Fandom: Torchwood

Characters: Torchwood team

Author: m_findlow

Rating: PG

Length: 7,568 words

Content notes: none

Author notes: Written for Challenge 298 - Cat

Summary: The hub is being invaded by something not so alien.


Ianto tucked his chin a little deeper into his scarf and his mittened hands a little deeper in his pockets. Jogging down the steps to the quay might not necessarily be the safest thing to do if they were covered in a thin sheen of frost, causing him to break and ankle or worse, but right now any movement that would get his blood pumping was preferable to becoming frozen to the spot.

He shuffled across the wooden boards, keeping the door to the tourist office in the centre of his vision. Just a few more yards to go before he would be safely ensconced inside, where it surely had to be warmer. This cold snap had caught everyone by surprise, him included. Having autumn turn so bitterly cold so early in the season was almost unnatural. If it dropped any lower overnight they might even get snow.

There was a small object right beyond the door and it wasn't until he got closer that he realsied it was a cat. Ianto looked down at the forlorn creature. Its fur was all puffed up like it was trying to make the most of its coat but the winds off the bay were doing nothing to help. Ianto’s own coat and scarf were barely able to keep the worst of it out, eating into whatever small nooks it could.

'This isn’t a great spot if you’re wanting to stay out of the cold,' he told it. It looked up at him thoughtfully and meowed before standing up and coming to rub up against his leg.

'Friendly sort, are you?' he asked, watching it twine around one leg then the other, smooching its chin against him, marking him as part of its turf.

'As much as I’d like to stand around all day basking in unadulterated affection I do have to go to work.' Not to mention he thought that Jack gave him more than enough of the former without needing to supplement it.

He slipped his key into the lock and twisted it open, looking forward to the meagre warmth the office would provide. He kept his eyes fixed around his feet, expecting his feline company to scoot through his legs and inside the minute he had the door open wide enough. Instead it just sat there and watched him, even as he stepped over the threshold. Its tail swished expectantly.

Ianto sighed. 'Polite as well as friendly.' He was going to feel ten kinds of guilt if he just shut the door in its face now. 'Alright, you can come inside, but just the office up here, okay?' He couldn’t let a cat loose inside the hub proper even if it might come in handy down in the archives ridding them of rodents that scurried between the stacks and were forever startling him as they suddenly zipped across his path or over the top of his shoes – usually when he was carrying something heavy or breakable.

The cat took his invitation, swerving around him to come through the door and seat itself right in the middle of the space. It meowed its approval at him.

'Thanks. I try to keep the place shipshape.' An involuntary shiver ran down his spine as he removed his scarf and coat, hanging them up on a stand behind the tourist counter, in the little alcove hidden away behind the tacky beaded curtain he could no longer bear to part with.

He came back around and knelt down, giving the cat a scratch on its head and under its chin. It purred happily. 'No collar,' he muttered, 'but maybe you’ve got a chip that will tell me who you belong to. I’m sure one of Tosh’s scanners will be able to find it if you have one. For now though I’ll go downstairs and sort out everyone else. Once all the usual natives are fed and watered I might be able to find you a dish of warm milk.' He hit the release button for the sliding door behind his desk. 'If anyone is brave enough to be out in this tell them I’ve got discount coupons for the Millennium Centre tours.'



Ianto heard Jack before he saw him. The thunderous sneeze was unmistakably Jack’s, as was the less than appealing sound of him drowning a handkerchief in the aftermath.

'Bendith,' Ianto said, holding out a box of tissues to replace the sodden handkerchief Jack was persisting with.

Jack looked confused, as was so often the case when Ianto slipped into Welsh unexpectedly. 'Huh?'

'Never mind.'

Jack took one of thr proffered tissues and honked again, dropping it into the bin. 'Thanks.'

'You look awful,' he said, seeing the way Jack’s eyes watered. Both they and his nose were red. Without thinking he reached up a hand to Jack’s forehead to feel it. It wasn’t any warmer than usual. 'Are you coming down with something?'

Jack waved away the caring hand. 'Fine. Just allergies, I think. Started up last night and I’ve been a snivelling mess since.'

'What are you allergic to?'

'Birch pollen, mostly.'

'It’s single digits out there. I don’t think you’re going to get much birch pollen in here.'

'Yeah. I think it’s something in the hothouse set it off. Anyway, I’ve closed it off and put the ventilation on. Hopefully that clears it.' He rubbed at a watering eye with the heel of his hand.

