his complaints, was still hands-on with a pressure bandage, scowling as he tried to keep it in place and stay out of Megan's way.
He spared a glance up though, then back to Megan. "At least ze's not puking alien diseases up at us."
"So we hope," Megan murmured and Ianto shifted uneasily. Every time he thought about the emo flu he felt a surge of embarrassment. It was small comfort that Jack had been nearly as ridiculous.
"Good lord," Megan murmured and Ianto straightened up, hand going to his gun, but it wasn't some sudden attack and nothing exploded. She was looking at the gaping wound on hir belly; Ianto saw a flash of something machined, and shuddered.
"Shrapnel from an explosion?" Jack suggested.
Megan tried to edge the end of her forceps under it. "I don't think so. Possibly a medical device, like a pacemaker. Does it look familiar to you?"
Jack peered at it. "Kinda hard to tell when it's inside someone and covered in guts. The Nwaxan-chu were big into gadgets when I knew them, ran the interstellar version of Kwik Fit all over the Imperial Sprawl. And the things they could do with their tongues-"
"It's not the only device in here," Megan muttered, and nudged Jack out of the way, neatly cutting off another bout of inter-species TMI. "And these punctured... lungs? Stomachs? Are more critical. Ianto, is there anything on this type of physiology?"
"I'll see what I can find," Ianto said, withdrawing to his station. He was sorry to hear the desperation in Megan's voice. Jack was probably right after all, and when he heard Jack come up out of the med bay, he was only more sure. Jack measured his dedication to lost causes carefully and stray aliens only rarely made the list.
Gwen was handling the UNIT liaison; he could hear her laughing behind him, and Ianto minimized that data stream with relief. One less thing for him to deal with.
"Lois keeps asking when I'm going to invite the bird with the pretty Welsh accent over for dinner," Lt. Mallory was saying.
"She does not! Wait, have I talked to her on the phone?" Gwen asked.
"A couple of weeks ago when you called my mobile."
"Oh, yes. Oh my God! That was her? You know, when you're busy you probably shouldn't answer the phone." Gwen was using her stern lecturer's tone, but Ianto could hear the grin in her voice.
"When we're busy and the phone rings, it might be someone we can invite to join in. Missed opportunities and all that." Lt. Mallory really was sounding more like Jack every day. Ianto shook his head. Jack Harkness, bad influence in a timeless retro package.
Ianto heard Jack pacing the main level, murmuring something to Gwen, pausing at Tosh's old station - Jack never sat at it anymore - to study the Rift monitor; Ianto watched his shifting reflection in his monitor, frowning a little. A crashed space ship and one dying (therefore helpless and harmless) alien was good news compared to some of the things they dealt with.
Jack circled round and came to a halt, propping a hip against Ianto's station. "Weather balloon?"
Ianto shook his head. "Airbus. Hardly have to do any work, with all the recent accidents around the world."
"Boring," Jack muttered, inspecting Ianto's pen cup and ignoring the steady blink of his PDA.
"Boring is good," Ianto reminded him. "Boring means no reporters-" He winced and made himself go on, "No awkward questions and no more fodder for the conspiracy websites. I'm getting tired of crashing them."
Jack caught sight of the medical search Ianto was doing and scowled. "There's no point," he said gruffly. "The alien's half crushed; ze's not going to live. You're wasting your time and so's Megan."
"It's still worth trying," Ianto said mildly. "Has to be better than dying alone in an airless rescue pod."
"All the best intentions in the world don't mean much when you're suffocating," Jack said sourly, tossing Ianto's pen back on his desk. He scrubbed his hands over his face. "And we'll be putting hir back in a box soon enough."
Ianto studied Jack's reflection for a moment; the drawn-down curve of his mouth and the strain at the corners of his eyes had nothing to do with their fairly simple day. "I've got an idea," he said, sliding off his stool. "Come on, you can lift heavy things."
Jack huffed a brief laugh. "Glad to know I'm good for something."
The storerooms just below the main level were a warren of junk; everything from extra toilet paper to broken furniture ended up down here, and Ianto had only the barest idea of what was squirrelled away in the further rooms. He did, however, remember something that might allow Torchwood to save someone, this time. "I found a record about the Nwaxan-chu and it sounded as if they could absorb oxygen directly through their skin-"
"Yeah..." Jack paused and Ianto imagined him rifling through memories dimmed by 2,000 years of airless, crushing darkness. Suffocating darkness. "Yeah, they can hold their breath for quite a while, which has some really sexy advantages."
"Yes, you mentioned," Ianto said dryly. "Try that shelf, there should be an experimental gel pack somewhere around here."
