ROTQ (4/8)
Title: The Roots of the Quadratic (4/8)
Author: nancybrown
Fandoms: Torchwood, Doctor Who
Characters: Ianto, Jack, Alice, Jenny, John Hart, OCs
Rating: R
Beta/Britpick: queenfanfiction, wynkat1313, temporal_witch, and fide_et_spe had a hand in fixing this. All remaining mistakes are mine alone.
Spoilers: up through CoE, one spoiler for "End of Time," one spoiler for Bay of the Dead
Warnings: character death, angst, child endangerment, mentions of sexual coercion, violence, timey-wimey temporal physics, and of course, Captain Bad Touch rides again
Words: 46,000 (6,500 this part)
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
***
Chapter Four
***
"Your successes may move you ahead in life, but your failures stay with you forever. Trust me on this." - from "Me: An Autobiography"
***
John followed the beeping signal from the bloody ring. Jack's plan was stupidly simple, which meant something was going to go wrong. You didn't know someone this long without figuring out how bad he was at making plans. Still, now that John was inside, he could gran the system himself to find the kiddies, rescue Jack's daughter and Jack's crumpet at the same time, and then Jack would owe him. Big.
He grinned, opening the door to where the signal led, mouth already open in an excuse.
No-one was in the room. The signal emanated from a plastic box filled with discarded junk. Process box, he thought. Take all the shinies off the stock, have some underling go through each piece to check for usefulness or value, file the good stuff, discard the rest. Back in the day, he'd nobbed more than a few of the filing-types; there was something to be said for sex with someone who was meticulous and detail-oriented.
In the box, John recognised two of the snazzy wristwatches, a communications earpiece, and a small phial of nanogenes. He pocketed the phial, because Eye Candy wasn't completely brainless, was he? Magic sparklies meant surviving anything. The signal ring glittered beneath it, abandoned. John hesitated, then pocketed that as well.
The computer station in the room wasn't nearly as secure as it should have been. Two units had just shipped to a classified location. One included a memwipe.
He'd need to get to the systems in the classified area to find out where and when the colony was. Choosing to be stealthy by being obvious, he swaggered his way to the proper area -- pausing to flirt with passing bits of beautiful, because you never knew -- only to find that the entire floor was under tight lockdown after the break-in.
"Well, then," he said to himself.
A guard noticed him. "Sir, respectfully, this floor is sealed off until further notice."
"Don't tell me what to do. You're a peon."
The guard tilted her head. "Sir, please. Our orders are not to let anyone through, not even Agents."
"But you're allowed to stand here. Where's the logic in that?" He considered pulling out his weapon and just shooting, but there were twelve guards and one of him, and frankly, he wasn't interested enough in Jack's little quest to risk his own neck.
"Sir?"
"Fuck off," he said in English, knowing the guards wouldn't understand. He turned on his heel and stalked towards an abandoned corridor to transmat back. No sense walking to deliver the news.
***
John was alone when he came back to the ship, and Jack bit back his shout of anger and disappointment. "Tell me."
"They've already been sent off, classified location."
Jack nodded. "That'll be the planet we're looking for. Tell me they sent Alice to the same place."
"Far as I know, they did."
Jenny said, "Then we just track them." She turned to the ship's controls and initiated the tracker. "That can't be right."
John pulled something from his pocket and tossed it to Jack, who nearly fumbled the catch. The transmitter ring. He held it between two fingers. "That's a problem."
Jenny sighed. "We need to get back in the Agency's computers."
"Not today," John said. "Thanks to our little raiding party, they're locked up tight. No-one's getting in. And the younger version of yours truly gets back from assignment tomorrow."
"We jump," Jack said. "Find another time when you're not around."
"After this? There aren't any times left until the Agency falls. I remember this. Bad situation after you left, everyone suspicious of everyone else. Agents were called off their missions or sent in secret, assignments made even less sense than normal, heads rolled. Thanks to your little announcement about being memwiped, anyone with a lost weekend started thinking they were getting fucked over by the Agency. People vanished in the middle of the night. I stayed and watched it all crumble."
"And got out with plenty of contraband?" asked Jenny.
"I wasn't getting paid anymore at the end. Had to make a living somehow." He looked at Jack. "I had holes in my memory. You didn't see me running around whining about it."
"I thought they stole two years of my life."
"You thought?"
Jack chose to look at the computer readout instead of at John. "That turns out not to have been the case."
"Someone else memwiped you? Or you just drank too much?"
"Retcon. I took it myself to avoid contaminating the timeline."
John threw back his head in bitter laughter. When he calmed down, he said, "You're telling me the Time Agency fell because you memwiped yourself and forgot about it?"
"The Time Agency was going to fall anyway," Jenny said. "It was unstable."
"If you say so," said John. "Oh. You should know. One of the units they sent was memwiped. The record didn't say which one."
Jack's eyes flicked over to Jenny, who'd frozen. "Did they say the duration?"
"No."
Memwipes were tricky. The machine worked with a backwards-wipe from the present, with settings from a few days to decades depending on need. Stubborn or potentially suicidal units might be memwiped back to adolescence if the psychological testing suggested they'd be better colonists without pesky memories of the people they'd left behind in their old lives. It'd been a risk with this mission, but he'd talked things out with Ianto when they'd hatched the backup plan. Ianto had planned to cooperate as much as possible, with an easy story on where he'd been. Alice hadn't been prepped that far, though, and she had plenty of reasons to want to forget the last decade or two.
"I'm sure they're fine," he said, without believing his own words.
***
The smells assaulted her here: dung and compost and fresh cut wood and growing things. As a child, her school had taken the class on a field trip to a farm so the children could see where their food came from. She'd met stinking pigs and obnoxious sheep, and had her hand licked by a cow, and this was the sum total of Alice's rural experiences in her old existence. She'd lived in cities her whole life, and she'd been happy with that. Travelling with Jenny, she'd been in many situations both urban and abandoned, alien worlds and even Earth at all time periods. She'd met people of all shapes and colours and species, fought some and loved some and saved some, but the first thing she ever noticed about a new place was its smell.
Alice took in deep gulps of air to acclimate herself. Beside her, Ianto made a face and covered his nose.
A middle-aged man and woman waited for them at the steps of a large, pre-fabricated wooden building painted white. "Welcome," said the woman. She had ash-blonde hair pulled back from her face and a tilted smile. "I'm Flora Mayhew."
"Harry Smith," said the dark-haired man beside her, and he shook Ianto's hand and then Alice's. "We weren't expecting new people to join us."
"We were placed here," said Alice. "Alice Carter."
Ianto introduced himself with an absent smile. Now that she knew what to look for, she saw the dullness around his eyes. Drugged, she guessed, to keep him pliant.
The guards said, "We'll unload the supplies. Why don't you show these two around and get them settled?" Now that they were away from the Agency, the guards seemed less distant.
Flora nodded at them. "Come on in. Our Town Hall was the first building at this site, so it's nothing fancy." Inside, the building was simple, but efficient: small offices in the front, restroom facilities, and a large meeting room taking up most of the structure. Alice wouldn't have blinked to find the floor plan in any little town she could name back home.
Harry said, "We're small enough that we tend to vote on everything as a group, and the town committee -- that'd be the two of us -- gets the day to day work done."
"What did they program you with?" Flora asked.
"Child care," said Alice.
"Agricultural work," Ianto said. "I have an urge to go plant something." Flora and Harry laughed, while Alice frowned.
"I think I need a moment."
"Of course," said Harry. "It takes a while to get used to this place. It's a bit overwhelming, being dead and then coming here." Something slipped behind his eyes. Then he took Ianto to see the maps of the field layouts surrounding the town.
Flora touched Alice's arm. "Did you work together at Thames House?"
"No. We're not from the original collection. We lived at the same time, though."
Flora nodded. "Your friend, they wiped his memory, didn't they?"
Alice looked over at Ianto, but he kept the same bemused expression. "I think so. When he greeted me, he didn't remember meeting me before."