Ianto gave him a sympathetic look. 'Well, let me know if it doesn’t improve, and get Owen to give you some antihistamines when he gets in. Can’t have you looking like you’ve spent all night watching and re-watching The Notebook.'

Jack gave a chuckle. 'Thanks. How’s about you fix me some coffee in the meantime? That can cure just about anything.'

Ianto bowed. 'Your wish is my command.'

Jack did nothing to suppressant a playful smirk. 'You say that now but when I come around later for some alone time you’ll tell me you’ve got work to do.'

'Alone time has yet to prove it yields any medical benefits.'

'Only because we haven’t tested it thoroughly enough,' Jack replied even as Ianto was already walking away.



Left to his own devices Ianto quickly got his morning routine done and out of the way. Jack's sniffing and sneezing could be heard pretty much wherever he was in the hub. He made a mental note for Owen to go up to the hothouse later and double check what was in there that might have suddenly decided to spawn. He was acutely conscious that if Jack was allergic to something up there, they all might suffer the same consequences and a team down with allergies, whilst not the end of the world, could be a nuisance nonetheless. So far he himself hadn't felt any irritation in his eyes or nose, but then, he didn't have springtime allergies.

His normal duties completed, he returned to the tourist office, armed in one hand with a small bowl of milk and in the other, one of Tosh's scanners. Under his arm he'd tucked a ratty old cushion that had been living under the hub's sofa for as long as he could remember, but which he'd never seen anyone desperate enough to use.

'I'm back,' he announced to his new feline acquaintance, setting down the bowl of milk. The cat immediately went for the bowl, happily lapping up the contents, which gave Ianto a chance the run the scanner over the spot above its head.

'Nothing,' he said, reviewing the negative result displayed on the screen. 'For a stray you're a very tidy, well behaved one,' he remarked. Usually when he bumped into stray cats around the city, it was at night out on yet a other wild goose chase dealt by the rift. They were usually tucked away in alleys or huddled behind bins, giving him a yowl and a hiss of displeasure as he invaded and disrupted their space. Many ran off at the first sign of another human, and others staunchly defended their patch until he was the one backing off. In any event, they were always scruffy looking things with matted fur and thin as a rake. This cat looked to be doing far better than his compatriots.

Ianto set the lumpy cushion down in the corner of the office. It went ignored for a few minutes whilst the cat took its time licking its paw and wiping its face.

'Better manners than pretty much everyone else I work with as well,' Ianto murmured. Jack could take some pointers for sure.

Eventually the cat decided it had cleaned itself sufficiently and wandered over to where Ianto had left the cushion. Like its preening exercise, it spent a good long while pawing the cushion, kneading the remaining stuffing inside it until it was satisfied and then curled up on it and went to sleep.

'Curiouser and curiouser,' Ianto said. Since he couldn't track down an owner, he supposed he'd have to go about it the old fashioned way. Did anyone still stick up lost animal posters anymore, he wondered. It had to be worth a shot. Even if it belonged to some homeless person, he bet they'd be sorely missing its company. For now though it seemed content to stay here. He flipped on his computer, setting aside for the moment the idea of mocking up some posters. He still had real work to do, and plenty of it. 'Never a day without some kind of mystery,' he muttered to himself, sitting down to begin his day in earnest. There was no sleeping all day for him. 'I'm coming back as a cat in the next life.'



Tosh's stomach growled its protest at her as she bent down to pull one of the servers from the rack. This is what she got for skipping breakfast, she told herself, feeling another growl and gurgle as it twisted in on itself. She'd probably missed the morning rounds of coffee as well by now, she decided, checking the time on her watch. First round was usually about seven, and usually only comprised herself, Jack and Ianto. The others were rarely here before nine unless they'd been on a night shift or Jack had hauled them in for some special project. Seeing the time as being nine forty, she knew she'd missed second rounds as well, when Ianto would diligently attend them yet again, keeping at bay the foul moods of her teammates who were anything but morning larks.

'You brought this on yourself, Tosh,' she said, plugging her diagnostic equipment into the spare port on the side of the server and turning back to her laptop to read through the program's data. She'd come in early specifically for this task. Maintaining Torchwood's systems was a big job and one that took up more than its fair share of her time. With all of the different systems that ran around the clock, monitoring rift activity, weather patterns, extra-orbital signals and atmospheric interference just to name a few, their systems needed to be in peak shape, and their servers checked and cleansed of poorly partitioned data.

