Travellers' Tales
Author: Soledad
For disclaimer, rating, etc. see the Introduction.
Author's notes: This is practically a retelling of the episodes "Army of Ghosts" and "Doomsday", from Toshiko's POV, assuming that she experienced some of the events from the sidelines. Slightly AU, so certain events will be a tad different. Some lines of dialogue are borrowed from the actual episodes, though.
The chroniton particles aren't originally part of the whoniverse, of course. They've been borrowed form Star Trek, as "Vortex energy" didn't sound geeky enough for me. My heartfelt thanks to aeshna_cyanea for delivering a few good arguments concerning Yvonne Hartman's motivations, some of which are loosely quoted in this chapter.
Chapter Two – Falling Towards Apocalypse
They woke up in the next morning after less than four hours of sleep and used up all the hot water in the shower to cure the stiffness of their limbs somehow. Then they had cereals and fruit juice for breakfast – Rajesh clearly not being a fan of diary products, unless in the form of chocolate – and walked back to the Babur to get his car. Today promised to be clear and sunny, but Rajesh, who was not a morning person (something Tosh had realized quite some time ago) looked at his beloved vehicle bleary-eyed and grouchy.
"God, I hate to drive first thing in the morning!" he groaned. "I don't suppose you'd like to…?"
"Are you offering to let me drive your car?" Tosh asked, astonished, because she'd never known a man who'd do that. "Your equivalent of a holy cow? Are you really sure about it?"
"Better you than me, with the killer headache I'm having right now," he replied. "Aspirin won't kick in for another half an hour, so… just be careful, okay?"
"I'm always careful," Tosh returned, accepting his keys. "At least when it comes to driving. You'd be extremely careful, too, would you be subjected to Jack's driving style as often as I am. Russian roulette doesn't even come close to sitting in the same car with him."
They got into the car and Tosh started the engine, secretly enjoying its smooth running. Unlike most women, she could appreciate a really classy car – from the purely technical point of view, of course. Although the design wasn't half bad, either, she admitted. Purple seemed to be Rajesh's favourite colour, and it went well with the back and the chrome. The car was a delight.
With the help of the navigation system, Tosh found her way into the underground garage of Headquarters easily enough. She parked the car in the slot specifically reserved for Rajesh, and then they rode the elevator a couple of levels. The one where they got off was unlabeled and had an abandoned look, but the high security snap doors revealed that it was anything but.
Using his ID card, Rajesh got them into his private office, where he exchanged his suit jacket for a white lab coat and handed Tosh one of those, too. Complete with a name tag; one reserved for co-workers, not one usually given to visitors. It simply said 'Toshiko', as junior researchers were addressed by their first names at Headquarters.
"Unless you're an assistant archivist and work for Rupert," Rajesh added with a grin; a clear sign that his headache was receding. "In which case you'd be addressed as Miss Sato, in complete ignorance of any and all scientific degrees. Of course, it's a moot point, since you're a woman and won't be allowed to work for the Archives anyway."
"I'm surprised that Yvonne lets your Head Archivist get away with such blatantly sexist behaviour," Tosh said with a frown.
"Oh, she's royally pissed off by him," Rajesh laughed, "but there's nothing she can do against him. Nobody knows the archives like Rupert does; he's simply needed."
"And Yvonne isn't?" Tosh asked. Rajesh shrugged.
"Well, of course she is; Yvonne is a skilled administrator, but there are others. She can be replaced, if necessary. Rupert cannot, and they both know that."
"Sounds like a pleasant working atmosphere," Tosh commented dryly.
"Oh, it's not that bad," Rajesh answered dismissively. "Yvonne is fairly easy if you don't cross her, and Rupert has only one ambition: to have his beloved Archives run at peek efficiency. They've arranged themselves, and as long as we're careful not to get between the fronts, we're safely ignored by both sides."
"The problem is: we're just about to cross Yvonne, big time," Tosh reminded him. Rajesh pulled a face.
"Well, yeah, I hate to point it out so bluntly, but it was your idea, wasn't it?"
"And you agreed… after some lame protests," Tosh countered.
"Of course I did," Rajesh said with a snort. "We make no headway with the bloody thing, and if she's gonna have my head anyway, I'd like to have at least some results first," he inserted his ID-card into the slot next to one of the huge snap doors, and it opened with slight reluctance. "Here we are."
They came into a cavernous room, a very small part of which was a high-tech lab, with instruments along the wall that made Tosh itch instantly to take them apart and see what made them tick. There was clearly a great deal of alien technology involved, some which she had never seen before; but that was to be expected. This was Torchwood "if-it's-alien-its-ours" London, after all.
In the middle of the lab area stood Rajesh's desk, with a laptop running on it, logged into the Tower's internal comm system, and a pile of Sudoku books. Seeing her baffled look Rajesh shrugged.
"Nothing really happens down here; I have to kill my time somehow. Trust me: it's the most frustrating project you can imagine."
He picked up two comm devices – Torchwood-issue ones, which meant they were accordingly enhanced by alien technology – that looked like ear pods and handed one of them Tosh.
"Put it on," he said. "It will enable you to follow whatever discussions take place on the main channel," he did the same, then he walked around the lab area and checked various instruments, commenting. "Terrific. We've got – nothing. A big, fat nothing, as usual."
Tosh was barely listening to him, her attention drawn to the enormous sphere, suspended eerily in mid-air at one end of the chamber, filling most of the available space. As Rajesh had mentioned on the previous night, it was bronze in colour and completely smooth. One couldn't detect any distinctive features upon its gleaming surface. There was a step ladder positioned just below it to provide easier access.
She shivered involuntarily. There was something sinister in the sphere, despite its perfection; as if something inherently dangerous would have been trapped inside, something that would be better left alone. But she had already learned that Headquarters wasn't very good at letting dangerous things alone, so she was willing to help, if she could. After all, she had faced strange and potentially lethal things all the time while travelling with the Doctor.
