Meeting at Infinity
Part Three
Chapter 15
Guéréda, Chad, 11th-13th March 2009
Tom stepped outside, mopping his brow as he came into the bright streaming sunlight. It hit him every day with the same intensity of wonder -- how beautiful the sky was here. Everything people said was true.
One of the nurses followed him out. "Tom?" she said. "Are you all right?"
"I'm fine," he said. "Just needed a quick break."
The mood in the camp was febrile this morning. The reports on the radio last night were garbled -- something about cars blocking the streets in the capital. He'd had training on what to do in the event of a coup -- the key message was that the new rulers were unlikely to earn themselves bad publicity at home and abroad by attacking medical facilities, but to remain alert and aware. The internal political situation was supposed to be relatively stable at the moment, and they were so remote that no one would be coming unless it was a particular target anyway. The more likely threat was from across the border.
There was a commotion behind him, then the crowds in front picked it up too, hundreds of faces craning to see ... what? Tom turned, and saw a wave of fire rolling across the bright blue bowl above them.
The beautiful sky was burning.
Not that night, but the night after, Martha rang. It had to be ludicrously expensive, and Tom found it somewhat suspicious that his satellite phone always seemed to work when she wanted or needed to talk to him. But then, her type of job ought to have perks, he thought.
This conversation was definitely the "needed" variety. She didn't explain exactly what had happened, but it was clear that she'd been involved at the centre of whatever had happened to the sky.
That wasn't what she really wanted to talk about, though. "Tom," she said, with an uncharacteristic wheedle in her voice. "If I was ... replaced, by, well, a clone, you'd be able to tell, wouldn't you?"
"I think so," Tom said, but he was thinking Bloody hell. Was that the sort of occupational hazard you got at UNIT?
"Tom, I ... I need you to know," Martha said. "How would you tell? What would give it away?"
Tom closed his eyes and began to speak. It was easy to list all the little things he loved about her, all the things that made Martha Martha, that even the best imitation couldn't.
Martha listened, making encouraging noises and "hmm"s. "Thanks," she said when he'd finished, minutes later. "I feel better now." But she didn't sound it.
"Martha, is there ... something else?"
"Listen, Tom, I haven't told you everything," Martha said. Tom waited for her to go on, wondering what revelation was coming. "You know I work for UNIT, and you know about aliens and stuff--"
"Yeah," Tom said guardedly. Where was this going?
"Well, before that ... the way I first got into all that ... I went travelling for a while. With an alien. In space. And time."
Tom boggled. "You mean you were, like, abducted?"
"No, no, it was nothing like that. Entirely my own free will," Martha said.
"OK," Tom said. "I think. To be honest, I was wondering if you were going to say you were an alien."
Martha laughed hollowly. "Would you mind if I was? An alien?"
"You'd still be you," Tom said. "That's the important thing."
"The thing is," Martha said, "my alien friend, the Doctor, he was back again, just now. And I ended up going on another trip. I didn't mean to, or anything, his ship just took off while I was saying goodbye."
"OK," Tom said again, trying not to sound too sceptical.
"We ended up on this alien planet in the middle of a war. I ended up with an injured combatant ..."
Tom made the leap. "You lost a patient," he said. When Martha didn't reply he knew he was right. "You'll be OK. It happens to all of us."
"I guess you're right. Thing is, though, Tom--" He heard her swallow. "When I left him, the first time, it was because I needed to leave. But this time, it's 'cos I had you to come back to. Even if you are thousands of miles away. I just wanted you to know that."
"I wish I could be there," Tom said. "If I had some sort of teleporter--"
Martha laughed hollowly.
"What's so funny? Do you have some sort of teleporter? 'Cos if you do, I think you should requisition it and come here right now, or I could come to you."
"I don't have a teleporter, Tom", Martha said.
"Oh," he said. "Well, I do wish I could be there, to ... well, look after you. You sound like you could use a bit of TLC."
"I'm a big girl," Martha said. "I can look after myself. But thanks." She made a kissing noise into the receiver.
Tom kissed his phone too. "Goodnight, Martha," he said.
"Goodnight, Tom."
He put down the phone and went outside. The sky was just as beautiful at night as in the daytime, a carpet of diamond-like stars. The stars that Martha had reached out, and touched.
He spent the rest of the night lying on the ground, staring up at them, not even trying to sleep.
Chapter 16
London, 6th-9th April 2009
Martha smiled when she saw Malcolm coming into her office. "What can I do for you?" she asked happily.
