1x13: The Taste of Fear (2/3)
Title: The Taste of Fear (2/3)
Author: gin_and_ashes
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Rose/Ten II
Summary: While on an errand for an injured Rose, the Doctor stumbles across a potentially deadly threat to the planet Earth in the unlikeliest of places.
Author's notes: Thanks to jlrpuck for being a terrific beta and to shinyopals for making sure all the pieces fit together.
Episode 13 of a virtual series at the_altverse, following Ten Minutes last week.
Virtual Series Masterlist
Chapter One
"Invaded?" Rose's first instinct was to leap out of bed and go running to wherever the Doctor was; in her distress, it took a moment for her to remember her leg. Even if she could get out of bed unaided at the moment, she couldn't walk, much less run. If she was going to be any help to him, she'd have to do it from here. "Are you all right? Where are you? Have you been taken prisoner? Should I call Dad?"
"No! No no no no, no Pete, no Torchwood. That's a disaster waiting to happen."
"But..."
"I'm fine, Rose. For now, anyway. I'm in the park."
"The park? As in Hyde Park?"
"Yes, of course Hyde Park, what other park would I...that's not important anyway. Now listen carefully."
"There's an invasion going on...in Hyde Park. And no one's noticed."
The Doctor paused. "Sort of?"
"Okay, you've lost me. Let's start over. You said Earth has been invaded?"
"Yes."
"Wait, why are you whispering?"
Another pause. "I'm hiding."
"From the aliens?"
"No, from the Police, of course. It's after curfew."
Rose sighed. "You don't have your Torchwood ID, do you?" There was a mumble on the other end of the line. "I'm sorry? I didn't hear that."
"I said I chucked it."
"Of course you did." Rose sighed. "Doctor..."
"Yes, I can't imagine why I might find Torchwood distasteful or useless. I mean, it's not like aliens have ever managed to infiltrate the Earth without them knowing, like, oh, say, now."
"Okay, Doctor, just tell me." Rose tucked the phone between her chin and shoulder and reached for her laptop, which sat on the nightstand. "What sort of aliens are we talking about?" She opened the computer and turned it on. If she couldn't fight the aliens in person, she could do the next best thing; use knowledge against them.
"Skimmymars." The Doctor's voice was laced with dread.
"Skim-a-what?"
"Skimmymars."
"Never heard of them."
"No, and you wouldn't have. They're an aquatic species, mildly bioluminescent--which is how I spotted them--group-dwelling but non-sapient, sentient in only the most basic sense, I suppose you could say, and completely incapable of space travel."
"They sound like fish."
"They are, essentially."
Rose stopped what she was doing and grabbed the phone again, frowning. "Doctor, are you telling me Earth is being invaded by alien fish?"
"No! I mean, yes, but...Rose, didn't you hear me?" His voice rose sharply, then fell to a whisper once more. Rose pictured him jumping up from his hiding place, pulling at his hair, then ducking down and hiding once more. If he hadn't sounded so deadly serious about the whole thing, she'd have been smiling. Instead, she covered her free ear with her hand, straining to hear his voice as he went on.
"Skimmymars are an invasive species, Rose. They're voracious eaters, breed like mad, and have no natural predators here. They're toxic to all but the most hardy Earth fish. It's like...it's like the cane toad in Australia. Habitats are delicate things; they require balance in order to keep harmony. Disrupt that balance and an entire ecosystem can fall apart. If the Skimmymar is in Earth's lakes and rivers it will out-compete other fish. For food, for space, you name it. Humans won't notice, not right away, but soon other animals, ones that rely on those fish and can't tolerate the Skimmymar toxin--birds, snakes, maybe even some bears--they'll suffer. Their populations will drop, maybe even die out over time, if they can't find other sources of food, and before you know it, Earth is smack-dab in the middle of an ecological disaster."
"What do we do?"
Rose could hear the determination in the Doctor's voice. "We have to remove them. Quickly and thoroughly. But it won't be easy."
"Doctor, I hate to say it, but this really sounds like a job for Torchwood. They have experts in just this sort of thing--rounding up aliens that shouldn't--"
"No! No no, absolutely not, the last thing we need right now is Torchwood's jackbooted thugs stomping in here and making a mess of things."
"They'd hardly--"
"I mean it, Rose, no." He paused and took a deep breath. "I haven't told you the worst of it."