She put on the communication device, then climbed up the ladder, grateful for her foresight hat had made her put on sensible shoes, so that she could reach out and place a hand on the bottom of the sphere – only that she could not. It was as though there had been an invisible barrier preventing her from doing so. It made the small hairs on her arm and on the back of her neck stand on edge.
"Forcefield?" she murmured.
"Not according to our instruments," Rajesh answered.
"But something is definitely there," Tosh strained to break through it, but his hand was thrown aside. "Something that won't allow me to touch it."
"I know," Rajesh said sourly. "I've tried. I've tried each day, ever since it came through. Perhaps your scanner can tell us what it is."
"We'll see," Tosh climbed back down the ladder and set up her scanner – the one Jack liked to call Tosh's-little-blue-box-of-knows-things – on Rajesh's desk.
"If we want results, I'll need a stronger power source than just the batteries, though," she said. "This is several magnitudes bigger than tracking down Weevils on the streets of Cardiff at night."
"You can connect it to our main power source," Rajesh's assistant, a tall, bald bloke in his thirties, suggested, showing her the access to the socket.
He didn't seem surprised or disturbed by her presence at all. They must have had all sorts of experts coming in and trying to help. His name tag, pinned to the breast pocket of his white lab coat, said Trevor, and Tosh wondered briefly who Samuel might be then; that was the name Rajesh had mentioned his as assistant's on the previous day. But perhaps he was the assistant from the other shift. Whatever.
Tosh connected the scanner to the power source and the readouts lit up like a Christmas tree. The two men were duly impressed.
"This is the first time any of the instruments would react to the sphere at all!" Trevor exclaimed. "What the hell is this little blue box of yours?"
"It's just a scanner," Tosh replied truthfully. She didn't feel the need to reveal the fact that it had been built aboard the TARDIS, with the help of Time Lord technology. "Albeit an enhanced one, I'll admit. One of its functions is to react to Vortex energy."
"Which would be… what exactly?" Rajesh asked.
"Chroniton particles," Tosh explained. "The side product of time travel. When you cross the Time Vortex, you pick up this sort of radiation; it's faint, it's completely harmless, but it's there nonetheless."
"Time travel?" Rajesh repeated slowly. "You mean this… this thing is supposed to travel through time?"
Tosh shrugged. "I'm not sure. It could have travelled through alternate dimensions as well. We cannot tell whether chroniton particles are capable of interdimensional travel or not. Theoretically, they shouldn't be; nothing should be able to do that. But this is a big and very strange universe, and I wouldn't reject any possibilities out of hand."
"You seem to know an awful lot about the oddest things," the guy named Trevor commented.
"I used to work for a government think tank for ten years before joining Torchwood," Tosh replied, glossing over the exact circumstances that had led to her joining the organization. "I'm used to think outside the usual sandbox," she checked her readouts again. "Well, the exact source of the chroniton particles is a little diffuse, but they definitely come from the sphere. I can't tell you anything else at the moment."
She knew that some of the chroniton particles originated from her. Like all time travellers, her body was practically saturated with them. But he scanner would never react so strongly to her presence, so there had to be another, much more powerful source, She could not quite pinpoint it, the sphere was playing havoc with her scanner to a certain extent, but it was a sound hypothesis that it had to be the other source.
"Perhaps you'll have more luck during a ghost shift," Trevor suggested. "Only twelve minutes left to the next one."
Tosh raised an eyebrow at Rajesh, not entirely sure whether she was supposed to understand the hint or not. Rajesh grinned.
"Right, I forget that you guys from Applied Physics are not privy to the details," he said, providing an explanation for his assistant. "It's about the breech where the sphere came through. You see, it's like a hole in space-time. It's usually inactive. But when we fire particle engines at the exact spot, the breech opens up."
"And the ghosts slip through," Tosh finished for him, finally getting the whole picture and cringing from the thought how outraged Jack would be once he had learned about this. Torchwood Three did their damned best to keep the Cardiff Rift inactive, since they could not seal it, to minimalize the damage the things coming through it might cause. And Headquarters did the exact opposite?
"How did you even find it?" she asked.
"Oh, we were getting warning signs for years," Rajesh explained. "A radar black-spot of some sort – at least that was what the bosses called it. Then they decided to build Torchwood Tower, with the express intention to reach it; it was six hundred foot above sea level, after all. There was no other way to reach it."
Tosh shook her head in exasperation. They had built a skyscraper just to reach a spatial anomaly? How much money did they have anyway? Remembering how doggedly Jack had to fight for the necessary upgrades every time the Cardiff branch needed something (like the SUV, for example), she could have punched Yvonne and her cronies in the nose.
"You're bloody insane, you know that?" she said. "You find a spatial disturbance, and instead of leaving it frigging alone, like every sane person would do, you start probing it, even though you must have known how much trouble the Cardiff Rift has caused during the last two centuries. And when this thing came through," she waved in the direction of the sphere," tearing a hole in the fabric of reality, you still can't leave it alone, can you? No, you build particle engines to make it even bigger. Do you realize that you could get everyone in this city killed? And for what?"
"Well, it's a massive source of energy," Trevor pointed out.
"So is the Cardiff Rift, but the only result is that it regularly threatens the existence of the entire city," Tosh returned.
"Yeah, because the ground looks like a Swiss cheese from all those abandoned coal mines," Trevor countered. "But if we can harness the power of this breech, we'll never need to depend on the oil of the Middle East again. We could become truly independent."
"Don't mind Trevor," Rajesh commented in a bored tone. "He's listened to Yvonne's PR speeches for too long."
"No, I haven't!" Trevor protested. "I mean it. Look, you can see for yourself. Next ghost shift is just about to begin. We can tap into the internal surveillance system and show you the Rift chamber."