"You seem to be in a good mood," Malcolm said.
"Tom came home at the weekend," she said. "I think I'm allowed." She found herself fiddling with her ring reflexively.
"Well, yes, I'm sure you are," Malcolm said. "Do you have a few minutes? The Project Indigo team would like to ask you a few things. About ... well, about what happened with the Valiant, I'm afraid. You don't have to ..."
Martha swallowed, but she knew that the idea didn't make her feel nearly as shaky as it once would have done. Her growing general experience with UNIT, and dealing with the Sontaran business and then coping with Messaline, were gradually giving her a broader context in which the horrors of her experiences in the other timeline made some small amount of sense.
"No, it's fine. I've just got to finish writing this report, and then I'll be over."
"Hello, Doctor Jones," Colin said as soon as she entered the lab. "Pleasure to see you again."
"Yeah, nice to see you again too," Martha said, hoping she didn't sound too insincere. "Malcolm said you wanted to ask me something?"
"It's just a few things," Ilsa said, stepping out around a bench. "We're making real progress; the test runs ... well, we still haven't actually teleported anything, but the diagnostics are highly encouraging."
"And what do you need me for?" Martha asked. "You don't want me to try using it or anything, do you?"
"We've been researching known instances of teleportation," Pete said from where he was stood on the other side of the lab, eyes still fixed on his computer screen while he spoke. "Including yours. We have excellent CCTV footage and other telemetry from the Valiant, you see, so it's ..."
"Get to the point," Colin said.
"The device you used belonged to Captain Harkness, is that right?" Pete asked.
"Yes," Martha said.
"We've put in a request to Torchwood Three to be allowed to study it," Ilsa said, "but they're being highly obstructive. Even more so than usual."
"Maybe you could ask him," Colin suggested.
"Is that what you asked me here for?" Martha said. "You think I'm a back channel to Torchwood?"
"You did liaise with them back in February," Ilsa said. "And ... well, you're a Jones, that might give you some pull with this 'Ianto' person who keeps fobbing off our requests." Martha couldn't help but smile.
"That's magical thinking, Ilsa," Colin said, "and you know it."
"We're working on a teleporter, Colin," Ilsa said. "I think we're allowed a little bit of magical thinking."
"I could ask," Martha said, "but I don't know that Captain Jack would be willing to part with it; it's very precious to him."
"But it could be the key to the whole thing!" Pete protested. He looked at Martha for the first time, fixing her with an intense stare. "It's a Vortex manipulator, as best we can tell a piece of 51st century technology for the transduction of objects through time. And ... well, what we've got here in Project Indigo is supposed to transduce objects through the gaps in time -- interstitial time -- so as to effect an apparent movement through space ..."
Martha frowned; something Pete had just said was ringing a bell, somewhere at the back of her mind. "Sorry, what was that?"
Colin butted in. "What we're trying to do here, what all this stuff--" he gestured at the apparatus in the middle of the room; it had become slightly more encrusted with gadgets since Martha had last seen it, but remained fundamentally unchanged "--is for, is taking tiny microscopic flaws in the fabric of space and time and magnifying them up so that we can push an object through them."
"That's a flawed analogy," Pete said.
"All analogies are flawed on some level," Colin said. "If they were exact, they wouldn't be analogies, would they? They'd be the real thing."
Martha wasn't really listening to their argument, though; the bell in the back of her mind had turned out to be an alarm.
"I'm going to go and phone Captain Jack," she said. "Right away."
"Wonderful!" Pete said and, the matter closed as far as he was concerned, turned back to his computer.
"Oh, that's fantastic," Colin said. "Thank you very much."
"Yes, thank you," Ilsa said.
None of you know what I'm going to say to him, Martha thought to herself as she headed out of the lab as quickly as she could.
As Martha got through the door of the flat that evening, her phone was ringing. She kissed Tom on the cheek as she grabbed it from her bag. "Jack", the screen said in large friendly letters. "I have to take this," she said. She gave him her best hangdog look. "Sorry."
"No worries," Tom said. "I'll get dinner started."
Martha went through to the bedroom. "What can I do for you, Jack?"
"Is this line secure?"
It was going to be one of those conversations, clearly. "No, not really," she said, not in the mood for this sort of skulduggery tonight. After her earlier conversation with Jack, she'd spent the rest of the day convincing herself that she was overreacting and being paranoid. But when Jack hung up on her, all her fears came back to the surface.
