Chapter 7

Rattus Sapiens

Chrissie "Brains" Anderson knocked on the door of the glass fronted Supervisor's Office as a courtesy, before opening the door and stepping through.

'Hi Chrissie,' Rose said with a warm smile. 'How's things in Tech Support?'

'As busy as ever,' Chrissie replied.

'And how's yer new apprentice shapin' up?' Rose was referring to Haruto Suzuki, a tech wizard who had been recruited by Yvonne Hartman, to hack Torchwood's communications equipment and server, so she could exact revenge on Rose and her family.

'He's already shaped up,' Chrissie said with her impish smile. 'He's a real asset to the department. He's doing my head in though.'

'How come?' Rose asked, as there was a question about him being a security risk after his previous "employment".

'He keeps apologising for trying to hack Torchwood, and keeps thanking me for giving him this chance to redeem himself.'

Rose laughed. 'He'll settle down when he realises he's here because he deserves to be.'

'Yeah, I know. He's a really nice lad, and he's got a wicked sense of humour,' Chrissie told her. 'So, on the phone you said you wanted to know about Gwen's competency training. Is there a problem?'

'Not really a problem, no. More of a concern. Gwen's been a bit preoccupied lately, and I was worried it might be affectin' her performance,' Rose explained.

Chrissie referred to her tablet computer. 'Okay. So her skills with the scanners, surveillance equipment, comms, and body armour were all up to standard. Resus and first aid, ditto.' She swiped to another page. 'The PT instructor reports her physical fitness level is good . . . Oh, here we are. Master-at-Arms says her aim was off a little on the target range, and her reaction time in Hogan's Alley was down a few points. Not enough to flag it as a concern, but unusual for Gwen who is normally very competitive.'

'Somethin' to keep an eye on then,' Rose said.

Chrissie nodded in agreement. 'Yeah, that sounds about right.'

'Okay. Thanks Chrissie, and if we can keep this little talk to ourselves. We don't want to go stressin' her out by her thinkin' that we don't trust her,' added Rose.

'Yeah, no problem. I hope she'll be alright.'

'Me too,' Rose agreed.

The intercom on Rose's desk buzzed for her attention, and she pressed the button.

['Rose. I've got a call from a Doctor Emily Williams at Gene Tech Research. She wants to speak to someone about Doctor Smith.']

'Oh, what's he gone and done now?' Rose asked herself as she stood and headed for the Dispatch Office with Chrissie.

'She's on line three,' Craig told her as she put the headset on.

'Hello Doctor Williams. Rose Smith, Watch Supervisor. How can I help you,' she said pleasantly.

['We've had a visit from some of your people this afternoon, Doctor Smith, and two agents,'] Emily said.

'That's right,' Rose agreed. 'He's making some enquiries about an incident in the area . . . Is there a problem?'

['No, not a problem. He did insist that we count our rats in the animal laboratory, and I told him we didn't need to. It's just to let him know that our animal care team leader, Bethany has told me that all animals in the laboratory were present. Some of the rats were dead in their cages, but we get that occasionally. Usually it's fighting over food or females.']

'OK. Thank you for that, Doctor Williams. I'll contact him now and let him know, as it might be crucial to his investigation.'

['Thank you Ms Smith. Goodbye.']

'Thank you. Bye.'

['John?'] Rose thought in his head.

['Hi Love. What can I do for you?]

['I've just had a call from Doctor Williams . . . She wanted me to let ya know that the animal care technicians fed the rats this mornin' and they were all there. Some of them were dead, she said, but that wasn't uncommon. She sounded a bit "I told you so", does that make sense?']

['What!?'All the rats were accounted for?']

['That's what she said,'] Rose confirmed.

['Got to go, Love. See you later.'] Rose could feel the urgency in his head. He was back in her head a couple of seconds later. ['Rose, have you got the number she called you on? I need to call her back.']

Rose sat at a terminal and copy and pasted the number to his phone. ['Yeah. I'm sendin' it to yer phone now. Is everythin' alright?'] She could detect his raised anxiety.

['I think everyone in unit seven is in mortal danger.'] And then he was gone from her head. He was obviously focussed on something, and it didn't sound good.

John pulled down the materialise lever and the TARDIS landed in unit seven. 'Emily. Listen to me very carefully. The blue box appearing in your lab is my . . . transport pod. Get everyone to the doors and I'll take you to safety.'