"Are the two of you together?"
"Not romantically."
"That's good, at least. We've had a few couples where they wiped one of them but not the other. Bit of heartbreak there."
"Did it happen to you?"
Flora shook her head. "My wife was left back in London. It's very strange, reminding myself that she's been dead for nine thousand years."
The enormity of it gave her pause. Alice had visited the distant past and over five billion years into the future, but no matter how far she went, the hurt followed. Now she was stuck here with no means of contacting Jenny, who could be anywhere, anywhen. She might never see her again, and would that make Jenny as lost to her as Steven?
She closed her eyes.
"Nine thousand. When are we?"
"Our colony was established to help ease a bottleneck event in AD 11300. There are five colonies on this world, and we're one of the smaller ones. The closest is about ten kilometres away. When the time comes, my grandchildren and great-grandchildren will be here to help repopulate the human race."
"You've had children here?"
"One. I have another on the way, but I'm not showing yet." Alice's eyes automatically dropped to the other woman's abdomen, then dragged back up again. "It's funny," Flora said with a smile that said it wasn't funny at all. "Back on Earth, I worked with spreadsheets all day. Now I help run the colony and my kids will be part of the main line of human genetics. Not what I went to uni for, I can tell you."
"I suppose not."
"When you start having children, you'll see."
"I'm not having children. I already had my child. He died."
"I'm sorry," said Flora, and Alice believed her. "Give yourself some time to adjust. You may change your mind. I named my daughter after my wife. It helped, a little." The woman wore her own grief on her face. Alice wondered how many colonists volunteered for the memory wipes, how many simply killed themselves to escape.
"Thank you," she said, because there was nothing else to say.
***
"As I see it," said Jack, "we have two options. Both of them involve going back into the Time Agency. We have about two years between the acquisition of the Thames House group and now. We could go back to some point between and look in the computer records again. Or we go to a point after the Agency falls and see if they've left any records behind them."
"They didn't," said Hart. "The last act of the management was to hide all traces of where they'd been."
"Hide them how?" asked Jenny suspiciously.
He shrugged. "The computer files were destroyed. A few Agents went after the colonies they knew about. It's a good gig: there's a bottleneck approaching, take over the only humans left. Most of the stock are so willing to roll over after the Agency's done with them that they won't even argue, and the ones that do argue are outgunned."
Jack narrowed his eyes. "Tried it?"
Another shrug. "Spent almost a year living like a king. Made a decree that everyone had to nob the boss. Great party."
If the disgust she'd felt for him could have grown, it would have. "You ordered them to sleep with you?"
"Not much sleep involved, love. Anyway, they voted me off the island, didn't they?"
Jack folded his arms. "I'm surprised they didn't behead you."
"They tried." He grinned darkly. "There's no telling which colonies got the instant god treatment. Be funny as hell if our little castaways ended up at mine, wouldn't it?" Jack and Jenny stared at him. "What?"
"Let's go," Jenny said, and she stroked Hilda's controls to life under her fingers. "Time to find Alice, dear."
***
Since they'd missed lunch, Flora and Harry offered them sandwiches -- vegetables on coarse bread with a paper-thin slice of meat for each -- and given them some privacy. For the first time since her capture, Alice let herself relax, just a little. They were still in trouble, but they were no longer under observation.
"You don't remember meeting me, do you?"
"We never met," Ianto said. "Jack said you're a time traveller now."
"Yes. You've been on my ship. We came here to retrieve two little children you and Jack took from their parents."
He frowned. "That doesn't sound like something we'd do. We've been living on an uninhabited planet for years. Jack's afraid of running into himself or someone who knew him." He took a bite of the sandwich, made a face, and then took it apart fastidiously on the plate to reach just the bits he liked.
"You had to leave the planet. There was a volcano, I think."
"Really?"
"It's not important. Anyway, we found you, Jenny and me."
"Jenny who?"
"She's … Jenny. We travel together." She's the best person I've ever known, and for some reason, she likes me. "You and Jack went on a mission together when he was a Time Agent. You rescued two children from a planet that was about to be destroyed. Any of this sounding familiar?"
He nodded. "I remember that. We took them to the same world where the Thames House survivors were taken."
"That's where we are now."
He started, sitting up and looked around himself. "We are?"
"Yes. You and I were captured by the Agency and sent here together. I think they took some of your memories."
Ianto looked around again, and she saw dawning horror and revulsion. "That makes sense," he said after a moment. "What did they do to me? Why did they take my memories?"
"I don't know. I want to figure out how much they've taken. You said you live with Jack?"
He nodded. "It's a lovely little world. Nice climate. We raise our own food, and about once a year, one of the trader ships comes into the system and we can restock on supplies, find out what's going on in the galaxy." The absent look was back in his eyes, but this had nothing to do with whatever sedatives the Agency had given him along with the mind wipe.
"A pretty prison is still a prison," she said, "no matter how big or who's there with you. And if you say something idiotic like, 'Nor iron bars a cage,' I'm going to smack you. Fair warning."
"Warning noted."
She sighed. "How long have you been on the planet with Jack?"
"Not quite twenty years."
She nodded. "You've lost a few years then, but not many. That's something."
"Does Jack know you're here?"
"He knows you are, and by now, they'll have noticed I'm missing. But the transmitter he was going to use to locate you is missing. Unless you find a ring in your pockets, we're stranded."
Ianto immediately patted himself down but found nothing. Alice hadn't let herself hope.
"All right," she said. "Jenny's brilliant. If there's a way to find us, she will. In the meantime, we're stuck here. At least there's civilisation." She picked at her own sandwich, but found she lacked an appetite.
"Alice?"
"Hm?"
"You know who I am. Do you hate me?"
She thought about it. "A little. If I had to pick someone to come back from the dead, it wouldn't have been one of Dad's shags."
"I know it doesn't make you feel any better to hear it, but I know Jack. If he'd had the choice, he'd have chosen Steven, too."
She stood up from her chair. "If you're done eating, we should rejoin the others." Without waiting for his reply, she hurried out. One room looked like another, but she located Flora and Harry.
"Have you rested?"
"Enough. What are you going to do with us?" Behind her Ianto approached but kept a respectful distance.
"Do?" Harry looked confused. "Well, we could start with a tour of the town. We'll introduce you around. Flora said you weren't at Thames House. Did you know anyone who was?"
"No," Ianto said, a bit too quickly.
"That's fine. We're all pretty friendly here. There's a dormitory for the single folks, but since it's your first night here, you're welcome to stay at our homes."
"Thank you," said Alice.
"Tomorrow, you can start work," Harry said happily. "We've got two new arrivals in the nursery, so you'll be busy."
Alice's head shot up, as did Ianto's. "Good," she said weakly. "I can't wait to meet them."
***
Hilda brought them into orbit smoothly, activating the cloak as she did.
"Seven habitations located," she said. "Southern continent. Approximate population, two thousand humans."
Jenny pulled up the readings. "The largest colony has four hundred people. Do we know how large the one we're looking for would be?"
Jack came up beside her. "There were about one hundred in the original haul. But we don't know how long it's been since founding. They could have had children. People could have died off." He glanced over at John. "Any of these look familiar?"
"A colony's a colony. We were making plans to invade the others when I was asked to leave."
"We'll start with the largest one," Jack said, watching Jenny's face. "We can land here," he pointed to a spot a few clicks away, "and walk in."
"If we're here after he was expelled, he's going to be a liability."
"Fine by me," John said. "I'll stay with the ship."
Jenny looked at Jack. "We're all going. One weapon, defensive only. This is reconnaissance. If we've found the correct colony, we can retrieve Alice and Ianto and then we can fine-tune the timing to get the children."
