by Dan Abnett
‘Jack? Jack, just follow the call.’
‘Christ almighty!’ James said. ‘Look at this!’
Gwen moved in behind him. She stared over James’s shoulder at the monitor on the master control box, her phone still pressed to her ear.
Something had appeared on the dim screen, like a radar echo, a light-bouncing outline. It was a chapel, except it wasn’t exactly. It was the ghost outline of a chapel, a luminous diagram. Struggling, the ring of scanners were painting something half-solid.
‘Jack? Jack? We can see the shape of the chapel on our system! Jack?’
Jack Harkness said something in reply, but it was too distorted to make sense of. On the monitor, two phantom figures appeared, ephemeral and half-formed. They were stepping out of the outlined chapel’s outlined doorway.
Gwen looked up. In the hard daylight, there was nothing to see inside the ring of mounted scanners.
‘Jack?’
‘They’re coming out,’ James said. ‘I…’
He faltered. He looked up at her, pain lacing his features. ‘Gwen, I feel really sick. I-’
James collapsed on the ground, quivering, his feet kicking.
‘Oh God! Oh Christ! James!’ Gwen exclaimed, bending over him. She tried to hold James’s body steady and hold the phone to her ear at the same time.
James went still. Blood dripped out of his left nostril.
‘Jack?’ she whispered.
‘Gwen? We’re right outside. In the dark. It’s really dark. Are you there?’
‘Yes, Jack. Follow my voice. Scrub that, follow the Amok.’
‘OK.’ Jack sounded like a scared child. It was not a tone she associated with him, nor one she wanted to.
‘Gwen? Gwen, I think it’s here.’
At first, she thought he meant the Amok, but that wasn’t it. Over the open line, she heard the footsteps. They were coming closer, hobnails on loose flags, clack clack clack clack.
Big Wooof. The sound of those footsteps was by far the scariest thing she would ever hear in her life.
FOURTEEN
Mr Dine vaulted off the burnished roof shell of the Millennium Centre and landed on the dry boards of the Quay below in a single bound.
He landed in a shock-absorbing crouch and slowly rose upright. Combat modulated, flicker-fast, skin-sheathed in battledress, he read the area. Environment appraisal, a super-vast sensory processing that took barely a nanosecond from initial data-capture to final tactical assessment. The gleaming finger of the water tower smelled especially hot to his elevated senses. He shot towards it.
Visitors and tourists milled around the area, all the way down Roald Dahl Plass, chattering in the colourless sunlight and taking pictures. None of them saw him, even though he passed amongst them. None of them recorded him in their pictures, even though he was right there in shot many times.
This was because he was simply moving too fast. Hyper-acceleration zigzagged him in and out of the bustling traffic as if he was occupying an entirely separate time scheme. The people were slo-mo to him, swaying, lumbering, cumbersome. It was also, partly, because he was invested for war, and the matt-grey sleeve of the battledress shrugged off light and colour like smoke.
In extremis, Mr Dine had switched to autonomous running. The upload was conspicuously unreliable, unacceptably compromised, and the fix undefined, so Mr Dine had muted the upload’s data stream. He didn’t need the confusion. For the sake of the Principal, he knew he had to act logically, and make the sort of executive anticipatory decisions all loyal bodyguards of the First Senior were expected to make when it came to the crunch.
This was the crunch. In selecting him, him out of all the exalted First Seniors, for this tour of duty, the Lord of the Border had placed enormous trust in Mr Dine, and Mr Dine wasn’t about to betray that trust. Protect the Principal. Protect the Principal. All other issues were secondary. That was why he had been inserted onto the Earth.
He was buzzing, his body singing with the immense power the investment had bestowed upon him. This was his purpose, in its purest, most ineluctable form, these brief, shining moments of performance. This was the fleeting joy of being what he was, what he had volunteered to be. This was why he had been made the way he was.
A selfless, devoted soldier. An implacable force. An instrument of war. There was nothing on Earth in this time that could match him, like for like. Nothing from Earth, at least.
There were plenty of things from elsewhere that might give cause for concern.