"The worst? What do you mean, the worst?" Rose was confused, and angry. Of course there was a wrinkle. There was always a complication, and usually a potentially deadly one. She girded herself for the bad news. "What haven't you told me?"
"Like I said, there's no way the Skimmymars could have gotten here on their own. Someone must have brought them. And there's really only one race that would want to do that."
"Who?"
"The Ude Shur."
Rose grabbed her laptop again and pulled up the Torchwood database. "How do you spell that? In English, that is?"
"Ude. U-D-E. Shur. S-H-U-R. Are you in the Torchwood system now?" the Doctor asked.
"Of course I am." She shook her head. "No, there's nothing here."
"Believe me, if anyone on Earth had met an Ude Shur, you'd know. Nasty, unpleasant folk. Nocturnal, humanoid enough to pass on Earth if they're careful, though they rarely mix with humans, so there's little chance of them being noticed. If they are here, they'll be nesting in abandoned buildings, sewers, steam tunnels--anywhere out of the light."
"Right, so why--wait."
"Rose--"
"Shh." She stilled, listening, and heard familiar steps in the corridor. "Call you back. Mum's coming."
"But this is--"
"Do you want her to know where you are, what you're up to?" Rose hissed. "I. Will. Call. You. Back." She rang off just as Jackie reentered the room.
"Just thought I'd check in, see how you were faring, if you need anything before I turn in," her mother said as she swept in.
Rose flashed a tight smile. "Nah, I'm good, thanks."
"Here, at least let me put these things away for you."
Jackie approached the bed to take the folded laundry. Rose tried to tab her browser to a news site, but wasn't quick enough; her mother saw the Torchwood logo on the screen and frowned.
"What are you up to?" Jackie demanded, her voice cold with suspicion. "And where's the Doctor? He's not gone after that Charila person, has he? Rose, after everything that's happened--"
"What? No, no, mum, it's nothing like that." Rose said. Jackie stared her down with a look she hadn't seen since she was seventeen and had been caught sneaking out with Shareen. "Honestly, mum."
It wasn't a lie. So why did it feel like one?
"Rose..."
"Really. The Doctor called. He got sidetracked, you know how he is. And I was just...okay, I was snooping a bit, but it's not like I'm about to go running off after Bob Charila--or anyone else for that matter. I can barely make it to the loo! So you don't have to worry, Mum. I'm stuck here. We both are." Frustrated, she blew a lock of hair out of her eyes and leaned back against the headboard.
Jackie looked crestfallen. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean--"
Rose raised a hand, stopping her mother before she could continue. "I know, Mum. I don't want to be hovered over or pitied right now, okay? Can you do that for me?"
"Yeah, sure. Of course I can." Shoulders slumped, she tucked Rose's clothes away in a bureau, then walked heavily towards the corridor, turning around again once she was in the doorway. "It's been a long day and we could all do with a bit of rest. I'll see you in the morning, that all right?"
Rose's heart clenched. Getting Jackie out of the room had been necessary; the Doctor needed her right now. The Earth needed her. But how could anyone blame a mother for wanting to take care of her child? She smiled again, this time in genuine apology. "Yeah. Goodnight, mum. Love you."
"Love you too, sweetheart."
With that, she withdrew, closing the door behind her. Rose let herself wallow in guilt for approximately six seconds, then fished her phone out from where she'd stuffed it under the duvet and jabbed the Doctor's speed dial key. With any luck, he hadn't gotten into too much trouble in the last five minutes.
~~~~~
The last five minutes had been agony for the Doctor. Rose had hung up on him--on him!--leaving him to thwart an alien invasion alone.
All right, perhaps "invasion" was too strong a term, but the threat was real, even if it wasn't quite as immediate as he'd made it sound. He really hoped she hadn't gone running--ooh, bad choice of words there, he admonished himself--to get Torchwood involved. He hadn't exaggerated about what a bad idea that would have been. Well. Not much.
Still, he needed to stay close to this spot, away from the patrols but within sight of the lake. If even one Ude Shur turned up...
His phone lit up, the brightness of the screen's light temporarily stunning him, making him jerk his head back as the phone vibrated in his palm. At least he'd remembered to turn his ringer to silent mode. Ducking down further into his arboreal cover, he answered with a whispered "Rose?"
"It'll take me weeks to get over the guilt, but Mum's all sorted. Now, who are the Ude Shur and why did they bring the Skimmymars here? What's so special about them?"