A few moments later, Tom came in with his own mobile clutched to his ear. Martha looked at him quizzically and he said, "Someone called Jack, calling for you?"
"Jack, now you're just being silly," she said, taking Tom's mobile off him. "And how did you get Tom's number anyway?"
"I'm being safe," Jack insisted. "Because now I'm 99% sure we've got our suspect. Everything you told me earlier, about Project Indigo ... It all fits. All of it. What you described, about 'interstitial time', Tosh says it's exactly what's going on with the quantum gravity stuff. And UNIT headquarters is right in the middle of the zone of possible source locations. It's been going on right under your nose all along."
Martha began rehearsing the arguments she'd been using on herself for the past several hours. "How many other known facilities are still inside your zone of possible locations?"
"Thirty-seven," Jack admitted.
"And you said yourself it could be somewhere that wasn't even on our radar."
"But Martha, we've got reasonable--"
"You've got next to nothing, Jack. Project Indigo is a major plank of the R&D budget and UNIT's peace-dividend justification. It's not the sort of thing we can just shut down on the say so of an extra-mural organisation that doesn't officially exist," Martha hissed. "Especially not one that half of UNIT still regards as a deadly rival."
"Someone on that project is using it, deliberately, intentionally, to try and create a paradoxical alter-time state. You don't need me to tell you how bad that would be, particularly if the alter-time state they're trying to invoke is the one we think it is." Martha suppressed a shudder at the thought of the radioactive wasteland of the Master's Earth being summoned back into existence. "Even if the project isn't shut down, you have to launch a thorough investigation of everyone with access to it."
Martha sighed. "I'll talk to Malcolm and Special Investigations."
"No SI," Jack snapped.
"They function as internal security for UNIT's UK operations; surely they're the best-qualified--"
"They're the direct inheritors of Department C-19, which was subverted -- hopelessly subverted -- by the Master in the seventies," Jack said wearily. "For all we know, they're behind the whole thing, some sort of wheels-within-wheels contingency plan he set up decades ago. Look, Martha, do you trust this ... Malcolm?"
"Absolutely."
"Then stop. Anyone could be an agent for a rogue sub-organisation infiltrating other branches of UNIT. Anyone at all. But you have to expose whoever this is, whoever they're working for, or even if it's just their own agenda."
"If it's just me ... well, I'll do my best, but I can't make any promises."
Martha was leaning back in her chair, scrolling through a file about the Doctor's (alleged, Malcolm's tagging system insisted on pointing out) antics in San Francisco on the eve of the millennium, when there was a knock at the door.
She quickly readjusted herself and closed the computer window. It might be her lunch break but she didn't want anyone and everyone knowing about her reading habits. Though perhaps it was more a reflection of her own discomfort that obsessing about the Doctor's past didn't exactly fall squarely into the category of "getting over him".
"Colonel Mace!" she said, standing up and saluting as he and Captain Price came in. Price was clutching one of UNIT's ubiquitous plain brown folders, stamped with all sorts of secrecy levels.
"At ease, Jones," Mace said. "Do you mind if I take a seat?" Without waiting for her to say anything, he sat down on the other side of her desk, Price following suit.
"What can I do for you, sir?" Martha said, sitting back down herself.
"I hear from Taylor you've been taking an interest in Project Indigo," Mace said.
Martha had been rehearsing this moment in her head. She hadn't expected Mace to be the one coming to ask her about it, but the evasive answers she'd developed worked equally well with anyone, however well-disposed she felt towards them personally. "Well, the potential spinoff benefits are astonishing, sir," she said. "An end to famine ..."
"Yes, yes, jolly good, glad to hear you're committed to the project," Mace cut across her. "You've been talking to Taylor's team?"
"Yes, sir."
"Then you'll be aware that their work is only one of thirteen Indigo subprojects."
"I didn't know that, sir, no." Martha's brain raced as she tried to keep up with the implications: were all these different parts of Indigo potentially compromised? How could they ever hope to track down the source of the problem if there were so many different possibilities?
"Damned aliens seem to be able to zap themselves around the place willy-nilly without so much as a by-your-leave," Mace said, "but the technology's proved terribly difficult to crack. That's why we thought Taylor's approach might work, y'see -- it's based on an earlier attempt from the seventies that's more of a home-grown affair."
"Mostly home-grown," Price said.
