Another Life (25 page)

He stood up, and gestured to Megan to come with him. ‘Should be fine, Leanne,’ he said as they stepped through the curtain. ‘Back in a minute.’

The staff-room was empty. Owen sat down at the coffee table, and played back the scan images on the Bekaran device. ‘Can you see the distortion in the pelvic bones? Not something you might have picked up before the birth.’

Megan stared. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Cephalo-pelvic disproportion,’ said Owen. ‘I don’t think her pelvis is big enough to let the baby through the birth canal.’ He switched off the image. ‘As if she hasn’t got enough to cope with, after losing her husband tonight.’

Megan took the Bekaran device from him. ‘This is just astonishing.’

‘I told you.’

‘This could speed up diagnosis for the whole department. Owen, they’re stacked up in rows out there in reception, a night like this. We could get them through twice as fast. No,
faster
, I bet! Just by having these for triage. And the whole idea of waiting forever to get an MRI or an X-ray…’

‘You’re missing the point,’ sighed Owen. She looked at him, baffled, and he continued: ‘It’s not this technology that’s important. It’s where it comes from. What it implies about other alien tech. This is the good stuff, right? This is what can make things better. Us having this is like a group of chimpanzees having a digital camera. If they work out what the buttons do, even by accident, well they can take nice pictures and look at them. They might not be David Bailey, but it’s better than scratching shapes in the dirt with a stick. Thing is, it’s not going to do them any harm if all they want to do with this thing they’ve found is to wipe their arses on it.’

He could see from Megan’s widening eyes that she was beginning to understand. She’d stood up and walked to the window now.

‘What if the chimps found a hand grenade?’ she said.

Owen nodded. ‘What if they found a grenade launcher? What if they found a flamethrower? What if they were given a box full of anthrax spores?’ He leaned forward. ‘And what if they weren’t just chimps?’

Megan shivered, as though there was a draught at the window.

‘Torchwood’s not just about potential benefits,’ said Owen. ‘It’s about real and present danger.’

Megan stared out of the staff-room window, into the storm. After a very long pause, she faced him again. ‘I want to see the rest.’

Owen didn’t have time to reply. The staff-room door opened, and in walked Nurse Nottingham. ‘There’s a bed on maternity, Megan.’

‘Excellent,’ Megan replied, shooing her from the room as she followed her out. ‘Keep it, even if you have to get in it yourself. I’ll write up the notes, but tell them it’s CPD and they should prepare for a Caesarean. Don’t mess her about with a trial of labour, she’s been through enough already. They can explain to her. But someone’s going to have to tell her about her husband.’

They were at the registration board now. Megan started to write up notes in Leanne’s file, explaining to Mr Majunath about a ‘suspected CPD’, so that she didn’t have to oversell her diagnostic brilliance. Owen, however, had seen something on the whiteboard, scribbled in blue marker pen against cubicle six.

‘Sandra Applegate,’ said Owen.

Majunath looked up. ‘Yes. She’s the jumper I mentioned earlier. Threw herself in front of one of our ambulances.’ The senior consultant shook his head slowly in disbelief at the madness of the world. He picked up the phone with one hand, and his other hand raced down a list of numbers pinned to the wall. ‘At least, we
assume
she jumped. She has had a fall, obviously. But she appears also to have a gunshot wound. We’re going to have to inform the police…’

Owen had already peeled off his white doctor’s coat, and dropped it on a nearby trolley. He reached into his jacket pocket, and brandished his Torchwood ID at the astonished senior consultant.

‘Don’t bother with that phone call,’ he told Majunath. ‘I
am
the police.’

TWENTY-TWO

‘Where’s Owen?’ asked Toshiko Sato’s voice

Gwen turned from her desk to see Toshiko standing by the entrance to the Hub’s main area, bedraggled and dripping rainwater on to the floor. ‘Couldn’t he drag himself in here like the rest of us?’ She brandished something in Jack’s direction. Her apparent intention to look intimidating was spoiled by the bedraggled newspaper that she’d been using as an improvised umbrella.

Ianto managed to sound as though Owen’s absence was his fault. ‘We couldn’t reach him this morning. I haven’t seen him since yesterday afternoon. He wasn’t irradiated any more, and said he was going out to celebrate. Didn’t say where. He was a bit grumpy.’

‘What are you, his mother?’ asked Jack.

