Meeting at Infinity
Part Two
Chapter 9
London, January 2009
Martha looked at herself in the mirror and frowned.
"You look good!" Tish said. She'd barely glanced up from the magazine she was flicking through as lay on the bed in her pyjamas, but clearly Martha's discomfort was palpable, at least to her big sister.
Tish wasn't wrong: she did look good. She just wasn't sure she looked anything like herself. The suited and booted person frowning back at her from the mirror didn't match the way she imagined herself at all. Even the hair seemed severe, overly formal. She knew how to be Doctor Martha; casual Martha; dolled-up-to-the-nines Martha; even, these days, time traveller Martha and post-apocalyptic inspirational leader Martha. But this sort of serious, businesslike person didn't match any of those.
"Everything you said last night's still true," Tish said, still not looking up. "If they want you in a uniform they'll sort it, and you're not going to be doctor-doctoring so you can't hide in that white coat ..."
"I don't--"
"Oooh, look, Madonna turns out to have overstated the size of the divorce settlement," Tish said as she turned a page. Then she closed the magazine and said, "You look great, Martha. But it's not your appearance that impressed them, is it? We could swap outfits right now--" she got up to show off the full effect of the teddy bear jim jams, furry slippers and towel-wrapped head "--and you'd still knock their socks off."
Martha looked at her reflection again. UNIT were in the world-saving business, she decided. Not everyone could get away with doing that sort of thing in trainers and an untucked shirt.
"Well, get going, then," Tish said. "Don't want to be late on your first day."
Mum stopped her at the bottom of the stairs.
"Please, Mum, don't ..." Martha could feel a tear pricking at her right eye, just at the memory of their argument before Christmas. She ruthlessly suppressed it.
"I'm not going to pretend I'm not ... desperately worried -- all right, scared -- but I'm so very, very proud of you, my love." She wrapped Martha up in a huge hug, such that her next words were muffled by being buried in Martha's shoulder. "I'm your mum, it's my job to worry about you, and I'd only really be happy if I could wrap you up in cotton wool forever to keep you away from the big bad world." She released her grip slightly and straightened up, looking Martha in the eye. "But it's a big bad universe, and the world needs people like you, heroes like you. Just ... always come home, OK?"
"OK, Mum," Martha said. She tightened her arms around Mum's back and kissed her on the cheek.
She'd put Tom's orchid on her desk, but by the end of her first day Martha felt that the most useful present he could have given her would have been a "Do Not Disturb" sign. After a brief orientation, she'd been shown to a small corner office and given a good ream or two of paper that she was apparently supposed to get her head round before starting her job proper. There were numerous background briefings and rafts of standard operating procedures, including four pages on what to do if you suspect your fellow squad member has been possessed, with extra notes for who to go to if you thought the chain of command had been compromised. Then there was the organisation chart, which she would have found bafflingly complex even if half of the people at the top of it hadn't kept coming by to introduce themselves personally, thus interrupting her attempts to understand where they fitted in.
It only started to make sense the next day, when she met Malcolm Taylor, a boffin type who sat in the same sort of ambiguous relationship to the military hierarchy as she seemed to. He'd made a bit of stammering small talk and asked her if she'd be interested in working on any of his projects (Martha had demurred, saying she hadn't even started her real job yet) when he dropped the bombshell. "You've travelled with him, haven't you? The-the Doctor, I mean."
Martha laughed. "Oh, is that why everyone's so keen to meet me?" She fought down her laughter. "Yes, yes, I have."
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply that you weren't qualified to work for UNIT on your own merits." He looked deadly earnest and Martha couldn't help but warm to him. "But it's a dream for many of us to meet the Doctor and you have, already. I've read all the files, you know."
"There are files?" It stood to reason, but it hadn't occurred to her before now.
"I'll show you."
Malcolm began by showing Martha which area of the computer network the more recent material was on -- it turned out there was an entire server -- but most of the files were still on paper in the vaults. Martha expected them to be down in a sub-basement, but it turned out they were on the very top floor -- safer from various risks like flooding, apparently.
Malcolm flicked a switch and overhead lights came on illuminating huge stages of box files, storage containers and hermetically sealed sample jars. Martha was irresistibly reminded of the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
"The really sensitive things are in the Black Archive, of course," Malcolm said airily, "but there's plenty of interesting stuff here." He headed off down one aisle and returned a little later almost skipping with delight. Martha had to suppress a giggle. He pushed the bland manila folder he'd cradled in his arms towards Martha. "This one's about dinosaurs. In London!" He was grinning uncontrollably.
As Martha began to read, Malcolm said, "This is one of the better attested ones. There are lots of stories, you see, some of them more dubious than others. As well as details of incidents where we were working directly with the Doctor, we've unearthed details of lots of other appearances in history that seem to involve him, and if the Doctor himself is to be believed--"
Martha snapped the folder shut and smiled at Malcolm. "Oh, the Doctor is definitely not to be believed. He's a terrible namedropper. And he doesn't like to talk about the really important stuff at all."
Malcolm looked crestfallen.
"What's wrong?"
"Well, you see, I have a-a-a system for assessing and recording the likelihood and verifiability of the various accounts. You see these little green dots at the top of each page?"
Martha had seen them -- small sticky labels that came on big sheets -- but not paid them much attention, assuming they were some arcane military code. Now it seemed they were Malcolm's arcane code, but it must have taken them ages: five of them had been meticulously applied to the top of each sheet in the file. And if this was only one of what must be thousands of files ...
"I rate each one in five categories -- visual records such as CCTV footage, recorded interviews from UNIT eye witnesses, written reports from same, forms of verification from civilian witnesses, and mentions by the Doctors of the events having happened to him -- and assign a traffic light colour -- red, amber or green in each. Five greens like this means it almost certainly happened. But if you're telling me the fifth category is flawed --"
"Oh, no, I'm sure it's fine," Martha said. "Ignore me. I mean, I got to meet Shakespeare, so--"
"You did? Did you help transcribe Hamlet? Or was this at Bosworth?"
"Er, no, and no," Martha said. "I did see the only ever performance of Love's Labour's Won, though."
