m_findlow | Torchwood Advent Challenge

Title: Heavy metal
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Torchwood team
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 2,069 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for prompt "Bring-Your-ICBM-To-Work-Day"
Summary: The team wake up to something unusual.

'Hurry up or we'll be late for work,' Ianto yelled at Jack, chasing him down the hall.

'I'm coming!' he said. 'Just gotta go out and pick up the paper,' he said, thrusting the door open wide and stepping out without a second glance. It was only by chance that Ianto was right behind him when his feet came out from under him, clumsily catching him.

'Watch what you're doing,' Ianto complained. 'Falling into my arms isn't going to make me forgive you if we're late.'

Jack managed to pick himself back up, trying to figure out what had gotten underfoot in the first place. 'Hey, look at that,' he said, pointing to the ground. All along the front steps and the lawn were tiny little objects littered all around. 'What are they?'

'There's dozens of them,' Ianto said, looking over Jack's shoulder.

Jack tentatively stepped out, making sure there were none underfoot, padding carefully towards the paper and picking it up. Meanwhile Ianto knelt down in the doorway and picked up a handful of the odd little objects. Jack returned and poked a finger through the handful as it was held out for inspection.

'Are they ball bearings?'

'I dunno. I don't think so. They've got pointed little ends, see?'

If he looked close enough, Jack could just make out that one end wasn't completely rounded, though they were all uniform in size, no bigger than those lentil things that Ianto occasionally made him eat.

'They look like tiny little bullets,' he said, picking up a few in between his fingers and thumb.

'Yeah, but what are they doing in our front yard, and where did they come from?'

It wasn't just the front yard, but the backyard as well. In fact, they were littered all along the road, up and down their street, and much of the roads, though the SUV merely crunched over them as it sped toward the hub. They seemed to come and go in patches, some suburbs completely bereft of the odd little things, others inundated.

'Did they forecast rain last night?' Jack asked as they pulled into the underground car park.

'If they did, they didn't mentioned anything about it being metal rain,' Ianto replied.

'Hey,' Gwen said, calling out to them from where she was just getting out of her own car. 'Have you seen these things all over the place?' She pulled out a snap lock bag full of tiny pellets.

'Yeah. Jack nearly broke several bones when he stood on a bunch of them and tripped.'

'What are they?'

Jack grabbed the bag and added it to the one they'd collected from their own yard. 'Guess we're about to find out.'

Owen and Tosh rolled into the hub much later, which in itself was odd, even without the strange overnight shower.

'What took you guys?' Jack asked. 'We've go a mystery on our hands and oh,' He stopped seeing Owen hobble in after Tosh, armed with a set of crutches.

'Someone had an accident his morning,' Tosh explained. 'We've been waiting in A and E all morning waiting to get a cast put on Owen's ankle.'

'Could have done it myself quicker, but Tosh bloody insisted. It was these stupid little things,' Owen complained, shoving a hand in his pocket and pulling out more tiny little balls. 'Frigging things were all over the driveway. Slipped on them, didnt I?'

'See, aren't you lucky I was there to catch you, Jack?' Ianto asked. 'Jack nearly went the same way this morning. Just goes to show you should always watch where you walk.'

'Yeah, yeah, 'Owen muttered. 'Not as if I was the only one. Whole hospital was backed up with broken limbs.'

'Have you had a chance to look at them?' Tosh asked, eager to get her own first proper look.

'Just about to give them a closer look,' Jack replied. 'We've been checking and mapping out reports of where they've landed. Turns out this wasn't just an isolated incident. Reports coming in from all over the globe of strange little metal balls having dropped over night.'

'They're calling it the Iron Rain in Asia,' Ianto said. 'They were still awake when it happened.'

'God, there must be millions of them, then,' Gwen said.

'Tens of billions more likely,' Jack replied. 'Question is, what are they?'

Tosh took a couple and placed them on the plate under her electron microscope. She leaned over and adjusted the focus. 'Oh, my,' she said.

'What is it, Tosh?'

'They look like... Well, I mean, this is going to sound silly, but... Missiles.'

'Missiles?' Owen scoffed.

'Take a look for yourself,' she replied, though it was Jack who stepped in, peering through the lenses.

Tosh wasn't wrong. When he got a real good look at them at full magnification, they did look exactly like missiles, right down to the paintwork and the little serial numbers on the sides.

'They're not going to explode, are they?' Gwen asked. The thought of tens of billions of them, made her feel sick.

'They certainly look capable of being activated,' Jack said, 'but I wouldn't worry.'

'Why is that?'

He took a handful from one of the bags and set them in a little pile on the metal workbench next to Tosh's equipment. 'Got a hammer, Tosh?' he asked. She rifled through her toolbox and extracted one, passing it to him.

Ianto frowned. 'Jack, I don't think that's such a good id-'

Jack raised that hammer and smashed it down onto the pile of metal beads. It was thoroughly anticlimactic as they crushed under the weight of the hammer without so much as a spark.

He chuckled. 'Even if you stockpiled them, you wouldn't have enough firepower to light the candles on a birthday cake.'

'You couldn't have known that! You might have just blown us all up. All well and good for you who can't die, but some of us aren't so lucky,' Owen said, having flinched when Jack made to strike the pile.

