David Llewellyn - Trace Memory

'But I don't know anything,' said Michael. 'I don't even know what's happening to me.'

'It's not what you know,' said Valentine. 'It's what you are.'

The butt of the rifle struck the side of his head once more, and this time Jack could feel blood, trickling down his cheek and along the contours of his chin. Yevgeny had tied him to the chair and was still circling him.

'Torchwood,' said Yevgeny. 'What do you know about Torchwood?'

'I've told you,' said Jack. 'I don't know anything about Torchwood. What's Torchwood?'

'On lozhnee,' said Tatiana: He's lying.

Yevgeny leaned close to Jack, so that his mouth was only inches from his ear and Jack could feel his breath.

'Tell us what you know about Torchwood. We want names. Locations.'

'How many times?' said Jack. 'I don't know what you're talking about. And if this is your way of trying to woo a guy, believe me, buddy, you're going about it the wrong way.'

Yevgeny laughed, and placed one hand around Jack's throat.

'You like that?' he said. 'You like it when I play rough, hm?'

His grip tightened, and Jack felt the swell of blood in his face. He looked Yevgeny in the eye.

'Oh yeah,' he croaked. 'That's it… Harder, baby, harder…'

Yevgeny glanced across at Tatiana, who was standing in a darkened corner of the room, watching with a cool impassivity. She nodded, and Yevgeny squeezed Jack's throat even tighter. Jack was feeling dizzy now, coloured spots dancing before his eyes.

'Is that enough for you?' said Yevgeny. 'I wouldn't want to crush your throat so bad you couldn't speak, now, would I? So is that enough?'

Jack shook his head as much as he could manage and forced a grin, though the pain was almost unbearable and he could feel himself slipping out of consciousness.

'I think you can go further,' he said. 'Go on… You know you want to…'

Yevgeny's eyes filled with rage, and he put both hands around Jack's throat, crushing them together with every drop of strength he had until the tips of his thumbs drew blood.

As his world became entombed in darkness, Jack thought of Michael, of what they might be doing to him in the neighbouring room, and then he felt it again — that all familiar surge and the cold embrace of the void.

He was still smiling at Yevgeny when he died.

'Massacres,' said Valentine, pointing at the array of black and white photographs and images of paintings and etchings from a bygone era that he had spread out on the desk. 'Sao Paulo in 1922. Canada in 1878. Japan in 1691. Siberia, 1927. Syria in the second century AD. Egypt in 1352 BC. All places where they were found… The spheres. Found, and then taken.'

'What are you talking about?' Michael asked. The photographs showed images of dead bodies, some barely recognisable as human.

'The crate that you helped us with in 1953 contained a metal sphere that was discovered in the Arctic about a hundred miles south of the Pole, buried beneath the ice, but it wasn't the only one. There have been others. The funny thing is, they never seem to last very long. They are discovered, transported, and that's when they arrive.'

'Who?'

Valentine smiled, the same lopsided smile Michael had first seen in the hospital, his mouth half-paralysed by the scar traversing the left side of his face.

'I think you know,' said Valentine. 'At least I should think you do by now. What do they look like to you, Michael? In Japan, they were said to resemble samurai. In Egypt they came "like gods". What do the creatures look like to you?'

Yevgeny checked Jack's wrist for a pulse one more time, waited, and then turned to Tatiana, shaking his head.

'Nothing.'

'Ha…' said Tatiana, staring into Jack's lifeless eyes. 'Maybe we were wrong. He's like the rest of us. Or rather, he was like the rest of us. Sweet dreams, Captain Jack Harkness. Take his body upstairs and have the men dispose of him properly. I want nothing left but ashes.'

'But what about the information?' said Yevgeny. 'If he's dead, he can't tell us anything.'

'There was no information,' said Tatiana. 'He was, how do they say, "taking us for a ride"? He was a con man, nothing more. Besides, if Comrade Valentine is to be believed, we've found something much better.'

Tatiana laughed, and walked out of the cell, the clacking of her heels echoing into the distance.

Yevgeny looked down at Jack's corpse and shook his head. Grumbling and swearing under his breath, he lifted the body onto his shoulder and carried him out of the interrogation room.

'So what are you going to do with me?' Michael asked.

'First,' said Valentine, 'Tatiana and her friends are going to put you on a boat. It arrives in a little under an hour. Then they are going to take you to East Germany before transporting you to Moscow. It'll be a long journey, and not all that comfortable, but then again, you're no longer my concern.'

'And what's going to happen in Moscow?'

Valentine laughed coldly.

'They'll assemble a team of scientists,' he said, 'who will do their best to… extract whatever it is those creatures are looking for, whatever energy it is you soaked up in that explosion. Sounds like priceless stuff.

Powerful stuff. The thing is, they need you alive. This has happened before, what's happened to you. Siberia. Exposure to one of the spheres left somebody in a very similar predicament. The patient died, and with it the energy just flickered out. Like that.'

He clicked his fingers. 'So you don't need to worry about dying. Not yet, anyway.'

'Jack won't let you,' said Michael. 'He won't let you take me to Moscow.'

As he spoke, the door of the cell opened and Tatiana entered.

'Jack?' she said. 'You think your friend Harkness is going to save you? Oh, I'm very sorry to inform you that Jack Harkness is dead.'

Yevgeny had climbed three flights of stairs with a corpse on his shoulder and was now out of breath. He called two of the men, Pavlov and Mikhail, and ordered them to help him carry Jack to the furnace room at the back of the warehouse. They both nodded and, taking a leg each, dragged the body across the substation and down a dark and dismal corridor to the furnace room. There, they dropped it onto a metal workbench on the far side of the room, and all three began shovelling coal into the belly of the furnace.

'Make sure it's hot,' said Yevgeny. 'Tatiana said she wants nothing left.'

Inside the furnace, the flames roared into life, and Yevgeny began firing air into it with a small hand bellows.

'I hate this,' said Pavlov.

'Hate what?' asked Mikhail.

'Burning bodies,' replied Pavlov. 'The smell… It gets in your clothes, in your hair, in your nose. You can smell it for days. Weeks, even.'

'You should try working in the fish market,' said Mikhail.

'When I was a boy, I worked six days a week in the fish market in Berdjansk. You smell of fish all day, every day. Even Sundays.'

'Why can't we bury him?' Pavlov asked Yevgeny.

'Boss's orders,' he replied. 'She wants him burned. Only ashes left, she said.'

'Boss's orders…' said Mikhail, sarcastically. 'Always with the boss's orders.

I'll be glad when I can leave this place and go home. There's no weather here. It never snows, it's never hot. Just rains all the time.'

'Hey!' cried a voice, in English.

The three men stopped what they were doing and turned to see the man who had been lying dead on the workbench now standing in the centre of the room.

Jack Harkness.

'Bozhye moy…' said Mikhail, crossing himself only a split second before Jack struck him across the head with a wrench.

Yevgeny dropped the bellows and reached inside his coat for his gun, but it was too late — the wrench hit him fully in the face, flinging him back against the side of the furnace. As Yevgeny fell to the floor, Pavlov too went for his gun and drew it, only to have it knocked from his hands with a single blow that broke several fingers. He fell to the ground, clutching his hand in agony. A final whack of the wrench left him sprawling unconscious beside his comrades.