Fans Fiction Viva Torchwood by Doreen Freitag

Chapter 5

Translated by Birte Scheider

Catherine had just put her mobile phone back into her pocket after her conversation with Jim Stuart when they could hear more gunshots from outside. Car doors were slammed and a car drove away.

One moment later, Rex Matheson and Jack entered the mini market through the back door again, breathing heavily.

The CIA-agent was dirty, as if he had been lying on the ground, and there was a bullet hole in one of his sleeves. He didn't seem hurt, though, because he moved his arm as if the hole wasn't there.

‘What the hell is going on here,’ Matheson asked and kicked against a news rack, which fell over with a huge noise.

‘Where's Gwen,’ Catherine asked. Her colleague should have been here long ago.

‘Hank and Spikey took her,’ Jack replied and Catherine's head jerked around.

The Captain put his weapon back into his shoulder belt and was staring to the ground with an absent air. When he looked at her, Catherine could suddenly see all of his emotions, the fear of another loss and the fierce resolution of bringing Gwen back.

Meanwhile, Rex Matheson was on the phone and he was talking loudly, describing the delivery van with which the two men and Gwen had left in the direction of North.

‘This won't be any good,’ Jack told Catherine. ‘They'll change the car as soon as they can or they'll go into hiding and we've got no idea who we're dealing with. Seems like there is something much bigger behind all of this.’

‘Let's go back to the warehouse. We've got a well-equipped van there, for investigations.’ Matheson was about to leave the mini market.

‘Shouldn't we keep looking here? Just for a short while,’ Catherine said. ‘It's unlikely that we'll find something, but the two didn't seem really smart to me, either.’

Rex Matheson indefinably looked at her for a moment, then shrugged. ‘They were at least smart enough to shoot at our tyres.’

Jack had already started examining the counter. ‘But they don't know more than those action movie tricks, Rex.’ He bent down and opened a drawer. ‘Ah. Well, what have we got here?’

He pulled the drawer out of the cupboard and put it onto the counter. Rex Matheson and Catherine approached him. The drawer was filled with new passports, which seemed real - or deceptively real.

‘So what are these desert-rambos actually doing here,’ the CIA-agent shouted. ‘Are they providing Weevils with documents here, where there is no-one else? And then they set them on the people?’

‘I think that's actually quite close to the truth, Rex,’ the Captain replied and gazed at the piles of documents pensively.

The footpath back to the warehouse suddenly seemed a lot longer to Catherine than it did before, when she had walked to the crossroads arm in arm with Jack. And she felt like this happy moment was only a memory from a different, distant reality.

Here and now she was suddenly in the middle of a real Torchwood case, Gwen had been kidnapped by alien smugglers and everything they would be doing from that point of time on was dangerous and left no room for mistakes.

‘You, take care of that broken car over there,’ Rex Matheson snapped at the assistant who approached them from the warehouse. He led Catherine and Jack to the ATV which was parked next to the rear front wall. ‘This is our investigation van. Well-equipped with the latest technology and also suitable for small lab analyses. Now we only need a direction we can head towards.’

‘Can I see the room with the finds,’ Jack asked. ‘Maybe we'll find another hint.’

‘Gwen was just examining some kind of metal chip card when you called her,’ the CIA-agent replied. ‘I think she put it into her pocket because she wanted to show it to you. We've got a second one. They were found near two of the human corpses.’

He showed them the way to the back entry of the building. In a room which originally must have served the delivery handling someone had put all found articles onto shelves. Rex Matheson sent the security guard out of the room and closed the door. While they had been at the mini market, someone had brought the metal glove here. It now lay on a table in a corner of the room. The rest of the so-called finds weren't more than black, indefinable chunks to Catherine.

Jack approached a box with black loops on one of the shelves. ‘These seem to have been the collars for the Weevils,’ he said and got one of the loops out of the box.

Rex handed him a small object. ‘Here, the second chip.’

Jack looked at both objects in his hands and Catherine could suddenly see a small slot at the side of the collar that was facing away from him.

‘Jack, look,’ she said, took the collar and turned it in her hands so the Captain could see the slot.

He understood immediately and fit the two pieces into each other. A small beep came from the collar and a series of small blue dots ran around it.

‘Like arming an alarm system,’ Catherine said. ‘Do you think they programmed the Weevils with them?’

