Chapter 2

"There's nothing there." Gwen's eyes lingered on the seemingly barren horizon where his wristcomputer had detected, and the scanner had confirmed, the presence of a large mass.

"Nothing you can see, but there's definitely something there." Jack showed her the spectrographic scan results.

She took the device from him, studying the display with an air of fascination and trepidation. "What is it?"

"It's a ship."

"It's invisible? Jack Harkness, you're telling me there's an invisible alien ship out there?" She pointed at the ship, or rather at the spot where the ship existed.

"Cloaked, yeah," he explained. Her acquired nonchalance around the office made it easy to forget she was relatively new to dealing with this kind of situation. "And good guess about alien. At least it's not any human design I recognise." Gwen fixed him with a stare. He ignored it. "Of course, it's not any alien design I recognise, either," he admitted, scratching at the back of his head. "I need to get some more readings."

Jack moved to take the scanner back from her, but she resisted, gripping it tightly and refusing to let him take it. "Human?"

"What?"

"You said it wasn't human. How could it be human?" she asked, her eyes narrowing. "If it were human, wouldn't it be us, Torchwood, that had it?" She thought of something else. "Not the Americans..."

He shook his head. "No, not the Americans. By the time human technology advances that far, there is no United States--no Britain, either. The majority of the human race won't even live on Earth."

"You're talking about the future." He nodded, beginning to regret what he'd said. "How do you know? You sound pretty certain of it because that sounds like more than simple speculation."

Much as he wanted to, he wasn't going to lie to her. This was the kind of information she needed to know to do this job, but how he had acquired the information was his own business. "Yeah, I am certain of it. And never mind how I know," he told her in a tone designed to end the conversation. Gwen didn't say more, but she maintained her mulish stranglehold on the scanner.

He sighed, kicking himself for the slip. He should have remembered who he was dealing with. With Gwen you couldn't drop things like that and expect them to go unnoticed. Jack addressed her again, softening his stance and his voice into something more reasonable. He was sorry to have snapped at her. It was his mistake, and, true to her profession, she was asking what she thought to be pertinent questions. "Listen, Gwen, what you need to know is that a ship could be human as easily as it could be alien, but it'd have to travel in time to get here. But this one, I'm almost positive, is alien." He paused as she assimilated what he had told her. "Can I have the spectrographic scanner back now?" Her dark gaze remained locked with his for a second longer. "Please?"

The corners of her mouth turned down, but she nodded, satisfied with the answer. "All right." And she let him take it from her hands.

This wasn't over, Jack knew, and he was sure Gwen was diligently filing all of this away for further analysis, the detective she was gathering evidence for the mental file that she was keeping on him. That was dangerous. It was a lot safer for everyone to know as little about his origins and his past as possible.

He calmed himself and walked toward the ship to start a real analysis, keying commands into the scanner as he went. Gwen moved closer, curious, her frustration forgotten or buried. "Talk as you go. I want to learn."

So he did, showing her how to set up each analysis mode, showing her the results and describing what conclusions could be drawn from each result. There didn't seem to be anyone at home aboard the ship. Maintaining a cloak like that consumed a lot of energy and typically blocked a spectrographic scan of the interior. Maintaining the anti-grav cushion the ship rested upon consumed massive amounts of power, too. So, to keep the energy signature the craft generated as small as possible, life support onboard was likely shut down, meaning the occupants were on the surface someplace. He explained all this to Gwen, who absorbed the information assiduously.

It took some time, and in that time, they hadn't been approached or attacked or, as far as Jack could tell, even been noticed. He'd been keeping an eye out for any activity or life signs in the area while they'd been out in the open, his wristcomputer set to warn him of any new energy readings in the immediate area. He also mentioned the lack of interest to Gwen. "Worrying that there's no distress signal either."

"So they're here on purpose," she concluded.

"It's possible," he responded, not ready to make that assumption yet. "Still, best stay on our toes."

She frowned suddenly. "Earlier you said we'd found our killer. But if the aliens aren't home, how did Longden and Nelms die?"

