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Title: Reunion
Pairing: Jack/Ianto
Rating: It's all as innocent as a summer rain... if Jack and Ianto were playing outside
Summary: After seven years, Jack and Ianto meet again
Disclaimer: Oh, please. If I owned them, would I let some of those idiots write the scripts? And if I were making any money off them, would I be where they could find me?
Author's Note: During my recent writer's brick wall (writer's block doesn't quite do it justice) I did manage to write something. This stand-alone was written for torchwood-fest.livejournal.com/. As usual, I forgot that livejournal and dreamwidth do not pick up the formatting in a .doc. My fault, I should have coded it properly, but, considering how many meds I was on, I doubt I could have been successful. Therefore, here it is. BTW, I do encourage you to go read the stories, especially the one written for me by tonjavmoore: torchwood-fest.livejournal.com/49611.html. She gave me a romantic!sappy!Jack that works perfectly, and an Owen that knows how to deliver a proper ass-kicking to a clueless man.
“I suppose so.” She sipped the tea, strong and sweet, the perfect cure for the megrims she seemed to be incubating. “Andy, what'll happen if we can't find who killed that... unprintable illegitimate of an ambassador?”
He shrugged. “We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. They've given us a week. After that...”
He shrugged again. Gwen knew exactly how he felt. She wasn't going down into slavery without putting up one hell of a fight. Rhys had spent most of his growing years in the Beacons; there were plenty of hiding places up there for a guerrilla band.
She remembered how excited everyone had been when it was announced that the Inabraxan Alliance's Quinquennial Assembly would be held in Cardiff. Humanity was the Alliance's youngest partner, and in the general run of things they wouldn't have hosted an Assembly for centuries; the Inabraxan were nothing if not conservative in their choices. But there seemed to have been other considerations, and the Council had deadlocked until the Onemi councillor had suggested Earth as a compromise, and the city of Cardiff in particular. The announcement had sent the whole planet into a frenzy of preparations, culminating in an Eisteddfod concert in the five-hundred-year old Millennium Centre.
And it had ended in murder and the possible loss of the planet to aliens.
The dull slap of trainers on the metal floor made them turn. Suzie Costello, the head tech of the Crime Scene Reconstruction Lab, was running towards them, a panicked expression on her face.
“They're here!”
“Slow down, Suzie,” Andy took hold of the woman's hand, pulling her to an abrupt stop. “Who's here?”
“Torchwood!”
The cup slipped from Gwen's suddenly nerveless fingers and crashed to the floor. The Inabraxan Alliance's Office of Intercultural Affairs was, as far as she could figure out, a cross between a police force and a university. They held jurisdiction over any situation that impacted two or more of the Alliance's member Cultures, and that jurisdiction was both wide and deep. The Torchwood team were Human Cultures specialists. It had been named after the estate in the Scottish Highlands were the first Human-Inabraxan contract had been signed. It was rumoured that the team leader was actually human, but since the OIA field operatives list was considered one of the Alliance's greatest trade secrets, even the most tenacious webnews hound had nothing but gossip and legend to report. Torchwood was supposedly both highly successful and completely ruthless.
“Duw!” Andy chuckled. “Top brass will be unhappy today.”
Gwen picked up her cup and threw it into the closest trash container. Andy was right; the Chief Constable wasn't going to be happy about having strangers take over the investigation. Worse, as far as Gwen was concerned, was that she didn't know Torchwood's brief in the matter. From what she could remember of her Uni history classes, the Alliance hadn't always sided with the underdog.
The front door was pulled wide open and a crowd marched through. Every senior official of the South Wales Constabulary seemed to be pulled along in the wake of a tall, brown-haired man wearing an ankle-sweeping brown leather coat. He was probably the most handsome man Gwen had ever seen, with deep blue eyes that swept over her as he took in everyone and everything in the room and then returned for a more lingering look. Behind him came a woman that looked human and yet alien, with long, elegant arms and legs, dark oriental eyes, and a mane of blue-black hair secured into an elaborate braided hairdo. Next to her danced a t'Li, a Person that to human eyes resembled a praying mantis, with a double set of wings exquisitely shaded in gold, red, and green.
