Trevor Baxendale - Something in the Water

Jack stood in a slowly moving cloud of gun smoke, arm extended, face stony.

‘Coffee, gentlemen,’ said Ianto as he came in. He put down the tray on one of the reloading tables and brushed a smudge of cordite from his shirt cuff. He looked up, saw Jack’s grim expression, then checked the Weevils. ‘Feeling a bit out of sorts, are we?’

‘I didn’t like the way they were looking at me.’

Owen smiled at Ianto and jabbed a finger at Jack. ‘He’s frustrated, he is.’

‘I know. He always aims high when he’s in a bad mood.’

‘You could both do with some practice yourselves,’ said Jack. ‘I want you all on this firing range at least once a day from now on.’

‘What’s the big hurry?’ Owen asked.

‘I don’t know — yet.’

‘It’s the Rift, isn’t it?’ said Ianto. ‘All these fluctuations and sparks. Something’s coming and we don’t know what it is.’

‘You gotta be ready,’ said Jack simply. He was wearing a fresh, pale blue shirt over his white tee. There was, predictably, no sign of any wound now. ‘Tell me about Gwen and Tosh. What’s new?’

‘They’re checking out a new lead,’ replied Ianto. ‘Not far from Newport, somewhere called Greendown Moss.’

‘New lead?’ prompted Owen.

‘Professor Len is with them,’ Ianto said.

‘Professor Len?’ Owen looked confused. ‘Sorry, have I missed something?’

‘An old acquaintance,’ Jack explained. ‘Historian and ghost hunter. Thought he could be useful.’

‘Well three cheers for Professor Len,’ said Owen. He turned and whispered to Ianto, ‘Never heard of him.’

‘Let’s hope they have more luck than we did, anyway.’ Jack reloaded his gun, slipped it back in its holster and closed the flap down over the butt. He picked up his coffee, sipped it, then talked as he walked, heading for the exit. ‘Course, they have a slightly trickier job: they don’t know exactly what they’re looking for either, but at least they don’t know where to look. What’s our excuse?’

Owen cleared his throat. ‘Poor light. Couldn’t see a thing in that bloody warehouse. I almost shot you.’

‘We had it cornered, Owen.’ Jack made his way through the Hub to his own office and sat down, swinging his boots up onto the desk.

‘Whatever it was,’ said Ianto.

‘There was no way out,’ Jack continued. ‘The damn thing just disappeared.’

‘Teleport?’ wondered Owen.

‘Anything’s possible. But it didn’t feel like that — and besides there’s usually an energy residue, a tang in the air you can taste when a matter transmitter’s in use.’ Jack’s blue eyes narrowed as he thought. ‘I want it found, guys. I don’t like the idea of an unidentified extraterrestrial loose in Cardiff. There are too many identified ones here already. And if anything’s coming in through the Rift we don’t know about, I want to know why.’

Owen stood at the hand rail, overlooking the Rift, which ran through Cardiff like an invisible dagger. It was symbolised by the huge water sculpture which stood outside the Millennium Centre and ran directly underground to the base of the Torchwood Hub. Down here the monolith had lost a lot of its shine to corrosion and algae, and parts of the complex machinery inside were open to view, but it was still impressive.

If the Rift was a blade, then the wound it had made bled problems — flotsam and jetsam and alien life forms from across time and space, all washed up on the South Wales coast. It was Torchwood’s job to find them, track them down, neutralise any potential threat and, if possible, use what they found to arm the human race against the future. The only trouble being that the future was already here: this was the twenty-first century, when ‘everything changes’, as Jack liked to put it.

So it was a race against time, a hectic roller-coaster of a life that Owen loved. They all did.

Ianto appeared by the basin at the foot of the sculpture and waved up at Owen. ‘I’ve checked for Rift activity,’ he said. ‘Tosh is the expert, but from what I can see we’re having another blip.’

‘Blip? Is that a technical expression?’

‘Yes. As opposed to a spark.’

‘Now you’re just kidding me, right?’

‘Activity surge,’ Ianto explained patiently.

Owen jogged down the steps to join him on the way to Toshiko’s workstation. ‘It’s been getting busier for weeks now,’ Owen muttered. ‘There could be any number of things coming through that we don’t know about.’

‘Tosh said that there was evidence of range fluctuation as well,’ Ianto said. ‘Meaning that the area affected by the Rift is widening.’

‘We need her back here to look at these readings,’ Owen said, casting a look over the six heads-up monitors suspended over Toshiko’s desk. They were all showing continuous readouts of one kind or another. Ianto had been right: Toshiko was the expert. She could have told at a glance what was going on here. ‘When’s Tosh due back?’

‘I assume that will depend on what they find at Greendown Moss.’

‘That’s out Newport way, isn’t it?’

‘That’s where Tosh said the original Rift spike earthed, yes.’ As they watched the monitors, bright green zigzags flickered across a number of display graphics. ‘Another surge.’

‘Give me a nice dead body any day,’ Owen muttered. ‘I can tell you everything then. Even if it’s alien I can tell you something. But this …’ he waved a hand at the glimmering screens. ‘Just bollocks.’

‘Is that a technical expression?’

Owen scowled. ‘Get onto Tosh and Gwen, tell them to get their arses back here and do some proper work.’

‘I have done some preliminary research myself,’ Ianto said. ‘Tried to pick up on some basic patterns in the Rift energy and cross-reference them to police reports on the paranormal.’

‘Police reports? Do they have time to make reports on the paranormal?’

‘You’d be surprised.’

‘I thought they were too busy polishing their whistles and telling people the time.’

Ianto smiled. ‘There are probably too many paranormal incidents to make a report on everything. They only report major strangeness, not minor strangeness. So they do keep records — the police are very good at that. I hacked into their database and ran a few sifting programmes to see if any minor strangenesses came up.’

‘So what have you found, Sherlock?’

Ianto pushed a slim manila envelope across the desk. ‘The Strange Case of Saskia Harden.’

Owen drove his Honda 2000S to Trynsel. The sat-nav prompted him quietly from the dashboard, and he was connected to the Hub hands-free via his ear comm.

‘I was hoping for a day off,’ he muttered ruefully as the first spots of rain appeared on the windscreen. The two-hour nap he’d taken on the sofa by his workstation already seemed like a distant memory — or a brief, unsatisfying taste of what real sleep was like.

‘There are no days off at Torchwood,’ said Jack cheerfully. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Ianto’s got me chasing some pretty young blonde-’

‘He knows you so well.’

‘-with a suicide habit.’

‘Like I said. Hold it — suicide habit?’

‘She keeps throwing herself in the canal,’ Owen said.

‘She sure sounds fun.’

Ianto’s voice came through: ‘Saskia Harden. Serial attempts to take her own life, according to the police reports.’

‘And Torchwood is interested in her because …?’

‘Filed under paranormal,’ Ianto explained. ‘She’s been found face down in garden ponds, canals, even a lake, on no fewer than seven separate occasions in the last five months.’

‘That’s weird, but it’s not paranormal.’