Right to the point, then. He smiled at his wife's tenacity. "Telepathy."
"A telepathic fish?"
"Very low-level, and only in the most basic sense. When a Skimmymar is threatened or harmed, it gives off a telepathic cry of distress, meant to warn others away from the source of the danger. It's the fear cry, not the Skimmymar itself, that the Ude Shur have a taste for; it's an intoxicant to them."
"They get drunk off of fear?"
"A very specific kind of fear, yes. In its purest form, it increases aggression as well. The Ude Shur love that. They eat the Skimmymars alive to inflict the most pain and elicit the strongest fear response. The cry from as few as three Skimmymars is enough to turn a room full of Ude Shur almost mindlessly violent. If Torchwood comes and simply nets the Skimmymars, they'll release that cry en masse. If one or several of them are hurt or killed, the cry will be even more powerful and travel farther. Every Ude Shur in greater London--be it a handful or a hundred--will be irresistibly drawn here. And on the way, they'll be drunk and looking for a fight. Any human in their way will be a target."
"Oh, God. It'll be like England's lost at football."
"Exactly."
"So how do we stop it? We can't leave the Skimmymars here 'cos they'll overrun all the other fish, but we can't catch them, either." There was a pause on the line while Rose tried to come up with a solution. "What...what if we got Torchwood to round up all the Ude Shur first? You said they're nocturnal, so we could, I dunno, we could sweep all the places they might be and take them in."
"Along with how many harmless squatters? No thank you, I'm not about to trample all over civil liberties when there's another way."
"Well, I don't see that there is another way," Rose huffed.
"Then you worked for Torchwood for too long," the Doctor shot back. Rose said nothing, but he could tell he'd struck a chord. "There is always another way. Always."
"Yeah, so what's the other way this time?"
"First, we need to establish just how widespread the Skimmymar population is. If they're only here in the Serpentine, we're in good shape and I can fix this." He paused, running the probabilities over in his head. "Most likely."
"And what if they're in other places, too, Doctor? What if they've spread beyond London? Beyond Britain?"
He didn't need to do fancy sums in his head to know exactly how dire the situation would be in that case. "As your mother is so very fond of saying? I'd rather not think about it."
The Doctor chanced a peek from his hiding spot. The coast was clear; there didn't appear to be any patrols nearby, and the CCTV wouldn't pick him up in such a dimly-lit area. At least not well. Carefully, he edged back towards the water. "You have your laptop?" he asked.
"Yep."
"Good. Give me a moment."
He waited, silently. A long, nervous few seconds passed before he saw the telltale glow beneath the water; he fairly jabbed the sonic screwdriver towards the spot. "I'm going to be sending you a small executable file," he said, pulling the phone from his ear and holding the tip of the sonic screwdriver to the touchscreen for a few seconds. "Run that file. It will upload the Skimmymar's biological signature to Torchwood's databases. You'll need to access the network of spy satellites Torchwood doesn't have and scan the planet for them."
"What?" To her credit, Rose sounded genuinely stunned.
"There's a lot about Torchwood even you don't know, Rose. But that's a discussion for another day. Now, while that programme is running, I need you to find me an computer shop, or a camera store, something nearby and with a stock of electronics."
He could hear her typing away on her laptop. "You still near Hyde Park Corner?"
"Nearer there than anywhere else, yes."
"Okay. Hmm...no...eh...no...yes! Strøm and Didriksen!"
"Who and who?"
Rose laughed. "It's not a 'who,' Doctor, it's a 'what.' They sell car stereos, televisions, speakers, all very sleek and Danish and outrageously expensive. Mickey used to fantasise about putting one of their systems into his car."
"I have a great deal of respect for the man Mickey became, so I'll refrain from comment," quipped the Doctor.
"Wise man."
"Indeed. Address, please?" She told him; he began making his way there at once, keeping to the shadows as best he could.
"I don't want to know what you'll be doing there, do I?" Her tone was wry, but he could detect the worry beneath the humour.
"No, but I'd take it as a kindness if you'd remotely deactivate any CCTV between here and there for, oh, the next...ten minutes or so?" He paused, estimating the distance he'd have to travel, the security measures likely to be in place, and the items he'd need. "Better make it twenty. And now, dear wife, it's my turn to say it: Call you back."
Before Rose could protest, he ended the call and tucked the phone into his pocket. Twenty minutes. He'd need to work quickly.
