m_findlow

Title: Some like it hot
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Torchwood team
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 3,156 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for paceisthetrick's prompt "Any, any, heatwave" at fic_promptly
Summary: An unexpected heatwave is causing all sorts of problems

'It's so fricking hot,' Owen moaned, slumped in his chair. 'When is this ever going to end?'

'The weather bureau is predicting at least a few more days of it yet,' Ianto replied.

The freak heat wave had hit the UK hard. Today was the fourth day in a row of scorching temperatures. It had gotten so bad that the country's power stations had gone onto overdrive trying to keep pace, but eventually even they had given up, plunging the cities and suburbs into brown out, reserving electricity for only the most essential functions in hospitals and law enforcement.

Even the hub wasn't immune to its effects, their own backup generator barely doing enough to keep the lights on and the doors to the cells firmly locked. Their computer systems were shut down, with only basic monitoring being done and limiting access to their phones and PDAs only. But still, they had to be here, making sure that the city was safe. There was no nipping down to the beach with everyone else to cool off in the water, as much as they might have liked to, assuming there was even a spare inch of beach left. The city had emptied out of people, all headed for the coast, or tucked up inside their houses, some too fearful to brave the heat. The shops were all closed, with very few having generators to keep fridges running, and with no clientele, it wasn't worth opening the doors.

Gwen waved a paper fan uselessly in front of her face. 'I thought at least being underground would be cooler.'

'The hub is on basic power only,' Jack replied. 'Even the air circulators are on minimum.'

He of course was still dressed in his usual garb, whilst the rest of them had dug out the only pairs of shorts and t-shirts they owned, unaccustomed to wearing anything less than three layers against the usually bracing cold Welsh weather.

'How are you not hot?' Ianto asked, passing around iced coffees. Well, cold coffees anyway. There was no more ice left; their fridge couldn't keep cold enough for ice anymore.

Jack grinned. He was used to the searing hot sun and dry winds from his years growing up on the Boeshane. It would take a few more days of persistently hot weather before he caught up with the rest of them. Then he'd have the perfect excuse to go around the hub naked, and had already invited the others not to wait for him to join them.

'It's all mind over matter,' he replied.

'You keep telling yourself that,' Tosh moped, leaning on her desk, enjoying the few brief moments of it being cool against her skin.

The bleep was faint but it was still discernable as a rift alert. It seemed that even their computer programs were flagging in the heat.

Ianto consulted his phone. 'Splott,' he said dejectedly. 'No beaches there.'

'Maybe now you'll stop complaining about the cold and the rain,' Jack replied.

He looked around at his team, all of whom looked drained and lethargic. 'Come on, let's go. Might be that an ice cream truck has dropped though the rift.'

Unlikely as it was, it did get them moving.

'Can we please have the air con on?' Owen begged, as the SUV sped down the empty road.

'I told you,' Jack said, 'the air con uses up fuel, and in case you haven't noticed, most service stations have shut down. We're not wasting fuel on something we don't need. Who knows how much longer we might have to get by on what we have. Roll down the window if you're hot.'

Owen did so, but the blast of hot, desert air that hit him from outside was worse than nothing at all so he quickly shut it again.

'We're sure that the weather has nothing to do with the rift?' Gwen asked.

'Positive. Just plain old freakish planet Earth weather.'

'Lovely.'

The spot where the alert had originated from was near a sad looking strip of shops that looked abandoned. There was a dry cleaners, a locksmith, something masquerading as a Thai restaurant, and the remnants of a bus stop, covered in graffiti, its glass panels spiderwebbed where kids had thrown rocks at it. The only thing that looked to still be in operation was the local fish and chip shop.

'I think it's somewhere around the back,' Tosh said, examining the signals more closely.

There was a small alleyway that ran down along behind the shops, allowing for shopkeeper parking and a row of dumpster bins.

'Uh, I think it's in the dumpster bin,' Tosh said sadly.

'Great,' Owen said, flipping open the lid. 'Phaw! When was the last time anyone emptied this? Smells like there's dead bodies in there.'

'Could be,' Ianto quipped.

'It's the heat,' Jack said. 'Everything is decomposing quicker.'

'Well, one of us is going to have to go in and get it, smell or no,' Ianto said.

'I'm not volunteering,' Gwen said. 'Just the smell alone is enough to make me puke.'

'No one likes it,' Ianto replied. 'We should draw straws.'

'No way,' Owen said. 'Jack cheats.'

Jack watched as the team argued about who was going to get the delightful task. They were all even more grumpy and irritable than usual, none of them having slept properly for days, and tetchy with the heat.

'I'll go,' Jack declared. 'Just all stop moaning for five minutes.'

No one argued with him, and he was soon climbing over the edge and into the bin. It really did stink something awful, so he tried his best to breath through his mouth. Fortunately it didn't take long to find what he was looking for, and as soon as he did, he wished he hadn't.

'Uh oh.'

'What?' Owen asked.

'It's bad.'

'How bad?'

'Very, very bad.'