The server stacks in this room were always the worst. They'd been here the longest and that made them the most finicky. They didn't always like it when Tosh uploaded new patches or tried to defragment their data cores. She was convinced that their mainframe, a computer system with alien augmentation that had been around since the nineteen forties, had developed its own kind of artificial intelligence. She didn't dare call it sentience, since that felt a little too creepy, but it did seem to pick and choose at will what commands it was prepared to accept from her. Getting these stacks in line with the rest was far more manual and tedious than she'd like, but it had to be done. They couldn't afford to lose a single piece of data stored on these servers.

She keyed a few instructions on her laptop, loading in the new software and crossing her fingers that it would install without a fuss. When it finally beeped a happy sound she breathed a sigh of relief before staring back up at the stack. 'Great. One down, only thirty five to go.' Her stomach growled again. At this rate, it was going to have to hang on until lunchtime. 'Should've brought a muesli bar,' she murmured, her mouth watering at the thought.

She slid the sever back into its rack, happy that if the first one worked, the rest should follow suit. On a whim, she decided to start from the top and work her way down. The severs were heavy and awkward despite their neat configuration, and she always regretted leaving the top ones until last, when her back was already sore and her energy flagging.

The stack was about eight feet high so she had to climb up to reach the uppermost servers. It wasn't exactly O H and S, but she couldn't be bothered carting a step ladder down here. She didn't weigh much so the racks would was hold her as she used them as leverage to hoist herself up enough to slide out the uppermost boxes.

She released the clips at the edge of the rack, readying to pull it out when a sudden hiss nearly sent her tumbling back to the floor. Only a last minute grab stopped her fall as she peered over the top of the stack. A huge white creature hissed again from its spot on top of the stack directly next to hers.

Tosh let out a breath as she got her first good look at it. Just a cat, she realised, albeit a fat one with long white fur that stood up on end as it tried to make itself look bigger still. How had a cat gotten in here? Clearly it thought that the servers were nice and warm which was why it was perched up on top of them. It leapt quickly and suddenly, straight at her she'd thought but actually ended up jumping right over her head.

'Oh!' Tosh’s startled cry echoed around the cavernous room even as a blur of white fur skittered across the top of the stacks as disappeared just as quickly as it had appeared. She renewed her grip on the rack, slowly climbing back down, her task forgotten as she wandered around the stacks, searching for her visitor. As quiet as she was moving between the rows as they hummed and whirred, there was no sign of the feline. It has clearly dashed out of the room in search of more private quarters. How it had gotten in was perplexing, but not troubling. Ianto was forever complaining about rats in the archives. No doubt the cat had decided this place was a good all you could eat buffet. She’d mention it to him just in case. No sense someone else getting a fright like she had.

Feet back on terra firma, she pulled out the second server from the bottom of the rack and plugged it in for diagnostics and upgrading. She took it as a sign that today was not the day to start working from top to bottom.



Gwen forced herself to relinquish her grip on the steering wheel as she noticed her knuckles going white. This was the last time she had Rhys on speaker whilst she was driving. Not that she didn't love speaking to him, but having discussions about their wedding plans was making her blood pressure go up. If she wasn't careful, she was going to run into the back of someone else's car.

They were still in disagreement about the decor for the reception. Did up they opt for the fabric seat covers or bows of tulle tied to the chair backs? Rhys thought the former would look tacky, whilst Gwen has reservations about the latter. Of course she wanted her special day to look the part but she did not, under any circumstances, want it resembling a fairy tea party. Not to mention she had resisted each and every one of Brenda's suggestions. If Gwen lt her mother in law have her way, the entire place would have been one giant circus tent of tulle, with enough hanging from the ceilings to strangle all of their guests and to wrap up the bodies for burying afterward. She'd seen the wedding photos at her in-laws house, Brenda with her coiffed up bouffant and those hideous puff sleeves on a dress that was lucky it would only ever see the light of day once. She wasn't taking any advice from a woman who looked like something out of a fifteenth century French porn movie.

Rhys had descended into a series of grunts and mumbled "ayes", a sure sign that she'd lost him somewhere along the way, probably between a decision on tea lights or pillar candles.

