Torchwood: Exodus Code

staring sadly through the security glass at Gwen, who was slowly becoming less agitated. ‘Who’re you calling?’ he asked.
    ‘Dr Steele is wrong, Rhys. There’s a pattern to all this. These woman are not just some kind of statistical anomaly. The doctor confirmed that all these woman are suffering from similar delusions, from similar mental breakdowns, to say nothing of the fact that all of them mutilated themselves in some way.’
    Both men looked more closely at each of the women in the ward, this time paying more attention to their other injuries. The woman in the bed closest to Gwen had her head bandaged, the dressing covering the entire left side of her face. Opposite her, a woman in her late twenties had her arm in a cast, only three fingers visible. The third, a heavy middle-aged woman with untidy curls of hair had a thick white patch dressed on her left eye, raw pink welts and lines of scratches covering her cheeks.
    Gwen’s right shoulder was bound in bandages, soft leather straps fastened across her chest and restraints on her legs to keep her frenetic movements restricted. She looked small and frail, and as he looked at her Jack’s heart cracked a little more.
    ‘Something wrong?’ asked Rhys. ‘I need to get home to Anwen so Mary can come see Gwen. I can’t be taking care of you too, mate.’
    ‘Go,’ said Jack, his knees aching terribly. ‘I’ll sit with Gwen until Mary gets here.’
    ‘Sure?’
    ‘More than.’
    When Rhys had gone, Jack tapped a number into his mobile. The guard banged on his window.
    ‘Is this line secure?’ asked Jack. ‘Good. I need you to do something for me.’ Jack laughed at something the caller said after Jack explained his request.
    ‘Of course, you should do it Torchwood style.’

The Ice Maiden

31
    IN THE COMMUNICATIONS room opposite the newly refurbished mess, the
Ice Maiden
’s two analysts sat in front of a bank of computers. Like Sam and Hollis, they were also ignoring the increasingly violent rise and fall of the ship as she sailed into the storm. Vlad Lidenbrok had his feet up on the desk, reading a Steampunk novel balanced on his lap while his computer was plotting a geologic map, its waves of reds, blues and yellows washing across his screen.
    Eva Giles was perched on the edge of her chair, leaning over what looked like an old-fashioned printer. It was, in fact, a sophisticated piece of sonar-recording equipment, its shuttle flying across the scrolling paper, while also sending its results to Vlad’s hard drive.
    ‘How many is that we’ve discovered now?’ asked Vlad, shouting to be heard over the thunderous waves battering the side of the ship.
    ‘Counting this one forming off the coast of Wales?’ asked Eva. She wore over-sized black-framed glasses and kept her long brown hair pulled off her face. Eva was the crew’s science officer who Cash had recruited, at Dana’s request, from the doctoral program in Earth Sciences at the University of Vancouver. As the crew’s youngest and newest recruit, she desperately wanted to be taken seriously.
    ‘Four significant disturbances,’ she finally replied. ‘That’s a lot in such a short time. Should we be worried?’
    ‘You’re not?’ replied Vlad, pulling up two other sonar maps to his screen. One was from a hundred miles off the coast of Vietnam, the other from the ocean south of New Zealand. Vlad quickly scrolled through a series of windows until he settled on an oceanic map of the world. Tapping the screen on the key places where they’d recorded the other deep-water disturbances, he then dragged the key bits of data and embedded them in each flagged point.
    Grabbing the arm of her chair before it rolled against the door, Eva watched Vlad work, knowing some morsel of data, a detail of code, had snagged his mind as he’d been scrolling and he was puzzling over what he was seeing. She watched quietly as he began rubbing his fingers across his short beard, his green eyes narrowed as he stared intently at the screen. Every few seconds, he scribbled a note on a sheet of paper, adding to the scraps and piles that already carpeted his desk. Then he’d twirl his pencil, once, twice, come to a conclusion and then, using the eraser, double-tap each flag on the screen. In one swift gesture across his screen, he made the images and the data fly to a massive electronic map that covered the room’s only open wall, each spot on the map pinging bright within seconds of Vlad’s touch on his