‘That makes sense,’ replied Jack.

‘That makes sense?’ Rex Matheson was angry. ‘Nothing makes sense! Why did we find forty-three Weevils here in a warehouse in Vidal Junction, California, programmed with collars and alien stuff? What were they programmed for?’

‘If I knew that, I was already on my way to wherever Gwen is,’ said Jack. He pulled the chip out of the slot and leaned on the table with the metal glove on it.

In this moment, his wristband gleamed and blinked pulsating and suddenly a pillar of light appeared in the middle of the room. Jack's head jerked around and he stared at it with puckered brows. When Catherine was about to close her eyes because the light was too bright, it faded again and a male figure appeared in it. When the light had vanished completely, there stood a man with a huge grin on his face. He was wearing a short red army jacket from Napoleon's time, which had seen better days, an Asian sword and a cowboy's weapon belt.

‘Jack,’ he said, and his grin got even bigger. But when he saw the frozen expression on Jack's face, his gaze showed slight uncertainty.

‘What do you want,’ the Captain wanted to know.

‘Don't you want to introduce me first,’ the man asked and looked at each of them hopefully, stopping when he saw Catherine.

‘No,’ the Captain replied shortly.

‘Who's that, Jack?’ Now Rex Matheson wanted to know who that strange man was and he had already placed his hand on his weapon. ‘I always thought you were the craziest person here, but Mr 18th Century beats the pants off you.’

Jack inhaled resignedly, then he said: ‘This is Captain John Hart. We have worked together a very long time ago.’

‘Worked together...,’ John Hart repeated. ‘Alright, I think I can't expect a more friendly description. And? This is supposed to be your current team? A chocolate brown wannabe-agent and a hot-blooded ginger?’ He glanced at Catherine again and didn't pay attention to the angry CIA-agent in the background. ‘Is she as fiery as she looks like?’

‘Stop it, John,’ Jack hissed.

But Catherine was used to those kind of chat-up lines. ‘You wouldn't believe how fiery I can be, Captain Hart,’ Catherine replied with a snappish undertone.

She didn't look at Jack Harkness whilst saying this - otherwise her face would have turned fiery red as well - but his laugh showed her that she had hit the right tone.

‘Wow, she's even hotter than your aggressive Miss Cooper,’ John Hart said and nodded impressed. ‘Speaking of which, where is she?’

‘I hoped you could tell me, since you appeared so unexpectedly,’ Jack said. ‘There must be a reason that you came here just in this moment.’

‘Your shrewd power of deduction keeps surprising me, Jack,’ John Hart laughed. ‘There is indeed something I want to tell you. In the course of my, uhm, practises, I stumbled upon something I thought you should know.’

‘In other words: you're deeply enmeshed in it,’ Jack Harkness replied contemptuously.

‘Would I ever do anything illegal,’ John Hart asked and lifted his hands in an innocent way.

‘Yes,’ Jack and Rex Matheson said simultaneously. The man wearing a red jacket looked at Catherine angrily because she had to force herself not to giggle.

‘Well,’ he snapped, ‘do you want to know what I want to tell you or should I leave again? I can't stay forever.’

‘Oh, please, Captain Hart,’ Catherine said courageously, ‘if you can tell us something that will help us finding Gwen, we'd surely be grateful.’

‘That was my plan,’ John Hart replied, glanced at Jack and then smiled again. ‘A bit to the east of here you can find Parker Dam, a dam which ponds Colorado River. A natural Rift established there. It's not as big as the one in Cardiff, but it's active enough to get several things through. Alien drugs and weapons and Weevils. You can control them with those collars.’ He pointed to the loop Catherine still held in her hand. ‘I only know what's happening at the dam but it looks like something big is about to start. Weapons and drugs are brought to Phoenix, the Weevils were brought here to Vidal Junction.’

‘Do you know what they wanted with this,’ Jack asked and got the glove from the table.

‘Wow, how did it get here,’ John asked surprised. ‘They're usually brought to Phoenix. This really is a good catch for you.’ He stretched out his arm and Jack handed him the glove, even though he was reluctant to do so.

‘It's fine, Jack, I won't steal it - even though it's quite tempting to leave with it right now.’ Captain John Hart looked at the glove as if he was unsure whether to leave or not, but Catherine could see him deciding to stay. She inwardly gave him a bonus point and felt like Jack also did because he relaxed a bit.