"Little bit of alien interference on the expertise side," Mace said, "but the materials were all Earth-derived, is the important thing. Thing called TOMTIT -- Transmission Of Matter Through Interstitial Time." Martha nodded; that familiar phrase again. "But we have different teams working on different approaches all across the world. Indigos One to Seven and Indigo Ten are mothballed, but that leaves four other than the one Taylor's division are working on still active in some respect."
"I see," Martha said.
"The thing is, Jones," Mace said, "Indigo Thirteen is showing some real signs of progress."
"That's ... good," Martha said. Mace was driving towards something, but she couldn't quite see what.
"Indigo Thirteen's based on some of the Sontaran technology we recovered after the ATMOS business," Price put in. "There must be something more compatible about it, because team thirteen's progress has been astonishing."
Mace cleared his throat. "Point being, Jones, they're ready to start human testing of the system."
"Human testing?" Martha said. "But surely the risks are enormous; your volunteers would be ... I mean, who knows what weird physiological effects a teleporter could have, if it was malfunctioning in little, tiny, subtle ways? You'd need to give them a full medical checkup before and after each trip ..."
"Sounds like she'll be perfect, don't you think?" Mace said to Price.
"I'm sorry, sir," Martha said. "I'm not following."
"As you say, now that they're moving on to human testing, they'll be needing someone to head up the medical side of things, keep everyone as safe as possible. I've been asked to recommend someone to become the project's medical director." He looked straight across the desk at her. "I was planning on recommending you."
It was a golden opportunity: for her in her career, generally; to find out more about what was going on with this mysterious project that seemed to be causing so many problems ... It was almost too good to be true. Was it some sort of double bluff? Was Mace in on some conspiracy, setting her up to fall by giving her exactly what she thought she wanted? Or did the conspiracy only exist in Jack's head?
"There is one thing," Price said. "Indigo Thirteen's based in New York."
"New York?" That changed things. "Is this a request, or an order?" Martha asked Mace.
Mace laughed slightly, and shared a private look with Price. "You're not the only member of the Medical Division, Jones. And UNIT is a forward-thinking, family-friendly employer. If you have pressing reasons to remain based in the UK we will of course take them into consideration."
Tom had only just got back from Africa; certainly, if they were going to live their lives in UNIT's shadow then they'd have to get used to postings -- she was well aware she could be sent anywhere in the world at a moment's notice if necessary -- but it would be nice if it wasn't quite yet.
"I think, sir," she said, "on this occasion, I'll have to decline."
She hoped she'd be able to persuade Jack she'd done the right thing.
Martha bowed to the new reality of her paranoid world and bought the cheapest possible pay-as-you-go mobile on her way home. She typed in Jack's number and dialled.
As she waited for him to pick up -- and Jack was the sort of person who normally picked up straight away -- she wondered what she would say to him. If there were thirteen Project Indigos, then the whole thing blew wide open. Given the locational fix, the most likely one was the one Malcolm was involved in -- and she had gone through a brief period of suspecting him, until she'd been convinced by the fervour of his "leeches, Martha! Leeches on the research budget!" speech that the only reason he'd never talked about the other projects was his sincere belief they had no hope of working -- but who knew how wide their net had to become.
Jack's phone went to the answering machine, and she hung up and dialled again.
This time the answer was almost instantaneous, but the voice wasn't the one she'd been expecting. "Hello?" said a Welsh accent.
"Ianto?" Martha said. "It's me, Martha."
"Martha," Ianto said, sounding as though he was saying it to Jack rather than acknowledging her. His voice sounded flat, as though he wanted to get her off the phone in a hurry. "I'm sorry. This isn't a good time."
"I'll call back," Martha said, letting a hint of amusement seep into her voice at the thought of what sort of "not good time" might be involved.
"It's Owen and Tosh, Martha," Ianto said. "They've just died."
Chapter 17
Cardiff, 14th April 2009
Tom felt his knuckles being crushed in Martha's grip as she listened to Jack's speech. "Owen Harper isn't dead," he said. "And nor is Toshiko Sato. They'll live on, in our memories, in the inspiration that they give us every day. We will always -- always -- remember them."
Martha wiped away a tear as the single coffin rolled into the crematorium. Tom stood, silently, trying to give her the strength she needed to continue.
As the service ended, she disentangled her hand from his and squeezed his arm, and it was enough for him to know that he'd helped in some small way.
After the wake -- more fun than any Tom had been to before, which Jack insisted was a reflection of the departed more than anything else -- they headed back to the same hotel they'd stayed at two months ago, after he'd proposed.
