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fredbassettTitle : Darkness By Day, Part 1 of 3
Author : fredbassett
Fandom : Primeval
Rating : 15
Characters : Stephen/Ryan, Nick, Claudia, Abby, Connor, Lester, Lyle, Blade, Ditzy, Finn
Disclaimer : Not mine, no money made, don’t sue.
Spoilers : None
Word Count : 7,484 in three parts
Summary : An anomaly opens on a London common and the team have to find a missing woman.
A/N : 1) Written for the very lovely![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kristen_mara’s birthday. I think you’ll recognise the prompt you gave me, sweetie, but I haven’t included it here as it’ll be a bit of a spoiler. 2) Part of my Stephen/Ryan series, but can be read as a standalone. 3) Many thanks to lukadreaming for the beta.
The sound of a book being thrown across the office and skidding out into the corridor brought an amused smile to Stephen’s face.
If Cutter didn’t like something, his literary criticism was usually short, sharp and to the point, with book-throwing generally reserved for things that had really got on his nerves. Whatever it was clearly hadn’t gone down well.
“Popularist bollocks!” Cutter pronounced loudly.
“Misuse of government property, Cutter!” Lester remarked as he passed the open doorway, stepping over the book that had aroused the irascible professor’s ire. “I’m sure I saw an expense claim for that item last week.”
“Recoup your loss and use it as bog-paper,” Cutter suggested. “That’s all it’s fit for.”
Lester looked down and raised an elegant eyebrow at the sight of the title. “Dino Gangs? Do I take it we can now expect to see our friends from the past wearing hoodies and thundering around on skateboards whilst tanked up on extra-strength lager? How very tiresome.”
“There were a lot of the buggers in the Forest of Dean that time at the hotel,” Stephen commented, more because he enjoyed getting a rise out of Cutter rather than any particular desire to defend the theory that tyrannosaurids hunted in packs.
“There were several of them in the same place. That doesn’t mean they were hunting as a pack.”
“Hard to tell,” Stephen acknowledged. “We were a tad occupied with staying alive at the time.” And one of Ryan’s lads hadn’t succeeded, but as Cutter hadn’t been there that night, the memories didn’t hold quite the same resonance for him.
The thought of the giant predators roaming the darkened forest still brought a shiver to Stephen’s spine. He’d used a rocket launcher for the first time in his life to take down one that had been advancing on Ryan. The missile had made a hell of a mess at close range, but had stopped the creature in its tracks, which had been all that had mattered at the time.
“Currie’s a bloody media-whore,” Cutter snorted, passing judgment on one of the book’s authors with a predictable sneer. It was certainly true that no one could ever accuse Cutter of pandering to journalists of any sort. When they’d been full-time at CMU, Stephen had dreaded the rare occasions when Cutter had been wheeled out to provide the press with a quote on some new discovery or other. His remarks invariably caused the reporters huge amusement and sent everyone else scurrying for cover – or their lawyers.
“An academic who talks in a civil manner to the press, heaven forefend,” Lester said, executing an Olympic-standard eye roll. “Don’t forget you owe me a report on your latest escapades, Cutter. It’s high time I heard your side of the story. After all, Miss Brown has spent the last three days fending off the Daily Vile. Was it really necessary to throw one of their reporters into a duck pond?”
“He slipped!”
“Not according to their legal department. Now do try to earn your vastly over-inflated salary. I don’t recall literary criticism being part of your job description.”
“That’s not literature, that’s…”
“More report-writing, less chuntering!” Lester instructed, as he waved an imperious hand and continued on down the corridor.
Stephen gave up any attempt to keep a straight face. Cutter in an academic strop was invariably unintentionally hilarious and he knew that this particular one would run and run, a bit like one of the SF guys after a bad Friday night curry. Cutter had disliked Canadian palaeontologist Phil Currie since they’d ended up going head to head at a conference several years ago. They were both bloody-minded, sure of themselves and took no prisoners in a debate, so it had ended up more like a gladiatorial contest than two academics talking at the bar. Currie was widely believed to have been one of the models for Alan Grant in the Jurassic Park films, another of Cutter’s pet bête noirs, which only added fuel to the rants he was capable of delivering given half a chance.