‘This is a Triple,’ John Hart said. ‘It's much more rare than the common gloves. The others can mostly only be used for resurrection, but this one has a few other extras. Ready for a little demonstration?’

Captain Hart put on the glove and pressed the panel on the palm. In no time, a hologram showing a map with many small and red flashing dots appeared in front of him.

All of them came a bit closer and studied the map.

‘That's the surrounding area,’ Rex Matheson said.

‘Here in the warehouse are lots of red dots, some are in Parker and others are further in the north.’ Catherine uttered her thoughts. ‘Are they the Weevil collars?’

John Hart whistled through his teeth. ‘Jack, you should keep this young lady here in your team. She really can do the math.’

‘I already noticed that,’ Jack said and started smiling again. This sent one of those warm waves, which she knew pretty well by now, through Catherine's body.

‘So with this map we can see where exactly Weevils are,’ Matheson summed up.

‘And where there are Weevils, there's Gwen,’ Jack said hopefully. ‘Since they drove north, I think they're heading towards...’ He squinted his eyes to see the area in more detail. ‘Las Vegas,’ he said amazed.

‘What's this small blue dot,’ Catherine asked and pointed to a place on the map that was close to the warehouse.

‘Blue shows the controllers. They are coding units shaped like chip cards. You program the collars with them. With the base station on the glove here you can code the maps. The hologram says one of them should still be here in this building.’

Catherine wanted to answer him, but Jack briefly touched her arm so he could speak instead. ‘Why are you telling us all of this, John? Why are you harming your so-called practises?’

Captain Hart shrugged. ‘As long as everything was going on normally, I didn't think about it. But there has been more and more action throughout the past few weeks. I realized that something was going wrong when I knew that you were in the US.’ He grabbed the wristband at his left wrist and Catherine saw that it was quite similar to Jack's.

‘Maybe,’ Jack Harkness replied impatiently. ‘But why? Why are you helping us?’

‘You know why, Jack,’ John Hart said and his eyes had a sad glance. ‘I owe you something. I owe you more than I could pay you back in my life. Also, I might not take laws too seriously, but this doesn't mean that I'll watch when Earth is destroyed. Is that enough for you?’

Captain Jack Harkness nodded seriously. ‘Yes John, it is. Thank you.’

John Hart pulled off the glove and handed it to Jack. Then he opened the cover of his wristband and typed something into the control panel underneath it. He looked at the others. ‘Any further questions?’

‘Are you going back to the dam,’ Rex Matheson asked.

‘Sure, at least one of us has to hold the line.’

This answer even made the CIA-agent smile.

‘Good luck with finding Gwen,’ Captain John Hart then said. ‘I've got to go now. Got a hot date.’

He activated his wristband and within the blink of an eye he had disappeared in a bright blue light beam.

‘Well, I guess you can't say goodbye more dramatically than him. Nice toy,’ Catherine said slowly and glanced insinuatingly at Jack's wristband.

The Captain laughed. ‘Yeah, it is. But unfortunately, mine doesn't have all of the functions any more. A - let's call him a friend imposed some restrictions on me a long time ago. But even though I can't travel with it any more, it can still do a lot of stuff, right, Rex?’

‘As if ascertaining your body's degree of salinity was such a great function,’ he said.

‘That was only a - what do you call it nowadays? - an app,’ Jack laughed. ‘I'll show you a few impressive tricks at the next opportunity, Cathy.’

The way he looked at her whilst saying this made Cathy tremble inwardly and she could feel how she blushed.

‘Enough flirting for now,’ Rex Matheson said. ‘We've got work to do. Why didn‘t you tell him about the coding card?’

‘John doesn't have to know everything,’ the Captain replied. ‘Even though he seems to be on our side this time, it's better for him if he doesn't know everything.’

He handed Catherine the glove. ‘Here, I think you can handle it best. If Gwen's chip card still works, we'll find her with this. But never use it to touch someone.’

When they left the warehouse, they were blinded by the Californian sun again which was already low in the sky.

Jack put on his sunglasses and headed towards the CIA-van they would drive from now on. ‘Looks like we'll reach Sin City just in time for the vespertine glitter-appearance.’

‘Have you been to Las Vegas before,’ Catherine wanted to know.

‘Vegas is always worth a trip,’ Jack replied and winked.