A blink, he arrived beside the base of the water tower. Clear rivulets of water poured down the steel flanks of the naive human monument. Tourists laughed and backed off as the Bayside wind carried the spray out at them. None of them saw him.
None of them except a three-year-old boy, pulling on his mother’s hand as the family posed for a father’s Kodak digital. In Mr Dine’s experience, very young human children sometimes possessed a knack of subtle intuition that adulthood stole away. The boy stared at him, goggle-eyed.
‘Mummy, who is the grey man?’
‘Look at Daddy, Kyle. Look at Daddy and say cheese.’
Mr Dine raised a grey-thorned finger to his lips and winked at the boy. The boy’s eye’s widened further and he grinned.
Mr Dine turned and took a deep breath. He could smell the technology buried under the flagstones. It reeked, hot and sharp, like cooking pheromones. Down below, deep under the Bay, exotic tech screamed to him like a newborn baby.
Autonomous running. Executive decision. Assess the options. Another nanosecond of deep reflection. He had no true fix on the Principal, so he had to work with the data available. If he couldn’t find the Principal himself, he could locate and neutralise that which was threatening the Principal.
The water tower. His systems lit up, hungry.
Here. Here.
There was a lift mechanism under one of the paving stones, cloaked by a perception filter. Interesting. Unexpected. He nodded his head. A simple hindbrain connection with the lift’s systems overwrote all the security measures.
Mr Dine began to descend as the lift kicked in.
He was lowered into a dank, twilight place, a lair of some sort. Gloom, concrete, old tiling, the background smell of the under-dock vault. The sleek flanks of the water tower extended down into the place, down through ground level into a recirculatory basin. Mr Dine tasted the heat of a network of high-level human computational systems and allied electronics: live work stations, woven sheaves of fibre-optic trunking. Very impressive, by local tech standards. Primitive to him.
He also read other things. Dead things, dormant things, slumbering things, dreaming things, things encased and secured and screened and boxed and locked away. A treasure trove of non-human artifice that had no business being either here or now. He approved of the way it had been so diligently sequestered.
But not all of it had been. Something was loose and live, aware and predatory. The lift had about five metres still to descend, but Mr Dine stepped off it. He landed on the grille decking with a quiet clank, and walked across the basin board-way towards the concrete platforms where the work stations flickered and hummed.
Two humans lay in a tangle of limbs on the floor, twitching, comatose. The loosed thing, the exotic tech, was a tiny object, revolving in a field of blue light. It felt him, read him and began to mew and wail in his mind.
Mr Dine’s systems were robust enough to deny its initial advances. Shield buffers rose automatically to screen him. He assessed. No match. The technology was not known to the First Senior data-archive. He filed his findings for future reference. Product of an unknown species, origin/manufacture unknown. Tech level sixty-plus. Powerful suggestion fields. Hazard (type 2) grade persuasion/manipulation protocols enabled by a quasi-sentience. Aggressive intercourse.
He took another few steps towards it. The tiny object began to spin more rapidly. To his surprise, his outer sets of shield buffers impacted suddenly and shattered. The inner sets held. Mr Dine accessed
reserve investment and erected a custom barrier shield to bolster his defences.
‘What are you?’ he asked.
It answered in a rattling string of colours, lights and concept impressions. Abstract numbers. It was as swift and ferocious as a hail of gunfire. Abstract numbers. Two blue lights, moving.
Mr Dine winced. His inner shields exploded without warning. Instinctively, he set a second custom barrier behind the first.
‘So, you want to play, do you?’ he asked.
Gwen found herself sitting in her Saab, turning the engine over. The starter motor gagged and wheezed. She flooded it.
How long had she been sitting there? How long had she been trying to-
She got out of the car. She felt like a zombie that barely, just barely, realises it is a zombie. She tottered back into the adjacent warehouse.
James was sprawled on the ground. He looked distressingly dead. The ring of scanners was whirring. She remembered her intention. She’d been trying to drive back to the Hub. The Hub, from where the Amok was calling to her.
‘Oh my God,’ she mumbled. Her head hurt like it had been crushed between cymbals. She could barely walk straight. There was a ringing in her ears.