Retrieving the book from the corridor before it became a trip hazard, Stephen put it safely out of reach on a shelf and wondered how he was going to manage to divert Cutter back to the report he was meant to be writing. Coffee and chocolate biscuits helped, but by the time the team retired to the pub for the traditional Friday night drink, Cutter was back in the role of book critic, treating anyone who didn’t manage to escape his clutches quickly enough to a scathing commentary on why accumulations of dinosaur bones weren’t evidence for the fact that they’d lived and hunted together. In Cutter’s view, a large quantity of bone was more likely to contain elements of animals that had died at different times or had simply been brought together in death in unusual circumstances. He steadfastly refused to accept that the tyrannosaurids had hunted in packs, despite claims to the contrary.
“What about the tracks from Alberta?” said Lyle, breaking off a somewhat one-sided darts match with Blade to add some fuel to the fire.
“I’m going to kill Jon,” Ryan muttered in Stephen’s ear.
“You’ve been reading books again, boss!” Finn said to Lyle, with a wide grin.
“Only ones with pictures in,” Lester said, handing Lyle another pint. “Please don’t encourage him, muffin. You might have had the pleasure of getting some healthy exercise on Hampstead Heath today but I’ve had the dubious pleasure of being cooped up in the same building as the irascible academic for the last 10 hours and I’m still no nearer to extracting a report from him than I was at 8am.”
Cutter glared at the pair of them. “There are sod-all tyrannosaur trackways, and the ones that do exist are solitary.”
“Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence,” Lyle intoned, mischief dancing in his eyes. He’d had to sit through numerous lectures on dinosaur behaviour since the early days of the anomaly project, and the lieutenant had a fly-trap memory for facts of all kinds. His scores at Trivial Pursuit were legendary.
“Another white wine, Claudia?” Stephen said quickly, looking for any excuse to escape. With Cutter in rant-mode and Lyle playing him like a fish, there was only so much dinosaur-related debate that Stephen could take in a day, and if Claudia was going to be saddled with Cutter for the rest of the night, she’d need to be suitably tanked up.
She smiled at him gratefully and they formed a breakaway group at the bar, leaving Lyle to continue Cutter-baiting, with Finn as an appreciative audience and Ditzy on hand in case Blade decided to put everyone out of his misery by the judicious application of six inches of cold steel to the protagonists.
Eventually, Lester succeeded in prising Lyle away from Cutter-baiting with the inducement of a curry in the place around the corner and the rest of the evening passed relatively uneventfully.
“Has he always been like that?” Ryan asked, back at their flat, as he stripped with customary efficiency, balling up his clothes and lobbing them with consistent accuracy into the laundry basket.
“Cutter? The phrase leopards don’t change their spots was probably coined for him,” Stephen admitted. “And he does have a nasty habit of bearing grudges.” Which was one reason why some secrets were better left buried, Stephen thought, as he deposited his clothes on top of Ryan’s.
“So I noticed.” Ryan sprawled out on the bed and didn’t object when Stephen pillowed his head on his lover’s shoulder, despite the fact that the night was still overly warm for comfort, and draped an arm around his waist. “It must be frustrating for him, though,” Ryan added. “Knowing all that stuff and not being able to publish it.”
As ever, Ryan had cut to the heart of the matter. The handful of papers Cutter had been able to publish since the start of the anomaly project had been nowhere near enough to satisfy him. The professor might hate writing reports with a passion, but with a paper buzzing around in his head, he was like a dog with a bone, determined to finish it. Some of the things they’d discovered had, with careful reference to the existing fossil record, been able to make it into print, but not until Lester had been all over any draft paper like a rash. The man’s knowledge of palaeontology was growing at an alarming rate and he was more than capable now of catching Cutter out in any assertion made based on observation rather than hard evidence.
But the need for secrecy was part of the job, whether any of them liked it or not.
Stephen tightened his arm around Ryan’s waist and closed his eyes, trying not to think too hard about his own secrets.
* * * * *
The sound of his phone and Ryan’s going off simultaneously never failed to send a jolt of adrenaline through Stephen’s system.
They were stuck in traffic, no more than five minutes away from the ARC, and before Stephen had even freed his phone from his pocket, Ryan had turned on the blue flashing lights on the black Range Rover.
