Notes: Some recreational maths by Gwen (Numbers) O'Toole leads to an unexpected discovery.

Chapter 2

Rose was in the kitchenette of the Standby Room of the Special Operations Unit, making a pot of tea. John was putting a packet of chocolate digestives into the biscuit tin.

It had been a quiet morning so far, with only Jack and Gwen responding to a UFO sighting in the New Forest at the start of the shift. Rose had been helping her father with office work, responding to emails and answering enquiries. John had been in his lab, continuing the tidy up after he had used it to isolate himself from the time line, while he grew their new TARDIS.

The rest of the Watch were watching news feeds, or keeping up with the Torchwood status board. John thought Rose a message that he was ready for a brew, and they met in the Standby Room.

"Is there one in the pot for us?" Jack asked as he and Gwen walked into the room.

"Oh hi guys, how was the unidentified flying object?" Rose asked as she poured two extra mugs of tea.

"Identified," Jack said with a grin. "It was a group of Vinvocci astronomers and astrophysicist. They had registered a request to fly through our system to study the planets."

Gwen took up the explanation from there. "Apparently they had also requested an atmospheric entry for Earth, but that request got lost in the bureaucracy and we never received it."

"One of the advantages of being Deputy Director is that I could authorise the flight and let them get on their way. A bit of galactic détente if you like," Jack said as he took the offered mug of tea.

John picked up one of the mugs and gave Rose a peck on the cheek, leaving a chocolaty lip mark from a half eaten biscuit. "Oops, sorry Love."

Rose rolled her eyes and wiped her cheek as she picked up her mug and headed for the couch.

"John, have you got a minute?" Gwen asked. "I've been doing some recreational maths and must have made a mistake, but I can't spot where."

"Really? That's not like you. Let's sit at the table and have a look."

They sat down and Gwen took out her tablet PC. "A few days ago, I sat in the restaurant with Roger from Earth Sciences, y'know, the seismologist? We were talking about the recent spate of earthquakes and eruptions and statistical probabilities."

She opened an email that Roger had sent her which had a spreadsheet attachment. "He sent me all this data of historical tectonic activity."

John put his 'brainy' specs on and took a sip of his tea while he looked over the numbers on the screen.

"Mmmmm," he said.

"What?" Gwen asked as she looked closer at the screen.

"A lovely cup of tea," he said with a grin. "So where's your maths then?"

Gwen displayed her statistical analysis on the tablet. "I applied the Weibull - Log - Weibull transition of interoccurrence time of earthquakes, which on its own was unremarkable." John could see the complex calculations on the screen.

"I then looked at the volcanic eruptions using the maximum likelihood method. I then used the Anderson-Darling, Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Chi-squared analysis to test the fit of the distribution, again with unremarkable results." Again, there were complex equations to demonstrate her point.

"Now, here's where it gets remarkable. I combined the two data sets with a Weibull probability to represent a generalisation of the exponential distribution, but I must have made an error because these results would suggest some outside influence on tectonic stresses," Gwen said.

John pushed the specs onto the bridge of his nose and leaned forward to scrutinise the calculations. His Gallifreyan brain quickly crunched the numbers and came to a disturbing conclusion.

"You haven't made an error Gwen," John said quietly. "Something is causing an increase in tectonic stresses within the planet." He took off his specs and put them in his pocket and then took out his smart phone, selecting a custom made application.

Rose was sitting with Jack on the couch, chatting while they drank their tea and watched the news. She spun around to look at John as she heard the TARDIS materialising on the Standby Room landing pad. He had used the emergency call function on his phone to remotely operate the TARDIS.

"John, what's wrong?" Rose asked. She'd picked up his concern through their telepathic link.

"I'm not sure, but we need to go into orbit and scan the planet."

They finished their tea and moved towards the TARDIS.

"I hope we're invited," Jack said as he and Gwen moved towards them.

"Of course," John said. "Wouldn't dream of leaving you behind."

