Torchwood Trilogy

TORCHWOOD
TRILOGY

Geraint J Day

CONTENTS

2 Kingdom

14 Power

26 Glory

KINGDOM
Pierre Mélotte strained for the fifth time to look up at the imposing grey stony
edifice. He was getting really tired after his long journey. His neck had begun
to ache as well.

“Am ... gu ... ed ... fa,” he muttered slowly. “Non.” He stopped and frowned.
“Je répète. Am ... gwed ... far”. “Merde! ... et encore ...”

He struggled to remember the rules. It was not a problem in his country. Two
main official languages. “Pas de problème.” Yet here he was, trying
desperately to remember the rules for pronunciation of the local language.

“Am ... ji ... ed ...fa, ”he tried again.

“Am ... gee ... edth ... va ... It means Museum,” said the young woman
dressed in black leather who rushed closely past him coming from the
Boulevard de Nantes and heading for the front steps of Amgueddfa
Genedlaethol Cymru.

“Merci beaucoup,” he said with genuine appreciation. He then shouted after
her in the minority tongue of the region he resided in, “Dank u voor u helpen.”

By then all he could see of her was a mane of flowing black hair disappearing
into the entrance of the National Museum of Wales. She hadn’t heard him.
Pity. “C’est la vie,” he shrugged.

Then it began to rain. It seemed so like Brussels.

At the reception desk on the left-hand side of the imposing entrance hallway,
Gwen Cooper stopped to ask the attendant the way.

“Up by there, love,” said the man. He thought for a moment and added, “Oh,
didn’t you used to work for the police or something? Honest to God, I’m sure
I’ve seen you here before. Some trouble with yobs trying to nick rocks or the
like, I think.”

“Yeah, something like that. Tell you on the way out. In a bit of a rush just
now,” was Gwen’s answer.

When she arrived outside the Head Curator’s office she knew that she had a
difficult job ahead of her. So she paused for a moment. This could be tricky. It
shouldn’t be, but it always seemed to take a while to explain to officialdom
exactly what Torchwood did. Not that she intended to elaborate on the
“exactly” part during this afternoon’s conversation.

“Mr Lloyd-Evans has made time to see you now,” said the woman seated at
the desk, rather condescendingly, Gwen reckoned.
2
Collection © Geraint Day, 2010 September 9

“Has he, now? Well, we’ll see if I’m free to see him,” retorted Gwen. “... Oh
yeah, I’ve checked my engagements and I see that I am free.”

“Mr Lloyd-Evans is a very busy man,” said the woman.

“He is, is he? Maybe. Well, we’ll see how busy he is after he’s listened to me,”
snapped Gwen, not to be outdone by some aspiring Lady Muck. “Tell him I’m
on my way in, will you?” Gwen glared at her for a moment. “Ta,” she added.

The woman at the desk looked gobsmacked. She was enraged. Then she
took a deep breath. “Who’s she think she is?” she muttered faintly before
picking up the phone to call the Head Curator. “Sounds like some Valleys girl.
Not the sort we want barging in here. No way.” After all, Cardiff was very
much on the up and up these days.

There were very few living dinosaurs in Cardiff nowadays. (Unless you
counted some of the members of the City Council, according to some
correspondents to the South Wales Echo.) That was mainly because most of
them had become extinct about 65 million years before the present. Ianto
Jones knew from personal experience of only one species that was classed in
the popular mind as dinosaurs. That actually wandered the streets of Cardiff
in 2009. Well, not so much walk the streets so much as fly about under some
of them. It was the pterodactyl that now had the caverns of the Torchwood
Hub in Cardiff Bay as its home from home.

When he had picked up a message from the museum curator in Cathays Park
he had not really been paying attention. He had been trying to sort out some
of the voluminous Torchwood archive boxes full of alien and human artefacts.

The man had been babbling about dinosaurs being on the loose. Cleaners
were getting terrorised. The man had eventually told Ianto at length and in
great detail that the whole thing could get out of hand and lead to all sorts of
frightening outcomes. He certainly didn’t want the Welsh Assembly
Government to withdraw any funding. Or any of the private benefactors he
had so closely worked with, he shuddered to think, to persuade them to
support the Museum. Things were tight enough already.

Eventually Ianto had managed to shut him up and get him to explain what the
issue was.

The whole thing had originally been referred to Torchwood by the desk
sergeant at police headquarters. That was why Gwen had ended up rushing
off to the Museum that morning. At any rate, she had to, as Captain Jack
Harkness was away in London.

That, and the fact that about half past nine the previous evening her former
colleague, PC Andy Davidson, had phoned her directly. He had asked her to
3

come down to Lavernock Point near Penarth. Some idiot had been reported to
running around there shouting his head off about the dinosaurs that were
going to kill him. That was what Andy had told her, anyway.

She had turned up around half ten. Andy had been first on the scene.

They were greeted by a man who said that he had his own show on one of
the local radio stations.

“What do you mean, you’ve never yeard of it?” Cosmo Probert looked aghast
at the woman in the black leather jacket. “Funky, yeah?”

Gwen and Andy looked at each other with an expression of more than just
surprise. It was more like irritation.

“I’ve got my own show,” repeated the radio presenter. He then began staring
into the distance dreamily.

He did indeed have his own show on Dragon FM, so he was already not very
pleased to have been used by the technical department to try out some
signal-boosting tests for their outside broadcasts. His own show, he thought to
himself with pride. If only he had not insulted that pompous bloke from London
he had bumped into in the foyer in Llandaff he might well have got that
primetime BBC job instead. So what if he had turned out to be one of the
deputies to the Director General? Or was it an assistant to the deputy?
Anyway, he felt sure that the BBC did not make its presenters traipse around
South Glamorgan carrying a load of wires and radio antennas in the middle of
the night.

Gwen broke his reverie. “Look, what’s this about a bloke and dinosaurs? And
by the way, I’ve been listening to Nation Radio lately. That’s when I get a
chance, which isn’t often, mind you.”

“Oh, yes. Over here.” Cosmo was slowly coming back to reality.

“The crew found him. He kept rushing around and getting the sound
engineers all worked up while they were doing their measurements. I had to
recite some standard script and they had to look at the numbers on the
meters. All very proper. But we had to do it hundreds of times. I ask you.”
Cosmo looked very dejected. “I was the only one with a working mobile
phone. Typical. Among a load of techies, too.”

“Yes, but where is he?” interrupted Gwen. She was beginning to feel glad
about her listening choice. This man could well drive her bonkers if she had a
regular dose via the airwaves.

Cosmo pointed to a huddled figure just visible in the shadow of a streetlight.

He looked exhausted, with streaks of dirt running in all directions over his
shabby jacket. And terrified. Another drunk, thought Gwen. That sort tended
4

to hang out in the City centre these days, rather than round here. But anything
was possible, of course.

When Gwen and Andy had calmed him down they did manage to prise some
odd pieces of what looked like knurled and dried meat from his shaking
hands.

“There’s alright now,” soothed Gwen. “Let’s be having you.”

“Keep him away from me! He wants to bloody lock me up.” The dishevelled
man glared at Cosmo Probert out of the shadows cast by a streetlight. Gwen
revised her opinion. Terrified and drunk? No, just terrified.

“No, I don’t. I just wanted to make sure you were all right,” Cosmo said,
looking quite hurt.

Perhaps he wasn’t so bad after all, thought Gwen for a moment. She began to
feel a little sorry for this Cosmo fellow.

“No, I’m not ... bloody ... alright,” muttered the man on the ground. “... Not ...
used to having to run around being followed by ... ,” the ruffled up man
paused for breath. “... some sort of things out of that kids’ dinosaur
programme. What’s it called?”

“Primeval,” suggested Andy helpfully.

“Well bloody evil, I tell you,” said the man.

“Look, give me that rock you’ve got there,” said Gwen. She held it up towards
the light.

“I think I’ll put that in the sample bag,” she said slowly after looking at it closely
but gingerly.

Getting a pair of protective gloves from the holdall she was carrying, she lifted
the piece of rock or meat or whatever it was and dropped it into the plastic
pouch. Sealing it, she quickly closed up the bag. “

“Andy, I’ve got to be off now,” announced Gwen “Can you look after the poor
bloke and get him home?”

“Oh, I suppose so,” answered Andy. “Do I get to know what that thing is and
what all this is about?”

“No, sorry.” Actually, she had no idea herself what was going on. “Mind you,
Owen will have some dating to do this evening, after all,” she thought. Of the
radioactive kind, probably, rather than Owen’s own usual preferences.

“Well, I suppose I’ll see you about.”

5

What? Oh, yes. Andy was looking as mystified and as left out as usual.

“Yes, see you, and you too, Cosmo Probert,” waved Gwen with a smile. “Best
of luck with the programme. And on helping Andy with his enquiries.”

“PC Davidson will take down all the details,” she added as she disappeared
back towards the road in the darkness.

It had reminded him of something. Years before he had looked at a similar
object. It was when he had decided that he really had to pass an exam in
biology in order to get on the path to study medicine at university.

Doctor Owen Harper looked once more into the eyepiece of the microscope.
What he looked at - for about the tenth time – resembled something he had
seen before. But what was it?

Cutting up frogs had been an essential prerequisite to getting his biology
qualifications. The small piece of limb that he was looking at looked like a tiny
frog’s leg, that was it. When he prodded it with the piece of wire that
happened to be in the field of view. The leg jumped! Not so much jumped as
kicked. He poked it again. The same reaction. Who was who had looked at
the effect of electricity on the leg of a frog? Some Italian guy, Galvani, Volta,
he couldn’t remember. Anyway, Owen had a vague memory of something
about an Italian scientist – or was he Swiss? – getting a dead frog’s leg to
twitch when it was struck by a spark. Electricity. “Eureka!”, he shouted. It was
Galvani, and he had been cutting up the frog to try to prove that its testicles
were actually in its legs. That had been a load of cobblers.