All anomaly project vehicles driven by members of the special forces contingent were now fitted with such lights and from the moment Ryan activated them, they were classed as an emergency vehicle attending a national security emergency. Their exemptions from traffic regulations were strictly limited, but the main value of the lights was in enabling them to forge a faster path through traffic, as generally other drivers would do their best to allow them free passage.
As long as they hadn’t just received a call asking them to pick up bacon rolls or cakes on the way into the office, no one was going to examine Ryan’s driving too closely, provided he didn’t actually hit anyone or anything.
“Anomaly alert,” Connor said succinctly as Stephen picked up the call. “Where are you?”
“Thirty seconds away from the main gates,” Stephen told him.
“We’ll have your kit ready in the garage.”
Connor was as good as his word, as ever. As soon as Ryan came to a halt in the cavernous internal garage, Lyle opened the rear doors and started chucking the boxes containing their gear into the back while one of the control room technicians gave Stephen the details to enter into the vehicle’s sat nav. Within two minutes of their arrival, they were tearing down the ramp in convoy, heading for Mitcham Common, South London.
According to Lyle, who’d thrown his own kit in with theirs, it had been touch and go whether to call in the helicopter that was now on standby to ferry the team to remote locations, but the time taken to get it to the ARC and then to the anomaly site wouldn’t have given them that much of an advantage, and the benefits of having vehicles on site had outweighed other considerations.
To Stephen’s surprise, they made better than expected time around the M25, and the blue flashing lights stood them in good stead as the passed New Malden and Mitcham itself at speed. A police cordon had been established in the area on Lester’s instructions, with Claudia, who’d been in the car with Cutter, acting as liaison with a harassed DI who, in his own words: didn’t appreciate being asked to do his job with both arms tied behind his back, whilst being kept in the dark and fed shit. The mixed metaphors were delivered over their in-car comms unit, the slight crackle doing nothing to disguise the barely-contained anger in the man’s voice.
Claudia had encountered DI Jamie Cross once before, when she’d had to convince him that a Surrey stockbroker hadn’t been responsible for disembowelling his wife in the garden of their home, whilst not offering any useful information other than judicious and frequent use of the words ‘animal attack’ and ‘national security interests’, a combination that had not gone down particularly well with either Cross or his superiors, but at least an innocent man hadn’t ended up behind bars for very long.
The DI was standing by the roadside, a look of thunder on his face as he watched the ARC convoy pull up. He looked to be in his mid-30s, no more than average height, with short, spiky brown hair. He was wearing a scruffy leather jacket and a pair of jeans that had seen better days. He clearly wasn’t a man who believed in dressing up for the job.
Ryan stuck out his hand. “Captain Tom Ryan, UK special forces. You know Miss Brown. This is Professor Nick Cutter, a Home Office consultant. Professor Cutter and his team are in operational control. It’s the job of me and my men to make sure no one gets hurt.”
It seemed like the policeman was intending to ignore Ryan’s proffered handshake for a moment but then he thought better of it, gripped the outstretched hand for a moment and nodded his acknowledgment of Ryan’s introduction. “DI Jamie Cross. Yes, Miss Brown and I have met. There’s another unspecified dangerous animal on the loose, I presume?” he said, addressing his question to Claudia.
“I sincerely hope not,” she replied. “But until we can confirm that, I need to maintain an exclusion zone around the common while we investigate.”
“While you check out the thing that looks like a laser mini-light show, you mean?” he snapped.
Connor, a hand-held anomaly detector in his hand pointed away from the road to a stand of trees about half a mile away across one of the more open areas of the common that they’d passed to reach this spot. “It’s amongst that lot.”
DI Cross gave Connor a sharp look. “Yes, it is.” To Claudia, he said, “I don’t have the resources to keep people away from the whole common. We’ve already caused traffic chaos by blockading this stretch of road.”
Before Claudia had time to reply, a short, stocky woman with bright red hair hurried over to them, an Airwave radio set in her hand. “Guv, we’ve got a missing person to worry about. A walker was meant to have been home an hour ago. Her mother’s been on the phone to the local station asking them to keep a look out for her. She says she’s on her way up here, but I’ve told them to keep her back behind the cordon.”
Cross’ eyes narrowed in thought. “An hour’s not long. Why the big panic?”
