Another Life t-1

by Peter Anghelides

  ‘You sound impressed.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you be? For fun, she works with a charity for blind ex-Service personnel on hundred-metre dives at Dahab in the Red Sea.’

  ‘I bet she’s kind to animals, too,’ said Megan. ‘And you got all this by researching her Army records?’

  ‘She has no significant financial commitments, sometimes rents a small place in Porthcawl because it’s handy for scuba diving. Her credit record is OK. No overdraft. She pays off her Visa on time, in full, every month-’

  ‘Hang on, Owen! You don’t get that sort of information from a quick search on the Internet!’

  ‘That’s every month, without notable exceptions,’ continued Owen relentlessly. ‘And the Visa bill’s rarely more than three hundred quid, except when she bought herself some specialist diving equipment. So it’s got to have been something really unusual, something outside the control of this brave and resourceful and organised woman, to cause her to go AWOL twenty-three days ago, wouldn’t you think?’

  Megan had her head in her hands now. ‘How can you know all this?’ She considered Owen, perhaps seeing him differently yet again this evening. ‘I don’t even have to ask really, do I? And all that stuff about the sniper incident and her injuries… maybe that’s why she’s coped so well with her wounds tonight. But hang on, you’re not shooting at her, Torchwood doesn’t want to kill her. So who does?’

  Owen pondered the question. In the ensuing silence, he could hear that Applegate’s breathing had changed. She was snuffling, short staccato snorts that soon turned into coughing.

  Megan moved swiftly to the bedside and calmed Applegate, who was struggling with the oxygen mask.

  ‘Have you been awake for long?’ Owen asked her from the foot of the bed.

  Applegate peered at him, waiting for the cough to subside. ‘For a few minutes. Just long enough to hear your very kind biography of me. Not to mention your routine as my new independent financial advisor.’ She raised a wavering hand to dismiss Owen’s attempt to explain. ‘I don’t need you to say where you got that information. Unlike your colleague here…?’

  ‘Dr Tegg. I’m supervising your treatment. Please call me Megan.’

  ‘Owen Harper. Dr Owen Harper, actually.’

  Applegate had composed herself a little more now. ‘Unlike Megan here, I do know about Torchwood. Because it was Torchwood who tried to kill me.’ Her brown eyes glittered at him. ‘So one way or another, Dr Harper, you’ve located me just in time.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  Now that Sandra Applegate was fully conscious, Owen and Megan raised the back of her hospital bed so that she could sit up more comfortably. Owen checked the monitors again, satisfying himself that their patient was stable. She was still very pale, though not the deathly grey colour he’d seen earlier. Her gestures were getting stronger, and her voice no longer wavered when she spoke.

  ‘Your colleagues made a mistake, Dr Harper. They didn’t know I needed Torchwood’s help.’

  ‘Guess how often we hear that, Sandra.’ Owen scraped his chair nearer to the bed. ‘So, what’s your story?’

  His tone was light, unthreatening. He watched the tension drain away from Sandra, and her face seemed to brighten. ‘They made a mistake. Oh, I mean, I can understand it, don’t get me wrong. I’d gone back to the flat for one last attempt to talk Guy out of his stupid plans… But he wasn’t there, and they thought I was working with Tony and Guy.’

  ‘The hairdressers?’ frowned Owen.

  Sandra rolled her eyes at him. ‘Tony Bee and Guy Wildman. My diving buddies. So I don’t blame your colleagues, it wasn’t their fault, really.’

  ‘You’re very forgiving, for someone who we shot.’

  ‘When I tell you what I’ve been through, you won’t think that.’

  Owen smiled reassuringly. ‘I’m hard to surprise.’

  Sandra’s eyes flickered between Owen and Megan, as though quickly assessing their mood. Then she closed them, and drew in a deep and shuddering breath, before releasing it like a slowly deflating tyre.

  ‘It started,’ she began, ‘when we took our scuba-diving trip out in the Bay. If we’re diving locally, we usually take a boat out of Porthcawl, maybe get out as far as Lundy Island to see the puffins and grey seals. But Guy could only take a short weekend, so we decided to explore out into Cardiff Bay.

