28.04.2009 - 10:30

"There's been an explosion in Cardiff," Ally said, and Ianto's stomach dropped. "An old factory near the site of the new Torchwood Hub. The team were responding to a report of activity out there." Her fingers rattled over her keyboard. "I'll check for life signs now."

A sick, dizzy feeling swept over Ianto at her words, and he stumbled to his feet to join her at her computer. Pinpricks of nervous energy rushed across his skin and sank into his bones, nausea churning in his stomach. The computer took an age to load up the Cardiff systems and grant them access to the monitoring software, and when it finally loaded it was to an alert crying out for backup for two deaths. He closed his eyes tightly and had to cling onto the desk to keep himself upright. "One is Owen," he reminded himself, before he opened his eyes again. "Who's the other?"

She clicked into the alert and sagged back into her seat. "Jack."

Guilty relief rushed through him. "Okay..." He exhaled for a count of five and let his head hang forwards. "Okay. Let me know as soon as he comes back. What about the others?"

"Gwen isn't even on site. Heartrate slightly elevated, looks like she's on the move, though, heading for them. Tosh and Christina both have elevated heartrates, but they look to be conscious." She carried on clicking through the reports. "Most of the channels are active, but they're not communicating right. It's like something in the blast fried it, or someone's tampered with it."

He nodded. "Can you get them back online?"

"Not as fast as you can." Ally pushed her chair back and jumped out of it, so he could take her place at the controls. "You want a headset to tap in?"

"Yes please." He tuned her out as he dug into the system, exploiting every override he knew to dig through the security to the code. When she passed him an earpiece, he just tucked it in and carried on. "You were right. Someone's been messing about in this. It's not an accidental outage."

Her hands landed on his shoulders and squeezed gently. "You can fix it, though?"

The code shifted again, and he growled. "I can patch it, but I need Martin on it. Get him in here now."

"On it."

She dashed off and left him to it and was barely out of the door before Jack's monitor sprang back to life like he had. Two of the communication channels sprang to life in conversation, and that was just the in he needed to get everything back online. His earpiece crackled with static for a second, and the next thing he heard was Owen and Christina swearing. He leaned back in his seat and rubbed a hand over his face, well aware of his satisfied grin.

"Okay, we're back," Jack called across the grumbling. "Tosh, does that mean you're okay?"

"That wasn't me." Her voice was strained. "I'm trapped, Jack. There's a massive slab of concrete resting on my legs."

"Damn. Okay, we're on our way. What about everyone else?"

"I'm half buried, and I think my shoulder is dislocated."

"I'm staring decapitation in the face here. Could do with some help."

"Okay... So who got us back online?"

Ianto cleared his throat. "It looked like you needed a bit of help. The system was taken offline deliberately. I'm going to set Martin to clearing out the code and looking for anything else in the system. Need any backup?"

"Let us get out of this, and we'll assess," Jack said, trying to sound more confident than he did. "They're probably not expecting us to be alive still."

"That's reassuring." Ianto squeezed at the back of his neck. "I'll get off the line. Be careful, and call for backup if you need it."

Jack laughed. "I'm always careful."

His jaw tightened. "I know. We'll keep an eye on the systems for you, until you get back to base."

Martin hurried into the room with the others on his heels, and Ianto pointed him to his own desk as he cleared off the line, turned the earpiece off and separated the microphone from the main body. "Cardiff have an intruder," he said once he was sure the device was deactivated. "They walked into a trap, and whoever lured them there was ready to cut them off from each other as soon as they sprang the trap. I don't know how much they know about us, but it's better to be safe than sorry. I'm instigating Code Green. Ally, get onto UNIT and have them ready to provide backup to Cardiff. Martin, you need to dig our intruder out of their code and keep the comms channels open. Make sure the security is all online, too, especially the Rift Monitor. You're in charge of that, Tiff and Peter are with you. Don't call UNIT in on this one."

He tapped at the keyboard to project the system report up onto the screen behind his desk. "Ally, you're our lead on liaising with UNIT. This might be a grudge match, or it might be something more. I'll alert the Prime Minister. And Jacqui, you're PM. Everything anyone finds out, Jacqui needs to know."

They nodded their understanding. "Are they all safe?" Jacqui asked.

"Not safe yet, but alive." He got up to let Ally have her seat back. "Stay off the Cardiff comms. If they're being monitored, whoever is behind this knows the Cardiff team isn't alone. I don't want to give them anything more than that."

He left them setting up a command centre in his office and hurried down the corridors of power to the Prime Minister's office. Anthony looked up at his approach and raised an eyebrow. "I'm afraid the Prime Minister is in a meeting. I can pass a message on, though."