Her phone. Her bloody phone.
She took it out, opened it upside down, turned it over.
‘Yeah?’
‘Gwen? For God’s sake, help us! We can’t find-’
‘Jack?’
She heard muffled voices, agitation, extraneous noises. Then, suddenly, clearly, she heard the footsteps again.
‘Jack?’
A scream. Toshiko, screaming. Gwen went cold. The repeated booming of a revolver, straining the limits of her phone’s speaker.
Laughter. Satanic, psychotic laughter.
Gwen squealed and hurled the phone away. It bounced across the ground, chipping and cracking.
‘Gwen?’
She looked around.
Jack was standing in the middle of the ring of sensors. He was holding Toshiko to his side with one arm. She was clinging to him, weeping. Jack’s face was drawn and haggard. He was shaking. His hair was lank with sweat. In his right hand, his Webley wavered, uncertain, smoke coiling from the long barrel.
‘Oh my God, Gwen,’ Jack stammered. He sat down on the ground, and Toshiko folded up beside him.
One by one, in sequence, the six stand-mounted scanners exploded, their cases bursting open in clouds of sparks. Two of the tripods toppled. The master control box began to smoke and then caught fire.
Her own brain ablaze, Gwen tried to speak, but nothing came out.
The Amok spun around even more furiously, and then stopped.
‘Yes,’ said Mr Dine. ‘Clever. But I believe I win.’
The Amok rotated left for two turns, then right for three.
‘No, I do not want to play again,’ said Mr Dine.
The Amok pulsed out a field of violet sulk.
Mr Dine reached forward and took hold of it. He grimaced as it burned his palm.
‘Still fighting?’ he asked.
It was. Mr Dine cried out as pain flared along his arm and into his head. The last of his custom barriers fell.
‘You are tenacious, but I am of the First Senior. I am not impressed by your spite. I have given you fair warning. Accept the consequences.’
Mr Dine squeezed his hand. The Amok winced and shattered. Mr Dine toppled backwards and sat down hard. It had been tough. Astonishingly tough. Almost a match.
He let the powdered fragments of the Amok slide out of his hand and then began to try healing the grievous damage he had sustained.
Owen woke up. He looked around, aware that he was on the floor with Ianto crumpled on top of him.
‘Hello?’ he called. ‘Hello?’
Something was sitting on the floor next to him. It was the size and shape of a man, but it was matt-grey, its bodywork comprising odd grey thorns and overlapping, segmented layers. A monster.
Owen had seen a fair few monsters in the course of his work. Weevils, for a start. This was altogether more nightmarish. So sleek, so machined, so artfully designed.
He felt funny. Muzzy. Sick. Maybe he was seeing things. Maybe there wasn’t a monster there at all.
The monster turned its extended, streamlined, recurve head and noticed him.
There was an expression on its vaguely human face. An expression of pain and torment. It pointed a long, thorny finger at him.
‘You will not remember me,’ it said, its voice as level and heavy as the speaking clock.
‘OK, fair enough,’ said Owen, and allowed unconsciousness to carry him away again.
FIFTEEN
‘Look, I’m all right. Really,’ said James.
‘No, you’re not.’
‘Owen, really, I-’
‘Am I a doctor?’ Owen asked. ‘Am I?’
‘You remind us often enough.’
‘Then I ought to know, didn’t I?’ Owen replied smartly. ‘And you know what’s also true? You don’t have to be a doctor — like me — to know that you’re not at all all right. None of us are all right. We just took a damn serious seeing to. One of the worst I can remember since I started this bloody job. So sit still and shut up and let me do my thing.’
It was eight o’clock at night. Two hours earlier, a terrific storm, the second in two straight nights, had blown up out in the Bristol Channel and come swirling inland. High above their heads, Mermaid Quay was empty. Driving rain pummelled the dock walks and lamp-lit boards.
‘How is everyone?’ James asked, as Owen continued to examine him with the medical area’s suite of instruments.