“With all due respect, Chief, we don't need them,” Gwen's boss, the Chief of Major Crimes and a major pain in the arse to his subordinates, pushed his way to the front of the pack. “I've put my best team on it.”
The t'Li made a noise that resembled a glissando played on a badly tuned harp. “You need us.” The voicebox he wore produced the usual bland English accent but it had a faint Cockney overlay. “Unless you have a yen to spend the next five hundred years as a eeulinaali so-called protectorate.”
The chief gave him a look of pure dislike. “If they really wanted to help us, they would have sent experts on the eeulinaali.” He managed not to mangle the name, for which Gwen gave devout thanks. “Aren't you supposed to be the experts on Human culture?”
The man in the long coat looked at him over his shoulder. “There are no experts on eeulinaali culture. There are a couple of people, however, who have enough knowledge to give us an edge.” He strode towards Gwen and offered his hand with a flirtatious smile. “I'm Captain Jack Harkness. And you are?”
“Jack!” The tall woman admonished.
“Don't be a spoilsport, Tosh. I was just saying hello!”
“I don't mind,” Gwen told the woman. “I'm Detective Inspector Gwen Cooper.”
“Well, Detective Inspector Gwen Cooper, you are now seconded to Torchwood for the duration.”
“Wait a minute!” The chief shouted. “You can't do that!”
“I suggest you take another look at your copy of the contract.” The lovely voice turned icy. “I can have anything I want, and right now, I want Gwen to do me a favor.” He turned back to Gwen, smile firmly in place. “I need you to go to the University of Cardiff, locate Professor Ianto Jones of the Anthropology department, and bring him here.”
“That won't be necessary.”
A man made his way through the crowd. Gwen couldn't help but gawk just a little. If Captain Harkness was the most handsome man she had ever met, this man was the most beautiful. The elegant jaw line and blue-gray eyes gave him vidstar appeal, enhanced by the old-fashioned suit he wore with elegant ease. But it was the soft smile playing on his lips that made Gwen sigh a little.
"That's an anthropology professor?” Gwen heard Suzie whisper. The two women shared a smirk.
“Ianto!” The woman Captain Harkness had called Tosh launched herself into the newcomer's arms. “So good to see you!”
He wrapped his arms around her and hung on for dear life. “My lovely Toshiko.”
The t'Li whistled and clicked in his own language. Professor Jones took something out of his pocket and, to the astonishment of all except the Torchwood group, answered in the same language. Finally, the t'Li threw out his grasping legs in an oddly human gesture.
“Tea-Boy!”
The professor thumped the exposed thorax. “It's good to see you again, Owen.”
Gwen nearly giggled. It was customary for a t'Li to ask a friend from another Culture to choose a name for the t'Li to use, since it was impossible for most Persons to pronounce a t'Li name. Professor Jones must have been tad bedydd to this particular one. It was obviously a family reunion of sorts.
Something made her look at Captain Harkness and was startled to see a deep sorrow flash across his eyes for a second. Then the armor was back in place and he grinned merrily.
“Ianto! Look good in a suit!”
CHAPTER TWO: JACK
The moment he heard Ianto's voice he realized all his blather about time and distance and moving on had been just that. Empty blather. No matter what happened for the rest of his life, Ianto would be the most important person in it, whether he was in the same room or three wormhole jumps away, and Jack foresaw a life filled with sudden jolts of memory and regretful dreams.
The worst thing was knowing Ianto felt the same way. Jack didn't doubt Ianto's love, any more than he doubted his own for Ianto. Love had never been the problem. It was Ianto's need for a family that had crashed their world. Jack knew he wasn't fit to raise children. Not after Gray.