'That's innumerably unhelpful,' Ianto said. 'Bad right now, or at some point in the not so distant future?'

'I don't know, but I'm erring on the side of caution in saying bad right now.'

Jack cautiously grabbed the item out of the dumpster and handed it down to Owen before pulling himself out of the bin.

'Why do I get to hold it, whatever it is? Looks like an egg,' he said inspecting the shiny black object, about the size of a football, but speckled with flecks of bright green across its surface.

'It is an egg,' Jack said.

'An egg of what?'

'Something very bad.'

The bad news was that it was basically a flying lizard, but a violent and very hungry one that would wreak devastation if it got loose. Jack described it as having sharp claws, sharper teeth, nasty spines, and being deadly quick to move.

'So put it in a cage,' Owen suggested. 'It's only a baby anyway.'

'You don't understand. This thing is so strong that nothing we have could contain it for long. It'd escape and have torn all our throats out before you even realised what had happened. That's how quick and dangerous these things are. They've been culled on most regulation planets, and even some uninhabited ones as a precaution. There are few things more deadly than these.'

'But it's an egg,' Gwen said. 'It hasn't even hatched yet.'

'Yeah, but what do you think this weather is going to do? It's already been incubating in this dumpster for the past half hour, and we have no way of knowing just how close it is to hatching. In this heat, it could hatch any minute.'

'That's not good,' Ianto said.

'We need to get it straight back to the hub and get it as cool as possible, to stop the incubation from progressing.'

'Keeping an egg cool in the worst heatwave in a hundred and fifty years,' Owen muttered, 'piece of cake.'

They quickly loaded the egg into a containment box, for all the good it might do to buy them a few precious seconds if it decided to hatch, and sped back to the hub.

'What have we got to keep it cool?' Gwen asked.

'I don't know. With the limited amount of power we've got, we don't even have a freezer running to make ice,' Jack said.

'There's probably some gel ice packs in the medical kit,' Owen added, 'but they won't be particularly cold in this heat.'

'What about dry ice?' Tosh suggested. 'We'd have some of that.'

'Too risky,' Jack replied. 'We could end up shattering the outside of the egg and letting it out even earlier.'

'I knew this bloody heatwave was going to kill us,' Owen complained.

'The only thing that's going to work is ice, and lots of it.'

'The one thing we don't have. I'll just ring up some Eskimos and get them to ship us some,' Ianto quipped.

Back at the hub, they were all nervously hovering over the egg, trying anything they could think of to keep it from overheating, which was difficult considering how hard it was to keep anything cool.

'This thing could go at any minute. We have to do something,' Jack said.

'Like what?' Gwen cried.

'I don't know. We just need more time.'

'Time!' Tosh exclaimed. 'We might not be able to get more ice, but we can get more time.'

They all looked at her like she'd gone mad.

'How?' Ianto said.

'The time lock program.'

'I thought that didn't work properly,' Owen said.

'It's not perfect, but I should be able to get it up and running, bypassing the usual protocols to get it to activate.'

'But hang on,' Gwen said, 'when we were stuck in it before, everything outside stopped whilst we carried on. What good is it if we're stuck inside it?'

'She's got a point,' Ianto added. 'We need time to run slower inside the lock, not faster.'

'I can reverse the lock. Make time come to a standstill inside the lock whilst time outside continues on.'

'How does that help us Tosh?' Jack asked.

'Well, for one thing, the heatwave will be over whilst we're still inside. Then we can get as much ice as we need and we'll have full power back.'

'So one of us has to stay outside the lock, to get supplies?' Gwen said, trying to follow the path of logic.

'Exactly.'

Jack paused. 'I'm not saying it's not a good plan Tosh, but there's two problems. One, we don't have enough power for the time lock; we barely have enough to keep the lights on around here, and secondly, there's no guarantees that the egg won't still hatch whilst the lock is in place.'

'I can narrow the field for the time lock,' she said, condensing it to a smaller sized field, based on our power supply. It won't be huge, but it should hold. The smaller I create the field, the more we can condense the time inside it, giving whoever is on the outside plenty of time to gather cooling supplies.'

'Okay, make it happen, but I'm going in there alone.'

'What. No, you can't. What if it hatches?'

'Exactly,' he said. 'I don't want any of you in there if it does. Tosh, you have my express authority right now to keep the time lock in place indefinitely if it does hatch.'

'But you'll be trapped inside,' Ianto cried. 'With that thing. It'll kill you.'

'Multiple times probably, but there's no other way to contain it. If we can't cool it to stop it hatching, at least it can be trapped for all of time.'

None of them liked the idea that had held so much promise ten minutes ago, but they all had to agree that for the sake of the safety of everyone in the city, it was their only plan, and there wasn't time for arguing. The hub was growing more and more sweltering the longer the day wore on; perfect conditions for hatching an egg, or boiling one for that matter.

Owen fetched a container of liquid nitrogen and began cooling the outside of a small metal box. The aim was to chill the outside, so that he could fill it with water and have Jack submerge the egg inside. It was all they had to keep it cool whilst he would be stuck inside the time lock.

