Torchwood: Exodus Code

carefully.
    ‘Since yesterday,’ said Andy, ‘three more round here and at least three or four further north. Could be more by now.’
    ‘I’m pretty sure,’ said Jack, checking Gwen’s pulse again, then packing a second clean tea towel against the wound on her shoulder, ‘that whatever’s going on, it’s not in the water. But when you get back to the station, Andy, you might want to alert everyone to a possible increase in domestic violence.’ He paused, grinning at Rhys. ‘I’m guessing Gwen might not be the only wife who wants to shoot her husband.’
    ‘Very funny,’ said Rhys. ‘Since you’re so smart, what do you think’s happening?’
    Before Jack could answer, Gwen moaned and slowly opened her eyes. Jack tasted peaches. He loved peaches, but he hadn’t been thinking about them at all. He wasn’t even hungry.
    Gwen stared up at Jack, gasped, panicked, tried to sit up, but couldn’t. ‘What happened?’ She whimpered, her memory flooding back, her eyes widening. She cried out, touching her hand to the wound on her shoulder, grimacing at the sopping towel.
    Rhys crouched next to her. ‘I’m here, love. So’s Anwen, and we’re both OK. Really.’
    Gwen burst into tears, looking first at Rhys, then at Anwen, and finally back at Jack. Outside, two medics were dashing towards the front door, a police constable jogging behind them.
    ‘Who shot me?’
    ‘I did,’ nodded Jack, sweeping her damp fringe off her face.
    ‘I guess it was my turn,’ said Gwen, taking Jack’s hand and squeezing it. Then her eyes fluttered closed and she drifted once again to unconsciousness.
    As Jack released Gwen’s hand, he noticed her forearm was bleeding. ‘What happened here?’ He rolled up her sleeve, staring at a recent wound sliced into her arm.
    ‘Christ,’ said Rhys, his face draining of colour. ‘That must have been what she was doing in the bathroom. She was cutting herself.’
    Jack slid his phone from his pocket and before the medics insisted he get out of their way, he clicked a picture of the three overlapping circles Gwen had razored into her flesh.
    *
    Later, Jack sat in the house waiting for Mary to arrive. He struggled to remember where he’d seen that shape tattooed on Gwen’s arm before. On his phone, he looked more closely at the design, puzzled.
    With Anwen playing at his feet, Jack sketched the shape on a sheet of paper, over and over again. He stared at it intently, ran his fingers over it, feeling a familiarity with its overlapping lines and its strange ancient aesthetic, but whenever he thought he had a sense of where he’d seen it before and what it meant, whenever he tried to concentrate, to get his mind to snag the memory, it was useless. Whatever this image was, it kept collapsing under his scrutiny.

The Ice Maiden

29
    North Atlantic, same day as the supermarket incident
    A FIERCE STORM was buffeting the
Ice Maiden
, a survey ship trawling in the North Sea near the cusp of the Skaggerak Strait. Henry ‘Cash’ Collins, a brick-house Scotsman – handsome, solid, dependable – stood in the wheelhouse, tucking his flannel shirt into his unzipped jeans, an unlit cigar clamped between his teeth. He checked the radar one more time to be sure. This one was going to be bad. He could feel it in his arthritic knees. Pressing a button on the control panel, he gave the orders to lock the ship down.
    The
Ice Maiden
was a beam trawler, equipped to navigate the violent northern seas. Years earlier, Cash and his father had dragged for blue-mouthed redfish in between survey trips for British Petroleum and Exxon – plus more than a few covert drilling operations around the globe for organisations only one or two folks knew about. When his father died, Cash changed the ship’s name, retrofitted it with air cannons, state-of-the-art sonar trawls, acoustic sensors and a full deck of mostly illegal electronic equipment, chartering the
Ice Maiden
’s services out to oceanic and geology departments of universities and scientific institutes. Only on the rare instances when he needed money would Cash prostitute the trawler ’s services to a government or an agency that wanted a mission run under the radar.
    This was one of those times.
    Cash’s principles had nothing to do with his politics, which were situational, and everything to do with his intense-to-the point-of-obsessive curiosity about the world’s oceans. Henry ‘Cash’ Collins had never met an authority figure he could