Tosh had stayed in the Hub, start the clean up early, couldn't run in heels anyway she told herself. Really she was engrossed in her new programme and no one had asked her, so she sat listening over the loud speakers until she heard the screams and a gunshot. Quickly she ran to the CCTV footage but they were under the bridge and some yob had spray painted the camera last night so all she could see was blackness. She stabbed at the keyboard to get a view from elsewhere until suddenly Owens voice came into the hub asking for an ambulance. Immediately she rang through to the control room and was about to speak when Jack countermanded the last order and she had to stutter an apology to the confused controller.
What was going on up there? Toshiko loved order, numbers that did what you expected and most of the time so did Torchwood. You might not know exactly when the Rift would start throwing things at you but the computer could tell you when it was and where but add people who didn't know the system, like this "civilian" and everything when to hell in a handcart, oh god she was starting to sound like Owen too.
But not at the moment, Owen was shouting to clear the treatment room and the elevator was starting to function, she looked up to see Ianto carrying a body which she thought for a split second was Gwen but the hair wasn't right, thank God. Tosh clattered down a level to open up the small but well equipped medical room and could hear Owen not far behind her.
"You know what to do?" said Owen pulling a stainless steel trolley towards him and grabbing a tray covered in sterilised cloth and handfuls of medical equipment, throwing them on in his own order.
"What happened?" Asked Tosh flicking switches on the electrical medical equipment, the weekly training sessions that Jack made them all give each other were about to pay off.
"God knows, ask God, or Jack, same difference" he said quickly washing his hands and drying them as Ianto crashed through the door, Jack close behind.
Jack surveyed the scene, as Ianto laid the woman on the table, Tosh spun into action with the leads for the ECG and Owen started to lay bear the skin scorched outside. There was something missing though, Gwen, she barrelled through the door carrying the bag and stopped short when she saw the hive of activity before her.
"I'll do this out here" she said pointing at the bag and backed out swiftly. Dead bodies she could cope with, holding hands with the dieing but needles always turned her green. Jack followed her out,
"Find out who she is, why she was there, how she knew."
"And I'll mop the floor while I'm at it." Gwen always got sarky when she was stressed. She tipped the bag out on the table and started sorting it out with an investigators eye, looking for the purse that all women carried their life in, finding car keys, looking for missing things, no house keys, nothing really personal.
Back in the medical room it could have been any A&E on a Saturday night, but the staff were a little over dressed, dapper suits sprayed with bright red blood and sexy spike heels kicking the plastic of the sterile packets skittering across the room were not NHS style.
"Owen I have a problem" said Tosh stabbing at another monitor.
Owen looked up from where he was trying to find a vein in her hand.
"Slightly busy here" He said wiggling the hand to get a better position in the light
"Owen I don't think I am doing this right, those numbers look to low" she said pointing to the blood pressure monitor.
"Nope, the amount of the red stuff on the floor this is going to be touch and go." He looked pointedly at Jack who for once had the grace to look slightly sheepish. Owen grunted as he finally managed to get the needle in her hand, I am good, he thought and if he could just save one person from the darkness it would all be worth it.
"Ianto, O neg"
Owen moved round to the other side of the bed and looked at the exposed shoulder, which didn't look as bad as he thought after Ianto had cleaned it up. The shuddering breathing reminded him of the collapsed lung and he turned to Tosh for the chest tube kit, Tosh had been appalled at the lack of order in here and had rearranged everything into neat drawers and trays, Owen had then rearranged them back into some sort of medical order but he had to admit it had looked and functioned better.
Jack looked over the ordered scene; he was surplus to requirements – the goal of a good leader. He turned to go back up into the hub removing his coat and rubbing his shoulder, though he would never admit it he was feeling distinctly distressed by events tonight. Gwen was still hunting through the bag for anything about this woman that would help them. Finally, after what seemed like an hour to Gwen but was only a few minutes, she found another zipped pocket and a small black purse fell out. It wasn't the gold mine she wanted though, the zipped section contained a few coins and a fiver but they way she was dressed and the contents of her handbag, the expensive lipstick, suggested she should be worth more than this. The cardholder on the purse was even emptier, but it was worn where cards had been, but were no longer there. Gwen growled with frustration as she took out the only two things in there, a bill and a small dog-eared piece of card.