An hour later, they stood at the outskirts of the settlement, John complaining about the tiny biting insects nibbling at every inch of exposed skin, Jenny muttering under her breath about the men's lack of camouflage. Jack ignored them as well as he could, trying to get a better look at the colonists and scraping his memory to think of distinguishing characteristics of early twenty-first century humans from the United Kingdom. Tea was a safe topic, but cultural milestones were always tricky. Had disco died yet? Had they invented the glippy, or was that a few decades later? Later, he thought. Ianto had never mentioned owning one, but he still talked about his iPod as though he'd left Earth last week. Jack could work with that.
Now the question was, what was an iPod?
Jack saw a man working near the edge of the village. He waved a hand at Jenny and John to stay back, and put on his friendliest smile. "Hi there," he said, coming out of the protection of the overhanging trees. The man's head came up.
Jack jerked his thumb over in a direction away from the other two. "You're not going to believe this, but I saw an iPod over there."
The man looked at him. "Γειά σου?"
Jack sighed. "Συγγνώμες. Το λάθος μου." He turned on his heel. The man put down his tools and started to follow, but Jack put up his hand, and fortunately, the man stopped.
"Well?" asked John as soon as Jack rejoined them.
"Wrong colony."
"There are six more on this planet," Jenny said.
"Yeah." There were thousands of colony worlds, scattered through time and space. The likelihood that they'd found the right colony on the right planet at their very first guess had been impossibly small. That hadn't stopped him from hoping, and it really didn't help at all with the disappointment.
***
Ianto woke disoriented. His head ached, his muscles ached, the surface under his body was wrong, the room he was in was wrong, everything was wrong. He sat up, heart racing.
"Jack?"
There was no answer. The darkened room was claustrophobically small, but open doorways to either end assured him that he wasn't a prisoner. His fingers felt over the sleeping surface, and found a simple, sturdy sofa made up into a bed. Bookshelves lined the walls, and a computer terminal sat on a desk opposite him. This clearly wasn't a room in their house, so where …
Memories trickled back, no longer blunted by the drugs he must have been given. He and Jack had stopped arguing out loud and fallen into a cold silence. Jack had been the one exiled to sleep on the sofa. Ianto had just reached over to turn off the bedside lamp to mutter himself to sleep, and then he'd opened his eyes to find himself sitting in a chair being interrogated about his farming skills. Not twenty minutes later, he'd been loaded on a platform with Jack's daughter (!) and sent to the same colony he'd just barely escaped when he'd first been brought to the future. And Alice had said it was all part of a plan Ianto had no memory whatsoever of helping to concoct.
No wonder they'd drugged him. Had he his wits about him yesterday after all that, he'd likely have killed someone.
A light flickered on in an adjoining room. Ianto clutched his thin blanket closer, checking himself rapidly for pants.
"Are you all right?" Harry, his name was Harry, appeared in a dressing gown at the doorway. He and his wife had invited Ianto to stay with them while he got his bearings. Alice was staying with the woman, what was her name, Flora. People were being kind to them. The Thames House people …
He felt all the blood leave his face at once, and he leaned against the back of the sofa. Harry frowned and sat down beside him, placing a hand on Ianto's shoulder. Ianto jerked away from the touch. Oh God, this man was offering him comfort and kindness. Oh no.
"I know what you're going through."
Ianto gaped. "You do?"
"They wiped my memories when we arrived. The others told me that I fought with the guards after they woke us up. Even had a gun on me." Harry smiled with grim pride in the dim light coming in from the other room, but Ianto blanched further. "About a third of us had memories taken, mostly people with families. Apparently I had a wife and two little kids."
"I'm so sorry," Ianto whispered.
"Thanks," he said with that same strange and sad smile, taking the words as sympathy rather than the admission of guilt that they were. "Anyway, they drugged us afterwards, probably to keep us quiet. When the drugs wore off, suddenly there was this gap in my life. Part of me is angry that I lost my family, but it's a Catch-22, you know? I don't remember them, so I don't have anything to miss."
Ianto thought about Jack's book, the many volumes recounting lives and lovers and children and friends. So many people only existed in Jack's memories. Someday soon, he'd go back to only being a random reminiscence in Jack's mind. And if someone took those memories from Jack, he'd be nothing at all.
"We've had some suicides. Most happened right after we arrived, when the drugs wore off. A few more a couple of months later. If you start doubting yourself, please come talk to me or to someone. It's a shock right now, but you will get over it."
Yes. Ianto would get over having killed all of these people, leading them to exile far from home without their families or even the memories of their families. He let out a short laugh.
"It's really not so bad," Harry continued. "You'll make friends. Lots of good people here." He must have seen Ianto's flinch, because he added quickly, "And plenty of opportunity to be by yourself if you need time to adjust." He smiled wanly. "When I arrived, I thought I'd died and gone to Hell. Then I met Tanya. She says we knew each other on the second floor, but I didn't remember her. We're happy. You'll see. You'll meet someone."
"I have someone." At least, he thought he did. They'd been fighting, hadn't they? Perhaps the Agency had done him a favour and wiped the last of a messy break-up. But Alice had said Jack was in on the plan to rescue them, so maybe he and Jack had worked things out. That was difficult to picture, as he remembered the hard words they'd exchanged.
"She's gone, mate. We're nine thousand years in the future."
Ianto frowned in confusion. Then he shook his head. "It's different."
Harry nodded. "Give yourself some time. But that girl you were with, Alice, she seems nice."
"'Nice' isn't the first word I'd pick." His brain caught up with him and his eyebrows shot to his hairline. "Do not ever try to set us up. I'm her stepfather." Kind of.
Harry jerked back. "Sorry. You know what happens when you assume."
"Yes." He'd assumed he and Jack knew what they were doing when they went after the 456. He'd assumed that rescuing two children from a doomed world was the kind thing to do. He'd assumed once he'd left his mistakes behind him, that they wouldn't come back.
Harry stood. "I'm getting some more shut-eye, and so should you. Work tomorrow. If you need anything, you let me know." He gave Ianto's shoulder a friendly squeeze and headed back to his bedroom.
Ianto lay back down, mind dizzy with his own past, wondering how much of it was gone forever.
***
Alice went to the nursery with high hopes of finding Kamb's children and figuring a way out of here. Within five minutes, one of those hopes was already dashed.
Chrissy was in charge of the nursery, having been a day care worker before she'd accepted the job in Human Resources that led her here. A matronly woman who appeared to be mostly bosom, she befriended everyone instantly, including Alice. "And these are our newest arrivals," she said in a happy voice.
Alice peered over the edge of the cots to see two babies of about three months of age. Nothing like the toddlers she was seeking.
"Where are their mothers?" she asked, trying to keep the disappointment out of her voice.
"Back at work. The new mothers don't have to work if they choose, but when the children are about this age, the mothers seem to want to get out for a while. Our business here is to make babies, so we try to accommodate the parents as much as possible."
"Do the fathers help?"
"Of course. Everyone does. Not all of the little ones have declared fathers, though we know everyone's genetic history. If you want a child without having a husband, plenty of men are happy to donate."
"I'm sure," she said, horrified. But this was what the Time Agency did. Human population about to take a tumble? Breed more. "I'm not having any children."
Chrissy nodded. "Flora said you might be that way. It's all right. No-one's going to force you." She reached in a cot and pulled out one of the new babies. "There's plenty of babies to go around." She handed the child to Alice, who took it -- no way of telling gender -- and held it.
The child was awash in baby smell, and Alice remembered. Oh, she remembered. She thrust the baby back at Chrissy, and did manage to run to the loo before vomiting up her breakfast. Chrissy waited outside when Alice came out wiping her mouth and trying not to cry.
"I had kids, too," said the woman, a world of sorrows in her words. "They can take those memories from you, if you ask."
Alice shook her head violently. The only thing left of her little boy in all the universe was her love for him. "I'm keeping my memories. All of them."
"So am I," said Chrissy.
***
They met at lunch. "I can't stay here," Alice said as soon as they sat down at their own table away from other diners. "I can't work there. I can't be around these people."