Ianto rolled his eyes. "Could you please tell him that there's been an explosion in Cardiff..." Anthony's face went even paler than usual and he pointed to the door. "Yes, I thought so." He pushed the door open, and ignored the Foreign Secretary's glare. "Excuse me, Prime Minister, might I have a word?"

# # #

28.04.2009 - 15:00

At the first trill of Ianto's phone, the previously bustling office fell completely still, only the clatter of fingers on keyboards from where Martin and Tiff were slogging their way through the security records disturbing the unearthly silence. Ianto grabbed it up and let his eyes slipped closed. "Ianto Jones," he said, voice steadier than he'd dared to hope. "How can I help?"

"Ianto, it's me." Jack's voice was the best thing he'd heard all day, and his own feelings of relief were quickly mirrored by the rest of the team when he switched him to loudspeaker. The relief was short lived, though. "We've got a situation developing here. I need a state of emergency declaring and backup as soon as possible."

"Whatever you need," he promised. "What's happening over there?"

There was a frustrated pause before Jack spoke again. "It's John Hart. He lured us out to one of the derelict warehouses we looked at for a new Hub, and then tried to bring the place down on us."

"I doubt it," Ianto said, before his brain could catch up with his mouth. "I think if he'd wanted to bring the place down, he would have done. It's showing off, or a distraction. Is everyone okay?"

"I don't know whether that's reassuring or not. We're all fine, though. Cuts and bruises. Gwen has finally decided to join us." Ianto could hear her apologising, and Rhys, of course, rumbling on in the background. "Ianto, Hart isn't done. He's stolen the SUV and now he's at the Hub, waiting for me."

Ianto's instincts and responsibilities warred with each other, more than they ever had before. His desperate desire to keep Jack safe at total odds with the need to stop this before Hart went any further. "If you take back-up..."

"He'll kill them on sight. I have to go and find out what he wants." The systems started flashing up alerts just as he said it. "And it looks like we'll have our hands full anyway. Toshiko?"

"Rift flares all over the city. I'd say they're coordinated." Tosh made a disapproving noise and tutted at someone. "The main server building, the hospital and the police station have all seen Rift activity. Ianto, can you monitor for any reports from those sites?"

"We're on it," he assured her, gesturing towards Ally's computer. She didn't need telling and was already halfway there to set up a monitoring station. Around them the rest of the team was springing into position like a well-oiled machine, and he spared half a second to be incredibly proud of them. "Jack, how are you going to do this?"

He paused, and Ianto could picture him standing there, looking over them all and weighing up the lives of his people against the safety of the world yet again. "Tosh, the server building, Owen to the hospital. Gwen and Christina, you take the police station. Ianto, we need people on standby. He shot up a bar for fun last time he was here, and that's best-case scenario."

"I'll issue a warrant for his arrest, UNIT only. Gwen, make sure none of the locals try to apprehend him if they get the chance."

Ally stuck her hand up and span around in her chair. "Ianto, Jack, there's been reports of an attack at the police station. Officers down."

He sucked in a breath and closed his eyes for a moment. Whatever it was, it had started. "Alright. Gwen, over to you." He disconnected his comms so that the Cardiff team could get on without him and got up from his seat. "Guys, I can't pretend this is going to go well. John Hart is a psychopath who murders people for fun. If he's able to manipulate the Rift, and he's been there long enough to know his targets this well, he's already too far ahead of us. Ally, Martin and Jacqui, be ready to go if we need to. Jacqui, you're in charge of monitoring the situation and keeping us and the Cardiff team updated. Ally, I want UNIT scrambled and ready to respond, especially a medical team. Martin, patch into Mainframe and do what you can to keep Hart out." He rubbed at the back of his neck. "I... need to go and inform the Prime Minister."

Miles away in his home city, his team were scrambling in response to a real and violent threat. A threat aimed not just at a convenient target, but at them. Nausea churned in his stomach and he had to clench his hands tight to keep them from shaking. The night before he'd fallen asleep on the sofa watching QI with Jack, and a few hours later their friends had nearly died in a grudge match that spanned space and time. And at some point he'd become someone who could handle this. He didn't want to, but he would. He drained the dregs of his coffee and straightened up. "Let me know if anything changes."

# # #

28.04.2009 - 17:00

The attack on the police station had killed the four most senior police officers in Cardiff. The news was reporting it as an as yet unidentified terrorist cell, whilst the COBRA emergency committee deep within Whitehall struggled to get their heads around the fact that the city was being attacked by aliens again. The Home Secretary rubbed at the bridge of his nose where a long-ago rugby accident had left its mark on him. "Is it connected to the ATMOS attack?" he asked, as if knowing that it was the same aliens back rather than a whole new attack would make things better. "Or the Canary Wharf thing?"

