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Torchwood Fic: The Siege of Annwfn (7/10)
Title: The Siege of Annwfn (7/10)
Author: Emma
Characters: Jack Harkness, Ianto Jones, Torchwood Three Team, Others.
Rating: R
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?
Spoilers: None. This takes place in my Homecoming AU, a few months after The Eye of Neith.
Summary: The only things that stand between our Universe and disaster are Torchwood Three and Ianto’s growing powers…
Author’s Note: There really is a ruined Norman castle built on the foundations of an Iron Age fort in Caerau, a small town outside of
Part one is here; Part two is here; Part three is here ; Part four is here ; Part five is here ; Part six is here
“It’s a set of equations,” John was fairly vibrating, “embedded in the meter. In Welsh meter. Is there even such a thing? In Welsh?”
“Oi!” The admonition came from three different directions.
“Whatever. If anyone wants the details, though beats the hell out of me why anyone would, I filed a report in the case file. It’s a dog’s breakfast of awdlau and caesuras and accent shifts and sound repetition patterns. What it boils down to is that someone actually used Welsh to transmit a major piece of mathematics.”
He tapped a few times on his i/o cube and the main display screen on the conference room filled with symbols.
“It looks more like embroidery than maths,” Gwen said.
“In context it probably is. At this level math can be indistinguishable from art.”
“And it means?” asked Andy.
John shrugged. “Damn if I know. This thing is as over my head as the Arnau-Yy’Na’Ari manipulation of Minkowski space through Lorentz transformations to generate self-sustaining wormholes would be to a present day physicist.”
“I don’t believe it,” said Andy. “Science you can’t understand?”
“I’m a hell of a computer geek and a fair-to-middling hedge engineer, Andy. This,” John tapped the screen, “is pure mathematics, at a level that makes my head hurt. I can recognize bits and pieces, but that’s it.”
“What bits and pieces, John?” Ianto asked.
“This section here,” he tapped the i/o cube again and a section of the symbols glowed bright orange “seems to say that you could generate a pocket Universe if you had enough power. This one here,” another tap, another section changed color, “seems to be related to some of the equations that serve as the basis of vortex manipulator engineering. That’s all I’ve got.”
“Jack?”
“Don’t ask me, Martha. Time Agents weren’t selected for their mathematical acumen. I’m a decent fix-it man, but my training was in psychohistory, social engineering, and tactics.”
“He was scary good at those,” said John. “Give him a couple dozen vids of any one place and he could work out its entire cultural matrix and where its vulnerable spots were.”
“Helpful, I’m sure,” Andy muttered, “if we ever want to take over
“Not quite,” Jack pointed at Andy. “You’re forgetting my other talent, Andy.”
“We’re not going to start talking about sex, are we?”
There was a burst of laughter from the others. Jack aimed his best sexy grin at Andy. “Only if you want to… but no, Andy. I’ve always thought my best talent was making friends.”
He plugged his cell phone into the mainframe port built into the table and speed-dialed a number.
“Hello.”
The equations in the conference room monitor were replaced by the face of a woman. She was no longer young, but her face had the ageless elegance of sharp cheekbones and a generous mouth. Her eyes sparkled with intelligence. Her silver-streaked hair was piled up on top of her head in a classic chignon, and pink diamond drops caught the light as she moved.
“Sarah Jane, my love, how are you?”
“Jack Harkness.” Her smile held affection and not a little suspicion. “I’m doing very well, though not nearly as well as you. To what do I owe the pleasure of a Torchwood call?”
“I need to ask Luke to take a look at something for me.”
“And you thought he would be visiting his aged mother for the weekend?”
“His aged mother my… left foot. You are the most gorgeous grandmother in the
She could hear the sincerity in his voice and it pleased what little vanity she had. “Flatterer. But yes, the whole crew is here for the weekend. I’ll get Luke for you.”
“Thank you.”
“No, I should be thanking you.” She flicked a nail at the shimmering pink stone dangling from her ear and set it swinging. “It was an extravagant birthday present, but I adore them.”
“I knew they would look good on you. Ianto agreed.”
“Jack, a hag would look good in pink diamonds.”
“You are not a hag, and every woman should receive diamonds for her birthday at least once in her life.”
“Devil,” she said affectionately. “I’ll be right back.”
“Jack,” Martha said as they waited. “Have I mentioned I have a birthday coming up?”
“Me too!” Gwen agreed. “Me too!”
“Yes, and you both have husbands,” mocked John. “I think Ianto gets first dibs.”
“John, I’d look dreadful in pink diamonds.”
They bantered back and forth until a new face appeared on the screen, a man in his thirties, rather handsome in an Englishman sort of way, but with the kind of smile that made women from eight to eighty sit up and take notice.
“Hey, Jack. Hi, guys.”
There was a chorus of hellos from around the table.
“Luke. Nice to see you again. How’s the family?”