But this thing was not a frog’s leg. It was far too old for that. Jurassic more
than haute cuisine, he thought. Well, that was what the radioactive dating of
the surrounding rocks in which these odd shaped pieces of tissue had been
found. Nowadays looking at these sorts of unusual specimens was part and
parcel of his job as medical adviser to Torchwood. If he was lucky they
weren’t trying to kill him at the time.

“Ah well,” he thought. If Jack Harkness hadn’t handed him the object on his
way out of the Hub on the way to UNIT headquarters, he would have not had
the chance to add another experience to the rich tapestry that made up the
daily routine of working for Torchwood.

“Now, my old mucka, what’s this, then?” Owen pulled his eye away from the
microscope, stopped for a moment, then returned to the eyepiece.
“What’s this bit of metal doing here anyway? Or corroded metal, more by the
look of what it’s attached to.”

Carefully he tweezered the tiny pieces of material away from the gooey mess.
It was mostly white with just a few flecks of bluish white streaks here and
there.
6

It didn’t look like a bullet or anything that might have led to the creature’s
demise. “Looks like zinc and zinc oxide, attached to the copper wire,” he
muttered to himself.

He whipped the specimen into the receptacle of the chemical analyser that
Jack Harkness said he’d ‘borrowed’ on his travels to some research facility
that Owen had never been to (and was unlikely to frequent, as it had in fact
come from a lab a hundred years in Earth’s future).

“Well, blow me down. All that chemistry course had been well worth pursuing.”
So had his experiences with the course supervisor, he reminisced about her
with a leery grin.

Now all he had to do was to find out why Jack had thought that this stuff found
on a nearby beach was something that Torchwood should at least take a
closer look at.

Just as he had finished Gwen Cooper came bounding into the Hub and swung
a sample bag onto the working surface next to him. It was getting late.

“I was just off for a nightcap. Fancy one?” Owen looked up at Gwen.

“No, gotta go, now. The meal that Rhys and I were having has probably gone
well cold by now, but I’d better get back in case he thinks any funny business
is going on. You might want to have a look at the gunk in the bag, though.”

After Gwen had related the circumstances of the find Owen opened the bag.

“Looks like the same sort of thing I’ve just been gawping at,” he said.

“Leave you to it, then. Tarra.”

Gwen was sitting at the desk and listening to the Head Curator’s account.

“I know that the animated mammoth exhibit attracts a lot of attention,
especially among our younger visitors. A couple of little boys from Swindon,
they come in every few months and ask to see the ‘real mammoths’ as they
call them,” explained Mr Lloyd-Evans to Gwen. “Actually, one of them is so tall
that it’s hard to believe he’s only five. His younger brother was the one who
called them ‘real mammoths’. It really is a good animated display we have
there, have you seen it? But the things aren’t real, of course. They don’t go
running around and attacking visitors, let alone the staff here. That would
certainly frighten away the visitors.”

“Apart from that, we don’t get a lot of excitement,” he continued. “Well, if you
don’t count the people coming in to film parts of their TV series from time to

7

time. Of course we have to do that when we are closed, mainly.” (Mind you, it
brings in a lot of much-needed funds, he thought to himself.)

“That’s fascinating but it’s not why you called us in, is it?” interrupted Gwen
Cooper.

“Er, no,” said Mr Lloyd-Evans. “We look after all the staff here, and we even
offer assistance to people with, er, ‘nerves’ – that’s what what we used to call
it in my day.”

“What do you mean?” Gwen looked puzzled. Surely the Museum didn’t think
that Torchwood was some sort of counselling service.

“I mean that, er, one or two of the cleaning staff made some reports about
seeing the exhibits move. More than move, try to run them down, one of them
said.”

“Go on,” encouraged Gwen. “That’s what my colleague told me you had been
worried about.” This began to sound more like a job for Torchwood after all.

“We offered them the staff support service. Trouble was that some of them
started saying the same things.”

“What, you mean about exhibits on the move, that sort of thing?” asked Gwen.

“Yes. Yes. Very odd. It all started the day after that new exhibition on
‘Communication in Wales’”

“You mean how they sing those songs to each other across the oceans?”

The Head Curator looked at Gwen closely. “No. ... Ah, not that sort of
‘whales’. It was about media in Wales going all the way back to the start of
broadcasting. Right up to S4C and all the new Internet and social networking
stuff. A lot of it would have been out of place in St Fagans so we set it up
here.”

“Mind if I have a look?”

“I can do better than that. One of the cleaners with the, the screaming abdabs,
was found clutching this lump of metal that she swore blind one of the
dinosaurs had knocked over in the exhibition hall. Oh, by the way, we did ask
the Museum doctor to check for any signs of drugs or alcohol. We have a very
strict policy on all that sort of thing. Can’t have people damaging the valuable
exhibits on account of being incapable.”

Mr Lloyd-Evans waved a hand towards a table in the corner of the room to his
left.

“Come over here,” he beckoned to Gwen.

8

Back in the Hub in Cardiff Bay, Toshiko Sato suddenly jumped as she heard
one of the loud alarms from the Rift monitor. They usually meant trouble. Big
and often highly dangerous trouble.

She looked at the screen and started her highly skilled routine to try to localise
the source. She had done that often enough for her fingers and brain to work
together rapidly to identify just what Torchwood was up against. No! It was in
Cathays Park, where Gwen had set off to visit only half an hour ago.

Not only in Cathays Park but in the very building that Gwen would be having
her meeting with the Head Curator at that very moment.

This time the Head Curator’s personal assistant was having none of it. Letting
one member of the public barge into the inner sanctum where her boss held
sway was one thing. Having another woman and a rough-looking man both
waving heavy guns at her and demanding to see Mr Lloyd-Evans was
another. Enough was enough.

“Look, you can’t go in there. Mr Lloyd-Evans has an important meeting, and
he is not to be interrupted!”

“He’ll be more than interrupted if we don’t get in there soon, love,” snapped
Owen as he indicated to Tosh to move towards the office door. “Disrupted
more likely.”

“But, but, I ...”

“Trust me, I’m a doctor,” said Owen with the best bedside smile he could
manage given the circumstances. As he never bothered with bedside smiles
at the best of times, this was a truly amazing display of acting ability.

Owen grabbed Tosh by the hand and they both disappeared into the Head
Curator’s office.

Elspeth Brown thought to herself that things were getting a bit much for her
here at the Museum. Women barging into meetings, doctors waving guns.
What was the world coming to? Perhaps all this 24-hour drinking in the bars
off Queen Street was contributing to the lack of civility she was seeing lately.
Maybe she would take that posting to St Fagans after all. It could be a little
quieter down there.

When she heard the gunshots a few moments later, that decided it. St Fagans
it would have to be. In a daze, she started looking for the HR part of the
Museum intranet.

Owen and Tosh rushed into the room. At first they could make out nothing
unusual. There was a desk and chairs. Bookcase. Not out of the ordinary.
9

“What’s that purple glow?” whispered Tosh.

From behind the open door a purple-red pulsating aura edged around the
door. There was no sound.

Owen beckoned to Tosh to crouch down and point her gun to cover him. He
slowly peeked around the edge of the door, all the time clutching the gun with
both hands. He felt so tense that he believed he would snap at any moment.

“Owen, aim for the energy source,” Tosh said faintly.

“I said I’m a doctor, not a killer,” snapped Owen, a little unkindly, thought
Toshiko.

Out of the corner of his right eye he could see the back of Gwen Cooper and
a man. They were motionless. Frozen rigid in the beam of some sort of ray.
Tosh had told him to watch for that. Before they had rushed from the Hub to
the Museum she had told him exactly what to look for.

“Sorry about this, chaps,” said Owen just before he fired two shots point blank
into the hole on the desk from where the shimmering beam was so obviously
mesmerising Gwen and the curator. “This will be a bit noisy.”

Gwen, Owen and Toshiko were sitting having their second cup of coffee. That
was one way to try to wind down in the Hub from the morning’s skirmish.

“Well, at least nobody’s got killed or worse,” said Gwen. “Even the Head
Curator at the Museum is happy that his employees aren’t a bunch of
delusional drug-takers.”

“Not so good news for the source of that energy beam,” disagreed Owen.
“What was it you called it?”

“A radiophile,” responded Toshiko. “At least I don’t know what it’s really called,
but what it does is absorb energy from living things and pay for that by setting
up currents that cause hallucinations and eventually death. Jack would
probably know.”

“Don’t know that I do, mam,” chirped Jack, who came striding into the Hub
rest area just at that moment. “But I do know that Ianto has something to say.
He called me just as I was getting off the train.”

All eyes turned to Ianto Jones. He was leaning on a desk and looked ready to
give a lecture. “Yes, I’ve done a little digging into some of what’s been going
on,” he announced.

“Go on,” encouraged Jack.
10

“Well, it’s like this. Guglielmo – that’s Italian for William, by the way - Marconi
made the first radio broadcast across water. It was all done in Cardiff, in 1897.
It was beamed from Flat Holm Island to Lavernock Point in Penarth. The bit of
zinc that Owen found with the first lot of tissue seemed to have been part of
the apparatus. Marconi had a 30-metre pole at Lavernock Point,” explained
Ianto. Well, that’s what it says on the BBC website here, anyway.” Ianto read
out the extract studiously and looked pleased to see that all his colleagues
were paying close attention.

“Well, it was meant to be a receiver, apparently. Says here that it didn’t work
first time,” Ianto continued expounding from his source. “But it did after they’d
made a few adjustments. Had to take it all down to the beach.”

“According to this bit, the transmitter was pretty powerful. That was on Flat
Holm. Apparently it could chuck a spark 20 inches through the air,” continued
Ianto, obviously enjoying his role as a potential Discovery Channel narrator.

“But surely that’s not enough to have caused the Rift to open,” chipped in
Toshiko Sato.