The Doctor reached Hyde Park Corner and skulked in the darkness under the Arch (they'd named it Victory Arch here; no one but he and Rose got the irony) as he planned his next move. He trusted that Rose had been able to deactivate the CCTV, as he'd surely have been picked up by now otherwise. Even so, there was a fair amount of risk involved in his net task. Any high-end electronics retailer would have several levels of security. While he was confident he could disable them all, he'd have to find them first, and there was a chance that he'd trip one alarm while disarming another. Not only that, but the area in and around the shop was distressingly well-lit, despite the curfew--or perhaps because of it. It was not an ideal situation by any means, but it was their best and only chance at dealing with the Skimmymar Problem. Risking arrest, however unpleasant, was preferable by far to risking lives. He sucked in a deep breath and held it as he dashed across the deserted street and into the shadowy space between two buildings. Exhaling slowly, he surveyed his surroundings.
Strøm and Didriksen was the very embodiment of anachronism, a temple of lustrous futurism housed in a crumbling marble-fronted structure, a building so austere it seemed to sag under the weight of its own majesty. Glaringly white electric light poured out of windows that had been retrofitted so as to appear nonexistent. It was overly bright and far too revealing. Incandescence showed the starkness that gaslight had been meant to conceal.
Sentimentality for the things of the past was an indulgence he normally tried to avoid. Things changed and the universe was ever moving, forward and outward. But for some reason, the cold impersonality of the store offended his sensibilities, a shrine to needless extravagance built into the hollowed-out shell of a warmer, more humble place. Or perhaps, he thought as he scanned the back door and disabled the first of many alarms, he was just seeking a justification for his imminent act of larceny.
The door opened with a grinding of steel against steel that was probably inaudible from the street, but to him sounded positively thunderous. He crossed the threshold only far enough to close the door behind him (he'd learnt the hard way about propping or taping doors, but who'd expected a hotel security guard to be so observant?), then stood as still as he was able while taking in the room around him, daring to move only his wrist as he scanned the unexpectedly dark space with the sonic screwdriver. He'd been lucky; the door he'd entered through had led not to the well-lit and no doubt highly alarmed showroom, but to a dark and largely windowless storage room. What alarms there were were far more basic and easier to disarm than he'd expected. Soon he was rifling through the shelves with abandon.
The one problem with stealing from a store that sells criminally expensive home entertainment systems is that since they don't anticipate many sales, they keep a limited amount of stock on hand. There were a fair few of the more "affordable" (in relative terms) aspirational pieces, but only a smattering of the truly advanced items. It was far from the treasure trove he'd expected. Even so, he determined as he scanned the shelves with a critical eye, it should be enough. It would have to be.
The Doctor worked with the speed and ruthlessness of a battlefield triagist, examining each item to determine if it contained even a single useful component before moving on, all the while designing and and redesigning in his head the devices he would need to construct. They'd need to be portable--the smaller, the better--yet powerful enough to cover the area encompassing the Serpentine, with a little added scope to allow for errors in calculation (not that he ever made any, but he was working on the fly) or fluctuations in power. For that matter, he'd need to find or create a power source. And he had, by his reckoning, approximately eleven minutes in which to do it all. Not enough time.
He'd gathered a sizable pile of electronic bits and bobs (the speakers and remote controls had been extremely fruitful) and had a basic plan for the mechanism he'd need to build, but he couldn't do it here. Although he'd disabled the alarms, they were almost certainly monitored. Someone was bound to notice and would alert the police. He swept the jumble of wires, magnets, speaker bits and other assorted pieces into a shopping bag and strode towards the door, but found himself unable to leave. There was nothing physically restraining him; the back door remained unlocked, there were no alarms or force fields, nothing to keep him in place except the weight of his own guilt.
He'd ransacked a shop. A shop for obnoxious hipster toffs, but a shop nonetheless. Yes, it was to save the world, but still someone--several someones--relied on the money made off those obnoxious hipster toffs to put food on their tables. Some of them had families to support, surely (the shop assistants, not the hipster toffs). He needed to leave, and immediately, but he couldn't.
Grimacing (for he suspected this was a result of the Donna that was left in him, and he couldn't think about that, not now, not ever), he dropped the bag by the door and searched the room, eyes wide, brow furrowed, until he found what he needed--the one thing that could make this right. A few moments later, and feeling slightly less conscience-stricken, he stepped out the back door of the shop, locking it behind him before taking off at a gallop back towards the Serpentine.