“Fantastic. Settling back down in
“I’ll bet, mister youngest-chair-of-maths-in-Oxbridge.”
Luke actually blushed. “What can I tell you, Jack? I’m good at what I do.”
“Which is why I called. We have something here neither John nor I can make head or tails out of.”
“Must be some something. Send it through?”
John tapped his i/o cube once more. They only had to wait a few seconds until Luke’s face lit up like a kid’s on Christmas morning. “Wow. As my American colleagues would say, hot damn. That’s some serious math.”
“Can you do something with it? Luke? Luke?”
“Uh?” Distracted eyes met his. “Yes, probably. I’ll call back soon, ok?”
“And he goes under for the last time, ladies and gentlemen!”
“Ha-ha. Funny, Jack. Call you later.”
Jack disconnected the call and sat back with a satisfied smirk. “And that is that. We’ll have answers.”
“You’re always telling us how there are things we’re not supposed to know, just in case we do something that could change the future,” Gwen ventured diffidently, “but you just gave Luke Smith something so far ahead of our time that even John couldn’t understand it. Wouldn’t that, well… I mean, I know we can trust him…”
“I thought about that, Gwen.” Jack seemed to make up his mind about something. “All right, here’s a secret you are all going to have to keep. Luke is already changing the future. His work will create the foundation for what historians in my time call the Great Expansion. Humans will go into space because Luke Smith developed the mathematics for it.”
“And it actually may be that it happened partly because Jack gave him those equations,"said John quietly. “I just remembered. In one of the interviews he gave after winning the Nobel he said that he was very frustrated with his work on general relativity field equations until a friend asked him to solve a puzzle.”
“So Luke Smith invented space travel because someone from the future came back in time and handed him a bunch of equations from the future? And that won’t damage the time lines because Jack was meant to do it in the first place?” Andy groaned as he rubbed his temples. “Duw, you people give me a headache with all the timey-wimey stuff.”
“It’s not that simple, Andy…”
“Nonononono! Be quiet, John. The less we know the better, right? Right. That way I won’t need any paracetamol to function.” He took a deep breath. “Making a fool of myself may be enough of a headache for today, thank you very much.”
“Andy, what’s wrong?” asked Gwen.
“I’m going to stick my neck out and probably look like a prat, but here goes. All last night I kept thinking about this Gwair bloke. Why did he mention Caerau? Thieves are not usually so accommodating in giving police clues to their domiciles. And Jack, you said he didn’t seem happy with what he was doing. And then it hit me. Caerau means from the castle.”
“But the poem mentions lots of castles, Andy,” said John.
“Well, there you go. Maybe yes, maybe not. Some scholars think it’s all one castle, but Taliesin was using the different names as descriptions. So, one castle. In Caerau there’s a Norman castle built on the site of an Iron Age fortification. Falling down like a Saturday drunk, of course.” He looked around the table. “This is probably bollocks…”
“Don’t second guess yourself, Andy,” Jack said. “Keep going.”
“So I went out to Caerau this morning. There’s a new bunch of uni folks digging there again. They’ve found a new area in the old Iron Age fort they think was used as an astronomical observatory.” He sipped his tea nervously. “For the rest, though, is back to the Preiddeu. See, the first castle mentioned in the poem is Caer Sidi. Now, some people say it means the revolving castle but others say it means the place of the zodiac. Wouldn’t that be a good name for an observatory? They were interested in predictions from the stars and all that sort of stuff.”
Jack started to say something, but Andy interrupted him.
“And another thing. The folks at the dig are really accommodating, gave me a tour and everything. The observatory has a room that they call the Treasury because it’s full of old pots and jugs, and they’ve found some neat little coins and such. The poem says Gwair is kept prisoner among the spoils of Annwfn, and he must sing songs about them for all eternity.”
“You know, Andy,” John said respectfully. “When you speculate, you speculate.”
“Oh, there’s more, In the center of the room there’s an upright stone, which they tell me is unusual because it’s inside, and it has a carving on it of a torque and the word Uffern under it, and a big hole on the ground in front of it that was used for a firepit.” He looked around to find everyone staring at him raptly. “Well, don’t you see? There’s a stanza in the Preiddeu that says before the door of the gate of Uffern the lamp was burning. Uffern is the welsh name for the Underworld. A separate world altogether. I think the poem is like, well, like driving directions. We might not know how to get to where these thieving Time Lords are, but we know where to find them.”
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Keep up the good work.
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Incidentally, Andy's speculations rock my socks. I think I even prefer this to Neith, and that's pretty hard to achieve. Your world just keeps getting sharper.
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I'm so glad the characters are good. If they work the fic works; it they don't... My biggest peeve is what I call infantile!Jack. Jesus, yes, he can be a bit of a showoff and he can act up to get his way but about his work, he's deadly serious. People should remember that when they write him.
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Helpful, I'm sure,” Andy muttered, “if we ever want to take over Andorra.
Also, he speculates extremely well.
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