“You’re right. The ghetto blaster had not yet greeted the unsuspecting world.
Yeah, in those days that sort of power wasn’t your everyday occurrence, least
ways not in every home. Alice and Emily would have been on one of their first
assignments for Torchwood Three then,” said Jack, who had been listening
intently after his recent return from UNIT HQ. “Quite some gals.”

“Who are those two?” Owen showed some keen interest.

“Emily Holroyd and Alice Guppy worked for Torchwood. Alice had only started
that year. Here in the Hub. Well it wasn’t exactly a Hub back then. A coupla
rooms and a holding cell. What more could a guy ask for?” Jack began to look
a little dreamy.

“Tell us more about Alice and Emily,” piped up Owen, clearly paying even
more attention.

“Some other time, Owen. Look them up in the archives. Or, in the case of
Alice, in Bay 12 of the morgue.”

“I will.”

Ianto looked on in disgust. So much for his lecture.

“Emily told me a few years later about some Torchwood assignment involving
large lizards down in Penarth. Folks panicking because they’d seen sadistic
creatures terrorising the neighbourhood. Actually, Alice and Emily could be
pretty mean when they wanted to be.” Jack broke off and looked wistful for a
moment.

11

Picking up rapidly, he carried on, “Could have been the dinosaurs or
something similarly shifted in time by the release of Rift energy.”

“Why then?” asked Gwen.

“Aw, the godamned transmitter must have been noticed by some passing
aliens,” continued Jack. “Picking up radio waves on Earth must have caused
some stir, especially as it was so close to the Rift running through Cardiff.
Back in those days Red Dragon FM was a thing of the far future. Getting a
book from the lending library was the height of mass communication back
then. But that tiny bit of radio energy must have been enough to trigger a Rift
reaction elsewhere ... Kinda appropriate - red dragons linked with dinosaurs.”
He paused and mused for a moment. “Eventually the living creatures must
have got fused with the bits of the antenna – leading to the gooey metallic
gunk that Owen was playing with under the microscope, from what Ianto told
me. And the stuff that Gwen got via that radio presenter. Got a slot on the
show yet, by the way?”

Gwen glared at Jack.

“It all ties in now with one of the things they told me while I was helping the
Torchwood ladies with their inquiries,” went on Jack. He did not really want to
go into details just now about how the two Victorian Torchwood operatives
had kept him locked up in a cell while they tried to figure out who or what he
was.

“I remember them asking me about dinosaurs in Penarth. As if I didn’t have
better things to do in the bars there,” joked Jack. “I’d never seen any, but
maybe it fits into the picture.”

“I thought they were crazy at the time. As they thought I was crazy, that made
three of us,” explained Jack.

“So, no surprise about somebody finding a piece of Marconi’s equipment
mixed up in dinosaur flesh. Owen, thanks for that piece of work,” said Jack
with a bow in the general direction of the medic.

“The antics in the Museum sound to be linked with some residual and time-
shifted energy after they put that piece of the antique Lavernock Point gear in
the new display.” Jack sounded well pleased.

“At least there was nothing much worse than some panicking and general
mayhem. People running around having delusions is better than finding locals
with their necks bitten open by Weevils or having been blasted by Cybermen,”
commented Gwen.

Thoughtfully, Jack did not stop to expand to his colleagues on one of the
present uses of Flat Holm Island. That was another place with a Torchwood
legacy, as he knew from visiting the tortured souls kept there for their own
safety and who had somehow survived a journey through the Rift. If “survived”
12

was the right word for some of those poor bastards. He might let his
Torchwood colleagues in on the secret one day. But some things were best
kept under wraps, even from Torchwood operatives, for the sake of their
sanity, if for no other reason.

He still, of course, had to break some news that he had been given during his
visit to the HQ of the Unified Intelligence Taskforce. His trusted colleagues
weren’t going to like it, but it was all in the finest family traditions of
Torchwood. It had somehow seemed even more appropriate to have been
told about it in the premises under the Tower of London that UNIT used as a
British base.

How was he going to tell them that they had to be on parade the next day at
ten o’clock sharp? Their official visitor would be arriving for one of her annual
inspections of the Torchwood estate. As her great-great-grandmother had
founded Torchwood up in Scotland it was all part and parcel of the strange
mix of reality and fantasy that made up the normal work of the hardy, brave
and truly unusual bunch of Gwen Cooper, Owen Harper, Ianto Jones, Toshiko
Sato and himself, Jack Harkness, at Torchwood Three.

Queen Victoria had founded the original Torchwood Institute in 1879 to
protect Earth from extraterrestrial threats. Thinking of that, Jack grinned to
himself.

“How am I gonna protect Her Majesty from these guys? ... and better keep the
Weevil off the official tour, I reckon. Ianto’ll have to keep that pterodactyl
grounded, too.”

“Now, which braces do I need to wear to see the Queen?”

© Geraint Day
2010 September 9
13

POWER

Three pieces of bluish slime smacked straight into the front windscreen of the
SUV. Jack Harkness stared at them in horror as they began to slide down the
glass, leaving an oily iridescence in their wake as the light of the setting Sun
caught their slow congealing progress. Thoughts flitted rapidly about in his
head. What could he do now? This must be the end, surely? “OK,” he thought.
“I’ll die again. And come back to life again.”

But how had these deadly creatures tracked him down? The terrors that they
could inflict he had seen for himself. And suffered. To have to go through
them again, right now on a Friday evening, just as the city was gearing up for
its weekend revelries, seemed even to Jack, to be just asking too much.

“You’re a menace to the planet! Gas-guzzler! Stop climate change now!” he
heard from his left through the partly wound down side window.

Startled again, he looked and saw the young woman holding a rainbow-
coloured placard and a bag of goo, as she was about to lob another load in
Jack’s direction. Then he realised that the slime wasn’t the remnant of the
living creature from inside a Dalek, and that he wasn’t going to die. Well, not
straight away, as long as he moved off from the traffic lights in Callaghan
Square and didn’t hold up the line of traffic behind him any longer. The lights
must have been on green for two or three seconds by now. Impatient
terrestrial motorists could put the Galaxy’s fiercest marauders to shame when
it came to displays of sheer hostility.

“Jeez,” he said aloud. He was thinking, “Man, I need a break.” Mistaking the
protest of a girl from Friends of the Earth for one of the many deadly aliens
that he had fought must surely be a sign of overwork. What’s more, he had
not had even a fleeting thought to ask her out for a drink. “I think I’ll do some
catching up with record keeping for the next day or two,” he sighed.

Captain Jack Harkness, leader of Torchwood Three, turned the SUV into
Lloyd George Avenue and headed towards the Hub in Cardiff Bay as the Sun
slid slowly down towards the western horizon.

Toshiko Sato was not known for her interest in environmental issues. Many
people would have thought her the opposite, with a passion, indeed
obsession, with science and technology. One problem was that, for her,
“many people” was not a very large number. The real reason that she had
turned up for the one-day ‘Save the Planet Festival’ that Saturday morning
was that she might meet and get to know a few more people. Or one, even.
Owen was elusive and probably unattainable, she had concluded for the time
being. Anyway, he was away for a few days doing some post mortems on
several mutilated corpses that the North Wales police had contacted
Torchwood about after also having logged some unexplained lights in the sky.
CSI: Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogochuchaf
14

didn’t quite seem to have the right ring to it, but looking into strange deaths
and injuries was quite often part of the Torchwood routine. It was part and
parcel of their job investigating and defending Earth from the many hostile
aliens that the rift running through Cardiff brought to the planet. One of the
other attractions of the festival today was in fact that Toshiko was really
involved in saving the planet. Most days, as it happened. It made her feel
quite smug, in fact, to think that she knew the real routes to saving worlds.

Anyway, the fact that the festival was in Roald Dahl Plass meant that she
could always slope off back into the Hub in a jiffy if today’s attempt to improve
her social life went badly.

Toshiko glanced down again at the printed programme then walked slowly
down towards the marquees and tents that were dotted about forming part of
the festival.

She could see a host of the usual rainbow insignia that for some reason were
the hallmark of ‘green’ and peace movements. Jugglers, stalls, half a dozen
people handing out leaflets. Coloured lights, helium-filled balloons hoisting
messages up into the air, such as “Save the planet”, “Save the whales” and
“Fill in the open-cast pits now!” Toshiko wondered for a moment whether the
event organisers had done a life cycle analysis of the environmental impact of
the event itself. That was a typical piece of analytic thinking on her part.

As she headed towards the red Pierhead Building she noticed a placard
proclaiming a public debate on “Is space research creating an environmental
disaster?” “No,” she thought instantly. “I’ll give that a miss.” Then,
remembering why she had come along in the first place, corrected herself and
started walking towards the Senedd building of the National Assembly for
Wales, where the debate was billed to start in ten minutes.

As she climbed the slate steps towards the public entrance she froze. “I can’t
go in! Wait a moment ... Ah, I’m not carrying any alien artefacts or Rift
scanners – it’s my day off,” she thought to herself with relief. It would have
been difficult to explain away any to the uniformed personnel on the X-ray
machine whose job it was to check all visitors in case of any security
problems.

“Hajime mashite”, said the tall man with a flowing moustache.

Startled for a moment, Toshiko looked up with surprise.

“I thought you might be Japanese,” he said. “I’ve been to Japan many times.
It’s a lovely country.”

“... er, yes,” she answered. “Pleased to meet you, as well. I am Toshiko Sato.”

“Bill Kravitz.” He shook her hand. “What brings you to the festival? You can’t
have flown in from Tokyo for the day, surely?”

15

Toshiko took another look at the stranger. He was strikingly impressive.

“No, I work here in Cardiff,” she said hurriedly, thinking that she didn’t really
want to say exactly how close her workplace was to where they were
standing. Then she added, “I thought I’d come to see what they all had to say.
Er, I think that there’s a lot being said about the environment these days.”