"I hadn't heard about that before," Malcolm said, sounding defeated. But he quickly perked up again. "The Shakespeare file is a particularly complex one. One day, you know, I'm going to rearrange everything here in chronological order. Just as soon as I can work out what the chronological order is."
It didn't take long for Martha to get into the swing of her job -- or rather, adapt to the way it was unpredictable and didn't really have a swing. As a civilian specialist, the higher-ups seemed to consider it fair game to drag her into anything that she might have expertise on -- and given that they knew she'd travelled in the TARDIS, their expectations of her expertise were fairly wide-ranging. One day she'd be checking the plausibility of pathology reports for alien specimens, the next haring about the South Downs in the back of a jeep looking for any evidence that might correlate with reports of lights in the sky from a poacher who'd been walking home late from the bar.
One of the main things Martha discovered was that for all the world-threatening crises UNIT got mixed up in, the organisation spent long periods ticking over, twiddling its thumbs and investigating reports that turned out to be hoaxes, paranoia or plain drunkenness (and there really were far more poachers around than Martha would have thought possible) far more often than they covered up real situations to do with aliens and extra-dimensional intrusions. It must have driven the Doctor mad with frustration, she thought, when he'd been stuck here.
Not that the Doctor had ever told her about that, of course. But she'd adopted the habit of popping down to the archive for an hour or so after work -- she was even slightly late for a date with Tom once as a result -- or spending her lunch hour clicking through the digital records of more recent events (on the computer, Malcolm had a complex tagging system that replicated the function of his coloured dots on the physical files). She enjoyed the opportunity to find out more about the Doctor -- there were so many things he'd never told her, and it was fascinating to see how different some of his incarnations seemed to the Doctor she'd known. He'd told her about regeneration, but she hadn't really understood the concept until then. Even in the dry, formal prose of official UNIT reports his different personalities inescapably communicated themselves.
What she didn't find particularly useful were Malcolm's ideas about different levels of verifiability. It seemed to her that a story about the Doctor was a story about the Doctor, and many of the ones that reminded her most strongly of her own adventures in the TARDIS scored a red on Malcolm's plausibility criterion. And why video evidence was such a gold standard in his system eluded her entirely, especially when so many of the things they dealt with were shiny blobs of light that could easily have been artefacts of the recording equipment as genuine proof of alien involvement.
It was over two weeks before she got her first sniff of involvement with a real extraterrestrial incident. No sooner had she got into her office than Private Jenkins was knocking on her door telling her she was needed in a briefing.
The hallway outside was crowded with an array of senior figures that would have been intimidating were it not for the way they'd all gushed at her when she'd first arrived, and remained fairly overwhelming, even so. She quickly found Malcolm in the crush.
The door opened and a blonde female captain stepped out. "They're ready for you now, sirs," she said, holding the door open.
Martha filed into the room with the others and sat down in front of a plain folder of the type she was becoming very familiar with. She opened it and started leafing through what looked like satellite reconnaissance shots of a mountainous area.
Colonel Mace began the briefing without much ceremony. He stood up in front of a screen on which the same images were cycling. "Latest intelligence confirms a Class IV Hegemonic has touched down in the Cairngorms," he said. Martha flipped through the file, hoping to find some sort of clue what a "Class IV Hegemonic" was, but apparently it was the sort of thing you just knew.
Malcolm scribbled quickly and slid his piece of paper over to her. "Self-replicating machine form," it said. She smiled a thank you at him and went back to listening to Mace.
"Growth is currently subexponential," he was saying -- this prompted a sigh of relief around the room. "However, it is continuing to convert matter around it beyond the mass limit that our understanding of such phenomena deems practicable."
"Could it be intelligent?" Martha asked.
"Good point, Doctor Jones," Mace said. "I think we need to upgrade the threat level. Major Hobsbawm, can you liaise with the Cabinet Office in case we need to authorise a limited nuclear strike?" Hobsbawm nodded and made a brief note.
"No, I mean, just because it's a machine doesn't mean it might not be alive," Martha insisted.
"And what precisely do you suggest?" an older man with whiskers -- Brigadier-General Farnsworth, Martha recalled -- said coldly.
Martha swallowed, summoned every iota of her courage that hadn't withered under his glare. "That we try to work out how to communicate with it," she said. "Find out what it wants. Ask it to stop. It may not realise that it's being perceived as a threat."
"It's almost certainly a Hulian xenoforming probe," Farnsworth said. "Entirely lacking in any sort of intelligence beyond its programming telling it to remake the entire planet. Dealt with one back in the '80s, tricky little buggers, don't you know?"
"Even assuming it is intelligent, and that we can discover how to communicate with it," Mace said, "we can't allow it to continue its expansion indefinitely. Projections show it will have taken over the entire mountain it's embedded in by tomorrow, and the whole of Scotland by the middle of next week."
"You're not even going to try?" Martha demanded.
"There simply isn't time," Mace said.
"You know, for a bunch of people who hero worship the Doctor, you're doing a bloody terrible job of following his example!"
The room sat silent, all eyes looking at her, Farnsworth's in particular boring right into her. Martha sat down again -- she'd barely realised she'd stood up -- and looked down at the desk.
"There's no doubt that we all admire the Doctor," Farnsworth said. "But I'm afraid, m'dear, that his rather unorthodox methods are not always compatible with our duty to protect the Earth. Unless you know of some reliable way to contact him?"
Suddenly her mobile phone felt as though it was burning a hole in her pocket; she imagined pulling it out and dialling the number programmed into it, the number that had been her own a relatively short time ago. But she couldn't call the Doctor for every tiny little thing, could she? She had to stand on her own two feet, just as Earth did. But what if this was the real thing? Something too big for UNIT to handle without the Doctor's magic touch? How would she know the difference when the time came?
Martha was surprised to find Malcolm coming to her rescue by letting out a loud "Ah ha!" When he realised everyone was staring at him, he cleared his throat noisily. "Sorry, sorry. It's just that ... looking at the surveillance images, I believe that under certain isomorphic transformations this is a Gentowka mass optimisation derrick. Not quite a xenoforming probe, sir," he said to Farnsworth. "But related, at least in purpose. The point being, though, that we have a full set of shut down codes for such devices. We can transmit them until we find one that works. And it will only freeze it," he said, turning to Martha. "If it's some sort of rogue unit that's broken its programming and developed true intelligence, we can reinstantiate it once we've deactivated its conversion dendrites, and try talking to it."
