Title: Weather warning

Author: m_findlow

Rating: PG

Length: 3,165 words

Content notes: None

Author notes: Written for Challenge 391 - Storm

Summary: Tosh’s fledgling rift predictor program delivers bad news for the team.

Gwen still couldn't get used to the idea of people knocking before speaking to her. She certainly hadn't invited them to do it, but somehow, since taking charge of the team, they'd fallen back into old habits, automatically deferring to whomever sat behind the desk that had once been Jack's. Truth be told it still didn't feel like hers, and she tried to spend as little time as possible behind it.

‘What is it, Tosh?’ she said looking up to find their technical whizz standing there clutching a tablet to her body and looking worried about something.

‘I'm sure it's probably nothing, but…’

Gwen knew better than to think anything was ever just nothing. ‘What?’ she said, hoping she didn't sound too impatient or bossy.

‘That rift predictor program I've been working on. It's thrown up some strange results.’

Was there anything about this place that wasn't strange? Gwen thought. No two days were ever the same. Even having Tosh devise a program that might be able to start predicting what any given day might be like was almost too much to hope for. Could anyone really predict what the rift might do?

‘What are we talking about?’ She expected Tosh was about to tell her that it was doing the opposite of what it was supposed to do, predicting the worst when absolutely nothing had happened, meaning they'd have to shelve the program and go back to their days being at the will of the gods.

‘Something big.’



Gwen had cut off most of Tosh's explanations, deciding that the team as a whole needed to hear what it was she had to report.

‘Another boring technobabble presentation?’ Owen mused, before reading the seriousness on Gwen and Tosh's faces, and choosing to keep his mouth temporarily shut.

Tosh brought up her computer interface on the large wall screen in the boardroom. ‘The rift predictor program has been operating for three months now,’ she began. ‘It uses measurements provided by the rift machine and other external sensors outside the hub to measure over fifty different types of temporal, spatial and atmospheric conditions, both in the lead up to a rift event, during it, and in the hours and days following it. Add this to the historical rift data we have from the last century and you can start to build up some predictive models for when a rift event might occur, and possibly what has come through as a consequence.’

‘Bottom line, Tosh,’ Owen said, already bored by the peripheral information.

Tosh clicked a few keys, unperturbed by Owen's gruff demeanour. ‘This came through the program at 9.17am this morning.’ She pulled up a schematic graph that was nothing more than a haze of oscillating lines. ‘The predictor program matches current readings to a single event in 1957. Not just a single rift event, but a series of several dozen rift events all at once. Like lighting in a storm, each event hitting a very specific area of Cardiff and causing untold chaos in the space of an hour.’

‘You think we're in for another rift storm?’ Ianto asked, already coining the term for it.

‘In ten hours and twenty eight minutes,’ Tosh confirmed, pulling up a countdown clock on the screen to show the time until the program predicted the major rift spike.

Ianto was already clicking the end of his pen, preparing to make notes. ‘What do the files from 1957 say? How bad was it?’

Tosh bit her lip and Gwen knew already what was coming next. ‘A lot of it is undocumented. Most of the Torchwood agents dealing with the after-effects died. We don’t know what happened, only that their personnel files and their dates of death coincide with this particular date. I think it’s safe to assume the two are inherently connected.’

‘What about Jack?’ Owen asked. “He must’ve been around to tell the tale.’

‘Because we all know how good Jack is with paperwork,’ Ianto replied, unable to resist the quip.

‘If he was there, he didn't file a report on it. Not one that I could find,’ Tosh said, watching as Ianto made a brief note on the pad in front of him to double check for her. If any one could find that particular record, it was their keeper of the archives.

Owen huffed and folded his arms across his body as he leaned back in the chair. ‘So we’ve got a shitstorm coming for us, with basically no warning and no telling what’s going to happen, only that we’re all probably about to die,’ he said, brutally summarising the situation as they saw it.


‘We really don't know,’ Tosh said. ‘I can only tell you what the program is telling me.’

‘Which is experimental at best,’ Owen reminded her. ‘Last week you told me the rift had dropped something small and inanimate. Tell that to the Hoix that nearly ripped off my bloody arm to have it for breakfast.’

‘This is correlative, historical data,’ she replied. ‘It can only work from what’s happened in the past for similar events.’

‘Which is to say basically we really have no idea. S’pose it won’t matter if we’re all dead tomorrow.’

‘Okay, well there’s no sense in panicking,’ Gwen said, trying to stop the situation from escalating between Owen and Tosh. The growing tension in the air was palpable and she knew that ultimately she was responsible for them now. Jack would have told them not to panic. He would have also had a brilliant plant for what they should do, but that was still a work in progress.

Owen snorted. ‘Yeah, ‘cause treating it like nothing bad will happen has always worked so well for us,’ he said before Gwen shot him a warning glare with her eyes that made him immediately shut up.

‘Ianto, Tosh, can we find out any more about the 1957 event and what we might expect?’