They were just around the corner when Martha nearly walked into a man who was standing, looking lost, casting his head from side to side. He turned around to apologise and Tom felt uncannily as though he wasn't looking into a mirror -- this wasn't the reversed reflection he saw every morning, but fully himself. Albeit with a much worse beard.
It wasn't some long lost twin, was it? That had to be ridiculous. It must be something stranger. Go to a funeral for people who deal with weird shit, deal with weird shit. It figured. Hello, Tom, meet yourself. Oh, god, what if that was his beard?
"You're Martha Jones," the other Tom said. "You're not supposed to be here. Not yet."
"I think you're the one who's not supposed to be here," Tom said. "I--"
He didn't get any further because at that moment a great screeching filled the sky and a winged shadow fell across the street. Tom looked up to see the shape of another of the Reapers; it seemed identical to the ones he'd encountered on Hallowe'en and at lunch with Martha's family. But who could tell if it was really the same one?
Martha stepped in front of the two Toms to face it. "Martha!" Tom shouted.
"It's OK," Martha said. "Jack explained to me. I'm safe."
And sure enough, as the thing descended on them it seemed to try to scrabble away from Martha, as though she radiated some barrier it couldn't penetrate. A moment later, it had vanished in a plume of ethereal yellow ... and so had the other Tom.
"Phew," Martha said as she turned back to Tom. "It's still you."
"Martha, what's going on?"
Martha didn't meet his eye. She swallowed nervously and said, "Let's go up to the room."
"... That's why I'm safe from the Reaper, you see. The year is in my past, not my parallel present. My timeline is folded back on itself, not split in two like yours and everyone else's. "
"So ... I might have been replaced? By myself from this other world?"
"Jack says it's happened once or twice. But mostly the correct timeline reasserts itself."
"Leo's daughter," Tom said. "She was dead when we found the other her. And your friend Morgenstern, we saw his dead body too."
"The Master targeted the people who might be a threat to him. My associates top of the list."
"But I survived," Tom said. "That was me, still alive. And I -- other me -- knew who you were ... because of this stuff with you running around saving the world single-handedly?"
"He was part of the resistance, yeah," Martha said.
"You met him?"
"He ... You ... you died, Tom. To save me. I saw it. Right at the end. You died to save me and I saw it."
The revelations, one piled on another on another in quick succession, were all too much. The idea that that other version of himself still existed somehow, out there in another version of reality, suffering through the hell that Martha had described, ready to sacrifice himself … And that Martha seemed fine with it, as though she could be sure that they were the real ones, not the shadows ... But far worse still was the revelation that there were things to be revealed, that Martha had seen fit to hide all this from him. He'd thought they trusted each other; he'd known there were some things she couldn't tell him, but surely, something like this, she should have. He had a right to know; the whole world had a right to know.
"And you never told me?" Tom exploded. "You never told me any of this, that we'd met before, that I died, that, oh my god ... You never told me."
"I'm sorry, Tom, I didn't want to ... It didn't seem important." He felt as though he was about to shout at her again, but she quickly headed him off. "No, that's stupid. Of course it's important. But I didn't want it to be. I'm sorry, Tom. I really am. I just wanted everything to be normal and--"
"Get out," Tom said quietly.
"Tom?"
He closed his eyes, forced himself not to look at the distress on her face, the tears welling in her eyes, the downturn of her mouth, forced himself to resist the urge to do the one thing he wanted to do more than anything else when he saw her like this -- comfort her. "I ... It all makes sense now," he said, eyes still screwed shut. "All those weird little things when we first met, all the looks you and Tish give each other when I say perfectly innocuous things that must ... what? Remind you of things I never did? Would we ever have got together, even, if it hadn't been for him?"
"Tom!"
He balled his fists, squeezing his fingernails into his palms. He forced his voice as level and calm as he could, but he could hear the edges of a terrible, cold bitter rage escaping around every word. "I don't know, Martha. Maybe I could have coped with all the weirdness, with being the shadow of a man who died, with you seeing him every day when you looked at me. Maybe I could. But you never gave me a chance. You never trusted me enough to tell me." He opened his eyes and looked straight into hers. "Get out of here, Martha, I don't want anything to do with you."