'Look, why don't we talk about it after tea?' she suggested, pulling into the Millennium Centre underground carpark. She didn't think she'd be any more up for a debate than she was now, but it was better than flogging a dead horse. 'Yes, I'll be home for tea, I promise. Okay, love you.' She hung up and heaved a sigh. 'I'm never getting married again,' she vowed. It was just way too much hard work to ever consider doing it twice. She'd rather spend days up to her elbows in alien slime than have to organise seating arrangements and designs for wedding invitations.

She pulled her electric blue Renault in beside the SUV, making sure she left sufficient room for Jack to swing open the SUV's driver side door without denting the side of her car. She groaned as she rubbed her hands together, her car having only just heated up enough to keep her fingers from going numb at the wheel. It was a shame she'd have to leave its warm confines just when she had it how she liked it, nice and toasty. She sat there for a few minutes, staring out at the drab grey concrete wall before conceding that she'd have to get out. It's only five minutes between here and coffee, she told herself, willing herself to move. That had to be incentive enough as she pushed open the door before she could change her mind, the warm air spilling quickly out into the chilly underground space.

She jogged the few short steps around the back of the SUV, hopping impatiently from one foot to the other as she waited for the security camera to recognise her retina print and let her in. As the door clicked and swung open, something darted out from under the SUV, through her legs and straight inside the long dark tunnel. Gwen caught only the briefest glimpse of the jet black cat that had nearly tripped her up as it bounded down the corridor and out of sight.

'Bollocks,' she swore, chasing after it. She cursed the lack of lights down here, just a few sad bulbs in old caged fixtures that did little to light the main passageway. It definitely wasn't enough to help her easily spot something that was totally black.

She poked her head in every room that lead off the main corridor, but there was nothing. The silly creature was either hiding or had run all the way and could now be just about anywhere. She could spend hours looking and never find it.

She growled under her breath. 'One of those days, Gwen,' she muttered, accepting defeat for now.



'Waste of a bloody morning,' Owen grumbled, tugging off his lab coat and dumping it in a heap on the floor of the medical bay. He hated it when Jack wasted his time, especially when he had stuff to do. All this nonsense about being allergic to birch pollen and something in the hothouse. 'Birch pollen, my arse,' Owen said for what felt like the fifteenth time. More like allergic to all those reports stacked in his office. He didn't need Ianto nagging him to fix Jack something to ease his runny nose, watery eyes and incessant sneezing. The sound alone was enough to drive anyone nuts. Not to mention he'd gone up to the hothouse and confirmed that nothing in there was doing anything it shouldn't. There were no plants flowering or with spores that could be causing any sort of allergy. It didn't stop Ianto from hovering over him the entire time, pointing at various plants and repeatedly asking "what about that one?".

'We've been in here for an hour and do you feel like sneezing?' Owen retorted at the umpteenth time the question was asked. 'It's probably all in his head,' Owen added, which only served to annoy the young man who followed him back out of the hothouse, down the spiral stairs and all the way to the bottom of the medical bay.

Owen rifled in a cupboard, tossing a small white bottle of pills at Ianto's head which he only just managed to catch. 'Give him two of those every couple of hours and tell him to stop being so bloody precious.'

Ianto studied the directions on the side of the bottle, clearly not believing Owen had the right dosage memorised. 'Are you sure?'

'He's not going to die from a runny nose, Ianto! Now, go be a good little nurse and feed him those. Get out of my sight and let me do some real doctoring work.'

Owen sighed as he heard the click of Ianto's shoes finally disappear. Peace at last. Now he could finally get on with his day.

He went over to his workstation, picking up a set of files from it and marching them across the hub towards the door on the other side. Gwen brushed past him in her way in.

'Late again, PC Cooper,' he said, hoping to get a rise out of her. 'Must be nice to have the luxury of time for an early morning shag.'

'At least I've got someone to shag, Owen,' she replied.

'Not even if I was desperate,' Owen said, grinning as he made sure he was out of reach. 'Tubby McTruck Driver is all yours.'

'You were a lousy shag and everybody knows it,' she replied, but not in a nasty way. They both knew he'd been more than decent in that department or Gwen wouldn't have been begging him for it straddled over the top of his sports car gear stick.

He carried on down the corridor and several sets of stairs towards the cells. It had been days since he'd had a chance to continue his work with Janet, their resident weevil. The more time he spent with her, the more convinced he was that weevils were far more complicated than anyone gave them credit. That she didn't simply beat her fists against the cell door every time he went down there said something. She was willing to see what he had to offer her before making any snap judgements. That wasn't to say he was going to go inside her cell and see if she wanted to play a game of chess with him, but she clearly had a sentience that needed to be explored and understood further.

