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AN: As promised, the beginning of part 2.5 of 'The Age of Paradox', as the Doctor must work with some old friends to face a most unconventional challenge…

The Age of Paradox 2.5: Miracle Day

"OK," Natalie looked around the console room in frustration as she got back to her feet. "What just happened?"

"That's… look, what was that?" Amy looked anxiously at the Doctor, even as she crouched down to put K9 back on his wheels from where he had fallen onto his side. "I mean, I get that we weren't having a regular trip, but if you were prepared for it and we were heading back to our universe… it shouldn't have been that rough, right?"

"Quite," the Doctor nodded grimly at her as he studied the monitor on the console. "I was trying to ensure that we've have a smooth trip by setting the coordinates for Earth to give us a stable point to focus on, and the old girl's still at full power so we're definitely back in our home universe, but it looks like there was something around Earth; the TARDIS basically had to pick up speed to penetrate some kind of artron-infused barrier…"

He raised his eyebrows in surprise. "And that barrier's still there."

"Barrier?" Natalie asked. "There's something around Earth?"

"Is it dangerous?" Amy asked.

"Hard to be sure," the Doctor said, still staring thoughtfully at the monitor. "As far as I can tell, this barrier shouldn't stop us travelling anywhere on Earth so long as we're just making short hops through space, but I'm not sure if it would be possible for us to travel in time, and… well, we essentially don't have the space to get out of this barrier from the inside…"

"Because… we don't have the space necessary to breach the time barrier?" Amy asked, smiling as an analogy occurred to her. "Like the trouble Doc had in Back to the Future III?"

"What?" Natalie looked at Amy in confusion.

"It's a time-travel film made in the eighties," Amy explained, smiling as she recalled the weekend she and the Doctor had watched the film as part of her training in temporal mechanics and four-dimensional thinking. "Long story short, a scientist developed a time machine from an old car, but it can only travel in time if it's reached a speed of at least eighty-eight miles per hour to 'breach the time barrier' or something like that, so a key challenge in the third film is getting the car back up to that speed after it's damaged back in the eighteen hundreds and he doesn't have the resources to fix it up."

"OK… and what does that have to do with this?"

"Basically, just like the DeLorean needed to reach a certain speed to travel in time, the barrier around Earth is too strong for us to break free of its influence because we can't build up enough power to breach it," the Doctor explained, his attention focused on the monitor for a moment before he smiled. "Still, on the bright side, I've worked out where we landed; we're in Porth Teigr, just outside of Cardiff, only a couple of years after Amy and I left Leadworth."

"That's… good?" Amy asked.

"When I have a friend who works nearby, yes it is," the Doctor smiled at her before he shrugged thoughtfully. "I admit, I'm not that sure of his working hours, but at the very least we can probably wait at his office until he gets in and have a bit of a chat about things then."

"He'd know about this… barrier thing?" Natalie asked.

"If he doesn't, he can probably help us find someone who will," the Doctor nodded as he reached over to open the doors. "Let's go."

"All of us?" Natalie asked.

"All of us," the Doctor nodded at K9, understanding his daughter's query. "It's dark, so he shouldn't attract too much attention, and Jack won't mind him."

"Jack?" Amy asked.

"Captain Jack Harkness," the Doctor explained as he led the way out of the ship, waiting for K9 to roll out of the doors before he locked the TARDIS and led the way along the small road the ship had materialised alongside. "He was born in the fifty-first century, but after he joined the Time Agency, he ended up running into me during an incident in the Second World War, and we travelled together for a while."

"And he left you to stay here?" Amy asked.

"These days, Jack runs a group dedicated to observing and protecting a rift in time and space that exists within Cardiff," the Doctor explained, as the four of them walked over a small bridge. "I've looked in on him when he calls me or when I need help, but… well, dropping in to see him wouldn't have helped me stay discreet while we were living in Leadworth."

"That… makes sense," Amy nodded tentatively. "So… he knows about time travel?"