Toshiko peeled off her wet coat to reveal wet jacket and trousers. They looked almost as wet as the coat. ‘The radiation has changed him.’ She affected an American accent, ignoring Jack’s mocking look. ‘“Doctor Owen Harper, physician, scientist. An accidental dose of radiation alters his body chemistry. And now, a startling metamorphosis occurs. Owen Harper is… the Incredible Sulk.”’

Gwen laughed along with her. ‘“Captain Harkness, don’t make me grumpy! You wouldn’t like me when I’m grumpy!”’

‘Thank you, ladies,’ said Jack firmly. ‘Owen going AWOL is not our only problem right now. Doesn’t help, but let’s save the ass-kicking for when he’s in range.’ Gwen watched his reaction. Behind his cheerful sarcasm, he was keeping something from them. Not information, she was sure. He’d not keep that from them. More likely to be his own worries about Owen, things that she knew he felt but that wouldn’t help them at the moment, stuff that would only get in the way. That would be typical of Jack – reassuring, supporting, keeping them focused. In the police, she’d seen several teams deteriorate into helplessness when the head of the investigation had lost it in front of them. Their guv’nor, raging at a briefing meeting. Or cursing over a pint at the local pub. Revealing his own frustration, his own powerlessness

– and, by implication, theirs. Not Jack. This guv’nor wasn’t like that. He gestured towards the Boardroom: ‘Shall we?’

Within minutes, they had been succinctly briefed by Jack. ‘So, it turns out that we still have two more fuel rods to locate. And our missing soldier, Sandra Applegate, is probably hunting them down as we sit here.’

‘You think she could have survived that fall?’

‘Gwen, she did survive that fall. Unless someone was waiting for her to drop from the window.’ Jack paused, as though he was considering the likelihood of this. ‘So how can she be so resilient? Did she know she could make it? No, that shot merely carried her forward and she couldn’t stop herself.’ Another pause for contemplation. ‘The other soldier, Bee, faced his death like there was nothing to fear. And Wildman… could he really have thought he might survive that drop from the eighth floor? Maybe there’s something else that could survive a drop like that, but the autopsies showed that Bee and Wildman were human… What are we missing?’

His statement was punctuated by a roll of thunder from outside.

‘Whoa,’ Jack laughed. ‘Timing, huh? And that must be some kinda storm, if we can hear it all the way down here. Ianto, run upstairs and close the bathroom window.’

Ianto looked for a moment as though he might take this request seriously.

‘The weather has deteriorated dramatically,’ Toshiko told them.

‘Oh, you think?’ smiled Jack helpfully. ‘Are you dried out yet?’

Toshiko ignored him, and punched up some images on the meeting room main display. ‘Here are some views from around the Bay area… the city centre…’ More images. ‘The wetlands… out into the Bristol Channel…’

The views came from traffic cameras, security cameras, CCTV. The images varied between grainy monochrome in half-lit areas through to higher quality colour shots of well-illuminated buildings. What they all had in common was that they showed chaos and devastation. In the shopping areas of the city, the pedestrianised streets were awash with streams of water carrying scraps of newspaper and discarded fast food containers. Shop awnings were ripped from their metal structures, and flapped madly in rage. In one road, cars crawled through a torrent of water that reached their sills. In another, a white van had slewed off the carriageway and into a post box. A park bandstand was whipped by the trees and bushes that bordered it. The foliage was thrashing about as though it was alive.

It was Monday morning, the start of the rush hour, but nowhere were there crowds of people. The few individuals Gwen could make out were struggling along, leaning into the rain and the wind like adventurers struggling against a foreign climate. The selection of images continued with a security camera on a boat in the Bay. She watched with growing incredulity as the camera surreally kept the seats and railings of the boat steady in the frame. Behind the boat, Bay water churned. Passengers were flung around like discarded dolls in a toy-box.

‘It’s getting worse,’ Toshiko observed.

They were looking at an apparently endless queue of traffic on the motorway. Gwen thought it looked like a shivering snake made up of flickering headlights. Windscreen wipers madly, fruitlessly swiped away at the water. In the grey daylight and the endless deluge of rain, it was impossible to tell the colours of cars, and only the sodium orange of the motorway lights gave any indication that this was a colour image. ‘Could it be worse?’

‘You’d be surprised,’ replied Toshiko in a tone that suggested the exact opposite. Her fingers danced over the keyboard again, and a different picture emerged on the main screen. A long queue of traffic still, but this time bright sunshine sparkled off the metal trims of the motionless cars, and their vibrant colours were clearly visible.

Gwen wondered if Toshiko had switched to the same stretch of motorway at an earlier point, but the timecode on the image showed it was a live feed. ‘Where’s that?’