"How certain are you, Professor Taylor?" Mace asked.
"As certain as I can be," Malcolm said. "There are other possible interpretations -- these pictures are fairly grainy -- but--"
"That's good enough for me," Mace said, cutting him off before he could talk himself out of it again. "Get your team on it straight away; Captain Magambo is heading up the field team in the area, liaise with her by radio."
"Aye, aye, sir," Malcolm said.
"Thank you for your time, sirs," Mace said to the top brass. "Dismissed," he said to the others. As Martha stood up, he added, "Doctor Jones, wait behind a moment please."
And the shortest UNIT career ever award goes to: Martha Jones, employed for 16 days between the 2nd and 18th of January, 2009.
"Don't worry about Farnsworth," Mace said once they were alone in the room. "Between you and me, he'll be gone within a year. He'd never have reached such an exalted rank if it hadn't been for the Slitheen crisis. There were a lot of dead men's shoes to fill that day." He trailed off, then snapped back to the point. "Look, Jones, we don't need yes-men here at UNIT. And you have extremely valuable expertise, expertise that I wouldn't want you to feel you shouldn't contribute, in briefings or anywhere else. But I should warn you that there's only so much direct insubordination the chain of command can tolerate. There are ways and ways of doing these things. You may not have to worry about Farnsworth, but you do have to worry about me."
"Yes, sir," Martha said. "Message received."
Mace smiled thinly. "Jolly good."
He stood silent, not looking at her, or anything really, it seemed. Martha was acutely conscious that she hadn't been dismissed. Eventually, she worked up the gumption to ask, "Can I go now?"
"One more thing," Mace said.
"Yes, sir?"
"Do you have a way of getting hold of the Doctor?"
Martha smiled. "Ah. If we really need to, then yes."
"Good, good, that's good to know. Let's hope we don't need to, eh?"
Later that day, Malcolm sought her out. "Are you all right, Doctor Jones?"
Martha stood up from her desk to greet him. "How many times have I told you to call me Martha?"
"I believe that makes eight," he said.
"And how many times will I have to tell you until it'll stick?" "I don't think I have enough evidence to form a hypothesis," Malcolm said.
"Did you deal with the Class IV?" she asked, gesturing to him to sit down.
"Crisis averted," he said, clapping his hands together with happiness as he put himself down in one of the spare seats opposite Martha's desk. "The unit is in stasis, pending further investigation."
"Oh, good," Martha said. "That's really good. It's not alive, is it?"
"Probably not," Malcolm admitted. "But ... well, I really admired what you did earlier, Doctor Jones. I can only hope that I'd be able to summon up the wherewithal to stand up for the right thing in similar circumstances."
"I'm sure you would," Martha said. "But ..."
"Yes?"
"I'm just not sure what I'm doing here. Among all these gung-ho, trigger-happy--"
Malcolm cut her off. "Come with me," he said. "Come on."
Martha looked at him curiously but, realising he wouldn't take no for an answer, she followed Malcolm into the bowels of his personal fiefdom, the research department. He introduced her to a large number of his colleagues, working on everything from adapting alien "nanogenes" to provide revolutionary medical treatments to non-polluting energy sources. Martha felt like James Bond, being led around by Q in one of the sillier films.
"And this," Malcolm said, leading her through one more door into a large lab, "this is my personal pet project. Well, at the moment. Well, one of them."
Computer workstations were scattered around the room, connected by long tangles of cables to other equipment, and in the middle a complicated arrangement of what looked like nothing more than pipes, but were doubtless far more sophisticated than that.
"Project Indigo," Malcolm said, as though that ought to make sense to her. "We believe we're close to cracking true teleportation."
A large bearded man working at one of the benches put down his soldering and came over. "Who's this then, Taylor?" he asked gruffly.
"This is Martha Jones, Colin," Malcolm said.
A sudden change came over Colin. He straightened up, fussed with his hair slightly and held out his hand for Martha to shake, his ill-fitting lab coat bulging around his upper arm as he did so. "Pleasure to meet you, ma'am, absolute pleasure." When Martha put her hand in his, he almost crushed it; clearly her fame had spread even farther within UNIT than she'd thought.
Sure enough, two seconds later the other two occupants of the lab -- a wiry man with dark hair and a short blonde woman who'd been deep in earnest discussion as they stared at a computer screen together -- were by her side.
"You went through a teleport," the man said. "When you went down to Earth from the Valiant."
The woman dug her elbow into his ribs. "Pete!" she hissed.
Malcolm coughed. "This is Pete," he put in, rather redundantly, "and Ilsa. Pete, Ilsa, Martha Jones."
"Yes, Malcolm, I know," Pete said. "But you did go through a teleport at the beginning of that whole business, didn't you? I mean, you were on the Valiant during the rewind -- you do remember it, don't you?"
"Yes," Martha said quietly. "I do. All of it."
"Do you know anything about the principles it operated on?" Pete went on, oblivious. "If it was based on transmission of a matter stream rather than quantum depatterning, did you experience any subjective correlates of the molecular disassemblement process? What was your experience of the passage of time?"
Martha counted off the answers on her fingers. "Don't know, don't know, and ... don't remember, so I suppose I didn't have one."
Pete looked put out. "Well, if you ever go through one again, it'd be great if you could take some notes." And he wandered back to his computer, muttering something about inverting matrices.
"I'll try and remember," Martha said to his back.
"Sorry," Ilsa said quietly. "Pete just gets excited. We think that the theory behind teleportation may depend very strongly on interpretations of quantum mechanics; subjective experience could be very important in giving us the clues we need to rule various ideas about the role of conscious observers in or out."
"He's an anti-social git and you should stop making excuses for him," Colin said.
"Whereas you're clearly a real charmer," Ilsa shot back.
"Sorry, was Pete on the Valiant then? When time went back?" If he had been, that meant that either his genius (and Martha had to assume that he was a genius if he was working on Malcolm's team) was sufficiently useful to the Master for him to be kept alive and close-by, or he'd fallen in with the new regime, maybe through fear, maybe through blackmail, or perhaps -- just perhaps -- because any moral sensibility he had was outweighed by the chance to do whatever it was the Master let him do.