Tosh glanced at Rajesh who nodded. "We can. It's completely illegal of course, but when did that stop scientific curiosity? Would you like to see it?"
"Yeah, I do," Tosh replied. And she did.
The Cardiff Rift wasn't a visible thing. All they knew about it had been gained by instruments. What they get to see were only the results, most of them not very pleasant. But she wouldn't say no if offered the chance to see a spatio-temporal or probably interdimensional rift opening, and caution be damned!
Trevor adjusted some instruments, and the laptop screen on Rajesh's desk was now showing the same busy office on the top level in which she had met Yvonne yesterday. It apparently also dubbed as the Rift chamber. The director of Torchwood One was just stepping out of her office – which was separated from the main area with a glass partition – to address the staff
"Two minutes to the next shift," she told them. "Let's make it a good one, people. Yesterday's record measured the ghost energy at five thousand gigawatts. See if we can top that today."
She was interrupted by a young couple returning to their desks and rolled her eyes.
"Come on, you two," she said as if addressing naughty school children.
"I'm sorry we're late," the young woman said. Tosh recognized her as Adeola, but something about her seemed… odd. Her face was blank and her eyes were a bit glassy. What had these two been up to?
Yvonne, however, had no time for discipline them right now – if she'd indeed planned to do so.
"Save it 'til later," she snapped, ignoring the murmured apologies of the male half of the couple. Tosh wondered whether the young man was Adeola's sweetheart, or the two just happened to come back at the same time. Somehow she doubted it.
Yvonne looked around, addressing the room at large now. "Aaand powering up," she announced proudly, as if she'd been the one who had built the particle engine with her own hands. She was certainly dedicated to her job, one had to give her that much.
Behind another glass partition two scientists began to push the levers of what must have been the particle engine upwards. The light in the room brightened gradually. Yvonne sauntered forwards, putting on a pair of sunglasses.
"And... we're into Ghost Shift," she announced.
"Online," the voice of the computer acknowledged.
The light increased so much that Tosh had to turn her eyes away; it hurt, even via laptop screen. Suddenly, though, an alarm went off in the Rift Chamber. Yvonne, started, hurried over to the desk of a young tech, looking over his shoulder at the computer screen.
"What happened, Matt?"
The young man, whose name was apparently Matt, worked on his computer furiously. "Something's interfering with the ghost field," he said, baffled.
"Location?" Yvonne's voice was icy with cold fury.
"It's close..." Matt replied. "Within the City somewhere."
"Find it," Yvonne ordered; then she looked over to the scientists operating the particle engines. "Close it down," she said urgently. "Close it down!"
The two men hurried to obey, pulling the levers down again, pushing them into space. The light dimmed, signalling the end of the ghost shift.
"Offline," the computer voice announced.
Yvonne returns to Matt. "Well? Could you localize the source of the disturbance?"
"It was a very specific excitation of the ghost field, and that makes it easy to pinpoint," the young man replied, clearly starting some sort of search programme. "Almost there... South London," he typed some more. "South East 15," he looked up, brow furrowed. "It's a council estate. The Powell Estate. SU15 7GO. It was a public area."
Yvonne nodded, her expression one of dark satisfaction. "Can we patch into the CCTV network?"
Matt was already tapping on the keyboard. "Doing it now."
From their vantage point in the sphere lab, Tosh and Rajesh couldn't see Matt's computer screen of course. Their choices were reduced to watching Yvonne and Matt watch the CCTV footage on said screen.
"Here we go," Matt said. "We've got a camera within fifty yards."
Their eyes widened almost comically as the footage changed… as though they've seen a miracle of some sort. A miracle they had waited for for a long time.
"Oh my God…" Yvonne whispered in stunned disbelief.
Matt adjusted something on his screen, probably zooming in closer. "Is it him?"
Yvonne gasped. "It's him," she stood up, breathless with wonder, as if she could not believe what she'd just seen – but she'd knows what it meant nevertheless. "It's him," she repeated breathlessly. "He's coming."
She laughed in disbelief and hurried from the room. In the next moment, Rajesh's comm device came alive. Running down the corridor, she practically shouted into his ear. "Rajesh. It's him! He's coming."
"Who is coming?" Tosh asked in frustration.
Instead of answering her, Rajesh ran up the first few steps to the sphere, staring up at it with an unholy glee.
"Now we've got you!" he told it.
"Raji, who is coming?" Tosh repeated the question with such a hard edge in her voice that it snapped him out of his daydreams.
"Why, the Doctor, of course," he replied. "Haven't you read the Torchwood Charta when you joined? He's an alien, travelling with a time machine that looks just like an old-fashioned police box. It's called the TARDIS, and…"
"I know what the TARDIS is," Tosh interrupted. "Don't forget whom I work for. I still don't understand why the Doctor would wish to come here, though."
"Perhaps he's every bit as concerned about the ghosts as you are," Rajesh guessed. "Perhaps he's tracked back the signal of the ghost field to its origin – here – and wants to investigate."
"That would be quite foolish of him," Trevor said. "After all, he's named in the Torchwood Charter as an enemy of the Crown."
"Yeah, but does he actually know that?" Rajesh asked. "Does he know that Torchwood exists in the first place?"
That was a very good question indeed. As far as Tosh knew, the Doctor – at least her Doctor, the same one Jack had used to know – had never encountered Torchwood before. She certainly had not named him the organization she worked for (or Jack for that matter), out of fear that she might contaminate the timeline. So he might still be clueless.
"Which would mean he's going to walk straight into a trap," she said quietly, torn in the inside whether she should try to find a way to warn him or not.
"Quite likely," Rajesh agreed, not the least concerned about that possibility, "but I'm sure Yvonne will make him as welcome and as comfortable as humanly possible. And imagine all the things we could learn from him!"
"If he's willing to teach is," Tosh said doubtfully. "What if he thinks we ought to learn things on our own?"