['Bethany?'] Emily called out. ['What's all the commotion?']

The three of them ran down the ramp and out into the brightly lit lab. Everyone there was looking at a door which was ajar at the far end of the room. They could hear dogs barking, monkeys making alarm calls, and people screaming in terror.

'EVERYONE! TO ME NOW!' John shouted with a voice which resonated inside their heads. Everyone turned without questioning why, and moved quickly towards the TARDIS. All except Emily, who wanted to help her staff in the animal laboratory. 'You too, Emily. We'll take it from here.'

John turned to his backup. 'Julia, see them safely inside and then come and join us.'

Julia nodded. 'OK everyone, I want you all to step inside the box. Don't worry, you'll all fit in, and it's probably best if you close your eyes as you step in.'

John led Jake to the door at the back of the room, and peeked through the gap. What they saw shocked them. There were monkeys running to and fro in their cages, screeching alarm calls as they bared their teeth. Dogs in lower cages were barking, frothing at the mouth, with their tails between their legs. Some rabbits appeared to have died from fright, and mice appeared to be hiding in their bedding. On the tables, where people kicking at brown rats, which were jumping up up on to the tables and running up their bodies, trying to bite their necks and faces. On the floor where a few bodies, lying in pools of blood and covered in a writhing mass of small, furry brown bodies.

'STOP!' John shouted, the TARDIS translating his words. He had his hand held out with the palm towards the hoard. The rats stopped their feeding, and turned to look at him, a few of them sat on their haunches, sniffing the air.

'Now you've done it,' Jake said, not liking the attention they were now getting. Julia arrived and looked past Jake's shoulder, gasping in surprise and horror.

'I know you can understand me, and can't understand why,' he told them. 'You've had consciousness forced on you, without any chance of being able to make sense of it . . . and that's not fair, but I can help you.'

The rats looked at each other before one of them looked up at John. 'I am . . . We are . . .'

'Oh, here we go,' John said, crouching down. 'Take your time, it'll come.'

'I, I knew I was different from my mother,' one of them said.

'We do not want to be caged,' another said.

'They torture us!' one exclaimed.

John looked up at the technicians on the tables, who were hugging one another and trembling, as blood trickled down their white lab coats. 'And that stops, right here, right now,' He told the technicians and rats together

'Our mother is content to be kept in a cage and be fed. We want to be free to hunt,' the first one explained, who seemed to be the spokesperson for the pack. "Or is that spokesrat?" John thought to himself.

'We are hungry,' one announced.

'We are always hungry,' another said.

'Why are we always so hungry?' the "spokesrat" asked.

'I'm sorry,' John said, his voice tinged with sadness. 'Your small bodies have a high metabolism. I mean you burn a lot of energy, and now your brains are more active, they are demanding more and more energy.'

'He would make a meal,' a rat at the back suggested, and there were mutterings of agreement.

John stood quickly and took a step back. 'Now hold on. When I said I could help you, I didn't mean as a menu item. When the authorities find out about you, they'll see you as a threat and try to exterminate you.'

'Let them try,' the spokesrat said. 'Haven't they tried to exterminate our ancestors through the ages?'

'He's got a point Doc,' Jake noted, holding his stun gun ready to shoot.

John was about to answer, and then thought about it. He shrugged his shoulders, and then lowered Jakes gun. 'Fair point. But I can take you somewhere where you can be free to be yourselves, to live in peace.'

'That would be nice,' said a female rat. 'Rather than living like criminals, hiding in the shadows.'

'Exactly!' John said. 'I can find you a nice planet where you can live comfortably, although you will have to use those brains of yours to manage your resources.'

'What do you mean?' the spokesrat asked suspiciously.

'Well, your predecessors would have lots of babies in a short period of time, eat all the available food, and then starve.' John explained. 'You'll have to learn to control those urges. Do you think you can do that?'

Was that a rat smiling? 'We can but try.'

'Good man!' John said, and then thought about it. 'Good rat. Now, wait here while I get my ship ready, and please, don't eat any more of the staff . . .'

The spokesrat looked around the lab and up at the people on the tables. 'Oh, yes. Sorry about that,' he said guiltily.