“The debate will begin in a moment, so please could you all settle down”, said
a man in a green boiler suit on a raised platform in front of the audience of
sixty or so that had gathered towards the café end of the visitor area above
the Senedd Chamber.

Chairs had been placed out, so Toshiko and Bill moved towards the nearest
two, at the end of a row.

“Looks like they’re expecting a confrontation,” observed Bill Kravitz.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, green groups tend to go in for sitting in circles. Having serried ranks
makes it look like they’re setting it up for a formal ‘them and us’”

“Oh, I see,” said Toshiko. “It is advertised as a debate, so I suppose that is in
keeping with formality.”

There were five people seated at the top table. She recognised one of them
as the local Member of Parliament for the area. MP for Torchwood. That was
quite a concept. Gwen Cooper had met him on some Home Office issues
concerning security of the Torchwood Hub entrance that looked from the
outside like a tourist information centre. Toshiko recalled that Gwen seemed
to have taken rather a shine to him. He was probably the only person present
in today’s gathering, apart from her, who knew that the Torchwood operations
centre lay spread out underground, beneath where they were sitting.

On that supposition she was so wrong.

Megan Jones looked down from the balcony. She stopped walking for a
moment, to admire the quaint scene. Cardiff’s shopping arcades seemed to
have been frozen in time. In an age where towns and cities across the country
were increasingly looking similar when it came to chain stores and brand
signs, it was a good thing, she thought, that some places still managed to
maintain their individuality and character.

She moved on round the corner, stopping when she noticed something else.
Somebody had scribbled over the “r” in the first word, making the English
version of “Friends of the Earth” take on a new meaning. It hadn’t been like
that when she came the day before. Although she was a strong supporter of

16

the green movement, she did admit that she found the slight modification to
be just a little amusing.

Opening the door she caught sight of Mr Oriel. That was all she knew of his
name. She had first met him on Friday morning, when she had called in to
volunteer to help out with some of the pre-publicity activity of the weekend
‘Save the Planet Festival’. He had a swarthy beard and wore a wide-brimmed
hat that he never seemed to take off, at least throughout their first encounter.
He had also seemed rather a cold character.

“Did you do as you were told?”, he asked her. Snapped at her would have
been a more accurate description, which took her aback somewhat.

‘Yes, I gave out the leaflets in the Hayes and around St David’s Hall, and in St
David’s Shopping Centre.”

“And did you visit the punishment on the transgressor?” Mr Oriel had definitely
asked that one with a hiss and menace to his utterance.

“What? Transgressor? ... uh, if you mean did I throw the goo at the man in the
black SUV that you told me to look out for later, um, yes, I did”, answered
Megan with a slight tremble in her voice.

Mr Oriel smiled. It more resembled a sneer. “It is vital that the enemies of
Earth are duly punished. They will answer for their crimes. They will burn in
the darkness. We will not allow them to continue.”

Now, Megan was beginning to feel a little less committed to the green cause,
at least to the one that Mr Oriel seemed to stand for.

“Is there anything else that I can do today - at the Festival, perhaps?” she
said, more of out duty than enthusiasm.

“No, we have that in hand, very much in hand ... Thank you. You have done
well. Very well indeed.”

“Well, I suppose I’ll be off now, then,” she said slowly.

As she closed the door behind her she could not help but think that the new
version of the sign outside was quite appropriate – at least in the case of Mr
Oriel. On that supposition she was along the right lines, unbeknown to her.

Megan shrugged her shoulders. “Oh well.” She had better get back to St
David’s. There was a sale on at that new trendy fashion store, according to
the leaflet in last night’s South Wales Echo. Tidy.

Sleep was not his normal habit yet he felt as if he could use some. He had
spent several hours catching up with Hub records on some of the recent, and
17

not so recent, Torchwood cases. A visit to the Weevil had led to an
unexpected chase. The Weevil had lunged at him. Although Jack knew that it
could not get through the armoured glass that effectively caged the strange
alien creature from the rest of the Hub, it had given Jack a shock. He was
definitely not himself. If something like a little ol’ Weevil could do that to him,
what sort of state was he in?

With Owen Harper away cutting up dead bodies, Ianto Jones visiting Glasgow
to gather some archive materials from that strange man Archie in Torchwood
Two, and Tosh off on some uncharacteristic visit to a green event, he couldn’t
even have some of his witty banter with his colleagues. He knew that Tosh
was actually just above the Torchwood Hub this morning, and that he could
always call Gwen on some pretext, but he knew that all of his team deserved
their time off. Protecting Cardiff and the rest of the planet was time-consuming
and stressful enough, especially for humans.

After the incident last evening with what he at first thought was part of a living
Dalek, Jack Harkness was definitely not himself. What was it that girl with the
goo had said last night? “Menace to the planet? No way! He was one of its
saviours”, he thought to himself. “I could use another coffee though, to pep
me up.” And today there was no Ianto to prepare it.

Toshiko was definitely feeling upbeat. Bill Kravitz had asked if he could meet
her again. They had both listened to the debate in the Senedd building that
morning. It had taken a not unexpected turn. On one side there seemed to be
people who would send everyone back to the Stone Age if they got their way.
They did not have a good word for technology. She had shuddered a little,
though, when the main proposer of the motion had advocated the end of
space exploration and had actually accused the world’s space agencies of
being devils incarnate. The way he had expressed that had seemed rather
menacing to her. The opposing speakers, including the Member of
Parliament, had taken it in rather good humour and in their stride, she
thought. It was only a debate, and she knew that the local greens could have
little influence over NASA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and
kindred organisations. It was a good job that they had not mentioned UNIT or
Torchwood, she had thought with relief, however.

Talking afterwards over a cup of tea, they had seemed to have a lot in
common. Bill was interested in space travel. She had talked a little about
computers and the latest commercially available technological gadgets (taking
care not to accidentally introduce any of the features that she had ready
access to among the many alien artefacts in the Hub, that Torchwood had
accumulated over the years).

They had agreed to meet the next day. So on Sunday morning Toshiko had
set off from home to the City Centre. The arrangement was to meet for lunch.
As she headed along the middle of the pedestrianised Queen Street she had
almost a spring in her step.
18

The meal and conversation passed very pleasantly. Then they had walked
across Bute Park, crossed the bridge over the River Taff, and stopped off in
the Mochyn Du for a drink. They now found themselves wandering back
through Sophia Gardens towards the bridge.

Toshiko felt elated. She had also begun to feel a little woozy. That was
perhaps not unexpected. She had had a few glasses of wine, after all. The
sound of water gurgling in the waters below began to resound in her ears as
she leaned on the rail to look down. The sparkle of light off the ripples almost
seemed dazzling. Then the bridge itself seemed to be oscillating up and
down. Up and down. Up and down. Up and down. Very gently ... The last
thing that she remembered before regaining consciousness was the arms of
Bill Kravitz embracing her. “Stunning,” she thought.

Jack must have dozed off. Now that was something. He made it a rule never
to do that. He was right about not feeling himself. An annoying sound from
somewhere was burning into his brain. It was coming from his phone. He
looked down at the display. Emergency distress code. From Tosh. He clicked
on the alert symbol and found a GPS location.

Rapidly he decided that he would need help in order to assist Tosh. He could
not seem to summon the energy to even get up out of his chair. “What the
hell’s wrong with me?!”

He called up Gwen’s swift dial number. “Hello, Jack. I thought you must have
phoned to find out the times of the nearest chapel service or something, it
being Sunday evening. Quick chorus of Cwm Rhondda, do you the world of
good.”

“Gwen, great! No time for chat. Tosh is in trouble. Get down to the Hub and
drive me to Newport.”

“Why, you gone over the limit and frightened of getting breathalised? I could
always pretend not to notice - and fail in my duty as a police officer, if that
would help,” said Gwen as cheerily as she could. Despite the jokiness, she
had already put on her jacket and slung her handbag over her shoulder as
she headed for the door. If Jack had called her like that it must be serious. He
also sounded, well, not quite like Jack.

Half an hour later, after she had had to help Jack Harkness into the front
passenger seat of the Torchwood SUV, they were on Western Avenue
heading eastward.

Jack had been peering at a Rift monitor and looking worried when she had
arrived at the Hub. He had looked a little off colour and definitely did not seem
himself. That tallied with the phone conversation, she thought.

19

“While I was waiting for you I managed to give myself the once over with one
of Owen’s whole-body scanners. Not quite a clean bill of health. I’ve got
traces of what look like Huon particles in my spinal chord,” announced Jack
grimly as Gwen had bounded into the Hub and towards his desk.

“Shouldn’t you get hold of Owen for a second opinion?” Gwen had piped up.
She did not know what Huon particles were, but if Jack was alarmed they
must be something menacing. That was Torchwood all over.

As they headed towards Newport Jack managed to fill Gwen in with some
more information on what was going on. Or what was occurring according to
what he knew, which was somewhat hazy in his present weakened condition.

“Tosh is holed up in Uskmouth Power Station”, announced Jack. “Don’t ask
me why. All I know is that she went to a green festival in the Bay yesterday.
Funny thing is that I’ve been feeling low after a chick lobbed some goo at the
windscreen on Friday evening. Look, see, you can see a little of the bluish
residue there. Thought I’d wiped it all off. Never was much good at the
domestics. Especially before they invented the vacuum cleaner.” Was that a
bit of the usual Jack coming back to life?, he wondered. He hoped so.

He pointed to a tiny area on the outside of the windscreen. Slowly he pulled a
small scanner out of the dashboard compartment. He moved it across the
patch of blue.

“Damn! I wasn’t so wrong after all.”

“Jack, what are you nattering about?” said Gwen, who was still finding this
Sunday evening Torchwood outing more than a little puzzling.

“I had some sort of hallucination when the girl with the rainbow placard threw
a gob of blue stuff at the windshield. Thought for a moment I was back fighting
the Daleks. You know, the actual living creatures that are housed inside those
metal cases.”

