Torchwood: Exodus Code

this job that spending months at sea would mean giving up certain things she enjoyed – a lot. Shopping for cheap couture, eating fresh fruit, running outside on solid ground with unsalted air in her hair, and regular pleasurable sex with one or two of her on-again off-again boyfriends. But until this moment in the middle of the coldest waters she’d travelled, she’d never felt such desire, such intense sexual hunger coursing through her veins, racing to every organ at warp speed.
    ‘Eva, really,’ interrupted Vlad, his patience wearing thin. ‘Focus. I think we have a serious problem.’
    ‘What?’ said Eva, using all her willpower to not look at Vlad below the neck.
    ‘How quickly is the disturbance in Wales growing?’ Vlad asked, standing over her to get a closer look at the echogram.
    Vlad smelled of Ivory soap and the scent set off a peculiar but not unpleasant ringing in her ears. When he reached across to highlight a point on the graph, her body tingled all over, every muscle vibrating like a million hands on her at once. She crossed her legs and leaned forward, her pulse quickening again, the ringing clanging in her head. Suddenly she could taste a burst of peppermint on her tongue.
    She sighed. Christ, she felt really good.
    ‘That was weird,’ said Eva, grinning up at Vlad. ‘I mean it’s weird… the events… they’re weird…’ His eyes narrowed. She charged on. ‘I mean they both displayed signs of a tremor, but neither area is close to any traditional plate boundaries or fault lines. And now there’s a deep water geyser forming in each site.’
    She pushed away from the desk and Vlad, stepping over to the world map secured on the wall. She needed to see the entire scope of their travels plotted on the map, and she was also afraid of what might happen again if she didn’t get some distance between her body and Vlad’s.
    The peppermint lingered on her lips, tasting pretty sweet.
    ‘OK,’ she said, gathering some professional composure, but keeping her back to Vlad to be safe. ‘Let’s look at what we have. All the waters we’ve trawled have experienced some kind of seismic disturbance since Tuesday, none of them are on traditional fault lines, and so far, thankfully, none of them have created any major tsunamis or any obvious disturbances on land for that matter. Yet. But who knows what can happen if they continue to strengthen.’
    She took off her glasses, and squinted at the map. ‘Did you see that?’
    ‘See what?’ said Vlad, his eyes still on his computer screen where he’d called up an imaging model of the Norwegian waters they’d just finished trawling. Pushing his hair from his eyes, he watched his projection image rotate on the screen, the same points of Eva’s map highlighted on his. He froze the map, and finally turned to Eva. ‘Sorry. Say again.’
    Eva rubbed her eyes and put her glasses back on. ‘It’s nothing,’ she said, ‘I thought I saw the lights on the map flash in an odd way.’
    ‘I think you may need some rest,’ said Vlad. ‘We’ve all been working odd hours recently. I can cover if you want to go and lie down.’
    And then it happened again.
    In her peripheral vision, she could see the lights on the southern hemisphere of the map burst into light at the same time, flashing a regular rhythm, which was odd because each light was recording a different deep sea disturbance. There was no possible geological way that each one of those events, thousands of miles apart, were syncing with each other.
    It must be a glitch in their deep-water recorder. Had to be.

32
    THE STORM WAS sending the ship into barrel rolls, and Cash had hit the lockdown alert for the second time. If that happened a third time, they’d have to strap on their lifejackets, gather the flares and prepare for the worst.
    This time walking skilfully against the ship’s barrel motion, Eva unlocked a ceiling-high storage locker, took out a camera and a tripod and set them up facing the wall map.
    ‘What’s going on?’ Vlad asked, watching Eva keying in a series of commands into her iPad to control the camera’s time-release.
    ‘Not sure, yet,’ she replied, staring again at the pulsing lights on the maps where they’d recorded recent seismic disturbances. ‘Going with a hunch. Trying some low-tech recording.’
    ‘OK…’ said Vlad, curious about Eva’s hunches, but not interested enough to push for an explanation. Instead, he returned to his own screen. ‘Not one of