"Perhaps he does," Rajesh said with a shrug. "But Yvonne is very good at persuading people to do her bidding. That's why she was made director of the Torchwood Institute."
That sounded vaguely sinister and made Tosh wonder whether the sizeable paycheck had been the only thing that had made Rajesh choose to work for Torchwood instead of teaching at university, for which he would have had the right qualifications, too. Unlike the majority, he had not been hired right out of college. And a man with two children could easily be pressured into accepting the job through his family. She would not put it beyond Yvonne to do exactly that if she had wanted Rajesh badly enough for her projects.
Suddenly she felt a gentle prickling on her skin; a feeling she hadn't had since last October… since the earthquake in Cardiff, caused by the schemes of the false Mayor Margaret Blaine. She knew what it meant: the TARDIS was coming. The TARDIS key that she always wore on a chain around her neck was reacting to it, vibrating gently.
"Can you track down Yvonne?" Rajesh asked his assistant in the meantime. "I'd like to see the TARDIS arriving. This is a historic moment for Torchwood."
"Sure," Trevor adjusted the instruments and called up the image of a busy factory floor, just in time for them to see a blue police box materializing out of thin air.
The man who came out of the TARDIS seemed unfamiliar to Tosh, but he could hardly be anyone else but the Doctor in his latest incarnation. It was hard for her to reconcile this impossibly young and slightly manic person with the memory of the man she had come to love and respect like a father. The whole thing was slightly… unsettling.
The security cameras provided only images from the factory floor, no sound, but it was obvious from the sight alone that Yvonne was holding the big welcome committee for him – and that he enjoyed being celebrated like some sort of film star. Clearly, the UNIT files – acquired by Jack in slightly dubious ways – had been right. Regeneration did not change the Doctor's looks alone; it also changed his personality, and not for the better, in Tosh's opinion, if his new, self-important attitude was any indication. She suddenly missed her old friend badly.
And who was the dumb-faced blonde woman with him? Surely, it couldn't be his precious Rose; she was what? Nineteen years old? This woman was at least forty… although there was a certain similarity… Tosh had only got brief glimpses of Rose Tyler during the Blaine crisis in Cardiff, and frankly, she couldn't understand what both Jack and the Doctor saw in her: an uneducated teenager, as common as dirt and lacking any common sense.
All right, she could understand the Doctor, at least. During their time together, the Doctor had told her a little about his granddaughter and how he still missed her. Perhaps Rose reminded him of Susan, despite the light years of intellectual difference and brain potential between the two of them. As for Jack, well… some men simply had a soft spot for dumb blondes. It was deeply unfair, but that was life.
Her somewhat bitter thoughts were interrupted by the crack of the comm device. It was Yvonne.
"Rajesh," she said, "we're going down to you with the Doctor. Perhaps he can tell us what the sphere is."
"I hope so," Rajesh grinned, rubbing his hands in expectation. Tosh, on the other hand, seriously panicked.
"She can't find me here, Raji," she said urgently. "I must get out before she arrives!" She wasn't really sure whom she wanted to avoid more: Yvonne or this new version of the Doctor who, quite frankly, frightened her for some reason she couldn't explain.
"Right, you're right, of course," Rajesh thought for a moment frantically. "Trevor, take her to the observation room below and send in Samuel. I want you to watch and record everything what might be going on from there, just in case. That's where our best surveillance equipment is installed."
"This way," Trevor herded Tosh into a small side chamber, from where a short string of metal stairs led down to a security chamber full of surveillance screens, on which various sections of the lab complex could be watched simultaneously. What was even better, here they could have audio as well, which was a definite advantage.
They got down just in time to see Yvonne enter Rajesh's lab, with the Doctor, the blonde cow and some soldiers in tow and wave around herself with proprietary pride.
"Well, what do you make of that?"
Rajesh straightened her lab coat and approached the Doctor in awe, trying to introduce himself. The regenerated Time Lord ignored him completely, though, gazing open-mouthed up at the sphere. Poor Rajesh lowered his extended hand like a kicked puppy and averted his eyes.
Tosh watched them discussing the sphere – the Void Ship, as the Doctor called it – and her respect for Jack Harkness went up several notches. After all, Jack had come to the same conclusions, without the help of any condescending Time Lords.
Granted, even the Doctor she had known could be condescending at times. That came from being so old and having seen so much. But her Doctor wouldn't have insulted a name-worthy scientist like Rajesh by simply ignoring him. And he'd never have left Jack behind on that space station, dying or dead. Seeing this new version of him, she now could believe it; and felt terribly sorry for Jack, who had been waiting for the return of his Doctor for almost two hundred years, not knowing that all he would find, should they meet one day, was this indifferent stranger.
Tosh touched the TARDIS key under her blouse. It felt warm, and she knew it was glowing, soft and golden, within its ornate protective casing. If she could somehow find the TARDIS and slip into her undetected, she might use her board systems to find out more about the sphere… the Void Ship. If anything, Time Lord technology at it purest ought to do the trick. Her self-built little scanner, although better than anything even Headquarters could have come up with, was simply not strong enough.
Yvonne and her entourage had left the sphere lab in the meantime and returned to the rift chamber, to witness the beginning of the next ghost shift. The Doctor did his best to persuade Yvonne to cancel it, but to no end. His warning felt to deaf ears by her.
"Oh, exactly as the legends would have it," she said tartly. "The Doctor, lording it over us. Assuming alien authority over the rights of Man."
Tosh hated to admit, but she was right about that. Even her Doctor displayed authoritative tendencies over "mere" humans; yes, he'd even been rude at times, but she'd never had the slightest doubt that he'd have their best interests on his mind. With this new incarnation, she was not quite so sure. The case of Harriet Jones had been quite the eye-opener.
Still, the argument wasn't over yet.
"Let me show you," the Doctor said to Yvonne.