Gwen had never met a Dalek. Clearly she had seen the news coverage when
the Battle of Canary Wharf had destroyed the tower used by Torchwood One.
But she knew enough to know that they spelled very bad news. That, and the
ghastly incident involving the Lisa Hallett-Cyberwoman creature and Ianto,
formed a very real link with that encounter between Daleks and Cybermen.
One that would forever live in the annals of Torchwood history.

“Anyway, it wasn’t a Dalek, but the goo did have ET written all over it. Look at
the readings here,” Jack interrupted Gwen’s brief reverie. That was just as
well, as she also had to swerve to avoid a cat for an instant.

“Phew!” that was close. “Down to eight lives now, you little bugger,” she said.

“Huon radiation, second opinion or not, I’m sure of it. That’s probably linked to
why Tosh and I don’t seem to be having a great weekend,” Jack opined.
20

“What, the cat?” asked Gwen. She still wasn’t getting the hang of these
developments.

“Na, something in the blue goo has irradiated me with Huon particles. You
don’t find those in the centre of Cardiff on a usual Friday night, I’m telling you.
Rainbows, environment, green movement. Must have been from Friends of
the Earth, I guess.”

“With friends like that who needs enemies?” responded Gwen, trying to
lighten the conversation a little, and to take her mind off what Tosh might be
going through just now.

When Toshiko had opened her eyes again she could not see a thing. She was
lying on a table. A hard and cold metal one at that. There was something
covering her face. Moving her hands upwards, she took off the black cotton
bag that was covering her head. Slowly she managed to focus on something
that she could just make out on the floor. It looked like a Mars bar. She was
feeling a bit hungry. Reaching down to pick it up, she realised that it was vital
that she got hold of it. Really vital, absolutely critical in fact.

Just before he opened the door and hit her, Toshiko managed to press a
button on the mobile phone to send an alarm signal to the Torchwood Hub.

Bill Kravitz shouted at her, “No, no, you won’t do that again!” He stamped on
the phone with all his might. Its case went scudding across the floor in a
dozen pieces.

“Uh, oh, no ...” Toshiko Sato had lost consciousness for the second time that
day. This time she had been thinking that gadgets could be so useful, before
the darkness engulfed her.

She came around to find that she was sitting on a chair. Bill Kravitz – the first
thing she recognised was the moustache – was standing directly in front of
her. She scowled at him. So much for meeting new people. That had
happened, with a vengeance. It did not exactly square with the theme of
peace and love, though. New people? Out of the corner of her eye she saw a
hat. It moved towards Kravitz. Then she saw that there were indeed two
people standing there with her.

“I am sorry about the abduction and for hitting you earlier,” said Kravitz.

Toshiko continued to glare at him. “Are you? I have noted your opinion.”

“We have to have access to Torchwood,” he continued.

Silence.

21

“I know that you work in the Torchwood Hub, just under Roald Dahl Plass.
That’s why I made sure that I would meet you at the festival yesterday. It is
vital that we enter the Hub and gain control over the Rift monitors.” Bill Kravitz
clearly knew a lot about Toshiko’s work. Asking about Japan had merely been
a front. Another letdown.

“Who are we?” she ventured.

“We – Mr Oriel and I – want to stop the wanton destruction that Torchwood is
protecting,” answered Kravitz. “The transgressions must cease and the planet
must be allowed to return to its natural state.”

To Toshiko he was beginning to sound like one of those green activists who
surely would have us all living in trees. Not thinking of her own predicament
particularly, she despaired.

In the growing twilight the SUV pulled slowly into the carpark next to the
administration building of the power station. Jack had been studying the
readings on the monitor and had asked Gwen to drive a sliently as possible
up to the building. Luckily the woman at the security gate had not questioned
her South Wales Police identity card. It still came in handy, even if they are
not paying her wages these days, Gwen often had reason to think that,
despite having changed career to work for Torchwood. In any case it made for
less of a scene than using the SUV to plough through the gate regardless.
Gwen and Jack wanted to rescue Tosh, not give her unknown and
undoubtedly alien captors cause to harm her – that is, if she were still alive.

“Gwen, take your gun and get into the main manager’s office. It’s here,” said
Jack, passing her a screen monitor showing a floor plan of the building. Find
out how many of them there are and call me. I’ll stay here. Godamn it, but I’m
still too weak to run around just now.”

“Don’t worry, Jack,” she said, drawing her Glock pistol and checking the
safety catch. “You pick up a few tricks after a few years of nicking villains for
breaking an entry.” Gwen’s police training would hopefully come in handy yet
again.

The lock picking was a breeze. She now crept past an empty reception desk
and along a corridor, towards the only room that showed a light. That was the
one that Jack had pointed out as the target.

She had switched on a low-light pocket torch to project only red light. It was
enough to make it easier to avoid any obstacles.

As she approached her destination she heard sounds. They were those of a
man talking. She inched up to the closed door and put her right ear to the
wood.

22

“... and the fact that your country has done so much to help destroy the
natural resources of the planet Earth is something that we hold humanity
responsible for.”

“What are you talking about?” This time it was Tosh speaking. Great. She was
still alive, Gwen thought to herself.

“The coal mining came to Wales to fuel the evils of industrial production. That
precious fossil fuel was burned, burned, to fire the iron-ore furnaces,” spat out
the unknown voice, which in fact belonged to the man known as Mr Oriel.

“The beautiful forests were cut down. Wildlife was displaced. The heritage of
our descendants was cruelly, cruelly, destroyed. Wales must suffer for
initiating these outrages against the world,” continued the monologue of Mr
Oriel. “Wales must be returned to its natural state and humanity restored to its
peaceful and non-destructive state. We will tolerate it no more.”

Gwen’s ears had pricked up, and she had begun to get angry. It was one
thing abducting a colleague. It was another bloody thing to insult the Land of
Her Fathers in that way. It was as much as she could do to stop herself from
kicking the door in and barging in right away, gun blazing. “Calm down a
minute, girl,” she thought. She needed to assess the situation before throwing
away what might be her only chance.

Mr Oriel went on. “The bomb that we have fitted to the main turbine in this
power station – this evil coal-fired powered station – is activated by this
device. You will see that it has five minutes to go before it sets off the
explosion. A small blow at human industry but a necessary signal, I am
afraid.”

Gwen assumed that he was showing a device to Tosh. She shuddered as to
what her colleague had been going through.

“We must have access to the Hub to use the Rift to restore the country to its
rightful state. You, Toshiko Sato, will help us, and also play an honourable
part in this noble act. You will help atone for the sins of humanity.”

Whoever was speaking was a nutter, decided Gwen, albeit some sort of alien
nutter or a throwback from Earth’s history. Anyway, this idiot did not even
seem to realise the irony of the situation that this particular power station was
now owned by Scottish and Southern Energy, hardly a paragon of local
business. They had not even bothered to read the sign at the entrance, in
English, let alone Welsh, she fumed silently.

Before Gwen bit her tongue to calm her herself down for the second time she
heard Tosh’s response.

“I am not going to let you get access to the Hub, about which you clearly know
so much. Do it yourself if you must, but I shall not help you. Never.”

23

“We have already taken steps to weaken your commander,” said Mr Oriel.
“My colleague, whom you know as Bill Kravitz, also read your mind and
learned that your other Torchwood companions were not at hand. They were
not at their work and were too far away to meddle in our mission. He did well.”

“Not so bloody well,” thought Gwen. “So they were responsible for Jack’s
condition, and had figured out that Owen and Ianto were out of the picture for
the moment. But their so-called mind reading wasn’t all that it might have
been, thankfully. They’d missed her out. Not for much longer, though,” she
determined.

Three minutes to go. No point in waiting for one of those clichéd movie cliff-
hangers where the timer stops at 00:01. Nor for calling in Jack. He could
hardly move when she had left him in the SUV. Gwen moved away from the
door, swivelled around on one heel and kicked the door in. Clutching the
pistol, she ran straight into the room holding her pistol firmly with both hands.

She caught sight of Tosh sitting between two men. One was holding a piece
of equipment with a digital display. The detonator, it must be.

At one and same time, Toshiko looked up, Bill Kravitz and Mr Oriel turned.
They all looked at the woman in the black leather outfit wielding a gun.

“Put that thing down!” ordered Gwen. “Gwen Cooper, if you must know. From
Torchwood. Your mind-reading wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be, was it,
you bloody buffoons.”

“No, we shall complete our mission.”

Mr Oriel reached for something on his belt.

“Gwen! He’s going to ...” shouted Toshiko in horror.

But Gwen was taking no chances. Mr Oriel dropped to the floor as she fired.
Something green and sticky started to spill onto the floor.

Kravitz tried to pick up the detonator device and to grab Toshiko’s throat at
the same time.

“I’d watch that, blokes aren’t that good at multitasking,” said Gwen grimly, just
before the second shot was fired.

Gwen and Toshiko watched with surprise as Kravitz slumped to the carpet.

“... and I’m not that fast a shot,” said Gwen, breathing rapidly with
astonishment and relief.

“Glad you said it, not me,” came a voice from outside the office. The end of a
black revolver appeared at floor level from around the bottom of the door,
followed by a blue woollen-clad arm.
24

“Jack! You’re supposed to be in the SUV,” said Gwen with surprise.

“And you, my lady, were supposed to give me the gen on what was
happening,” said Jack Harkness weakly from his prone position in the
corridor. “Voilà, I give you the wonders of Torchwood teamwork.”

Toshiko and Gwen looked at each other. They both began to smile.

“Something like the survivors from an earlier section of the human race,”
announced Jack. “Or maybe from an alternate timeline, I’m not sure. Owen
can give us the low-down on the green blood. That bit is strange.”

