Skypoint t-8

by Phil Ford

  ‘Oh, come on, Tosh. This is your dream come true.’

  ‘Actually, Owen, no it isn’t! This is nothing like my dream come true!’

  She couldn’t look at him any more. She crossed to the window, stared out across the water and wished she could throw herself into it.

  Owen stood still, watching her. He could see her trembling with pent-up rage. He felt like an idiot. How the hell could this be anyone’s idea of a dream come true – pretending you were married to a bloody corpse!

  Still staring out of the window, determined to keep at least some control of her emotions, Toshiko said, ‘I know what we’re doing here, Owen. It’s my job, too. And that’s all I’ve got, my job.

  ‘But the instruments have drawn a blank. There’s not the first sign of Rift activity. And that means the only way we’re going to find anything out is from the people that live here. I’m sorry if that means we have to make it look like we love each other, but believe me, Owen, that is no dream-come-true for me. It doesn’t even come close.’

  Owen stood at the window and looked out over the Bay with her. He wanted to touch her, wanted to tell her that he was a prick, and that he was sorry. But he thought she would tell him to shove it, and he didn’t blame her.

  Instead he said, ‘I suppose we should count that as our first marital.’

  TEN

  Toshiko didn’t want Owen to think a joke was going to get him off the hook just like that.

  With barely a word she had gone into the bedroom and grabbed the messenger bag that carried her equipment then told him she was going to take a look around as she went through the front door.

  ‘I’m getting on with the job,’ she said as the door closed.

  It didn’t hit her until she got into the elevator that she was following the ritual of domestic politics she had grown up watching her mother employ on her dad.

  Never let a man know you’ve accepted his apology. Let him sweat a little more first.

  Her mother had never actually tutored her in the fine art of male-female power games, but it was the sort of thing she would have said. And the young Toshiko had seen her employ the gambit so many times, she had come to understand its mechanics the way a lion cub learns to hunt.

  The longer you leave it, the more opportunity he has to buy you something nice.

  Toshiko rode the elevator down to the basement. As long as she was playing sexual politics with Owen, she might as well get on with what she had told him she was doing, she thought. When she and Jack had snuck into SkyPoint before, she had been unable to pick up any Rift activity, but she had been wondering if it was possible that the building itself was somehow masking the energies that would normally mark its presence. She didn’t have the first idea how that could be the case, but she figured that the best place to look for a clear trace was at the building’s foundation.

  So, the basement.

  It wasn’t part of the regular itinerary for residents using the elevator – access to the basement was through a button with a key that Toshiko guessed would be carried by the building’s maintenance people. But it was going to be a pretty special key that stopped Toshiko Sato going where she wanted.

  A few seconds later, the elevator doors opened in the SkyPoint basement.

  She had pulled up the SkyPoint blueprints in the Hub before Jack and she had made that first visit. She now had them on the screen of her hand-held computer. The basement was below SkyPoint’s underground car park, and that put her now at twelve metres below the surface. She shivered. It was cold down here. Nothing all that strange about that, she thought, and the Rift didn’t work like so-called psychic activity – supposedly haunted locations were said universally to register markedly lower than ambient temperatures; Toshiko’s research had in fact shown that Rift activity often created a slight increase in temperature. Scientifically that made sense: the power involved in tearing a passageway between dimensions would inevitably create an energy fallout that would most easily be manifest as a brief temperature boost. It was basic physics. That was why Toshiko didn’t believe in ghosts. Even if there were ghosts, they couldn’t hurt you – the things that came through the Cardiff Rift were something else, altogether.

  Light from the elevator fell across a board of switches on the wall, but Toshiko took a flashlight from her bag – the darkness of the subterranean level was comforting, it meant that no one else was already down here. If a janitor turned up before she completed her readings, she didn’t see why she should advertise her presence.

  The flashlight burned a hole in the darkness and picked out an expanse of piping and wiring beyond her. Holding the torch at shoulder height, she stepped into the darkness and the elevator doors hissed to behind her. The only light now was that of the torch beam and the glow of the hand-held. Moving further into the gloom, Toshiko switched screens on the hand-held with a practised movement of her thumb. The SkyPoint plans were replaced by a graphic that would pick up the slightest hint of Rift activity. She had taken four steps across the basement floor and so far the graphics were still. No activity.

  As she moved across the basement she swept the flashlight from side to side, and occasionally above her, lighting up the channels of steel ducting that ran across the roof. She had been in places like this before – dark, empty warehouses, derelict hospitals – and, after five years, they were places she knew she would never get used to. The darkness pressed close to you like a living thing and the tiniest sound was magnified inside your head by nervous tension into the most sinister portent of bloody destruction. She had learned to cope with such things, but it was dangerous to ignore them. If nothing else was down here, she knew that Weevils got everywhere. They reckoned that in the city you were never more than a couple of metres from a rat – you could probably say the same about Weevils. Somewhere down here in the vast darkness there would be a manhole cover and under that (and only under that, if she was lucky) somewhere there would be a Weevil.

  So Toshiko moved through the darkness, following the tunnel of light ahead of her, every sense testing for danger.

