Slow Decay t-3

by Andy Lane

  ‘I’ve got a couple of knives,’ Gwen added. ‘Two are still being held in the corpses’ hands, one is half-under one of the bodies. They’re nothing special: basic folding knives, available at any camping shop or school playground.’ She systematically checked through pockets for ID cards, credit cards, anything that might tell the group who the kids were. ‘I have a Craig Sutherland,’ she said, ‘a Rick Dennis, a Geraint Morris, a Dai Morris, presumably related, and an Idris ab Hugh. I’m working on the theory that we have three local Welsh lads and two students at the Uni, probably fighting over some girls. How often have we heard that story before?’

  She straightened up, still holding the various cards she had taken from their pockets. Cards, Toshiko realised, they would never be needing again.

  ‘Over to you, Tosh,’ Jack said. As she knelt down next to Owen and prepared to search amongst the bodies for anything else, anything that shouldn’t have been there, she noticed Jack walk over to join Gwen. His hands were thrust deep in the pockets of his greatcoat and there was a strange look on his face.

  ‘They could have grown up to be anything,’ he said. ‘Scientists who might have invented the first practicable star drive, allowing humanity to escape an increasingly overcrowded and polluted Earth. Artists who could have encapsulated the human spirit in sculptures and paintings and forms yet to be invented, but which would have lasted for millennia. Politicians who might have brought peace to the Middle East. Or, if nothing else, they might have been happy, with partners and kids and barbecues on a Sunday afternoon. And none of that will happen now. They’ve been erased from the world for the sake of a few harsh words and the chance of a snog with the wrong girl.’

  ‘Some lads would risk anything for a snog with the wrong girl,’ Owen said, straightening up and wiping the blood off his hands with a Kleenex. ‘Not me, of course,’ he added, catching the way that Jack, Gwen and Toshiko were looking at him. ‘But some lads I met. Once. Er… anything else, boss?’

  Toshiko removed a small scanner from her pocket, about the size and shape of her thumb but matt-black and with an antenna on top. Switching it on, she swept it back and forth across the bodies, waiting for it to beep. If it did, then something in the area was transmitting somewhere in the electromagnetic spectrum.

  Nothing.

  Replacing the scanner, she took out another little device. This one was no larger than a lipstick, but a lot heavier. Again, Toshiko scanned it back and forth over the bodies. If there was an active power source of any kind there, it would vibrate.

  Still nothing.

  Something was nagging at Toshiko. Something wasn’t quite right with the bodies. One of them was hunched over, protecting something. Gently, she eased a hand underneath his chest and tried to take the boy’s weight so she could turn him over, but her angle was wrong and she couldn’t get any purchase.

  Seeing what she was doing, Owen bent to help. He took the body by the shoulders and tipped it backwards, allowing Toshiko to reach beneath it and retrieve the object that the boy had in his hand.

  She brought it out slowly, reverentially, and as Owen eased the body back to the ground Jack and Gwen gathered around Toshiko, eager to see what she had found.

  It was a metallic object, the size of a paperback book, but ovoid in shape and heavier than its size indicated. The colour was the first thing that struck Toshiko: a deep lavender which looked like it was the colour of the metal itself, rather than an enamel or a paint. The object was criss-crossed with raised ribbons of metal, and the ribbons broadened out at random intervals to encircle what looked to Toshiko like buttons. At the broad end of the object there were three irregular holes, perhaps cable sockets, and the other end, the narrower end, was different in texture, like ceramic rather than metal, but still the same shade of lavender.

  ‘Is it an iPod?’ Owen asked. ‘It is, isn’t it? It’s the latest one.’

  ‘It’s not an iPod,’ Toshiko said quietly. ‘Look at the size of the buttons. They’re designed for smaller fingers than any teenager has. And the layout is ergonomically wrong for an entertainment device. And, of course, there’s nowhere to plug your headphones in.’

  ‘Ever seen anything like it before?’ Jack asked.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she replied. ‘I have a feeling it’s similar to some of the items we have in the Archive, but let me take it back to the Hub and I can tell you everything there is to know about it.’