A few minutes later, they were in a geostationary orbit above the equator on the Greenwich meridian. John was running a multitude of scans of the planet and the surrounding space, until a half hour later and one orbit of the Earth, he had acquired sufficient data for them to return to Torchwood.

The rest of the Watch glanced over at them to see if anything interesting had occurred as they stepped out of the TARDIS. The coming and going of the TARDIS was commonplace now and didn't cause a stir like it used to.

The TARDIS computer had performed the statistical analysis of the scan data and uploaded it to John and Gwen's tablets, as well as the Torchwood mainframe. They sat at the table and looked over the data, while Rose and Jack waited for them to explain.

"Do you see it Gwen?" John asked her.

"Well, yes. But I don't know what I'm looking at. What does it mean?"

"It means someone is messing around with transdimensional physics," he replied.

"Hang on," Rose said. "Isn't that what Malcolm Taylor wrote a paper on with Roger Stansfield when they built the dimension jump devices?"

John gave her a proud smile. "That's right, it is. We need to call a meeting with Pete and the section heads, this is global."

The large table in the executive meeting room was full of people from a diverse variety of departments. Members of Blue Watch sat on chairs against the wall so that they could hear the proceedings.

John was standing with the media remote in his hand.

"Gwen O'Toole was looking at the data on tectonic activity and running some analysis on it when she spotted an anomaly," John started.

"The numbers themselves are difficult to appreciate, but if you put them into a graph…." He displayed the graph on the screen. "You can see that there is a significant increase that is above the random norm."

"I hadn't spotted that," Roger Ellis the seismologist said. "What could cause such a thing?"

"To be fair, you wouldn't spot it unless you were looking for it and you were a maths genius. Fortunately, Torchwood has got two." He waggled his eyebrows at Gwen. "As for what's causing it, I'm not certain, but I do know where the cause originates, and I have got an idea."

He clicked the remote to display the TARDIS data. "We went into orbit and scanned the planet. Magnetometer, gravitometer, radar, all the usual and unusual tests. We found that the Earth is 'ringing' like a bell."

He clicked again and a graphic cross section of the Earth from above was displayed.

"The mantle of the Earth is being gently vibrated from three points on the surface. [Click] Here in Egypt, [click] Mexico, [click] and Cambodia."

Three lots of curved lines, looking like loudspeaker symbols were shown radiating through the globe at 90 degrees to each other were displayed.

"What's causing these vibrations?" Jack asked.

John clicked the remote. Three pyramids appeared on the screen, the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan, 30 miles northeast of Mexico City. Prang Pyramid in Koh Ker, Cambodia. And the Great Pyramid of Cheops at Giza in Egypt.

"These three pyramids are just like loudspeaker cones standing on the ground. Something inside them is causing an oscillation that is being magnified by the shape of the structure."

"Who in God's name would want to shake our planet to pieces?" Pete asked.

"I don't think that's the intention," John answered, as he clicked the remote again. A view of Earth sitting on a 'rubber' graph paper was on the screen, the kind of view that showed how gravity distorted space. Ripples could be seen spreading outwards like a pebble being dropped in a pond.

"The three oscillations are at three different frequencies. This creates harmonic resonances that 'wobble' gravity, which in effect 'wobbles' reality."

He looked at Rose as he explained the next bit. "Do you remember when the void ship smashed its way into the other universe? It fractured the walls of reality. And then, when your team here developed the dimension cannon, they 'melted' a hole through the walls. Well, these oscillations are turning the walls into jelly."

Rose had a sudden and emotionally troubling thought. "John, does this mean we could travel back to the other universe?"

John just stood silently looking at her, his expression was unreadable. "Er, yes, yes we could…. Would you want to?"

She thought about it out loud so that John could pick it up. The 'other' Doctor was there. Not the 'real' Doctor, because they were both very real, but the 'other' Doctor, his brother. All her old friends were there, her old life, and that was the point, it was old.