Jack thought he was partly mad, but neither did he discourage any of Owen's research on the matter. He didn't think they'd ever reach a point where they could peacefully negotiate with a weevil on the loose, but perhaps if he could get to grips with their social networks and how it was that they could commune from great distances, they could make some progress on how to ensure the city's human inhabitants could learn to live in concert with them.

Owen knew something was wrong when he could hear her growling and whimpering in equal measure from two floors away. He couldn't speak weevil but he knew enough from the tone of her guttural noises that she was teetering somewhere in between fear and aggression. He dropped his files and went for the nearest storage cupboard, knowing he'd find a stun gun in there for emergencies. He didn't know what was going on but it was better to be safe than sorry. She might have escaped for all he knew, even though he was sure that wasn't possible. Not without help from the outside.

He skipped down the next flight of steps two at the time, keeping the gun gripped tight but low, and all the while hearing the ongoing keening and growling. In his head he knew he should probably call for backup but decided that there was no time for waiting around. It was him or nothing.

He paused at the door to the level four cells, wondering why the hell they'd never bothered to stick a small window it in so that they could see the room beyond. He knew what it should look like - an empty corridor with four cells on each side, one lot of perspex style windows looking into the cells on his left, four solid metal doors as entry points to the cells on his right. Janet should be in the first cell on the left. He sucked in a breath, made a mental invocation to the God of fuck knew what and pushed the door in.

Something furry and ginger tangled in his legs, nearly sending him tumbling to the floor. There was a hiss and a mrow! and then it dived away, detaching itseld from Owen and making a speedy getaway.

'Oi!' Owen yelled. 'Get back here you stupid furball!' he added, stumbling back upright and seeing only a flash of tail held high as it darted away. Owen huffed and shoved the stun gun into the back of his jeans. 'I hate cats.'

He turned back to the cell where Janet was curled up in the far back corner, mewling and hugging her knees to her chin. Owen raised an eyebrow at the weevil. 'Seriously? You'll happily tear the throat out of a bloke twice your size, but a scruffy flea bag has you cowering in the corner? I would've thought that'd just be the entrée.' He sighed. Chalk that up as one more curiosity about the lives of weevils he'd have to get to the bottom of one of these days. Trying to get Janet to engage in any of the other behavioural experiments he'd had lined up or today was pointless now. She wasn't moving from her safe little corner of the cell no matter what. He stomped off, hoping that by now Jack had at least brought him a corpse. He really needed something he could disembowel right about now.



'Achoo!' Jack's sneeze couldn't have been any more ill-timed as he'd just picked up the phone and dialed the mayor's office, giving the poor clerk an earful of his mucus laced explosion. He hung up the phone and decided to try again later. The last thing he needed was to sound like a sniveling idiot in front of someone who actually was a sniveling idiot. How anyone had voted this guy into office was beyond him.

'Have you taken those tablets like I asked you?' came the sound of Ianto's dulcet tones, floating loudly across the hub.

'Yes, mother!' Jack snipped back, equal parts appreciative and harangued. He loved that Ianto cared but there was a limit of how much nagging he could take. Owen's antihistamines hadn't done a damn thing to help apart from make his eyes water a little less. Two boxes of used tissues could testify to their worthlessness in easing his symptoms. Even more annoyingly, nobody else seemed to be affected. He liked to think that his fifty-first century genetics were a cut above those of his team. Common colds and flu usually bypassed him completely even when the rest of his team were laid low by them, but whatever this was, it was wreaking havoc with his body. It just had to be alien. That was the only explanation for it.

He stood up and poked his head out of his office, fixing his gaze on Ianto's desk. 'And tell Owen-' he began yelling before he was rudely cut off.

'Tell me what?' Owen snarked, appearing out from behind the water tower as he made his way towards his desk, looking to be in a foul mood.

'These things aren't working,' Jack said, waving the bottle in the air for effect.

'Really not working,' Tosh agreed, leaning her head on her elbow on the desk. 'I've got a headache just from listening.'

'You lot think you've got problems?' Owen grumbled. 'All my plans for working with Janet this morning have just gone out the window because of some blinky cat down there that's upset her. Stupid thing nearly broke my ankle. God knows where it is now.'

'Oh, I forgot to mention that,' Gwen said. 'Yeah, there's a cat in the hub. I tried to find it, but... '

Jack's ears immediately pricked up. 'What's it look like?' Jack asked.

