Pausing to light a cigarette as he surveyed the destruction, Cromwell turned to the woman who had driven the Land-Rover; a tall brunette in a black miniskirt and leather jacket. She was already taking readings, walking around the rubble and the patches of blood where bodies had been, pretending not to notice the lustful looks from some of the soldiers.
'Lucy?' said Cromwell. 'Anything?'
'Nothing,' Lucy replied. 'They're gone.'
'All of them?'
She nodded.
Cromwell took a long drag on his cigarette and shook his head.
'So much death,' he said.
He was walking towards the edge of the quayside when two soldiers approached him, carrying a covered body on a stretcher.
'Sir, Captain Turner said you might want to see this,' said the first, indicating the body.
Cromwell nodded, took another drag on his cigarette, and lifted the sheet. Though covered in blood and ash, one side of the face partly staved in by falling masonry, it was the scar that identified the corpse. Valentine was dead.
'So it goes,' said Cromwell. 'Goodbye, Mr Valentine. Take him away, boys. Do with him what you will.'
Cromwell sat, a little awkwardly, on one of the mooring posts on the edge of the dock. Age, he felt, was starting to creep up on him. There had been a time, which didn't feel so long ago, when he would have been the one running around the ruins, noting every last detail, taking readings. He'd have shrugged off, or at least blocked out, the more gruesome details, like the pools of blood or the recognisable fragments of tissue and bone. Those days were leaving him now. How much more of this did he have left in him? Five years? Ten?
His moment's contemplation was interrupted by the sound of splashing water. He turned around suddenly, and looking down at the sea saw a figure emerging from the surface. It was a man, a man who gripped a rusting ladder with both hands and pulled himself, gasping as if in pain, up onto the edge of the dock. For a moment he lay there, on his side, coughing up water and simply staring into space, as if his mind were a million miles away.
'Harkness…' said Cromwell, but the man did not acknowledge him. Instead, he got to his feet and walked away, past the ruins of the warehouse, past Lucy, leaving a trail of wet footprints behind him.
'Jack?' called Cromwell, but it was too late.
Jack Harkness was gone.
SEVENTEEN
Jack's office was silent but for the whirr of his computer. He hadn't spoken in perhaps a minute. Ianto leaned back against one of Jack's archaic filing cabinets, drumming his fingers on one of the metal drawer fronts, and sighed.
'But Valentine?' he said. 'Why did they wipe all his records?'
'Embarrassment?' said Jack. 'Desperation? I don't know. They were different times. There weren't just aliens and the Rift to think of.'
Jack was quiet now. He wasn't in the mood for questions. As he'd told Ianto about the events at the KVI substation, he'd glanced occasionally at his monitor, and at the image of Michael, sleeping. The whole night had felt like a cruel dream; the kind of dream you have in which a loved one who has died comes back and, halfway through, you recognise it for what it is: a lie.
'But it's worse than a lie,' thought Jack, 'because it's a lie you tell yourself.'
'So where does this leave us?' asked Ianto.
Jack looked at him quizzically. 'What's that supposed to mean?'
'I mean, if he's here now.
Jack shook his head. 'He won't stay,' he said. 'The guy sleeping down in the Boardroom… None of those things have happened to him yet. He's still alive, for one thing.'
'But maybe you could stop it… I mean…'
'No,' said Jack. 'Not in this universe. In this universe, Michael always goes back to 1967. He always dies.'
'So there's nothing we can-'
'No.'
Ianto thought about this for a moment. He'd been thinking of Lisa, ever since he'd told the others about his encounter with Cromwell at Torchwood One. Those days seemed a lifetime ago, now. Lisa seemed so many lifetimes ago.
'You need to go to him, then,' he said. 'Now, I mean. Go and talk to him. Just… just be with him.'
Jack nodded, and smiled. As he walked out of his office, Ianto caught his hand, and held it for a second before letting go.
'So these Vondrax?' said Gwen. 'They look like people?'
Toshiko shrugged. She was examining the Orb, while Gwen sat at her workstation sipping coffee that was still a little too hot.
'Kind of,' she said. 'I can't remember. Or at least I couldn't remember. Until now.'
'And they wear bowler hats?'
Toshiko nodded.
'But why?' said Gwen. 'Why do you think they wear bowler hats?'
'I don't know. To fit in?'
'It's weird. It just reminds me of something Jack said a while ago. He said that in an infinite universe there must be a planet full of civil servants. Maybe that's the planet they're from…'
Toshiko laughed softly. 'I've seen one of them, Gwen,' she said, 'and they were not civil servants.'
Then she looked at Gwen with an expression serious enough to kill Gwen's smile. She looked strangely scared, as if the memory were enough to still terrify her.
Jack stepped out of his office and walked across the Hub.
'Having fun?' he asked. It was the kind of line that would normally be accompanied by a smile, but he said it softly with little trace of emotion.
Toshiko looked up from the Orb. 'This thing,' she said. 'There's no tech. No moving parts. The metal is a new one on me.'
'Have you named it yet?' asked Jack.
Toshiko frowned. 'What do you mean?'
'Well, it's a new metal. Nothing like it on Earth. You should name it. Something like Toshikinum. Or Torchwoodium, if you're not into the whole egocentric naming thing.'
'Torchwoodium it is,' said Toshiko. 'I just can't figure out how it works. Or rather, how it worked.'
'And I don't think you ever will,' said Jack. 'That thing is probably older than this planet. Maybe older than this solar system. The creatures that made it were working with technology as old as the stars themselves. It's Clarke's Third Law, Tosh. Clarke's Third Law.'
'You said that earlier, Jack. What's Clark's Third Law?'
'I'll tell you some other time,' said Jack. 'I have to go see how our visitor's doing.'
As Jack headed down towards the Boardroom, Toshiko left the Orb on the table and followed him.
'Um, Jack,' she said. 'I've been thinking.
Jack turned. 'About what?'
'Well, about the Vondrax. If they follow Michael, and Michael's here… Well… What do we do if they turn up?'
Jack breathed deeply. He could still see the Vondrax in the underground corridor of the KVI substation, and the bullets passing through them as if they were made of smoke. He'd been immune to them, but the others hadn't been so lucky.
'They don't like mirrors,' he said, glancing across the Hub, and Toshiko followed his gaze.
'I wonder,' said Owen, peering through the glass of the holding cell. 'Do you have regrets? Do you sit in there sometimes and think, "How the bloody hell did I end up here? What did I do to deserve living in this little bloody room a hundred feet below Cardiff?'"
In its cell, Janet was hunched over in one corner, breathing quietly but for the occasional grunt. It was hard to know whether the Weevil was listening to him or not and, if it was, whether it might be able to understand a single word he was saying.
'I wonder what you think of us,' said Owen. 'I mean, apart from as food, obviously. I wonder whether you've got a favourite.'