There was more thick dust than anything else on this level. All jokes aside, Ianto usually didn't have time to clean up the main level anymore, let alone play housewife to the rest of the Hub, and no one came down here often. But his memory was still good and there was the box he'd wondered about more than a year ago, an experiment from the 1970's abandoned when one particular employee had died young.
"What is it?" Jack asked from the other side of the shelving unit where he was struggling to free up the box, while Ianto shoved at it, the ancient cardboard crumbling under his fingers.
"If it's still viable, it could work as supplemental oxygen until the Nwaxan-chu's lungs are in better-" The box slid out of Ianto's hands, tumbling back off the shelf in a cloud of dust and sudden choked gasping from Jack. The whole shelving unit rocked, making Ianto leap back, as Jack shoved his way free, stumbling to his knees in the walkway, face white beneath the dust and grime. Ianto caught him around the waist as he went down; Jack's breathing seemed more impaired by panic than anything else.
"C- can't breathe," Jack panted miserably, pressing his face to Ianto's sleeve. "Can't- couldn't-"
Ianto rubbed his thumb gently at the nape of Jack's neck. "It's an early aero gel experiment," he went on quietly. "I think we can hyper-oxygenate the gel and put it under the Nwaxan-chu, in contact with its skin, and give it - hir - some extra air."
Jack nodded, cheek rubbing against Ianto's bicep. "Probably should get on that, then."
"Yup." Ianto stood and offered Jack a hand.
Jack's glance was rueful as he straightened up, but he brushed off his trousers, squared his shoulders, and edged his way back into the cramped, dark and airless space behind the shelves to fetch the fallen box.
Climbing back up the stairs with Jack at one end of the box and Ianto the other wasn't easy; but as they unrolled the thick blue mat and discovered the gel was still viable, the look on Megan's face was worth it. When they managed to get the pad under the Nwaxan-chu and the sticky gel clinging to its skin, the mottled marking faded as oxygen flowed directly into its bloodstream.
"It's remarkably stubborn," Megan said, sounding pretty pleased with that fact. The wound in the alien's abdomen had been closed and bandaged, broken limbs braced and, in general, ze looked more like a patient now than a movie special effect. "There are already signs of tissue growth and none of the organs - whatever they are - have actually failed."
"And that means?" Jack sounded as if he knew already.
"I think ze will live."
"Ah. What about any others?" Jack said, and caught Ianto's eye.
Ianto nodded back. "Containment facility. One that can get wet." He fished out his PDA to check his supply lists and wondered if he'd be able to get a paddling pool this time of year, and if it would do for the alien's needs. He also wondered what they were going to do with an obviously alien refugee. They'd been lucky last time with Vy, and he didn't bet on luck striking twice. At least they'd be able to add something besides porn to the Nwaxan-chu entry on the archives. Ianto prided himself on the fact that over fifty percent of the alien information entries under his tenure didn't involve any form of porn whatsoever. It was nearly a record, in Torchwood Three.
"I can't really say," Megan admitted as Ianto turned away. "If they were human, I wouldn't have expected this one to live, honestly. If there were other escape pods... there could be other survivors. Possibly."
"UNIT needs to know," Jack said. "Just in case."
"Get in touch with their medics," Megan called. "I can transfer my initial findings to them."
"I meant their soldiers."
Ianto quickly ducked behind his monitors - that was an argument he had no interest in joining. Jack ended it by simply walking away from Megan, who couldn't leave her patient. Ianto sighed. That used to work on Owen, but Megan, Ianto was quite sure by now, wasn't the sort of person to leave things alone. Jack would hear from her again.
"Still flirting with Lt. Mallory?" Jack leant over Gwen's shoulder to peer at her screen. "Can I join in?"
"I'm not flirting, Jack," Gwen said, pushing him away with a laugh. "Besides, Erin has a girlfriend already."
"Hey, the more the better, right?" He laughed, then sobered. "Listen up. Tell them they should keep an eye open for survivors. The aliens are tougher than they look."
"What's the risk? Are they toxic?" Gwen asked, returning quickly to business as she reconnected to their UNIT liaison. "Parasitic? Telepathic? Please, not that again."
"Nothing like that," Jack said. "Nwaxan-chu aren't so common this end of the spiral, but they're nothing unusual. Standard-issue technological species, not too different from humans, really."
"If that was their ship, with the emergency sanitation process you mentioned," Ianto put in, on Dr. Muli's behalf as much as anything. "It implies they're not totally hostile to other species. UNIT's shoot on sight policy might not be as... enlightened as it could be in this case. Isn't it going to start looking a little bad to our galactic neighbours if all we do is kill everyone?"