He took his sonic screwdriver out of his pocket and stood on the other side of the glass partition between Yvonne's office and the main area.
"Here did the sphere come through," he said, pointing the sonic screwdriver at the glass and activating it. The glass splintered and the crack extended outwards, continuing to do so as the Doctor spoke.
"But when it made the hole, it cracked the world around it," he explained. "The entire surface of this dimension, splintered. And that's how the ghosts get through. That's how they get everywhere. They're bleeding through the fault lines. Walking from their world, across the Void, and into yours. With the Human race hoping and wishing and helping them along! But too many ghosts, and..."
He placed the lightest fingertip on the glass and the whole thing shattered, falling from the frame.
Yvonne still wasn't completely persuaded, and who could blame her? She didn't know the Doctor as well as Tosh did. She only knew what she had read about him – she lacked personal experience.
"Well, in that case we'll have to be more careful," she replied with a shrug and turned to the staff. "Positions! Ghost Shift in one minute."
The Doctor jogged after her. "Ms Hartman, I am asking you – please, don't do it."
Yvonne waved off his concerns, now clearly annoyed with him. "We have done this a thousand times."
"Then stop at a thousand!" the Doctor yelled furiously, and Tosh winced. An enraged Time Lord was not someone you wanted to encounter. It hadn't happened often that she would see him angry, but none of those cases had been a pretty sight.
Yvonne, who had no way of knowing it, still wasn't taking his warnings seriously. "We are in control of the ghosts," she replied. "The levers can open the breech, but equally they can close it. "
There could be no doubt that she meant that honestly. She believed in her work, she was dedicated to it, and there was nothing wrong with that per se. The problem was that any assessment of the risks of the ghost project had been based on the best data available, but with completely alien phenomena involved, there simply was not enough reliable data to even understand the dangers involved, never mind the likelihood of those things actually happening.
The bottom line was: Yvonne was not a scientist. She was an administrator, and a good one; and the same traits that made her such a good executive also made it not easy for her to back off, no matter what. She and the Doctor stared at each other for a few moments, a battle of wills, then the Doctor walked off into her office and grabbed a chair.
"Okay then," he said lightly.
Yvonne raised an eyebrow. "Sorry?"
The Doctor flapped his hand generously. "Never mind! As you were."
"What, is that it?" Yvonne couldn't quite believe his sudden change of heart, and Tosh didn't blame her for that. The Doctor was known for sticking to his opinions, no matter which incarnation he might be in.
Now, however, he was settling down in the chair with a falsely amiable expression.
"No! Fair enough," he shrugged. "Said my bit. Don't mind me. Any chance of a cup of tea?"
"Ghost Shift in twenty seconds," Adeola, still wearing that strangely bleak expression, interrupted.
"Mm!" the Doctor said brightly. "Can't wait to see it!"
Yvonne shot him a suspicious look. "You can't stop us, Doctor."
"No, absolutely not!" the Doctor agreed; then he turned to the dumb-faced blonde he had stated would be his companion. "Pull up a chair, Rose! Come and watch the fireworks." The blonde went to stand behind his chair with expectation. Apparently, she still hadn't realized there might be danger – just how stupid was she and where had the Doctor picked her up?
"Ghost Shift in ten seconds. Nine... eight..." Adeola was counting down monotonously.
Yvonne was uneasy. She stared at the Doctor. He raised his eyebrows at her, as if daring her to go through with it.
Adeola kept counting down emotionlessly. "Seven... six... five... four... three... two..."
… and that was when Yvonne broke. "Stop the shift," she called out. "I said stop. "
The Doctor made a small bow towards her, without rising from his chair. "Thank you."
Yvonne tried to look like she was still in control of the situation. "I suppose it makes sense to get as much intelligence as possible," she said, sounding the slightest bit forced. "But the program will recommence, as soon as you've explained everything."
The Doctor inclined his head in mock seriousness. "I'm glad to be of help."
Yvonne rolled her eyes and addressed the room at large. "And someone clear up this glass," she glanced at the Doctor wryly. "They did warn me, Doctor. They said you like to make a mess."
As the Doctor and Yvonne seemed to have come to an impasse, Tosh turned her attention to another screen: the one that showed Rajesh's lab directly above them. Rajesh was sitting at his desk, presumably following the events in the rift chamber on his laptop, while the assistant Trevor had called in was checking some of the instruments set in the back wall. The sphere – the Void Ship – was doing his usual: nothing. It was simply hanging in the air, emanating the same vague threat, but that was all.
"I guess we can go back now," Tosh said uncertainly.
Trevor gave her a shrewd look. "You go. I'll keep recording here and warn you, should Yvonne decide to pay the lab another visit."
"What do you mean?" Tosh asked with a frown.
Trevor grinned. "Oh, c'mon, Doctor Sato, this isn't the first time I see you with Doctor Singh. I know you work for the Cardiff branch, and I know Yvonne would tear Doctor Singh a new one for letting you see that… that thing above us. No, don't worry," he added hurriedly, "I won't report either of you. Doctor Singh is a great guy and I hope he'll find out what that thing is doing here, so that he can return to his own research again. This isn't exactly his area of expertise… or mine. But I'm just a lab assistant, my time isn't half as precious as his."
"Why did Yvonne assign him to this project anyway?" Tosh asked. "He's a xenobiologist, not an engineer. Did she assume that someone – or something – was inside the… the Void Ship?"
"Yeah; and based on what the Doctor has just said, she must have been right," Trevor replied. "You mustn't underestimate Yvonne. She might be ruthless and ambitious, even a bit fanatic when it comes to her dream about a new British Empire, but she's not a fool. She gives her people a great deal of leeway because she wants us to give her our best – and we do, because we enjoy our work here, despite the stress and the set-backs and yes, even the risks. But she knows very well what we're doing. Not necessarily the minute technical details, but she's got a good, solid understanding about the projects running here at any given time."
