Risk Assessment (20 page)

‘Oi!’

‘— I shall make best endeavours—’

‘Open up!’

‘— pass on at the earliest—’

‘Open! The! Bloody! Door!’

Gwen had tried this a couple of times before, with the firm sense that she was being icily ignored. But it was either do this, or slump back to the parlour for sardines on toast. Whoever else was on board, they were probably the size of a house by now.

Gwen continued banging and yelling and the computer continued to protest politely.

‘I know who you are!’ she bawled.

There was a click and a creak.

Gwen leapt back, and grabbed a handrail before she suffered the ironic fate of being the first human in orbit to fall twenty metres to her death.

With a steady, slow grinding of metal, the door groaned open and a figure was revealed.

Jack ran forward, waving his wrist-strap. ‘Correction. There’s an enormous energy build-up from these coffins!’

Agnes stood her ground. ‘Hadn’t you better keep back, then? What kind?’

‘I don’t know,’ yelled Jack with frustration.

Ianto joined them, cross-checking the information from his PDA with Jack’s computer.

‘Not good, not good,’ shouted Jack.

Agnes arched an eyebrow. ‘Bang?’ she said.

‘Not exactly,’ groaned Jack. ‘But it’s . . . See. . .!’

The coffins began to glow.

‘Glowing coffins. Never going to be good.’

Agnes placed her hands on her hips.

‘I think,’ said Ianto, with the care and calm of a bomb disposal expert choosing between the red and the green wire, ‘I think we’ve been operating under false principles. What if these aren’t coffins at all?’

‘Then what do you suggest?’ asked Agnes.

‘Er,’ said Ianto, weakly. ‘I was thinking pods. Survival pods.’

The man on the other side of the door wore a smoking jacket and a worried expression. He was a slender man of late middle age with quite comical sideburns, remarkably elaborate spectacles and a stiffly pressed white shirt.

‘Oh, hello,’ he said with an air of forced jocularity. ‘Were you knocking?’ It was an amazingly feeble lie. ‘I am afraid I’m most extraordinarily busy just at the moment. How’d’y’do?’

‘Right,’ said Gwen, tired of this already. ‘And you are?’

‘Ah,’ said the man, clearly embarrassed. He stretched out a hand. ‘George Herbert Sanderson.’

Gwen nodded. ‘Agnes’s fiancé?’

The first coffin clicked open, spilling out a harsh blue light. An instant later, a hundred echoing clicks sounded across the beach, and the night was lit up an entirely wrong shade of blue. The figures that sat up, stood up and stepped out were initially silhouetted by the glare, but Jack could see that they were barely humanoid.

They looked like toadstools, or the kind of unpleasant stick dogs find for you on walks – all knobbles and whorls and glandular protuberances, like nightmare trees. They were about two metres tall, a clicking, whirling bulk of bark and moss and twitching branches without any obvious faces.

They weren’t wearing uniforms, or clothing of any kind. Normally Jack liked nothing more than a naked alien, but these were the wrong kind of naked alien. Whether it was the harsh lighting, the sticky ugliness, the horrid way they slithered across the sand, or just the enormous guns they were holding, there was something about them that was threatening.

Jack pulled his own revolver and aimed it. ‘Hi there!’ He began, ‘I’m from Tor—’

The first alien spoke, hardly aware of him, its horrible voice filling the beach with a noise like walls tumbling in a flood. ‘We are xXltttxtolxtol. We have arrived.’

Agnes Harkness strode forward, arm outstretched. ‘Greetings,’ she said. ‘Agnes Havisham. I have heard so much about you. Welcome to your new home.’

‘What?’ hissed Jack.

Ianto leaned close to him. ‘This is an invasion. And she’s organised it.’

Jack groaned.

XV

CONSPIRATORS

AND OTHERS

In which Miss Havisham has a meeting with remarkable trees, and Little Dorrit’s secret is finally revealed

‘Shall we take tea?’ ventured George Herbert Sanderson nervously.

‘Are you kidding? I’m so full of the stuff I’m sloshing. What the hell is going on here?’

George Herbert looked as though he had never, ever been spoken to like this by a woman.