Jack sighed, bowing his head for a moment. "Sure, sure. Just tell them there might be survivors... who need help. Dr. Muli's got some initial trauma findings to send to their medical team."
Gwen nodded, then smiled into her video feed. "Hi, Erin. Hey, I've got an update on our salvaged alien. Listen, there's a possibility you'll find other survivors on site."
Wales: 51º 33' 16" N. 3º 06' 37" W., Friday
"Major! Sergeant Farley's team has just reported in. Section two seems to be clear." Corporal Weatherly pointed at a forested area on the map, west of the command centre. "But there's still no sign of our missing Privates."
Major Everett Hopps raised an eyebrow and fixed Corporal Weatherly with a gimlet eye. He waited. It only took the young fellow a moment to realize what he'd said and begin stammering an explanation. The Major put up a hand to halt him. "Never backtrack. Apologise; get your foot out of your mouth; move on."
"Yes, sir. Sorry, sir."
"Anything else to report?"
"No, sir. Two sections cleared, and the search teams reassigned to keep watch."
"Are we still having trouble with the communications?"
"Yes, sir."
Major Hopps frowned. That made him nervous. Very nervous. "Make sure we continue to keep the lines open to our field units in case one of them can get through," he ordered.
"Yes, sir."
"And-" Major Hopps paused. He could order some of the search teams back and have them man some of the heavy weapons, but then the search would take longer. Still, if there was a threat...
"Sir?" Lt. Mallory saluted him. "I've got a message from Torchwood. They report that it's possible there might be more survivors than just the one they found."
"Right. Anything else?"
"They suspect any other survivors will be badly injured and in need of help. They're sending over the data their doctor has so far."
"Thank them for the intel. Corporal Weatherly?"
"Yes, sir!"
"Call in one third of the search teams - here, here, and here," he said indicating the units on the map. "Have them man the heavy weapons."
"Yes, sir. We'll need to send runners if we can't reach them over the radios."
Major Hopps frowned at the unnecessary information. "I'm aware of that, Corporal. I don't require you to tell me how you do your job. Carry out your orders."
"Yes, sir!"
As Corporal Weatherly hurried off, another comm tech looked up from her equipment and called him over. "Major? We're picking up chatter from one of our teams; it's as if whatever was causing the interference just... suddenly stopped, at least in their area. We're still getting only sporadic communications from everyone else."
"Amplify that," Major Hopps ordered.
"Yes, sir."
There was a sudden burst of sound from one of the radios, and the voices of one of his search teams filled the small tent.
"-don't know why we need to pick up samples. That's the tech's job. Or some scientists."
"They don't send scientists out to slog through the mud. That's our job."
"Yeah, but that's my point. Taking samples isn't. What the hell is this stuff anyway? It looks like Styrofoam, but it's sticky."
"No idea. Just get the sample so we can get moving."
"Piss off. You think this is easy? Gimme a minute."
It sounded like they were right on top of some of the white material that Torchwood had told them was interfering with communications; why was their signal getting through?
"Ask them-" Major Hopps began, but a surprised shout over the radio interrupted him.
"Christ! It's moving! Jesus!"
"What did you do?"
"Just scraped some of the stuff into the- Fuck!"
"Get back! Get-"
Hopps could hear the chatter of automatic fire, one continuous, drawn-out stream, as if the shooter had forgotten basic training and was clinging to the trigger. A burst of static ended the transmission, but the sound of gunfire could still be heard from outside.
Bugger! Major Hopps drew his sidearm and peered out of the tent flap.
The sounds of gunfire were closer now, and had been joined by shouting coming from the opposite direction. It took Hopps a moment to sift through the confusion of noise, but then he could hear it: the cadence of orders being issued, and the refrain of the lower ranks' responses as they ran to carry them out. The snap of a female voice nearby doubled the guard around HQ, while a drill-yard bellow of "Halt!" in deeper tones had one group of men skidding to attention by the tent before sending them off again. No sign of the enemy yet, but...
More weapons fire from two new directions. Damn! He hated being right.
"You!" Hopps turned back, pointing to one of the comm techs. "Call command. Tell them we've got trouble. Mallory, call Torchwood. Tell them their bloody crash site isn't secure." He held up a hand to forestall any questions. "I know you might not get through. Keep trying until you do. You three!" He motioned to the last comm techs. "Grab your weapons and guard the tent," Major Hopps ordered, before checking his sidearm and finally ducking outside. He trotted towards the nearest gunfire, halting in shock as he arrived. The confusion of the battlefield was familiar to him; the enemy was not.
"Oh my God."
Point of Impact: Part Two