m_findlow

Title: A bump in the road
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Torchwood team
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 2,806 words
Content notes: Written for Challenge 39 - Black at beattheblackdog
Summary: The team have a new traffic hazard to deal with.

They stood there, the five of them huddled around it, inspecting the pool of black goo in the middle of Bute Street. The area had been cordoned off by police and there were a considerable number of disgruntled motorists, annoyed at having to be diverted onto other roads. There were brightly coloured barriers on both sides of the road, and a large white marquee planted over the pool, hiding it from the view of onlookers. The police were passing around a story that a pothole in the road had been positioned over a large underground sewer pipe, and that the road had collapsed in on it.

'Do we know what it is?' Gwen asked. 'Has the road melted?'

Jack knelt down near it. It looked a lot blacker than the road which was more of a dark grey. It looked thick and viscous, but flat and still.

Jack went to poke the edge with his finger before Ianto grabbed his arm and stopped him.

'Please don't do that. We have scientific equipment for a reason.'

Tosh quickly pulled out some items from their portable kit, attaching a test tube to a metal clamp and reaching over to scoop up a sample of it. As soon as the tube touched the surface it melted and was absorbed into the blackness.

'Woah.'

'Aren't you glad now you didn't go sticking your finger in it?' Ianto asked.

'It would have grown back,' Jack replied.

Tosh walked back across the plass to the hub to retrieve a containment flask that was far more durable than glass. She attached it to the clamp and scooped again, this time managing to fill the tiny flask. Just as she was pulling it back, the liquid began to bubble through the surface of the flask, eating it from the inside out.

'Let it go, Tosh,' Jack ordered, and she released the clamp, letting it drop onto the road, forming another small pool of black just inches from the main pool.

'That's some nasty stuff,' Owen said.

'Well, at least we know now it isn't antimatter,' Jack said. 'That was my main concern.'

'No, it's just a mystery black substance that eats through matter. That's loads better,' Ianto quipped.

'Believe it or not, it is. That means it's either organic or chemical, which means there must be a way to neutralise it. Owen, Tosh, grab whatever you need from the hub and run your tests here, since we can't take it back with us. Gwen, make sure the police keep the area clear, and widen the cordone. Ianto, see if there's anything in the Shadow Proclamation database that matches the description.'

'Would that be under B for black, C for corrosive, or A, absolutely no idea?'

'Just try. Someone must have come across this before. Guys, I don't think I have to tell you to be careful. If this thing ate through that alloy flask, there's no protective suit we own that will keep you safe.'

Tosh and Owen carted several heavy crates worth of equipment across the plass, setting up their in situ lab. Several onlookers and tourists were beginning to wonder what kind of pothole warranted such unusual equipment, so Gwen had the police move everyone further back. All it would take would be one particularly nosy reporter to take their chances and cross the police cordone in the hopes of snaffling some photos.

Owen and Tosh had a hard time of it, trying to analyse something they couldn't touch. They had all manner of other devices, lasers, emission monitors, spectral analysis equipment, trying to determine its composition. Most of what they came back with was unhelpful to say the least. It emitted no traceable gasses, it absorbed any light source they tried to bounce off it, and the lasers were unable to penetrate the surface. And all the while, the pool grew in size, melting away more of the road. After an hour it two, they had to pull down the marquee, before the goo began to eat that too. It was also for safety, since they only had a few feet now between the edge of the marquee and the pool in which they could work.

Jack returned with a portable forceshield from the secure archives, activating it and sending up a forty foot invisible dome around the area, so that they could continue to work without being spied on from overhead. To an outsider, it was designed to distort the internal view so that they only saw what they expected to see, which in this case, was a boring strip of road.

'Couldn't we use one of those smaller personal forceshields to contain it?' Owen suggested.

'Assuming it worked,' Jack said. 'Then what? The power on those things is limited. And where would we put it?'

'Fair point.'

Jack tapped his comms. 'Ianto, find anything useful yet?'

'Nothing matching the description, although I now know more about dangerous alien liquids than I ever cared to.'

'Maybe someone would've written about it,' Owen said, 'if their whole planet hadn't been eaten by the stuff.'

'Let's hope not,' Jack replied.

The pool continued to expand outwards. It was a good fifteen feet across and slowly expanding, its inky depths unknown. Whilst it expanded outwards, no one could tell if it was also expanding downwards.

'Tosh, bring me up a schematic of the city's underground network.'

She produced a few slick keystrokes and up came a display of the intricate maze of piping, sewers, telecommunications and electrical networks that intertwined around one another, vying for precious space underneath their feet.

'Find me the closest sewer tunnel underneath Bute Street, and the nearest access point.'

