Torchwood_Exodus Code

by Carole E. Barrowman

  ‘What exactly is a hydrothermal vent?’ asked Vlad.

  ‘Essentially an underwater geyser.’

  ‘And the order of these disturbances?’ asked Jack, fitting this data into his own theories.

  ‘Eva has a hunch,’ cut in Vlad, ‘that these deep water events are synchronised in some way.’

  ‘The geysers beginning to erupt above the surface that the Ice Maiden’s probes are detecting,’ continued Shelley, ‘is a primary consequence of these hydrothermal vents. The first was off the coast of southern Peru, followed exactly one minute later by deep-water eruptions off the coast of Wales, Scotland, New Zealand and Indonesia. And, Captain, these hydrothermal vents are not registering on any of our traditional measurement scales. Currently, according to my data, only one other source is monitoring these vents.’

  ‘Who?’ asked Jack.

  ‘The information is being downloaded from a UK government satellite to an office in Thames House, London.’

  ‘Christ,’ said Vlad, ‘that’s MI5. I thought you said this software and this mission weren’t going to bring the men in black on us.’

  ‘This particular man in black is on our side,’ said Jack. ‘And although Shelley can monitor what they’re doing, they cannot–’ Vlad rolled his eyes. ‘Trust me. They’ve no idea what we’re doing, and I have my friend’s word, that we’ll be allowed some freedom. For now, anyway. He’s holding Big Brother and Big Sister at bay.’

  Eva was only half-listening to Jack and Vlad. She was much more interested in the unusual discovery that the ocean had a number of new hydrothermal vents erupting from deep within the Earth’s core. More than she’d tracked yesterday. As a scientist this was thrilling. Right now, it also helped her to suppress the desire for Vlad that was not far beneath her surface. Her desire was not helped one bit by the fact that the Captain, in a more refined and imposing way, was pretty gorgeous too.

  Focus, she thought. Focus.

  ‘According to my calculations,’ continued Shelley, ‘a highly unusual energy field from the first eruption is creating the ongoing tremors. They are not, in fact, the result of any shifting of tectonic plates as Eva and Vlad had originally speculated from the data.’

  ‘Is it morphic resonance?’ asked Jack.

  ‘I’ve been monitoring the morphic fields,’ said Vlad. ‘It’s one of my areas of interest – was, that is, until my funding was stolen. I’ve not noticed anything unusual.’

  Shelley continued. ‘The data also suggests that the water around each of the vents has a considerably higher measure of carbon, iron and sulphur than is normal. I’m also detecting traces of something else. I’ll need more time for analysis.’

  ‘The ocean floor always has measurable carbonic acid,’ said Eva. ‘It’s part of the carbon cycle and part of the Earth’s natural waste disposal system.’ She was graphing the data onto another screen as Shelley presented it.

  Vlad was watching Shelley, who said, ‘I beg your pardon, Eva, but although you’re accurate in your assessment that the ocean is part of the carbon cycle, the amounts of carbonic acid I’m detecting surrounding each of the hydrothermal vents is much higher than what is considered normal, and, along with the water temperature, the levels are rising significantly on a daily basis.’

  Shelley drew her pen across her leather journal and projected her numbers onto Eva’s graph, showing that the carbon levels in the areas around each of the underwater geysers were more than a thousand times greater than other parts of the ocean. ‘I’m also detecting many of the vents are forming vent chimneys.’

  ‘We must have a malfunction in our probes,’ said Eva, shocked by the data. ‘That’s not possible in such a short period of time. Vent chimneys take thousands and thousands of years to form.’ She looked at Vlad. ‘We dropped the probes at all the places where there had been tremors initially, but something must be wrong. That data doesn’t make sense. Shelley, can we activate the cameras on the probes that have them?’

  ‘Activating cameras to the screen.’

  Vlad stood and walked across the passageway to the mess, returning with four beers, passing one each to Jack, Eva and Cash. Looking across the room at Shelley, he held up his bottle.

  ‘That function is sadly not yet operational either.’

