THE SOUND OF SNOW PART 9
Ianto closed his eyes and coughed for a moment. He was startled by Owen sliding an oxygen mask over his face.
"It's alright mate, just some O2, take slow deep breaths."
Ianto nodded. "What happened Owen? What's going on?"
Owen busied himself with unfolding a soft blanket and spreading it over Ianto's back when he became aware of the goose bumps on his white skin. He decided to leave the chest drains in place for the time being.
"What do you remember?"
Ianto sighed. "I was with Tad, on the beach. I ran off to climb on the rocks and I fell into the sea. I sank into the water and I remember seeing the sun through.... Owen I was seven when that happened. Wasn't I in Jack's office?"
Owen walked around the autopsy table, once again running his bekaran scanner along the length of Ianto's body.
"You were. You had a phone call, went into a trance and then started to drown." He replied matter of fact.
Ianto shuddered with cold. "Is it like those people that died?"
Owen nodded, even though Ianto couldn't see him. "Looks that way mate. Look you're going to be fine. Jack's not likely to let you take any more calls."
Ianto didn't feel even remotely comforted by that.
Jack followed Toshiko up to her work station and watched as she brought a series of data windows on the screen.
"I disconnected the call as soon as it became apparent that Ianto was in distress. However I don't think it would've made any difference whether that signal was active for 4 seconds or 4 hours. I'll need some time to study this Jack, in the meantime may I suggest that we issue Ianto with a new phone and only keep the number within Torchwood for the time being. I'll keep this one active in case another call comes through, but I suspect there will not be another one." She tapped at her keyboard as Jack frowned at the back of her head.
"You have a theory?"
She nodded. "Like I said give me some time with this."
"Ok. Gwen do you have anything for me?"
Gwen shook her head apologetically. "No, not yet."
"Ok, we'll meet in the boardroom in three hours." Jack turned and went to the kitchen to get a bottle of water out of the fridge and he took it down to the autopsy bay.
Owen was analysing a sample of the water from Ianto's lungs and quietly muttering to himself as he worked so Jack pulled up a stool and sat beside Ianto who was dozing under the Oxygen mask. Jack gently stroked his head and Ianto opened his eyes and pulled the mask away from his face.
"Is that water for me?" His voice was ragged.
Jack nodded. "Let me help you sit up."
"No Jack, leave him there for a bit!" Owen passed him a straw. "Just a few sips please. I've put the IV saline up because he lost nearly three litres of fluid. I'm amazed he's not in shock. His heart rhythm is up the spout because his sodium levels have dropped too low."
Jack carefully offered up the straw now sitting in the water and Ianto happily sipped on the icy liquid, cooling his burning throat.
"How come he lost so much salt?"
Owen gestured to the floor. "He was throwing up salt water, says he remembers drowning in the sea."
"How?"
Owen shrugged. "Whatever happened his brain was convinced he was drowning and somehow his body lost a lot of fluid and salt, which was diverted to his lungs. I have no explanation. I've taken some blood and am currently setting up for a full neurological work up, now that I've confirmed what it was he was drowning in. I'm starting him on anti-biotics as well so we don't add pneumonia to his problems......"
He was interrupted by Ianto speaking somewhat breathlessly as he finished drinking.
"Jack check under the name of 'Remote Assault by Proxy'. It's a file in the secure database."
"You have an idea?"
Ianto nodded. "It's not like this exactly, but I remember reading about a research project carried out in the States during the late 1950's using sound transmissions as weapons. It could be nothing, but....."
Owen was already inputting the file name and Jack went over to his terminal to add his password. The data came up, lots of it and Owen forwarded it to Tosh's workstation.
Jack went back to Ianto's side and purposefully slid the O2 mask back into place.
"Rest, that's an order."
It was easy to obey, only because Owen slipped in a sedative with his first dose of Metranidazole.
Three hours and the four team members were gathered around the conference table. Ianto's mobile phone strategically placed in the middle for all to see. Owen kicked things off.