Jack searched the ground for a moment, finding a fair-sized chunk of rock. He tossed it in the air and caught it once. "Watch," he said, and lobbed the stone at the place where the invisible ship hung twenty feet above the ground.

The stone impacted craft's defence screen, a brilliant discharge of arcing electricity crawling back over the skin of the transparent hull away the point of contact. It caused Gwen to grip his arm and flinch away, ready to run or to throw them both to the ground should greater danger present itself. She looked at him, eyes wide, and he looked straight back, answering her question. "They were electrocuted."

He turned, making his way back to the nearest crime scene marker, surveying the terrain as he did. Locating what he was looking for, a large, vaguely trapezoidal depression in the ground, he crouched beside it and beckoned to Gwen. "Here. This is where the ship was sitting." He indicated the indention the landing pylon had left in the earth. Spotting another some distance away, he pointed it out to her. They were easy to see if you knew what to look for. "They probably walked right into it." He shook his head dejectedly. Of all the dumb, stupid luck, bumping your nose on a lethal, invisible defence grid.

"Now it's moved." Gwen glanced back over her shoulder in the direction of the alien craft.

He nodded to her. "Now you could walk right under it and never know it was there." Jack stood up. "With the deaths and the police activity, they couldn't leave the ship on the ground, but they couldn't keep the anti-grav engines on and still have life support. So, my guess is they parked the ship and have gone to ground someplace--hiding out. But it would have to be nearby," he theorised.

"Gone to ground," she repeated, pensive. "Or gone underground."

He snapped his fingers as he followed her line of thought. "The mine."

She grinned. "The mine."

At least he wasn't carrying around a pack full of climbing apparatus and rope for nothing.

oOoOo

The torch beside her supplied dim but adequate light in the darkness of the cavern. There was still no sign of the missing cavers, Gwen noted as she finished repacking the equipment and electronics she'd had to remove from her rucksack. Nearby, Jack had done the same after unpacking his share of the gear they needed to rappel down the vertical mineshaft.

Since entering the mine they hadn't encountered any evidence of Matheson and Westman's passage. Nor had they seen any sign of the ship's owners, and tension and fear about what they might find had been slowly mounting within her with every empty chamber they explored.

Standing, she cinched her harness tight and checked the lines were anchored securely, forgetting some of her apprehension as she worked through the once familiar routine. It had been a while since she'd done this, but she found that she hadn't forgotten it. Glancing up, she saw that Jack was still dithering through getting himself ready to go. Smothering an exasperated sigh, she waved him over. "Jack, get over here." Her voice echoed oddly from the rough rock walls.

He raised a bemused eyebrow at her disconcertingly mothering tone, but complied without a word. It took less than thirty seconds to get him strapped in and his gear ready, and she tried not to notice that he started smirking the moment she put her hands on him. "I would've got it--not that this isn't nice, too...in a kinky sort of way." For that comment, she smiled sweetly and avenged herself by snugging one of his straps tight enough that he squeaked. "Ow. Anti-grav's easier," he commented. "I take it you've done this more than once?"

Checking over her work once more, she explained, "Before Grant, I dated a rock climber."

"Mm. Good-looking?"

"Not bad. And, no, you can't have his number." She stopped, thinking over what she'd just said. "Why does it seem like I'm always telling you that?"

"Because you are," he pointed out. "I think you're trying to keep me all for yourself."

She ignored him to survey the drop and the rock face, casting her torch beam over the face, automatically searching out the tiny crevasses and outcroppings that would serve as finger-holds like Luke taught her. They weren't out for a workout this time, she reminded herself. Getting down, and up, with the gear they had would be easier than trying to scale the sheer face with no mechanical help. Thank god. If she never again had sore muscles like the ones she had when she was learning to climb, it would be too soon.

Picking up her pack, she pulled it on and grabbed up the torch. Tying a line to it, she went to lower it down into the shaft so she could get a look at the bottom and their landing zone. As the torch spun on the end of the rope, the dancing shadows it cast upon the walls grew longer, stranger and more eerie. Halfway down the pit, the pool of torchlight had dwindled to the point that she turned on the headlamp she was wearing.

"Long way down," Jack observed, reaching up for his own lamp.