  Vlad took a long pull of his beer, as the live feed from three probes miles beneath the ocean appeared on the large screen. ‘All of our probes can’t be malfunctioning, Eva. I’ll run a diagnostic on the others, but for all of them to fail, at the same time? Not gonna happen.’

  Eva peered at the video images on the screen. ‘I don’t believe it. It’s like I’m watching a million years of the Earth’s evolution in seconds. What’s going on?’

  ‘What exactly are we looking at?’ asked Jack, standing behind the two analysts.

  Eva pointed to one of the vents where a beehive like structure was forming around the underwater geyser. ‘These craters or cracks in the ocean’s floor vent a complex combination of superheated chemicals and gases. The only thing that keeps them from actually boiling the water is the pressure from the ocean. In all of these cases, what’s known as a vent chimney can be seen rising up out of the ocean, surrounding each of the geysers. Shelley, can you bring up a clearer picture of a vent chimney?’

  In the space next to Shelley, an image appeared that took Jack’s breath away. He leant against Eva’s chair, a wave of images crashing through his mind, one after another – a man, a kiss, a plane, a mountain, a fight, then falling, falling, the ground opening up and swallowing him. A beautiful woman kissing him deeply, passionately, longingly, a sleek, lithe, midnight black-eyed puma. The fierce familiarity of the images shook Jack to his core.

  He stared again at the picture that Shelley had thrown up, aware that something had shifted in his mind.

  ‘This,’ said Eva, ‘is a vent chimney, a massive tower of oxidized iron, zinc and rock rising out of the ocean floor.’

  The chimney was spewing black smoke.

  And suddenly Jack knew where he’d seen the chimney before. Inside a mountain many years ago.

  ‘Jack, are you OK?’ asked Vlad, offering Jack his chair. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

  ‘Not a ghost… a sliver from my past,’ said Jack, sitting down, calming his racing heart. Jack finally understood that, for whatever reason, his brain was rebuilding a gap in his memory, a void that had been there for a long time, putting pieces together that long ago something or someone had split apart, sending its shards boomeranging across his consciousness. And now they were finally returning.

  Jack’s brain needed more time to process what he was no longer forgetting, time to let his memory fill the blank spaces as if it were rebuilding a damaged track on a hard drive.

  50

  ‘SHELLEY,’ SAID JACK, gulping most of his beer. ‘How many hydrothermal chimneys have the Ice Maiden’s deep-water probes detected in the past, say, two weeks?’

  ‘Including the one now forming off the coast of Wales, Captain, seven.’

  ‘What!’ said Eva. ‘That’s impossible. It’s just impossible. It takes at least a million years for that kind of geologic phenomenon to happen. The Atlantis Massif is at least two million years old.’

  ‘What the hell is the Atlantis Massif? Sounds like a breed of dog,’ said Cash, feeling more out of his league every minute of this conversation.

  ‘Shall I explain?’ asked Shelley.

  ‘Please,’ said Jack, giving Vlad back his chair. Jack stood in front of the screen, watching all the vent chimneys flashing on the map. Crossing his arms, he stared at it, his jaw clenching and unclenching in sync with the pulsing lights.

  ‘The Atlantis Massif, named after the lost city of Atlantis,’ explained Shelley, ‘is a submarine mountain in the North Atlantic approximately twelve miles under the sea, rising at its peak approximately 14,000 feet. It can be found off the northern coast of Africa and east of the Mid-Atlantic mountain range.’ With a wave of her hand Shelley brought up a comput
erised image of the underwater mountain in the space between her and Jack. ‘Eva is correct. This massif is 2.5 million years old.’

  ‘And,’ interrupted Eva, ‘the two or three other core complexes on the ocean floor like this one that have been discovered are at least that old too. The Earth simply does not respond to change that quickly.’

  ‘So, Shelley,’ said Cash, ‘let me see if I understand this correctly.’

  ‘I can talk more slowly, Cash, if that will help.’ Shelley giggled.

  Despite her growing anxiety, Eva laughed too. Jack shrugged as if a sense of humour was exactly what you’d expect from a Torchwood program.

  ‘These tremors are creating hydrothermal vents and they in turn are forming chimneys like this one,’ Cash said, ignoring them. He pointed to the growing conical structures they were seeing from their underwater probes.