‘Eight miles further up the M4,’ Toshiko explained. ‘The end of the same queue. But look at the weather.’

Jack looked as amazed as Gwen felt. ‘How?’

‘The effect is localised.’ More keystrokes. ‘Here’s the most recent satellite pass, about twenty-three minutes ago. It’s like a typhoon, but restricted within an eight-kilometre radius.’

‘Radius means a circle,’ said Jack. ‘So where’s the centre?’

Toshiko overlaid a pattern of lines on the satellite image. ‘From an analysis of the variables, it’s out in the Bay. And you can see from the Bay cameras that there’s nothing out there except for plenty of churning water and a crowd of seasick sailors.’

Gwen studied the composite image. ‘It’s underwater.’

‘It’s underwater,’ confirmed Toshiko. ‘Something must be coming through the Rift, below the surface. My projections show that if it continues then it will create tidal waves across the Bay. Maybe out into the Bristol Channel, too. The Wetlands Nature Reserve is flooding already—’

Jack laughed humourlessly. ‘Aptly named.’

‘And you saw what’s happening out there above the water. A couple of water taxis were sunk by freak waves. They’re struggling to prevent damage in the Roath Basin – the lightship berthed there has already smashed into the quayside.’

‘Yeah, great place for a lightship.’

Gwen laughed at Jack’s sarcasm. ‘You’ll never become a Blue Badge Guide with that attitude.’

‘The tourists wouldn’t like the stories I could tell them about Cardiff.’

‘Hello?’ interrupted Toshiko. ‘Do you want to see these data and schematics?’

‘Data,’ Jack said. ‘That’s like information, right?’

Toshiko gave him a freezing look. ‘Or I could just stop now. Go and do some more correlations of the variables on my own.’ She paused, as though to let this sink in. Jack affected to look contrite, and Gwen stifled further laughter. Toshiko continued: ‘The telemetry from the boreholes is so confusing, it’s as though water is flowing uphill. Thing is, even though there have been unexpected tidal surges way up the Rivers Taff and Ely, it’s all caused by this localised weather system.’

Gwen tried to put the information together in her head, and could see a flaw. ‘If it’s localised, then where is all this rain coming from?’

‘Think of it like a localised typhoon. It’s sucking water from the Bay. Dropping it back over the local area in this huge thunderstorm.’

‘So why’s the Bay not emptying?’

Toshiko looked at her, surprised. Gwen was started to feel like a slow pupil in the GCSE Geography class. ‘Where do you suppose the water there came from in the first place? Out in the Bristol Channel. And beyond that, the Celtic Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. Imagine that lot dumped all over the vale of Glamorgan.’

Gwen’s head was starting to spin. ‘But a
typhoon
? A tropical storm, in Cardiff?’

‘And I estimate that it’s only Category 2 at the moment. The only good thing I can see is that the eye isn’t moving. It’s still out in the Bay. Or at least…’ Toshiko checked some more figures. ‘It’s encroaching very slowly. But whatever is coming through, it’s still coming.’

‘And there’s nothing to say that it won’t suddenly get a shift on,’ said Gwen. She thought about what Toshiko had explained to them the previous evening. The slow tsunami. Suddenly, it didn’t seem so slow after all.

Jack slapped his hands on the table, an unexpected sound that startled Gwen. He was no longer pensive, he’d reached his decision.

‘So, no Owen. We’ll have to work without him. Ianto, keep trying his number and locator. Gwen and Tosh, you’re gonna have to get out there into the Bay, find out what this thing is. Take the mini-sub, that needs two. And I’m going back to Wildman’s apartment. I’m gonna find those missing power packs if I have to tear the place apart. Hey, I may tear it apart anyway, it already needs a makeover. Apart from that, who can tell? There are too many variables at the moment.’ He thought about this briefly. ‘D’you see what you’ve done to me, Tosh? You’ve got me using the word “variables”. Now I
know
I’ve been sitting here too long.’ He picked up his greatcoat from a nearby chair where he’d draped it earlier, and prepared to leave.

Gwen watched Toshiko for a reaction. She was shutting down the various programs on her computer, getting ready to follow her latest instructions from Jack. But Gwen hesitated. Despite her police training. Despite that instinct to obey orders without questioning every detail. Despite the copper’s belief that the guv’nor assigns the jobs, picks the people, and doesn’t have to say why. Somehow, in Torchwood, that was different now. After handling the stuff that she had – that they all had – in the past couple of months, she’d begun to believe that asking the obvious questions was what kept you alive.