And none of it mattered right now. Jack would be double-damned if he let the eeulinaali take Humanity's home away from them, and that meant Ianto. He plastered a big smile on his face and advanced on his ex-lover, hand extended.
“Ianto! Look good in a suit!”
“Careful, sir. That's harassment.”
They shook hands, smiling ruefully in acknowledgment of everything left unsaid. Jack turned to the local boffins. “Thank you, gentlemen. We'll probably use this building as our base of operations. It's our understanding that you are decommissioning it as a forensics lab, and it's exactly what we need. Inspector Cooper will act as liaison between Torchwood and the local authorities.” He looked over Andy and Suzie. “I believe Inspector Davidson and Ms. Costello will be useful also.” He ignored the assorted splutterings and harrumphings and swept on down the corridor. “Suzie, I can call you Suzie, can't I? Good. I'm Jack. And do you have a holo lab?”
Suzie hurried after him. “We do. Gwen and Andy... uh... inspectors Cooper and Davidson... asked me to program the feed from their casecams into it yesterday, so it's all set up.”
Looking over his shoulder he gave Gwen and Andy a dazzling smile. “Well done, children. Lead on, Suzie.”
They followed her down the corridor to a large cog door. She tapped a sequence on a flat metal plate inset in its center then flattened her palm on it. Jack heard the faint whirr of a chromosomal sequencer. A few seconds later the cog door rolled aside.
“Good security,” Jack said.
“A bit outdated.” Suzie shrugged. “Once they decided to concentrated all the major lab work at Canary Wharf in London, they stopped keeping the regional labs up to date.”
She led them into the hangar-sized space beyond. Floors, walls, and ceiling were lined with black plastiglass and inset with projectors.
“Control room over there,” Suzie pointed. “Do you want me to run the program or would one of your people...”
“No, you go ahead. Gwen, Andy, with me.”
The two cops took up positions behind him.
“You knew who we were before you got here,” Gwen said calmly.
“Information makes all the difference between success and failure in our business. More to the point, I needed to know if you were competent enough for us to trust your observations.”
Andy snorted. “And your conclusions?”
“You're still in the room, aren't you?” The overhead lights flickered and faded away, leaving the room in darkness. “Here we go.”
The Plas came to life around them. It was night, with a full moon high overhead. An excited crowd milled around, kept back from the area nearest the fountain by uniformed constables and what looked like miles of police barriers. Media vans jockeyed for position. Snatches of Christmas music could be heard above the tumult.
“Gwen, tell me what you saw.”
“We got pulled from another case, so by the time we got here the forensic people were half finished.” An image of Gwen ran towards a group gathered around a fabric-covered mound. One of the men turned and waved to her. “Peter Miller. Good man, knows what he knows and what he doesn't know. Not that he was allowed to do much. The body was claimed by the eeulinaali embassy. Cultural taboo.”
The image-Gwen pulled the fabric off the mound. An eeulinaali male sprawled face down, half-in and half-out of the fountain. His crest feathers made a halo in the water. One of his arms was twisted backwards as if he were trying to touch his back.
“Freeze it!” Ianto stepped forward to examine the tableau. “Owen, look at this.”
The t'Li scurried over, wings flickering lightly. They bent over the image-body, clicking and whistling softly. It was a familiar scene to Jack, and one he had never expected to see again. As Owen extended his wings for balance, he heard a small gasp, immediately suppressed, behind him. He grinned slyly. That Gwen Cooper could be a keeper, he thought. Now, for Detective Inspector Davidson.
“Andy, tell me what you saw.”
“While Gwen talked to the forensic types I tried to get eyewitness reports.” The policeman snorted. “No joy there. The Plas was filled with gawkers, all hoping to catch a glimpse of the Assembly delegates. They were keeping warm in the usual fashion. Many were too pissed to see anything and of those who said they had seen something, well, the stories were inventive, to say the least . Nothing played out. The Ambassador's entourage was whisked away, diplomatic immunity, so we're left with a big blank.”