  ‘That is correct.’

  ‘And these geological phenomena are happening at a speed of evolution that’s impossible,’ Cash caught Jack’s eye, ‘at least by the rules as we know them?’

  ‘Also correct.’

  ‘If all that’s true,’ said Eva, finally regaining some composure. ‘Then what’s causing the eruptions in the first place?’

  For the first time since he and Eva had started monitoring these deep-water events two weeks earlier, Vlad was beginning to worry that something pretty bad was happening underneath the sea.

  ‘Have you ever heard of the Gaia theory?’ asked Jack.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Eva, ‘but it’s a theory with only a few disparate threads to prove it.’

  ‘Oh, there’s a few more threads still to be found,’ said Jack.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Trust me.’

  ‘Gaia is one of the ancient names given to the goddess of the Earth,’ said Shelley. ‘The Gaia theory was named after her and it maintains that all living organisms, including the Earth itself, are part of a complex process of self-regulation that strives for balance and sustainability. This stability, this balance, is dependent on three important functions: the salinity in the oceans, the oxygen in the atmosphere and keeping deformation and destruction caused by the human population in balance with both of those things.’

  ‘Otherwise,’ asked Vlad, ‘what happens?’

  ‘The balance is disrupted,’ said Jack, ‘and the Earth can no longer sustain life as we know it.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Listen,’ said Jack, ‘We know that global warming is out of control, that the Earth’s atmosphere is already damaged, maybe beyond repair, and we know that global warming is affecting everything from weather to crops to species extinction. If we now have hydrothermal chimneys suddenly flooding the oceans with metal sulphides, then we’re well on the way to desalinating the oceans and completely disrupting the Earth’s ability to self-regulate.’

  Eva was poring over the data that Shelley had summarised, using a series of calculations and simulations that would have taken her and Vlad months to complete.

  ‘Jack, you need to look at this,’ Eva said. ‘We now have a comparison of all the dates and times of the deep-water events with the reported synaesthesia incidents in the world.’

  The three of them stood next to each other, watching the map light up as one by one, the dates of the outbreaks of synaesthesia flashed in orange next to the already pulsing red of the deep-water vents.

  Vlad looked from one to the other. ‘That’s not good, right?’

  ‘It’s not good at all,’ said Jack. ‘Shelley, we need to know exactly what these hydrothermal chimneys are spewing into the oceans and quickly.’

  ‘It will take me a little more time to analyse fully, but on a superficial glance I would say that it’s iron, sulphur, carbonic acid, hydrogen and something else that I cannot categorise yet from my samples.’

  ‘Run the data as quickly as you can.’

  ‘It would help if I didn’t need to use part of my program for projection.’

  ‘Of course.’ Jack tapped the disc, and Shelley disappeared.

  51

  Southern Ocean, a week before Isela’s shot

  THE FIRST HYDROTHERMAL chimney erupted from the ocean’s surface and became visible a hundred miles off the southern coast of New Zealand, forming a shell around one of the smaller geysers to erupt.

  A charter fishing cruiser was the only boat close enough to witness the event, but the passengers on board, a honeymooning couple from California and two retired lawyers had no chance to report it, photograph it, tweet it, or even comment about it among themselves.

  Along with their four passengers, the cruiser’s first and second mates watched in awe as an uneven rocky shell began to encase the geyser as if the water was shooting out rocks and building a wall around itself.

  In 10 minutes and 42 seconds the geyser was encased completely, leaving a massive conical structure visible above sea level, thin veins of pulsing silver flashing across its ribbed uneven surface.

  ‘Jesus Christ! What the hell is that?’ said one of the lawyers, digging around under his seat for his camera. He never reached it.

  Seconds before the hydrothermal vent was sealed, his new wife let out a low anguished howl, picked up her fishing spear and stabbed her husband through his back.

  ‘You should have taken me to Rome,’ she mumbled.

  She whipped round and slashed the throats of the two retirees with her husband’s fillet knife before they knew what was happening.

  ‘I hate the stink of fish.’

  The first mate saw the young wife charge at his friend with a bloody spear.