‘Come now. Perhaps a little refreshment, my dear?’ he pressed on, good manners prevailing over a face that was thoroughly taken aback. He called up to the ceiling. ‘Bramwell, a pot of tea in the Observatory, if you wouldn’t mind.’

‘Of course, sir,’ oozed the computer.

George Herbert rubbed his hands together. ‘Splendid. Come along.’

He steered a fuming Gwen over the threshold and into a room which offered an even more jaw-dropping view of the Earth. As they climbed up a spiral iron staircase to a table laden with paper charts, Gwen noticed a tea trolley sidling unobtrusively into view. ‘Sit down! Sit down!’ George Herbert ordered, making a small attempt at tidying up the charts, but failing dismally. He sighed and sat down, absently drumming his fingers on the desk.

Gwen mastered her fury and went with her biggest smile. ‘You are who I think you are, aren’t you?’ she said.

‘What?’ George Herbert seemed to have his mind elsewhere, and splashed tea everywhere as he poured. ‘Oh, right, yes, Miss Havisham and I are betrothed, indeed. Have been for over one hundred years. Goodness, sounds funny when you put it like that. I am the luckiest man alive. Battenberg?’

Gwen waved away the plate, kept her smile in place, and gave George Herbert a piercing look. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be at the other end of the universe?’

‘Nonsense! What a preposterous notion! Why, the universe is so appallingly big, whereas I was merely visiting a spot a few solar systems away. Practically next door.’

‘But it still took you a hundred years to get there.’

‘More or less, ah yes.’ George Herbert looked a little uncomfortable.

‘And yet not so long to get back.’

‘Not so long, no. Bramwell was able to piggyback us through your Rift, weren’t you?’

‘Indeed sir.’

‘Splendid fellow. Talented cook, excellent navigator, but,’ he leaned forward confidentially, ‘sadly predictable at draughts.’

‘Right,’ Gwen pressed on, eagerly. ‘This is brilliant news, isn’t it? Does Agnes know you’re back?’

‘Ah. . .’ said George Herbert hesitantly. ‘Yes. Yes she does.’

‘She does?’ exclaimed Gwen. ‘But she must be overjoyed, I mean, you’re back! Early! You know. . . How long has she known?’

George Herbert whistled a broken bit of Gilbert and Sullivan. ‘I am afraid she’s known for quite some time. You see, ah, I’m sure she won’t mind me mentioning this, but I have been back for several days.’

‘But,’ said Gwen, ‘when she told me about you, she said you were a long way away and. . . Days?’

‘Days,’ nodded George Herbert apologetically.

‘But why hasn’t she . . . ? I mean . . .’

‘I am sorry,’ repeated George Herbert sadly. ‘This must be quite a shock for you.’

‘Well, yes, but not as much as it must be for her. I mean, surely she’s overjoyed. You both must be.’

George Herbert looked anything but overjoyed. His face drooped like a donkey’s. ‘Things are, I rather regret, complicated.’

Gwen laughed. ‘I’m sure she’s not met someone else! She thinks the world of you.’

George Herbert winced at the phrase. ‘I’m saddened to say that she is responsible for your current predicament.’

‘Yeah,’ huffed Gwen. ‘I’d gathered that. Somehow. I mean, I guessed it would be something like that. I’m not stupid. I figured it was because you wanted to surprise her, but, hang on, that doesn’t fit now, does it?’

George Herbert shook his head. ‘I am so dreadfully sorry. She ordered you brought here.’

‘What?’ gasped Gwen.

‘What the hell is going on?’ shouted Jack Harkness.

A hundred guns immediately pointed in his direction.

‘Wait!’ yelled Agnes, a gloved hand raised. ‘Don’t kill him. Well, I mean to say, you can’t kill him. Just don’t shoot. Thank you.’

Ignoring the mildly confused xXltttxtolxtol troops, Jack bore down on Agnes, his gun waving like an exclamation mark. ‘You organised all this? The coffins? The Vam?’

The xXltttxtolxtol commander looked at Agnes enquiringly and then back at Jack. The way his gun moved said clearly, ‘Surely you would like me to kill him?’

Agnes looked Jack directly in the eyes and inclined her head slightly. ‘I am responsible for rescuing the xXltttxtolxtol, yes. I am shocked and really must protest at the accusation that I had anything to do with the Vam. That excrescence simply hitched a ride in the Rift.’