Chapter 18
Cardiff to London, 14th-15th April 2009
Martha ran out onto the street outside the hotel. The sodium lights reflected from puddles and windows all around, painting the world in tones of harsh orange-yellow as she ran and kept running, not caring where to, only where from -- she had to get away, from all of it, from Tom's righteous anger and the happy earlier memories of the same place that now provided only a bitterly ironic counterpoint to her despair. But she couldn't run from her own sense of failure, that their relationship, the best thing to happen to her in a long time, had fallen apart and it was her fault.
There was a screech of brakes, a crunch of gears, and a car was reversing up the road. Suddenly, Martha's awareness switched entirely; there was no time for self-pity now, she was alone in the darkness late at night, and who knew what attention she had attracted?
When she saw that it was the Torchwood SUV, she was so relieved she burst into tears.
Jack wound the window down. "Martha? I was just coming to-- Get in."
She made no move to do so, and he ended up getting out, opening the passenger side and bundling her in before getting back in himself.
They sat silently for a while as Jack drove on. "This is your fault," she said eventually.
Jack was concentrating on the road. He turned momentarily. "Huh?"
"You're the one who told me that people could never know what we'd done," Martha said. "That it was this ... big secret that we had to keep from everybody. Well, look where it's bloody ended up."
Jack blinked. "Martha, has something happened with Tom?"
"Of course it bloody well has," Martha responded. "If by 'something' you mean, he met his other self right here on the street. And then dumped me for lying to him all this time."
"Oh, Martha," Jack said sympathetically. "Martha ... Do you want me to drive you back to the hotel? I'll talk to him ..."
"Oh, that'll help," Martha said with heavy sarcasm. "No, he needs ... time. If he's ever going to speak to me again at all, which I doubt."
"He'll come around, Martha," Jack said, "you'll see."
"I don't think so," Martha said. "He was ... I've never seen him angry like that, not ever. It was ..."
Jack swung across into the outer lane as he accelerated up the dual carriageway; Martha became dimly aware that they seemed to be leaving Cardiff, for all Jack's offer to take her back. "Martha?" he prompted when she didn't pick up.
"I know exactly how he was feeling, Jack," Martha said. She felt empty inside as she spoke, the words reverberating uselessly in the hollow shell of herself. "Betrayed. He felt betrayed. I'm not who he thought I was. Some secrets are just too big to keep."
"Was there a Reaper?"
"Yes, Jack, there was a Reaper," Martha said wearily. "Just like every other bloody time this has happened. Dammit, is it ever going to stop? We beat the Master, surely that means we get to be free of him?"
"Funny thing is, that's why I was coming to find you," Jack said.
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"I think we can stop it," Jack said, with the sort of confidence that Martha couldn't imagine ever feeling again. "No more Reapers, no more bleed-throughs from the unhappened timeline ..." He glanced over at her. "When I got back to the Hub, Tosh's interstice-tracing program was going haywire. All over the country, all over Europe, the same sort of events that tie into the Reaper appearances. Whoever's opening up those wormholes has switched over to production mode."
"You've got enough data to be sure of the source, haven't you?" Martha asked. She barely cared, except for the dull aching sense that she was about to learn that Jack's suspicions, that she'd so dearly wished would prove unfounded, had been proven correct. And why not? Her night could hardly get any worse.
"UNIT headquarters," Jack said. "I'm sorry, Martha."
They were zooming across the Severn Bridge; Martha didn't want to think how fast Jack must be driving. "You want me to take you in, don't you?"
"No, Martha, I'm going to take you home, and I want you to go and sleep or have a good cry into your pillow or smash all your plates or ... whatever it is you need to do." He turned to her with one of his irritatingly charming smiles. "But if you could just give me your security codes ..."
Chapter 19
UNIT Headquarters, 15th April 2009
The laboratory was dark and quiet in the dead pre-dawn hours, even the most dedicated of UNIT's Science Division gone home to catch some sleep. All that remained was the faint glow and steady humming emanating from the machinery at the back, still active in the middle of the night.
Jack should not have been here; he should have been with Ianto and Gwen, helping them recover from the trauma of their teammates' deaths. But, equally, it would be dishonouring Tosh's memory to ignore this threat now that her painstaking work had paid off and the very source of the disturbances had been pinpointed to exactly where he had most feared it would. He had worked alone before; he would work alone again.
Jack should not have been here; he was not a member of UNIT's Science Division. The clearance codes he'd been given by Martha had worked like a charm so far, but he remained alert for any sign that their magic had worn off.
Jack should not have been here; he should have been helping Martha deal with her break up, or driving back to Cardiff to shake some sense into Tom Milligan.