  ‘Danny! Look out,’ he screamed, pushing his friend away from the control panel as the woman stabbed the harpoon through the back of his chair.

  While Danny scrambled across the floor in a desperate attempt to get away from the woman, his mate darted down to the cabin tearing open all the cabinets, pulling everything from drawers in a panicked search for the hand gun that he knew the owner kept hidden for emergencies. He was tossing books from the locker above one of the spare bunks when he heard his friend’s dying screams from above.

  Then silence.

  Dropping to his knees, he dragged the extra fishing gear from a metal storage locker from beneath the lower bunk.

  ‘Please be here. Please be here.’

  ‘It’s not,’ the woman said, a beat before she shot him.

  Blood-splattered and muttering angrily to herself, the new wife climbed up on deck, surveyed her carnage, then with a trembling hand lifted the gun to her own head and fired.

  52

  JACK PUSHED OPEN the iron door of Dana’s cabin, stepping quietly inside. He stood over Gwen’s bunk, brushing a wisp of hair from her forehead, watching the steady rise and fall of her chest, hearing the slow drip of the IV sedative, hanging from the bunk above. Gwen’s arms were covered in bruises and she had a purple target around her eye, but the wound on her arm was healing, the image no longer as visible as it had been.

  ‘You are one tough lady,’ Jack whispered.

  Lifting her hand, Jack checked her pulse. Normal. He’d been checking every couple of hours, not only afraid of a reaction to the IV sedative but also afraid she might break through the sedation and hurt herself again.

  Jack kissed her forehead, tucked her arm under the blankets and backed out into the passageway where he bumped into Hollis.

  ‘Bon ami, perfect timing,’ said Hollis, following close behind Jack as he navigated the tight passage to his cabin.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ asked Jack when he got to his door.

  ‘I wanted to offer you dessert,’ said Hollis.

  ‘I appreciate that, Hollis, but I don’t think I could eat another slice of your grandmother’s pecan pie no matter how delicious it was.’

  Hollis stepped directly in front of Jack, placing his hand flat on Jack’s chest. ‘Ah wasn’t offerin’ pie.’

  Jack grinned. ‘In that case, you’d better come inside.’

  *

&nb
sp; A ship at dawn is never a quiet place. Every space is small, every sound big, every voice amplified.

  Cash thumped on Jack’s cabin door at 6.15 the next morning.

  ‘Hollis Jefferson Albert the third,’ called Cash, thumping again, ‘this is your captain speaking. The one you work for not the one you’re screwing. If you don’t get your worn-out ass into the kitchen and feed me, you’ll be sorry you ever set foot on my ship.’

  Hollis rolled away from Jack, grabbed his clothes and headed for the door. ‘Later, mon cher. He’s just cranky because Dana’s not here and he had to sleep alone.’ Hollis blew Jack a kiss and darted down the passageway naked, his clothes bundled in his arms.

  ‘I can see where you’ve been, you know,’ yelled Sam, sticking his head out of his cabin.

  ‘I’m willing to share,’ laughed Hollis.

  Jack was climbing off his bunk when Eva pushed into his cabin. She sounded breathless and looked exhausted.

  Jack grabbed the sheet, wrapping it around his waist.

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ she said. ‘I saw Hollis head to the showers. I figured you were free.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s a small ship.’

  Jack took two quick strides towards her. She backed into the door. Jack leaned closer, his hip brushing against hers, his hand trailing along her bare arm, lifting her head to his. She exhaled, but she didn’t move.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ Jack whispered.

  ‘Not that.’ She blushed, but didn’t duck out of his way.

  Jack grinned and backed off, sitting on the edge of the bunk. ‘Are you always this easy to embarrass?’

  ‘Not usually,’ she admitted, looking away from Jack’s piercing stare.

  ‘Been a while, has it? Vlad not fast on the uptake?’

  This time even her ears burned. ‘Vlad might be if I looked like Shelley.’

  ‘Hmm. Don’t confuse Vlad’s fantasy with what he really wants; otherwise, it wouldn’t be a fantasy.’ Jack pulled on his trousers, letting his braces hang loose. ‘What brought you charging along here so early this morning?’