~~~~~
Chapter Three
Author: gin_and_ashes
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Rose/Ten II
Summary: While on an errand for an injured Rose, the Doctor stumbles across a potentially deadly threat to the planet Earth in the unlikeliest of places.
Author's notes: Thanks to jlrpuck for being a terrific beta and to shinyopals for making sure all the pieces fit together.
Episode 13 of a virtual series at the_altverse, following Ten Minutes last week.
Virtual Series Masterlist
Chapter One
"Invaded?" Rose's first instinct was to leap out of bed and go running to wherever the Doctor was; in her distress, it took a moment for her to remember her leg. Even if she could get out of bed unaided at the moment, she couldn't walk, much less run. If she was going to be any help to him, she'd have to do it from here. "Are you all right? Where are you? Have you been taken prisoner? Should I call Dad?"
"No! No no no no, no Pete, no Torchwood. That's a disaster waiting to happen."
"But..."
"I'm fine, Rose. For now, anyway. I'm in the park."
"The park? As in Hyde Park?"
"Yes, of course Hyde Park, what other park would I...that's not important anyway. Now listen carefully."
"There's an invasion going on...in Hyde Park. And no one's noticed."
The Doctor paused. "Sort of?"
"Okay, you've lost me. Let's start over. You said Earth has been invaded?"
"Yes."
"Wait, why are you whispering?"
Another pause. "I'm hiding."
"From the aliens?"
"No, from the Police, of course. It's after curfew."
Rose sighed. "You don't have your Torchwood ID, do you?" There was a mumble on the other end of the line. "I'm sorry? I didn't hear that."
"I said I chucked it."
"Of course you did." Rose sighed. "Doctor..."
"Yes, I can't imagine why I might find Torchwood distasteful or useless. I mean, it's not like aliens have ever managed to infiltrate the Earth without them knowing, like, oh, say, now."
"Okay, Doctor, just tell me." Rose tucked the phone between her chin and shoulder and reached for her laptop, which sat on the nightstand. "What sort of aliens are we talking about?" She opened the computer and turned it on. If she couldn't fight the aliens in person, she could do the next best thing; use knowledge against them.
"Skimmymars." The Doctor's voice was laced with dread.
"Skim-a-what?"
"Skimmymars."
"Never heard of them."
"No, and you wouldn't have. They're an aquatic species, mildly bioluminescent--which is how I spotted them--group-dwelling but non-sapient, sentient in only the most basic sense, I suppose you could say, and completely incapable of space travel."
"They sound like fish."
"They are, essentially."
Rose stopped what she was doing and grabbed the phone again, frowning. "Doctor, are you telling me Earth is being invaded by alien fish?"
"No! I mean, yes, but...Rose, didn't you hear me?" His voice rose sharply, then fell to a whisper once more. Rose pictured him jumping up from his hiding place, pulling at his hair, then ducking down and hiding once more. If he hadn't sounded so deadly serious about the whole thing, she'd have been smiling. Instead, she covered her free ear with her hand, straining to hear his voice as he went on.
"Skimmymars are an invasive species, Rose. They're voracious eaters, breed like mad, and have no natural predators here. They're toxic to all but the most hardy Earth fish. It's like...it's like the cane toad in Australia. Habitats are delicate things; they require balance in order to keep harmony. Disrupt that balance and an entire ecosystem can fall apart. If the Skimmymar is in Earth's lakes and rivers it will out-compete other fish. For food, for space, you name it. Humans won't notice, not right away, but soon other animals, ones that rely on those fish and can't tolerate the Skimmymar toxin--birds, snakes, maybe even some bears--they'll suffer. Their populations will drop, maybe even die out over time, if they can't find other sources of food, and before you know it, Earth is smack-dab in the middle of an ecological disaster."
"What do we do?"
Rose could hear the determination in the Doctor's voice. "We have to remove them. Quickly and thoroughly. But it won't be easy."
"Doctor, I hate to say it, but this really sounds like a job for Torchwood. They have experts in just this sort of thing--rounding up aliens that shouldn't--"
"No! No no, absolutely not, the last thing we need right now is Torchwood's jackbooted thugs stomping in here and making a mess of things."
"They'd hardly--"
"I mean it, Rose, no." He paused and took a deep breath. "I haven't told you the worst of it."
"The worst? What do you mean, the worst?" Rose was confused, and angry. Of course there was a wrinkle. There was always a complication, and usually a potentially deadly one. She girded herself for the bad news. "What haven't you told me?"