'You're not going down there are you?'

'I need to know how far it's spreading. It could get into the water supply, or melt the phone lines and power cables, sending the entire city into a blackout.'

'And it'll do nothing for the local weevil real estate market,' Owen added, smirking.

'There's an effluent discharge tunnel right beneath our location, and an access point just off Ship Lane.'

'Okay, be back soon.'

'Be careful,' Tosh said, to which Jack gave her his trademark smile and a salute.

Owen exchanged looks with Tosh.

'Better him than us.'

'Right now, I'm not so sure,' she replied.

'Come on, cheer up. We've still got a dozen things we haven't tried.'

They started experimenting at the edges of the pool by adding various substances to it, to see if it would react, but keeping a safe distance in case anything they tried ended up have explosive consequences.

Water did nothing, as did acid and soap. Oil was disastrous, causing the edge of the pool to expand even quicker, but nothing they tried slowed the ever expanding black mass.

'At its current rate of growth,' Tosh explained, loading the latest data into her computer model, 'it'll cover the entire plass and the Millennium Centre in less than a week, assuming a steady growth rate. If it starts to expand faster, that time might be a day or two at best.'

'And here I was thinking how nice it would be if the whole one way system got sucked into a giant black hole. Better tell Gwen.'

'Better tell Gwen, what?' she asked, coming up behind them, looking like she'd had her fill of dealing with the public for the day.

'That if we don't fix this, we're gonna need to move the hub.'

'Well, good news is that it's not expanding downwards,' Jack said, returning to join them.

'Oh,' Gwen coughed, waving a hand in front of her face as the smell assailed her nostrils. 'Where have you been? No actually, don't bother. I don't think I want to know.'

'Gang's all here. No wait, where's Ianto?'

'Accounted for,' he said striding up towards them, laptop in his arms, 'as is our mysterious substance.'

Jack looked surprised. 'I thought you said we couldn't find anything?'

'The reason we didn't find anything is because we were looking for the wrong thing. Had we been searching for voracious microorganisms, we'd have turned up this,' he said, flipping the laptop around.

'They're microscopic bugs. Feed them the right food and they multiply like crazy.'

'What's the right food?' Jack asked.

'Carbon.'

'But that's everything,' Owen said.

'True, but they prefer hydrocarbons, the more complex the better. And given how the road is made of bitumen, which is a by product of crude oil refinement,'

'They went on a feeding frenzy,' Jack finished.

'Okay, so they've gone and found just about everything the human race has ever manufactured to be undeniably tasty. How does that help us?' Owen asked.

'We feed them something that they don't like. Not only will it stop them multiplying, it should also send them into a dormant sleep state.'

'So what's this magic sleeping food?'

'Talc. It absorbs the carbon in their systems, making their metabolic systems shut down.'

'Great work, Ianto,' Jack beamed. 'What made you think of it?'

'Oh, I don't know. I was running out of ideas for search parameters so I just typed in black death. Did you know that the bubonic plague doesn't even register on the Shadow Proclamation database as a significant threat? A minor affliction from the planet earth, it says. Casualty ratio minimal. Two thirds of the planet die and they call it minimal?'

Jack put a placatingly hand on his arm. 'Maybe we can leave being incensed about the earth's lack of significance in galactic history until after we've sorted out this problem. Hmm?'

Ianto grunted his displeasure. 'Well, looks like I'm off to Tescos, then.'

'Take Gwen with you.'

'Excellent,' Gwen replied. 'Just think of the loyalty points I'll clock up. Rhys and I will be on discounted fuel for a year.'

It was certainly an awkward moment when they both trundled up to the cash register with two trolley loads of talcum powder, having stripped the shelves of every last brand and fragrance.

'You don't think we ought to have used the self serve, do you?' Gwen asked.

'I don't think we could be any less conspicuous either way. And this will be quicker.'

The cashier was an older woman who clearly had seen a lot of odd purchases over the years, but perhaps none quite so odd as this. Whilst Ianto was busy loading the bags back in the trolley, the cashier leaned over to Gwen.

'It's so lovely to see a nice young couple getting so excited about starting a family. When are you due?'

Gwen was startled by the comment. 'Oh, not for ages,' she replied, at least having the good sense to remember she didn't look pregnant. She quickly exchanged surprised glances Ianto before turning back to the cashier, smiling.

'Bit of a worrier, is he? Stocking up early, and all.'

'Yeah.'

As they pushed the trolleys over to the SUV, Ianto couldn't help but ask.

'Did you actually call me a worrier?'

'Well, you are, er, sort of.'

'Right, well only five more supermarkets in the local area to go. Next time you can be the obsessive compulsive parent to be.'

