Ianto checked his watch, then he checked again. He wasn't quite sure were time had gone, a few hours ago they were choosing a bed and now he was stood in the toiletry aisle of the supermarket while Jack asked his opinion on bubble bath.
"I don't have a preference Jack, but we really need to go now."
"You're keen. I like keen." Jack flashed Ianto an enormous grin.
"We need to go pick Mickey up from the station."
"Right," Jack said rather blandly, "yes so we do."
They paid for the shopping and squeezed it into the boot before making a mad dash through Cardiff to the station. By the time they got to the car park Mickey was already standing there, mobile in his hand.
"Mickey" Jack called out the driver's window as he turned the SUV to a stop in front of him.
"Jack!" Mickey exclaimed, "nice" he said approving, nodding his head as he admired the SUV.
"Jump in. We're on a mission"
"Right you are." Mickey opened the back door and lept into the seat, slamming the door shut behind him. "What the... someone's been shopping."
"Yeah, Ianto I have a new home. Ianto meet Mickey, Mickey meet Ianto the more respectable part of my life."
"Hi." Said Ianto politely.
"Hi" Said Mickey enthusiastically from the back seat. "So, where are we off to?"
"First we need to pick up Gwen and Martha and then we're taking you straight to the hub, I need you to analyse some tracings of Rift activity for us. Ianto has booked you into Cardiff's finest should you get a chance to sleep."
"Great."
The trio arrived laden with shopping bags taking up most of Gwen's long entrance hall.
"Jack you can't just leave that there, you're blocking the road again!" Gwen exclaimed after noticing the SUV abandoned in the street outside.
"We're not stopping." He yelled from the spare room. "Martha help Ianto and Mickey with the last of these bags out the SUV."
"More bags?" Martha asked.
"Don't ask." Said Ianto as he made his way out of the spare room.
"Right." Said Martha as she and Mickey exchanged looks and followed Ianto back out to the SUV.
"So that was Mickey then." Said Gwen peering down the path to the street.
"That was Mickey," said Jack. "The bed doesn't arrive until tomorrow morning, but once its gone I promise we'll be out of your hair."
"No worries," said Gwen, "It's been fun having you around, Rhys has enjoyed it too." She added a nod to the final comment, it did nothing to convince Jack that Rhys had found their guests anything other than somewhat of a disruption to his life.
"Get what you need from here, and lets go, they've got the last of the bags."
"Right ho." Gwen disappeared towards her bedroom. Then there was a shout "If you can collect Carys from her bouncer I'll just pick up my handbag and we're all set."
Ianto, Martha and Mickey dumped the last of the bags into the spare bedroom, the sight of carpet had become some what of a rare event. Carefully they picked their way out into the hall, apparently one of the bags contain crockery and Ianto didn't want that broken. Out in the hall Jack was standing with Carys in his arms, and Gwen was just appearing behind him with her handbag.
"Right team lets go!" Jack annouced and set off towards the door, Carys in arms, coat flapping behind him.
A neatly arranged pile of boxes greeted them on their return to the hub. Otherwise as far as Mickey could see this was nothing other than a warehouse, not at all spectacular place he had imagined when Martha and Jack had talked about the hub a while back.
"First things first." Jack said as the group just stood inside the door way.
"Get these boxes unpacked, preferably the workstations first, I want Mickey to be able to get his hands on the rift data sooner rather than later. Once you've got one workstation in place I want Mickey to be left in piece to exam it. Gwen and Ianto you two get unpacking the rest, I need the stuff that came through the rift catalogued and I want it cross checked with the archives, you'll need another computer for that. I want to know anything about them that might link them to each other, or you," he sort a look at Ianto, not the sort of I love you look he might have hoped for, more a sort of what the hell are you kinda look. "size, arrival at torchwood, use that day, use every day, whatever we need to know."
"Might just be co-incidence Jack?" Gwen offered.
"If its co-incidence then we need to rule everything else out. Co-incidence is what people say when they can't be bothered to work out what actually happened. Torchwood is hear to find out why the unexplained happened."
"And to cover it up" Ianto muttered.
"Anyone got any questions?" Jack surveyed his group. Gwen with Carys smiling expectantly at him, Mickey in his black coat still taking in the empty expanse, Ianto stood with his hands in his pockets alternating his gaze between the boxes and his feet, and then Martha, the voice of a nightingale, beaming back at him shivering slightly in the draft.
"Ah, Martha!" He said. "You would be best to make a list of what you want in the medical area, and then start getting that in place."
"Right you are Jack," she took herself and her bag over to a corner of the hub, "you know I'm not staying, even if you build me my own medical suite."
"I know," said Jack, "but there's always time to change your mind and I wouldn't want you disappointed if you did." He grinned. Martha rolled her eyes and continued to unpack her own laptop.
An hour later Martha was typing away on the laptop, while Jack and Gwen unpacked boxes, Ianto had one of the laptops balanced on an empty cardboard box and was cross checking the archives with every item. They'd set Mickey up with the only desktop computer in the place complete with Torchwood server connection and full database access. Jack was grateful that some of the stuff the rift had thrown out or Gwen had salvaged were at least some of the fundamental alien tech that they would never have been able to replace otherwise.
"Jack?" Mickey called from behind the screen. "I think I've got something."
Jack lept out of the middle of a pile of boxes and jogged over to stand behind Mickey. Ianto and Gwen stopped what they were doing and followed him over.
"You see this big negative snowball of rift activity at the time of the bombing?" Mickey said pointing at it on the screen. "And you see this series of posistive spikes you've seen the last couple of days?" he continued.
Jack nodded. "Yep we'd spotted them."
Was that sarcasm Mickey detected in the Captains voice? "Well, watch this." Mickey brought up another couple of boxes side by side on the screen. "This one is that snow ball we saw earlier," Mickey explained, to be fair even a child could probably have drawn that conclusion. "If we greatly stretch the timeline," he dragged the end of the snowball towards the edge of the screen, it retained its amplitude but the gap between the time intervals changed so that rather than looking at seconds space out by a mm or so, they were now looking at mmsecs spaced out by about 20 cm! "if we look closely you can see that the snowball is actually a series of individual spikes happening in very quick succession."
"Agreed" said Jack, "so what does that have to do with now, we know what happened then, I exploded and we became Britain's most wanted."
"Yes. But if we do something similar with the activity of the last couple of days." Mickey returned to the second box, which showed a trace of activity in the last 72hrs. This time he altered the time axis so that the last 3 days fitted into just 2cm of screen. "See the similarity?" He said excitement in his voice and his eyes.
"Its backwards" said Ianto, running a hand through his hair.
"Exactly" said Mickey extending his arms a little in celebration. "and even better than that the spacing between spikes appears to be proportional, so at a rough guess I'd say we're not due another present until midnight tonight, and then it will probably look that" he pointed at a spike from the explosion snowball.
"Nice work Mickey" Jack patted him on the shoulder. "Martha?" he yelled.
"Yes Jack?" she looked up from her corner.
"We've got a reprieve."
"Great" she smiled "I'm nearly done with this list."
"Ok," Jack turned back to the others. "It's just gone 6, I think we all deserve some food and Mickey ought to get checked into his hotel. Gwen I need you to phone Andy and get him to fence off the forest area, tell him we'll keep an eye on it then get yourself home to your family."
"But Jack" Gwen protested
"Gwen, go home, see your husband, have an evening with your daughter, get some rest and I'll pick you at 11pm. I don't want to hear from you before then."
"Fine" She said and gathered up Carys and her handbag, "call me if anything happens."