"And aliens, and a range of advanced technology," the Doctor confirmed. "Jack has a tendency to take a more direct approach to things than I might like, but he does what he can, and I like to think I helped him be better."

"Better?" Natalie asked.

"When we met he was pulling various scams on other time travellers by getting them to pay him for supposedly valuable artefacts that he knew were going to get blown up before anyone could collect," the Doctor explained. "When he's saving the world from temporal anomalies just because it's the right thing to do, I'd call that a step in the right direction."

"Yes…" Natalie looked uncertainly around herself, before she glanced at her watch. "Should this place be this quiet?"

"Quiet?" Amy glanced at her own watch, noting that the time was only around nine in the evening in late September. She recognised that she hadn't been to Cardiff before, but when they were approaching what looked like a fairly busy dock, with several boats tied up alongside a few buildings that looked to her like restaurants, that all added up to create a place that should have been more populated than this…

With nobody able to satisfactorily answer Natalie's question, the group fell into silence as they continued walking, until they reached the end of the road and walked along the edge of the docks until they reached a large open stone bowl-like formation between a large building and a set of restaurants, with a large water-tower in the centre. A small group of people were gathered around some of the steps on the edge of this stone bowl, consisting of a dark-haired woman in dark leather who seemed to be talking to someone on her mobile in front of the others, a slightly overweight man holding a pink bundle that Amy assumed was a baby, a tall, handsome man in a long blue coat that put her in mind of something from the Second World War, and a dark-skinned man in a dark suit who was hunched over in a manner that suggested he wasn't feeling well.

"Hello, Captain," the Doctor nodded at the man in the blue coat as they reached the edge of the stone bowl just as the woman finished her phone call.

"Doctor?" the man looked up at the sound of the Doctor's voice, revealing a distinctive American accent as he looked at the Time Lord in surprise, uncertainly replaced by a growing grin. "You changed again?"

"It's been… an interesting time," the Doctor replied as he walked down the steps to shake the American's hand with a warm smile.

"You know this guy?" the dark-skinned man asked, looking curiously at the new arrivals, his voice revealing another American accent.

"Yeah," the apparent captain said with a smile. "This is-"

"Doctor John Smith, joint scientific advisor and liaison officer to Torchwood and the Unified Intelligence Taskforce," the Doctor explained, stepping forward to shake the dark-skinned man's hand as he got to his feet. "This is my assistant Amelia Pond, our security expert Natalie Kriener, and our dog K9."

"Your… dog?" the man repeated, looking at K9 in confusion where the dog had remained at the edge of the 'bowl'. Amy noticed that the man had his shirt half-open and a large bloodstain on his chest, but since nobody else was making a fuss about it she decided not to pay too much attention to it either.

"Affirmative," K9 reported.

"He's a sophisticated computer system with a fully interactive database and even comes equipped with self-defence capabilities," the Doctor smiled. "I just thought the dog look worked."

"Well… everything helps right now," the dark-haired woman said, walking up to the Doctor with a hopeful smile. "Gwen Cooper; I take it you're the Doctor Jack's told me about?"

"Good things?"

"For the most part," Gwen nodded, before she turned back to Jack. "OK, so we've got the Doctor's help, but what else do we have? I've got the old Eye 5s, but what do we have for weapons?"

"I knew it," the slightly overweight man said with a bitter edge to his voice, looking briefly at the baby before looking at Gwen. "Didn't I say? First sign of trouble, you go running off with Captain Jack Bollocks."

"What choice have I got?" Gwen countered to the other man. "I mean, they rebuilt the tower, now we're rebuilding Torchwood. Isn't that right, Jack?"

"Jack?" the Doctor looked at his old friend, who was staring at a cut on his arm. "What's wrong?"

"I cut my arm," Jack indicated

"OK, can't help but think there's more important things to be worrying about here-" Gwen began.

