Torchwood: Exodus Code

is protected.’
    Eva looked at Vlad. ‘Do you really believe that? It sounds like another creation myth, only one that involves aliens of a sort.’
    ‘And that’s the strangest thing you’ve heard today?’
    ‘The Helix Intelligences are not aliens per se,’ said Jack, ‘but sentient astral forces. The Greeks called them Titans, the gods of the gods.’
    ‘How do you know?’
    ‘The friend I was telling you about, she witnessed the Helix splitting.’
    Eva looked at Jack, then Cash and finally Vlad. ‘You’re not seriously believing this, are you?’
    ‘Eva,’ said Vlad, ‘Shelley has data to prove that Earth functions that should be taking two million years to develop are suddenly happening overnight. Thousands of women across the world are being driven mad from an ecto-hormone, a sophisticated pheromone that’s slowly seeping into the atmosphere. Jack’s explanation is the best one I’ve heard, and,’ he held his hand up to stop Eva who was about to interrupt him. ‘And in 2009 a virus infected the net. It was a fragment of a Helix Intelligence. I was one of the techs tasked to study it.’
    Eva put her head down on the desk. Hollis pulled his chair next to hers, and gently stroked her back.
    ‘Hollis, what about you?’ asked Jack. ‘Are you buying my theory?’
    ‘Jack, I’m buying anything you’re selling, darlin’. I’m from N’Orleans. I’ve seen plenty of weird shit in my day too.’

56
    FIVE MILES OFF the coast of Wales, HMS
Churchill
reached its cruising depth at 300 feet below the surface of the Atlantic.
    ‘Torpedoes at the ready.’
    ‘Ready, sir.’
    ‘Position confirmed.
    ‘Confirmed, sir.’
    ‘Release torpedoes.
    ‘Fire!’
    Inside the brightly lit sonar room, three officers of the Royal Navy and two visiting commanders from the US Navy watched the screens as the torpedoes shot through the water to the ribbed trunk of the hydrothermal chimney. Both torpedoes hit the structure at the same time, detonating against the surface of the rock, sending a screaming sound wave bouncing back to the submarine. The waves spiralled around the entire ship, shorting every piece of electrical equipment inside, and flipping the submarine a full 360 degrees in the water.
    The emergency generators switched on immediately. Only a handful of men and women sustained injuries. When the engine crew adjusted the ballasts and the submarine steadied itself in the water, the officers, shaken but remaining steady on their feet, took a closer look at the damage the missiles had inflicted on the hydrothermal vent.
    ‘Let General Laine at HQ know that the chimney has sustained no damage from our attack,’ said the British commander. ‘We are awaiting further orders.’

57
    ‘FOR MONTHS,’ SAID Jack, ‘fragments of a memory have been haunting me, flashes of something that until recently I thought was part of a dream, or perhaps some kind of genetic memory. But when Cash sent me your data and I reviewed your discoveries about these eruptions, I knew my blood had triggered something deep in the Earth’s core, and that I had started a countdown to the planet’s self-destruction. Again.’
    ‘Again?’ asked Vlad. ‘This has happened before?’
    ‘My blood,’ Jack told him, ‘along with global warming, over-population, the extinction of certain species, all the things Eva was mocking, started decades ago, in 1930 to be exact, but a friend saved me and unwittingly saved all of us. I think the helix, the astral energy force trapped at the centre of the Earth, has been searching for me ever since. It needs my genetic code, my 51st-century DNA, to free itself. This sentient mass at the centre of the Earth has a limited time span.’
    ‘It’s like the Earth has a planned obsolescence,’ said Cash.
    Jack nodded. ‘Sort of.’
    ‘Aliens were here,’ said Vlad, ‘and they slapped a Best Before date on us, and now humanity’s reaching its expiry date.’
    ‘That’s one way to put it,’ said Jack, smiling. ‘But the timing is wrong. If global warming and those other elements continued then the trigger should have been in the 51st century. Not now. Not today. But my DNA in the morphic field messed up the geologic time scale and stimulated the archetypal memory of the helix.’
    ‘What’s the geologic time scale?’ asked Hollis.
    ‘Shelley, explain please?’ asked Jack, his exhaustion making his bones ache. The closer the
Ice Maiden
got to the Panama Canal, the worse his