Title: The Wayward Soldier
Summary: A string of brutal murders accompany the appearance of one Cpl. J. Quinn, a 39th century soldier on the run. What begins as a run of the mill locate-and-neutralize procedure for Jack quickly becomes more complex as Jack learns more about the man and what he's running from.
Rating: High Teen, for violence, profanity and a little bit of suggestive language.
Timeline: Early second season, before the Dead Man Walking arc.
Characters: Jack, Gwen, Ianto, Tosh, Owen and OC.
Pairings: Jack/Ianto, references to unrequited Tosh/Owen, references to Gwen/Rhys
Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.
- Henry David Thoreau
"Is a Weevil attack really so much of an emergency that you needed to pull me out of bed at this godforsaken hour?" Owen moaned as he ducked under the fluorescent police tape webbed over the mouth of the alley. Rain was coming down in sheets, and he was already soaked to the bone, his sneakers squelching with every step. He barely noticed when one foot sank ankle deep in a puddle of water, as he picked his way around a heap of plastic garbage bags and loose trash. The stench was unbearable, rotten food and dirty diapers and under all of that the familiar smell of blood and death.
"What's your job again?" Gwen replied, handing him a Styrofoam cup of coffee as he approached the sad white tarp huddled between stacks of cardboard, black and swollen with dirty water. The rain rattled against the tarp and washed sheets of pinkish water toward the already overflowing gutters. "And besides, this wasn't a Weevil."
"The coffee's cold," Owen replied, grimacing as he lowered the cup and handed it back to her. "The bulletin Tosh sent me said someone was torn apart by a wild animal, I just assumed that meant Weevil."
"I don't know what anything means in this city anymore," Gwen replied bitterly. Her face was bone white, framed by soaking wet strands of dark hair. She avoided his eyes as she knelt beside the body and seized a handful of blood-spattered tarp. She gave it a sharp tug and it slid away, revealing the glistening hunk of butchered meat underneath.
Years as a doctor assured him that this had, at one point, been a human being. He could see the shape of a skeleton gleaming at the heart of multiple deep lacerations. Purple organs spooled across the pavement from the shredded ruin of the belly and the head had been torn almost entirely off, exposing spinal column and torn trachea. The facial features had been mashed into bloody paste under a naked skull, earless and broken jawed. Every limb had been broken, they twisted in unnatural shapes, hunks of bone jutting out of jagged wounds. Hunks of flesh had been ripped entirely away, and both hands had been torn off at the wrists.
Bile rose in Owens throat, searing his nostrils as he tried to hold it down. He tried to tell himself that he had seen worse than this, but it simply wasn't true. The savagery required to turn a human being into this pile of meat was horrible to contemplate and Owen had to close his eyes, breathing deeply, to keep himself under control. His hand shaking only slightly, he set his medical kit down on the pavement outside the ring of watery blood surrounding the corpse. When he opened his eyes again, it was with the cool professionalism of a doctor. He pushed the part of him that wanted to do nothing but scream into the very back of his mind and dropped to his knees beside his kit, drawing out different tools and setting them up beside the body.
"Fucking hell, Gwen," he said. It felt like he should say something, anything, but all he could do was swear again. "Fucking hell. Did anyone see anything?"
"Shadows," Gwen replied, hugging herself and looking back up the alley where Ianto had just appeared, carrying waterproof floodlights to illuminate the crime scene. Her eyes looked past Ianto, far away into the pouring rain. "Shadows that howled."
"Howled?" Owen asked. "Like wolves."
"Like people."
Owen glanced away from the chest wound he was examining with one eyebrow raised at her.
Gwen raised both hands to the sky in a gesture of helpless frustration.
"Direct quote," she said.
"Shadows that howl like people," Owen muttered, "fucking hell, Gwen."
"I know," she shuddered visibly as her eyes strayed to the victims masticated face. "I don't know what scares me more, the possibility that the Rift has spit out something worse than the Weevils or the thought that a human being actually did this."
A moment of silence stretched between them, broken only by the patter of rain on garbage can lids and the slosh of Ianto ruining his shoes in the puddles flooding the alley.
"Owen?"
"Yeah?"
"Tell me it wasn't a human that did this."
Owen squinted at the wound he was examining, observing the clean precision of it. The cut was far too smooth and straight to be the product of claws or teeth. The deep grooves carved into the bone said blades, sharp ones, wielded by something with more than just animal savagery at its disposal. Arteries had been severed with deliberate intent, tendons snapped and muscles shredded.
"Owen!" Gwen snapped.
"See if Tosh managed to get anything off CCTV," Owen replied. He tenses as he felt Gwen's eyes burning into him, making his skin crawl under the trickles of icy water sliding down the back of his neck. Silently, he begged her not to make him say it.