  Jack nodded. ‘I know you can.’ Looking at the other members of the team, he said, ‘Anything else before we leave? Remember, this is the last chance we get. After this, the police get to walk all over everything.’

  They all shook their heads.

  ‘Then let’s go.’

  The fresh air outside hit Toshiko as they left the club. The police were still holding back from entering, although there were some dark glances cast their way as they walked toward the Torchwood SUV.

  The four of them climbed in and, within moments, it was as if they had never been there.

  From the wall-wide window of the Boardroom, Captain Jack Harkness looked down at the central atrium of the Hub, and at his team.

  His team. His team. He still felt a burning pride whenever thought of them in those terms. The three of them had confronted one of the most terrifying things any human being could confront — the knowledge that not only were they not alone in the universe, but they weren’t even terribly important — and they had dealt with it, quietly and with grace. And now they worked together, each bringing their own particular skills to the party, to keep the world safe.

  To prepare for the moment that Jack was privately dreading — the moment when it all started…

  Over to one side of the Hub, Toshiko was using a hyperspectral scanner to investigate the interior of the device they had found at the nightclub. Jack already knew roughly where in the galaxy it had come from — he had quite a lot of background knowledge that the others lacked — but he wasn’t going to give them any clues. Partly that was because it would mean giving something away about himself, and he was wary of doing that. Partly it was because he didn’t know what the device was for. His knowledge was fragmentary, superficial. But metaphorically filleting alien technology and picking the bones out — that was what Toshiko did best.

  Toshiko worried him. Although she was at the heart of the team, she didn’t realise it. She felt that she was remote from the rest, off to one side. Perhaps it was her Japanese heritage showing through, perhaps it was just natural diffidence, but Jack viewed it with some concern. Beneath that reserved exterior, he suspected there was a supernova of emotion, and he didn’t want the resulting explosion to damage the team.

  Near Toshiko, Owen was at a lab bench, testing samples scraped from the device for traces of DNA, or any of the myriad other complex biochemical substances with which alien life forms transferred their genetic information. Owen’s skills were literal versions of Toshiko’s metaphorical ones; he filleted alien bodies and picked the bones out of them — when he could. And he patched the team up when things went wrong — which they did. Often.

  Owen worried Jack too, but for different reasons. Where Toshiko was locked down, Owen was wide open. Things affected him too much, and he let everyone know about it. Jack had no idea what Toshiko got up to in her spare time — if she got up to anything — but Owen was an open book. The first fifteen minutes of any day consisted of him reciting everything he’d got up to the night before: every drink, every sexual encounter, even — until Jack had put his foot down — every bowel motion.

  And then there was-

  Hang on. Jack quickly scanned the Hub. No sign of Gwen. She should have been applying her analytical police brain to the fight in the nightclub, trying to work out what evidence they had, and where they could go next to work out where the device had come from. He knew she was annoyed about being pulled out of her dinner with the boyfriend, but he hoped she hadn’t left to go back…

  ‘Missing someone?’

  Jack abruptly
stopped looking down into the Hub and refocused his eyes on the reflections in the glass in front of him. And there she was, Gwen, standing in the darkness at the back of the room.

  ‘Been there long?’

  ‘Don’t you know?’

  ‘I know I seem omniscient — actually, I try hard to cultivate the image — but I don’t know everything. How’s the investigation going?’

  She moved further into the room. ‘I’m going to have to make some enquiries tomorrow — friends, relatives, workmates. Someone might have seen one of those lads with a new toy, something high-tech that they didn’t recognise. I can’t do it from here, that’s the problem. As my old tutor at Hendon used to say: “There’s no substitute for bodies on the ground.”’ She winced. ‘Sorry, that wasn’t the most tasteful thing to say, given the circumstances.’

  He smiled. ‘You’re forgiven. Just don’t do it again. Any other discoveries down there?’