'You can't be blamed for what you did to them, just as you can't be blamed for what was done to you,' John told them. He looked up at the technicians. 'You lot, get down carefully, no sudden moves, and follow Julia and Jake.' He turned to Julia and Jake. 'Get everyone out of the console room and into the kitchen. They could probably all do with a strong cup of tea anyway . . . Are you alright Julia?' She was looking rather pale and a little sweaty.

She nodded. 'Musophobia.'

'Ah, right. You'd best stay in the kitchen as well then,' John told her.

Jake frowned. 'Whataphobia?'

John nodded to the side. 'A fear of our little friends here.'

'Ah, right.' He helped Julia round up the technicians and herd them into the TARDIS.

'Why are you helping us?' one of the rats asked suspiciously. 'Most people hate us and want to kill us.'

'I'm not most people,' John told him. He crouched down and his eyes had a far away look in them. 'Actually, I'm not any people. I'm a Time Lord, Human hybrid, and I've had many lives. In another universe, I'm over nine hundred years old, and I've seen so many things . . . Too many things at times.' He turned his head and looked the rat in the eye. 'I've seen persecution, hatred and genocide, just because people look different, sound different, or behave differently, and I vowed "no more". That's why I'm helping you . . . because no one else can.'

The rat nodded, obviously moved by his words. 'Thank you, Time Lord-Human.'

In the TARDIS, some of the people were in the Kitchen-Diner, drinking tea or coffee, and some were receiving first aid in the Med-Bay from Julia. Jake was carrying a tray loaded with steaks into the Console Room from the food replicator. He put it on the floor. 'Here you go folks. Tuck in.'

'Thank you, Jake,' the spokesrat said, as they moved slowly to the tray and started eating in a calm, organised fashion.

John had been giving them some instruction on how not to freak people out and how to control their base instincts. It would take time and a lot of practice, but they'd made amazing progress in the space of an hour.

'I've been wondering Doc,' Jake said as he wandered carefully over to the console. 'If you're going to take them to a new planet, won't they be an invasive species . . . and won't that be bad?'

John raised his eyebrows and gave him an enormous smile. 'Jake Simmonds! You never fail to surprise me. Under normal circumstances, that would be absolutely correct.'

'And let me guess, these aren't going to be normal circumstances?'

'Right again,' John replied. He started the landing sequence, and the Time Rotor ground to a halt. He looked down at the hundred or more passengers. 'You lot finish eating and we'll see you outside.' He led Jake down the ramp and opened the door.

'Oh wow!' Jake said as he stepped outside. The sky was the colour of burnt ochre, with a couple of pale disks near the horizon. They were in the middle of a young forest, where the trees were saplings with fern like plants in between them.

'It's a relatively young star system,' John explained. 'A few hundred years ago there was a mass extinction event when a meteor impacted the planet, hence the colour of the sky. The ecosystem was reset, so this is similar to what happened on Earth when the dinosaurs were wiped out.'

'So our passengers will be just as much a part of this environment as anything else,' Jake realised.

'Exactly. Although, they might have a bit of an advantage,' John said, as he saw the first of the rats step out and sniff the air. 'There you are, a brave new world,' he told them. 'The clock has been reset, so it's a level playing field. You'll have competition from some of the survivors of course, but over time, you will gain wisdom to go with that intelligence.'

'Thank you Doctor for this opportunity. We will not waste it.'

'I know you won't. Goodbye, and good luck.' They stepped back into the TARDIS and made their way up to the console, where John set the coordinates for Torchwood.

['Rose, we're on our way back now. We'll need some trolleys to take the casualties to the hospital wing,'] John thought to her.

['OK Love, consider it done.']

John landed the TARDIS on the cordoned off landing pad in the Standby Room, where they had left a couple of hours before. He opened the door and was immediately embraced by his wife.

'You OK?' she asked him. She could feel his regret and guilt at not being able to save the lives of two of the animal care technicians.

He kissed her lovingly on the lips. 'Uh-hu. I'm sorry I couldn't save those technicians,' he told her. 'But I did prevent a genocide, and in a few million years, there might be a planet with a civilisation evolved from some very clever rats.'

The injured staff from Gene Tech Research were taken to the floor below to have their wounds treated, and the uninjured staff shuffled out of the TARDIS, looking back and gawping at the impossibility of an area that vast being shoehorned into that small, wooden box. Doctor Emily Williams was the last one out, and she looked at John with tears in her eyes.