Gwen and Toshiko had carried the bodies of Mr Oriel and Bill Kravitz out to
the SUV, as Jack had been in no fit state to do so, even after summoning up
the energy to crawl along the carpet at Uskmouth. The two corpses now
joined the growing and often macabre collection in storage in the Hub. Their
former occupants had clearly had some knowledge of time travel. The Huon
particles had indicated that. Who knew when something similar would show
up? They could form important reference material for the present or future
staff of Torchwood.

Jack had by now perked up. “Owen told me that the effects should wear off in
another day. He’ll be back in a couple of hours, he said. Got some more stiffs
with him, I’m afraid. Crashed alien spaceship stuff, no survivors, by the look of
it. Wish some of these folk would look where they are going when they try
buzzing Earth's air bases. You can get a seriously heavy fine for flying a
spaceship without due care and attention.”

“He can stick ‘em in storage himself,” said Gwen. “I for one have had enough
of lugging dead bodies down there.”

“It makes a change from the usual weirdos who say they have been abducted
by aliens, though, I suppose,” said Toshiko. “As far as I can tell, if you
believed them, you’d have to explain why most sightings occurred to people
with habitual hallucinations.” Then she added with slow deliberation, “Or like
that unpleasant pair we just stopped from throwing us all back to the Dark
Ages.” She stared in front of her looking quite uncharacteristically angry.

“Yeah, good job that the aliens we deal with come up against a bunch of
normal, fun-loving healthy human beings with not a care in the world,” offered
Jack. “Anybody for a game of strip poker before the others get back?”

At least he was back to normal.

© Geraint Day
2009 November 23
25

GLORY

It was Sunday. A day of rest for some. At least for the tourists awaiting flights
from Cardiff International Airport it was, if not for the airport and airline
employees. It certainly was not for the workers in the minor shopping mall and
the food hall that had been built to cater for travellers. Or was that to deal with
a captive audience?

It was, however, a fine and sunny day and generally restful for many. Yet after
waiting in the departure lounge for over two hours, one group of
holidaymakers was in no mood for any other problems. So it was a welcome
relief for them to hear over the public address system, “Thomas Cook Airlines
flight to Malta is now ready for boarding. Please have your boarding card
ready and have your passport open at the photo page ready for inspection.”

There was all round movement among the assembled travellers. It had been
pretty roasting sitting in the glassed-in area that had served as quite a good
greenhouse for the last 120 minutes. Now they would all be off. It was the
usual mixture for a package tour to Malta. There were lots of late middle-aged
travellers, a wheelchair and a few walking sticks. But they would soon be off,
and the atmosphere seemed to clear with a bustle made up of a both
excitement and apprehension. Plus one or two people who, having dozed off,
were asking their neighbours if that was their flight that had just been
announced. In all it was a typical scene at a fairly busy airport.

One by one, or in pairs, the band of Mediterranean bound travellers passed
the boarding desk, next to which stood two young Thomas Cook ground staff.
Away from the desk, and down towards ground level filed the hundred or so
travellers.

As the first few passengers started moving out of the terminal building and
across the tarmac towards the aircraft boarding steps, a loud voice shouted
out. It seemed to come from the flybe plane parked about 50 metres off. That
had come in from Paris all of fifteen minutes ago.

According to the report that was subsequently written up by the Health and
Safety Executive, what many of the passengers to Malta heard that sunny
afternoon was a man exclaiming, “No, no, no! I’m going to have to bail out! ...
Oh god, the cockpit’s on fire. My hands, my hands, they’re ..." The rest was,
from the consensus of the eyewitnesses, unintelligible and drowned out by his
screams.

Both the HSE and police accounts recorded that, according to several dozen
witnesses, a man’s head had shot out horizontally from an open baggage
hold. He was a baggage handler. He had had his hands over his head and
they had been flailing wildly in the air. The next thing that happened was that
the rest of him came of out the hold. Head down straight onto the ground. A
pool of blood had then started to seep around his cranium onto the concrete.

26

To cap it all, at that moment several of the Malta holidaymakers started
screaming and crying. It was clearly no longer a day of rest.

Even before the Monday mid-afternoon downpour started, the building had
looked gloomy. The huge edifice managed to pull off that feat on most days.
At least in the rain it blended a little more into the dark cloudy background of a
South Wales downpour. “A blot on the landscape,” bemoaned some of the
residents of the suburb of Llanishen, where the complex of Government
Buildings on the Parc Ty Glas Industrial Estate exerted its foreboding
presence over the surrounding area. “A baleful influence that costs us all too
much money,” said one cheery commentator. Perhaps she had been thinking
of the fact that one of the main occupants was the Cardiff office of Her
Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. That was always good for the butt of a joke.

Looking for all the world as if it had been built to fit into the depressing scene,
a shiny black SUV turned off Ty-Glas Road. After the driver had impatiently
shouted out his identity into an intercom so that the barrier would be raised,
the vehicle sped down a slope and sent spray all over the windows of the
entrance lobby as it braked sharply to a halt.

The driver got out. His large blue overcoat and peaked cap kept the rain off
while he bounded across into the lobby.

“Hi there, where’re the Health and Safety guys?” said the driver to the balding
man at the desk, who looked like he may have seen better days.

“The HSE’s up in the lift by there,” answered the man behind the desk. “But
you have to sign in first,” he added, trying to sound as if he had some sort of
authority.

“Sorry, no time for that. I’ll do you an autograph when I take the elevator back
down.”

Bounding towards the lift, the man in the overcoat pressed the button and was
soon dripping water over the floor of the lift.

“Americans!” moaned the man at the desk. “No bloody manners. Didn’t even
take his hat off.”

There was no point in calling security, he decided. So he went back to filling in
his National Lottery ticket for the week. “I’m not having it. I’ll give him what for
on the way out,” he resolved.

In the Torchwood Hub in Cardiff Bay two people were going about their
duties.

“Where’s Jack? I just brought his coffee,” said Ianto Jones.
27

Gwen Cooper replied, “Gone with the wind, as far as I know. Well, not really.
Truth is, he’s off to those big Government buildings in Llanishen.”

Ianto observed, “That’s appropriate. Depressing place; it’s where they deal
with death and taxes. They’ve got the Revenue and Customs, and the Health
and Safety Executive to boot, all in together. Horrible-looking monstrosity.
Should never have got planning permission.”

“Jack said he was off to put the HSE straight on those deaths at work they’ve
being going on about in the Western Mail these last few weeks,” said Gwen.
Then she added, after a slight pause, “Mind you, Rhys wouldn’t be too
pleased. The Health and Safety had one of his blokes in the other day ...
something to do with his transport business - risk regulation, or something or
other.”

“I’m sure that Jack will keep your dearly beloved out of it. Jack’s got bigger
things on his mind, judging from all the Rift activity lately,” said Ianto seriously.

A staid looking civil servant sipped his mug of tea, sighed and said, “Look,
Peter, I know you’ve got these fantastic notions, but those deaths are not out
of the ordinary. Tragic though they are, of course.”

Peter Watts, a young and enthusiastic HSE inspector retorted with
determination, “I don’t agree. There’ve been too many deaths and injuries in
such a short time. And the places where they happened! There’s something
linking them all. No, there’s definitely something odd been going on in Cardiff.”

Another sigh of annoyance emanated from the civil servant. But it was cut off
as the meeting room door opened suddenly, and a man in a blue Royal Air
Force greatcoat bounded in and sat down in an empty chair that happened to
be conveniently placed nearest to the door.

“Sorry to spoil your tea party, but he’s on to something!”

“Who the devil are you?!” blustered the staid looking civil servant.

“Captain Jack Harkness at your service. Torchwood,” came the swift and
snappy reply.

The Monday night shift had just begun at the distribution terminal in Cardiff
Docks. The foreman had just told Huw that one of the Maersk containers that
lay by the dozen in the storage area had been reported to have a bent hinge.

28

“Could you have a look at it?” said the foreman, looking up from the sports
pages of the South Wales Echo. “It’s the third one on the left in the second
row over there.”

“No worries,” said Huw Eriksson. He picked up a stepladder and his toolbox
from the storeroom, put the ladder under his arm and walked briskly towards
the container area. It was a fine night with a fresh breeze. A straightforward
start to his working day. Or was that night? He had worked these shifts for so
long that it did not seem to matter.

The shadows of the stacked metal containers stood out clearly under the
glare of the high-power lighting. Now he could see the one with the dodgy
hinge. It looked like something had walloped it and blackened part of it at the
same time. Maybe one of the crane drivers hadn’t been looking where he was
going with some load or other. Anyway, he’d soon have it fixed and then be
able to put the kettle on for his first cup of coffee for the night. He’d probably
be able to clean up the hinge as well. Huw stopped, unfolded the ladder and
began climbing the steps, toolbox in hand.

As he reached the top of the ladder he noticed that one of the shadows cast
by the bright artificial lighting moved for a moment. He turned around to see a
dazzling flash of light almost overhead in the night sky high up over Cardiff
Bay. It was followed a few seconds later by a loud explosion. Huw Eriksson,
together with his toolbox, were hurled to the ground before he had time to
even protect his head.

When he gradually came to consciousness three hours later he kept saying
over and over again to the nurse, as he lay in the hospital bed trembling, “No
more bombing. I can’t stand it no more. I thought surely to God the ack-ack
would have had them this time.”

The nurse had looked mystified. Head injuries could do strange things.
Equally perplexed were the police constable and the Health and Safety
Executive inspector when they were investigating the mishap, later the
following morning.

Jenny Marks had not seen her close friend Peter Watts for weeks until this
Tuesday evening after work. His work took him all over Wales. Just getting
from South to North often meant a couple of days away. Her career was in
organising events. That took her all over the UK, as well as abroad every few
months. Their meeting in the Old Brewery Quarter in Cardiff was a welcome
catch-up. They had ordered the expensive drinks and nibbles that had come
to be associated with many of the trendy redevelopments in the City Centre.

“I saw it,” said Jenny anxiously.

“Saw what?”

