Slow Decay

TWO

‘Turn right here!’ Toshiko called out, trying to make herself heard above the roar of the engine.

The Torchwood SUV swung round a corner, almost spilling her from her seat. She grabbed hold of a strut with one hand whilst the other used a trackball to keep crosshairs centred on a map on the computer screen in front of her.

Jack was driving. That was always a bad thing as far as Toshiko was concerned. Especially when she was navigating. He seemed to assume that when she said ‘right’ or ‘left’ then that abrogated any responsibility he had to check for other traffic, pedestrians, buildings or, in one instance a few minutes ago, the existence of a roundabout which he then went the wrong way around.

‘Any sign of that alien tech?’ Jack yelled from the driver’s seat.

‘Nothing,’ she called back. ‘I’ve not seen any signals since the one half an hour ago.’ She glanced sideways, towards the front of the SUV, but the sight of tall buildings whipping past against a black sky made her feel sick, so she concentrated on her display.

‘That’s the one you triangulated to the nightclub?’

‘To the block in which the nightclub is located,’ she corrected. Toshiko glanced back at the map display. ‘Left!’

The SUV veered again, and somewhere behind them Toshiko heard a squeal of brakes, a blaring horn and a sudden crump as two heavy metal objects came into an unexpectedly close proximity.

‘Have you ever thought about getting hold of a Torchwood helicopter?’ Owen called out. ‘We could probably get there faster, and cause fewer accidents on the way. Two benefits for the price of one.’

‘If I had a helicopter,’ Jack yelled back, ‘then I couldn’t do this!’ He threw the SUV into a screeching two-wheel skid around a corner. Falling sideways, Toshiko caught a glimpse of a red traffic light turning the windscreen the colour of blood, then they were past and straightening up again.

‘Where’s Gwen?’ she asked, more to distract Jack from his stunt driving than anything else.

‘She’s gone out to dinner,’ Owen and Jack answered in harmony.

‘I texted her,’ Jack added. ‘She’s meeting us there.’

‘She went to the Indian Summer,’ said Owen, just to prove that he knew something Jack didn’t. ‘I think she was meeting Rhys.’

‘And even if we did have a Torchwood helicopter,’ Jack continued, ‘where would we land it? SUVs are easier to park.’

‘Last time we went out in this vehicle,’ Toshiko said quietly, ‘you parked it in the foyer of an office block. The time before that, you parked it in the middle of the Taff Bridge. I can’t help feeling that finding suitable parking spaces is not high on your list of priorities.’ Catching a glimpse of a flashing red set of arrows on the map display, she called out: ‘Stop anywhere along here.’

The vehicle slowed and then slewed sideways into what Toshiko fervently hoped was a parking space, as opposed to someone’s front garden. Owen broke the sudden silence by saying, ‘Wait for a moment while my stomach catches up with us. And wait… and wait… and yes! We’re back together again. Thanks for holding on.’

Jack jumped out, while Owen pulled open the SUV’s side door and gestured for Toshiko to go first.

The SUV was parked across the mouth of an alleyway off St Mary Street. They were obviously in the middle of a crime scene: the nearby shop fronts reflected the flashing lights of police cars between each other in a crazy neon chiaroscuro. Uniformed officers were standing around, staring at the Torchwood team with barely disguised hostility. It was something Toshiko was used to. Nobody liked to be outranked, especially when they didn’t understand what was going on.

The street ahead of them was closed off with red and yellow striped incident tape. Turning, Toshiko could see that the street behind them was closed off as well; at least, it had been until the Torchwood vehicle had driven straight through. Now the tape just lay limply on the ground. None of the police officers standing around made any attempt to pick it up again.

Owen slid the door shut behind him, and Jack led the way down the alley to what appeared to be the entrance to a nightclub, to judge by the sign suspended from the brickwork above the door. Policemen around the doorway moved away as they approached.

‘Bloody Torchwood,’ one muttered as they passed. ‘Who do they think they are?’

Jack sighed. ‘They’d better not clamp it while we’re gone.’

The nightclub was empty of living people, although Toshiko could smell their presence in the humidity of the atmosphere: sweat, stale tobacco, cheap aftershave and cheaper perfume. The overhead lights had been turned on, and their glare transformed what had probably been something high-tech and impressive in the near-darkness into something that Toshiko felt was rather tawdry. Not her kind of place. She wasn’t really sure what her kind of place was, but this wasn’t it.