'They fell from the sky, Owen. Even the velocity from hitting the ground from a height wasn't enough to set them off. Plus the SUV must have run over a million of these things on our way here. If they were that deadly, we'd have heard about it long before anyone tripped up on them in their front yard.'

'But how did they get into the sky in the first place?' Gwen asked. 'Did they come through the rift? I didn't seen any reports of rift activity when we checked the logs this morning.'

'There's no way that many could have dispersed so quickly.' Tosh did the math in her head. 'The rift couldn't produce a hole stable enough for long enough to let that many objects through.'

'I agree,' Jack said. 'Tosh, can you ramp up the sensors on our satellite network?'

'How much?'

Jack thought about this for a moment. 'Two thousand percent.'

Tosh looked at him like he'd gone mad. Making their scanners that sensitive would send the computers into overdrive analysing alien signals. Anything even remotely alien would light up like a beacon. The whole of Cardiff would be nothing more than a blob of bright white, picking up everything that had ever come within five yards of the rift.

'Are you sure? I don't think the servers can take it.'

'Isolate it to analysing signals originating above the mesosphere. I'm not worried about what's down here. I've got a hunch.'

She turned to her computer, tapping out a series of instructions before finally hovering once the enter key. 'Just warning you that I don't know how many alarms this might set off. We've never lowered it to this level of sensitivity. We could overload the systems completely.'

'It's only for a few seconds,' Jack said. 'We're ready,' he added, answering for the rest of them, whether they were ready or not. She hit the key.

Alarms immediately began wailing all around them, forcing them to cover their ears. 'Turn it off, Tosh!' Jack yelled over the din. She quickly scaled back the sensitivity on their satellite sensors and the alarms stopped. She brought the data up on the screen so that they could all see it.

'Bloody hell,' Owen muttered. 'Is that what I think it is?'

'That's...' Ianto began, seeing the blue haze that covered the entire uppermost atmospheric layer of the planet. 'But there must be billions.'

'Trillions,' Jack replied, seemingly unfazed. 'Trillions of tiny little spaceships launching tiny little ballistic missiles. Don't know why they bother. Most must just be getting burnt up on entry through the stratosphere.'

'They're firing missiles at us?' Gwen exclaimed. 'But why?'

'Interplanetary invasion 101, of course,' Jack said. 'Wipe out the population, take the planet. They really ought to do their homework first, though. Points for ambition, I suppose,' he added, shrugging as if this were no big deal.

'So... they're aliens... in miniature spaceships...' Owen clarified.

'Yup. Sometimes it's easy to forget that not everything in the universe it built to the same scale,' Jack replied.

'You mean there's planets out there full of midgets?' Ianto quipped. 'Or is it giants? I think I'm confused now.'

'Both. We're somewhere in the middle. Now, these guys,' Jack said, pointing to the screen, 'they're not playing by the usual rules, which means they're either lost, or have really bad intelligence. Either way, you don't just go around blowing up whole planets if you're following the Shadow Proclamation Convention. There's serious sanctions for contravening that stuff.'

Jack leaned over Tosh's desk and flipped on a small device attached to a microphone.

'Hello, there,' he said. 'Not sure if you've been checking out the news to see how the invasion is progressing, but just in case you haven't heard, it's not going well. I should probably also mention that under Article 57 of the Shadow Proclamation, you're in direct violation by attacking a Level Five inhabited world.'

There was a small buzz on the other end of the line, which in fairness, could have been a message, or might merely have been static. Jack didn't let it bother him either way, carrying on.

'Now, see you're in luck, because you just happen to be in touch with this planet's primary line of communication with the rest of the galaxy. If you leave peacefully now, we won't even mention this little faux pas to Judoon law enforcement.' There was a bit more static noise, more of a flurry this time. Definitely someone on the other end of the line. Jack could just picture the bollocking someone up there was about to get from their superiors.

'I might also advise that next time you think about invading, you might try picking on someone your own size,' he added, winking at the rest of the team.

There was no more static after that and Jack flipped the microphone off. 'Tosh, run another scan.'

There were no alarms this time, just blissful silence, and the blue haze that had encircled the planet just a few minutes ago was a dispersing in a huge cloud, floating off towards Mars.

'I think they got the message loud and clear,' Jack said, grinning.

Tosh watched the cloud pause near their red planet neighbour. 'They're not thinking of just invading the next planet along, are they?'

'Wouldn't dare,' Jack said. 'Even I wouldn't mess with Martians. And if they do, it'll be the last planet they ever invade.'

'Martians?' Owen said.

'Long story,' Jack replied.

'So, we just stopped an invasion?' Ianto asked. 'What about all the munitions they left behind?'

'Worthless. Let people sweep them up and throw them in the bin. No one's going to be nuking cities with these things.'

'Well, I have to say waking up to a military invasion was not how I pictured this morning,' he replied, picking up the snap lock bag and peering at it.

'And now thanks to those sodding aliens, I've got a broken ankle,' Owen griped.

'Well, if all we have to show for it is a few broken bones and bruised egos, I'd say we've come off pretty well,' Jack said. 'There's a lot worse things out there that could come knocking on our door any day.'

'Cheery thought,' Owen muttered. 'Thanks for that.'

'Bring-Your-ICBM-To-Work-Day,' Ianto mused. 'I don't think it'll catch on, somehow.'

'Probably not,' Jack admitted.

Torchwood Advent Challenge - 16th December

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