Toshiko returned from making a circuit of the scene. “There are at least three places with direct lines-of-sight to the fountain. A professional assassin would have used them. One single shot and that would have been that.”
Ianto and Owen joined the group. “One blow between the shoulder blades, then a thrust with something very long, very slender, and very sharp. See how he’s reaching backwards? He felt it go in,” the t'Li reported. “But it didn't kill him. It immobilized him. He drowned in the fountain.”
Jack whistled. “Nasty death for an eeulinaali aristocrat.”
“Why?” Andy asked.
“During the eeulinaali Wars of Succession, drowning was used as a means of execution for clan traitors,” Ianto explained. “Whoever did this recreated the execution of a Great One.”
“So it was personal,” Jack said.
“There have been rumours of a war among the Cliffs clans. Ambassador iilaaila'inali was considered to be the most likely heir to the iil clan War Leader. Eliminating the future leader of an enemy clan while getting a new planet for your people would be considered quite a success. Or maybe, just maybe, that's what we're supposed to think.”
“I feel a long lesson in eeulinaali sociopolitics coming on,” the t'Li complained. “And I haven't had decent coffee in ages. Any possibility of a place to sit down and have a cuppa?”
Jack heard another suppressed giggle from the locals. “Suzie?”
The hologram flickered and disappeared. “We have a conference room upstairs,” the technician reappeared, taking off a pair of black gloves lined with circuitry. “But I don't think we have anything but instant coffee and tea.”
Jack turned to Ianto, hands held in front of him as in prayer. “Tell me you can do something for us.”
Ianto rolled his eyes. “Don't I always?”
Pairing: Jack/Ianto
Rating: It's all as innocent as a summer rain... if Jack and Ianto were playing outside
Summary: After seven years, Jack and Ianto meet again
Disclaimer: Oh, please. If I owned them, would I let some of those idiots write the scripts? And if I were making any money off them, would I be where they could find me?
Author's Note: During my recent writer's brick wall (writer's block doesn't quite do it justice) I did manage to write something. This stand-alone was written for torchwood-fest.livejournal.com/. As usual, I forgot that livejournal and dreamwidth do not pick up the formatting in a .doc. My fault, I should have coded it properly, but, considering how many meds I was on, I doubt I could have been successful. Therefore, here it is. BTW, I do encourage you to go read the stories, especially the one written for me by tonjavmoore: torchwood-fest.livejournal.com/49611.html. She gave me a romantic!sappy!Jack that works perfectly, and an Owen that knows how to deliver a proper ass-kicking to a clueless man.
CHAPTER ONE: GWEN
Detective Inspector Gwen Cooper of the Cardiff Major Crimes Unit stared at the lights of the spaceport that crouched like a poisonous spider at the edge of the bay. Even the Christmas lights festooning the buildings couldn't relieve their menacing air. Maybe the earthfirsters are right and we should stay home and mind our own business. She realized she had spoken out loud when she heard her partner snort.
“We're not the stay at home types, Gwen,” Andy handed her a steaming cup. “Humans always want to see what's on the other side of the mountain. Or the galaxy.”
“I suppose so.” She sipped the tea, strong and sweet, the perfect cure for the megrims she seemed to be incubating. “Andy, what'll happen if we can't find who killed that... unprintable illegitimate of an ambassador?”
He shrugged. “We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. They've given us a week. After that...”
He shrugged again. Gwen knew exactly how he felt. She wasn't going down into slavery without putting up one hell of a fight. Rhys had spent most of his growing years in the Beacons; there were plenty of hiding places up there for a guerrilla band.