“She’s blind, guv,” the woman told him.
Author : fredbassett
Fandom : Primeval
Rating : 15
Characters : Stephen/Ryan, Nick, Claudia, Abby, Connor, Lester, Lyle, Blade, Ditzy, Finn
Disclaimer : Not mine, no money made, don’t sue.
Spoilers : None
Word Count : 7,484 in three parts
Summary : An anomaly opens on a London common and the team have to find a missing woman.
A/N : 1) Written for the very lovely
kristen_mara’s birthday. I think you’ll recognise the prompt you gave me, sweetie, but I haven’t included it here as it’ll be a bit of a spoiler. 2) Part of my Stephen/Ryan series, but can be read as a standalone. 3) Many thanks to lukadreaming for the beta.The sound of a book being thrown across the office and skidding out into the corridor brought an amused smile to Stephen’s face.
If Cutter didn’t like something, his literary criticism was usually short, sharp and to the point, with book-throwing generally reserved for things that had really got on his nerves. Whatever it was clearly hadn’t gone down well.
“Popularist bollocks!” Cutter pronounced loudly.
“Misuse of government property, Cutter!” Lester remarked as he passed the open doorway, stepping over the book that had aroused the irascible professor’s ire. “I’m sure I saw an expense claim for that item last week.”
“Recoup your loss and use it as bog-paper,” Cutter suggested. “That’s all it’s fit for.”
Lester looked down and raised an elegant eyebrow at the sight of the title. “Dino Gangs? Do I take it we can now expect to see our friends from the past wearing hoodies and thundering around on skateboards whilst tanked up on extra-strength lager? How very tiresome.”
“There were a lot of the buggers in the Forest of Dean that time at the hotel,” Stephen commented, more because he enjoyed getting a rise out of Cutter rather than any particular desire to defend the theory that tyrannosaurids hunted in packs.
“There were several of them in the same place. That doesn’t mean they were hunting as a pack.”
“Hard to tell,” Stephen acknowledged. “We were a tad occupied with staying alive at the time.” And one of Ryan’s lads hadn’t succeeded, but as Cutter hadn’t been there that night, the memories didn’t hold quite the same resonance for him.
The thought of the giant predators roaming the darkened forest still brought a shiver to Stephen’s spine. He’d used a rocket launcher for the first time in his life to take down one that had been advancing on Ryan. The missile had made a hell of a mess at close range, but had stopped the creature in its tracks, which had been all that had mattered at the time.
“Currie’s a bloody media-whore,” Cutter snorted, passing judgment on one of the book’s authors with a predictable sneer. It was certainly true that no one could ever accuse Cutter of pandering to journalists of any sort. When they’d been full-time at CMU, Stephen had dreaded the rare occasions when Cutter had been wheeled out to provide the press with a quote on some new discovery or other. His remarks invariably caused the reporters huge amusement and sent everyone else scurrying for cover – or their lawyers.
“An academic who talks in a civil manner to the press, heaven forefend,” Lester said, executing an Olympic-standard eye roll. “Don’t forget you owe me a report on your latest escapades, Cutter. It’s high time I heard your side of the story. After all, Miss Brown has spent the last three days fending off the Daily Vile. Was it really necessary to throw one of their reporters into a duck pond?”
“He slipped!”
“Not according to their legal department. Now do try to earn your vastly over-inflated salary. I don’t recall literary criticism being part of your job description.”
“That’s not literature, that’s…”
“More report-writing, less chuntering!” Lester instructed, as he waved an imperious hand and continued on down the corridor.
Stephen gave up any attempt to keep a straight face. Cutter in an academic strop was invariably unintentionally hilarious and he knew that this particular one would run and run, a bit like one of the SF guys after a bad Friday night curry. Cutter had disliked Canadian palaeontologist Phil Currie since they’d ended up going head to head at a conference several years ago. They were both bloody-minded, sure of themselves and took no prisoners in a debate, so it had ended up more like a gladiatorial contest than two academics talking at the bar. Currie was widely believed to have been one of the models for Alan Grant in the Jurassic Park films, another of Cutter’s pet bête noirs, which only added fuel to the rants he was capable of delivering given half a chance.