After a moment she turned and he heard her splashing away, sparing only a few murmured words with Ianto. That left him alone with the desecrated corpse. He breathed a sigh of relief that turned sour when he realized the most relaxing part of his job was the part he spent crouched in dirty alleyways, poking at butchered human meat with scalpels. Scowling, he took the cup of coffee Ianto passed him with one hand as he pointed out where the other man could set the floodlights. The coffee was hot, which helped. But only a little bit.
"Come look at this," Tosh called immediately as they trooped through the door, wheeling the body and shedding puddles of water with every step. She had her usual buzz of excited energy glowing behind her spectacles, a mix of pride and exhilaration that accompanied her successful computer hijinks, but it seemed unnatural to the rest of them after everything that had happened.
It was difficult to believe that Tosh had had an almost perfectly normal night, as far as sudden surges of Rift activity went. She had not seen the body in the bag, or stood in an alleyway painted with blood and sorrow. She did not have the chill riding in her bones that had nothing to do with the cold, or the haunted paleness to her features that each of them carried. It made her half a stranger, and it took a long moment for her words to register to them, for anything to penetrate the thick fog that enshrouded the Torchwood team. Even Jack, immortal Jack, who had seen enough violence to populate a million nightmares looked pale and shaken under his shock of dark hair.
"Did you find a suspect?" He asked brusquely, approaching Tosh's station as Owen and Ianto rolled the bagged corpse toward the morgue. Gwen followed a step behind him, wringing water out of her hair.
"Several," Tosh replied. She turned toward her monitors and summoned up several grainy images isolated from CCTV footage. The first showed a single figure, male, dressed in some sort of dark, form-fitting clothing. He looked heavy, in the muscular sense, and the poor-quality of the images had reduced his features to a smear of grey pixels. It could have been anyone in Wales. The other images showed a pack of low-slung creatures, jet black and hunched over on obscenely long forelegs. Jack counted six of them, frozen in the act of running down the street outside the alley where they had found the body.
"Not much help," he grunted.
"No," Tosh admitted, her voice trembling with excitement, "but then I tried out my new software."
The images inflated, doubling in size and somehow becoming clearer, details resolving themselves out of the static smear of bad video. The man's face sharpened, an aquiline nose emerging from the flat tones of grey, under black eyes topped by thick, scowling brows. His mouth was twisted into a half-snarl that made him look fierce but there was a tinge of fear clinging to his features, creases across his forehead, an edge to his furtive gaze that spoke of terror not ferocity. The clothes he was wearing became recognizable as body armour, sleek and polished black with an array of silvery chasings that glowed with spots of light. Advanced stuff, the kind of thing top-level black ops soldiers might wear. There was a tiny plate of polished silver stamped onto the breastplate that read Cpl. J. Quinn.
Jack leaned closer to the monitor, wiping beads of water away from his face and flicking them onto the floor. He examined the boys face intently, as though he could learn more about him just by looking harder. Gwen frowned, turning to Tosh.
"How'd you manage this?" She asked. "CCTV is rubbish in that area of Cardiff."
"Image compilations," Tosh exploded, as though she had been dying to be asked. "The program goes through the video frame by frame, picks the clearest one and draws the rest of the features by tracing the clearest parts of the rest of the footage. It takes a while, but it produces images with 99% accuracy."
"Impressive," Jack muttered without turning around. "What about these things?" He flicked a finger at the frozen images of the black shapes.
"Well..." Tosh trailed off as she turned back to her station and hit a few keys, "it's not perfect."
The images sharpened, just as the man's had, the brick and asphalt surrounding the shapes transitioning easily to photo quality. The beasts themselves became clearer, revealing triple-jointed arms heavy with grotesque muscles, hunched shoulders, and elongated snouts pressing out of otherwise human-shaped heads. They remained entirely black, not as much as slash of teeth marring the snouts. They looked two-dimensional, as though they had been painted on the photograph by an unimaginative art student. Jack swore under his breath and pushed himself away from the monitor, running his fingers through his hair and planting one hand on his hip. He closed his eyes and took several deep breaths.
"What is it Jack?" Gwen asked, taking his place in front of the monitors and staring at the black stains of their killers. Shadows. Shadows that howled. "What are they?"
"I'm not sure," Jack said after a moment, "I've never seen them before. But I've heard stories."
They waited for a moment and Jack swore again, pacing back over to the monitors and glaring at the assembled images. After a moment he sighed and drew up a chair, collapsing back into it without even shrugging out of his sodden coat. Water dripped from its hem, adding to the spreading puddles.
"They're called Krthis. Krthis Hunters, and they were manufactured in the 39th century by the military council of New Earth," he paused, closing his eyes and cradling his forehead in one hand, "they're serious bad news."
"You don't say," Gwen had gotten used to Jack spouting off random facts he had no right knowing, but she was definitely not accustomed to the fear and resignation she was bearing witness to now. "So if they're the ones that killed that person in the alley... who's he? What's he doing here?" She jabbed a thumb in the direction of the mans photograph.