'Absolutely,' she quickly agreed, feeling as if she'd just dodged the decaf bullet.

With the SUV's boot and back seat loaded to the roof with bags of talcum powder, they returned to the scene. Ianto handed Jack a tall red container of powder. 'Care to do the honours?'

'It'd be a shame if it didn't work.'

'Don't worry. I've got proof of purchase. Figuring out which ones came from which supermarket might be trickier.'

Jack began dusting the edge of the pool, which at first turned grey and then back to black as the powder was eaten by the tiny bugs. The rest of the pool's edge slowly expanded, but the spot that had been powdered remained still and unmoving.

'Looks like it's going to work. Now all we need is a way to disburse this over the entire area,' Jack declared, which was now nearly thirty feet wide.

'There's a couple of UAVs back at the hub,' Tosh said. 'I could probably program them to drop a payload.'

'How big are they?' Gwen asked.

Jack was staring over at the plass nearby as they continued to discuss technical specifications. He spotted the man who wandered the bay area selling helium balloons to tourists and lovers.

'I've got a better idea,' he said.

It didn't take long to acquire the man's large tank of helium and all of his spare empty balloons. Jack was on good terms with him, being one of his best customers ever since the day he'd bought the entire bunch in one go as an apology to Ianto for ruining his day. He often picked up one or two to cheer whomever needed cheering.

The plan was to fill the empty balloons with powder, then fill them the rest of the way with helium. Soon they had several dozen tethered to a nearby railing.

'Gwen, did you get those pellet guns?'

'Yup,' she said, handing him one, and passing them around to the rest of the team.

'Anyone here ever shot clay pigeons?' Jack called out, letting one of the balloons go floating skywards before putting a pellet in it, letting it bang loudly, showering the ground with white dust, settling over the black surface.

'Okay team, on three,' he said, reaching for the rope that was holding the rest of the balloons.

'One, two, three,'

He tugged the rope and the balloons floated up en masse, letting the wind drift them sideways over the road. The street was then filled with a cacophony of bangs as each of them shot several balloons, white powder going everywhere, covering every last inch of the blackness, and the street, themselves included. There was a thick layer of white settling over the black, before it was sucked inside, and then the pool stopped moving.

Tosh consulted her laptop, checking the scans that were measuring its growth.

'It's stopped completely. There's no expansion at all. It worked.'

'And now we all look like ghosts,' Owen moaned, 'achoo!' he sneezed, sending up a cloud of white.

'The UAV idea would've worked just as well,' Tosh said.

'Yeah, but it wouldn't have been nearly as much fun,' Jack replied, grinning and ruffling a hand through his hair, creating another cloud.

'There are far worse things to be covered in,' Gwen said.

'Agreed,' Ianto added, dusting himself off.

'We should get them into containment whilst they're still sleepy,' Jack said.

'But won't they just start eating anything we put them in?'

'Not if we use a gravity containment field. That way they won't be touching anything, they'll just be suspended. Then we can hand them over to the Shadow Proclamation for proper storage. I don't fancy keeping them here on earth if we can help it. Not whilst we rely on fossil fuels for just about everything.'

'But if they're microscopic, how do we know that we've got them all?' Tosh enquired.

Jack returned with a clunky looking device that looked part blender, part leaf blower and part fish tank.

'What's that?' Gwen asked.

'Think of it as a super duper vacuum cleaner. Sucks up stuff at the microbial level. Should ensure we get every last one of the little guys.'

'Can I please get one of these for Christmas?' Ianto asked, wondering how long they'd had that lying about in the archives.

Jack laughed. 'The hub would be so clean after one use that you'd be out of a job.'

'So that's a no, then?' he said, looking disappointed.

Jack fired it up and soon he was unloading his first tank full of black bugs into the gravity field cell. It took several hours to collect them all with the limited space in the vacuum, and several more rounds of balloon drops to ensure that the remaining critters didn't wake up in the mean time, but eventually the street was cleared of every last inch of black, just leaving one big gaping hole in the road and the adjoining pavement on either side.

'That's the biggest pothole I've ever seen,' Ianto said, returning to survey their handiwork once they'd all had a chance to shower and don clean clothes. Despite scrubbing, he couldn't get rid of the smell cottage roses, and Jack had a strong air of lily of the valley.

'The road needed redoing anyway,' Jack replied.

'You know what they're going to do now though, don't you?'

'What?'

'They've finally got an excuse to install more of those wretched speed bumps.'

'Hmm,' Jack considered, disliking the idea of any more traffic additions that slowed him down. 'Maybe we could get someone to fill in the hole overnight so that no one notices.'

'I'll put in some calls.'