She remembered how excited everyone had been when it was announced that the Inabraxan Alliance's Quinquennial Assembly would be held in Cardiff. Humanity was the Alliance's youngest partner, and in the general run of things they wouldn't have hosted an Assembly for centuries; the Inabraxan were nothing if not conservative in their choices. But there seemed to have been other considerations, and the Council had deadlocked until the Onemi councillor had suggested Earth as a compromise, and the city of Cardiff in particular. The announcement had sent the whole planet into a frenzy of preparations, culminating in an Eisteddfod concert in the five-hundred-year old Millennium Centre.
And it had ended in murder and the possible loss of the planet to aliens.
The dull slap of trainers on the metal floor made them turn. Suzie Costello, the head tech of the Crime Scene Reconstruction Lab, was running towards them, a panicked expression on her face.
“They're here!”
“Slow down, Suzie,” Andy took hold of the woman's hand, pulling her to an abrupt stop. “Who's here?”
“Torchwood!”
The cup slipped from Gwen's suddenly nerveless fingers and crashed to the floor. The Inabraxan Alliance's Office of Intercultural Affairs was, as far as she could figure out, a cross between a police force and a university. They held jurisdiction over any situation that impacted two or more of the Alliance's member Cultures, and that jurisdiction was both wide and deep. The Torchwood team were Human Cultures specialists. It had been named after the estate in the Scottish Highlands were the first Human-Inabraxan contract had been signed. It was rumoured that the team leader was actually human, but since the OIA field operatives list was considered one of the Alliance's greatest trade secrets, even the most tenacious webnews hound had nothing but gossip and legend to report. Torchwood was supposedly both highly successful and completely ruthless.
“Duw!” Andy chuckled. “Top brass will be unhappy today.”
Gwen picked up her cup and threw it into the closest trash container. Andy was right; the Chief Constable wasn't going to be happy about having strangers take over the investigation. Worse, as far as Gwen was concerned, was that she didn't know Torchwood's brief in the matter. From what she could remember of her Uni history classes, the Alliance hadn't always sided with the underdog.
The front door was pulled wide open and a crowd marched through. Every senior official of the South Wales Constabulary seemed to be pulled along in the wake of a tall, brown-haired man wearing an ankle-sweeping brown leather coat. He was probably the most handsome man Gwen had ever seen, with deep blue eyes that swept over her as he took in everyone and everything in the room and then returned for a more lingering look. Behind him came a woman that looked human and yet alien, with long, elegant arms and legs, dark oriental eyes, and a mane of blue-black hair secured into an elaborate braided hairdo. Next to her danced a t'Li, a Person that to human eyes resembled a praying mantis, with a double set of wings exquisitely shaded in gold, red, and green.
“With all due respect, Chief, we don't need them,” Gwen's boss, the Chief of Major Crimes and a major pain in the arse to his subordinates, pushed his way to the front of the pack. “I've put my best team on it.”
The t'Li made a noise that resembled a glissando played on a badly tuned harp. “You need us.” The voicebox he wore produced the usual bland English accent but it had a faint Cockney overlay. “Unless you have a yen to spend the next five hundred years as a eeulinaali so-called protectorate.”
The chief gave him a look of pure dislike. “If they really wanted to help us, they would have sent experts on the eeulinaali.” He managed not to mangle the name, for which Gwen gave devout thanks. “Aren't you supposed to be the experts on Human culture?”
The man in the long coat looked at him over his shoulder. “There are no experts on eeulinaali culture. There are a couple of people, however, who have enough knowledge to give us an edge.” He strode towards Gwen and offered his hand with a flirtatious smile. “I'm Captain Jack Harkness. And you are?”
“Jack!” The tall woman admonished.
“Don't be a spoilsport, Tosh. I was just saying hello!”
“I don't mind,” Gwen told the woman. “I'm Detective Inspector Gwen Cooper.”
“Well, Detective Inspector Gwen Cooper, you are now seconded to Torchwood for the duration.”
“Wait a minute!” The chief shouted. “You can't do that!”