"He entered the alleyway five minutes before these 'Krthis' arrived on the scene," Tosh supplied helpfully, "but there are no images showing him leaving."
"I don't know who he is," Jack replied. "If he's from the same time period as them then it would be child's play for him to avoid being captured by a CCTV camera. More importantly that armour says he's a Corporal, and if he is from the same time period as the Krthis then they should be on the same side."
"The same side?" Gwen asked, aghast. "But... why would humans make things like that?"
"Those things were human, once," Jack replied, "genetic experiments gone wrong and adapted to military use. Krthis aren't very bright, but they're strong and deadly fast and they have enough brains to organize for pack hunting. They were used as frontal assaults in high-risk operations during the rise of the Second Human Empire, for thinning out battle grounds and for swift elimination of non-combatants in contested areas."
The two women blinked at him for a long moment, as though they were having difficulty absorbing what he was saying.
"Non-combatants?" Gwen asked. "You mean civilians."
"Yes, civilians," Jack confirmed, "it's hard to get a human soldier to shoot up a room full of women and children, but a Krthis... a Krthis doesn't care about anything or anyone. It just wants to kill. After they're loosed there's no way to get them back under control so they were implanted with kill chips. After they completed their purpose the commander would just activate them and..." he shrugged, "move in a clean-up crew. Fast, lethal, efficient. It's what let the Second Empire spread so far, so fast."
"So they're hunting this Corporal J. Quinn, and that person in the alley just got in the way? He was just some random person they stumbled across while they were chasing their target and they tore him into bloody pieces?" Gwen's voice was hot, rising in anger as she glared at the shadowy forms of the Krthis. "How do we stop them?"
"I don't know," Jack replied.
The two women stared at him.
"I never fought them. I never even saw them. They're like military bogeymen, stories that soldiers tell each other without really believing. All I ever heard about them was that once they have your scent they never, ever stop looking for you. The most popular story was one about Nathan Haus, a rebel in the early days of the Empire who heard the Krthis were on his trail. Haus was a war hero that had won a hundred battles and slain a hundred generals, but when he heard the Krthis had been deployed he took his gun and killed every member of his family. He killed his friends. He killed his dog. And then, with his last bullet, he killed himself. Because once the Krthis are loosed they tear a bloody swath through everything around you and every breath, every heartbeat, becomes nothing more than a clock. Ticking."
Silence stretched between the three of them. Jack sat in his chair, dripping water onto the floor, his white face still cupped in one hand with his eyes closed. Gwen looked between him and the image on the screen, struggling to understand why Jack would put so much stock in soldiers' stories. They couldn't be that bad. Nothing was that bad. Unbidden, an image of the savagely murdered person from the alley rose in her mind, the memory like a blister full of blood that burst and flooded her senses with the smell of death. No one important. No one special. Just some bum, sleeping on the street, stumbled upon by chance and torn apart so completely that Gwen had not even been able to make out a gender. Still, she reasoned as she fought the sticky taste of blood clinging to the back of her tongue, they had fought worse.
Hadn't they?
"What about him?" Tosh asked in a small voice. She recoiled as both of her companions shifted their gaze onto her.
"Well it's just... you say this Nathan Haus killed himself and his whole family instead of facing these things, or even running from them," she said. "But Corporal J. Quinn is carrying at least three guns that I can count, and he hasn't killed himself. Yet."
Jack looked from Tosh, back to the face emblazoned across the screen.
"He's just a kid. Probably he doesn't know any better," he said, but he sat up straighter in his seat and folded his hands together, staring intently at the face. He really was just a kid, probably somewhere between seventeen and twenty, with boyish good-looks in the first stages of giving way to the premature aging of war.
"Maybe," Gwen agreed, "but he hasn't been killed yet either."
"It's better than sitting in the Hub doing nothing," Tosh chimed in helpfully.
"Okay," Jack conceded. "Tosh, circulate a bulletin with law enforcement on this J. Quinn, identifying him as a Torchwood Priority One Target. Police aren't going to be able to match up against a fully armed 39th century soldier, so it's better that they don't try." He turned to Gwen. "You're coming with me. We're going to canvas the neighbourhood, see if we can find out where he's laying low. If he's smart, he'll be trying to stay out of sight and there's only so many places a man in full body armour can do that in Cardiff."
"Right," Gwen nodded as Tosh swung around and began typing again.
"Ianto!" Jack called, and the welshman poked his head around the corner, a plastic autopsy apron splattered with blood protecting his suit. "Where would you go if you were on the move and wanted to get very lost and avoid being seen by anyone?"
"Do you want the alphabetical or geographical list?" He asked, one eyebrow raised.
"Are you done assisting Owen?"
"Almost."
"Then you're coming too. GPS with a welsh accent, there's nothing better," he flashed a winning grin. "There's always a silver lining."