‘The records aren't that good,’ Tosh confessed. ‘The rift predictor program is based on them which is what's triggered this alert but other than that, to take Owen’s point, there's really no way of knowing. It's like any storm. We might get winds and heavy rain or hailstones the size of golf balls that rip through the roof and major flash flooding.’

‘See what you can find,’ Gwen insisted. ‘Anything that might help. If this thing really is as big as we think it might be, we need to prepare the city for it. Owen, you get on to the hospitals. Double their rotas for this evening and have every other healthcare worker put on standby. They could be inundated before we know it.’

‘And tell them what?’

‘I don’t know. Heightened terrorist alert, possible chemical spill. Just think of something. I’ll deal with the police, get every officer on the beat and special ops primed and ready to be deployed if we need them. Tosh, see if you can’t override all the local supermarket stock systems. Have them order triple the quantity of everything they have so that it’s on trucks and headed this way within the next 12 hours. Extra drinking water too. If people panic, those shelves are going to be stripped bare in minutes. Ianto…’

‘Let me guess, have the SUV fully stocked, and every weapon in the armoury checked and readied. I’ll add extra fuel for the generators, just in case we get stuck in here without power.’

Gwen nodded. ‘Okay, we all know what we have to do, and not much time to get it done.’ She watched them push their chairs out from the table and silently, but purposefully set about doing what was needed, each of them knowing how important it was to be ready, or at least as ready for the unknown as one could be. Only Ianto tarried to collect their mug which gave Gwen the opportunity she’d been waiting for.

‘Ianto?’ He raised an eyebrow at her as he clutched two mugs in each hand. ‘I also want you to go through Jack's files and the secure archive. He might have something in there that could tell us more. Maybe he was there, and maybe he did file a report. Why he thought to keep it a big secret we have no idea, but if there is a report…’

There was a worrying frown that crossed his face as he took in the full gravity of what Gwen was asking him to do, effectively breaking the rules that they themselves – and Jack – had set. ‘Are you sure? Only it's the secure archives.’

She understood his reticence. Anything could be in there and Jack had always expressly forbid them to open it for any reason. But he’d also lost the right to be mad at them since he’d upped and left them to face this on their own. It was one thing to lock items away inside but taking them out was a different matter. ‘I'm giving you permission,’ Gwen told him. ‘And I trust you.’ She trusted him not to take out anything that might be used for some other purpose should he land upon it. He could stay focused on the task at hand.



Gwen lost herself in hours of phone calls to various emergency services departments, battling with them to take her seriously. That she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell them specifically what they were meant to be preparing for didn’t help her cause, though by the end of it she’d managed to persuade at least a reasonable proportion of them to be on high alert for responding to incidents within forty miles of Cardiff Bay over the next forty eight hours, starting 6pm this evening.

They clearly hadn’t liked dealing with Jack in the past, but neither did they enjoy entertaining any requests from Gwen, even having quoted them the emergency override protocol codes that they’d found pencilled into a small notebook tucked in the top drawer of Jack’s desk back when they’d first pored over his personal work effects three months ago. At least he hadn’t deemed those to be sensitive information that the rest of the team didn’t need to see. Any of them might need to suddenly pull rank with external authorities and having those codes to quote very quickly had them put through to the highest ranking official they could get on the line.

Out of the corner of her eye, Ianto had been emptying the secure archive, tucked away in the corner of the office, at first making a huge pile of crates, inspecting them each in turn and then slowly packing them back away. Gwen had no idea what all those crates contained and to some extent, didn’t want to know. If she’d been hoping for one with a stock of yellowing Torchwood files, describing the near end of the world, she was going to be disappointed as Ianto finally loaded the last crate back into the store and swung the heavy safe door back closed, giving her a defeated look. ‘Sorry, but there’s nothing. I’ve tried hacking his captain's log, even assuming he kept one of those all those years ago, but none of us have managed to crack it. Apart from the plans for the rift machine, I don't think there's anything else that’s going to help us.’

‘Well, we’re not touching the rift machine,’ she said, making that abundantly clear. God alone knew even Tosh, with the plans, would be dicing with danger to try and do anything to influence the rift. It was bad enough that unknown things were going to come through in their droves. They didn’t need to make things worse. The rift machine seemed only able to either open the rift wider or to manipulate its ability to send things back. There was no mention anywhere that there was an ability to shut it off completely. If they could then Torchwood wouldn’t be needed here. Jack would have shut it down decades ago and they all would have led uneventful but safe lives.

‘Can I get you a coffee?’ he asked. There was something so sad in his expression, as if asking was an offer that this might be the last time they ever had coffee.

She reached out to put her hand on his arm, trying to be reassuring. ‘Thank you. That would be lovely.’



Gwen found the hardest part was the sitting around and waiting. Whilst she’d expected that there would be far too much for them to do in such a short space of time, everyone had excelled themselves in doing all that they could to prepare, and even going beyond that as they thought of additional things that they could be doing to ready themselves, and the world outside, for whatever was to come. To imagine that in the hour before it was all due to begin that they’d find themselves just sitting on the sofa, nibbling at the pizza none of them felt like eating, without much to say, was unsettling. They were all lost in their own thoughts of what might lie ahead and whether any of them would make it out the other side. All around them, every computer screen that wasn’t being actively used was showing Tosh’s countdown clock, now with a fateful zero in front of the minutes as they ticked down. That alone was enough to put anyone off their food.