Retrieving the book from the corridor before it became a trip hazard, Stephen put it safely out of reach on a shelf and wondered how he was going to manage to divert Cutter back to the report he was meant to be writing. Coffee and chocolate biscuits helped, but by the time the team retired to the pub for the traditional Friday night drink, Cutter was back in the role of book critic, treating anyone who didn’t manage to escape his clutches quickly enough to a scathing commentary on why accumulations of dinosaur bones weren’t evidence for the fact that they’d lived and hunted together. In Cutter’s view, a large quantity of bone was more likely to contain elements of animals that had died at different times or had simply been brought together in death in unusual circumstances. He steadfastly refused to accept that the tyrannosaurids had hunted in packs, despite claims to the contrary.
“What about the tracks from Alberta?” said Lyle, breaking off a somewhat one-sided darts match with Blade to add some fuel to the fire.
“I’m going to kill Jon,” Ryan muttered in Stephen’s ear.
“You’ve been reading books again, boss!” Finn said to Lyle, with a wide grin.
“Only ones with pictures in,” Lester said, handing Lyle another pint. “Please don’t encourage him, muffin. You might have had the pleasure of getting some healthy exercise on Hampstead Heath today but I’ve had the dubious pleasure of being cooped up in the same building as the irascible academic for the last 10 hours and I’m still no nearer to extracting a report from him than I was at 8am.”
Cutter glared at the pair of them. “There are sod-all tyrannosaur trackways, and the ones that do exist are solitary.”
“Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence,” Lyle intoned, mischief dancing in his eyes. He’d had to sit through numerous lectures on dinosaur behaviour since the early days of the anomaly project, and the lieutenant had a fly-trap memory for facts of all kinds. His scores at Trivial Pursuit were legendary.
“Another white wine, Claudia?” Stephen said quickly, looking for any excuse to escape. With Cutter in rant-mode and Lyle playing him like a fish, there was only so much dinosaur-related debate that Stephen could take in a day, and if Claudia was going to be saddled with Cutter for the rest of the night, she’d need to be suitably tanked up.
She smiled at him gratefully and they formed a breakaway group at the bar, leaving Lyle to continue Cutter-baiting, with Finn as an appreciative audience and Ditzy on hand in case Blade decided to put everyone out of his misery by the judicious application of six inches of cold steel to the protagonists.
Eventually, Lester succeeded in prising Lyle away from Cutter-baiting with the inducement of a curry in the place around the corner and the rest of the evening passed relatively uneventfully.
“Has he always been like that?” Ryan asked, back at their flat, as he stripped with customary efficiency, balling up his clothes and lobbing them with consistent accuracy into the laundry basket.
“Cutter? The phrase leopards don’t change their spots was probably coined for him,” Stephen admitted. “And he does have a nasty habit of bearing grudges.” Which was one reason why some secrets were better left buried, Stephen thought, as he deposited his clothes on top of Ryan’s.
“So I noticed.” Ryan sprawled out on the bed and didn’t object when Stephen pillowed his head on his lover’s shoulder, despite the fact that the night was still overly warm for comfort, and draped an arm around his waist. “It must be frustrating for him, though,” Ryan added. “Knowing all that stuff and not being able to publish it.”
As ever, Ryan had cut to the heart of the matter. The handful of papers Cutter had been able to publish since the start of the anomaly project had been nowhere near enough to satisfy him. The professor might hate writing reports with a passion, but with a paper buzzing around in his head, he was like a dog with a bone, determined to finish it. Some of the things they’d discovered had, with careful reference to the existing fossil record, been able to make it into print, but not until Lester had been all over any draft paper like a rash. The man’s knowledge of palaeontology was growing at an alarming rate and he was more than capable now of catching Cutter out in any assertion made based on observation rather than hard evidence.
But the need for secrecy was part of the job, whether any of them liked it or not.
Stephen tightened his arm around Ryan’s waist and closed his eyes, trying not to think too hard about his own secrets.
* * * * *
The sound of his phone and Ryan’s going off simultaneously never failed to send a jolt of adrenaline through Stephen’s system.
They were stuck in traffic, no more than five minutes away from the ARC, and before Stephen had even freed his phone from his pocket, Ryan had turned on the blue flashing lights on the black Range Rover.