"She must have got a phenomenal memory, then," Tosh said, impressed. Trevor shook his head.
"She does have a good memory indeed, perhaps better than your average executive, but she only keeps the general overview in her own head. When it comes to the details, she relies heavily on the archivists; we all do. Without them, work in Torchwood Tower would be seriously hampered. The scientists make the discoveries, but it's the archivists who keep the whole place running."
"But you have those Digital Archives," Tosh said. "An entire floor of them. I've seen it from the lift."
"Four levels, actually," Trevor corrected. "Two hundred years of research and information from time-displaced humans and aliens, stored on encoded hard discs, so that even if an exceptionally talented hacker would manage to break into our network, he'd only find the research that's currently running. For everything else, we need the archivists. Only the archivists are familiar with the filing system; without them, it would take us forever to find even the right disk. And should we find it, we'd still need an archivist, since only they know the codes. Granted, safety copies from the codes and passwords are hidden in places known to Doctor Howarth and Yvonne alone. But the junior archivists know them by heart – each for his own specified area, that is."
Tosh's mind bogged by that concept: archivists as the secret power behind the throne. It did have a certain nerdy attraction, though, she had to admit that much.
"So, if I wanted to study previous research on, say, the Dogons…" she began.
"…you'd have to turn to the assistant archivist assigned to the xenobiology department," Trevor finished for her. "Who, in our case, would be Ianto Jones. Which would also mean that you'd get treated to the best cup of coffee on this planet… and presumably on any other planet where the aliens happen to know coffee, too."
Tosh laughed, remembering the neat, polite, quietly sarcastic young man they had met in the lift the day before. "That was what Rajesh said."
"And he was right, even though he wouldn't be able to make a difference between really good coffee and that dishwasher stuff served at Starbucks," Trevor said. "Yvonne always gets her daily fix in the Archives, even if she has to endure Doctor Howarth's attitude in exchange. And Doctor LaFiamma from Applied Physics says that Ianto's coffee is the best he's ever had – not a small compliment, coming from an Italian."
"Must be something like a Japanese gourmet chef complimenting an English housewife on her way of preparing rice," Tosh grinned, starting to climb the steps that led to Rajesh's lab.
"I'll take your word on that," Trevor answered, returning to his surveillance monitors.
"Ghost shift has been cancelled, Doctor Singh," the assistant was saying at the same moment Tosh re-entered the lab. Rajesh nodded absently, his eyes still on his laptop screen; he must have watched something else than the events in the rift chamber, then.
"Thanks, Samuel," he said. "Toshiko, can you see any difference between these results and the ones recorded before the Doctor would take a look at the sphere?"
So, he was checking the data still being fed to his laptop via Tosh's little blue box. But Tosh wasn't listening to him. She was staring at the assistant, Samuel: a young black man with extremely short-cropped hair, wearing the usual white lab coat and name tag. She had the feeling that she'd seen the man somewhere before; and it hadn't been in London. She was positive she'd seen him in Cardiff, she just couldn't quite remember where or when. The hair – or rather the almost complete lack of it – seemed wrong, somehow, but she was sure they'd already met.
Not getting any answer, Rajesh looked up at her a little impatiently. "Toshiko?"
Despite whatever was going on between them, when at work, Rajesh was completely focused on the task at his hands – and expected the same from his co-workers, temporary or not. Realizing that she'd been asked a work-related question, Tosh hurriedly pulled herself together, postponing the problem of Samuel's identity for alter. She went to the desk and looked at the readouts over Rajesh's shoulder.
"Hmmm… there's a slight increase of the density of chroniton particles coming from the Void Ship," she said with a frown.
"Which would mean – what exactly?" Rajesh asked.
"I'm not really sure," Tosh admitted. "It could be, of course, that the scanner simply reacts to the Doctor's presence; he's a time traveller, after all, so he must be saturated with chroniton particles. On the other hand, it is also possible that the Void Ship is about to open – in which case I can't even begin to predict the possible consequences."
"You mean it can be dangerous," Rajesh said.
"That's always the risk we have to take when handling unknown technology," Tosh replied. "Even with all necessary precautions, we simply don't know what dangers are involved. The only way to be safe would have been not to bother that thing at all."
"Which would kinda contradict the purpose of scientific research and discovery," Rajesh pointed out.
"I know," Tosh sighed. "Every time when scientific or technological innovations are tested, there's the latent possibility of a big disaster. The one is almost inseparable from the other. I still think you guys should have left the bloody rift alone; but that's a moot point now, isn't it? The Void Ship is here, and we'll have to deal whatever it has brought into our world."
She went to readjust the scanner when the door opened and a young blonde girl came in, wearing a white lab coat but without a name tag. Again, she struck Tosh as fleetingly familiar, and again, the memory seemed to be related to Cardiff. That was definitely strange. Either she was starting to see real ghosts, or someone had infiltrated Headquarters. Which in itself was no small feat, making Tosh wonder who aside from the Doctor would be able to do so.
The girl walked into the lab, slowly, almost hesitatingly. Her eyes were fixed on the Void Ship, as if hypnotized by it. Rajesh spotted her, too, and rose from behind his desk, approaching her.
"Can I help you?" his voice was coldly polite. He did not like people walking into his lab uninvited.
She answered as if in trance, not looking away from the sphere. "I was just..."
"Try not to look," Rajesh warned. "It does that to everyone. What do you want?"
Now she finally turned to him, quite apparently making up a suitable answer as she was going. "Sorry. Um... they sent me from Personnel. They said some man had been taken prisoner. Some sort of doctor? I'm just... checking the lines of communication, did they tell you anything?"
Tosh rolled her eyes because frankly, this was the clumsiest attempt to lie she'd ever heard. Rajesh seemed to share her opinion, but he was still fairly polite as he went on questioning her.