"Oh, no," Ilsa said, and Martha breathed an inward sigh of relief, "but we've all been briefed, you know."
"Only most of us are tactful enough not to say anything about it to the people who were there," Colin put in. "Are you all right?"
"I'm fine," Martha said. "Really." It seemed that wherever she went, reminders of her ordeal were never far away; maybe Mum had been right, maybe working for UNIT was a mistake, even without her ridiculous behaviour at the briefing this morning. She coughed. "So, what is all this stuff, exactly?"
"Well, here we have a couple of desktop synchrotrons," Ilsa said, patting a couple of circular objects on either end of what Martha still couldn't help thinking of as "pipes" in the middle of the room. "Same principle as the ones at CERN," she said. "But more powerful, even despite being so small."
"They're based on alien technology," Colin said, "so of course it's highly classified. Pity really, it'd be nice to give the civilians a leg up. Especially after so many delays."
"Now, now," Malcolm said, "you know that we can't ..."
"Don't worry, Taylor," Colin said, "just dreaming."
"Yes, well," Malcolm said. "Of course, if we can crack Project Indigo, there'd be no question of keeping it under wraps; it would be revolutionary. The potential applications are astonishing. Quite astonishing!" He looked deliriously happy even at the prospect of it.
"What applications in particular?" Martha asked. The places she'd been with the Doctor where they'd had teleportation didn't seem to have miraculously fewer problems than anywhere else, though maybe that was more to do with the fact that wherever the Doctor went, there seemed to be problems.
"Pollution-free personal transport," Ilsa said. "Well, assuming you use clean energy to power the thing," she added more quietly.
"An end to famine," Colin said. "Imagine it -- being able to send food wherever it was needed, instantly. And not just food -- medicines, the doctors to administer them ..."
"Commuting to the Moon!" Pete shouted from across the room. They all turned to look at him; Martha felt her eyebrow rise involuntarily in response to the outlandishness of the suggestion. "Well, obviously you have to build a moonbase first. But if you did, you could commute there, even more easily than we come to work now."
"How would you know?" Colin said. "You never leave work!"
"I can't help it if some of us are more dedicated than others," Pete shot back.
As they descended into bickering once more, Malcolm led Martha to one side. "What do you think, then?"
"Interesting bunch you've got here," Martha said to him. "Are you sure they're not all about to kill each other?"
"Oh, it's all in good fun," Malcolm said. "Mostly, anyway. But ... well, the reason I brought you here is that I wanted to show you that not everyone who works for UNIT is a gung-ho, trigger-happy ... whatever it was you were going to say earlier. There's more than one way to save the world."
"Yeah," Martha said. "You're right, Malcolm, thanks." And he was right. Everyone was right: Mum had been right before Christmas when she'd said about how hard it would be, and Martha had been right, too, that it was a hard thing worth doing. She'd just needed to be reminded. "Really, Malcolm, thank you," she said again.
"My pleasure ... Martha."
Chapter 10
London, 25th January 2009
"More chicken, Tom?" Mrs Jones -- Tom refused to think of her as Francine, whatever she said -- asked.
"Oh, god, yes, please," he said through a mouthful of potato. Martha had warned him that he ought to eat heartily to make sure her mum wasn't offended, but with food this good it wasn't exactly a hardship.
"Leave some for the rest of us!" Clive -- in contrast, Tom could call Mr Jones that quite happily, at least in his head -- said.
"If you liked my cooking that much you shouldn't have left in the first place," Martha's mum said, and she and Clive both laughed.
Tish, Martha and Leo seemed to be giving each other slightly funny looks. Tom guessed that this sort of comment would have been a lot less lighthearted not so long ago. Martha had mentioned that they seemed to be getting along better, but clearly none of the children was sure what to make of it. Tom wondered how significant it was that Clive's girlfriend hadn't been invited along to meet him. Then he decided that stopping worrying and keeping eating was both the safest and tastiest bet.
"So, what sort of doctoring is it you do, exactly?" Clive asked.
"Paediatrics," Tom said.
"Have you always wanted to work with kids?" Tish asked.
Tom laughed. "No. To be honest, I was dreading it when my rotation first came up. But it turned out to be really rewarding."
"And of course it appeals to the girls," Mrs Jones said.
"Mum!" Martha said.
"I ... well, I ... don't know. Does it appeal to you, Martha?"
Martha gave him a real glare -- a prolonged "you bastard, dropping me in it like that" look -- before she eventually said, "No, that's not what I like about you." But instead of looking at him, she looked at Tish, who nodded imperceptibly.
Before things could get any weirder, Leo's toddler, who had been allowed to play in the next room after finishing her own dinner, started screaming -- a real bawling-her-eyes-out job.
"I'd better go and check on her," Leo said.
"It's all right, I'll go," Shonara said instantly.
"No, you stay here, finish your meal," Leo said with a hint of firmness.
They exchanged a little mini-glare of their own then, and as Leo left Tom shared a brief look with Shonara, trying to show some sort of solidarity but also feeling a guilty sense of relief at not being alone in the slight discomfort of being a guest at a Jones family lunch.
"Bloody hell!" Leo shouted. Shonara was out of her seat instantly; the others followed almost as quickly. Tom found himself momentarily alone at the table before going through himself. Shonara had grabbed Keisha and was cuddling her close to her chest. Leo was holding on to Shonara's shoulder, but she didn't seem to be finding it particularly comforting.
Then again, Tom could sympathise, seeing as there was a monster beating its wings just outside the patio door. It screeched then swept away before turning to launch itself at the house, divebombing the glass. The whole house shook as it impacted, then scrabbled away to try again.
Tom recognised the apparition immediately, of course -- it was the same as the thing that had appeared at Hallowe'en, the night he'd met Martha.
"I've seen some weird stuff," Leo said, "that bloke who turned young again and all that, but that takes the cake."
"Martha?" Mrs Jones asked.
"I've seen this before," Martha said. "It's called a Reaper." Tom looked at her then -- she hadn't mentioned the name when they'd talked about it previously, but presumably it was something she'd found out at UNIT.