He wanted to offer a comforting hand, but this was Alice and she would not take it well, so he didn't. "Talk to Harry and Flora. See if you can work somewhere else. It's not bad work in the field. We're weeding." He frowned. "I know things about weeds. It's weird. And mostly the others will leave you alone."
"There are so many children here." Her face was distant.
"I'd call it ironic, almost. Since this started with the children."
"If you dare call this life-affirming … "
" … You'll smack me. I am maintaining the list of smackable offences."
Unexpectedly, this drew a smile. He was glad. Bad enough that he was ready to panic.
"Talk to them," he said. "I'm sure they'll understand. And remember this is just temporary. Jack and Jenny will find us."
"And John."
Fear hammered through him. "Not John Hart? The poodlefucker?"
"He fucked a poodle?"
"Maybe. He wanted to. This is bad. He's bad news."
"I know he's bad news. We've met."
***
Bad News lazed in a chair in the control room as Jenny wrapped up the nasty burn Jack sported across his back. "You know he'll heal up in an hour or two."
"I know. I don't want him bleeding on the surfaces."
Jack flicked his annoyed glance from John to Jenny. "Thanks. Really."
"It's not my fault," John said. "You were the one who talked to them."
Jenny said, "But you were the one they wanted to kill."
"Some people can't get over their grudges."
They'd kept to the sidelines of the colony as before, but when Jack introduced himself, a sharp-eyed local had spied Hart and Jenny lurking in the shadows, and sounded the alarm: the monster had returned! Jack had caught the brunt of the sudden attack from blasters and worse, even holding back to allow Hart and Jenny a little more time while he provided their pursuers an easier target.
Jenny would be more grateful if she weren't 93% certain he'd been trying to impress her.
Hilda said, "Alert. Incoming."
Jenny had enough time to turn her head and say, "What do you … " The ship lurched beneath them.
Jack bounded to the controls. Jenny pushed him out of the way and took them. "Evasive manoeuvres, you know this." The ship jerked forward, and Jack shoved Jenny.
"Let me." His hands flew over the controls, and Hilda zoomed out of reach of another attack.
Jenny, annoyed but too busy to deal with the emotion, pulled up an image of the planet. "They have weaponry. They just shot us."
"That can't be right," Jack said. "The Agency would leave them with defences, but nothing with an offensive capability. Someone would have had to have brought them weapons." They stared at each other, and then as one, turned to Hart.
Hart had heard of shame and didn't want any part of it. "What part of 'dictator for life' did you not comprehend?"
"The part where you're still breathing," said Jenny.
He tapped his Vortex Manipulator insouciantly.
Jack brought Hilda to a parking orbit around the largest of the planet's moons. Jenny went back to the controls. "She's hurt. Hilda, tell me about your systems."
"Hyperthrust, offline. Time circuit, offline. Life support, damaged but online." Hilda paused, then said in a plaintive tone, "Where is Alice?"
"Alice isn't here, dear. We're looking for her."
"I want Alice!"
"I do, too, dear."
"So we're stuck?" Jack asked.
Hart played with his VM again. "You might be."
Without looking at him, Jack reached out and grabbed his arm. "Thanks for mentioning it. We may have to send you to fetch parts." He let go, rolled up his sleeves and crawled under the control panel. "Hello, beautiful. Let's see if we can put you back together."
***
The first week crawled by. While his mind was filled with knowledge on how to treat or pull each weed from a row and details on how to wrap healthy tendrils around the delicate slats of a lattice, Ianto found his body was not yet on-board with the new program. This enormous farm was a far cry from the small fields he and Jack had haphazardly tended whenever they remembered. The rich soil of their planet had been easy to work: place a seed, and it would grow. The soil here was poorer, and stony, and required physical effort he wasn't used to. Muscles gone soft with ease and comfort protested at their new work. Meanwhile, his mind raced with the issue of their big problem, and the smaller ones surrounding it.
They needed to make contact with Jack and Jenny (and, God help them, John Hart). They needed to find out when the children would arrive. They needed to leave before someone caught onto who he was.
Resting between rows, Ianto glanced over the fence to an adjoining field, where he could make out Alice under a wide-brimmed straw hat, plucking weeds and swearing. She didn't like the work and hadn't been programmed for it, but her mood was better out here than in the town proper. He wondered if she knew how much her eyes darkened when she passed by a child. He didn't dare wonder, had he been there in the room with Jack on that terrible day, if everything could have been different.
Ianto took a lukewarm drink from the water flask at his hip and started on the next row.
When they broke for lunch, Ianto took his familiar seat with Alice. "Did you hear? We have tomorrow off."
"Are they calling it Sunday?"
He shrugged. "They're calling it a day off. Harry says when they first arrived, there was a resolution to make the official state religion of the colony the Church of England, but it was voted down."
"I'm sure that was a mess." She took a bite of her mashed vegetables and made a grimace. Seasonings were at a premium here, brought out for special occasions only.
"I'm thinking about walking to the next colony."
"Why? Are you emigrating?" There was a teasing smile on her lips.
"No. I just want to see. And if we are stranded here, it might not be a bad plan for me to make myself scarce." He played with the bread that came with their lunch. He'd run into the guards who'd been on duty the day they'd all died. Thankfully for him -- less so, for the former guards -- every one of them had been given memory wipes of two to ten years each. None of them had any clue who he was. The woman he'd spoken to when they'd first awakened, and the only one who might have remembered him from that time period, had killed herself a week after arrival. He worried nonetheless.
"Well, I am going to take a nice, long hot bath and stay there for three hours tomorrow." Her expression was already luxuriating in bubbles, although they had work ahead of them still today.
"Enjoy." He toasted her with water.
"What do you miss most?" she asked him suddenly. "Other than people?" Of course, since she'd said it, his thoughts turned to his friends and his family. He'd lived in the future since he was twenty-six, and it still didn't seem like they were gone.
He took two bites before responding. "Chocolate. Talking to people who understand references I make. Top Gear."
She laughed. "Top Gear? Really?"
"Mindless diversions in general. But yeah." He drank some more of his water. "You'd think there'd be more entertainment in the future. Seriously, the longest thing I've had to read in years has been Jack's book."
"I cannot imagine reading that," she said, her expression horrified.
"I've been helping him edit. He rambles, and he thinks commas should go where they're pretty." Ianto had long since given up trying to explain ordinal lists and clauses, and settled for just cleaning it up himself. And if he happened to learn more about Jack's mysterious past as he did so, well, it wasn't like Jack hadn't written the thing for the whole universe to see.
"He used to help me with my homework," said Alice. "The weekends he'd visit. But he always knew science and things far ahead of what was in the textbook, so it was marked as wrong."
"He got into a fistfight with your teacher once, didn't he?"
Alice sat back. "He told you that?"
"I read about it. You're all through the book. Stories about when you were small. The times he ran into you again." Jack had sired other children through the years, but none came close to the amount of space he'd dedicated to the woman across from him. "I think Jenny must have come up once or twice, but you were the focus of those scenes."
Her face scrunched. "He wrote his tell-all with me in it?"
"It's not a tell-all. It's just Jack. He's had an interesting life. You're a part of it." Her expression did not look convinced.
The supervisor called them. Lunch was over. Ianto thrust the last of the bread into his pocket for later. Alice put her tray away, the rest of the food untouched.
They went back to their respective fields. Though he tried to catch her eye, she didn't seek him out again for the rest of the day, and at supper, he ate alone.
***
There was a sharp crackle, and the lights in the control room dimmed and then rebrightened.
Jenny was intent on her work on the top panel, rewriting the time circuit code for a jump that might use a little less power. "Stop it," she said to Jack, irritably. He didn't respond.
Her senses twitched, and for a moment, she felt the constant headache ease. "Oh." She peered under the control panel to be sure.
Hart said, "Problem?"
"Not a permanent one. Jack just electrocuted himself."
Sure enough, a minute later, there was a gasp of air returning to his lungs as he revived just out of sight.
"Be more careful," Jenny chided, continuing to work as her temples resumed their pounding.