"Almost there." The torch touched bottom and she jiggled the line a little to get its beam pointed in a direction that wouldn't blind them during their descent. "Ready?" He nodded, and she replied with a smile, "Watch that first step." Gwen watched for a moment as he climbed over the edge and started to lower himself, starting her own descent a minute later when she was sure Jack was doing all right.

At the bottom, they shed the climbing gear. While they would need it to get back up, there was no point in carrying the added weight any further. If they came across another spot where they needed more than the hundred feet of rope still in her pack, they would figure something else out.

Jack had the scanner out again and was handing it to her. Surprised, she accepted it a little gingerly. "You wanted to learn," he said with a shrug. As an aside he added, "With the distinct bonus that I don't have to carry it anymore." He laughed and danced away from the irked swing she took at him, but quickly returned to help her.

The results were the same as they had been since entering the mine, nothing conclusive. Jack furrowed his brow at it and complained again about how short the scanner's range was down here.

He consulted the device on his wrist again. More that just a timepiece, she could see now, though she had never imagined it was only a watch. "What is that, Jack?" For a second he looked like he wasn't going to answer. She shook her head. "Never mind, Captain Jack. Keep your broken compass."

He stiffened. Cold, hard suspicion flashed across his features. She felt pinned by the sheer force of it. "How'd you--"

Unsure what she'd said to provoke such a reaction, she hurried to explain, cutting across his demand. "Captain Jack Sparrow. It's a movie, Jack." He listened, the hard expression slacking. "Pirates of the Caribbean? He's got this compass that everyone assumes is useless because it doesn't point north. But he won't explain why he still has it."

Jack considered and then, resigned, he shoved up his sleeve and showed her the cuff, pulling back a leather flap and uncovering a complex user-interface. "Wristcomputer. Functions as a scanner--among other things--but a hell of a lot lighter than the Sato-Price model." He tilted his head toward the comparatively clunky box in her grasp. "Unfortunately, its range down here isn't much better."

She bit her lip to keep her next question from being Where'd you get it? because, even without his statement, it was obvious he didn't get it from Angela or Toshiko. But it was also clear to her that he was berating himself for his mistake and that he'd showed the thing to her only because she happened to catch him in an obliging mood. Gwen chose her next question very carefully, knowing a trickle of information was better than having the source shut down completely because she'd opted for a full-on interrogation.

"Handy. And now I'm hauling around fifteen pounds of the other why?"

"Bio-keyed to me. Wouldn't do you any good."

Bio-keyed? She had been around the Institute long enough to know that Torchwood definitely didn't have that kind of technology. But she realised there was something else he'd let slip with his unexpectedly violent response to 'Captain Jack'.

"Ah." She paused, drawing a breath to put forward her guess about his reaction. "So...Captain Jack Harkness, I presume?"

The look he gave her turned to a rakish smile touched with rue. "I'll thank you not to spread that around."

"You can trust me, Jack. Suppose asking what branch of service--even what country--is out of the question," she said, knowing she was pushing it, but leaving him an out. He took the out.

"Nothing you would have heard of. Leave it at that." He would say no more about it.

"Done." For now. "Sorry."

He shook his head, dismissing her apology. "Nothing to be sorry over. My own fault I hired a detective." He craned his neck a bit to look her straight in the eye, the spark of mischief in him returned. "It's something I have to live with." She noticed he didn't ask her to stop asking questions.

She smiled. "You know, I appreciate the fact there are things you can't tell me. Official Secrets Act, the others--I signed them, too."

She had been vetted to a higher security level than she ever knew existed when she joined Torchwood--before she joined Torchwood. Grant too. Gwen remembered the day she'd tracked down the Institute and their front, a little tourist office situated near the Millennium Centre, the day she'd thought she was being so clever, posing as a pizza delivery girl and infiltrating the secret organisation only to be met by Jack. He had slapped a thick packet of forms down in front of her with the words, "Congratulations on getting this far. Come work for me."

When she got back to the flat that afternoon, Grant had been freaked, immediately gathering her into his arms, enveloping her in a smothering embrace and telling her he'd been afraid he'd never see her again. MI-5 had been to see him, interviewing him and asking scary questions about her, stonewalling any time Grant asked what their interest was. He'd finally let go of her reluctantly so she could answer a call from her mum with a frighteningly similar tale.

