Torchwood: Fanfic: London falling

[m_findlow]

Title: London falling
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Owen, Suzie, Tosh
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 1,501 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for badly_knitted's prompt "Any, any, The ghost that wasn't" at fic_promptly
Summary: The team come face to face with their deadliest enemy yet.

'Drive faster,' Owen complained, fidgeting in the passenger seat as the maze of London streets drifted past his window. It'd been years since he'd been back he couldn't tell one suburb from another anymore. They all looked that same to him so they could be lost for all he knew.

'I am going fast,' Suzie protested.

Owen snorted. 'Hardly, grandma.'

She grimaced and gripped the steering wheel harder, half wishing it were Owen's neck she had her hands around. 'Well, you could have driven.' Especially since they'd both been at Owen's place to begin with when the call came through.

'Oh, and you were whinging about taking my car,' he retorted.

'Only because it's stupid and only has room for two.'

'It's a sports car. Who needs room for more than two?' They certainly hadn't the other night, Owen wanted to say.

'Would the pair of you just shut up?' Tosh interjected, catching them both by surprise with her outburst.

'Alrigh, fun police. Steady on,' Owen griped. 'What have you found out, anyway?'

Tosh juggled the computer on her lap, gripping it tightly as they swung hard right at the corner, Suzie taking each turn at speed in her second hand Vauxhall sedan, despite Owen's complaints she wasn't going fast. 'I don't even know what I'm looking for,' she replied, the streets of outer London zipping past the windows.

Jack had called in and told them to get to London as quick as they could. 'Break whatever speed limits you have to, just get here.' His choice of words made it sound like he was already there or at the very least, on his way, not waiting to pick the rest of them up. So much for their day off Jack had promised. They hadn't even made it to lunchtime without getting the infamous call announcing that their plans for the day would have to be put on halt - again.

'Where are you?' Tosh had asked, already grabbing her car keys off the sideboard and making for the door as she held the phone to her ear.

'I'm already on my way,' Jack replied. 'Meet me at Torchwood Tower.'

And that was that. There'd no been no further instruction from Jack after that. It was merely the terse nature of his words that set them on edge. Even in the middle of a crisis, Jack was never short on words. This was something else however. Something bad was going down and they had no idea what it was they were hurtling towards.

Anything that involved Torchwood London had to be serious. Jack hated them with a passion and didn't get involved in any of their operations. It didn't stop him from putting in the occasional phone call, telling them that he didn't approve of whatever it was that he'd sniffed out. Jack had Tosh make sure that even though they'd locked him out of their systems, that he always had a backdoor way inside their servers. 'Call me crazy, but I like to be able to keep an eye on them,' he'd told her. It wasn't hard for Tosh to break down their security. Even with all their advanced technology, their computer systems were still twenty-first century, as were the security protocols that went with them.

'Look out!' Owen yelled.

It was too late. Suzie, who had only taken her eyes off the road for a split second to check her rear vision mirror, went colliding into that man standing right there in the middle of the road. The body hit the bonnet hard, then bounced off the windshield and tumbled right over the roof, landing in a heap on the other side. She hit the brakes hard, feeling the car fishtail slightly at the sudden arrest, but held it under control until it finally stopped.

She was out of her car in a heartbeat, Owen and Tosh quickly following her, their urgency to follow Jack's instructions quickly forgotten.

'Shit. I didn't even see him,' Suzie said, her voice wavering with horror and guilt. 'What the hell was he doing just standing there, anyway?'

Owen rushed behind the vehicle, jogging the thirty yards between where it had come to a stop and where the body lay crumped on the ground. As he got closer, he frowned. The man was all dressed in silver or something. Not until he was standing right over him did he see what they'd hit. Two sets of footsteps jogging up behind him also came to a halt.

'It's not a man. It's some kind of robot or machine thing,' he said, lowering down onto his haunches to get a better look. It was bipedal, a metal replica of a human form, but with empty holes where eyes should be and strange protrusions coming out of its head, forming right angles, that made it look more square than oval.

'...ete ...ete,' the silver robot wheezed in its equally metallic voice.

'What is that thing?' Suzie asked.

'...eeeoooooooot...' the robot uttered before its head lolled to one side and it seemed to deactivate.

A man in his fifties came rushing towards the three of them from across the other side of the street. 'Is it dead?' he asked. 'Oh, thank God!'

'What's going on? What's happening?' Suzie asked.

'It just started killing people. It kind of touched them and it was like they'd been hit by a thousand volts or something. Kept repeating the word "delete" over and over again.'

Suzie turned to Tosh behind her. 'Tosh? Do we know what it is?'

'I've never seen one before. Let me check the database,' she replied, reaching into her jacket pocket and extracting her PDA.

'It's got to be connected to whatever Jack called us about,' Owen stated. 'Alien robots don't just start turning up in London on the same day.'

'Look,' Suzie began, trying to get the man's attention as he stood there and stared open-mouthed at the robot lying on the ground, 'just go back inside and stay there,' she said, trying to reassure the local. 'We'll handle it.' She was subconsciously aware that other people were standing outside their houses now, or peering through their curtains at them. They'd all need to be retconned somehow. She couldn't exactly have them remembering three people shoving a robot in the boot of her car.

'Inside?' the man exclaimed. 'Are you mad? Where d'you think it came from to start with? One of those ghosts, it was. We thought it was uncle Richard and then, then...'

'Tosh? Anything?' Owen said, growing impatient.

'Nothing. Wait, yes, here. An entry from the UNIT archive cross referenced to our logs.

The entry was made by The Doctor in 1968. It's called a cyberman.'

'Yeah, I got that from the appearance,' he sniped. 'What's it do?'

Tosh scrolled through the brief report before looking up at her two teammates. 'It's bad. They're killing machines, hell bent on the destruction of all sentient races, converting them into robots like them. According to this they're almost unstoppable.'

'Almost,' Owen quipped. 'Can't survive Suzie's driving, though.'

'Hey, my car is ruined now,' she snapped at him, cringing at the thought of the huge dent in her bonnet and the windscreen that was now a mangled spiderweb of cracks.

Owen snorted. 'Better it than us.'

'You called it a ghost?' Tosh asked the man. 'One of the ghosts that turns up each day?' He nodded in reply.

'What ghosts?' Owen asked.

Tosh rolled her eyes at him. 'Don't you watch the news? Every day, twice an hour across London for the last three weeks, there's been ghosts that turn up in people's houses and on the streets. It's Torchwood One. Jack had me hack their files to find out what they were up to. They have a machine that makes the ghosts appear. They're the ones doing it. Jack was livid about them using technology they didn't understand.'

'Well, this thing is no ghost, that's for sure,' Owen said,

'And if every one of those ghosts is actually one of these cybermen things...' Suzie pondered.

'Then they could be everywhere,' Tosh said, finishing the thought.

'How do we stop them, Tosh?' she asked. 'There must be some thing in those UNIT files. Clearly they must have stopped the one before.'

'You could always drive around town running them over,' Owen joked, though it fell flat amidst the gravity of the situation.

Tosh shook her head. 'I don't know. But if Jack's right then we have to get to Torchwood Tower as quick as we can. If they've got the machine that brings the ghosts here, then maybe it can send them back as well.'

'Makes you wonder though,' Owen began. 'If they did, then why the bloody hell haven't they done that already?'

'Let's just get there and worry about it when when do,' Suzie commanded, prepared to mow down as many as she could if they stood in her way. 'Jack will know what do to.'

Comments

[bk_forever]

Horrifying situation. Cybermen are just as scary as Daleks.