  ‘Easy enough to charter a boat locally. Nice clear day, not far, nothing too adventurous we thought. Until we saw the hatch poking out of the sediment. First thought, of course, was that it must be discarded debris. When it wouldn’t budge, then you start to think it’s a wreck — but this clearly wasn’t anything like the wreck of the Louisa out there. This had a dull shine, even that far down. Modern, not nineteenth-century. Not even twentieth-century. When we opened it up, it was an airlock. But what kind of modern submarine would be buried down there?

  ‘One of us should have stayed outside. I’m the most experienced diver, I should have known that. But we all went in — it was an unbelievable space, more like a hallway than an airlock. And once we were in, the door shut behind us and the place started to fill with gas.

  ‘Do you know what I mean when I say that the military instinct kicked in, Dr Harper? For me and Tony, I mean. Checking for exit options, areas of danger, ensuring our backs were covered. Even unarmed, we were ready. Guy was starting to panic, though — scraping at the exit door with his bare hands, tearing off his own mask. That’s when we knew it was oxygen, and we could breathe. Our relief didn’t last long, because when the inner door opened what we saw made us abandon all that hard-learned military training.

  ‘It wasn’t human, that much was obvious. I mean, like with the hatch, your first thought is to make it normal: it’s a bloke in a mask; we’ve stumbled into a film set; it’s a weird kind of scuba gear; it’s a trick of the light.

  ‘It wasn’t. It was alien. Tony’s a big guy, you know, six-three. But this thing dwarfed him. Easily strong enough to force me and Tony further through that inner door. Guy was curled up in a corner, whimpering, terrified. It picked him up with one of its claws and threw him after us into the ship. The alien ship.’

  Sandra swallowed hard at this point.

  ‘The next bit is all a bit hazy now. I prided myself before all this that nothing could faze me. But it’s not like the uncertainties of a combat zone. My first commander told me that the more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war. Let me tell you, no amount of readiness training could have prepared us. Maybe I was starting to react like Guy had, I don’t know. All I remember now is being surrounded by alien machinery, and an agonizing pain in my back, and then I must have passed out.’

  Owen pointed up at the wall, where the light-box still displayed her X-ray images. ‘That thing was inserted into you. I think it’s a tracking device.’

  Megan stared at them, incredulous. ‘What is this, The X Files?’

  Owen touched her lips gently with his finger, and encouraged Sandra to continue. ‘What do you remember next?’

  ‘When I came round, Tony was pulling me towards the exit. Guy was helping him. The pain was still intense, as though I’d been knifed in the middle of my back. Yet there was no blood. I was able to stumble out with them. Tony got us back through the airlock. Don’t ask me how. There was a lot more of the ship visible around the airlock when we got out, as though the sediment had started to fall away around the prow of some dull grey rocket.

  ‘I don’t remember much of the journey home, Tony seemed to handle that. Maybe my mind blotted it out, maybe it was like post-traumatic stress

  — we’ve seen that in the services, of course. “The invisible injury”, it’s called. Not a mark on you physically. But PTSD isn’t something the Army likes to admit to.

  ‘We spent the rest of the weekend at Guy’s apartment, out in Splott. Tony explained to us that we escaped because the alien ship was failing. Its crew was dying, and couldn’t stop us from escaping. And that’s when Guy Wildman had this crazy idea
. That we could go back. Reactivate it, maybe. Or cannibalise it, at least.’

  Owen was surprised to hear Megan laughing. ‘And that was the crazy thing, was it?’ She stared at Owen and Sandra, wide-eyed, mouth open, daring them to contradict her. ‘You are talking about alien ships as though they’re real. And you Owen, you’re just encouraging her! I don’t think she needs our medical attention, I think I should be calling the psychiatric nurse!’

  ‘Listen to what Sandra has to say.’

  ‘Going back there? Cannibalising this alien ship? Just popping back underwater to grab some extraterrestrial spare parts?’

  There was a note of frustration in Sandra’s voice now. ‘With Guy Wildman’s professional contacts in the international scientific community, who knows what he could do? He certainly knew all about Torchwood, and didn’t want to involve them. He’d have found some way of selling the stuff on.’