"Can I see your authorisation?"
"Sure," she handed him what seemed a piece of paper in a plastic casing, now obviously very certain about herself. Rajesh checked it.
"That's lucky," he said, and the girl gave him a decidedly smug smile. However, he looked at her and his voice grew ice cold. "You see, everyone at Torchwood has at least a basic level of psychic training," the girl's smile faded, not quite following what he was hinting at. Rajesh continued in the same calm, even manner. "This paper is blank. And you're a fake." He touched his comm device. "Trevor, seal the lab. Call security," then he looked at his assistant. "Samuel? Can you check the door locks? She just walked right in."
The black guy in the white lab coat turned to them. "Doing it now, sir."
But his eyes rested on the girl, warningly, and he put a finger to his lips, giving her the thumbs up behind Rajesh's back, grinning.
"Well," Rajesh said to the girl with exaggerated hospitality. "If you'd like to take a seat."
She nodded, seemingly lost for words, not even noticing Tosh's presence who was fumbling with her scanner still. Tosh, however, decided to keep an eye on her – and on the potentially fake assistant – because that trick with the blank paper was tantalizingly familiar. The Doctor had done something like that on occasion. He had called the thing psychic paper, explaining that it read one's thoughts and caused itself to display the expected form.
Of course, with Torchwood-issue psychic training one could easily see through the illusion. And since Rajesh had been trained to deal with potentially telepathic alien life forms, his training had been way above basic level. Not to mention that he was an intelligent man who recognized a clumsy attempt to fool him – for which reason he was contacting the rift chamber right now.
"Yvonne? I think you should see this. We've got a visitor," he said, turning the webcam to the blonde girl, while Tosh was backing off quickly to stay out of the focus of the camera. "We don't know who she is, but funnily enough, she arrived at the same time as the Doctor. And she tried to fool me, showing me a blank piece of paper instead of any proper authorization."
There was a moment of silence, then Yvonne's wryly amused voice came through the comm. "She one of yours?"
"No," the Doctor replied promptly. "Never seen her before in my life."
"Good!" Yvonne said with deep satisfaction, clearly aware of the fact that he was lying through his teeth. "Then we can have her shot."
Please, do! Tosh prayed, remembering the Doctor's completely besotted gushing about his young companion. No, besotted was probably the false word. He'd behaved like a father totally blinded towards any possible failure his oh-so-perfect daughter might possibly have. It hadn't been quite so bad while Tosh had been travelling with him – he'd only known Rose for a short time back then – but it had become really annoying by the time of the Slitheen crisis in Cardiff.
Now Tosh realized why both the girl and Rajesh's supposed assistant seemed so familiar; they'd both been with the Doctor in Cardiff, last October; together with a younger, still mortal Jack Harkness. She wondered what Jack would say when he learned that the same Doctor who had abandoned him for no acceptable reason would give up any cover story he'd mcgyvered together at a whim of his heart, to protect his precious Rose.
Because, of course, the Doctor could not let her come to any harm, even if it was her own doing, so he 'fessed up in a second. Tosh found it hysterically funny that he had to endure Rose's mother, of whom he'd used to speak in the most derogatory of tones. Especially that this current incarnation of him seemed a great deal more vain than the previous ones.
His banter with Yvonne was interrupted by the sound of the particle engines starting up. Rajesh frowned.
"Yvonne? I thought you said the next ghost shift was cancelled. What's going on? Yvonne?"
He got no reply from the rift chamber. Tosh hurried to the server control screen to check out what was happening to the system, while they could hear Yvonne scream at her staff, demanding that they stop what they were doing and step away from their desks, RIGHT NOW! Nobody seemed to follow her orders, though.
"They're overriding the system!" Tosh realized, blanching. "We're going into ghost shift, at full power!"
"Can't you do something?" Rajesh asked anxiously. "You're a computer genius… I can give you the override password."
Tosh was already at it, her fingers hushing about the keyboard in a rapid dance. "Password!" she snapped at Rajesh. "Quickly! They're demonically fast, I can't stay ahead of them much longer!"
Rajesh gave her the password and she typed it in so quickly that her fingers became a blur – but still not quickly enough.
"It's over," she said glumly. "They've locked me out; though I can't understand how, no-one is faster at the keyboard than I am. No-one!"
"Unless they're guided by something a lot faster than human reflexes," Samuel said grimly; at their surprised looks, he added. "It's the ear-piece controlling them. I've seen this before."
"But these are standard comm devices," Rajesh hurriedly removed his own earpiece and stared at it suspiciously. "How could they control anyone?"
"Trust me," Samuel replied darkly," you don't wanna know."
Rajesh looked as if he wanted to argue, but he didn't come to it. The whole lab started to shudder without forewarning. "What the hell's going on here?"
Tosh checked her readouts. "The disturbance comes directly from the sphere."
"It can't be!" Rajesh hurried over to the sphere, Rose and Samuel hot on his heals, and stared up at it anxiously.
Another crash could be heard from within the thing, and the words SPHERE ACTIVATED flashed across the screen of Rajesh's laptop.
"It's active!" Rajesh darted back to the webcam and yelled frantically. "We've got a problem down here. Yvonne, can you hear me?" he got no answer, and the sphere started vibrating continually. "Yvonne, for God's sake – the sphere is active!" he whirled around to Tosh. "Do you have any readings?"
"I've got weight, mass, an electromagnetic field – the whole none miles," Tosh replied with barely controlled scientific excitement. "Whatever it was doing before, the sphere definitely exists in our reality now. As if it had just finished crossing the interdimensional void!"
She jumped, startled, when there was a loud crash behind her, and turned around jut in time to see the security doors closing down. "What was that?"
"Automatic quarantine," Rajesh answered tiredly. "The doors are sealed. We can't get out – not until someone overrides the security system."
"Who has the authority to do that?" Tosh asked, stomping down her increasing panic ruthlessly. Rajesh gave her a defeated look.