"All you ever have to do is tell me when to let something go. But aside from that..." She placed her hand on his arm, recalling the hurt that she'd glimpsed in him that morning. "If you ever need someone to talk to..."

Jack smiled again, warmly, and covered her hand with his for a second. "I might take you up on that sometime. Thank you."

oOoOo

The hope of actually finding anything down here was getting pretty tattered. He and Gwen had been exploring pitch-black tunnels and caverns for hours now and still had exactly squat to show for it. There was no telling how far these tunnels extended and both his wristcomputer and the scanner were practically useless against the dense limestone walls. Jack glanced at the chronometer displayed on his wristcomputer. He'd give it another hour and, if they still had not found anything, pack it in and get back up to the surface. One call back to the office and he could get a team of investigators out yet tonight--though his popularity would take an unavoidable hit for it--and the mining company survey maps for the mine. Then at least they'd have a guide as opposed to this wandering.

Had he been a subscriber to his own directives, they should have called in the moment they'd found the ship. But he wanted to know more about the situation they were dealing with and assess the threat level before complicating matters by turning a load of rabid Torchwood investigators loose on it. Loath to hand the ship on the surface and its technology over to his often overzealous staff just yet, and especially loath to hand over living aliens, he wanted to make sure he couldn't take care of the problem first. If the aliens were harmless, he wanted nothing more than to set them on their merry way.

But, if he and Gwen didn't turn up something on their own soon, he would be forced to make the call. If the owners of the craft really did pose a danger to this planet, that had to be his first priority.

He looked over to her, slumped beside him against the chamber wall where they'd stopped for a rest and an energy bar, the lamplight casting her features in shadow. She was tired, her eyes closed and shoulders hunched, her temper shortened by fatigue, frustration and hunger. He would confess that he knew exactly how she felt. There was one bright spot; there didn't seem to be room within her for both the fatigue and her earlier trepidation. She hadn't said anything, but he had seen it, lurking in the spaces between her fascination and the distraction of getting them down here.

Suddenly she was alert, fumbling for the heavy-duty flashlight providing the illumination for their rest stop. "Gwen?"

She instantly shushed him, switching off the lamp as she did so, plunging them into blackness. "Listen," she hissed in the darkness. But not complete darkness, he was shocked to realise as his eyes adjusted. There was a very, very faint glimmer down the unexplored passage to their right, and though he strained to hear what she had, he heard nothing but the soft sound of dripping water echoing through the cavern.

Touching his wristcomputer, the device's backlight responded with a soft, confident glow that he sheltered with his hand, and he directed a scan toward the foxfire-lit tunnel. Beside him, the sibilant sound of something drawn against canvas told him Gwen was quietly gathering things into her pack, finally running the zipper closed with a hushed purr. The reading was distorted; he couldn't be sure of numbers and positions, but there were definitely life-signs up ahead.

"Got something," he whispered to her, getting to his feet as silently as he could. Feeling her move beside him, he found her shoulder in the blackness, urging her with a firm hand to stay where she was for the moment. Gwen heeded the wordless order and he crept toward the light, cautiously feeling out each step, careful not to shift the loose rock debris underfoot.

He had not gone far when he heard something. Stopping, he listened--distant and muffled, but voices. About to move on, he froze as something brushed his hip. The touch came again, bolder at his waist. Gwen. He rolled his eyes, yet could not keep himself from smiling indulgently. He should've known she was too curious, brave, or headstrong--very possibly a combination of the three--to stay put. Taking her hand, he continued forward.

Several minutes passed as they stalked the source of the illumination, the ambient light in the passage brightening to the point that he didn't have to hold on to Gwen to keep her from blindly tripping over him. The floor had become decidedly rougher, the walls no longer smooth and the tunnel narrower. It seemed the mine linked to a system of natural caves.

Ahead, the source of the light became visible. The passage had widened out some, another tunnel running off to the left. The white light, brilliantly bright after shuffling around in the dark, shone through a jagged opening in the rock wall in front of them. A few feet up from the floor, the hole looked just wide enough that he'd be able to crawl through it.