***
Chapter Five
Author: nancybrown
Fandoms: Torchwood, Doctor Who
Characters: Ianto, Jack, Alice, Jenny, John Hart, OCs
Rating: R
Beta/Britpick: queenfanfiction, wynkat1313, temporal_witch, and fide_et_spe had a hand in fixing this. All remaining mistakes are mine alone.
Spoilers: up through CoE, one spoiler for "End of Time," one spoiler for Bay of the Dead
Warnings: character death, angst, child endangerment, mentions of sexual coercion, violence, timey-wimey temporal physics, and of course, Captain Bad Touch rides again
Words: 46,000 (6,500 this part)
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
***
Chapter Four
***
"Your successes may move you ahead in life, but your failures stay with you forever. Trust me on this." - from "Me: An Autobiography"
***
John followed the beeping signal from the bloody ring. Jack's plan was stupidly simple, which meant something was going to go wrong. You didn't know someone this long without figuring out how bad he was at making plans. Still, now that John was inside, he could gran the system himself to find the kiddies, rescue Jack's daughter and Jack's crumpet at the same time, and then Jack would owe him. Big.
He grinned, opening the door to where the signal led, mouth already open in an excuse.
No-one was in the room. The signal emanated from a plastic box filled with discarded junk. Process box, he thought. Take all the shinies off the stock, have some underling go through each piece to check for usefulness or value, file the good stuff, discard the rest. Back in the day, he'd nobbed more than a few of the filing-types; there was something to be said for sex with someone who was meticulous and detail-oriented.
In the box, John recognised two of the snazzy wristwatches, a communications earpiece, and a small phial of nanogenes. He pocketed the phial, because Eye Candy wasn't completely brainless, was he? Magic sparklies meant surviving anything. The signal ring glittered beneath it, abandoned. John hesitated, then pocketed that as well.
The computer station in the room wasn't nearly as secure as it should have been. Two units had just shipped to a classified location. One included a memwipe.
He'd need to get to the systems in the classified area to find out where and when the colony was. Choosing to be stealthy by being obvious, he swaggered his way to the proper area -- pausing to flirt with passing bits of beautiful, because you never knew -- only to find that the entire floor was under tight lockdown after the break-in.
"Well, then," he said to himself.
A guard noticed him. "Sir, respectfully, this floor is sealed off until further notice."
"Don't tell me what to do. You're a peon."
The guard tilted her head. "Sir, please. Our orders are not to let anyone through, not even Agents."
"But you're allowed to stand here. Where's the logic in that?" He considered pulling out his weapon and just shooting, but there were twelve guards and one of him, and frankly, he wasn't interested enough in Jack's little quest to risk his own neck.
"Sir?"
"Fuck off," he said in English, knowing the guards wouldn't understand. He turned on his heel and stalked towards an abandoned corridor to transmat back. No sense walking to deliver the news.
***
John was alone when he came back to the ship, and Jack bit back his shout of anger and disappointment. "Tell me."
"They've already been sent off, classified location."
Jack nodded. "That'll be the planet we're looking for. Tell me they sent Alice to the same place."
"Far as I know, they did."
Jenny said, "Then we just track them." She turned to the ship's controls and initiated the tracker. "That can't be right."
John pulled something from his pocket and tossed it to Jack, who nearly fumbled the catch. The transmitter ring. He held it between two fingers. "That's a problem."
Jenny sighed. "We need to get back in the Agency's computers."
"Not today," John said. "Thanks to our little raiding party, they're locked up tight. No-one's getting in. And the younger version of yours truly gets back from assignment tomorrow."
"We jump," Jack said. "Find another time when you're not around."
"After this? There aren't any times left until the Agency falls. I remember this. Bad situation after you left, everyone suspicious of everyone else. Agents were called off their missions or sent in secret, assignments made even less sense than normal, heads rolled. Thanks to your little announcement about being memwiped, anyone with a lost weekend started thinking they were getting fucked over by the Agency. People vanished in the middle of the night. I stayed and watched it all crumble."
"And got out with plenty of contraband?" asked Jenny.
"I wasn't getting paid anymore at the end. Had to make a living somehow." He looked at Jack. "I had holes in my memory. You didn't see me running around whining about it."
"I thought they stole two years of my life."
"You thought?"
Jack chose to look at the computer readout instead of at John. "That turns out not to have been the case."
"Someone else memwiped you? Or you just drank too much?"
"Retcon. I took it myself to avoid contaminating the timeline."
John threw back his head in bitter laughter. When he calmed down, he said, "You're telling me the Time Agency fell because you memwiped yourself and forgot about it?"
"The Time Agency was going to fall anyway," Jenny said. "It was unstable."
"If you say so," said John. "Oh. You should know. One of the units they sent was memwiped. The record didn't say which one."
Jack's eyes flicked over to Jenny, who'd frozen. "Did they say the duration?"
"No."
Memwipes were tricky. The machine worked with a backwards-wipe from the present, with settings from a few days to decades depending on need. Stubborn or potentially suicidal units might be memwiped back to adolescence if the psychological testing suggested they'd be better colonists without pesky memories of the people they'd left behind in their old lives. It'd been a risk with this mission, but he'd talked things out with Ianto when they'd hatched the backup plan. Ianto had planned to cooperate as much as possible, with an easy story on where he'd been. Alice hadn't been prepped that far, though, and she had plenty of reasons to want to forget the last decade or two.
"I'm sure they're fine," he said, without believing his own words.
***
The smells assaulted her here: dung and compost and fresh cut wood and growing things. As a child, her school had taken the class on a field trip to a farm so the children could see where their food came from. She'd met stinking pigs and obnoxious sheep, and had her hand licked by a cow, and this was the sum total of Alice's rural experiences in her old existence. She'd lived in cities her whole life, and she'd been happy with that. Travelling with Jenny, she'd been in many situations both urban and abandoned, alien worlds and even Earth at all time periods. She'd met people of all shapes and colours and species, fought some and loved some and saved some, but the first thing she ever noticed about a new place was its smell.
Alice took in deep gulps of air to acclimate herself. Beside her, Ianto made a face and covered his nose.
A middle-aged man and woman waited for them at the steps of a large, pre-fabricated wooden building painted white. "Welcome," said the woman. She had ash-blonde hair pulled back from her face and a tilted smile. "I'm Flora Mayhew."
"Harry Smith," said the dark-haired man beside her, and he shook Ianto's hand and then Alice's. "We weren't expecting new people to join us."
"We were placed here," said Alice. "Alice Carter."
Ianto introduced himself with an absent smile. Now that she knew what to look for, she saw the dullness around his eyes. Drugged, she guessed, to keep him pliant.
The guards said, "We'll unload the supplies. Why don't you show these two around and get them settled?" Now that they were away from the Agency, the guards seemed less distant.
Flora nodded at them. "Come on in. Our Town Hall was the first building at this site, so it's nothing fancy." Inside, the building was simple, but efficient: small offices in the front, restroom facilities, and a large meeting room taking up most of the structure. Alice wouldn't have blinked to find the floor plan in any little town she could name back home.
Harry said, "We're small enough that we tend to vote on everything as a group, and the town committee -- that'd be the two of us -- gets the day to day work done."
"What did they program you with?" Flora asked.
"Child care," said Alice.
"Agricultural work," Ianto said. "I have an urge to go plant something." Flora and Harry laughed, while Alice frowned.
"I think I need a moment."
"Of course," said Harry. "It takes a while to get used to this place. It's a bit overwhelming, being dead and then coming here." Something slipped behind his eyes. Then he took Ianto to see the maps of the field layouts surrounding the town.
Flora touched Alice's arm. "Did you work together at Thames House?"
"No. We're not from the original collection. We lived at the same time, though."
Flora nodded. "Your friend, they wiped his memory, didn't they?"
Alice looked over at Ianto, but he kept the same bemused expression. "I think so. When he greeted me, he didn't remember meeting me before."