29

“It was up at Cardiff Castle a week ago. I had some clients attending a
conference. It was for business analysts. Some of them had wandered out of
the wine reception in Lord Bute’s bit of the Castle and they were heading off
to the old Castle Keep. Well, staggering, more like. So I thought I’d go and
see that they didn’t come to any harm. Those old stone steps are tricky even if
you haven’t had six glasses of our best champagne. With the Recession we
can’t afford to lose too many more customers. Even if they are pissed. And
occasionally obnoxious. Mind you, this chap from Liverpool, who was in
charge of them, was very nice and very helpful.”

“I suppose you have to do risk assessments for your events, especially in a
ramshackle place like the ancient part of Cardiff Castle”, mused Peter.

“Yes indeed. Don’t worry. We do. Anyway, I toddled along with this little group
of merry men,” continued Jenny. “More to keep an eye on them – sorry about
the pun there – than anything else.”

“Another poet who didn’t know it,” joked Peter.

“What? Oh, never mind. Anyway, Two of them got ahead and disappeared
into one of the rooms, you know, more like remnants of rooms these days.
One of the other lot was asking me if they served more champagne in this
part of the Castle,” explained Jenny. “Cheek. I said I’d see about that when
we got back to the Victorian bit of the Castle, but I just wanted to check where
the other two had got to.”

“The next thing – I can’t remember it all, as it happened so quickly, was that
this little man with glasses – I mean spectacles – and a beard came running
past me,” she added.

“He nearly knocked me over. I looked back to where he’d come from and I
can swear that I saw this figure with what looked like a ... a sword and some
sort of, what do you call it, knight’s uniform. It was standing there in the
shadows at the back of the room.” She paused and gazed into her glass.

“What?!” said Peter with astonishment. “A knight in armour?”

“Yes, like those kids’ toys they sell in the souvenir shop on the way out,”
replied Jenny, looking up slowly. “I only got a quick look because the next
thing was that the bloke with the glasses was hurling himself off from the top
of the stone steps. He shouted something like, ‘Owain’s men have broken
down the West Gate of the City. God help us all!’. Bonkers, if you ask me. I
don’t mean to speak ill of him, in the circumstances of course.”

There was a moment of silence. “Phew,” gasped Peter. “I didn’t know you’d
been there.”

“The rest you do know, because that’s when your lot in the HSE got involved,”
muttered Jenny slowly and as if in a dream.

30

Before she had fully woken from her reverie she glanced up, blinked twice
and saw a man striding rapidly towards their table.

“The fancy dress party’s round the back, I think,” she called out to him.

“Whaddya mean fancy dress? Can’t a guy take a walk without being noticed
in this City?” He pronounced “City” with that “Cidy” sound that many residents
of North America habitually used.

He stopped and said, “Hi, Peter, glad you agreed to see me to fill me in, after I
drove over to your office yesterday. Hush hush, of course. Not a word to
anyone.”

“Ah, Jenny, I forgot to say that Captain Jack Hartnell would be joining us,”
said Peter sheepishly.

“Harkness, Captain Jack Harkness,” interrupted Jack.

“Thanks for keeping me informed. Eventually. But why’s he dressed like an
RAF officer?” asked Jenny looking quickly back and forth from Jack to Peter.

“Jeez, thinking of it like that, it reminds me of when I first saw the Doctor.”

“Have you been ill?” enquired Jenny.

“No, not that kinda doctor. It was when I was in the RAF in London, England,
World War 2. Group Captain Jack Harkness.”

“Are you sure it isn’t a psychiatrist you’ve been seeing?” said Jenny trying to
suppress a giggle. She had now come back to reality. Even if the rather
striking man in the greatcoat showed no signs of doing so.

“Nah, The Doctor. One of the most amazing characters in the Universe.
Centre of attention. Fun. Attractive - personality and every other way.
Everybody wants to be with the guy. Can be dangerous, though. But wouldn’t
miss him for the world.”

“Tell me more. Do you have his email address?” She was still suppressing a
laugh.

“Jenny!” said Peter, trying to bring the conversation back to normal. That is, if
the evening’s conversation was going to be on subjects that bore any relation
to chit-chat.

“Aw, the Doctor can be a bit of a killjoy at times,” said Jack as he leaned back
in his chair. “I remember the time he wanted to stop me inviting those two ...
Anyhow, let’s talk about the present.”

“Oh, sorry, I’m Jenny. I organise events.”

31

“Pleased to meet ya, ”said Jack, adding a flourish as he laid his hat on the
table. “Maybe you could organise one for the two of us later. I had in mind a
little ...”

Peter Watts butted in firmly, “She’s with me. Anyway, I was just going to say
that – with all the Iraq and Afghanistan stuff in the news every day of the week
– it annoys me that most people know sod all about the military history in their
own local area.”

“What do you mean?” Jenny sounded hurt. “Aren’t you interested in what I
was telling you about what I saw at Cardiff Castle last week?”

“Yes. I am, and I’ll come to that in a minute,” answered Peter.

Jenny sighed, turned to the new arrival and said, “He’s always going on about
military history. What was it you said the other week? The Duke of Wellington
popped down to The Mumbles to inspect the troops, wasn’t it?”

“No, no. It was Admiral Nelson who went to Merthyr Tydfil,” answered Peter
looking very studious.

Jenny snapped, “What for? Why’d he want to go to Merthyr? Took the wrong
turning on the way to his ships at Barry Docks, did he?!”

“He was inspecting the making of cannon for the Royal Navy, as it happens.”

“Enough of the military past. What about the ongoing situation?” asked Jack.
“By the way, mine’s a coffee, a large latté,” he said to the passing waitress. “I
need a clear head. You guys want a refill?”

After a quick glance at Jenny, Peter said, “Thanks, not for now. It was really
good that you came along to the meeting yesterday.”

“Now you can do me a favour,” responded Jack. “I need to have some more
details on those workplace deaths in unusual circumstances that you picked
up on. We need to get a handle and correlate some of those common
features.”

“Pity the Head of the unit in HSE didn’t pick up on it. He thought I was off on
one, making those links that had started to dawn on me.”

“You mean those military links you were on about?” asked Jenny.

“Exactly,” said Peter with a certain intonation of satisfaction.

“Yeah, your boss he seemed a bit of a boring guy,” observed Jack after taking
a swig of the large cup of coffee that had just arrived. “I guess it takes all sorts
in your line of business. Now, apart from the incident at Cardiff Airport, and
the one at the Docks last night, there’ve been several more, haven’t there?”

32

“Jenny was talking about an incident at Cardiff Castle and a man in armour
with a sword, just now,” responded Peter.

“We logged that one at the Hub,” said Jack.

“What, you mean another incident? The Hub’s that new night-club near the
railway station over the road, isn’t it?” said Jenny.

“The Hub’s what we call our base,” said Jack.

“Oh. I see.” She didn’t really, but asked, “But what’s the military connection
with Cardiff Airport? I’ve been on holiday from there loads of times. And on
business trips. I’ve never seen any guns or bombers or anything like that. And
talking about bases, isn’t MOD St Athan the main military airbase around
here? I’ve run a few events there for some of those Ministry of Defence
organisations ... and the odd overseas people who looked like arms buyers to
me,” she added with a look of disgust.

Jack carried on, “Back in 1942 Cardiff Airport was a base for training RAF
pilots. I’ll never forget some of those Spitfire rookies. It was called RAF
Rhoose in those days. I got friendly with a few of them. Some good times in
the country pubs nearby. And afterwards. Great times.” He paused and
sighed. “They’d missed out on the Battle of Britain, but there was still a war to
be won.” He drank the last of his latté. “The coffee in those days was godamn
awful! Calling it coffee caused damage to the language as well as to the taste
buds. Nice change having this one. Think I’ll have another.”

“Are you ... sure you don’t need that psychiatrist?” Jenny asked, looking
closely into Jack’s eyes. “I’m organising an international conference for some
of them in Swansea soon, and maybe I could put you in touch with one of
them.”

Jack simply grinned.

Peter looked as mystified as Jenny. There was definitely something odd about
Cardiff these days. There was also something unusual about Torchwood,
although he was not entirely sure about the exact details. There had been
some confidential briefing down at the Welsh Assembly Government in
Cathays Park a few months back. He was not considered senior enough to
get an invitation. Also he had never had security clearance. Maybe he would
get that after the present situation was resolved.

Anxious to carry on with the business, Peter said, “Anyhow, as far as I know
there was the delivery driver who swerved into a loading bay who swore he’d
seen a Roman soldier complete with shield and helmet. I thought at first it was
down to the firm making its drivers work excessive hours and the driver being
a bit too tired in the early hours of the morning. We’re not keen on that at the
best of times. But when the transport people checked the tachograph we
couldn’t pin that on them. The driver wasn’t too badly hurt, but very shaken

33

up. And insistent about a Roman soldier. Drugs and booze didn’t show up
either, before anyone asks.”

“Can you get me some more of the file records on that one?” asked Jack.
“Post mortem results on the deaths, too. I know your boss-man didn’t seem
too keen on giving too much away at yesterday’s little get together. But it’s the
sort of detail that we need to stop any more of this type of event threatening
Cardiff.”

“Threatening Cardiff?” asked Peter with astonishment. “I know that strange
things are going on, but surely they’re not a danger to the whole City?”

“You wouldn’t want to know,” said Jack. “Believe me.”

At that moment he picked up his mobile phone, which was glowing. “Yeah,
sure. I’ll be back right away.” He turned to Peter and Jenny, stood up and said
“Sorry, got to go now, but if you can get me the details ...”

Jack put a £10 note on the table. “That should cover the coffees”, he said.
“And call this number,” he added, as he walked towards the exit, tossing a
pair of business cards towards Peter and Jenny.

“I’ll see what I can do,” called out Peter, waving goodbye to the retreating RAF
greatcoat.