Jack should not have been here; he would not be born for thirty centuries yet.
Jack should not have been here; he should have died many, many times.
Jack felt all of this, and knew it for what it was: the machine itself, by some digitalised instinct, pushing him away, recognising that he was not quite part of the reality it was created to rewrite.
He reached its control console, a jerry-rigged lash-up extending out from the network of tubes making up the core of the device. The whole thing sat just above waist height, suspended between two fat doughnuts, the synchrotrons that fed into the central mechanism. He put out his hand to touch the controls, defying the way the machine screamed at him to stay away. The heart of Indigo Twelve. Not so much a standard teleporter, as a machine for rewriting the whole history of the universe around an object so that it was always where you wanted it to have been. But in that process, the reordering of space-time at the tiniest possible scales, it opened gaps into other realities. He took out the scanning device in his pocket and waved it over the machine quickly to confirm what he already knew -- this was the source of the energy signature associated with the Reaper appearances.
He glanced at his wrist, then around the room. A tiny sampling of the data stored in any one of the PCs sitting silently on the workbenches would be sufficient to calibrate his Vortex manipulator, but he could not access it without alerting UNIT security to his presence. Maybe if Tosh were here ... but she wasn't, and never would be again.
He pushed the thought away. You need to concentrate on the task at hand, he imagined Ianto telling him. He began to study the controls more carefully. Ideally, he would find a way to sabotage it so that it caused some terrible accident, made UNIT think the technology was too dangerous to be pursued further. At the very least, he needed to disable it so that the project was put back months, buy them time to work out how to deal with the Reapers. Perhaps time was all that was needed -- delay whatever the mole within UNIT intended to do beyond the point where time had been rewound. If accessing the Master's paradoxical reality was indeed what they intended.
He flicked a switch tentatively. The machine hummed slightly louder.
There was a knife at his throat. "Don't try anything."
The voice in his ear was a snarl from someone unaccustomed to snarling. Jack felt confident he could fight back, and win, but there might be more to be gained by playing along. But then the knife at his throat was joined by a stinking handkerchief over his mouth and the floor was sliding away from his feet and the world swimming out of focus into nothing.
Jack woke to find himself hanging upside down in mid-air, trussed to a frame suspended above the Indigo device and naked from the waist up. His captor had been busy while he'd been out. He looked up and to the left, and saw a figure standing silently, wearing long red robes and a mask made from an animal skull, all ridges and teeth.
"Well, you're not a Sycorax," Jack said. "Not tall enough." Then he laughed. "Faction Paradox? Oh, come on."
"You've heard of us, have you, 'Time Agent'?"
"There are some things--" Jack couldn't stop himself from laughing again "--that the Time Agency knew only as legends and myths. And there are some things that we knew only as a joke. The Faction doesn't exist any more. It never has existed any more. All that's left is the ghost of an idea. Are you really telling me all this trouble has been caused by your pathetic delusions of grandeur?"
"The ghost of an idea can be the most powerful thing of all," the masked figure said. "If you don't see that then you understand nothing of our methodology. The Faction will become great once more, through me!"
The realisation hit Jack with sickening force. "You want to use Project Indigo to access a reality where the Faction still exist?"
"You understand nothing," the figure snarled. "None of you understand anything!"
"That's what it's all about for you, is it?" Jack said. "Knowing something other people don't makes you feel important? No wonder you like the idea of Faction Paradox."
"Would you believe that all I was doing was trying to understand some of the background files for the Project? But there were all these omissions and elisions and contradictions ... And the more I explored them, tracked down references and related topics, the more sense it began to make; all those gaps and discrepancies built into a bigger picture. I discovered the necessity of the Faction's existence by their very non-existence."
"What are you saying? If Faction Paradox did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them?"
"Precisely."
"They're not gods," Jack said. "Nowhere near."
"I suppose you'd know all about not being a god, wouldn't you, Mr Immortal? Oh yes, I'd love the chance to explore your biodata fully, but I need it for something else."
"Give me a break." Jack laughed. "You haven't read my biodata, you've read my file!"
"You're an abomination, an unnatural disruption to the order of the universe. You're perfect for the Faction. Perhaps I should have tried to recruit you. But as it is, you're a tool, just like the quantum gravity device."
"You really think you're going to bring back the Faction?"
"Not just the Faction, Grandfather Paradox himself! With this device, I can reach any alter-time state I choose, even the one the Grandfather himself created in the Act of Severance, when he took off his own arm and removed himself from the timeline."