“I suggest you take another look at your copy of the contract.” The lovely voice turned icy. “I can have anything I want, and right now, I want Gwen to do me a favor.” He turned back to Gwen, smile firmly in place. “I need you to go to the University of Cardiff, locate Professor Ianto Jones of the Anthropology department, and bring him here.”
“That won't be necessary.”
A man made his way through the crowd. Gwen couldn't help but gawk just a little. If Captain Harkness was the most handsome man she had ever met, this man was the most beautiful. The elegant jaw line and blue-gray eyes gave him vidstar appeal, enhanced by the old-fashioned suit he wore with elegant ease. But it was the soft smile playing on his lips that made Gwen sigh a little.
"That's an anthropology professor?” Gwen heard Suzie whisper. The two women shared a smirk.
“Ianto!” The woman Captain Harkness had called Tosh launched herself into the newcomer's arms. “So good to see you!”
He wrapped his arms around her and hung on for dear life. “My lovely Toshiko.”
The t'Li whistled and clicked in his own language. Professor Jones took something out of his pocket and, to the astonishment of all except the Torchwood group, answered in the same language. Finally, the t'Li threw out his grasping legs in an oddly human gesture.
“Tea-Boy!”
The professor thumped the exposed thorax. “It's good to see you again, Owen.”
Gwen nearly giggled. It was customary for a t'Li to ask a friend from another Culture to choose a name for the t'Li to use, since it was impossible for most Persons to pronounce a t'Li name. Professor Jones must have been tad bedydd to this particular one. It was obviously a family reunion of sorts.
Something made her look at Captain Harkness and was startled to see a deep sorrow flash across his eyes for a second. Then the armor was back in place and he grinned merrily.
“Ianto! Look good in a suit!”
CHAPTER TWO: JACK
The moment he heard Ianto's voice he realized all his blather about time and distance and moving on had been just that. Empty blather. No matter what happened for the rest of his life, Ianto would be the most important person in it, whether he was in the same room or three wormhole jumps away, and Jack foresaw a life filled with sudden jolts of memory and regretful dreams.
The worst thing was knowing Ianto felt the same way. Jack didn't doubt Ianto's love, any more than he doubted his own for Ianto. Love had never been the problem. It was Ianto's need for a family that had crashed their world. Jack knew he wasn't fit to raise children. Not after Gray.
And none of it mattered right now. Jack would be double-damned if he let the eeulinaali take Humanity's home away from them, and that meant Ianto. He plastered a big smile on his face and advanced on his ex-lover, hand extended.
“Ianto! Look good in a suit!”
“Careful, sir. That's harassment.”
They shook hands, smiling ruefully in acknowledgment of everything left unsaid. Jack turned to the local boffins. “Thank you, gentlemen. We'll probably use this building as our base of operations. It's our understanding that you are decommissioning it as a forensics lab, and it's exactly what we need. Inspector Cooper will act as liaison between Torchwood and the local authorities.” He looked over Andy and Suzie. “I believe Inspector Davidson and Ms. Costello will be useful also.” He ignored the assorted splutterings and harrumphings and swept on down the corridor. “Suzie, I can call you Suzie, can't I? Good. I'm Jack. And do you have a holo lab?”
Suzie hurried after him. “We do. Gwen and Andy... uh... inspectors Cooper and Davidson... asked me to program the feed from their casecams into it yesterday, so it's all set up.”
Looking over his shoulder he gave Gwen and Andy a dazzling smile. “Well done, children. Lead on, Suzie.”
They followed her down the corridor to a large cog door. She tapped a sequence on a flat metal plate inset in its center then flattened her palm on it. Jack heard the faint whirr of a chromosomal sequencer. A few seconds later the cog door rolled aside.
“Good security,” Jack said.
“A bit outdated.” Suzie shrugged. “Once they decided to concentrated all the major lab work at Canary Wharf in London, they stopped keeping the regional labs up to date.”
She led them into the hangar-sized space beyond. Floors, walls, and ceiling were lined with black plastiglass and inset with projectors.
