Fic: Taking Care Of Business – Part 1

[badly_knitted]

 


Title: Taking Care Of Business – Part 1
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Ianto.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1794
Spoilers: Children of Earth Fix-it.
Summary: Ianto died, confronting the 456 beside Jack, but then he woke up…
Written For: Weekend Challenge ‘Oh The Places You'll Go 2,’ at 1_million_words.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters.
 
 


Ianto had died; he was reasonably certain about that. Either he’d died, or it had been some sort of peculiar trick played by the 456, some ruse to get the people of earth to capitulate to their demands, but it had certainly felt like dying… Not that he had any previous experience to compare it to. Still, when he’d awoken in the makeshift morgue, one among dozens of bodies draped with red sheets, none of the other deceased from Thames House had been moving, so the ‘trick’ theory seemed unlikely. The 456 had seemed deadly serious in their intentions, and also seriously unpleasant, not the kinds of beings to have much, if anything, in the way of a sense of humour.

 
There’d been a vacant spot on the floor beside him though, a discarded sheet with no body beneath it, and that had clearly been where Jack had lain before reviving. But Jack was gone now, and Ianto had no idea where his lover might be. He didn’t even know if Jack had gone of his own volition, to have another try at stopping the 456, or if he’d been taken by force, but right now that didn’t matter. As much as he would have liked to, if only to make sure Jack was alright, Ianto didn’t have time to hunt his lover down. The clock was still ticking towards the deadline set by the 456; children were no doubt still being rounded up, ready to be handed over in their thousands…
 

There was precious little Jack could do to prevent it, even if he wasn’t still a captive, and nothing at all Ianto could hope to do, not by himself and with no resources. What little they had at the old Torchwood One warehouse, mostly stolen tech, would be useless. It had allowed them to get eyes inside Thames House and gain a better idea of what was going on, but to defeat the 456 would require the kind of tech that had  existed at the Hub, and even that was unlikely to be enough, if any of it had even survived the explosion that had destroyed the upper levels and left a gaping hole in the Plas.
 

Ianto could make his way back to Cardiff, try to get into the lower levels via one of the seldom used entrances off the sewers, and see if there was anything salvageable that might help, but it was a three-hour journey by road, he didn’t have a car, short of stealing one, and anyway, the deadline would be long past by the time he got there and ransacked the archives… He racked his brains for other options as he spread his sheet over the body next to him, picked up the number that had rested on the floor at his feet and fitted it under the number that had marked Jack’s position, slid Jack’s sheet to take up more of the empty space… It wasn’t ideal, but it might buy him a little longer before anyone noticed another dead body had got up and walked off by itself. He could hope.
 

It was a shame he didn’t still have his jacket; he felt absurdly undressed in his waistcoat and shirtsleeves. He’d left it in the car near Thames House, something he now had reason to regret, but a quick look in an adjoining room netted him a sports jacket that would do for now, not that it was much of a disguise. He found a bathroom, checked his appearance in the mirror, straightening his tie, surprised to find the cut on his cheek now completely healed… at least that wouldn’t draw unwanted attention. Then he simply walked past the guards at the main doors, head down, fumbling a packet of cigarettes and a lighter from the borrowed jacket’s pockets as if he was stepping outside for a quick smoke. They barely gave him a second glance; probably figured anyone inside the building had every right to be there. It wasn’t their job to keep people inside anyway; they were there to keep reporters and other unauthorised people from getting in.
 

Outside, he stepped into an alley to get his bearings, still unsure what to do next. The building he’d just come out of was next door to Thames House, which made sense; they wouldn’t have wanted to carry all those bodies any further than they had to. That meant he knew exactly where he was, too far from the warehouse he and the others had set up their temporary base in, and a quick glance told him the car he and Jack had used was no longer where they’d left it, so he’d have a long walk to get back there. It would probably be pointless anyway, nothing much of use there, it must have been cleared out years ago, but… There used to be another secret Torchwood One facility, or several really, but the one he was thinking of was a secure facility only a few streets away, quarter of a mile at most. Yvonne Hartman had pointed it out to him once, when giving him an overview of Torchwood’s London holdings, and he still remembered his former boss’s access codes.

 
Shoving the cigarettes and lighter back in the pocket of the jacket, unused, Ianto followed the alley out onto the street at the back of Thames House, crossed the road at an unhurried walk, and as soon as he was well out of sight, broke into a run, knowing he couldn’t afford to waste time he didn’t have.
 