  ‘Well,’ said Megan, ‘it doesn’t sound like the kind of thing you could stick on eBay, does it?’

  ‘You’d be surprised,’ muttered Owen, and waggled the Bekaran scanner at her. ‘It was only because Tosh was checking online for a pair of shoes that we first came across this thing.’

  Sandra had sunk back into her propped pillow, like she’d received a physical blow. Owen reached out to touch her arm, a human touch to restore her confidence. ‘I understand, Sandra. Now trust me for a moment. I need to show Megan this. Lean forward, if you can.’

  Sandra levered herself forward carefully. She started to part her hospital gown at the rear, but Owen stopped her. He beckoned Megan to watch while he passed the Bekaran scanner between Sandra’s shoulder blades.

  ‘Look at this.’

  The screen image revealed the vertebrae in Sandra’s spine. But it wasn’t the grey murk of an X-ray that needed close study to properly decipher its contents. Not even the artificial colours of an enhanced MRI scan. This was eerily like a post-mortem image, but the vertebrae and discs were still moving naturally as Sandra stooped forward and breathed in and out. From the sides, the vertebrae looked like white cubes in the red surrounding flesh. From the rear, the bones resolved into the familiar saddle-shaped structures that straddled the off-white intervertebral discs. ‘See,’ urged Owen, ‘between T3 and T4, just to one side. Attached to the spinal column, but not within it.’

  It was almost shocking to see. A sphere of metal, like burnished chrome, with a soft inner light somehow pulsing within it.

  ‘Not a bullet,’ he said quietly. ‘You’ve seen it for yourself, Megan. What is there not to believe any more?’

  She looked like she might be about to cry. Seemed to shake herself a little, rolled her shoulders. Looked directly at him. ‘What do I do, Owen? I don’t know what to do any more. I don’t think I even know how to feel.’ She let him hold her close, and he felt her shiver against his chest. ‘Shouldn’t we take this to someone? Shouldn’t you have gone to the authorities, Sandra?’

  Sandra settled into her pillow again. ‘You’re the one who said I needed a psychiatric nurse. What do you think the army would have said? PTSD, combat neurosis. And then kept me out of the way. The end of my career, whatever happened.’ She watched them both cautiously. ‘So I’ve come to you. To Torchwood. And I know what happened to Guy and… and Tony…’

  She covered her face with both hands, and began to weep silently. Dry sobs heaved her shoulders. Owen put a hand gently on her arm, calming her, while he quietly explained to Megan about the deaths of Bee and Wildman.

  ‘So it’s over, then,’ Megan said. ‘They won’t be going back to this alien ship… I can hardly believe I’m just saying that…’

  ‘Neither can I,’ said Owen, jerking his head in the direction of Sandra, who he was still comforting as best he could. ‘Bedside manner?’ he hissed.

  ‘We have to go back to that ship,’ Sandra blurted out. There was a fresh urgency in her voice.

  ‘Steady,’ Megan warned her, and rose to check the monitors. ‘I’m amazed by your resilience, Sandra. You’ve had a gunshot wound, you’ve been in a pedestrian RTA that would normally result in major trauma. I know you’re a very fit soldier, but for anyone else I’d have been arranging a bed in ITU at best, and maybe a visit from the chaplain at worst.’ She was considering the evidence of the monitors in wonder. ‘Owen, could this thing in her spine be helping her, do you think?’

  ‘That’s why I have to go back,’ Sandra interrupted. ‘I want to get this tracer thing out of my back. And I can’t do that with conventional surgery here in the hospital, I could be paralysed. But you’re doctors. If you return with me to that ship, you could use the machine that inserted this thing to remove it again.’

  Owen studied her thoughtfully. ‘That’s a thought.’

  Megan was infuriated. ‘She’s still in no condition to travel. You heard how traumatic she said it was the last time.’

  ‘I have nothing to fear from capture now. I’m a trained soldier, I’ve recced the area already. And besides the aliens are all dead.’

  ‘And in this weather…?’ protested Megan.