There was some sort of bundle on the far side of the room, by the window where the Reaper had appeared. "Tom," Martha said warningly, but he went over to it, rolled it towards him, some instinct telling him that it was ...
Not just a child's body, but Keisha's. The happy face was peaceful in death, but unmistakeably recognisable even though Tom had only met her earlier that day.
"Oh, god," Leo said. Shonara buried her head in Leo's chest and he put his arms fully around her and Keisha. Even as they did so, the Reaper returned to slam against the window once more. Its claws scrabbled against the glass, still failing to find purchase.
Tom swallowed. The Reaper. Did this creature offer some sort of vision of your own death? Was that its power? What a terrible thing for a young child to experience, he thought. The stuff of nightmares, indeed. He hoped sincerely Keisha would be too young to recall too much of it. It would be bad enough for Leo and Shonara; he knew from bitter experience that the sight of such things never left the parents.
Tom knelt to close the eyes of the tiny corpse in front of him. A useless gesture, but one he felt compelled to perform. But then Martha was shouting "Mum!" and Tom looked round to see Francine marching towards the French window, sliding it open and walking out. In that moment, she became Francine in Tom's mind -- an unstoppable force of nature in her own right, not just a relation of Martha's.
"That thing is not getting my granddaughter!" she said defiantly. She shouted at the winged beast in the sky. "Take me instead, you bastard!"
"Mum!" Martha and Tish shouted together.
"She's only bloody going to go and get herself bloody killed," Clive said, and rushed out to join her.
For a sickening moment it looked as though they were both doomed, but as the Reaper dived for them, it suddenly vanished into a glowing yellow patch of ... something in the air. Tom looked down and saw that the body and the rags it was wrapped in were both gone.
Francine came back in, Clive following her like a butterfly caught in a hurricane. She dusted her hands off. "Dessert, anyone?" she said.
Chapter 11
Cardiff, 3rd February 2009
The woman across the interview table was not in the best of shape. Her hair was dull and lank, her clothes little more than rags. But she still carried herself with a certain confidence. Owen had brought in the suspect -- no, Gwen corrected herself, the woman, there was no evidence she was directly involved in anything, not yet -- after accompanying Tosh to an interstitial opening that was close enough to the Hub that they had some hopes of finding useful evidence from it before it was all over.
"So what were you doing late at night in a locked car park for which you don't have the key?" Gwen asked.
"I told you already, I wasn't in anything like a car park a moment beforehand. I was in the lower workings of the strip mine when suddenly the world ... twisted, and there I was, staring at myself. And then that beaky thing, you saw it--" The woman broke off, and Owen nodded affirmation of the even more outlandish part of her story "--was squawking all around, and then it disappeared, the other me along with it. And that's when you found me."
"Why don't we start from the beginning?" Owen said, leaning over the table towards her, his body language hovering in an uncertain middle ground between friendly and intimidating. "What did you say your name was?"
"Amy Hughes," the woman said.
Owen made a big show of tabbing to the open file on his laptop. "Amy Hughes of 32 Angelina Road, yes?"
"Well, I used to live there, before ..."
"Before?"
"Before! Before the decimation! Before the Toclafane and the Master and--" She broke off. "Look, you must know this stuff. Your boss, he's Jack Harkness," the woman insisted. "He can die and come back to life."
"What makes you say that?" Gwen asked, trying not to give anything away by her response. Torchwood's existence being an open secret, she'd become accustomed to, but it wasn't everyone in Cardiff who could name its leader by sight and describe his strange abilities.
"I've seen him on the transmissions, of course," the woman went on. "The Master's transmissions, the ones he uses to demoralise Martha Jones. Silly bugger; he doesn't seem to realise that bombarding the Earth with TV signals addressed to her just makes us believe in her more, not less. Oh god, you're not working for him, are you? This isn't some weird game, where you make me think I've escaped but really it's just to reinforce the utter futility of everything and how trapped I really am? And Captain Jack's just being coerced into playing along?"
"No, we're not working for the Master," Gwen said. She and Owen shared a baffled look. "Do you mind if I confer with my colleague for a moment?"
"You're not going to handcuff me to the chair while you're out or anything?" she said warily.
"Like she said, we're not working for the Master," Owen said, getting out of his chair and heading to the door of the interview room.
Gwen followed, and as soon as the door was closed, said, "This is well weird, Owen. Have you got any idea what's going on?"
"I don't know," Owen said. "But I don't like it."
Jack came in through the outer door into the interview room's antechamber. His face told them he'd been watching the CCTV feed of their conversation with the Hughes woman. "This is bad," he said simply. "Very bad."
"Yeah," Owen agreed emphatically. "Er, why exactly?"
"All the previous Reaper encounters that we know of have ended with the instance of the person involved that came from the parallel timeline--" that was a very fancy way of avoiding talking about her dead body, Gwen thought "--being taken back out of existence."
"But this time," Gwen said slowly, feeling her way through the implications, "the person from the Master's reality stayed, and the real Amy Hughes has been ... what, exactly?"
"Hard to say. The fact that this Amy made it through might suggest that the other reality is still there, somehow, underlying or alongside this one, more accessible than we thought."
"So the Amy from our reality is there on the Earth ruled by the Master, suffering and at risk of death any second?"
"That is one possibility," Jack said.
Gwen was appalled at his matter-of-factness at such a horrendous fate. "Well, what's the alternative?"
"That she's in the naked Vortex, being ripped apart by roaring Time Winds," Jack said. "The big problem, though, is that the other timeline seems to be bleeding through into our own. The-- It was a whole year, Gwen. Until this timeline, our timeline, gets past the point where the paradox was undone, there's still a chance that it could be ... un-undone."
"Tosh told me she thinks the space-time flaws the Reapers are using are being deliberately created," Owen said. "Could that be the intention, to reverse the reversal?"
"Could be," Jack said. "We'll keep looking into it. In the mean time, it's hardly Amy Hughes's fault. Let her go; I'll have Ianto help her with reintegrating into this timeline as best she can."
Jack started towards the door, but Gwen called him back. "Jack," she said, "who is this Martha Jones anyway?"