  ‘Tosh believes that the device is part of a whole batch that arrived on Earth some time back in the 1950s. We’ve got twelve or thirteen items already in storage, confiscated from various places around South Wales. One even made it as far away as London. Apparently, the Torchwood team there had it in their archives, until…’ Her voice trailed away. She hadn’t been in the team when Torchwood London had been laid waste, but Jack knew that she was sensitive to the fact that the others didn’t like to talk about it. ‘Anyway, it was destroyed. Tosh is trying to find out if there are any design elements that the items have in common, something that might shed light on what this thing does.’

  ‘What do the other items do?’

  Gwen shrugged. ‘That’s apparently the problem. They’ve been archived without anyone doing any serious analysis on what they are or what they do. Owen thinks that they’re the interstellar equivalent of Apostle Spoons- all part of a set: a collection of stuff. Decorative, rather than practical.’

  ‘He may have a point.’

  Gwen looked around the Boardroom. ‘You know, you could do with some stuff to brighten this place up. You should start a collection of your own.’

  Jack indicated the Hub, behind and below him. ‘I have you lot,’ he said. ‘That’s enough to be getting on with.’

  ‘Look, it’s quiet now, and there’s nothing I can do until tomorrow. Can I get back to my meal, please? Even if it’s just for the mints?’

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ Jack said and, as Gwen left the Boardroom, he turned and gazed out of the window again, back down into the depths of the Hub.

  The meal was long finished and, by the time Rhys had drunk two cups of coffee, he had worked out that he wouldn’t be seeing Gwen again that night.

  Which, he thought, as he gazed across the table at Lucy’s bright, open face, wasn’t necessarily the worst thing in the world.

  The restaurant had filled up to overflowing and then gradually emptied again whilst he and Lucy ate. And while they talked. In fact, it seemed like they’d never stopped talking, even though Rhys seemed to have eaten all of his own food and what was left of Gwen’s as well. Now the white tablecloth was spattered with various sauces, the metal platters were piled up to one side, and the hot towels had cooled down some time before.

  ‘Don’t take this the wrong way,’ he said, ‘but I can’t believe you stay as thin as you do and eat so much. I’m going to have to live off watercress for a week to make up for this.’

  ‘I never used to be able to,’ she replied. ‘It’s these tablets. They’ve really changed my metabolism.’ She smiled. ‘I can’t believe how much fun this has been,’ she said, gazing into Rhys’s eyes. ‘I really needed this, especially tonight. Thanks.’

  ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘I enjoyed myself too. I’m only sorry…’

  He trailed off, and Lucy made a sympathetic face. ‘I guess it must be hard on you, with Gwen suddenly going off on urgent business all the time. I wouldn’t have thought there was that much serious crime in Cardiff. I mean, you never really get to hear about it, do you?’

  ‘Not often,’ Rhys admitted. ‘I used to listen to the local radio stations every night when Gwen was called out, just in case there was a report of a bank robbery, or a raid on some crack den, or something. Just in case she’d been hurt, you know? But there never was. Closest I ever got was a nutter on a phone-in show talking about UFO sightings. He had a thing about them. It worried me for a while, the fact that every time Gwen was out working, I’d listen to the radio and he’d be on, at two in the morning, talking about UFOs. Then it occurred to me that he was probably doing the same thing on the evenings when Gwen wasn’t out working, but I was fast asleep and couldn’t hear him.’

  ‘You don’t sleep when Gwen’s out working?’

  He looked down at the tablecloth. ‘I get lonely when she’s not there,’ he said. ‘Pathetic, isn’t it?’

  ‘I think it’s rather sweet.’

  He looked up at Lucy, not really thinking about what he was doing, but when his eyes met hers a sudden shiver ran through him. Part of him wanted to look away, but part of him wanted to keep holding on to her gaze for ever. He ended up looking away, then looking back to check what she was doing, and when he found that she’d done the same he blushed. And so did she.

  Her eyes were brown, flecked with green, and her lashes were startlingly thick. Freckles were sprinkled across her cheeks and the top of her nose. Her mouth looked soft. He could see the tip of her tongue touching her teeth.