‘Far as I can tell, sore, exhausted and traumatised,’ said Owen, ‘and we can be pretty damn thankful that’s all we are. I haven’t found anything more… serious. But I’m going to be checking everyone every day for as long as it takes to make sure there’s no lasting damage.’
James nodded. He’d been told that he, Owen and Ianto had all fugued out, and that he had been unconscious the longest. Gwen had come close to joining them, but she’d kept it together, just about. Jack and Toshiko had said very little about what they’d experienced, and it seemed likely that they had suffered the effects of the Amok the least, insulated to some extent by… by wherever they had been.
Gwen walked into the medical area. Her face was drawn with fatigue, and there were dark shadows under her eyes. Unabashed, she went over to James and kissed him.
‘I’m the doctor,’ grumbled Owen. ‘I’m the one who kisses things better.’
‘Jack wants us in the Boardroom in ten,’ said Gwen.
‘OK,’ said James.
‘All of us,’ said Gwen.
Owen nodded.
She climbed the stairs to Jack’s office. He was at his desk, cleaning his revolver.
‘Hi, come in,’ he said.
She came in and sat facing him.
‘Anything new?’ he asked.
‘Nope,’ she said. ‘Oh, one thing. Reports of civil disturbance down on the point this afternoon. Round about the same time we were up to our necks.
‘Where?’
‘Exactly where we were last Thursday night. Where we recovered the bloody thing from in the first place. There was some fighting, a mini-riot. A couple of cars set on fire, windows smashed.’
‘You’re getting this from?’
‘I checked the police system. The whole thing went away again as quickly as it started, with no one willing or able to explain what the hell had been going on.’
‘It all went away again?’
‘At about the same time our migraines eased and we started to remember how to spell our own names again.’
‘And the police are saying?’
Gwen shrugged. ‘Someone’s suggesting it might be some kind of chemical poisoning event, a toxic spill at one of the Bay’s industrial depots. Environmental teams are checking. It has happened twice in a week, after all.’
Jack smiled sadly. ‘Well, they’ve written a cover s
tory for us, at least.’
‘We going to start this meeting, then?’ she asked.
‘Couple of things I want to say to you first,’ Jack said, closing his old gun’s frame and sliding it back into its leather holster. He screwed the lid back on the small bottle of gun oil, and put it away in the cleaning kit with the bristle push-brushes.
‘Can they wait for the meeting?’
‘No,’ said Jack. He tossed two oil-smudged cotton wool pads into his waste bin and got up to put the cleaning kit away in a drawer. ‘The first thing I want to say is thank you. You saved me today, Gwen.’
‘Oh, no, I just-’
‘You saved me,’ Jack insisted, sitting back down. ‘Me and Toshiko both. Despite everything, despite the… circumstances under which you were operating, you stuck to it. You stayed right there and, crazy though it was, you came up with a trick to get us out.’
He looked over at her. ‘It was a damn crazy trick, Gwen. Damn crazy. Using one threat to combat another. How did you know it would work?’
‘Honestly? I didn’t. It seemed to have some resemblance to logic at the time. But — at the time — I was a girl with a jack-hammer going off in her head and serious big hand/little hand differentiation issues. So I think we were lucky, really.’
‘I’ll take luck, any time it’s offered,’ said Jack. ‘Again, thank you.’
‘Please,’ she said, ‘you’re going to make me blush.’
‘Yeah, well you’ll hate the second thing, then. The second thing is sorry.’
‘Oh, what for?’
Jack sighed. ‘I know I’ve already apologised about tearing you all off a strip last week, but seriously, I need to do a lot more. I handled this whole thing really badly. Like-’
‘An amateur?’ she suggested.
‘Oh yeah,’ he grinned. ‘I had no business calling you that.’
‘I told you the other day,’ said Gwen, ‘the best we can ever hope to be at this is amateurs. You too. We should be proud of that. Anything that doesn’t kill us makes us learn for next time. How can we expect to tackle the mysteries of the bloody Universe head-on and know everything about everything? A piece of alien technology put you right off your game today, Jack. But it’s the end of the day, and we’re all still alive, and Cardiff isn’t a smoking hole in the ground populated by shuffling zombies, so, you know, yaaay us.’