‘But what,’ asked Ianto reasonably, ‘are these xXlttxt. . . creatures doing here?’

‘It’s xXltttxtolxtol, dear, and it’s quite simple.’

‘They’re invading,’ growled Jack.

Agnes laughed dismissively. ‘Nonsense. That’s not it at all. Isn’t that right, er. . .?’

‘My name is zZxgbtl of the xXltttxtolxtol.’

‘Of course, it would be,’ trilled Agnes. ‘And this isn’t an invasion. The very idea!’

‘You see,’ said George Herbert, ‘it took me many years to reach the planet that the drive came from that this ship is built around. Of course, time passes inside this craft at a different rate. Agnes told me the other week that it’s since been discovered and explained by a clever Jew scientist, but back then we just had to make a few educated guesses. Honestly, ninety per cent of this craft is food. Bramwell is terrified of it all going to waste, you know. Biccie?’

Gwen waved the plate away.

‘So,’ the scientist continued, ‘I sailed off in my rocket ship, you know, keen to take the Empire out into the universe. Bit of enlightened self-interest, don’t you know. Set up a trading partnership, that kind of thing. I mean, the message that we found with the drive unit was in effect that we’d learn something to our mutual advantage by visiting, so it seemed rude to ignore the invite.’

‘Eh?’ said Gwen.

‘Well, the drive unit was part of a probe that crashed. The drive itself survived rather well, along with a full set of formulae that were reasonably easy to decipher. It was effectively a set of coordinates, together with instructions for building a ship around the drive unit. And that’s an invitation, clear as day. Well, old Ralston Baines argued that it was more of a “if this probe should dare to roam, box its ears and send it home” kind of ballyhoo, but I overruled him, and got the grand wave from the old Regina to set sail for Planet X.’

Gwen blinked.

‘That’s what we’re calling it, you see. Good name, eh? So, off I set. And when I arrived, you know, I met the natives and they were friendly blighters. Odd-looking fellows but jolly eager to learn English and all about the Earth. You see, the xXltttxtolxtol—’

‘Oh’ said Gwen, realising that, despite what Jack had told her, Welsh was not the hardest language in the galaxy.

‘Yes, ah, yes, well, turns out they were in a bit of a pickle. Hence sending out all the probe things. Their planet is dying – only a few thousand years left in the old gal. So they were looking for likely other worlds to live on apart from doomed Planet X. The idea being that either a probe would find somewhere, or an obliging species with a spare bunk would get the message and pitch up with a set of keys.’

Gwen wondered at this. How much of this did Agnes know? How long had this been planned?

‘So when I turned up, all pith helmet and Rule Britannia, they knew they were onto a good thing if they played their cards right. And I chatted about this to Aggie, and she happened to mention the dear old Cardiff Rift, which, with a few equations, the top xXltttxtolxtol boffins were able to turn into a neat little space warp, enabling me to set off with a few chums and get here early. Brilliant plan.’ And here his face fell. ‘Only. . .’

‘They’ve got guns,’ said Jack.

Agnes wasn’t fazed. ‘Of course they’ve got guns, Captain. The xXltttxtolxtol have only just met us and they’re not sure of their welcome. Especially not with you waving your firearm about like a nursery rattle.’

‘Those are very big guns,’ said Jack.

‘Agreed,’ said Ianto.

‘Then our welcome must be even bigger!’ beamed Agnes. ‘Dear zZxgbtl! How was your journey? You must be tired. You’ll want a rest and a chance to get your bearings before I show you to your Guatemala.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ said Jack while zZxgbtl swayed in the breeze.

‘Guatemala! It’s a chunk of the Earth that I identified as most compatible with the xXltttxtolxtol’s own environment, whilst not being terribly important. There’s really not that many of them, and they’ll fit in jolly well.’

‘What. . . about. . .’ Jack spoke slowly, ‘the. . . people. . . of. . . Guatemala?’

Agnes shrugged. ‘They’ll have to budge up and put up. But it’ll be of enormous advantage to us. And, as I said, it’s not exactly a country that’s really contributing at the moment. This is their chance to do their bit.’