"Are the two of you together?"
"Not romantically."
"That's good, at least. We've had a few couples where they wiped one of them but not the other. Bit of heartbreak there."
"Did it happen to you?"
Flora shook her head. "My wife was left back in London. It's very strange, reminding myself that she's been dead for nine thousand years."
The enormity of it gave her pause. Alice had visited the distant past and over five billion years into the future, but no matter how far she went, the hurt followed. Now she was stuck here with no means of contacting Jenny, who could be anywhere, anywhen. She might never see her again, and would that make Jenny as lost to her as Steven?
She closed her eyes.
"Nine thousand. When are we?"
"Our colony was established to help ease a bottleneck event in AD 11300. There are five colonies on this world, and we're one of the smaller ones. The closest is about ten kilometres away. When the time comes, my grandchildren and great-grandchildren will be here to help repopulate the human race."
"You've had children here?"
"One. I have another on the way, but I'm not showing yet." Alice's eyes automatically dropped to the other woman's abdomen, then dragged back up again. "It's funny," Flora said with a smile that said it wasn't funny at all. "Back on Earth, I worked with spreadsheets all day. Now I help run the colony and my kids will be part of the main line of human genetics. Not what I went to uni for, I can tell you."
"I suppose not."
"When you start having children, you'll see."
"I'm not having children. I already had my child. He died."
"I'm sorry," said Flora, and Alice believed her. "Give yourself some time to adjust. You may change your mind. I named my daughter after my wife. It helped, a little." The woman wore her own grief on her face. Alice wondered how many colonists volunteered for the memory wipes, how many simply killed themselves to escape.
"Thank you," she said, because there was nothing else to say.
***
"As I see it," said Jack, "we have two options. Both of them involve going back into the Time Agency. We have about two years between the acquisition of the Thames House group and now. We could go back to some point between and look in the computer records again. Or we go to a point after the Agency falls and see if they've left any records behind them."
"They didn't," said Hart. "The last act of the management was to hide all traces of where they'd been."
"Hide them how?" asked Jenny suspiciously.
He shrugged. "The computer files were destroyed. A few Agents went after the colonies they knew about. It's a good gig: there's a bottleneck approaching, take over the only humans left. Most of the stock are so willing to roll over after the Agency's done with them that they won't even argue, and the ones that do argue are outgunned."
Jack narrowed his eyes. "Tried it?"
Another shrug. "Spent almost a year living like a king. Made a decree that everyone had to nob the boss. Great party."
If the disgust she'd felt for him could have grown, it would have. "You ordered them to sleep with you?"
"Not much sleep involved, love. Anyway, they voted me off the island, didn't they?"
Jack folded his arms. "I'm surprised they didn't behead you."
"They tried." He grinned darkly. "There's no telling which colonies got the instant god treatment. Be funny as hell if our little castaways ended up at mine, wouldn't it?" Jack and Jenny stared at him. "What?"
"Let's go," Jenny said, and she stroked Hilda's controls to life under her fingers. "Time to find Alice, dear."
***
Since they'd missed lunch, Flora and Harry offered them sandwiches -- vegetables on coarse bread with a paper-thin slice of meat for each -- and given them some privacy. For the first time since her capture, Alice let herself relax, just a little. They were still in trouble, but they were no longer under observation.
"You don't remember meeting me, do you?"
"We never met," Ianto said. "Jack said you're a time traveller now."
"Yes. You've been on my ship. We came here to retrieve two little children you and Jack took from their parents."
He frowned. "That doesn't sound like something we'd do. We've been living on an uninhabited planet for years. Jack's afraid of running into himself or someone who knew him." He took a bite of the sandwich, made a face, and then took it apart fastidiously on the plate to reach just the bits he liked.
"You had to leave the planet. There was a volcano, I think."
"Really?"
"It's not important. Anyway, we found you, Jenny and me."
"Jenny who?"
"She's … Jenny. We travel together." She's the best person I've ever known, and for some reason, she likes me. "You and Jack went on a mission together when he was a Time Agent. You rescued two children from a planet that was about to be destroyed. Any of this sounding familiar?"
He nodded. "I remember that. We took them to the same world where the Thames House survivors were taken."
"That's where we are now."
He started, sitting up and looked around himself. "We are?"
"Yes. You and I were captured by the Agency and sent here together. I think they took some of your memories."
Ianto looked around again, and she saw dawning horror and revulsion. "That makes sense," he said after a moment. "What did they do to me? Why did they take my memories?"
"I don't know. I want to figure out how much they've taken. You said you live with Jack?"
He nodded. "It's a lovely little world. Nice climate. We raise our own food, and about once a year, one of the trader ships comes into the system and we can restock on supplies, find out what's going on in the galaxy." The absent look was back in his eyes, but this had nothing to do with whatever sedatives the Agency had given him along with the mind wipe.
"A pretty prison is still a prison," she said, "no matter how big or who's there with you. And if you say something idiotic like, 'Nor iron bars a cage,' I'm going to smack you. Fair warning."
"Warning noted."
She sighed. "How long have you been on the planet with Jack?"
"Not quite twenty years."
She nodded. "You've lost a few years then, but not many. That's something."
"Does Jack know you're here?"
"He knows you are, and by now, they'll have noticed I'm missing. But the transmitter he was going to use to locate you is missing. Unless you find a ring in your pockets, we're stranded."
Ianto immediately patted himself down but found nothing. Alice hadn't let herself hope.
"All right," she said. "Jenny's brilliant. If there's a way to find us, she will. In the meantime, we're stuck here. At least there's civilisation." She picked at her own sandwich, but found she lacked an appetite.
"Alice?"
"Hm?"
"You know who I am. Do you hate me?"
She thought about it. "A little. If I had to pick someone to come back from the dead, it wouldn't have been one of Dad's shags."
"I know it doesn't make you feel any better to hear it, but I know Jack. If he'd had the choice, he'd have chosen Steven, too."
She stood up from her chair. "If you're done eating, we should rejoin the others." Without waiting for his reply, she hurried out. One room looked like another, but she located Flora and Harry.
"Have you rested?"
"Enough. What are you going to do with us?" Behind her Ianto approached but kept a respectful distance.
"Do?" Harry looked confused. "Well, we could start with a tour of the town. We'll introduce you around. Flora said you weren't at Thames House. Did you know anyone who was?"
"No," Ianto said, a bit too quickly.
"That's fine. We're all pretty friendly here. There's a dormitory for the single folks, but since it's your first night here, you're welcome to stay at our homes."
"Thank you," said Alice.
"Tomorrow, you can start work," Harry said happily. "We've got two new arrivals in the nursery, so you'll be busy."
Alice's head shot up, as did Ianto's. "Good," she said weakly. "I can't wait to meet them."
***
Hilda brought them into orbit smoothly, activating the cloak as she did.
"Seven habitations located," she said. "Southern continent. Approximate population, two thousand humans."
Jenny pulled up the readings. "The largest colony has four hundred people. Do we know how large the one we're looking for would be?"
Jack came up beside her. "There were about one hundred in the original haul. But we don't know how long it's been since founding. They could have had children. People could have died off." He glanced over at John. "Any of these look familiar?"
"A colony's a colony. We were making plans to invade the others when I was asked to leave."
"We'll start with the largest one," Jack said, watching Jenny's face. "We can land here," he pointed to a spot a few clicks away, "and walk in."
"If we're here after he was expelled, he's going to be a liability."
"Fine by me," John said. "I'll stay with the ship."
Jenny looked at Jack. "We're all going. One weapon, defensive only. This is reconnaissance. If we've found the correct colony, we can retrieve Alice and Ianto and then we can fine-tune the timing to get the children."
