Treachery - Triage 8/?

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TITLE:   Triage (Part 8 of the Treachery Series)
RATING:  PG-13
WARNING:  None
CHARACTERS:  Ianto (John), Tosh, Ocs 
DISCLAIMER:  Not mine; Aunty B's and RTD's
WORDS: ~ 1256
SUMMARY:  A post-cyberwoman fic.  Ianto(John)'s future with UNIT is debated; Tosh discovers some disturbing information about Ianto.

Treachery (Part 1) here:  http://aviv-b.livejournal.com/49816.html 
All chapter are linked.

 

He woke up alone in bed. Looking around, he realized that he was in a hospital room. A set of electrodes were attached to his chest and another lead was threaded to a small band around his finger. He looked at the monitor and saw that his heart rate, blood pressure and oxygen saturation were being measured. “Where the hell am I?  How did I get...?”

The door opened. A man dressed in a white lab coat entered and looked at the monitor. “You are doing much better Mr. Thomas. You gave us quite a scare.”

John was confused. He thought he remembered, but no he couldn’t remember. Was he in Moscow, no that couldn’t be right? “Where am I, what’s going on?”

The man, a physician John assumed, smiled and went to adjust his IV. “I’m noticing a slight elevation of your white count, just going to add an antibiotic to your drip; don’t want you getting in infection.”

The ‘doctor’ pulled up a chair and began to speak softly to John. John felt himself relaxing at the sound of the man’s voice. “You are in the UNIT hospital in London. You were unable to complete your mission successfully but you got away and were brought to safety.”

John tried to focus, but it was so hard, and he was so tired. “But, the boy…” he started to say but couldn’t think of the rest of the sentence.

“The boy is safe; he’s safe because you always do a good job. You were frightened when the mission failed and dreamt that something bad was going to happen to him. Nothing bad happened, the boy is safe.” The voice droned on and on as John felt himself sinking into oblivion. “Thank goodness, it was only a dream.”

 ***

“What the hell were you thinking?” John’s handler spat at the Colonel as they watched John and the doctor through a camera discretely placed in a light fixture.

“He has to know the price of failure.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, you almost made him short circuit. He’s a prototype; while we’ve removed most of his empathic architecture he’s still fully human and is quite capable of feeling emotions.”

“Pity, I thought we were closer to creating a Cyberman than we appear to be.”

The trainer gritted his teeth. These officers were such idiots. It took so much time and effort to create John, a man totally controlled by their inputs, yet who believed he was perfectly free to act. They’d had numerous failures before John. The first attempt had resulted in an agent who could follow orders but couldn’t react to changing inputs. No ability to improvise lead to his death on his second minor mission, a simple robbery gone wrong.  The next two agents had too much ability to improvise. Both had gone rogue. One had killed several UNIT employees before being killed herself; the second had committed suicide after a mission failure.

The next batch of conversions did better, but still had problems. One had tried to run away in horror after his first successful assassination, another had gone completely mad after half a dozen missions, and the last one before John was still operational, but increasingly brutal toward his comfort companion. They were trying to tone down his pent up aggression, but if they were unsuccessful, they would have to destroy him as well.

And now John Thomas. It looked like he was going to be a failure as well. Everything had been going fine, even this failure shouldn’t have been a big setback if it had been handled right. But no, the UNIT brass always thought they knew best. Rough him up a bit, frighten him a bit, what a colossal mistake that was.

They had worked for weeks trying to get John to forget the murder of his comfort companion, if they couldn’t stamp that memory out, he’d be useless. 

“Why don’t you just give the whole Cyberman wish a rest. Let’s just see if we can’t get this one back to a functioning level. We created a brilliant assassin, let’s just work with what we have.”

“Of course,” the Colonel said deferentially. Inside he smirked at the handler’s lack of perspective. “Creating a perfect assassin is marvelous, but if you think UNIT is dumping hundreds of millions of Euros into this project to create mere assassins, you are sadly mistaken.”

“I’ll leave you to your rehabilitation work, then” the Colonel said getting up from the observation room. “We have one final mission for Mr. Thomas; just get him well enough for that and he’ll have served his purpose.”

***

Tosh stared at the computer in dismay. She hadn’t hacked into Jack’s records but decided to take a different tact. While she knew that the reports about Ianto’s progress as a tour guide might be a decoy, she was surprised that other than Jack’s records, there were no records planted on-line to support the deception. She was sure that if Ianto was living in Edinburgh working in any trade she would have found a trace of him. She looked at endless records for people meeting Ianto’s general description and came up empty. She had looked at every person listed as a tour guide, travel agent or related profession and found nothing. She had even had face recognition software scan every CCTV feed in Scotlandover the prior three years. Nothing. It was if Ianto Jones had disappeared off the face of the Earth.

As she sat there she pulled up the picture she had taken of Ianto leading a group of tourists around Edinburgh. She enlarged his face and looked at the area around his body. It was certainly him, and if it had been altered someone very, very good had done the work. She looked at random sections, enlarging them to see if even one pixel had been altered. It looked like the picture was genuine.

Just as she was about to close down her computer something caught her eye. There was a spec of red in the corner of the background that she had enlarged. It was probably nothing, but it would only take a minute to check. She yawned and stretched and refocused her attention. She reduced the enlargement a bit and began to refocus. There was definitely a tiny red object at the side of one of the buildings in the background. She worked at enlarging that area, refocusing until the image became clear.

She gasped. It was a man in a uniform with a red cap on his head. No, it couldn’t be. She worked the image some more until she could see the insignia. UNIT. It was a UNIT soldier with a weapon trained on Ianto and the tourists. Something was terribly wrong.

What the hell was going on? What was UNIT doing there? She looked at the picture one more time and saved the image. She got back online and looked for archived CCTV feed around UNIT headquarters in London. Again she used the face recognition software to see if any glimpse of Ianto could be found over the last three years. It would take several hours for the program to complete its search so Tosh went to bed, tossed and turned for a while and then got up again.

She was surprised that the face recognition program indicated that it already had several hits from the London CCTV archives. It was still running, but she didn’t want to wait until it had finished its search. She took a deep breath, opened the files and looked at the images before her. 

  Chapter 9 here:  http://aviv-b.livejournal.com/89056.html