'Black.' 'White.' 'Ginger.' Gwen Tosh and Owen all replied at the same time, their words blurring into a jumbled mess.

'Actually it's a mottled grey,' Ianto said. 'I believe the correct term is tortoiseshell. Besides, it's been with me all morning up in the tourist office.'

'No, that's not right,' Gwen said. 'It snuck in with me when I was coming in from the carpark.'

'Well, it can't be the same one then, can it?' Owen added. 'It can't be four different colours for a start.'

'It's cats,' Jack said.

Tosh frowned at him as she twirled in her chair to face him. 'What's cats?'

'My allergy. If there's cats in the hub, that would explain why I've been sneezing like crazy.'

Ianto looked at him in askance. 'I thought you said you were allergic to pollen.'

Jack nodded. 'And cats.'

'You didn't think to mention that earlier?'

'Pollen seemed a lot more likely than cats.'

'True.'

'Okay,' Jack said, feeling a little better now that he'd pinpointed why he alone seemed to be suffering. 'We've got a couple of cats in the hub so it would seem. They've obviously been here since at least last night which is why... Achoo!' The sneeze snuck up on his unexpectedly. Gwen held out a box of tissues and he grabbed several, blowing hard before continuing on. 'How did they get in?' he asked, deciding to abandon long-winded sentences for brevity.

'Not exactly hard, is it.' Ianto replied.

'How many entrances does this place have?' Owen asked.

'Fourteen,' Ianto replied. 'And plenty of them in less than top condition. Something the size of a cat could easily replied if it wanted.'

'But why? Why now?'

'Have you been outside lately?' Gwen said, shivering at the thought.

Jack bristled at the comment. 'Do we get an influx of cats every winter?' As obvious as it sounded, there had to be a better explanation than just coming in out of the cold. 'Okay, so we've got a few strays. Wouldn't our life signs detectors have picked them up?'

'If we set them that sensitive, this whole place would be lit up like a Christmas tree,' Tosh said.

'Sure, but we could ramp it up to find them, couldn't we?' Owen asked.

'We'll get a lot of false positives.'

'And how does one go about catching a cat?' Ianto asked. 'Humanely, I mean.'

Jack was about to add that he didn't care much about how they went about it when the inside of his nose twitched violently. It was all he could do to slap both hands over his mouth in time. 'Achoo! Would somebody please do something about all these goddamn cats before, ah, before... Achoo! Achoo! Ah-Ah-choo!'

'Before Jack sneezes too hard and his one brain cell escapes,' Owen suggested.



Owen quickly arranged some cages and nets that could be used to capture their quarry whilst Tosh ran some more refinements on their hub monitoring systems, trying to pinpoint exactly which life signs signatures they would follow, and which were most likely the cats they'd all seen. 'This is as best I can narrow it,' Tosh said, turning up more than a dozen signals on her monitor for them to look at.

'Fours cats, so what are the rest?' Owen asked curious.

'Really big rats?' Tosh suggested.

'Three cats,' Ianto replied.

Owen gave him a questioning glance. 'Three?'

'Smokey is sleeping upstairs in the tourist office.'

Owen groaned. 'Jesus Christ. You've named it already?'

'We're not keeping it,' Jack said, his tone firm and unyielding. Ianto tried not to look disappointed. 'Go up there and get rid of it. That's an order.' Ianto plodded off silent and sullen at his orders.

'We've only seen three, sorry, four cats,' Tosh said. 'These other signals could be more we haven't yet.'

'Gwen, there's another cage in the back of the SUV,' Owen said. 'Can you go fetch it? I think we're going to need it.'

She nodded and made her way back through the armory and out the corridor that would lead her back to the carpark. When she reached the door, she paused a moment. She could hear the sound of of cat and twirled, listening to see where it was coming from. With luck she might catch it, ridding them of one right from the off. She held her breath a moment, straining her ears. It sounded like... No, that wasn't right. It sounded like it was coming from the other side of the door, out in the carpark. She strode towards the door, pulling it back a few inches so she could peer out. It was silly, she thought. There was nothing there. Just their cars and-

Oh. Oh dear, she thought, seeing and hearing what confirmed her suspicions. There, waiting at the door were a dozen or more cats, mewling and meowing, tails swishing and dashing towards the slim opening as soon as she'd pulled it ajar. She quickly pushed it back shut, hardly believing her eyes and tapping her comms. 'Uh, guys? Slight problem down here.'