She opened out the paper, the carbon copy of a car rental agreement so scuffed and badly written that the name was barely legible. The form however had a pre-printed agreement number on it and Gwen hoped that Tosh would have a nice little programme to find out the details of the rent-a-car computer, failing that it would have to be a good old fashioned phone call. She turned her attention to the card and turned it over to the writing side, she quickly scanned it,
"Oh Shit", she said running to the door and looking across to where Ianto was stood.
"Owen you better see this"
"Busy" he said as the hiss of air told him that he was again successful in his efforts to save this unknown woman.
"No Owen she's got a card, it says she doesn't want any sort of blood transfusions."
"Too late" said Ianto with his typical level of understatement.
"What does she have a death wish?" he looked up at the wound on her shoulder, he could swear it was getting smaller, certainly wasn't bleeding as much and her lips had lost the deathly blue colour of a few minutes ago. He cast a professional eye over the lines and numbers showing her vital signs, they were improving too, he was going to pull this one off.
"Owen" Gwens voice was insistent, "It says this woman, a Sarah Jones, doesn't want any blood products and that looks like blood." She said stabbing the air at the bag of blood quickly draining into her arm.
"Just one, she'll never know, medical imperative in an emergency, probably save her life." That scar was starting to heal before his eyes, he turned round to pick up his hand held scanner, life was so different here from the NHS hours waiting for CT scans, portable x-rays broken and never mended; pity the technology couldn't be replicated on earth.
Gwens eyes bored into his back.
"It's nearly gone now, I won't replace it." The scanner showed that there was a hole in the scapular, but it was smaller than it should have been.
"Might not need to." He said scratching his head.
Gwen turned and went back to the Hub, give this Sarah a history, do some real investigation. She started stabbing numbers in her keyboard, she had really learnt the power of a computer from Tosh. Pity other people hadn't, like the person who had input this form at the depot at the airport, half the information was missing but it was a start, perhaps she could work it out from airline records. She sent the info she had to print and went to the printer.
The printer was working overtime spitting out pictures, she went back to her computer to cancel the proceeding job but the queue was massive. She tried the age-old computer fix of hitting the mouse against the desk and then rocking back in the chair.
"Problem?"
"How on earth do you do that?" said Gwen startled
"Years of practice, what have you found."
"Precisely, very little and some twonk has locked up the printer with their holiday photos." She picked a handful up and threw them onto the desk. Jack flicked idly at the printouts and something caught his eye, he looked deeper and called Gwen over. He started picking the papers and looking deeply at them, her interest piqued Gwen looked over his shoulder and immediately understood why he was looking. Picking up the photos he was throwing on the desk she started to lay them out on the desk, there were images from all different ages, different places but one unifying factor. Her face.
"Where have all these come from, it's like some fun photo parlour at Barry." Said Gwen "Could it be a family album through the last 100 years?"
Sorting further through she came across a sheaf of files, passport applications, drivers licences, military records, all with photographs clipped on the corner. All different dates through the last century but the amazing thing was the face in the photo always seemed the same. Jack was holding one particular photograph, a highly starched group of nurses in sparkling white aprons and white linen squares on their heads. Slightly incongruously the backdrop was a broken wall.
At that moment Tosh came back into the Hub,
"Owen says that our patient is stable, but don't ask me what that means." Still in the dark about what had happened above them she shuffled back to her workstation, planning to carry on with the clean up. She sat down quietly and moved the mouse to dissolve the screensaver and read two messages that came up over many flickering images.
"Are these your handy work?" Gwen asked handing Toshiko more of the pictures and a few of the information pages.
"Oh I forgot I started this, yes it's my new programme I thought I would test it out when Ianto saw our patient sitting in the rain, before all this happened of course. I tried it on Owen and you don't want to see the results." She said pushing her glasses back on her nose.