Ianto wasn't about to tell them that it was his lover's former partner taking their break-up badly, if that's even what it was, but he couldn't reassure them. Everything that sprang to mind, like 'oh, we deal with aliens pretty much every week but most of them don't cause much trouble' or 'no, those were particularly violent races', would probably just make things worse. He settled for shaking his head. "No, Home Secretary, those were different."

"Well, how many are there?"

"It's a big universe. But most alien species are rather like humans - the majority of people mind their own business, and we notice the ones that don't." He tapped a button on his keyboard and brought up a map of Cardiff with the key locations marked on it. "These are the locations that have been attacked. They were specifically chosen for having historically low levels of Rift activity, so we can be sure that for all three to see activity at the same time it must be a targeted attack. The murders at the police station, ironically, were an additional and separate attack."

"But why?"

"Insurance, perhaps? By using both the Rift and Weevils he improved his chances of crippling our response. This is why I've asked UNIT to deploy additional resources to the hospital and the server building." He tapped on the map. "We also have teams in readiness on the outskirts of the city, ready to respond if required."

Gordon nodded at him, a touch proudly if Ianto was reading him right. "And the Torchwood team are on hand in the centre?"

"Of course. Gwen is running the command centre at the police station, Tosh is in charge of the team supporting the server building, and Owen is at the hospital. Both the hospital and the server building have had aliens come through the Rift, but those are contained."

"More attacks?" someone squawked.

He shook his head. "These weren't deliberate. When the Rift opens, things sometimes fall through. On very rare occasions that's people, but usually it's what we consider to be detritus. Mostly small electronics, actually. We have lots of theories about why but nothing concrete. These Rift events may have been targeted to increase the likelihood of a living being coming through, but they were quickly contained. The attacks on the police station were likely planned in more detail and further in advance." He tapped through the slides until a picture of a Weevil flashed up. "This is our attacker, or something like her. Weevils are native to a planet about thirty three light years away. We don't know how they behave on their home planet, but here they largely keep away from humans. They live in the sewers, actually, and abandoned buildings. Anywhere dark and a bit damp. A team about thirty years ago found that if they left clothes out, the Weevils would wear them. To this day we have no idea why. Under normal circumstances they'll attack if they feel threatened or if they're particularly hungry - this wasn't one of those occasions." He rubbed at the back of his neck and scowled. "They appear to have a slight psychic ability, and communicate using that and growls. It's possible that our mastermind..."

"This John Hart, was it?"

"Yes, that's him. It's possible he's using some sort of psychic control over them; to weaponise them, in effect."

The Home Secretary tilted his head to one side like a particularly grumpy bird. "And what does he want with Cardiff, of all places?"

"I've only met the man once, but that was enough for me to say with absolute confidence that he wants to hurt people. There may be nothing more to it than that, or it may be part of some larger plot." He caught Gordon's eye and sighed. "He's a former associate of Captain Jack. Very much former, from before Jack's time on earth."

"You mean to say that the head of Torchwood, the organisation that protects us against aliens, is himself an alien?"

He nodded, plastering a puzzled look on his face. "MI5 defends us against humans, but you wouldn't consider putting a cat in the role just in case. Jack has had a long and distinguished career with Torchwood and saved many lives over the years. His experience and knowledge is invaluable, as I'm sure you can imagine. He speaks several alien languages for a start."

There was a bit of grumbling around the table at that, but Gordon stepped in and squashed it very efficiently. "Captain Harkness's loyalties and his contribution are not in question. Has there been any update from him?"

"No. At the moment he's missing," Ianto admitted. He was very much aware of the eyes meeting around the table, the shifting in seats and the low murmur of surprise. "Presumed... incapacitated."

Gordon managed to get a lot across with one slight quirk of his eyebrow and a glance down at the table. "Well, then we'll await his next report. What would you propose as our next course of action, Mr Jones?"

He glanced up at the door and tightened his fingers around the back of a chair to stop himself running them through his hair. "I'm going to take my team to Cardiff to support the team there. Until Captain Harkness does report in, all we can do is hope for the best and prepare for the worst."

"Agreed. We will await your updates."

Ianto straightened up again and made his farewells, then made for the door. Ally was outside, pacing like a caged animal, and handed him his bag as soon as he emerged. "UNIT are ready and waiting for us outside. We should be in Cardiff by nightfall."

"Alright." He checked his phone again, pointlessly, hoping for any sort of update from Jack. "Let's move."