'I'm sorry Doctor Smith, for not taking you seriously,' she said in a quiet voice. 'If I'd have listened to you, Bethany and Liam would still be alive.'

'This is what happens when you tamper with a powerful molecule like DNA,' John told her in a quiet, solemn voice. 'I've seen it before . . . A man who thought he could make himself young again.

'Lazarus?' Rose asked.

He nodded. 'But instead, he let the genie out of the bottle, awoke dormant genes which should have remained dormant.'

'What happened?' Emily asked.

'He died,' John told her with a sigh. 'Look, Emily. If you want to make this right, then do the right thing. Show us your research.'

Emily's shoulders sagged. 'Alright, I'll tell you. What do you want to know?'

'Thank you. Let's go through to the Briefing Room and you can start with telling me about the rats and what you were trying to do to them?'

John and Rose led her out of the Standby Room, and down the corridor to a glass door on the right, where Emily could see her colleagues drinking tea and coffee.

'The client wanted us to try and enhance an animal's strength, reaction times, and strategic thinking,' Emily explained as she entered the room.

'That's an interesting combination. Was this private or public sector? Because that sounds like a military objective to me,' John told her.

'Private sector . . . part of the European Space Agency. They had a group of astronauts who had volunteered for the program to make them perform better in space.'

'Mmm, that sounds plausible I suppose . . . go on.'

After Emily had told them what she knew, John left the room for a few minutes, and returned with the injured technicians, who had been patched up, and what looked like a miniature loudhailer in his hand.

He turned to Rose and spoke quietly. 'Now I can't have this lot knowing about the TARDIS,' he told her. 'So I've got this gadget which I confiscated from the equipment archive when I did the first stock audit all those years ago.'

'What is it?' she asked.

He gave her a mischievous grin. 'You've seen "Men in Black", and the neuraliser they use.'

'You are kiddin' me.'

'Nope. A programmable memory wipe. Torchwood used to use them in the bad old days. I think "Welsh" Pete's grandad and the villagers of Llandrillo had it used on them back in 1974, when that ship crashed on Berwyn Mountain,' John told her. 'Oh, and UNIT use them at the entrance to their Black Archive. I've modified and refined this one though.'

He turned to address the people in the room. 'Can I have your attention please.'

Everyone turned to look at him, and he pulled the trigger. There was no flash of light or noise, in fact the only indication that it had worked, was the flash from a green LED on the controls of the unit.

'Now, you are all here at Torchwood, because there was an incident in your laboratory,' he told them. There were puzzled looks on their faces as they tried to remember. 'The rats somehow escaped from their cages and attacked the animal care technicians . . . remember?'

'Oh yeah,' a few of them agreed, now realising why they had cuts and were bandaged up.

'I am so sorry that Bethany and Liam did not survive their injuries,' John continued. People put their hands to their mouths, and there were gasps of surprise with mutterings of disbelief.

'Poor Bethany and Liam,' Emily said, tears forming in her eyes.

'But rest assured, the rats have been contained and disposed of humanely,' John informed them. 'It has been reported as an industrial accident to the Health and Safety Executive, so they will be leading an investigation.' He turned to Emily. 'I'm afraid that research project has come to an abrupt end, and I don't think it would be wise to try and replicate it.'

Emily glanced at the injured technicians. 'No, perhaps not.'

John nodded. 'Good. Now if you all wait here, I'll organise some transport back to Gene Tech.'

As John and Rose left the room, they felt EJ's stress level go up a notch. They gave each other worried looks.

['Son . . . Is everything alright?'] John thought in his head.

['Yeah. It's that bully from lunchtime. I think he wants to make an example of me,'] EJ thought back.

[You're not gonna fight him are ya?'] Rose thought back worriedly.

['No Mum. I'm goin' to talk to him . . . like Dad would.']

She couldn't help but smile at that, he rreally was his father's son.

John grinned as well. ['Good lad . . . 'Stay sharp.']

['Thanks Dad. See you at home.']

'He'll be alright, won't he?' Rose asked.

John smiled. 'You've seen him with Master Lau on Shan Shen . . .'

He didn't have to say anything else. Rose had seen him astound their friend and martial arts master on the future colony world. 'Yeah. He'll be fine,' Rose agreed.