"Like I said, there's no way the Skimmymars could have gotten here on their own. Someone must have brought them. And there's really only one race that would want to do that."
"Who?"
"The Ude Shur."
Rose grabbed her laptop again and pulled up the Torchwood database. "How do you spell that? In English, that is?"
"Ude. U-D-E. Shur. S-H-U-R. Are you in the Torchwood system now?" the Doctor asked.
"Of course I am." She shook her head. "No, there's nothing here."
"Believe me, if anyone on Earth had met an Ude Shur, you'd know. Nasty, unpleasant folk. Nocturnal, humanoid enough to pass on Earth if they're careful, though they rarely mix with humans, so there's little chance of them being noticed. If they are here, they'll be nesting in abandoned buildings, sewers, steam tunnels--anywhere out of the light."
"Right, so why--wait."
"Rose--"
"Shh." She stilled, listening, and heard familiar steps in the corridor. "Call you back. Mum's coming."
"But this is--"
"Do you want her to know where you are, what you're up to?" Rose hissed. "I. Will. Call. You. Back." She rang off just as Jackie reentered the room.
"Just thought I'd check in, see how you were faring, if you need anything before I turn in," her mother said as she swept in.
Rose flashed a tight smile. "Nah, I'm good, thanks."
"Here, at least let me put these things away for you."
Jackie approached the bed to take the folded laundry. Rose tried to tab her browser to a news site, but wasn't quick enough; her mother saw the Torchwood logo on the screen and frowned.
"What are you up to?" Jackie demanded, her voice cold with suspicion. "And where's the Doctor? He's not gone after that Charila person, has he? Rose, after everything that's happened--"
"What? No, no, mum, it's nothing like that." Rose said. Jackie stared her down with a look she hadn't seen since she was seventeen and had been caught sneaking out with Shareen. "Honestly, mum."
It wasn't a lie. So why did it feel like one?
"Rose..."
"Really. The Doctor called. He got sidetracked, you know how he is. And I was just...okay, I was snooping a bit, but it's not like I'm about to go running off after Bob Charila--or anyone else for that matter. I can barely make it to the loo! So you don't have to worry, Mum. I'm stuck here. We both are." Frustrated, she blew a lock of hair out of her eyes and leaned back against the headboard.
Jackie looked crestfallen. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean--"
Rose raised a hand, stopping her mother before she could continue. "I know, Mum. I don't want to be hovered over or pitied right now, okay? Can you do that for me?"
"Yeah, sure. Of course I can." Shoulders slumped, she tucked Rose's clothes away in a bureau, then walked heavily towards the corridor, turning around again once she was in the doorway. "It's been a long day and we could all do with a bit of rest. I'll see you in the morning, that all right?"
Rose's heart clenched. Getting Jackie out of the room had been necessary; the Doctor needed her right now. The Earth needed her. But how could anyone blame a mother for wanting to take care of her child? She smiled again, this time in genuine apology. "Yeah. Goodnight, mum. Love you."
"Love you too, sweetheart."
With that, she withdrew, closing the door behind her. Rose let herself wallow in guilt for approximately six seconds, then fished her phone out from where she'd stuffed it under the duvet and jabbed the Doctor's speed dial key. With any luck, he hadn't gotten into too much trouble in the last five minutes.
~~~~~
The last five minutes had been agony for the Doctor. Rose had hung up on him--on him!--leaving him to thwart an alien invasion alone.
All right, perhaps "invasion" was too strong a term, but the threat was real, even if it wasn't quite as immediate as he'd made it sound. He really hoped she hadn't gone running--ooh, bad choice of words there, he admonished himself--to get Torchwood involved. He hadn't exaggerated about what a bad idea that would have been. Well. Not much.
Still, he needed to stay close to this spot, away from the patrols but within sight of the lake. If even one Ude Shur turned up...
His phone lit up, the brightness of the screen's light temporarily stunning him, making him jerk his head back as the phone vibrated in his palm. At least he'd remembered to turn his ringer to silent mode. Ducking down further into his arboreal cover, he answered with a whispered "Rose?"
"It'll take me weeks to get over the guilt, but Mum's all sorted. Now, who are the Ude Shur and why did they bring the Skimmymars here? What's so special about them?"
Right to the point, then. He smiled at his wife's tenacity. "Telepathy."