"Only Yvonne; and Rupert Howarth, but I can't reach either of them."
"I can try to hack into the security files," Tosh offered, but Rajesh shook his head.
"It would take too long, even for you," he gestured towards the now continuously vibrating sphere. "That thing is gonna open any moment now. Gather your equipment and go down to Trevor. You might give it a try from there, although chances are slim."
"I won't leave you here with this thing!" Tosh protested, but Rajesh took her face in his hands and looked her in the eyes.
"This is my responsibility, Toshiko. But I can only deal with it when I know you're not in immediate danger. Please, go down to Trevor. Do it for me, will you?"
After a heartbeat of hesitation Tosh nodded. He pressed a brief, desperate kiss on her lips, then turned back to the sphere, steeling himself to face whatever might come out of it eventually. Tosh collected her little blue box and rushed to the only door still open: the one leading to the security room below. It was a rat trap, unless it had another exit (which she doubted), but if it made Rajesh believe she'd be safe there, she would not argue.
She stopped right behind the door, though, leaving it open for a finger's breadth, eager to see what would happen. Being protective might give Rajesh the strength to deal with the situation, but she was a scientist. She simply had to see.
"It's all right, babe," she could hear Samuel comfort the Doctor's blonde git. "We beat them before, we can beat them again. That's why I'm here. The fight goes on."
"The fight against what?" Rose asked stupidly.
"What d'you think?" Samuel replied with marked impatience, making Tosh wonder what the hell they were referring to. But then she had to fight to keep her balance, as two violent crashes emitted from the sphere, shaking the lab roughly. She held onto the doorframe, because these two definitely knew more than everyone else, and if they did know something, Tosh wanted to know it, too.
"We had them beaten, but then they escaped," Samuel explained. "The Cybermen just – just vanished."
The Cybermen? They were talking about the bloody Cybermen?
Like all companions, past or present, Tosh, too, had heard of the mechanical menace enough to realize the threat they represented. But how had they found their way to Earth?"
"They found a way through the Void to this dimension," Samuel was explaining to Rose. "But so did we. We followed them, and we'll beat them here, too."
"But – but the Doctor said that was impossible," Rose protested. Tosh rolled her eyes at the stupid argument. Sure, the Doctor was old and knew a lot, but he wasn't omniscient. He could make mistakes – especially when arrogance overcame his better judgement.
"Yeah, well it's not the first time he's been wrong," Samuel countered, as if reading Tosh's thoughts.
There was another loud crash, and Rose frowned. "What's inside that sphere?" she wondered. Samuel shrugged.
"No one knows. Cyber Leader, Cyber King, Emperor of the Cybermen," he broke into a broad, almost manic grin. "Whatever it is, he's dead meat."
Clearly, the Doctor's delusions were contagious.
Rose apparently didn't see it so, though, because she nudged Samuel. "It's good to see you again."
He grinned back at her. "Yeah. It's good to see you too."
How nice of them to rekindle their romance, or whatever used to be between them, while we're all trapped down here, Tosh thought sourly. She hated it when other people had more info than she did. She preferred to be the one with the knowledge. Besides, she had the bad feeling that Samuel's self-confidence might not be entirely well-founded.
Rajesh must have felt the same thing, because he was speaking into the comm with desperate urgency, while the entire lab was shaking around them, accompanied by booms from the sphere.
"Can anyone hear me? Come on, I need help down here! We're sealed in, I need…"
In that moment, the sphere stopped vibrating. Eerie silence filled the cavernous room. Rajesh put his glasses back on and approached the sphere cautiously, while Samuel removed his lab coat and pulled off his earpiece.
"Here we go," he said softly.
As they watched, smooth cracks appeared in the sphere, and it slowly began to open, like the petals of some gigantic, metallic flower. Light spilled from the gaps, golden light, not entirely unlike that in the console room of the TARDIS. Curious…
The computer beeped and the warning Sphere activated. Sphere activated. Sphere activated. Sphere activated flashed across its screen continuously.
"I know what's in there," Samuel said grimly. "And I'm ready for them. I've got just the thing," he retrieved a weapon that he had been apparently hiding under a counter, and then positioned himself in front of the sphere in a horribly cheesy superhero comic manner. "This is gonna blast them to Hell."
Rajesh stared at him in shocked surprise. "Samuel, what are you doing?"
"The name's Mickey," his assistant told him, in a really bad imitation of James Bond. "Mickey Smith. Defending the Earth," and he cocked his gun as the sphere parted further.
"Well, in that case I hope your big gun works on polycarbide," Tosh muttered as the top part of something that looked like a gigantic pepper pot emerged from the sphere, "Because that's not a Cyberman."
Watching for a terrible moment as four Daleks glided smoothly from the sphere, Tosh then very slowly, very carefully closed the security door and hurried down to Trevor's little pigeonhole below. She knew she needed to find a way to override the security system, or else they'd be all dead in no time.
You couldn't work for Jack Harkness and not know what the Daleks were – less so if you had once been the travelling companion of a Time Lord. For Tosh's Doctor, the Daleks might have been just a terrible memory. But her Jack had fought them – and been killed by them – on Satellite Five, so she knew all too well how hopeless their situation was. It would have been fairly hopeless with Jack and his sonic blaster on their side; with him in Cardiff, clueless, and his sonic weapon confiscated by the Doctor, their chances were like zero – very carefully calculated.
Still, she had to try opening at least a way of escape for them Headquarters' security experts might have been good, but she was Toshiko Sato, computer genius and ex-companion. She was better than them. She could do this.
Or so she hoped.
Nonetheless, she could feel her blood freeze to ice as – even through the three-inch-thick steel of the security door – she could hear the mechanical screaming of the Doctor's arch enemies:
"Exterminate! Exterminate! EXTERMINATE!"
~TBC~