  ‘She never talks about what she’s been doing,’ he said suddenly, surprising himself with the words. ‘Which kind of worries me. I know it’s all meant to be a big secret, and I guess there’s some security reason why she can’t tell me the details of what she does, but I wouldn’t mind if she just gave me the highlights. “Hey, I abseiled down into a white slave trade convention tonight!” Or “Someone fired a machine gun at me and ruined my nice white blouse!” But she never says anything. Just “God, I’m tired.” Every night.’ He laughed bitterly.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘this is… ah. Shit. Shall we go? It’s getting late.’

  Instead of replying, Lucy reached out across the table and put her hand over his. He felt a jolt run through him. ‘I’d like to help,’ she said softly. ‘You’ve been so good to me tonight, and I’d like to make things better for you. If I can.’

  ‘I’ll get the bill,’ he said. He could have sworn that he sent his hand a message that it should pull itself out from underneath hers, but somehow the message didn’t get through, and his hand just stayed where it was.

  And, thanks to the immutable laws of cosmic irony, which Rhys believed in as much as he believed in anything spiritual, that was the perfect time for Gwen to walk back into the restaurant.

  THREE

  Owen was whistling again.

  At least, Toshiko assumed it was Owen. Jack was in his office, doing whatever it was that he did up there, Ianto was out in the little Tourist Information Centre they kept as a back entrance and Gwen had left, Toshiko assumed, to return to her interrupted meal with her boyfriend. It was just Toshiko and Owen in the central atrium of the Hub, and she wasn’t the one who was whistling.

  And if she had broken the peace and calm of the Hub at night with something as crass as whistling, it would have been soft and mystical, not an out-of-tune whine which wandered up and down several octaves apparently at random.

  She tried to block it out by concentrating harder on the alien device on the table in front of her. There was something about the lavender colour and the smooth curves of the metal that made her think of Japanese art: the surface was incised in patterns reminiscent of formal calligraphy, and the colour was reminiscent of her father’s favourite Hokusai etchings. It wasn’t from Earth, of course. Her brain was just looking for comparisons, connections, similarities. But it was oddly comforting, compared with the harsh, hard-edged technology she usually ended up examining.

  Toshiko had started off by using a microwave imager to get a picture of what was inside the shell. And that’s how she
thought of it: a shell protecting something delicate, vulnerable. The image she got was fuzzy, in shades of green and blue, and so she had turned to an ultrasound scanner, using the vibrations from whatever was inside to map out the interior structure. The results had been ambiguous: there were definitely voids within the shell, separated from each other by denser areas, but it wasn’t as clear as she had hoped. The transmission X-ray system which she had wheeled in, based on the kind of thing used in dental surgeries but with some significant improvements of her own, had just revealed a series of what looked like grey-white whorls and spirals that didn’t really help.

  And that whistling was driving her crazy. Tuneless, atonal, and yet strangely mournful.

  She glared over at Owen, but he was sitting with his back to her, oblivious. He had his hands behind his head, and he appeared to be leaning back and listening to something on his headphones. Didn’t he have any work to do? Didn’t he have a home to go to?

  Looking at the images from the three separate imaging systems that she had employed to no good effect, letting her eyes skip back and forth from one monitor to the next, Toshiko felt her mind teetering on the edge of revelation. It was as if there were something momentous sitting just beyond her reach: she knew it was there, but she couldn’t find a way of getting to it.

  Her eyes slid from the turquoise contours of the microwave image to the grey spirals of the X-ray, and she suddenly noticed a correspondence: a curve that started off in the microwave and then apparently stopped dead, but in fact continued on in the X-ray, appearing there out of a dark void. And once her brain had made that connection, others suddenly sprang out. How could she have missed them? There was a picture, there was a coherent whole, but not revealed through any one sensor. Working feverishly, she whipped the cables out of the backs of the various monitors and fed them all into a central image-processing server. It took her ten minutes, during which she was so busy she couldn’t hear Owen’s sad whistling at all, but when she had finished she had all three images being projected at the same time onto the same screen.