silkendreammaid

Title: Green
Author: silkendreammaid

Disclaimer: I do not and never will own Torchwood or the characters within.
Rating: PG13
Warning: Language
Characters: Ianto Jones, Jack Harkness

Note: Written for the 2011 Advent Challenge. Prompt #19 taken from the 2010 prompt list.

Author’s Note: Eleventh in the series that started in Cold … and now for painkillers and coffee...

Summary: December is starting off unseasonably cold. Torchwood has one dead alien and another one missing. There’s also the sudden disappearance of Cardiff’s rats.

In this chapter Ianto and Tosh speculate

Green

Ianto Jones studied the screens in front of Tosh. Thermal imaging, flaring like swirling rainbows, over lay the map of Wales. Cardiff was a spectacular kaleidoscope of shifting colours.

“It’s showing as white heat under us and also where Jack and Gwen are. Something has to be containing or controlling it because the temperatures around it are so low. There was a low pulse under it but that stopped with that energy flare and it doesn’t seem to have had any effect on the overall image.”

“So it’s sucking heat in rather than sending it out. Or… a heat sink?” Ianto frowned.

“Except that if it’s transferring heat from everything around it, where is the heat going?” Tosh tapped the small intense white spots. “The temperatures keep increasing but the area never changes. The hot spot under the Hub started after the one Jack and Gwen went to. And there are no lines to connect them that I can see.”

“No heat lines,” Ianto agreed as he traced the distance between the spots. “What if it’s under the bedrock?”

“That’s possible. Geothermal imaging can only detect surface heat and I can’t use some of our more alien tech to try to scan deeper because we have to rely on the satellite images. Now if we had our own satellite with our tech in place…”

Ianto laughed softly and nudged her shoulder lightly. “I’ll add it to the wish list, shall I?”

She smiled. “Yes please.” And she knew he would and tomorrow she would receive an email with have our own satellite at the head of the list of several more wanted impossibles.

“So, we know what it’s doing just not how and why” Ianto summed up.

“Yes,” Tosh agreed thoughtfully.

“What if it’s meant to control climate, rather than weather?” Ianto posed hesitantly. “I mean, if it keeps going like this, we’re going to have the coldest Winter ever and without stopping, it would mean Spring would be cold as well. it could set off a whole climate change.”

Tosh spun her stool around and looked at him with startled eyes that narrowed considerably as she looked at him. “What are you thinking, Ianto?”

“Jack’s mentioned terraforming units before and I wonder… terraforming implies changing the climate not just the landscape.”

“You think we have something like that here? Causing this?”

“I think it’s a possibility.”

“But – it’s making everything cold. Wouldn’t such units be used to make things green and fertile to sustain life?”

Ianto swallowed, his mind filled with silent echoes. “What if they didn’t need temperate conditions? What if being cold was temperate to them?”

Continued in Christmas Songs