A long bar took up most of one wall, stocked with hundreds of upside down bottles of spirits, beer taps and drink dispensing hoses left limp across the bar. The surface of the bar was translucent acrylic, and it was lit from beneath. When the overhead lights were turned off, it would form the major source of illumination in the club, but now it just served to highlight how much the walls needed a new coat of paint.

The central area was reserved as a dance floor. It was scuffed by too many pairs of feet, and stained by years of spilt drinks, but none of that would have been evident with the lights off. Scaffolding hung from the ceiling, and spotlights hung from the scaffolding, fitted with motors so they could rotate and pan around, randomly picking dancers out of the crowd. Elsewhere, tiny video cameras could follow the spotlights, transmitting their images to flat-screen monitors that were located around the walls.

Tables were scattered around various platforms on different levels separated from one another by chrome rails and steps.

‘Nice place,’ Jack commented as he strode in. ‘I wonder who did the decor for them. I might just have them redo the Hub in the same style.’

‘What, with a bar?’ Owen asked.

‘Or maybe I’ll just get Laurence Llewellyn Bowen to come in and put swags of velvet and stencilled oak leaves everywhere,’ Jack continued. ‘Just for a change.’

‘Swags?’ came a voice from the doorway.

‘“Swag” — an ornamental drapery or curtain that hangs in a curve between two points. There’s a proper word for everything, you know, and a lot of them are falling into disuse. I’m thinking of making it a Torchwood rule that every conversation has to include at least one word that nobody else knows. Thanks for turning up, by the way. How was dinner?’

Gwen walked into the club. ‘What little I had of it was great. Hi Owen. Hi Tosh.’

Owen nodded once, then glanced away. Toshiko gave her a friendly smile.

‘What have we got?’ Gwen asked.

Jack walked over to the bar and pulled himself smoothly up until he was standing on it, looking down on the team. ‘A quick recap. Tosh has been tracking an intermittent energy surge of a frequency and modulation that doesn’t match anything in use on Earth at this point in time. She triangulated it to this area of Cardiff where some suspicious deaths had just occurred. The two seem linked, so I’ve thrown the local coppers out, allowing us to take a look around. I can’t imagine that aliens living in Cardiff would choose to come here for a night out — there are clubs nearby that cater far better to the discriminating traveller — so I suspect that someone here was human and was dabbling with something they shouldn’t have been in possession of. Swag, in fact, which is a word also used to mean “stolen goods”.’

‘Where are the bodies?’ Owen asked.

Jack looked around. ‘There’s a couple of overturned tables over there,’ he said, pointing. ‘The smart money says that’s where the bodies will be. Remember, we suspect that the deaths are due to some kind of alien tech, so keep an eye out for it. Someone may have taken it away, of course, so we also need to check the bodies for identities and any clues.’

‘And also remember that the whole thing might be a coincidence,’ Gwen added, ‘and the person who had the alien tech, if there was alien tech, left when the fight started rather than get involved.’

‘Let’s get started,’ said Jack. He jumped down from the bar and led the way across to a low plateau some ten feet above the dance floor, accessible via a set of stairs.

Jack was right. Sprawled across a clutch of tables and chairs that had been pushed apart and overturned were five bodies. Young men, all of them. There was a lot of blood, stark on white T-shirts, and a lot of broken glass. Looking at them, it struck Toshiko that sleeping bodies still had a certain amount of muscle tension pulling the limbs into distinct shapes. Dead bodies lost that tension. They just lay there, like carelessly thrown rugs.

‘Owen?’ Jack prompted.

‘Don’t touch anything if you can help it,’ Gwen said quickly. At Owen’s questioning glance, she added: ‘There’s still a police investigation that needs to occur. We only take stuff that’s not from this Earth, and we leave without disturbing anything. Like the Country Code, only a lot weirder.’

Bending down between the bodies, Owen quickly checked them over. Toshiko admired the rapidity with which his hands and eyes operated: so similar to the way that she checked over technological devices she had never seen before. A combination of knowledge, skill and instinct. Owen was an exceptionally good doctor.

‘The wounds are nothing out of the ordinary,’ Owen said. ‘Standard contusions and stab wounds mainly, with the occasional knuckle-shaped bruise and one punctured eye caused, I suspect, by a broken bottle. Just your usual Wednesday night in Cardiff. No laser burns, no strange bite-marks made by non-human teeth, no sign that the life force has been sucked out of them.’ He grinned. ‘I suspect the only sucking they were in for tonight was the home-grown variety.’

‘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.