An hour later, they stood at the outskirts of the settlement, John complaining about the tiny biting insects nibbling at every inch of exposed skin, Jenny muttering under her breath about the men's lack of camouflage. Jack ignored them as well as he could, trying to get a better look at the colonists and scraping his memory to think of distinguishing characteristics of early twenty-first century humans from the United Kingdom. Tea was a safe topic, but cultural milestones were always tricky. Had disco died yet? Had they invented the glippy, or was that a few decades later? Later, he thought. Ianto had never mentioned owning one, but he still talked about his iPod as though he'd left Earth last week. Jack could work with that.
Now the question was, what was an iPod?
Jack saw a man working near the edge of the village. He waved a hand at Jenny and John to stay back, and put on his friendliest smile. "Hi there," he said, coming out of the protection of the overhanging trees. The man's head came up.
Jack jerked his thumb over in a direction away from the other two. "You're not going to believe this, but I saw an iPod over there."
The man looked at him. "Γειά σου?"
Jack sighed. "Συγγνώμες. Το λάθος μου." He turned on his heel. The man put down his tools and started to follow, but Jack put up his hand, and fortunately, the man stopped.
"Well?" asked John as soon as Jack rejoined them.
"Wrong colony."
"There are six more on this planet," Jenny said.
"Yeah." There were thousands of colony worlds, scattered through time and space. The likelihood that they'd found the right colony on the right planet at their very first guess had been impossibly small. That hadn't stopped him from hoping, and it really didn't help at all with the disappointment.
***
Ianto woke disoriented. His head ached, his muscles ached, the surface under his body was wrong, the room he was in was wrong, everything was wrong. He sat up, heart racing.
"Jack?"
There was no answer. The darkened room was claustrophobically small, but open doorways to either end assured him that he wasn't a prisoner. His fingers felt over the sleeping surface, and found a simple, sturdy sofa made up into a bed. Bookshelves lined the walls, and a computer terminal sat on a desk opposite him. This clearly wasn't a room in their house, so where …
Memories trickled back, no longer blunted by the drugs he must have been given. He and Jack had stopped arguing out loud and fallen into a cold silence. Jack had been the one exiled to sleep on the sofa. Ianto had just reached over to turn off the bedside lamp to mutter himself to sleep, and then he'd opened his eyes to find himself sitting in a chair being interrogated about his farming skills. Not twenty minutes later, he'd been loaded on a platform with Jack's daughter (!) and sent to the same colony he'd just barely escaped when he'd first been brought to the future. And Alice had said it was all part of a plan Ianto had no memory whatsoever of helping to concoct.
No wonder they'd drugged him. Had he his wits about him yesterday after all that, he'd likely have killed someone.
A light flickered on in an adjoining room. Ianto clutched his thin blanket closer, checking himself rapidly for pants.
"Are you all right?" Harry, his name was Harry, appeared in a dressing gown at the doorway. He and his wife had invited Ianto to stay with them while he got his bearings. Alice was staying with the woman, what was her name, Flora. People were being kind to them. The Thames House people …
He felt all the blood leave his face at once, and he leaned against the back of the sofa. Harry frowned and sat down beside him, placing a hand on Ianto's shoulder. Ianto jerked away from the touch. Oh God, this man was offering him comfort and kindness. Oh no.
"I know what you're going through."
Ianto gaped. "You do?"
"They wiped my memories when we arrived. The others told me that I fought with the guards after they woke us up. Even had a gun on me." Harry smiled with grim pride in the dim light coming in from the other room, but Ianto blanched further. "About a third of us had memories taken, mostly people with families. Apparently I had a wife and two little kids."
"I'm so sorry," Ianto whispered.
"Thanks," he said with that same strange and sad smile, taking the words as sympathy rather than the admission of guilt that they were. "Anyway, they drugged us afterwards, probably to keep us quiet. When the drugs wore off, suddenly there was this gap in my life. Part of me is angry that I lost my family, but it's a Catch-22, you know? I don't remember them, so I don't have anything to miss."
Ianto thought about Jack's book, the many volumes recounting lives and lovers and children and friends. So many people only existed in Jack's memories. Someday soon, he'd go back to only being a random reminiscence in Jack's mind. And if someone took those memories from Jack, he'd be nothing at all.
"We've had some suicides. Most happened right after we arrived, when the drugs wore off. A few more a couple of months later. If you start doubting yourself, please come talk to me or to someone. It's a shock right now, but you will get over it."
Yes. Ianto would get over having killed all of these people, leading them to exile far from home without their families or even the memories of their families. He let out a short laugh.
"It's really not so bad," Harry continued. "You'll make friends. Lots of good people here." He must have seen Ianto's flinch, because he added quickly, "And plenty of opportunity to be by yourself if you need time to adjust." He smiled wanly. "When I arrived, I thought I'd died and gone to Hell. Then I met Tanya. She says we knew each other on the second floor, but I didn't remember her. We're happy. You'll see. You'll meet someone."
"I have someone." At least, he thought he did. They'd been fighting, hadn't they? Perhaps the Agency had done him a favour and wiped the last of a messy break-up. But Alice had said Jack was in on the plan to rescue them, so maybe he and Jack had worked things out. That was difficult to picture, as he remembered the hard words they'd exchanged.
"She's gone, mate. We're nine thousand years in the future."
Ianto frowned in confusion. Then he shook his head. "It's different."
Harry nodded. "Give yourself some time. But that girl you were with, Alice, she seems nice."
"'Nice' isn't the first word I'd pick." His brain caught up with him and his eyebrows shot to his hairline. "Do not ever try to set us up. I'm her stepfather." Kind of.
Harry jerked back. "Sorry. You know what happens when you assume."
"Yes." He'd assumed he and Jack knew what they were doing when they went after the 456. He'd assumed that rescuing two children from a doomed world was the kind thing to do. He'd assumed once he'd left his mistakes behind him, that they wouldn't come back.
Harry stood. "I'm getting some more shut-eye, and so should you. Work tomorrow. If you need anything, you let me know." He gave Ianto's shoulder a friendly squeeze and headed back to his bedroom.
Ianto lay back down, mind dizzy with his own past, wondering how much of it was gone forever.
***
Alice went to the nursery with high hopes of finding Kamb's children and figuring a way out of here. Within five minutes, one of those hopes was already dashed.
Chrissy was in charge of the nursery, having been a day care worker before she'd accepted the job in Human Resources that led her here. A matronly woman who appeared to be mostly bosom, she befriended everyone instantly, including Alice. "And these are our newest arrivals," she said in a happy voice.
Alice peered over the edge of the cots to see two babies of about three months of age. Nothing like the toddlers she was seeking.
"Where are their mothers?" she asked, trying to keep the disappointment out of her voice.
"Back at work. The new mothers don't have to work if they choose, but when the children are about this age, the mothers seem to want to get out for a while. Our business here is to make babies, so we try to accommodate the parents as much as possible."
"Do the fathers help?"
"Of course. Everyone does. Not all of the little ones have declared fathers, though we know everyone's genetic history. If you want a child without having a husband, plenty of men are happy to donate."
"I'm sure," she said, horrified. But this was what the Time Agency did. Human population about to take a tumble? Breed more. "I'm not having any children."
Chrissy nodded. "Flora said you might be that way. It's all right. No-one's going to force you." She reached in a cot and pulled out one of the new babies. "There's plenty of babies to go around." She handed the child to Alice, who took it -- no way of telling gender -- and held it.
The child was awash in baby smell, and Alice remembered. Oh, she remembered. She thrust the baby back at Chrissy, and did manage to run to the loo before vomiting up her breakfast. Chrissy waited outside when Alice came out wiping her mouth and trying not to cry.
"I had kids, too," said the woman, a world of sorrows in her words. "They can take those memories from you, if you ask."
Alice shook her head violently. The only thing left of her little boy in all the universe was her love for him. "I'm keeping my memories. All of them."
"So am I," said Chrissy.
***
They met at lunch. "I can't stay here," Alice said as soon as they sat down at their own table away from other diners. "I can't work there. I can't be around these people."