The building was still there, fronted by a shop dealing in rare books, which appeared to still be in business, but he didn’t go in by the front door. There was another entrance around back, with a keypad on the wall, and he typed in Hartman’s code, hoping nothing had been updated since her death. The light turned green, the lock clicked, and breathing a sigh of relief, Ianto slipped quickly inside, shutting the door behind him and hearing the lock re-engage.
 

There were several doors leading off the small room he was in. One no doubt led to the bookshop’s back rooms, another to the building next door, also part of One’s holdings, a third to the stairs leading to the upper floors… Ianto’s eyes came to rest on the final door, solid metal and rather more imposing than the other three, and he crossed to it. It was flanked by another keypad, this one requiring two authorisation codes. He typed in Yvonne’s, then, holding his breath, his own old Torchwood One code. To his relief, it was accepted; one of the unexpected benefits of his time as Yvonne’s personal assistant. He swung the door open and stepped into a dimly lit stairwell, leading downwards to Torchwood One’s off-site storage vaults.
 

Now that he was here, he could only wish he’d thought of this place sooner, back when they’d been on their way to London. It was far more secure than the old warehouse, the backup servers for Torchwood Tower were here, and there might be some equipment that would prove useful in the current crisis. He hurried down five flights of stairs, into the depths, to check whether the servers were still operational, then settled at a computer terminal to access a catalogue of what was in storage here. On a second terminal, he logged in to mainframe and started typing in questions and requests for data.
 

Mainframe was sluggish at first, no doubt affected to some degree by the explosion that had taken Jack out, but with a bit of careful coaxing, she began to respond, offering first answers, and then, as she became more alert, suggestions. Ianto pawed through the list of what technology and weapons were stored in the facility, and bit by bit, a plan began to form: what if he took the carrier wave the 456 were using to control the children, cycled it back on itself a few times to increase the strength of the signal, creating a constructive wave, then directed it right back at its point of origin? That should be enough to blow the aliens’ minds, and probably all their ship’s systems too. The gas mixture the 456 breathed was highly flammable… one spark from short-circuiting equipment should be enough to ignite it and blow the ship to kingdom come.
 

He wondered if Jack had thought of that too, although it wouldn’t have done him much good since, not knowing the location of the aliens’ ship, in order to direct the constructive wave back to its source, it would need to be passed through the brain of a child, with fatal results. Ianto himself didn’t have that problem, not with the equipment he had access to right here in the vaults. Along with all the other weapons and devices, there was an experimental android which hadn’t worked out. Its prototype artificial brain had failed to develop properly, leaving it with the mind of a pre-adolescent child, totally useless to Torchwood, who’d been trying to create android soldiers
 

Ianto felt a little guilty for what he was about to do as he set the carrier wave cycling and booted up the android, now out of its storage crate and plugged in, since there wasn’t enough time to charge its internal power source. The android seemed to wake as if from a deep sleep and looked around itself, confused.

 
“Hello? Where am I? Who are you?” it asked in a childlike voice, not afraid, since fear hadn’t been programmed into it, but curious.

 
“Hello,” Ianto said, crouching down in front of it. “You’re in a safe place. I’m Ianto. What’s your name?”
 

“I don’t have a name. My designation is prototype three.”

 
“That’s a bit of a mouthful. I think I’ll call you Joe. Would you like to play a game, Joe?”

 
“Yes, please! I like games!”
 

“Wonderful! Okay, here’s what we’re going to do…”
 

It was simple really, all Ianto had to do was plug a couple of cables into the android’s skull, input and output, feed in the cycling wave, passed through an amplifier, send the signal to Torchwood’s satellites, still in orbit, and set them to transmit… It would destroy the android’s artificial brain, burn out all the circuits, but he comforted himself with the knowledge that Joe wasn’t really alive, just an AI, and a faulty one at that. A failed project, destined for the scrap heap anyway, except that Torchwood One had fallen before that could happen. It wasn’t like he was killing a person, but still…
 

“You’re saving the children, Joe. All the children. You’ll be a hero.” Even though the world would never know.
 

Ianto pressed the final button.
 
 

TBC in Part 2
 



 
 
 

Comments

[mrs_sweetpeach]

Oh my. I think Ianto's plan should work. Poor Joe even if he is AI.

[badly_knitted]

Yes, poor Joe, but it's a necessary sacrifice.

Thank you!