"Ianto's fine, well as good as can be expected, but he'll be off field ops for a few weeks and I'll need to be sure that his heart rate has stabilised before he can home from here, but he's not in any danger. His lungs are clear of fluid now so I've taken the drains out. He'll need to rest and not be exposed to any more trauma. It was definitely salt water that came out of his lungs, but it was clean so hopefully he'll not pick up any infections. Blood work is clean and his EEG and brain scan were both normal, bearing in mind that both were done after the fact." He slid a folder over to Jack. "Like I said to you earlier, I have no explanation as to how this happened, but it does appear to be related to past real memories, given what Ianto was able to tell me before I sedated him."
Jack quickly leafed through the document Owen had passed him. "We are absolutely certain that this phone call was the trigger for what happened to Ianto?"
Owen and Tosh both nodded. "Without a doubt."
Tosh sighed. "Sorry Jack, nothing else showed up on the internal sensors at the time. It was one of the first things I checked. I annalysed the transmission." She brought a series of images on the main screen.
"The top one, is the sound waves.... basically the noise that could be heard coming through the phone. The bottom one is an additional set of data in the ultrasound band, which is effectively sound that we cannot hear."
Gwen faced her. "Isn't that what they use in medical diagnostics?"
"Ordinarily yes, but this is different, the frequencies are much higher."
Jack was still looking at the screen. "And the third diagram?"
"I've no idea what that is. The computer couldn't make sense of it. All I got back was that......"
"It looks like an EEG reading." Owen finished.
"Precisely, more accurately. It looks like Ianto's EEG, the one I took using the sensors in your office when he first received the call."
Jack and Owen both looked at her in surprise and Tosh actually blushed. "It's going to be built into our security protocols, we each have unique signatures in our brainwaves.... I was testing it out, purely by coincidence to see if it was viable. Jack's office is the smallest confined space except for the cells and we all go in there....... some more than others....." She trailed off and Jack smiled at her. "The point is, this transmission was tailored to Ianto and quite obviously hasn't affected any of us. I've got no trace on the call itself and the phone company have no record of him receiving the call. Who ever is doing this knows their stuff not only about what ever this weapon is but also communications systems. I read through the file Ianto pointed out and I am certain that this may be an off shoot from the earlier research done in the States but I need to look at it more closely. That's all I've got for now."
Jack noted the slightly dejected look on her face as if she felt she had failed in some way.
"Good work Tosh, keep at it and contact UNIT, see if they can shed any light on this."
"Ok."
Gwen took that as her cue to begin, she too shoved a folder of paper work towards Jack.
"I've so far located 11 victims, the two we know about here in Wales and 9 others who have all died of varying things, ranging from spontaneous knife wounds to overdoses of drugs. Ianto so far as I can tell is the only survivor, but I am still trawling through all the hospital and police databases, so there could be more. All of the victims were survivors of previous traumas and it seems that they died from whatever it was they survived at an earlier age, only in crazy circumstances. The gunshot victim literally died in a shopping mall immediately after answering her phone, witnesses stated that there was no gunfire, she just dropped to the ground dead and started to bleed. Three slugs were removed from her body in the PM. The victims are all under the age of forty, but otherwise, so far I have found nothing to connect them."
"Thank you Gwen."
They all sat in silence for a moment and finally it was Owen that spoke up. "So the triggered memories of a previous event is being turned into some kind of remote murder weapon?"
No one had an answer; it was just too weird to contemplate.
"There is no weapon that can do that. The only thing I've ever seen even remotely possible is telepathic assault and that wasn't here on Earth. Ianto is empathic and has a high psi rating for a human, maybe that makes him vulnerable, but we have no way of finding out about the other victims."
"That sounds a bit Star Trek to me." Owen commented.
Jack couldn't agree more and it troubled him greatly that they had got precisely nowhere since their last meeting that morning.
"Ok, keep looking for answers. Gwen concentrate on collating what you can about victims or possible survivors. Tosh call in anyone you need who may know more about this than we do. Owen re do the post mortems on the two victims and do every test you can think of on Ianto, short of killing him."
Owen smirked. "He's going to moan like hell about that and you'll be on Decaf for a month."
Jack let out a long suffering sigh. "Make that the rest of the year!"