"No," Jack said, looking urgently between Gwen and the Doctor as he pulled down his sleeve to reveal a bleeding graze on his forearm. "I cut my arm. Look at it. It's not healing."

"Oh," the Doctor said, his eyes widening further as he looked more intently at Jack. "Oh… that's not good."

"So?" Amy looked between the two men in confusion. "What's the big deal?"

"You didn't tell her?" Jack looked at the Doctor in surprise.

"It's been a busy few days, and I only even knew that we were coming here a few minutes ago," the Doctor explained as he directed a firm glare at Jack. "But seriously, how could this have happened?"

"It… makes sense," Gwen said, looking shakily at Jack. "The whole world becomes immortal…"

"And I'm mortal," Jack finished.

"Wait a- the world's immortal?" Amy repeated incredulously.

"You didn't know that already?" the dark-skinned man looked at Amy in surprise.

"We've been travelling; we lost track of the news," the Doctor said dismissively before he looked at the other man with new curiosity. "And what happened to your chest?"

"I'll get that seen to," the man said, before he turned his attention back to Jack. "What's important right now is that you're all here when my ride shows up."

"Your 'ride'?" Natalie asked, before an armed police force suddenly gathered around the stone bowl, sirens blaring as people drew their weapons to point at Jack, Gwen, the still-unidentified man with the baby, and the TARDIS crew before any of them could do more than move briskly to the middle of the stone bowl. Amy glanced briefly at K9, but it was easy to confirm that there was nothing the robot dog could do in this situation; even assuming he had the power to stun every one of the new arrivals, he couldn't do it before one of them took him out with a good number of their opponents still standing.

"Andy," Gwen looked urgently at the only unarmed policeman in the group, "you can't do this."

"Orders from above," Andy said apologetically as he stood beside the dark-skinned man. "I'm sorry; he's in charge."

"Since when?" Jack asked.

"He can't arrest us," the overweight man said indignantly. "He's American."

"I hate to bust up your sweet little tea party, but this isn't an arrest; this is a rendition," the man said, walking forward to stand in front of Jack (if he wasn't about to arrest them, Amy would have been impressed that he was still walking when he clearly seemed to be in some pain). "And on behalf of the CIA, under the 456 amendments to US code 3184, I'm extraditing this so-called Torchwood team to the United States of America. Now let's get out of here."

"Wait a- we're not-!" Amy began.

"If you're taking us, you'll want to collect my box," the Doctor cut in as the police force gathered around them.

"Your box?" the apparent CIA repeated, pausing his walk away from the small group to look sceptically at the Doctor.

"It's a large blue police box, just back that way in Porth Tiegr; we decided to leave it there when we got back to Cardiff until I could talk with Captain Harkness," the Doctor explained, waving his hand back the way they'd come. "It's got most of my equipment in it; assuming you're extraditing us to discuss recent events, not only will I need K9 to keep an accurate record of everything, but I'm also going to need that box to give you a decent answer to what's going on here."

"…Fine," the man nodded grudgingly at the Doctor before looking around at the nearest group of policemen. "You heard the man; get his… box."

"Thank you… sorry, you are?"

"Rex Matheson," the man replied, shooting a firm stare at the Doctor. "And that's the last favour I do for you until I get some answers."

"Fair enough," the Doctor nodded back at the now-named Rex before he shot a reassuring smile at Amy, who wished that she could feel half as confident as the Doctor looked.

She could just about guess that the Doctor wanted to get arrested/extradited/whatever was about to happen with Jack and Gwen so they could establish what was actually going on, but if Gwen was telling the truth and the world had suddenly become immortal, Amy had a worrying feeling that this was going to turn out to be a very difficult situation…?

AN 2: Hope that works as a starting-point for this new turn in the series; next chapter will basically be a 'recap' of recent events for the benefit of the Doctor, Amy, Natalie and K9, but we'll get back to the events of the original crisis after that, and I do have plans to diverge from canon in more detail as the narrative unfolds.