"Someone I need to call, right now," Jack said, as he pulled the door closed.
Chapter 12
Chilworth, Surrey, 8th February 2009
Martha wiped her forehead with her sleeve, but just succeeded in spreading dirt everywhere. As she picked up the spade and started digging again, she said, "You know, when you suggested going away for the weekend and getting hot and sweaty, this wasn't exactly what I had in mind." In fact, visions of meeting Tom's parents -- for all that Tom had coped well with both her family and the minor Reaper emergency -- had been the last thing on her mind when she'd received his text. But here they were, in the expansive garden of his parents' house in the leafy Surrey suburbs.
"Oh, come on, it's fun," Tom said. He pushed the big bush -- a Spiraea, was that what Tom had said? -- back and forth a few times and the roots came loose. "There, I think we've got it."
"It shouldn't be possible to get this hot outside on such a cold day," Martha protested.
"Since I know full well that you understand the physiology of perspiration, I'm going to ignore that as the moaning it so clearly is," Tom said, grabbing the plant around the thick stalks at its base. Martha crouched down to help him, but he picked it up effortlessly and started taking it over to the hole they had prepared earlier. "Anyway, it's because of the cold weather that we need to do this. Forecast for next week's even worse, and this thing needs some decent protection from the frost, so we'll put it in the greenhouse for now."
Martha picked up the spade and followed him into the glass structure. It was well-tended, but well-established too, the slight green tinge to its glass making it look like it had been an integral part of the garden for years. "So this is where you are, when I ring you at the weekends?" she asked. "Digging up weeds and planting bushes round your mum and dad's?"
"Why, did you think I was having some torrid affair?"
"I thought I was your torrid affair."
Tom turned round with a grin. "Yeah, I like a good bit of gardening. Mum got me into it when I was little. I've got the window box at the flat, but it's not the same. And now that they're getting on a bit, they can't keep up with stuff so much. So .. ."
They reached the hole Tom had prepared earlier for the plant, while Martha had still been inside helping his mum with the washing up. Tom lowered the large shrub in gently. As she looked at the pile of excavated earth next to it, Martha realised that she was in for another round of digging. Then it hit her that they hadn't refilled the hole they'd taken it from, either -- her arm muscles ached in anticipation.
Tom sighed and grabbed the spade from her without a second thought and started shovelling the soil back. Martha smiled with relief, then grabbed the plant's thick stem to keep it steady while the hole filled around it.
Now that they were inside the greenhouse, and with the bush screening them from being seen out of the windows for added privacy, Martha judged that this was the time to say what she'd wanted to say for hours now. "Tom, your dad ..." she began quietly, but then didn't know how to continue.
Tom's father had greeted Martha with the immortal words "What's wrong with you, then?" He'd gone on to explain that someone as beautiful as Martha couldn't possibly be going out with his useless son unless there was something the matter with her, but ... well, it wasn't the only way he'd made an impression over the course of the weekend.
"I was hoping he'd be having a good day," Tom said. "When you came. I wanted you to see what he used to be like, the dad I knew. But he doesn't seem to have many good days any more."
"Is it Alzheimer's?" Martha asked quietly.
"Of course it bloody well is," Tom snapped. He looked away. "Sorry. It's not your fault. It's not anybody's fault." He threw the last few spadefuls forcibly, little clods of soil skittering out across the cold ground around Martha's feet.
"Tom, I'm sorry, it's ... I've got no idea what it's like," she said. But it was a lie: the sight of the artificially aged, debilitated Doctor that had haunted her dreams all through her year of walking the Earth might not have been quite the same thing, but someone close to you, someone you relied on, someone you thought could always make the world all right, losing their powers ... that she was all too familiar with.
Except that she'd been able to give the Doctor back everything he'd lost, and there was no chance of the same for Tom's father. She'd been disappointed, in reading through the UNIT files, how little success they'd had in applying alien technology to medicine -- Malcolm's nanogenes project had been going on and off since before UNIT was founded, without real success. The details of implementation in a different species overwhelmed even the most promising of seemingly miraculous treatments. There really was no such thing as a universal panacea.
"It is what it is," Tom said, standing up straight again. Martha could see he was locking away his feelings rather than confronting them, but this wasn't the time. She reached a hand out, tentatively, put it on his arm, and smiled up at him, then determinedly changed the subject.
"So, anyway," she said, "I got in trouble at work again."
"You don't actually want this job, do you?" Tom said with a wry smile.
"I do, I do!" Martha protested. "But I'm not going to roll over when they're doing things wrong."
"The details of which wrongness must remain maddeningly vague, I'm guessing. Official Secrets Act and all that." This part of their relationship proceeded by guesswork; Tom speculated on things and Martha did her best neither to confirm nor deny. But he could read her well enough that it was a polite fiction at best. "Was it anything to do with that thing in the news the other day? With the lights 'dancing in the sky'?"
"No, no, that really was a weather balloon. What!" she added when he looked at her sceptically. "The Met Office have to sample the upper atmosphere at enough points to be able to predict how the patterns will change, so there are loads of weather balloons all over the place. Really!"
Martha was interrupted by her phone ringing; when she pulled it out, she saw it was an official UNIT number calling. She rolled her eyes. "Sorry. I have to take this." "It's OK," Tom said with a resigned smile.
"Jones here," Martha said as she put the phone to her ear. Tom did a silent mimic of her phone manner, holding a hand with outstretched thumb and little finger up to the side of his face and rocking his head side to side, with a wiggle of the hips for good measure. She stuck her tongue out at him.
On the other end of the line was Captain Price. "Martha, sorry to interrupt your weekend furlough."
"Quite all right," she said. The longer the delay before Tom roped her into heavy gardening work again, the better.
"It's relating to those Welsh toxic shock cases you were working on."
"Go on," Martha said.
"Torchwood Three think they've encountered some similar cases; they've requested a UNIT liaison. I believe you're familiar with some of the personnel involved?"
"You could say that, yes," Martha said with a smile. Tom gave her a quizzical look but she waved him away.
"Excellent, I'll requisition transport for you to Cardiff for 0700 on Monday."