All anomaly project vehicles driven by members of the special forces contingent were now fitted with such lights and from the moment Ryan activated them, they were classed as an emergency vehicle attending a national security emergency. Their exemptions from traffic regulations were strictly limited, but the main value of the lights was in enabling them to forge a faster path through traffic, as generally other drivers would do their best to allow them free passage.
As long as they hadn’t just received a call asking them to pick up bacon rolls or cakes on the way into the office, no one was going to examine Ryan’s driving too closely, provided he didn’t actually hit anyone or anything.
“Anomaly alert,” Connor said succinctly as Stephen picked up the call. “Where are you?”
“Thirty seconds away from the main gates,” Stephen told him.
“We’ll have your kit ready in the garage.”
Connor was as good as his word, as ever. As soon as Ryan came to a halt in the cavernous internal garage, Lyle opened the rear doors and started chucking the boxes containing their gear into the back while one of the control room technicians gave Stephen the details to enter into the vehicle’s sat nav. Within two minutes of their arrival, they were tearing down the ramp in convoy, heading for Mitcham Common, South London.
According to Lyle, who’d thrown his own kit in with theirs, it had been touch and go whether to call in the helicopter that was now on standby to ferry the team to remote locations, but the time taken to get it to the ARC and then to the anomaly site wouldn’t have given them that much of an advantage, and the benefits of having vehicles on site had outweighed other considerations.
To Stephen’s surprise, they made better than expected time around the M25, and the blue flashing lights stood them in good stead as the passed New Malden and Mitcham itself at speed. A police cordon had been established in the area on Lester’s instructions, with Claudia, who’d been in the car with Cutter, acting as liaison with a harassed DI who, in his own words: didn’t appreciate being asked to do his job with both arms tied behind his back, whilst being kept in the dark and fed shit. The mixed metaphors were delivered over their in-car comms unit, the slight crackle doing nothing to disguise the barely-contained anger in the man’s voice.
Claudia had encountered DI Jamie Cross once before, when she’d had to convince him that a Surrey stockbroker hadn’t been responsible for disembowelling his wife in the garden of their home, whilst not offering any useful information other than judicious and frequent use of the words ‘animal attack’ and ‘national security interests’, a combination that had not gone down particularly well with either Cross or his superiors, but at least an innocent man hadn’t ended up behind bars for very long.
The DI was standing by the roadside, a look of thunder on his face as he watched the ARC convoy pull up. He looked to be in his mid-30s, no more than average height, with short, spiky brown hair. He was wearing a scruffy leather jacket and a pair of jeans that had seen better days. He clearly wasn’t a man who believed in dressing up for the job.
Ryan stuck out his hand. “Captain Tom Ryan, UK special forces. You know Miss Brown. This is Professor Nick Cutter, a Home Office consultant. Professor Cutter and his team are in operational control. It’s the job of me and my men to make sure no one gets hurt.”
It seemed like the policeman was intending to ignore Ryan’s proffered handshake for a moment but then he thought better of it, gripped the outstretched hand for a moment and nodded his acknowledgment of Ryan’s introduction. “DI Jamie Cross. Yes, Miss Brown and I have met. There’s another unspecified dangerous animal on the loose, I presume?” he said, addressing his question to Claudia.
“I sincerely hope not,” she replied. “But until we can confirm that, I need to maintain an exclusion zone around the common while we investigate.”
“While you check out the thing that looks like a laser mini-light show, you mean?” he snapped.
Connor, a hand-held anomaly detector in his hand pointed away from the road to a stand of trees about half a mile away across one of the more open areas of the common that they’d passed to reach this spot. “It’s amongst that lot.”
DI Cross gave Connor a sharp look. “Yes, it is.” To Claudia, he said, “I don’t have the resources to keep people away from the whole common. We’ve already caused traffic chaos by blockading this stretch of road.”
Before Claudia had time to reply, a short, stocky woman with bright red hair hurried over to them, an Airwave radio set in her hand. “Guv, we’ve got a missing person to worry about. A walker was meant to have been home an hour ago. Her mother’s been on the phone to the local station asking them to keep a look out for her. She says she’s on her way up here, but I’ve told them to keep her back behind the cordon.”
Cross’ eyes narrowed in thought. “An hour’s not long. Why the big panic?”
“She’s blind, guv,” the woman told him.