Jack glanced down the left-hand tunnel, checking it was clear, as Gwen approached the bright opening. They hadn't heard the voices again, but now there was the clear sound of movement echoing in what sounded like a good-sized room beyond the opening.

Gwen was shrugging out of her backpack and climbing into the passage before Jack could stop her. He'd been planning to take point, wanting to keep her out of harm's way, but he was learning that there was little he could do to dissuade Gwen Cooper once she got it in her mind to do something, and he spared a brief, pitying thought for her boyfriend.

She stopped a few feet in; he could still see her legs. Her body blocked most of the light, throwing the passage he stood in into shadow, drawing irregular shining blocks on the stone walls. A second and she was twisting to worm her way back out again. He offered a hand to help her out.

"It looks down onto a big chamber on the other side," she briefed him, her voice hushed. "Something's there, but it's underneath the hole near the wall. Couldn't see much. Whatever's down there, it looks like it's set up house."

Jack nodded, leaving his pack behind and crawling in for his own look. Gwen had been right about setting up housekeeping. The wide, vaulted chamber was scene to what amounted to an encampment of some sort. He could see a sleeping pallet shoved against one wall, a makeshift kitchen and living area filling the rest of the view. Like the ship, he didn't recognise the design of the equipment either.

Catching movement at the edge of his vision, he pulled back to avoid detection as a something entered the cavern below. Easing forward to get a look, he saw the alien. It was hard to judge size from his position, but he guessed the creature was about two and a half metres tall with roughly scaled green skin. It was bipedal and powerfully built, and looked exactly like the sort of thing you'd rather not run into in a dark cavern.

Oh, Jack knew better than to make assumptions like that. He was well-travelled enough to understand that appearance had nothing to do with the temperament or intelligence of a species, but he was still human, still prone to the instinctual reactions of his Earth-evolved ape brain, as the Doctor used to put it. These creatures had to be intelligent based solely on the level of the technology he could see scattered below and the fact that they had piloted the ship upstairs, but their purpose here remained a mystery.

The alien turned in his direction, but did not look up. Instead, it addressed the room's other occupant--or occupants; as Gwen had told him, in his current position, half of the chamber was obscured. Softly trumpeting and strangely rhythmic, the creature's language was one Jack had never heard before.

He watched and listened to the conversation for a few more moments before edging his way back out of the hole. Gwen was crouched close by and looked to him expectantly, but before he could say anything to her, another voice caught his attention, and Gwen's. Unlike the alien voices below, this one and the one answering were speaking in Welsh-accented English. The missing cavers. The indistinct sounds of the second conversation filtered up to them from the other tunnel.

Grabbing Gwen's pack from where she had discarded it beside the opening, he pulled it open and extracted the tablet PC he'd packed there earlier. The translator he'd got from UNIT was going to get its field test.

"Gwen," he murmured to her, preparing the computer, "take this and record as much of the aliens' conversation as you can. We'll need as much data as possible to compile a usable language database. Once we get a translation, we can figure out what they're doing here."

She nodded, replying in an equally hushed tone. "You off to find Westman and Matheson?"

"That's the plan. If I'm not back in thirty minutes--or if something happens to me; the way sound carries in here, I think you'll hear if it does--get to the surface and call Bast and explain the situation. Use your judgement, but tell him I don't want them running in here with guns blazing if it can be helped. Call me naïve, but I'd love to see them try diplomacy first." He glanced up from the computer at her. "For once."

"No one could call you naïve, Jack." She smirked and took the computer as he handed it to her.

He picked up his pack and winked at her. "See you in hell."

oOoOo

Jack disappeared down the shadowy tunnel, and she watched him go. A large part of her was wishing she could go with him, be there to protect his back, but she also knew that she had an important role to play in intel gathering, as well. How many times had the case been cracked by the guys on stake-out?