"But what does it all mean?" asked Gwen patiently, two years and she had about trained Tosh not to bamboozle her with techno babble to the point where she was supposed to be a mind reader.
"Oh yes." Said Tosh giving Gwen the 'mouse' look that she took on when she was embarrassed. "I've been working on this new algorithm for a few weeks now, it takes the facial characteristics of a subject, in this case I took the image off the feed of the CCTV, it matches 17 points on the face –I'm hoping to extend this to the whole body if it works, but then of course you would have to take into account the possibility of injury or disfigurement, but bone structure often stays the same" Jack was loosing patience he started twisting his finger in the air to wind it up.
"Oh um yes, well the computer then scans through all the government departments which I can hack into, which of course is most of them and passes back the matches." She finally finished and smiled as if this was all the explanation anyone ever needed.
"And this?" Jack had the group shot of the nurses gripped tightly in his hand, the unsmiling face at the end of the back row highlighted by the computer
"Well it's still at the testing stage, I didn't know what sort of returns I was going to get so I set it to search all the images on the internet."
"Well look these can't all be the same woman the pictures must span 150 years, look there's even a painting in here that must be eons old." Said Gwen trying to be the voice of reason again.
Tosh turned to the computer again, when she was stuck for an explanation return to what she knew best.
"Jack you should take a look at this."
"Uh" replied Jack, looking through grainy images from the beginning of photography.
"And this one Jack." Said Gwen formally handing him a photograph.
He took the paper and gasped, Gwen had never seen Captain Jack Harkness poleaxed but she had found a chink in his armour. The team knew Jack was different, they knew he had been around for a long time, had many tales he had never told but somehow none of that mattered, perhaps it was better not to know. Gwen could have sworn she saw tears in his eyes as he looked down at the image, a nurse attending a badly injured soldier in a field hospital, the solider was Jack, the nurse unmistakably her.
"You've met before then?" asked Gwen rubbing his shoulder unconsciously.
"She was special, she would have saved my life then if I'd needed it, I felt such a fraud at the time but I strung it out as long as I could."
"What happened?"
"I got a few days R&R in a small French town about 20 miles behind the front lines and she happened to come back to the field hospital based there. We had coffee, well burnt toast in water." He smiled his normal wry smile "We talked for hours, it wasn't particularly the done thing even though we were never alone. One lousy night was all we had and yet I have never felt so connected to another person." Jack sat down, Gwen had never seen him like this, she hunkered down in front of him like you would for a child who had lost his mummy. She stroked his knee, while Tosh shuffled awkwardly behind her.
"We arranged to meet the next night, but there was an explosion that destroyed the hospital, an ammunition truck hit an old shell and boom." He left the image to settle. "All the able bodied men ran to help but they thought I was injured so they stopped me, didn't need more casualties. From the 32 nurses asleep in the accommodation block they said none survived." He ran his fingers through his hair "I didn't have a picture but I remember everything about her, 48 hours and she changed my life." The air seemed to bristle with tension.
"But Jack it can't be her, she'd be well over a hundred by now and she looks about 30." Said Gwen consolingly
"I'm sorry to butt in," squeaked Tosh before clearing her throat, "But I think Jack needs to take a look at this."
"I think he has enough on his plate at the moment Tosh" snapped Gwen feeling positively matronly.
"No this has a bearing on this woman" she said more forcefully. They both turned to look at the screen she had turned towards them.
"My programme goes through government files for images, which of course includes Torchwood files, though I've never found anything in them before." She smiled in her normal nervous way. "But there's a problem, I don't have security clearance for these files."
Jack looked up, his momentary melancholy gone,
"Which files?"
Tosh stabbed away at the keyboard to find the required information and read the numbers back to Jack, he made her repeat them.
"J-1-0293 and J-1-1948, I think they're both from Torchwood One." She said her voice falling away, they tended not to talk about London after what happened.
Jack sprang into life, his face set with a grim look that Gwen knew too well and didn't like,'
"Jack" she said with a note of caution in her voice "Tell me what those numbers mean."
"You don't want to know." He said springing off the raised computer area and making towards the medical room, Gwen followed shouting his name.