With a bit of careful programming, Tosh had managed to reverse the time stream inside the lock, and to narrow the field down to the largest possible size that their current generator could manage to maintain, based on her models of power consumption, and allowing for variances should the generator struggle to keep pace with the requirements. It didn't leave a lot of room to move inside, just a small circular space no more than ten feet wide, able to fit two people at most, plus their deadly cargo.

Owen was trying to scan the egg to find out more about how far along its occupant was, but the shell was completely impenetrable, leaving them none the wiser about their ticking time bomb, not able to arm Jack with any useful information.

Ianto was fussing around the hub, trying to gather supplies for Jack to take inside the lock with him, bottles of water and energy bars and anything else he could think of.

'A blanket,' he muttered, rushing past Jack. 'You might need one. And a torch, in case it's dark. Oh, and a pen and some paper in case you need to write a message.'

'Ianto, stop,' Jack said, grabbing his arm. 'I don't need any of that stuff.'

'But you said you might be in there a while.'

'If it hatches before you can get cooling supplies, then yes.'

'It'll kill you.'

'Then I'll come back.'

'You said it eats people.'

'It can only eat me once. Wow, never thought I'd say that.'

'So it'll starve? Once you're dead, I mean.'

'Yup.'

'How long?'

'They're pretty resilient. They can go for months without feeding. That or it'll just chew enough off me until I regenerate, and we'll keep going around in circles forever.'

'That's why you'll need supplies, then.'

'But remember, time is going to move faster on the outside, not the inside. What passes for an hour inside could be months outside, even years.'

'So when you say it might live for weeks before it dies,' he let the sentence trail off.

'Centuries will have gone by.'

'Right.'

Jack caught the look of hopelessness on Ianto's face.

'Hey, we're talking worst case scenario, Ianto. Chances are I'll be in there a few minutes and you'll be deactivating the lock with half the North Pole on hand.'

'I could come with you,' he offered.

'You know I'd never let you.'

'Worth asking, though.'

When everything at Tosh's end was ready, the four of them huddled just outside the range of the time lock. Jack made sure that the water and the egg were as cold as they could be before giving Tosh the thumbs up to proceed. Moments later, it seemed as if Jack had been frozen in time, his waving hand coming to a standstill as time almost completely stopped moving.

Even though they knew that almost no time was passing inside the lock, with Jack standing there like a wax work figurine, the waiting was nervous. They took turns keeping an eye on the time lock, since none of them could sleep in any case.

In the meantime they'd tried to procure whatever they could that might keep the egg cold, attempting to source ice from the local hospital but being turned away as their supplies were limited and needed for critical care patients.

'Times like this I wish we had some kind of alien ray gun that shot ice,' Owen said glumly, walking out the doors of the hospital empty handed.

Two days stretched into three, with still no luck except to hope that the weather would give in, and finally it looked like the heatwave might be about to break. At some point late on the afternoon of the third day, as Tosh was taking a break, walking across the plass to clear her head, she felt the wind whip up off the bay, and spied the dark clouds rolling over the Bristol Channel, hearing the first faint rumbles of thunder. Half an hour later, she was standing there with Gwen and Owen, letting the rain come pelting down on their heads, still warm, but refreshing nonetheless.

As the storm raged on throughout the night, the temperature finally began to drop, and by midday the brown out had been lifted. People returned to the streets and shops reopened. Within a few days, the weather had once again reverted back to its bleak, grey coldness, as if the sudden outbreak of Saharan heat had never existed.

With the added power, the hub was back in full swing, and Owen and Ianto diligently spent several hours stockpiling mountains of ice in the vast freezer chests that had been out of operation since the brown out had begun. They now had more than enough ice packed into one of the chests, with a small hole left in the middle for their prize egg. It would be a stop gap measure until they could get in touch with the relevant people at the Shadow Proclamation to come and take it away safely. Even though they might be able to keep it frozen in the morgue once it was cooled enough, there were strict prohibitions on any occupied world housing Class M dangerous aliens. The sooner it could be gone, the better.

When the time lock was deactivated, there was a frown on Jack's face. He was sure they'd only tried it a few seconds ago.

'Did it not work?'

He'd half expected to know if it was working, because he'd be able to see them bustling around outside of the time lock, but Tosh's concentrated lock has slowed time down so much that he wasn't even able to visually register their movements, as they appeared and disappeared from view so quickly.

'It worked,' she confirmed.

The boys made quick work of shoveling mounds of ice into the containment box before it could be carried down to the freezer and properly buried in three feet of thick ice all around.

'That ought to keep it asleep for a while,' Owen said.

Ianto rubbed his hands together. 'My hands are frozen from all that ice.'

'Hang on, two seconds ago you were moaning about the heat,' Jack said.

'It was four days, and I'm allowed to moan about the weather. I'm Welsh; it's like a national pasttime.'

'So no chance of us heading out for ice cream, then?'

'You can have whatever you like. I'll be sticking to a nice warm, hot chocolate. It's positively miserable out there.'

Jack shook his head. 'There's just no pleasing some people.'