  The torch beam settled on a half-open door. What lay beyond it was cast into a darkness that seemed even deeper than that which pressed in around her. Curious, Toshiko moved towards the door. Subliminally, her mind noted the weight of the gun that nestled in the small of her back beneath her leather jacket. A part of her brain rehearsed the motion of dropping the hand-held computer module and yanking the gun from her belt if she needed it.

  Gently, she pushed the door open with the toe of her shoe, and she spread the flashlight beam across the room beyond.

  The first thing she saw was a half-naked woman.

  The brunette wore skin-tight leather trousers that shone like spilled oil, and they were unbuttoned at the waist – like she’d forgotten to do them up, the same way she had forgotten to put anything over her silicon-pumped boobs. She was spread over the bonnet of a sports car and at her feet it said SEPTEMBER. Someone – the janitor who used the office – was marking off each day of the month. There was a crude circle drawn around the last Friday of the month. Maybe that was pay day.

  Toshiko took in the rest of the room: there was an old table covered in paperwork and old newspapers; there was a kettle and a stained mug. There was a box of tools. And in one corner of the room there was a big, scratched metal cupboard. Toshiko opened the cupboard and saw bottles of what she took to be cleaning chemicals. She closed it again and got down on her hands and knees. The cupboard stood on four metal feet that raised it a little way off the concrete floor. This was what Toshiko was looking for.

  From the messenger bag over her shoulder she took a wafer-thin device that was about the size of a cigarette packet. She brought up another screen on the hand-held module and a couple of small diodes flashed into life on the device. She hid it under the cupboard. From there it would relay foundation-level readings to Toshiko’s hand-held. There might be no evidence of the Rift down there right now; it didn’t mean that was the way t
hings were going to stay.

  As she got back to her feet, she heard the noise in the ducting.

  Nerves stretched to tripwires, she stood absolutely still, listening to the noise and trying to rationalise it. She found it hard to come up with something that it even sounded like.

  A little like wind rushing. A little like water spraying. And yet, unmistakeably and somehow horribly, solid.

  Something was moving through the ducting overhead.

  She glanced at her hand-held module: still no indication of Rift energies.

  But whatever was up there was no rat.

  And it wasn’t human.

  Toshiko moved out of the office, her torchlight following the ducting as she traced the progress of whatever was up there.

  And then it stopped.

  Toshiko stopped with it, her eyes on the metal ducting directly above her. Whatever she and Owen had come to SkyPoint to find, she knew it was just a few feet away, in the ducting above her head.

  Why has it stopped? What’s it doing?

  Suddenly she felt as if she was being watched. As if whatever was up there in the ducting was looking straight through the metal at her, waiting to see what she would do.

  Toshiko forced herself to shake off the notion. But she slipped the computer module into the messenger bag and drew the automatic from the small of her back. Then her ears strained for the slightest noise. She heard nothing. She counted the seconds with the beats of her heart. As a minute passed, there was still only silence, and it was as if she had imagined the whole thing.

  She ran the torch beam along the ducting. Three metres further on there was what looked like an inspection hatch. She had noticed a stepladder back in the janitor’s room. Her stomach turned over: the last thing that Toshiko wanted to do was climb into that steel tube with whatever was up there waiting for her. It wasn’t just the thought of something unknown, possibly alien and almost certainly dangerous up there. Toshiko wasn’t much good in confined spaces. UNIT had made sure of that when they cooped her up for six months in a cell that had been just 1.2 metres square. She knew without any doubt that if Jack hadn’t shown up when he did and made her that offer to join Torchwood, then one day the UNIT guard that brought her food would have found her dribbling and crazy in the corner.

  But that had been a while back now, and she had coped with a hell of a lot more than being shut in a box. She got the stepladder and set it up beneath the hatch, her ears still straining for the slightest noise from above. She climbed the ladder and wished to God that she had telekinetic powers or a third hand – she was going to need the torch to see by and that meant she had to put the gun away while she opened the catches to the duct. For a moment she thought about getting Owen. Sure, that would be the sensible thing – but she still had a point to make.

  She listened again, turning her head a little so that her ear was so close to the metal, so close to whatever was on the other side of it.

  She heard nothing.

  Quickly, she shoved the gun back into her waistband and snapped open the catches to the inspection hatch. She held the hatch in place against the body of the torch and listened some more as she retrieved the weapon. In her mind she rehearsed what she was going to do next.

  Duck. Drop the hatch. Go for it.

  Toshiko held her breath. There was still no sound from within the steel duct.

  Then she did it like she had rehearsed it.

  She moved fast, her muscles beating her synapses – getting it done before she had time to think twice.

  The stench hit her even before her head was through the hatch, and she knew what she was going to find in there ahead of the torchlight falling on it.

  It was, in fact, only the stench that told her.

  What lay along the narrow steel channel, illuminated by the flashlight beam, looked nothing like human remains, but that stink was unmistakeable. More than once she had come across what was left of people that had been savaged by Weevils – they were messy killers but had the good sense to hide what they left behind. Generally, Weevils found a good hiding place and packed it with bodies until there was no room to pack any more. Torchwood would come across a mass grave of Weevil kills on average once every couple of months. But you only had to smell one to remember the stink.