“Wow!” said Jenny. “I’m not sure that I know what’s going on, but he’s in a
hurry.”

Peter thought for a moment and said, “Yes, and I think we both seem to have
been of some help. Another drink?”

Jack strode into the Hub. It still seemed quiet since they had lost Owen and
Toshiko. And Suzy, of course. Twice, in her case. And all the rest over the
years. It was a dangerous business defending Earth from hostile aliens and
dealing with all the weird and monstrous things that the Rift running through
Cardiff could throw at them. But Torchwood still had to go on. There was no
time for reminiscence. Even with all the time in the world, which Jack’s unique
condition seemed to have granted him.

“Whaddya have for me?” he asked Ianto.

“I have a lot to offer, and we can see about that later,” said Ianto.

Gwen yawned and said, “Can’t you two keep this to business?”

“Who said it wasn’t business?” responded Jack with more than just a twinkle
in his eye. “I didn’t notice that Ianto said anything other than that.”

34

Ianto straightened his tie, which was a pointless exercise, as it never needed
straightening, such was his usual immaculate demeanour.

“I’ve been looking into the war and military history in and around Cardiff,” he
said, producing a file containing pages of detailed printouts. “We know about
the World War 2 connections. Those tie in with the incidents at the Airport and
the Docks. The description from Cardiff Castle links with Owain Glyndŵr’s
men entering the gates of Cardiff in 1400 AD. The local council and HSE had
that one about the building worker who ran into the front window of Tesco in
Caerphilly, screaming that one of Cromwell’s Roundheads was trying to stick
him with a pike. Didn’t do much for their sales that day. Then there are several
ancient Roman connections all around Cardiff, of course. That links with a few
sightings of centurions and other Roman soldiers linked to half a dozen
serious injuries and a couple of deaths.”

Jack said, “It looks like we are dealing with an alien that loves to conjure up
the violence and dangers of war to frighten the locals.”

“What’s it doing that for?” asked Gwen.

“I don’t have the faintest idea,” answered Jack. “Probably gets its kicks, its
energy, that way. All I know is that we need to put a stop to it right now. The
HSE guy I saw earlier is going to get us some more background on some of
the other events, by the way. Before we do that let’s have our own energy –
from some coffee.”

“I’m onto that right now,” said Ianto. Then, a moment later, he called back,
“Jack, I’ve just noticed an alert about a radio message from the police.
They’re saying that there’s group of hoodies being attacked by an eight-foot
high creature with green skin and claws up in Canton.”

“Leave them to sort it out, then,” said Gwen. “The hoodies were probably
trying to beat up the local Asians. Looks like the locals are getting their own
back.”

“Did you say green skin and claws?” Jack said slowly. “That sounds like one
of the Slitheen family. Don’t you remember the plan to build a nuclear reactor
in the middle of Cardiff? The folks behind the Blaidd Drwg Project were the
Slitheen family from the Planet Raxacacoricofallapatorius. I don’t really think
that any of the Slitheen are back but I think our alien or aliens may be living
off the fears that event stirred up. The Slitheen were gonna make the reactor
explode and open up the Rift. The Doctor put a stop to that little game. We’d
better get down there. I’m off to the SUV.”

Jack halted for a moment, then added, “Gwen, we may need you to
smoothtalk your police colleagues.”

“At your service, Jack,” piped up Gwen as she ran along towards the exit.

“Thanks for the offer. Not a word to Rhys, though.”
35

For a moment, Gwen’s expression resembled a scowl and a smile at the
same time.

“Ianto, I hadn’t forgotten you, so come along too. The coffee’s gonna have to
wait,” Jack said.

The SUV screeched to a halt just behind a row of police cars. Ahead in the
darkened corner of a cul de sac was a group of six or seven youths who
seemed to be cowering and whimpering as they lay prone on the tarmac.

“Got it all under control, have you?” Jack shouted to the nearest man with
HEDDLU written on the back of his fluorescent jacket. “Captain Jack
Harkness, Torchwood.”

The police officer turned round slowly. He gave Jack a disapproving look up
and down, then said, “Torchwood. Eh? Alright? No, the funny thing is that
these yobs were making the running all evening. Menacing the locals. Racial
sort of stuff, you know. Now they are sitting there yelling about being attacked
by big green monsters. Probably on substances, if you ask me. They usually
are.”

Ianto, handheld monitor in hand, said, “Excuse me, but there’s definitely a
disturbance.”

“Of course there’s a bloody disturbance, my butty just told you that, didn’t he?”
said another policeman standing nearby. “They’ve been chucking bricks and
taunting local residents all night, on and off. We don’t need no Torchwood to
tell us that.”

“Enough of that, Trefor, ”said Gwen. “We only come when we’re needed. And
tonight’s one of those occasions.”

“Gwen flipping Cooper, haven’t seen you for yonks,” said Constable Trefor
Jones. “Thought you’d packed it in.”

“No, and you won’t be seeing me or anybody else for a while unless we get
this alien sorted out good and proper now,” Gwen said with annoyance.

Jack pulled out his Webley pistol and started to advance, leading Gwen and
Ianto through the now parting line of police.

“Keep a lookout for alien presence,” ordered Jack.

“What sort of alien?” Ianto started to ask. Then, a moment later he exclaimed,
“Look! Over there!

36

Just behind a wooden fence loomed a dark figure. Although almost
completely black it had a very faint pulsating bluish glow about its edges.
Some said later that it sort of flowed down towards the prone youths. Well,
that was the best thing they could think of to describe it.

“Don’t hit me again!” bleated one of the boys, tightly holding his arms over his
head, trying to cover his eyes and ears at the same time. “We’re not going to
stop you building your nuclear whatsimacallit. We’ll go home. No more
trouble, honest, mon.”

The dark figure stopped its creepy descent when Jack called out, “That’s
enough! Leave them alone.”

There was a moment’s silence.

Then a growing hiss started to fill the night time air.

“Stop that!” cried Jack.

The shadowy figure started to move towards Jack. Jack Harkness stood
there. The menacing figure flowed on.

“C’mon. You know darned well that there’s no war, no Slitheen, no air raid
here. And I’m gonna put an end to your mind games.” Jack stood defiantly in
the path of the alien. “Go, vamoose, quit, find a real war someplace else.”

He aimed the gun at the head. The shape kept advancing.

“Jack, for God’s sake get out of the way!” shouted Gwen.

“No way,” said Jack as he stood his ground. “It can’t fool me. I’m not seeing
the Slitheen that those kids were probably seeing just now. All I get is the
vibes of this evil entity. It’s alone, by the way. That’ll make things easier for
me.”

The shape was looming, right up in front of Jack. There was no sound.
Everybody – police, Gwen, Ianto and the youths – was silent.

“Damn you,” said Jack through gritted teeth as the shape engulfed him.

Gwen and Ianto looked on in horror. Why hadn’t Jack moved out of the path
of the creature, if that was what it was? All that could be seen was the shape,
now with flashing pulsations, changing from blue to red to yellow. There were
flames, and was that a view of a gun, and a plane, and sabre, an airship, that
seemed to come and go out of sight against the outline of the dark and
foreboding figure?

Then suddenly the dark shape disappeared. They could see Jack again. He
was falling to the ground, gasping, his legs giving way beneath him.

37

Gwen rushed forward. She put a hand on his shoulder. He was breathing
rapidly. Then a slow smile spread across his face.

“I’m OK. Cardiff is OK. It’s gone.”

“What’s gone?” asked Gwen.

“There’s been enough frightening the locals and filling their heads with
imagined fears. Of war. And death. War and death. And all the other
happenings that the thing thrived on. It conjured up the terrors of past wars
and conflict to terrify the people of the present. Its whole life force relied on
that. Sucking the very fear out of people. I’ve seen enough death and
mayhem to last loads of lifetimes, so picking on someone who knows what it
means did it no good at all. I think that I probably managed to frighten it.”

“Sometimes you scare us too,” said Gwen softly.

Back at the Hub the following morning, Jack, Gwen and Ianto were sitting
quietly.

Ianto looked up. “Good job that creature didn’t get onto another of the links
with Ty Glas.”

Jack looked puzzled.

“What I mean is that when I was looking into some of the military links with
Cardiff’s history I came across the Royal Ordnance Factory. Except that it’s
not there anymore. It’s now the Parc Ty Glas Business Park. Where the HSE
and the Revenue and Customs are,” Ianto said. “Apparently, after 1940 the
Government built a whole series of them in areas of the country that were
thought of as ‘safe’. By that they meant being away from populated areas.
Cardiff lost out – or gained, depending on your point of view – because
politicians said the City needed the jobs after the high unemployment of the
1930s. So they put one here. It was there until 1987 but then it ...”

Gwen interrupted. “The only military action in Cardiff that I came across when
I was in the police was on the weekend in St Mary Street. Proper set of field
hospitals they set up there on a Saturday night. Especially when a load of
football hooligans had been let loose on the Millennium Stadium. Real
bloodbaths they had. The only good thing was the extra overtime. Oh, and a
bag of chips on Caroline Street afterwards, if we were lucky.”

“As I was saying,” continued Ianto, as he was determined to let his colleagues
know of his thoroughness. “In 1987 the Ordnance Factory got turned into part
of the Atomic Weapons Establishment. That lasted until the Nineties. That’s
when it was closed down.”

38

“God knows, we’d have been dealing with reports of little glowing UFOs from
Area 51 or from the planet Zog,” quipped Gwen.

“Or maybe even from Raxacacoricofallapatorius.” It was Jack’s turn to
interject. “Now, you both know as well as I do that we only deal with the real
world. We’re not sci fi nuts,” he added.

“That’s true,” said Ianto. “Just another normal day at the office. I’ll go and
have a look at what’s showing on the Rift Monitor. And at the coffee pot.”

© Geraint Day
2009 November 2
39

Title font from: http://sostopher.deviantart.com/art/Torchwood-Font-143341310.

40

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