She wished she wasn’t in charge right in this moment. She’d silently been hoping that at any moment, Jack might come swanning back in – their last minute hero, come to save the day and tell them what to do. Gwen had been here the shortest period of time. All the others had years of Torchwood experience under their belt, but they'd chosen Gwen to take the lead. What did that tell her about the faith they put in her to make the right decisions? It hadn’t been perfect so far, and even Owen could attest to how difficult it was to be the one making the hard calls, having led the team for three whole weeks before tossing it in. Gwen didn't have that option. No one else wanted the job.



With less than a minute left on the clock, there was a tension as they all took up positions, hovering in front of computer screens or rechecking firearms, ready to run for the SUV at a second’s notice. It’ll be fine, Gwen wanted to say, imagining Jack saying it at that very moment to calm their nerves, but instead she kept her mouth shut. It wasn’t fair to make those kinds of promises.

The rift machine at the heart of the hub didn’t even wait for Tosh’s clock to officially hit zero hour. It began to hum in an annoyed fashion. The metal gangways around them rattled and groaned, as if the rift were trying to shove out something huge and straining from the effort of doing so. It was beginning, and on the inside, Gwen was slightly terrified.

‘Tosh?’

The invocation wasn’t necessary. Both she and Ianto were already at their computers, trying to analyse whatever it was that was going on and to provide them with better intelligence.

‘It's not…’ Ianto began.

‘I know,’ Tosh replied, eyes fixed on her bank of computer screens as he flicked from one window to another at rapid speed, fingers moving with equal pace.

‘What’s not?’ Owen asked.

Tosh shook her head. ‘I don't get it.’

Ianto looked back at her, frown equally perplexed. ‘Are you sure?’

She shook her head. ‘No.’

The hub was still rattling and creaking, the old Victorian brickwork holding up despite bits of ancient mortal crumbling from in between the bricks and spilling down from up on high.Then it all just stopped, like someone had flicked a switch. It had lasted less than a minute. Everything fell silent, even the keyboard strokes from Tosh’s nimble fingers.

‘Someone tell me what’s happened,’ Gwen demanded, looking up to make sure that the hub roof wasn’t still about to collapse in on them.

‘Um, well…’ Ianto began. ‘Nothing, actually.’

Owen scoffed. ‘What d’you mean nothing? This place was about to fall in on itself. Where's all the end of the world stuff?’

‘It just isn’t,’ Tosh said, checking and rechecking readings on several screens. ‘I mean, it looked like something was about to come through and then it just didn’t.’

‘Your delivery has been diverted to an alternate destination?’ Ianto remarked.

‘That just shouldn't happen,’ Tosh replied. She turned away from her computer screens to look first at Gwen, then at Owen. ‘The end of the rift is situated here,’ she said, pointing down at her feet. ‘It’s the other end that moves across time and space.’ Tosh had once attempted to explain it to Gwen as if it were a snake with its tail pinned to the ground, but swinging wildly around at the top end. Now it sounded like that explanation was about to be debunked. ‘If something was going to force its way through the rift, it’d arrive here, not just end up somewhere else. But… all our systems are recording nothing having come through. There’s not even the residual temporal energy we usually see, that tends to hang around like dust kicked up.’

‘You mean that’s it?’ Gwen asked, trying to get clarity. ‘The rift storm has gone?’

‘Gone around us altogether, more like,’ Tosh said. She pushed her glasses further up her nose and refocused on the screen. ‘It still doesn't make sense. The rift predictor gave a confidence interval of 93%. That’s more accurate than any of the analyses it’s done to date.’

‘So, what you’re saying is the program got it wrong.’ Gwen had never been so relieved to be wrong in all her life.

‘Not wrong, just…’ Gwen could tell from Tosh’s body language that she had one hundred percent confidence in the program and what it had told them was coming. Something else must have interfered at the time, preventing the rift from doing what it had intended.

‘So, can we agree that the world isn't going to end today?’ Ianto asked. ‘Just that council taxes are due next week and it’d be good to know whether to pay them or not.’

‘Christ I need a drink,’ Owen said, flopping back on the sofa.

‘I’ll go get the coffee machine started,’ Ianto said, standing up from his computer.

‘Nah, don’t bother. I’m going to need something stronger than that. I say we all go out and get absolutely shitfaced.’

Tosh and Ianto both looked to Gwen for guidance. Apparently it was her final call whether they’d just dodged a bullet and that it wasn’t about to come back and bite them. ‘Does the program have anything scheduled in the next forty eight hours?’

Tosh tapped a few keys. ‘Nothing.’

Gwen nodded. ‘Good. Then let’s go get shitfaced. My treat.’ For once, that was one order she didn’t mind enforcing.