Gwen hefted the tablet computer and carefully manoeuvred her way into the hole in the wall again, taking extreme caution not to jostle the translator too badly and not to dislodge any loose pebbles getting settled. Finding a position she thought she could spend half an hour in, she peered down into the aliens' camp again, finally catching her first sight of one of them: big with a tough-looking, mottled green hide and scales like a huge reptile, its four-fingered hands ending in what appeared to be long, pointed talons.

She looked on, enthralled, and a strangely disconnected feeling settled into her, as if this wasn't really happening, like what was happening below her was part of a movie or a programme on the telly. Suddenly, the creature turned its elongated head in such a way that Gwen was sure she'd been spotted, its black eyes almost certainly on her, and the feeling melted like ice under a blow-torch, leaving harsh, stinging clarity. Heart racing, she stayed statue-still and eventually the alien looked away, apparently unaware that she was there. Gwen shuddered as she let out the breath she'd been holding. She was safe for the moment, but she had realised that she couldn't let her guard down like she had. She had to keep her wits about her. No matter how incredibly amazing and interesting the experience.

Dutifully the translator in front of her ground away at its function, storing and cataloguing, sorting the sounds and sound sequences of the language being spoken below, displaying nothing very interesting while it did it. When the database was large enough, it would begin to assign the sound sequences to English words according to its best guess as to their meanings. The whole process was hugely complex and technical, based in statistics, theories of language, semantics and syntax, and had taken many people over at UNIT, a lot smarter than she was, years to devise. She just marvelled at the simple fact that it worked.

There were at least three distinct voices that she could now recognise and a few minutes passed as she merely listened intently to the ebb and flow of the conversation. It might have been her imagination, but it seemed to be getting more heated. An argument?

The creature below jerked up from where it'd been lounging on a pile of cushions, getting to its feet, intensely angry. Gwen assumed she could safely apply human body language to the alien in this case. The creature glared at a place just under Gwen's perch for several seconds until a second creature crossed to the first, trilling softly to it, a soothing sound. The larger, first alien shrugged away as the second put a hand out to it, but the action didn't deter the second. It just reached out again and was accepted this time, allowed to embrace the first. An apology, she hypothesised.

She smiled as the incomprehensible drama unfolding below her brought to mind the memory of the holiday she and Grant spent in Majorca. Grant had surprised her with it--a getaway to take her mind off the lingering grief over the loss of her partner, her friend. Sand and beach, and insanely they'd ended up hostage to the telly for an hour each afternoon, inexplicably drawn in by one particular Spanish soap opera. And neither of them even spoke Spanish. They'd guessed at what was happening, making up their own story and sub-plots as they went along.

This was a little like that, except it was really happening. Suddenly she felt like a voyeur, eavesdropping on private exchange--between family members, close friends, lovers? Impossible to know.

About to move away from the opening, Gwen paused as the talking stopped. She glanced down once again. The two creatures within her view were both staring off in the same direction toward the side of the chamber, staying that way for a long moment until the voice closest to her seemed to pose a question and the spell was broken. The larger of the two she could see replied and headed off in the direction it had been gazing in.

Though it was a different tunnel and level, it was vaguely the same direction Jack had headed in.

oOoOo

Twenty minutes after leaving Gwen with the translator, he was working his way down the darkened tunnel, senses sharpened to a knife's edge by adrenaline, years of combat training and experience coming to the fore as Jack stalked forward. It was times like this that he missed being able to carry his sonic blaster, the .38 at his side a crude substitute for his Villengard 470. Though, down here with only Gwen to question it, he probably could have. But then, he'd already been doing a fine job of supplying her with ammunition. He had no idea why he had shown her the wristcomputer, confessed his Time Agency rank, but he knew he could trust Gwen not to share the information. That much he was sure of.

Having left the first puddle of light behind, folded once again into near pitch-blackness and having to feel his way along for a few metres--he dared not use a light and invite the possibility of giving away his presence--he'd soon found another patch of light some distance down the passage in front of him. The path had led him downward, and he estimated that he had descended to about the same level as the floor of the chamber he'd left Gwen observing.

She'll be fine, he reassured himself one more time. Gwen could handle herself and she was unlikely to give away her position. Besides, there were only two entrances to the passage she was in. The way they'd entered, which was likely still clear--they'd thoroughly searched that approach--and the tunnel he was in, putting him between them and her.