Here she had him, her husband, her son, her Mum, her new Dad, her new friends, and they had their new TARDIS. It was just a bit of nostalgia, nothing more.

"No," she said with a smile. "My life is here with you. But if someone is wobbling the walls of our reality, like Dad said, who's doin' it and why?"

"Now THAT is a very good question," John said. "Someone living today knows how to operate equipment that was built thousands of years ago. And then you have to ask yourself, 'is that someone leaving, or inviting someone else in'?"

"Well whatever the answer is, we have to 'switch off' the pyramids before the planet falls apart," Pete said.

"I agree," John said. "We'll go to Koh Ker in Cambodia. We explored the pyramid when we were on honeymoon."

"And I've visited Giza before," Jack said.

"I went on holiday to Mexico a few years ago," Julia said before anyone else in the Watch could claim a place on the mission.

Pete had a wry smile on his face. "Okay, I think we can wind up this meeting. Go home teams and pack while I get logistics to book your flights. We have no jurisdiction in these countries so you'll have to be tourists."

"Rose and myself will take the TARDIS," John started.

"Hold on John," Pete said. "Reality check. Don't you think a celebrity couple just appearing in the middle of Cambodia is going to look a bit suspicious?"

"Surely you're not suggesting we sit on an airship for hours on end while the world rattles itself to pieces below are you?"

"All I'm saying is that a covert operation with you two is going to be hard enough as it is, without you drawing attention to yourselves by popping up out of thin air."

Rose had an idea. "Here's a compromise, why don't we land the TARDIS at an airport. You could log a flight plan that would match our time of arrival, and we could pass through arrivals and get our passports stamped."

Pete had an enormous grin on his face. "That's my girl. I can see who's the brains in your marriage."

"Oi!" John said in mock offence. He had to admit, when it came to everyday human affairs, Rose had him beat hands down.

"Pete, we need to go to S.O.U (Special Operations Unit) and start planning a mission profile," Andy McNab, the S.O.U leader said.

"Okay. I'll call the Foreign Office and see if I can get an embassy official to meet each of the teams at the airports."

In the Special Operations briefing room, John was giving his assessment of the situation from the data he'd gathered from the TARDIS.

"As far as I can tell, there will be an oscillator somewhere near the centre of each pyramid. We need to find them and shut them down."

"What will the oscillators look like?" Jack asked.

"Well, they can be purely electronic, or like a digital watch, they can use a crystal."

"Crystal?" Chrissie Anderson said. She was the Technical Operations lead, responsible for all the high tech equipment used at Torchwood. "Crystals, crystals…. There was something on the news months ago. What was it?"

She logged onto her computer and used a search engine to look for the words 'crystal' and 'pyramid'.

"Oh wow! I think I've hit the jackpot!"

The group moved around her workstation. "In January, the American Museum of Natural History in New York was broken into and the Teotihuacan Sapphire, a Mesoamerican pyramidal gemstone of exceptional quality was stolen," she read.

"In February, the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris had the Cheops Ruby stolen. This ruby is the exact same size and shape as the sapphire."

"Let me guess," John said. "There's a third gemstone?"

"The Prang Emerald," Chrissie said. "We don't know if it's been stolen because it disappeared in 2001 when an anonymous collector bought it from Christie's."

"Mmmm. If a collector had it stolen, I'm betting he'd have reported it to the police," john mused. "I wonder if the collector has anything to do with rattling the planet? Chrissie, while we're exploring the pyramids, can you try and track down this mysterious buyer?"

"That's a big ask, but you know me, I love a challenge."

"Right then people," Andy said. "Your mission. Gain access to the pyramids. Locate the oscillators, which are probably the stolen gemstones, and stop them from oscillating. We'll send your gear in a diplomatic briefcase that you can clear through customs. The embassy staff can open it for you when you leave the airport."

