STORIES
SEVENTEEN
One of the stars was moving. Although it was morning, it was yet a dawning daylight and the brighter stars and planets still shone. The star was moving so discreetly at first John had to calm his breathing, find his balance and observe it closely to be sure. It was no illusion. The ancient, animal part of his brain, so attuned to subtle, suspicious movement, had picked it out among the multitude. It was in the western sky, not far above the horizon, hence diluted, at first, in the haze. But it rose slowly and steadily into the sky. As it did, it changed its color and its size. Early on it was a pinprick of white light, just like any other star, but as it rose toward the zenith it reddened, became more meteor-like. Then it broadened to a dot of orange, then flared yellow and threw out a comet-tail.
Until that point John's eyes had been playing a number of tricks on him and despite his considerable savvy he'd misconceived its distance, its altitude and its velocity. But the comet-tail shocked him into the right view: the thing was not high above in space but descending into the atmosphere, dumping its energy into shredded, glowing air. Its apparent motion slowed as it neared the zenith and it became clear it would lose all forward speed before it passed overhead. The meteor's bearing had never changed: it was headed right toward them, and the brighter and fatter it grew the more it seemed to hang motionless in the sky, like a ball thrown straight at your head.
For the better part of a minute it was a little sun, fixed in the sky and stabbing rays of incandescent air in all directions. Then it shrank and faded back through orange into a dull red, and became difficult to make out.
John realized he had tilted his head up as far back as it would go, and was gazing vertically upward. At the risk of losing his track on it, he dropped his chin and looked at Ecba. The two men's eyes met and held, but nothing was said. The time for words was over.
John looked back up just in time to see a white streak slice heaven in half, moving from above his head east, and ending, with no loss of speed, behind him in the caldera of the volcano that he and Ecba had hiked the previous day.
In the moment before the sound reached them, John remarked, "Clever."
After the sound reached them John was sorry he'd been born with ears.
The Aedui had essentially thrown a rock at them. A big, dense rock. It penetrated a quarter of a mile into the solid cap of hardened lava on top of the volcano before it vaporized of its own kinetic energy, creating a huge burst of pressure that is known on the marbled, watery third planet out from Mother Sol as an earthquake. The pressure vented up along the wound that the rock had left, through the cap, widening the hole as it roared out, founding systems of cracks that were immediately blown open by the underlying lava. The lava was wet, saturated with steam; the steam exploded into gas as the stress was relieved, just as bubbles appear in a bottle of soda when the cap is removed. The lava, inflated by the steam, blew itself up into ash, most of which went straight skyward. But some of it, a relatively small percentage but still an enormous quantity, came down the side of the mountain in the form of a cloud, rolling down the slope like an avalanche, and easy to distinguish because it was glowing bright orange.
It didn't take long for the two men to get over the shock of what they'd seen and they staggered to their feet after the leg-breaking jolt of the explosion, only to realize the glowing cloud was coming straight for them and that the pyroclastic flow would simultaneously crush them like a sledgehammer, and roast them like a flamethrower. There was, just as Wil had warned, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. The roiling thunderhead was heavy as stone, fluid as water, hot as a forge. The buildings at the foot of the volcano imploded before that glowing cloud even reached them, for the avalanche was pushing an invisible pressure wave before it. John closed his eyes and held his breath but instead of feeling the crushing heat, he felt the all-too familiar tingle of a transporter.
The next thing he knew, John Hart woke standing up, spread-eagle, uncomfortably chained to a wall in a dark room. There was a distinct sensation that time had passed, but as to how much time, he'd no idea.
He shrugged inwardly. "Hello?" he said loudly, "anybody home?" There was no answer. He did a quick inventory. Two hands (chained at the wrists); two legs (chained at the ankles); voice unimpaired; ears evidently working again since he had been able to hear the sound of his own voice; eyes apparently functional even though the room was almost totally lightless; all the important bits of his body still seemingly intact underneath his clothing. He sighed. It was unlikely that the dashing Captain Jack Harkness would come thundering to his rescue this time around as he'd done repeatedly and so heroically in the past.
John found himself hoping that Wil was all right… that his nightmare about the gravestone hadn't been prescient. The shriveled corpses of some of his darkest memories, his grimmest and most despairing stories, reanimated; he performed a quick mental sidestep to avoid any further psychological necromancy.
Speaking of Jack, and just like the Captain, John viewed imprisonment, interrogation and torture as a challenge. That positive attitude was something they'd worked diligently on and perfected back when they were Time Agents. The end result had been proven worth the effort many, many times over. But beyond that, in John's case the boundaries between torture and titillation, between pleasure and pain were particularly – ah, how to put it? – amorphous. As Jack Harkness might tell you if you bothered to ask, while John wasn't a masochist, he did have a curious if not intriguing response to discomfort. Well, let's be brutally honest here: discomfort had a tendency to arouse him. The greater the discomfort, the more intense the arousal. That response, once they figured it out, often drove his captors crazy. For John Hart, it could be a glorious and thrilling game. And a dangerous one, too, to be sure; he had the scars to prove it. Those same captors could get quite ticked off when they finally realized they'd been exciting John, not tormenting him.
Same old, same old, John thought, bring it on! Although granted it had been a good long while since he'd been raked over the coals, stretched to the breaking point, or whatever these miscreants were going to do to him. Regardless, he was anxious for the games to begin and opted to ignore the little, tinny version of Jack's voice in his head warning, "Be careful what you wish for, you may receive it."
No matter… Jack had always had trouble appreciating the finer things in life.