"A telepathic fish?"
"Very low-level, and only in the most basic sense. When a Skimmymar is threatened or harmed, it gives off a telepathic cry of distress, meant to warn others away from the source of the danger. It's the fear cry, not the Skimmymar itself, that the Ude Shur have a taste for; it's an intoxicant to them."
"They get drunk off of fear?"
"A very specific kind of fear, yes. In its purest form, it increases aggression as well. The Ude Shur love that. They eat the Skimmymars alive to inflict the most pain and elicit the strongest fear response. The cry from as few as three Skimmymars is enough to turn a room full of Ude Shur almost mindlessly violent. If Torchwood comes and simply nets the Skimmymars, they'll release that cry en masse. If one or several of them are hurt or killed, the cry will be even more powerful and travel farther. Every Ude Shur in greater London--be it a handful or a hundred--will be irresistibly drawn here. And on the way, they'll be drunk and looking for a fight. Any human in their way will be a target."
"Oh, God. It'll be like England's lost at football."
"Exactly."
"So how do we stop it? We can't leave the Skimmymars here 'cos they'll overrun all the other fish, but we can't catch them, either." There was a pause on the line while Rose tried to come up with a solution. "What...what if we got Torchwood to round up all the Ude Shur first? You said they're nocturnal, so we could, I dunno, we could sweep all the places they might be and take them in."
"Along with how many harmless squatters? No thank you, I'm not about to trample all over civil liberties when there's another way."
"Well, I don't see that there is another way," Rose huffed.
"Then you worked for Torchwood for too long," the Doctor shot back. Rose said nothing, but he could tell he'd struck a chord. "There is always another way. Always."
"Yeah, so what's the other way this time?"
"First, we need to establish just how widespread the Skimmymar population is. If they're only here in the Serpentine, we're in good shape and I can fix this." He paused, running the probabilities over in his head. "Most likely."
"And what if they're in other places, too, Doctor? What if they've spread beyond London? Beyond Britain?"
He didn't need to do fancy sums in his head to know exactly how dire the situation would be in that case. "As your mother is so very fond of saying? I'd rather not think about it."
The Doctor chanced a peek from his hiding spot. The coast was clear; there didn't appear to be any patrols nearby, and the CCTV wouldn't pick him up in such a dimly-lit area. At least not well. Carefully, he edged back towards the water. "You have your laptop?" he asked.
"Yep."
"Good. Give me a moment."
He waited, silently. A long, nervous few seconds passed before he saw the telltale glow beneath the water; he fairly jabbed the sonic screwdriver towards the spot. "I'm going to be sending you a small executable file," he said, pulling the phone from his ear and holding the tip of the sonic screwdriver to the touchscreen for a few seconds. "Run that file. It will upload the Skimmymar's biological signature to Torchwood's databases. You'll need to access the network of spy satellites Torchwood doesn't have and scan the planet for them."
"What?" To her credit, Rose sounded genuinely stunned.
"There's a lot about Torchwood even you don't know, Rose. But that's a discussion for another day. Now, while that programme is running, I need you to find me an computer shop, or a camera store, something nearby and with a stock of electronics."
He could hear her typing away on her laptop. "You still near Hyde Park Corner?"
"Nearer there than anywhere else, yes."
"Okay. Hmm...no...eh...no...yes! Strøm and Didriksen!"
"Who and who?"
Rose laughed. "It's not a 'who,' Doctor, it's a 'what.' They sell car stereos, televisions, speakers, all very sleek and Danish and outrageously expensive. Mickey used to fantasise about putting one of their systems into his car."
"I have a great deal of respect for the man Mickey became, so I'll refrain from comment," quipped the Doctor.
"Wise man."
"Indeed. Address, please?" She told him; he began making his way there at once, keeping to the shadows as best he could.
"I don't want to know what you'll be doing there, do I?" Her tone was wry, but he could detect the worry beneath the humour.
"No, but I'd take it as a kindness if you'd remotely deactivate any CCTV between here and there for, oh, the next...ten minutes or so?" He paused, estimating the distance he'd have to travel, the security measures likely to be in place, and the items he'd need. "Better make it twenty. And now, dear wife, it's my turn to say it: Call you back."
Before Rose could protest, he ended the call and tucked the phone into his pocket. Twenty minutes. He'd need to work quickly.