Ianto was the first to respond. 'If by slight do you mean several dozen cats waiting at the door for you?'

Her face scrunched up. 'How did you-'

'Because the quay is now home to about three dozen cats and I don't think they're here for recommendations on what to see and do in Cardiff this weekend.'




Owen pinched the bridge of his nose as he slumped at his desk watching the rotating views from the cameras outisde. 'Someone please tell me why we suddenly have an influx of stray cats trying to lay siege to the hub?' It sounded as ridiculous as the external CCTV proved. If Torchwood hadn't been the worst kept secret beforehand, it was about to be as cats milled about at every entrance point, and several more lounged up by the water tower, which today of all days, was not running any water down its surface. Even the cold didn't seem to deter them. 'There has to be a reason why all of these cats are suddenly converging on the hub. If it's not the weather, then what?'

Jack honked his way through another tissue end popped three more of Owen's pills, for all the good they seemed to do. 'There must be something they want, something that's drawing them here.'

'Free fish?' Owen couldn't resist letting the unhelpful remarked slip out.

Jack turned serious. 'We need to go back and review everything we've done for the last few days. Anything at all that might have triggered a change in their behaviour.' Four faces stared blankly at him as they worked through their recollections.

'I was digitising silver nitrate photo plates from the 1907 archive files,' Ianto replied.

'Working up my autopsy notes for that body we switched out last week to keep the coroner's office in the dark,' Owen said.

'Running diagnostics on our current data storage systems', Tosh chimed in.

'Going back over old case notes from those unsolved files you gave me,' Gwen added.

Jack eased back against Tosh's desk where he was leaning. All of those things sounded perfectly boring and none of them could account for anything that might be causing strange animal behaviour. Maybe it wasn't anything to do with them at all.

'There is one thing,' Tosh piped up. 'That escape pod that crashed in the river. Weren't you checking it out?'

Jack folded his arms. He had been tinkering with it, just to find out whether any of it was salvageable or not. Apart from being waterlogged, most of the circuits were fried and those that weren't were in need on some serious repair work. He'd been itching to get downstairs and up to his arms in grease and spanners, taking it apart and trying to put it back together again. He never could resist an opportunity to sharpen his mechanical skills. 'It's dead as a dodo, Tosh.'

'Escape pods would have some kind of rescue beacon though, wouldn't they?' she asked.

'Of course. Wait. You think...' There'd been no one on board the vessel, but that didn't mean its alarms weren't going off, undetected. It would be the only part of the pod that was working, but then again, wasn't that was kind of the point? When you were in dire straights, a rescue beacon needed to be the last thing to give up. Like a black box on a jet plane, it needed to be almost impervious. 'It's a little on the crazy side, but you could be right, Tosh. Only how do we test the theory? We can check if the beacon is transmitting, but whether it's calling out in such a way that brings cats running?'

'Ahem.' There was a slight cough from Ianto who had so far said very little. 'I expect you'd need a cat.'

Jack scoffed. 'You wanna let the invading forces inside?' Apart from the chaos that would cause, Jack didn't want to think about how he'd cope with the flurry of fur. He might never stop sneezing ever again.

Ianto looked quietly confident. 'I might have one cat who could be relied upon.'




Jack looked skeptically at the scene in the room where they were storing the escape pod. Tosh confirmed that yes, it was transmitting a signal, which was fine, but it was the next part of the test that had him scratching his head.

'Why are you doing that?' he asked as he watched Ianto put a bowl of milk in one corner of the room and the plate with flaked tuna in the other.

'Because, Jack,' he proceeded to explain, 'if you really want to know if this beacon is drawing cats towards it, you're going to have to test it against things that might be far more appealing to a cat than some heap of broken metal.' He stood up and surveyedhis handiwork. 'Okay, I think we're ready.'

Gwen was waiting out in the corridor, Smokey clutched in her arms and purring contentedly at the attention of her hand scratching his ears. Jack just frowned, trying to give the pair of them a wide berth and sneezing despite.

'Okay, let's just get this over with and get that thing out of my sight.'

Gwen set the cat down at the doorway and stepped back with the others. Smokey looked around the space with mild curiosity. His nose twitched upwards as the scent of the tuna hit his senses, but he turned away from it, walking immediately over to the escape pod instead. He pawed at the metal, trying to fathom it out before sitting down and just staring fixatedly at it, ignoring everything else.