Or first thing tomorrow morning, in English; Martha could tell when Price was following protocol and when she was just plain hiding the unpleasant truth behind the cryptic nature of military communications. "OK," Martha said, trying not to let any disappointment show in her voice. "Er, how long will the assignment be?"
"Difficult to say," Price said. "Inter-agency cooperation's flavour of the month, even when the agency in question's Torchwood. So I expect top brass will consider this your number one priority. In amongst all your other number one priorities, of course. Best to think of it as open-ended until further notice, I'd say."
"Roger," Martha said as Price hung up perfunctorily, to a fresh round of mocking from Tom.
"Wilco," he said. "Over and out."
"I have to go to Cardiff. Tomorrow morning until ... whenever." He looked somewhat upset. "It's not like Cardiff's far, there's a good train from London and ..."
"Oh, I know, I know," Tom said. "It's just ... well, I had plans. For Saturday." Valentine's Day, Martha remembered with a guilty start. "It's OK, I'll cancel."
"No, it's fine," Martha said, "I'm sure I can come back for the weekend."
"Best not, I realise things might get busy. I'm sure threats to world security have an even worse schedule than us doctors."
"I really am sorry. I'll sort us out a nice restaurant, yeah?" Martha said. "And a decent hotel room if the accommodation UNIT sort out turns out to be a dive."
Tom smiled. "OK. It's a date."
Chapter 13
Cardiff, 14th February 2009
Tom looked across the table at Martha. She was even more radiant than usual -- the black dress suited her figure perfectly and her hair was amazing, and Tom was the last person in the world to notice hair. But the thing he could never fix in his mind, the thing that made her more beautiful in the flesh than he could ever remember, was the alchemical way she inhabited her face and body, her features lighting up with each tiny smile, the way her eyebrows quirked upwards when she was being sarcastic ...
At this precise moment, though, she was frowning. But even that was adorable. "I am sorry you had to come out here," Martha said. "Don't be daft," Tom stopped her. "Thank you for finding us such a nice restaurant."
"It was recommended by a friend," Martha said.
"Well, then you owe her one. This is amazing," he said, gesturing at his plate with the fork. The food was relatively simple, but fantastically well cooked, and the ambience nicely understated -- there wasn't any overdone Valentine's Day cheesiness; the only hint of a difference for the occasion was the way all the tables had been separated out for dining a deux.
"Him," Martha said. "But don't worry, he already owes me one. If not several. Seriously, though," she said, "I do appreciate you coming. Especially with the weather the way it is."
"It has been a bit crazy," Tom said. "What's up with that anyway? Some megalomaniac with a weather control machine?"
"Tom!"
Tom dropped to a whisper. "What, you mean it is?"
"I don't know! They don't tell me everything. The weather is supposed to be random or chaotic or whatever, isn't it? It could just be chance. But I did see something the other day about the influence of graviton fluctuations on the upper atmosphere that ... well, I don't know. But you shouldn't talk about that sort of thing in public," she hissed.
"This is hardly in public," Tom retorted. "There's like four other people here." The weather had clearly had a bad effect on business, because with food this good the place should have been packed. But perhaps the champagne Tom was hoping to be ordering soon would make up for that.
"Still," Martha said. "I don't want to get in trouble. At least, not for dumb stuff like that. I'll save my getting in trouble for things that are worth it."
"You know what, I think I might be about to get myself in trouble," Tom said.
"Tom?" Martha looked concerned. "Is everything OK? Did something happen at work?"
"Oh, no, I mean ... Look, Martha, I know we've not been together very long. But ... well, with me going off for MSF soon and everything ..." He'd worked out a speech, even sort of rehearsed it to himself in the mirror before it started feeling too silly, but the whole thing was rapidly unravelling in the face of reality. "The thing is--"
He got out of his chair, got down on one knee next to her table, and pulled the small box out of his pocket, popping it open. He'd expected it to feel like a terrible cliché, but as he lived through the moment, it was the most sincere thing he'd ever done.
"Martha Jones, will you marry me?"
Chapter 14
Cardiff, 15th February 2009
"Martha, glad you could make it," Jack said, inviting her into his office. She'd come in through the deserted Hub, past the desks of the Torchwood team: Tosh's organised chaos; Ianto's meticulously filed orderliness; Gwen's tottering piles of paperwork; and the mess Owen had left behind, uncaring as he stormed out to rage against his undeath.
"Thank you for coming in at such a strange time," Jack said.
"Well, thank you for the restaurant recommendation," Martha said, smirking to herself. She still felt as though she were floating somewhere above Cloud Nine. Part of her wished she was wearing that gorgeous ring, but it had turned out Tom had got the size of her finger wrong. But that was hardly important -- they fitted together well in all the important ways. Besides, they'd agreed -- well, Martha had insisted, if she was honest -- not to tell anyone else quite yet. It was all a little sudden -- in a good way, she'd emphasised -- but Tom had agreed she should have time to get used to the idea herself before they told anyone else.
Jack smiled his wicked smile. "You had a good Valentine's Day? Or should I say Valentine's Night?"
"Best Valentine's Day ever," Martha said. "Definitely." She was bursting to tell Jack, but resisted the urge.
"So have you two lovebirds set a date?" he asked.
"Jack! How did you--"
"Alberto's an old friend of mine," Jack said. "He couldn't wait to tell me about how the gorgeous couple I'd sent him had had him breaking out the good champagne."
"You don't think it's cheesy?" Martha said. "I mean, it's a bit cheesy. Proposing on Valentine's Day and down on one knee and--"
"I think cheese is good," Jack said. "And I'd never object to a gorgeous man down on his knees. I mean, I have to assume he's gorgeous because you have such exquisite taste, but when do I get to meet this wonderful fiancé of yours, anyway?"
"I'm thinking never!" Martha said, acting slightly more scandalised than she felt. "Look," she went on, "about the fiancé thing, you won't tell the others, will you? We're keeping it quiet for now."
"My lips are as sealed as a church mouse's purse strings," Jack said. "I won't even tell Ianto. Yet."
"And speaking of Ianto, how was your night?" Martha asked.
"What do you want me to say? That our bodies danced by the light of the silvery moon? That our souls communed on a higher plane as our--"
"OK, OK, stop now!"