He wanted to offer a comforting hand, but this was Alice and she would not take it well, so he didn't. "Talk to Harry and Flora. See if you can work somewhere else. It's not bad work in the field. We're weeding." He frowned. "I know things about weeds. It's weird. And mostly the others will leave you alone."
"There are so many children here." Her face was distant.
"I'd call it ironic, almost. Since this started with the children."
"If you dare call this life-affirming … "
" … You'll smack me. I am maintaining the list of smackable offences."
Unexpectedly, this drew a smile. He was glad. Bad enough that he was ready to panic.
"Talk to them," he said. "I'm sure they'll understand. And remember this is just temporary. Jack and Jenny will find us."
"And John."
Fear hammered through him. "Not John Hart? The poodlefucker?"
"He fucked a poodle?"
"Maybe. He wanted to. This is bad. He's bad news."
"I know he's bad news. We've met."
***
Bad News lazed in a chair in the control room as Jenny wrapped up the nasty burn Jack sported across his back. "You know he'll heal up in an hour or two."
"I know. I don't want him bleeding on the surfaces."
Jack flicked his annoyed glance from John to Jenny. "Thanks. Really."
"It's not my fault," John said. "You were the one who talked to them."
Jenny said, "But you were the one they wanted to kill."
"Some people can't get over their grudges."
They'd kept to the sidelines of the colony as before, but when Jack introduced himself, a sharp-eyed local had spied Hart and Jenny lurking in the shadows, and sounded the alarm: the monster had returned! Jack had caught the brunt of the sudden attack from blasters and worse, even holding back to allow Hart and Jenny a little more time while he provided their pursuers an easier target.
Jenny would be more grateful if she weren't 93% certain he'd been trying to impress her.
Hilda said, "Alert. Incoming."
Jenny had enough time to turn her head and say, "What do you … " The ship lurched beneath them.
Jack bounded to the controls. Jenny pushed him out of the way and took them. "Evasive manoeuvres, you know this." The ship jerked forward, and Jack shoved Jenny.
"Let me." His hands flew over the controls, and Hilda zoomed out of reach of another attack.
Jenny, annoyed but too busy to deal with the emotion, pulled up an image of the planet. "They have weaponry. They just shot us."
"That can't be right," Jack said. "The Agency would leave them with defences, but nothing with an offensive capability. Someone would have had to have brought them weapons." They stared at each other, and then as one, turned to Hart.
Hart had heard of shame and didn't want any part of it. "What part of 'dictator for life' did you not comprehend?"
"The part where you're still breathing," said Jenny.
He tapped his Vortex Manipulator insouciantly.
Jack brought Hilda to a parking orbit around the largest of the planet's moons. Jenny went back to the controls. "She's hurt. Hilda, tell me about your systems."
"Hyperthrust, offline. Time circuit, offline. Life support, damaged but online." Hilda paused, then said in a plaintive tone, "Where is Alice?"
"Alice isn't here, dear. We're looking for her."
"I want Alice!"
"I do, too, dear."
"So we're stuck?" Jack asked.
Hart played with his VM again. "You might be."
Without looking at him, Jack reached out and grabbed his arm. "Thanks for mentioning it. We may have to send you to fetch parts." He let go, rolled up his sleeves and crawled under the control panel. "Hello, beautiful. Let's see if we can put you back together."
***
The first week crawled by. While his mind was filled with knowledge on how to treat or pull each weed from a row and details on how to wrap healthy tendrils around the delicate slats of a lattice, Ianto found his body was not yet on-board with the new program. This enormous farm was a far cry from the small fields he and Jack had haphazardly tended whenever they remembered. The rich soil of their planet had been easy to work: place a seed, and it would grow. The soil here was poorer, and stony, and required physical effort he wasn't used to. Muscles gone soft with ease and comfort protested at their new work. Meanwhile, his mind raced with the issue of their big problem, and the smaller ones surrounding it.
They needed to make contact with Jack and Jenny (and, God help them, John Hart). They needed to find out when the children would arrive. They needed to leave before someone caught onto who he was.
Resting between rows, Ianto glanced over the fence to an adjoining field, where he could make out Alice under a wide-brimmed straw hat, plucking weeds and swearing. She didn't like the work and hadn't been programmed for it, but her mood was better out here than in the town proper. He wondered if she knew how much her eyes darkened when she passed by a child. He didn't dare wonder, had he been there in the room with Jack on that terrible day, if everything could have been different.
Ianto took a lukewarm drink from the water flask at his hip and started on the next row.
When they broke for lunch, Ianto took his familiar seat with Alice. "Did you hear? We have tomorrow off."
"Are they calling it Sunday?"
He shrugged. "They're calling it a day off. Harry says when they first arrived, there was a resolution to make the official state religion of the colony the Church of England, but it was voted down."
"I'm sure that was a mess." She took a bite of her mashed vegetables and made a grimace. Seasonings were at a premium here, brought out for special occasions only.
"I'm thinking about walking to the next colony."
"Why? Are you emigrating?" There was a teasing smile on her lips.
"No. I just want to see. And if we are stranded here, it might not be a bad plan for me to make myself scarce." He played with the bread that came with their lunch. He'd run into the guards who'd been on duty the day they'd all died. Thankfully for him -- less so, for the former guards -- every one of them had been given memory wipes of two to ten years each. None of them had any clue who he was. The woman he'd spoken to when they'd first awakened, and the only one who might have remembered him from that time period, had killed herself a week after arrival. He worried nonetheless.
"Well, I am going to take a nice, long hot bath and stay there for three hours tomorrow." Her expression was already luxuriating in bubbles, although they had work ahead of them still today.
"Enjoy." He toasted her with water.
"What do you miss most?" she asked him suddenly. "Other than people?" Of course, since she'd said it, his thoughts turned to his friends and his family. He'd lived in the future since he was twenty-six, and it still didn't seem like they were gone.
He took two bites before responding. "Chocolate. Talking to people who understand references I make. Top Gear."
She laughed. "Top Gear? Really?"
"Mindless diversions in general. But yeah." He drank some more of his water. "You'd think there'd be more entertainment in the future. Seriously, the longest thing I've had to read in years has been Jack's book."
"I cannot imagine reading that," she said, her expression horrified.
"I've been helping him edit. He rambles, and he thinks commas should go where they're pretty." Ianto had long since given up trying to explain ordinal lists and clauses, and settled for just cleaning it up himself. And if he happened to learn more about Jack's mysterious past as he did so, well, it wasn't like Jack hadn't written the thing for the whole universe to see.
"He used to help me with my homework," said Alice. "The weekends he'd visit. But he always knew science and things far ahead of what was in the textbook, so it was marked as wrong."
"He got into a fistfight with your teacher once, didn't he?"
Alice sat back. "He told you that?"
"I read about it. You're all through the book. Stories about when you were small. The times he ran into you again." Jack had sired other children through the years, but none came close to the amount of space he'd dedicated to the woman across from him. "I think Jenny must have come up once or twice, but you were the focus of those scenes."
Her face scrunched. "He wrote his tell-all with me in it?"
"It's not a tell-all. It's just Jack. He's had an interesting life. You're a part of it." Her expression did not look convinced.
The supervisor called them. Lunch was over. Ianto thrust the last of the bread into his pocket for later. Alice put her tray away, the rest of the food untouched.
They went back to their respective fields. Though he tried to catch her eye, she didn't seek him out again for the rest of the day, and at supper, he ate alone.
***
There was a sharp crackle, and the lights in the control room dimmed and then rebrightened.
Jenny was intent on her work on the top panel, rewriting the time circuit code for a jump that might use a little less power. "Stop it," she said to Jack, irritably. He didn't respond.
Her senses twitched, and for a moment, she felt the constant headache ease. "Oh." She peered under the control panel to be sure.
Hart said, "Problem?"
"Not a permanent one. Jack just electrocuted himself."
Sure enough, a minute later, there was a gasp of air returning to his lungs as he revived just out of sight.
"Be more careful," Jenny chided, continuing to work as her temples resumed their pounding.
***
Chapter Five