Ianto stepped inside and picked up the tuna, setting it down much closer, but the cat ignored it completely. 'Well, I think that's pretty conclusive, don't you? I can't explain the why or the how but...'

'One more thing, just to be certain,' Jack said. 'Tosh, switch off the beacon for a second.'

She walked in and fiddled with the panel on the underside, pressing invisible buttons. 'Okay, it's off.'

The cat blinked, like it had been caught in some kind of trance and then trotted towards the tuna, eating it with vigor, before spying the dish of milk in the corner of the room and lapping up that as well.

'Well, I'll be buggered,' Owen remarked.

'Okay,' Jack announced. 'So, we know how to stop the invasion, but we still have a bunch of them inside already. They need to be dealt with.'

'I can boost the signal a bit,' Tosh said.

'Won't that just make even more cats start turning up and trying to get into the hub?' That was all they needed. It'd be like Hitchcock's "The Birds" but with an allergy nightmare twist.

'Just a short burst,' Tosh promised, obviously seeing the look of horror etched on his face. 'Enough to draw every cat that's already inside right here. After we've got them all, we shut it off completely and all the cats outside should just go back to their normal lives.'

'Whatever those are,' Owen muttered.

'Do it,' Jack agreed. 'I want this hub cat free within the hour. Catch them and dump them back out on the streets where they belong. Achoo! And get that one out of here, too.'

Ianto gave Jack the eye before picking Smokey up and walking him back out.




'Fat lot of good our illustrious leader is,' Owen griped, having been left with Tosh and Gwen to implement their plan

'If you were allergic, you wouldn't want to be here either,' Gwen argued.

Owen snorted his derision. 'Amazing what you can delegate your way out of.' Even as he said it, the ginger culprit that had tripped him up from earlier poked its head around the doorway and began moving towards the pod, settling down in its shadow.

'Bloody weird, that is,' Owen said, continuing to watch as a second black cat entered the room, followed by a fluffy white one. 'Like the Pied Piper or something.'

Several more turned up in the next half hour until nine cats were all lounged around the pod, gazing at it like it was the grand sardine. They didn't seem the least bit concerned as they were picked up one by one and loaded into cages, their earlier feistiness gone. Only once they were all caged and the pod's beacon switched off for good, did the real commotion begin. Trapped with nothing else to focus their attention on they began wailing and meowing, desperate to be let out.

'Let's get these flea bags out of here,' Owen said, hefting the first two cages and hauling them out. In the bay was his preference, but the girls out-voted him, opting to load them into the SUV and release them a few blocks away. If he never saw another cat again, he wouldn't be upset over it.




'I thought I told you to get rid of that thing,' Jack said as he entered the tourist office, pausing only to sneeze again. 'Or are the masses still waiting outside our doors?'

Ianto looked up from his computer, eyes settling first on Smokey who was napping on his cushion and then at Jack. 'They're all gone now,' he replied.

Jack went to the door and pulled it open a smidge, just to be sure. The fresh salty breeze that hit his face was a blessed relief. 'Good. Just one last one to boot out the door and then we can call it a day.' He could feel his eyes beginning to prickle already and his nose twitching in anticipation of another sneeze. He'd be so glad when he was back to normal and allergy free.

'He doesn't have a chip or a collar,' Ianto said, 'but I don't think he's stray. We can't just leave him wandering the streets.'

'So, take him to a shelter and let them deal with him.'

Ianto's look was so cold that Jack could almost feel the ice running down his spine. 'Do you know what happens to adult cats that don't end up reclaimed or adopted?'

Jack bit down on his tongue before could utter the words "the big kitty little box in the sky". One wrong move now could leave him bereft of kisses and more for a week. 'We're not adopting him, Ianto. You know I'd say yes if I could but I can't just stop being allergic. I'm sorry, but he's got to go.'

Ianto let out a heavy sigh. 'You're right. He's just too well trained to not be someone's pet.'

Jack could see this was one battle neither of them were going to win. 'Okay, he scan say here for a couple of days, but only here,' Jack warned him. 'Not a single cat hair comes downstairs, got it?' Ianto nodded emphatically. 'We'll make up some lost cat posters and hopefully someone will contact us to take him home.'

'I hope so,' Ianto agreed. 'I'd hate to have to choose between you.'

Jack wrapped him in a headlock and mussed Ianto's hair. 'And I hope you're joking, Ianto Jones. No cat is getting rid of me.'