Chapter One - Immigration and Customs Enforcement
The Doctor blinked and shook his head to clear the sweat that had begun pouring in rivulets down his face and obscuring his vision. Another perk of his newfound humanity, the inability to regulate his own internal temperature as efficiently as he'd been previously accustomed. Before the metacrisis, as he was growing used to thinking of his former life now, he'd simply tweak a few of his metabolic processes and been quite comfortable while his companions glowered enviously at him and began removing articles of clothing to cool off. He was beginning to understand their complaints on a whole new visceral level.
The reason the Doctor found himself drenched in sweat in the dead of winter, or what passed for winter in the milder, global warming impacted, England of Pete's World, was this damned Torchwood mission.
One of the functions of the new, improved and fully governmentally recognized Torchwood was to step in when customs enforcement got a little... extraterrestrial. Strictly speaking, they'd served much the same function before the Cybus Incident as well, but now everything was done through much more official channels. Torchwood was afforded a remarkable degree of discretionary authority but it still had to answer to the President and the House of Commons' Oversight Committee. Mostly, it meant more paperwork and considerably less reliance on Retcon to manage "operational externalities" aka the uncomfortable questions afterwards.
As the planet became more familiar with the concept that humanity was far from alone in the universe, other agencies started to push back against Torchwood's authority, thinking that they were quite capable of handling most issues themselves. Inevitably, this meant that more often than not, Torchwood wasn't called in until situations became exceptionally dire, or needlessly complicated, much to Pete's annoyance and the Doctor's secret glee. The thrill of danger called to him still, mediated only by the gnawing fear for Rose's safety and, when he allowed himself to think about it, his own, now that he'd lost his "get out of death free" card.
This mission had started simply enough; for once they'd been called in fairly early on when a sting operation had uncovered a group smuggling in weapons from a little further away than Eastern Europe. In the interests of keeping a rash of plasma burn injuries out of the casualty wards, Rose had assembled her field team to intercept their latest shipment. It was supposed to have been the Doctor's job to locate and disable their transport system while Rose's agents took the smugglers and contraband into custody. It seemed so routine, that the Doctor thought they probably could have just let the Met handle it. The biggest difference between the police and Torchwood in this instance was really just that all of the Torchwood agents were armed; even the Doctor, or rather John, since he blamed his concession on this point entirely on his new status, had agreed to carry a stun pistol when told that under no circumstances would he be allowed in the field without one.
As always seemed to happen whenever a mission appeared simple, the situation rapidly deteriorated. The weapons smuggling was just the tip of the iceberg, likely being used to finance the other, much more dangerous cargo hidden deeper in the warehouse. Someone was trying to bring a couple hundred Surarin Dromel eggs into the country. Dromels were extremely fierce creatures, approximately a meter high, with razor sharp claws and thick hides. In certain parts of the galaxy, Dromel fighting was a popular form of entertainment. They had a rather nasty reputation for killing their trainers and the occasional unlucky spectators when they got loose. They were extremely quick and had the potential to be much more threatening to the safety of greater London than the shipment of cut-rate plasma disrupters.
That was not what really had him worried though. The eggs needed to be kept at a constant temperature of at least 42 Celsius, but preferably higher, in order to hatch properly; hence the sweltering heat inside the building where the Doctor was crouched, trying to come up with a plan that wouldn't end with them all sliced to ribbons by newborn Dromels or blown to pieces. Unfortunately for the greater London area, or at least everyone within a one block radius, the half-witted smugglers had gone about achieving this increase in ambient temperature via one of the most ill-advised feats of jiggery pokery he'd ever seen. Lacking the appropriate incubating equipment, they'd removed parts of their own ship's sublight engines, set them up like small pylons surrounding the eggs, and rigged a feedback loop through all of them back to an auxiliary power cell. It did indeed produce a lot of heat, but it was incredibly unstable and could quite easily be overloaded.
This would have been an excellent time to have a working sonic screwdriver, the Doctor thought as he calculated his chances of making it over to the controls without alerting the guards prematurely. The part of the original plan where his team would cut off the smugglers' possible escape route by shutting down the transmat system still needed doing. When he'd spotted the danger they were all in, he'd sent Addy and Quinn back to warn Rose before her team could find themselves in a very precarious situation. It wasn't exactly necessary that this message be delivered in person, since they were all carrying Torchwood issue communicators, but the Doctor had pulled rank on the two techs to make sure they were a safe distance away when he attempted to dismantle this unintentional booby trap.
Slipping out of his jacket and hoodie quietly, the Doctor squinted at his target; he was close enough to the eggs that in a few long strides he could be among them but there were at least two guards watching the hatching pen carefully, wary should any of their precious cargo begin to stir. That gave him an idea. Reaching into his pocket, the Doctor withdrew the palm sized glittery rubber ball that Tony had given him as a present when he and Rose had had dinner with the Tylers a few nights ago. As diversions went, this one was dead simple and probably one of the oldest tricks in the book, but these sorts of things didn't become classics because they didn't work.
Taking careful aim, the Doctor waited until the guards' backs were turned away from him and then stood quickly and hurled the ball across the warehouse, striking one of the eggs furthest from the controls with a satisfying "thwack!" It bounced off of his first target to do additional damage to a few other eggs nearby. The cracked eggs began releasing noxious green fumes and startling the guards into action. Having missed the flight of the rubber ball, they would believe that they had an early hatching on their hands and run to fetch a proper cage for the creatures.
When the guards acted exactly as he expected them to, he seized his chance and jumped up to dash to the controls. The panel was an absolute mess. Was this what passed for power regulators these days? The Doctor shook his head in amazement and set about untangling the wires feeding back to the power cell. They'd obviously not had a proper engineer on their crew. He hurried as best he could, fingers slick with sweat and glasses slipping down his nose. With any luck, his work here would serve the double purpose of cutting power to all of their equipment, transmats and egg warmers included.
His plan probably would have worked too, if it wasn't for one tiny factor that the Doctor had forgotten. The Dromel eggs, in addition to having vicious, bloodthirsty creatures inside, also contained a highly corrosive nutrient substance that did not agree with the wires strung between the heating pylons. The dripping Dromel goo caused a short and the Doctor had just enough warning when the panel in front of him showered him in sparks to turn and run for the exit as fast as his trainers could carry him.
Mercifully, the Doctor had managed to disconnect the power cell from the ship's primary engines, otherwise the blast would surely have killed them all. As it was, the shockwave from the power cell overloading threw him with considerable velocity into the wall and blew out all of the windows in the large warehouse.
Before he lost consciousness, the Doctor had just enough time to reflect that Rose was not going to be pleased with him.