  But this was no Weevil kill. Toshiko stood on the stepladder, the flashlight in one hand, her gun in the other and regarded the stinking mess a few feet away from her. She didn’t know what had killed this poor bastard – or bastards.

  What she saw was a shapeless gelatinous mess that looked mottled and grey in the light of the flashlight, streaked with veins and splotches of red-brown. Here and there, patches of hair clung to it like lichen.

  And there was an eye.

  Toshiko gasped and almost lost her footing on the stepladder.

  The eye stared at her, a large black pupil in a fading blue iris. It had been a beautiful eye once. It was hard to imagine that it had once gazed from anything other than a beautiful face. Now it glinted in her torchlight, set in a mass of decomposing cellular matter.

  Toshiko didn’t have the first idea what could have done this. She just thanked God that it didn’t seem to be around any more. It was time to get Owen. He was the medic; maybe he would have some clue as to what turned human beings into mush like that. She closed the hatch and put the ladder back where she had found it.

  She was almost at the elevator doors when Besnik Lucca stepped out of the darkness.

  ELEVEN

  Owen was angry with himself over what had happened with Toshiko. She was a good friend. When it came down to it she was in fact the only good-looking female he had ever been friends with that he hadn’t screwed.

  Maybe that was his problem. Owen had known for years that Toshiko wanted to go to bed with him, and for years he had taken an almost perverse delight in denying her. By the time he’d got over that he had actually started to feel too close to her – he hadn’t wanted to screw things up between them and almost inevitably that was what sex would have done. But things were different now with Toshiko, he knew.

  She loved him.

  He had heard her tell him that after Copley’s bullet had put a hole in his chest and after Jack used that frigging resurrection glove to bring him back for a few minutes – but before they realised Torchwood was going to be stuck with a walking corpse on the payroll.

  I love you.

  Not many women had said that to Owen, fewer still that meant it. And none that had known him as well as Toshiko did. Even the woman he had been going to marry hadn’t known him that well – after all, that had been a different Owen Harper; that had been before Torchwood.

  And maybe that was what got Owen so angry.

  Maybe he could have been happy with Toshiko. If he hadn’t been dead.

  Life was shit. And so was death.

  Ten minutes after she left the apartment Owen decided to go and look for her.

  He took the elevator. And went up.

  The twenty-fourth floor was something special. It wasn’t every apartment block that had its own high-rise park. At least, that was how SkyPoint’s designers had seen it. They called it SkyPark.

  The elevator doors opened onto an open area that had been laid out with plants and trees growing in pots. They hadn’t gone so far as carpeting the floor in artificial turf – thank God – but there was a good-sized pond with koi flickering just below the surface. There was even a small kids’ play area and what Owen guessed was going to be a coffee stall (he thought they probably wouldn’t get the franchise sorted out until the building had rather more residents).

  As he stepped out of the elevator he was pretty sure that Toshiko wasn’t there. There were a few hidden corners to SkyPark, isolated by walls of potted bushes, but his senses told him straight away that he was alone up there. After all, all but a few of the building’s apartments were still empty, and it was a nice day outside – the odds were all against a busy day on the twenty-fourth floor.

  Th
ere was always something strange about a park when it was empty, he thought, as he crossed the floor towards one of the benches that had been set to look out across the city below. He guessed it was like any normally busy public place that you came across deserted. It felt eerie and wrong. Like Oxford Street or Times Square in some post-apocalypse movie. He passed through the play area and pushed the small roundabout. It made a quietly oiled sound that was somehow disappointing – he had wanted it to make a sound, to squeal like a banshee or something. Something to add to the surreal feeling of the place.

  ‘It won’t go very fast.’

  The little voice in the empty park made Owen jump.

  He saw the little girl from across the corridor on the thirteenth floor. She was peering at him from behind one of the big tree pots. Owen walked towards her. She was sitting with her back to the pot, a big book balanced on her drawn-up knees.

  ‘Alison. Right?’

  ‘Alison Lloyd,’ she corrected indignantly.

  Owen smiled and wondered if the girl was playing him. He asked her what she was reading. If she told him it was a book, then she was playing him.

  ‘Fairy stories,’ she said.

  Owen crouched down. Maybe it wouldn’t feel quite so strange talking to a kid in a playground if he was kind of the same height. Next to her on the floor was some kind of pixie doll, faded and worn. It looked like the kind of thing that kids sometimes inherited from their parents’ old toybox. It looked like it had had a hard life; it had lost one pointed ear and a bright green eye. But the little girl loved it; it looked like she had been reading to it before Owen disturbed her.

  ‘Which fairy story?’ he asked.

  ‘Rapunzel,’ she told him.

  The story of a golden-haired girl locked in a high tower. She didn’t seem to see the irony of it. Why would she? Did kids get irony at six, or whatever she had said she was earlier.

  ‘Mr Pickle likes it.’

  It looked like Mr Pickle was the doll. Pickle the Pixie. Why the hell not?