"If the oscillators are these crystals," John mentioned. "They will probably retain some charge. Make sure you pack an inductance coil in the briefcase to syphon off any residual energy."

Andy nodded in acknowledgement and set off with Chrissie to assemble their kit.

Pete came into the room and announced that embassy officials would meet each team at the airport. John and Rose went over to him.

"Dad, would you and Mum mind havin' EJ while we're away?" Rose asked.

"Of course sweetheart, you don't have to ask, we'd love to have him."

Rose hugged him around the neck and he patted her back.

"We've got everything we need in the TARDIS, so we'll stop off at yours on the way so we can spend some time with him before we go. Andy and Chrissie are just puttin' our equipment together, they shouldn't be too long."

"Tell you what, I'll knock off early and come with you. Director privilege," he grinned.

John and Rose flew the TARDIS together, while Pete looked on in admiration. They were a proper team, in every sense of the word, and they moved around the console in a coordinated dance. When the time rotor stopped, they walked down the ramp and opened the door into the living room of Tyler mansion.

In front of them, Jackie was smiling with EJ in her arms, whose face lit up when he saw his parents.

"Where's my best little man then?" Rose cooed as she held out her arms for him. EJ reached out excitedly and she took him and enveloped him in a gentle hug. As Jackie handed him over, Rose noted that her expression was a bit 'off'.

"Are you alright Mum?" Rose asked her.

Jackie gave her a look that said 'no'. "Yeah, I'm fine."

Rose knew that 'I'm fine', meant that she wasn't.

"John, I'm just going to have a walk around the garden with Mum. Okay?"

"Sure sweetheart. See you in a bit." He'd picked up her concern for Jackie and knew she needed to have a chat.

"So what is it Mum? You've had somethin' on your mind for a while now," Rose asked as they walked over the manicured lawn.

Jackie didn't reply straight away, she was mulling it over before she spoke. She wanted it to come out right.

"It's you and that TARDIS of yours," she started. "You've been goin' away a lot lately, and seem to be goin' away more an' more."

Rose was a bit surprised by this. "Well yeah, it's a great way to travel. How is that a problem?"

"You don't know what it's like Rose, stayin' behind an' wonderin' if you're ever comin' back."

Ah, now it made sense to Rose. She remembered her Mum talking to her before she got stranded in this universe.

'You'll keep on changing', she had said. 'And in forty years time, fifty, there'll be this woman, this strange woman, walking through the marketplace on some planet a billion miles from Earth. But she's not Rose Tyler. Not anymore. She's not even human.'

Rose reached out and hugged her Mum. "Oh Mum, I'm sorry. I never realised you felt like that." She released the hug and held her shoulders at arms length so that she could look at her face.

"We have a home now Mum, a home that we love. I have a son that needs that home and stability. And John 'does' domestic. I know that's unbelievable, but he does. I think it's the 'Donna' in him," she said with a smile.

Jackie looked questioningly at her daughter. "Are ya sure Love? Because I know how powerful the attraction of that life was for yer. Yer jumped across a universe to get it back, remember?"

"And I got it back Mum! I have got the best of both worlds. I can have my cake and I can eat it. We will be travellin' in the TARDIS, we have a tropical paradise that we can go an' hide in when we need to get away from it all. But we will ALWAYS come back."

Jackie pulled Rose back into a hug. "That's all I needed to know Love. Thank you."

As they walked back through the French windows, John told Rose that the flight plan had been logged and that they would land at Siem Reap airport at 22:00, as Cambodia was seven hours ahead of Britain. They would stay at the Park Hyatt overnight, in keeping with their celebrity status.

John was hugging and tickling EJ, who was chuckling at his father. He gave him a gentle, loving kiss on his forehead before handing him over to Jackie.

"We'd better get going Love," John said to Rose.

"Yeah." She kissed EJ on his head. "Be a good boy for Grandma."

They walked over to the TARDIS. "We'll be right back," John said, and they stepped into the TARDIS and closed the door.