Jack grunted as he struggled to free himself from his bonds. "You don't even understand what you've done! Indigo isn't accessing other timelines, it's accessing one other timeline, a paradox overlaid on this one by--"
"Immaterial," he said. He paused for a moment, and when he spoke again it was softer, and Jack could hear the scientist this had once been puzzling things out. "Perhaps there is some strange attractor in the probability space, but that's irrelevant." He cleared his throat, and the wannabe Faction initiate returned in full force. "Your biodata will be a glorious offering to the loa. They will allow me to open a door to anywhere I want." He moved his empty hand across Jack's chest and pushed downwards. Jack winced as he felt a sharp point draw blood, even though there was nothing there. Jack twisted his head to see his captor's shadow on the wall was brandishing a knife. "As you can see," the figure gloated, "I have already mastered the sombras que corta."
"The bondage I can cope with," Jack said through a grimace, "but I really think it's time we had a good long chat about safewords."
"Quiet," was the only reply. The shadow-knife bit into his flesh again, and again. Each cut burned, as though the unreal blade had been dipped in concentrated acid. Jack bit down on his lip to keep himself from screaming as the process went on. The ever-decreasing part of his brain that wasn't preoccupied with the pain noted absently that his captor seemed to be carving some sort of symbols on his chest.
Jack lost track of time, but finally, his captor seemed to have finished. Jack let out a long groan as his captor moved away and started to work the switches and buttons on the console. The machine beneath him came to full life, the unremarkable grey tube at its centre somehow glowing from within. The drops of Jack's blood, still flowing from his stinging wounds, were suddenly suspended in mid-air above it.
"And now, the final stage." He held his arms wide and shouted something in a language Jack didn't recognise.
And then the shadow knife slid across Jack's throat. His final sight was of his gushing blood freezing into a fountain as it hit the stasis field.
Each time Jack dies, his death is total. There is no ghost-like consciousness persisting while his body starts to decay, no metaphysical battle in the afterlife to return to the land of the living. Whatever it was Owen encountered is not for him, and never will be, not after the Gamestation.
And so his dead mouth did not register the iron tang of blood on the back of his tongue.
His dead ears did not hear the incantations of the ritual, increasing in their fervour and incoherence.
His dead nose did not pick up the sulphurous stench of decayed dreams.
His dead skin did not prickle as the eldritch energies of the dimensional portal swirled around him.
And his dead eyes saw nothing of the figure that stepped forth, a man who seemed old but still vital, long robes, long hair and long beard all flowing away from him.
A man still in full possession of both his arms.
The War King's body was alive with subtle senses, reaching out across this continuum and into others. He knew instantly that he had been ripped from his reality into another. How and why he could determine in time; for now, the knowledge of what has happened was enough.
But what screamed out at him, through every cell of his body, was an absence. Nowhere, in or out of time, could he feel a connection to the caldera. This history seemed to have no anchor, no ultimate observer.
How can the Homeworld be gone?
And yet this was a history in which his very existence was possible, so by definition the Enemy could not have been victorious here, or the whole universe would have been remade into something utterly inimical to his mode of being. There must have been some sort of a catastrophe -- perhaps a War, but one quite different from the one he was fighting.
"You're not the Grandfather," a voice said, and for the first time he took notice of what his baser senses were telling him about his precise location. Some sort of laboratory equipped with a very primitive reality reprocessor, above which a dead body had been suspended for reasons surpassing understanding.
Distant memories chimed at the back of his mind as he recognised elements in the reprocessor's design, and he knew he was on Earth. So presumably the snivelling wretch in front of him was a human, albeit one dressed in a parody of Time Lord robes. The bone mask was the giveaway, though: here before him was some sort of degraded Paradox ritualist. Amusing that the Faction, of all things, were what survived in this alien timeline. He reached down and ripped off the mask to reveal the face of a human male, eyes wide in fear, mouth working up and down wordlessly.
He controlled himself enough to speak, but merely repeated, "You're not the Grandfather."
"Grandfather." The word was resonant of raw biology and chaotic, unplanned breeding; of revolutionaries and iconoclasts; of old enmities and older friendships.
The War King threw back his head, and laughed for the first time in a long time.
The Homeworld had been swept away. But so too had the Enemy: they were no more, or perhaps they had never been. Perhaps it was time for the old titles once more.
"No," he said. "I'm not the Grandfather." He looked into the terrified eyes. "I am the Master, and you will obey me."