Jack smirked. "You're probably wondering why I interrupted your lie-in."
"I think Tom's wondering more than I am, to be honest."
Jack's eyes sparkled with amusement for a moment, but then turned serious. "I needed to talk to you when the others weren't here, and when you weren't on UNIT time, officially. Sit down, Martha."
Martha sat on the old leather sofa that he was gesturing towards, and Jack joined her. "Jack?" she said, turning to him.
"I've had Tosh looking into these Reaper manifestations," Jack said. "She's made some ... disturbing findings. Increasing numbers, but ... I'm not sure how well I can explain this, bear with me." He got up again and turned his laptop round so that the screen faced her. It was displaying a map of Northern Europe, peppered with dots, the greatest concentration in Southern England. "The Reaper appearances are correlated with these tiny gaps that appear in space-time, microscopic -- sub-sub-sub-microscopic -- tears in the fabric of the universe, accessing other realities -- well, one other reality."
"The Master's year," Martha said simply.
"Right," Jack said. "We think someone may be doing it deliberately, trying to bring that parallel timeline back into existence. Or perhaps it's an accident, perhaps they're just trying to surf through all the different realities out there, but the Master's Earth being so close to our own means they keep ending up with that particular one. But those flaws in space-time are what Tosh is tracking on this map."
"And all of those dots correspond to someone coming across their dead body from the other reality?" Unbidden, her mind flashed back to Keisha, that little bundle of rags on the living room floor ...
"Martha, are you OK?"
"Fine, fine, it's just ..." She blinked away tears. "The other day, my baby niece ..."
"Oh, Martha, you should have said." Before she knew what was happening, a glass of water was in her hand and his arm was around her back.
She took a long swig and sighed deeply. "It's fine, really."
Jack gave her shoulders a final squeeze and stood up again. "Really? Because ... well, the news gets worse."
"Just tell me, Jack," Martha said.
"Firstly, it's not always dead bodies. Tosh says that the flaw in space-time somehow latches onto the nearest person and brings forth their alternate self. Now, that is a dead body for a lot of people, but there are plenty of people who survived, the slaves of the Master's regime ..."
Martha interrupted, "I know I've only seen two myself, but they were both dead bodies, and so was Gwen, you told me ..."
"The Master targeted the Torchwood team deliberately, Martha, and he did the same to everyone you knew who he hadn't managed to capture. It's not a coincidence."
Martha was dumbfounded. She'd struggled with her feelings of guilt over her family's ordeal, but now she couldn't help but think that she'd been responsible for the deaths of everyone she knew, even if they had come back to life. How could the Master possibly have seen the likes of Oliver Morgenstern as a threat? How could killing a two-year-old child be anything other than sadistic pleasure?
But then a fierce resolve swept through her: at least that meant she'd really got to the bastard, that he'd really feared what she was capable of. And she'd proven that fear completely justified. So if some twisted nutcase wanted to bring him back, then she'd stop that too.
"But it's OK, isn't it?" Martha said. "Really, in the end. The Reaper appears and takes the paradoxical element out of the equation. Though they seem ... put off by me, somehow. And my family."
"Really? I ... That's interesting."
"Why?"
"I had a similar effect during the incident with Gwen; I assumed it was my age, but perhaps ... Perhaps for those of us who were on the Valiant, whose timeline is folded back on itself, instead of split in two, it ... puts them off somehow. They're searching for the thing that fits one reality and not another, but we fit both."
"Maybe," Martha said. "But in the end it doesn't matter, does it? The Reaper heals time, so in the end everything's back to how it should be, apart from everyone being badly shaken up."
"Ah," Jack said. "It seems ... not always. The other day, there was a girl, here in Cardiff -- Amy Hughes, her name was. The same thing happened -- space-time flaw--" Jack gestured vaguely at the map on the screen "--parallel self, Reaper ... but the one that was left behind was the Amy from the other timeline."
"But that isn't healing time, is it?" Martha said. "It's still a paradox."
"That's why I'm worried. Maybe which reality gets to be really real isn't as settled as it should be. And each time one of these incidents happens--" he jabbed the screen, dot after dot after dot "--the chances of it reverting back increase."
Martha looked closer at the display; the distribution of points on the map stretched all the way from Oslo to Marseilles. "I didn't realise they were spread so far apart," she said.
"There are a few indications even further afield. The thing is, if Tosh is right, the location of each individual manifestation is random, but they cluster as ..." His face screwed up as he tried to remember something. "... an exponential drop-off with the distance from the source of the fluctuations."
"So the more often it happens, the closer you can pinpoint the source. Looking at the map, it must be somewhere in or around London."
"That's what we think. We haven't got enough data yet to narrow it down -- there are still a huge number of scientific facilities that could be involved. Branches of Global Chemicals, the Rattigan Academy ... Or it could be some secret lab we're not aware of ..."
Jack had stopped, but it was obvious he had more to say. "Or?" Martha prompted.
"Or it could be UNIT. There are several of your research divisions based in the area." He was right; as well as the headquarters where she worked, there were any number of labs squirreled away throughout Greater London and the Home Counties.
"Jack," Martha said, "does Tosh have some sort of problem with UNIT? She seems ... I don't know, just a little bit off with me. And when she talks about it--"
"Tosh isn't without her reasons," Jack said curtly.
"Well, OK, as long as you're sure she's not casting accusations about out of some personal vendetta."
"Tosh is nothing if not professional," Jack said. "She's shown me the evidence, and I agree with her analysis. It's hugely likely that whatever's causing this is based on alien technology. And with Torchwood One out of commission, UNIT are by far the most likely to be using it."
"You want me to spy on UNIT," Martha said.
"Not spy," Jack said. "Not exactly. But you know as well as I do about the risk from rogue elements. Just ... keep your eyes open. And let me know what you find out."
"You really think there's something going on, don't you?"
"I think it doesn't hurt to keep our eyes open, Martha."
Martha shuddered again at the possibility that someone would be intentionally attempting to return the Earth to the hell of the Master's rule. But if Jack was right and that was just the closest of an infinity of parallel timelines ... Martha began to wonder, horrified, what other nightmares lay even further sideways in time. She grimaced. "I'll look into it," she told Jack.