Unfortunately the cavers' conversation hadn't lasted long and he was left hoping he'd hear something to let him know he was close to their position. That was the thing about caverns and caves: rock walls, twisting passages and echoing chambers all made for excellent--and rather distorted--sound conduction. The smallest noise could be heard from a great distance, but often it was impossible to pinpoint the location of the source.

Finally, he came to an opening large enough to count as a doorway, light pouring out of it, robbing him of his cover of darkness and making him feel unnervingly exposed. The tiny sound of cloth alerted him that the room beyond was occupied. Using the scan on his wristcomputer as a substitute for sticking his head in and looking, he found that there were two life-signs, both human, within. There were other signs registering, but not close and not clearly.

Steeling himself, he risked a glance into the chamber beyond, ready to draw back immediately if he spotted trouble. Seeing none, Jack slipped inside.

The room, another natural limestone cavern, more a widening of a passage that seemed to parallel the one he had just exited, tended toward the ovoid. Narrow tunnels led off in two opposite directions, and the high, stalactite-covered ceiling described a high arch, the edges of the space dotted with large columns of rock where the floor and ceiling had stretched to be united. Near the wall opposite his entry point, a cage of sturdy metallic mesh had been erected, sleeping pallets on its floor, sanitation unit occupying one corner.

As Jack warily approached the mesh confinement housing the two men, an eye on the passages, mindful of the aliens not far away, one of the captives noticed him. Shocked, the man moved to speak, and Jack hastily held two fingers to his lips for silence. Shaking his drowsing friend and giving him the same warning, the captive scrambled to his feet. His friend followed suit.

"Guessing you're Westman and Matheson?" Jack whispered when he got close, garnering emphatic nods from both of them. "Both all right? You aren't hurt at all?"

"We're fine." And, indeed, they did look unharmed. Just scared and weary after their ordeal. Inwardly, he breathed a sigh of relief, more convinced that the deaths of Nelms and Longden were accidental. "But there are these monsters," the blond started, his eyes nearly wild with remembered panic.

"Yeah, I've seen 'em," Jack replied smoothly, projecting a well-practised air of authoritative confidence. "Try to stay calm." The last thing he needed was one or both of these guys succumbing to blind terror and getting him caught. "You Matheson?" he asked the lank-haired blond.

"Michael Westman."

"Doug Matheson," his skinny friend answered.

"Jack Harkness." For the smile and tone of voice he used, he might've met the two at a party instead of locked in a cage deep underground. "Well, Mike and Doug, we're going to get you out of here, but it'll be a bit." Both men made to protest, but Jack shushed them with a gesture. "We're not ready to move yet. And I'd rather like to get out of here with everyone's hide intact, okay?" That included the aliens, but he neglected to mention that point.

"How long?" Doug wanted to know.

"I don't have an answer for that yet," he told him truthfully. "A couple of hours at a guess. Just know we're here and we're working on it."

"Who's we?" the kid asked again, curious.

"Security services."

They both looked mildly impressed and Jack was appreciative of the fact that it seemed he'd be able to leave them to sit tight for the moment. He needed to get back to Gwen before she called out the troops. Though he had the creeping suspicion that, if he didn't turn up on time, she wouldn't follow his order and go call in backup. She'd be down here ready to drag him by the scruff out of whatever distress he'd managed to get himself into. Dauntless, that was Gwen Cooper.

Jack was about to ask one final question, try to find out what kind of numbers they were looking at, but was interrupted by a sound from one of the passages. Someone was coming, and he froze, trying to evaluate how close they were. Too close, he decided, sprinting for the opening, resuming a more stealthy pace when he reached the cover of the darker tunnel.

When he determined he'd reached a dark enough section he paused, pressing himself against the jagged stone, and listened. He could no longer hear anything that indicated he was being followed, so he moved on, back up the tunnel toward the place he had left Gwen.

Jack was halfway up the sloped passage when he stopped again. He could hear the voices from Gwen's chamber, but he could also hear something that chilled him, and the gradual brightening of the light behind him confirmed his fear. Now he was being followed.