“Control room over there,” Suzie pointed. “Do you want me to run the program or would one of your people...”
“No, you go ahead. Gwen, Andy, with me.”
The two cops took up positions behind him.
“You knew who we were before you got here,” Gwen said calmly.
“Information makes all the difference between success and failure in our business. More to the point, I needed to know if you were competent enough for us to trust your observations.”
Andy snorted. “And your conclusions?”
“You're still in the room, aren't you?” The overhead lights flickered and faded away, leaving the room in darkness. “Here we go.”
The Plas came to life around them. It was night, with a full moon high overhead. An excited crowd milled around, kept back from the area nearest the fountain by uniformed constables and what looked like miles of police barriers. Media vans jockeyed for position. Snatches of Christmas music could be heard above the tumult.
“Gwen, tell me what you saw.”
“We got pulled from another case, so by the time we got here the forensic people were half finished.” An image of Gwen ran towards a group gathered around a fabric-covered mound. One of the men turned and waved to her. “Peter Miller. Good man, knows what he knows and what he doesn't know. Not that he was allowed to do much. The body was claimed by the eeulinaali embassy. Cultural taboo.”
The image-Gwen pulled the fabric off the mound. An eeulinaali male sprawled face down, half-in and half-out of the fountain. His crest feathers made a halo in the water. One of his arms was twisted backwards as if he were trying to touch his back.
“Freeze it!” Ianto stepped forward to examine the tableau. “Owen, look at this.”
The t'Li scurried over, wings flickering lightly. They bent over the image-body, clicking and whistling softly. It was a familiar scene to Jack, and one he had never expected to see again. As Owen extended his wings for balance, he heard a small gasp, immediately suppressed, behind him. He grinned slyly. That Gwen Cooper could be a keeper, he thought. Now, for Detective Inspector Davidson.
“Andy, tell me what you saw.”
“While Gwen talked to the forensic types I tried to get eyewitness reports.” The policeman snorted. “No joy there. The Plas was filled with gawkers, all hoping to catch a glimpse of the Assembly delegates. They were keeping warm in the usual fashion. Many were too pissed to see anything and of those who said they had seen something, well, the stories were inventive, to say the least . Nothing played out. The Ambassador's entourage was whisked away, diplomatic immunity, so we're left with a big blank.”
Toshiko returned from making a circuit of the scene. “There are at least three places with direct lines-of-sight to the fountain. A professional assassin would have used them. One single shot and that would have been that.”
Ianto and Owen joined the group. “One blow between the shoulder blades, then a thrust with something very long, very slender, and very sharp. See how he’s reaching backwards? He felt it go in,” the t'Li reported. “But it didn't kill him. It immobilized him. He drowned in the fountain.”
Jack whistled. “Nasty death for an eeulinaali aristocrat.”
“Why?” Andy asked.
“During the eeulinaali Wars of Succession, drowning was used as a means of execution for clan traitors,” Ianto explained. “Whoever did this recreated the execution of a Great One.”
“So it was personal,” Jack said.
“There have been rumours of a war among the Cliffs clans. Ambassador iilaaila'inali was considered to be the most likely heir to the iil clan War Leader. Eliminating the future leader of an enemy clan while getting a new planet for your people would be considered quite a success. Or maybe, just maybe, that's what we're supposed to think.”
“I feel a long lesson in eeulinaali sociopolitics coming on,” the t'Li complained. “And I haven't had decent coffee in ages. Any possibility of a place to sit down and have a cuppa?”
Jack heard another suppressed giggle from the locals. “Suzie?”
The hologram flickered and disappeared. “We have a conference room upstairs,” the technician reappeared, taking off a pair of black gloves lined with circuitry. “But I don't think we have anything but instant coffee and tea.”
Jack turned to Ianto, hands held in front of him as in prayer. “Tell me you can do something for us.”
Ianto rolled his eyes. “Don't I always?”
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