  ‘It’s the alien vessel that’s causing these freakish weather conditions.’ Sandra grasped at Owen’s hand, the one that he had laid on her arm to reassure her. ‘Surely you could stop the ship? Save the Bay? I can take Torchwood there! Dr Harper, I’m at your mercy in so many ways here. But I want to help. You should contact your Torchwood colleagues.’

  ‘I think we can handle this.’ Owen patted her hand and released it. He looked at Megan and grinned. That familiar adrenalin buzz was kicking in, it was like his head was fizzing with an exhilaration that he thought had been gone for too long. ‘Megan, this is it. Your chance to see what Torchwood is all about. First-hand!’

  ‘It’s insane — crazy!’ squealed Megan. But he saw she was laughing too.

  ‘Crazy is what makes me feel alive! C’mon! What’s keeping you here?’ He made a wild gesture that encompassed the room, the department, the hospital. That implied her whole life. ‘Why accept just this?’

  ‘Look at the weather,’ she protested feebly.

  ‘That’s my whole point. You’ve got to put up with the rain to get the rainbow.’

  ‘Oh, that’s lovely, Owen,’ said Megan sarcastically. ‘Now you’re quoting poetry at me?’

  ‘I’m quoting something I heard on Trisha, actually,’ admitted Owen. ‘But my point stands.’ He stood and watched her intently, his eyes urging her to decide.

  Sandra made a decision first. ‘If you won’t help me, then I’ll have to do it for myself.’ She started to pluck the sensors from her body. As each sharp tug removed another one, the ECG machine flatlined and began to ping a warning. ‘I won’t stay here,’ insisted Sandra. ‘And you can’t make me. I’ll take my chances on my own.’

  ‘All right, all right.’ Megan hurried to Sandra’s side, trying to calm her at the same time as helping her with the sensors and wiping away the remaining conductive gel beneath them.

  The examination-room door burst open as a nurse barged her way in. It was the short, thin girl, Roberta Nottingham. She was looking less eager now and more panicked. When she saw two doctors in the room, she slumped back against the wall in relief. ‘Sorry, Dr Tegg,’ she said to Megan. ‘I heard the ECG alarm went off.’

  ‘That’s OK, Bobbie.’ Megan switched off the ECG monitor and the alarm stopped at once. ‘Here, sort out her drips.’

  ‘So,’ said Sandra brightly, ‘how long will it take to get discharged from here?’

  ‘How long is a piece of red tape?’ smiled the young nurse.

  Now that Sandra had stood up, she was pressing her forehead gently with one hand. Megan moved to the door. ‘I’ll sort out some portable analgesia.’

  Sandra flexed her arm where the nurse had removed the saline drip and attached a plaster in the crook of her elbow. ‘It may just be that I need a drink, and I haven’t eaten for a while. Owen, can you get my discharge papers sorted out while I get dressed here? I’ll come and meet you out
at reception.’

  A soldier who protected her modesty, thought Owen. But he just said: ‘Sure.’

  ‘And I am absolutely famished,’ Sandra told him as he was leaving the room. ‘But don’t worry. While you’re gone, I’m sure Nurse Nottingham here can help me get a bite to eat.’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  There was no sign of the dead policeman outside Wildman’s apartment building in Splott. The battering rain had scoured the pavement clean. Even the shrubs where the body had sprawled were flattened by the torrent from the broken gutter.

  A half-hearted effort had been made by one of the residents to prop the front doors shut. It wasn’t as if they’d be able to get a carpenter out to effect an urgent repair; there were quite enough other emergencies to attend to as the typhoon blew through the city. Only the two hallway tables and a couple of plastic brooms were holding the doors in place, and Jack was able to force them aside with no difficulty. The crash and clatter of falling furniture was masked by the howl of the wind.

  Jack had brought a laser cutter and an axe. Up in Wildman’s apartment, he pulled all of the furniture towards the centre of the room, and tossed pictures and wall hangings on top of them, so that he could methodically test the cavity walls. Where he found that the plasterboard sounded hollow, he applied the laser cutter to slice a hole through it.

  Within half an hour, there were scorched gaps in every wall and in the backs of all the fitted cupboards. There was no sign of any lead boxes. A similar search of the small gap under the floorboards yielded nothing either.