The Doctor reached Hyde Park Corner and skulked in the darkness under the Arch (they'd named it Victory Arch here; no one but he and Rose got the irony) as he planned his next move. He trusted that Rose had been able to deactivate the CCTV, as he'd surely have been picked up by now otherwise. Even so, there was a fair amount of risk involved in his net task. Any high-end electronics retailer would have several levels of security. While he was confident he could disable them all, he'd have to find them first, and there was a chance that he'd trip one alarm while disarming another. Not only that, but the area in and around the shop was distressingly well-lit, despite the curfew--or perhaps because of it. It was not an ideal situation by any means, but it was their best and only chance at dealing with the Skimmymar Problem. Risking arrest, however unpleasant, was preferable by far to risking lives. He sucked in a deep breath and held it as he dashed across the deserted street and into the shadowy space between two buildings. Exhaling slowly, he surveyed his surroundings.
Strøm and Didriksen was the very embodiment of anachronism, a temple of lustrous futurism housed in a crumbling marble-fronted structure, a building so austere it seemed to sag under the weight of its own majesty. Glaringly white electric light poured out of windows that had been retrofitted so as to appear nonexistent. It was overly bright and far too revealing. Incandescence showed the starkness that gaslight had been meant to conceal.
Sentimentality for the things of the past was an indulgence he normally tried to avoid. Things changed and the universe was ever moving, forward and outward. But for some reason, the cold impersonality of the store offended his sensibilities, a shrine to needless extravagance built into the hollowed-out shell of a warmer, more humble place. Or perhaps, he thought as he scanned the back door and disabled the first of many alarms, he was just seeking a justification for his imminent act of larceny.
The door opened with a grinding of steel against steel that was probably inaudible from the street, but to him sounded positively thunderous. He crossed the threshold only far enough to close the door behind him (he'd learnt the hard way about propping or taping doors, but who'd expected a hotel security guard to be so observant?), then stood as still as he was able while taking in the room around him, daring to move only his wrist as he scanned the unexpectedly dark space with the sonic screwdriver. He'd been lucky; the door he'd entered through had led not to the well-lit and no doubt highly alarmed showroom, but to a dark and largely windowless storage room. What alarms there were were far more basic and easier to disarm than he'd expected. Soon he was rifling through the shelves with abandon.
The one problem with stealing from a store that sells criminally expensive home entertainment systems is that since they don't anticipate many sales, they keep a limited amount of stock on hand. There were a fair few of the more "affordable" (in relative terms) aspirational pieces, but only a smattering of the truly advanced items. It was far from the treasure trove he'd expected. Even so, he determined as he scanned the shelves with a critical eye, it should be enough. It would have to be.
The Doctor worked with the speed and ruthlessness of a battlefield triagist, examining each item to determine if it contained even a single useful component before moving on, all the while designing and and redesigning in his head the devices he would need to construct. They'd need to be portable--the smaller, the better--yet powerful enough to cover the area encompassing the Serpentine, with a little added scope to allow for errors in calculation (not that he ever made any, but he was working on the fly) or fluctuations in power. For that matter, he'd need to find or create a power source. And he had, by his reckoning, approximately eleven minutes in which to do it all. Not enough time.
He'd gathered a sizable pile of electronic bits and bobs (the speakers and remote controls had been extremely fruitful) and had a basic plan for the mechanism he'd need to build, but he couldn't do it here. Although he'd disabled the alarms, they were almost certainly monitored. Someone was bound to notice and would alert the police. He swept the jumble of wires, magnets, speaker bits and other assorted pieces into a shopping bag and strode towards the door, but found himself unable to leave. There was nothing physically restraining him; the back door remained unlocked, there were no alarms or force fields, nothing to keep him in place except the weight of his own guilt.
He'd ransacked a shop. A shop for obnoxious hipster toffs, but a shop nonetheless. Yes, it was to save the world, but still someone--several someones--relied on the money made off those obnoxious hipster toffs to put food on their tables. Some of them had families to support, surely (the shop assistants, not the hipster toffs). He needed to leave, and immediately, but he couldn't.
Grimacing (for he suspected this was a result of the Donna that was left in him, and he couldn't think about that, not now, not ever), he dropped the bag by the door and searched the room, eyes wide, brow furrowed, until he found what he needed--the one thing that could make this right. A few moments later, and feeling slightly less conscience-stricken, he stepped out the back door of the shop, locking it behind him before taking off at a gallop back towards the Serpentine.
~~~~~
Chapter Three