Skypoint

THIRTEEN

‘Basically,’ Owen told them, ‘it’s shit.’

They were in the medical centre of the Hub, Owen’s Autopsy Room: Toshiko, Jack, Gwen, Ianto and Owen, looking at a piece of shit.

It was a sample from the SkyPoint ducting.

When Toshiko had returned to the apartment, Owen hadn’t been there. He’d turned up a couple of minutes later and said he’d been looking for her.

Toshiko told him about what she had found in the SkyPoint ducting and took him there immediately. She didn’t tell him about meeting Besnik Lucca, and she didn’t know why. Owen had climbed into the ducting and taken a sample of the foul mess that she had found in there. He had said he could take a fairly educated guess as to what it was, just as Toshiko already had, but he wanted to get back to the Hub to do a proper analysis.

So two hours later they were standing around Owen’s sample in the Autopsy Room.

‘Something is shitting in the ducting?’ said Gwen, raising a single unimpressed eyebrow.

‘But not mice,’ said Ianto.

Owen had chosen the most stomach-churning sample he could find. It was, after all, Owen. Death had done nothing to leaven his schoolboy delight in putting the others off their dinners. The eyeball stared at them out of the gelatinous chunk Owen had collected in one of the plastic kitchen storage boxes Ianto had included among their moving-in props.

‘So spell it out for me, Owen,’ Jack said. ‘What are we talking about here?’

‘It’s human cellular matter. It’s been broken down. Digested, if you like. If you ask me, whatever did this, this is what it didn’t need. The waste product.’

‘Shit,’ said Ianto, horrified.

‘Exactly,’ said Owen.

‘No. I meant, shit.’

‘The poor bastard,’ said Gwen.

‘Bastards,’ Owen told her. ‘According to my scans there are at least three distinct DNA markers. Three people. Oh. And I found this.’

He produced a small plastic bag. There was something square and metallic inside.

Gwen reached for it and saw that it was a cufflink bearing the picture of a clown.

‘Brian Shaw,’ she said, flatly.

Jack started to move around the autopsy room. ‘OK. So now we know what happens to the people that get taken. What we don’t know is, what’s doing this and why.’

‘Food,’ suggested Toshiko. It seemed like the obvious answer.

‘I guess,’ said Jack. Though there were creatures in the universe that would kill you for other reasons – even procreation. It wasn’t too much of a leap to think that there might be things around that would turn a person into a pile of crap for reasons other than eating.

‘So, we know it’s some sort of creature. These people aren’t being torn away by some sort of force created by the Rift. There’s something living in SkyPoint and feeding off the residents,’ said Gwen.

‘SkyPoint is a big place. And it’s still largely empty. This creature could be anywhere,’ said Toshiko.

‘Or anyone,’ Ianto reminded them. ‘I’m sure we all remember how much fun a shapeshifter can be.’

He was looking at Gwen. Now that had been the Wedding from Hell. Gwen got bitten by a shapeshifter that passed on its unborn young in its bite. Next morning – the morning of her wedding to Rhys – she was fully pregnant with a baby alien. And then it’s shapeshifting mum showed up to rip it out of Gwen – that was Nostrovite childbirth; gas and air wasn’t an option.

‘This isn’t a Nostrovite,’ said Jack.

‘Thank God,’ said Gwen.

‘But there are all sorts of shapeshifters,’ Owen told them, ‘and they’re all tricky bastards.’

Jack was musing. ‘A shapeshifter that can move through walls and pull people out with them…’

‘That’s not just shapeshifting, Jack. That’s atomic realignment,’ Owen told him. ‘Changing shape is one trick. There are all sorts of ways different creatures pull that off, but moving a solid body through brick-’

‘You’re not telling me it’s impossible, Owen. I mean something got at those people and it took them with it the same way it got in. And those apartments may be fitted with every mod-con, but they don’t have trap doors.’

‘No, Jack. I’m not saying it’s impossible. When you get down to an atomic level nothing is solid. Everything is built up of energy particles. Theoretically, it should be possible for other energy particles to pass through. Trouble is, passing the energy particles of a living creature through the energy particles of a brick wall would make driving round Marble Arch blindfold look like a piece of cake. If just one particle touched another, your whole living being would be trapped in the wall.’

‘So not impossible, just not very possible?’ observed Ianto.

‘On top of that,’ Owen continued, ‘you’ve got your wall-walking predator that then alters the sub-atomic structure of its victim to get it back through the wall. I said shapeshifters were tricky, but if we’ve got some sort of wall-walker prowling SkyPoint, then it makes David Copperfield look like my Uncle Bob pulling pennies out of my ears when I was six.’

Jack had listened patiently to Owen’s lecture. Now he asked, ‘Have you got a better idea?’

Owen shook his head. ‘A shapeshifting wall-walker. Shit.’

‘Sounds like that’s where we came in.’ Jack grinned.

‘Shapeshifting wall-walker shit.’

But Toshiko wasn’t in the mood for jokes. ‘That means it could be anyone living at SkyPoint.’

‘It also means we can’t evacuate the building to deal with this,’ said Gwen. ‘If what we’re after really is one of the residents, then we’d be just letting them out through the front door.’

‘Yeah,’ said Owen. ‘And the neighbours have invited us round for dinner. Better just hope we’re not it.’