Slow Decay t-3

by Andy Lane

  ‘It’s not a gun,’ Gwen said, ‘and it’s got nothing to do with drugs.’ She took a sip from her cappuccino. They were both sitting in a small Italian-run café not too far away from the police station. Mitch had a large mug of milky coffee in front of him. He’d asked for a strong white coffee several times, getting louder and louder, until Gwen translated it into a venti latte with an extra shot. The world was changing in ways that people like Mitch found it difficult to keep up with.

  ‘I’d already worked both of those out,’ Mitch said. His face still looked naked to Gwen, without that bushy moustache he used to have. ‘The question is: what is it?’

  ‘Some kind of games platform is the best we can come up with,’ Gwen lied smoothly. ‘We think one of the kids built it himself. You can see the design is completely different from anything Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo are putting out. It’s possible that the fight started over this, but it’s much more likely it started over a girl, or drugs, or something.’

  Mitch grunted, still weighing the smooth, lavender-coloured object in his hand. ‘So why are Torchwood hanging on to it?’ he asked eventually.

  ‘We think it might contain some proprietary software. We need to download what it contains and check who the owner is.’

  ‘And that’s what Torchwood does?’ Mitch said, his face expressing his disbelief. ‘Investigates copyright theft?’

  ‘It’s a big problem,’ Gwen said, evading the question. ‘Lots of new software and Internet start-ups in Cardiff.’

  ‘All right. Keep us informed, luv. Did the video footage from the nightclub make sense?’

  ‘Just about,’ Gwen said. ‘I could see the device clearly, but not what they did with it or what they were saying. But it’s all grist to the mill. Thanks for making that copy for me.’

  Mitch drained his venti latte in one go. ‘Warm milk,’ he complained. ‘They always make it with warm milk, these days. Tastes like something from a kids’ nursery. Look, I’ve got to get back. There’s a briefing on. Keep in touch, and if you ever want to come back…’

  ‘Thanks, Mitch. I appreciate it.’ She watched him weave through the closely packed tables. He’d been a colleague, and she hated to take advantage of him.

  She turned her attention back to the device on the table. An emotional amplifier, Toshiko had said. Something that took emotions and boosted them.

  She and Rhys could do with a bit of boosting. Everything between them seemed trivial these days. Where was the grand passion they had started off with? When they made love, it was comfortable, nice, friendly. When they argued it was as if they just didn’t have the energy any more.

  Gwen ran her hand across the blistered surface of the device. She should be getting it back to the Hub before Jack realised she had taken it. She’d had a good reason, of course, and Mitch had learned nothing from it about aliens, or about Torchwood — but Jack frowned on Torchwood staff taking alien technology out of the Hub once it had been booked in.

  And yet…

  Gwen wondered what it would be like to make love with this device amplifying every feeling, every caress. What would an orgasm be like with this device accentuating the rush of sensation? What would it do to her? What would it do to Rhys?

  Would it, could it, save their relationship?

  She slipped the device into her handbag.

  She was sure Jack wouldn’t miss it for another few hours.

  SIX

  The further one went from the central atrium of the Hub, the darker it got. Toshiko had been walking for fifteen minutes now, along tunnels lined with damp red brick liberally scattered with circular blemishes of yellow fungus. Lights had been attached to the ceiling at some stage in the past — by Ianto perhaps, or by one of his predecessors — and linked by cables. They cast a strong orange light in a perfect circle underneath them, casting long shadows from the small blemishes in the brickwork, and leaving pools of darkness halfway between each pair of lights. For Toshiko, walking along the tunnel was like walking through an eternal sequence of rapid sunrises and sunsets, days and nights in rapid succession, leading her either forwards in time or backwards as she moved: she wasn’t sure which.

  It was a peculiar fantasy, and Toshiko wasn’t normally prone to fantasies. She considered herself a rationalist. Physics was all there was, as far as Toshiko was concerned: everything, in the end, came down to the movements of molecules, of atoms, of elementary particles and, ultimately, quantum energy twisted into multi-dimensional loops and strings.

  She and Owen often had this argument, late at night, when there was nobody else around in the Hub. Owen tried to persuade Toshiko that her belief in quantum physics, loop theory and superstrings was itself a faith, given that she couldn’t actually buy them off eBay (and, as far as Owen was concerned, everything he needed in life could be bought online or obtained from a bar). In response, Toshiko logically proved to Owen that biology — the science he had spent his life following — didn’t exist, being partly biochemistry, which was just a branch of chemistry, and partly classification of forms, which was just stamp collecting. And chemistry itself was just a branch of physics because it depended on how atoms and molecules interacted. Owen got really tetchy when she got to that point in the argument, and either put his headphones on and turned the music up loud or just stalked off in a huff. And that left Toshiko feeling like she had lost the argument, because the last thing in the world she wanted was for Owen to stop talking to her, and that was something that physics just couldn’t explain.

  Openings in the brick walls on either side of her provided glimpses of large, brick-lined chambers, some containing piles of crates and some row upon row of metal shelving filled with anonymous boxes. It was the Torchwood Archive; Ianto’s domain, where the various bits of alien technology that Jack and the team had found, confiscated or otherwise obtained were now stored. Not for any particular purpose, but just to keep them out of the way.

  A shadowy figure stepped from an opening ahead of her, and Toshiko stopped dead, putting a hand to her mouth to suppress a sudden scream.

  Gwen lit the aromatherapy candle in the centre of the dinner table. Sandalwood and cedar-wood: that should set the right mood, if the search she had done on the Internet before popping out to the shops meant anything at all.

  As a thin trail of smoke drifted up towards the ceiling, she stood back and looked at the table. The sweet white wine was open and cooling in the ice bucket, the good cutlery — the stuff with the beech-wood handles which hadn’t come out of the cupboard since Rhys’s sister had come to visit the year before last — was on the table and the food was cooking gently in the oven. Chicken breasts marinated in lime juice and orange juice, then wrapped in Parma ham and left in an oven dish on gas mark 4 for three-quarters of an hour. The smell was making her salivate already, and the food still had a quarter of an hour to go. The asparagus was in a dish, ready to pop in the microwave when the chicken was ready, and she even had a little parmesan to crumble over the asparagus when it was cooked. It didn’t matter that Gwen thought parmesan smelled like puke and asparagus made her pee smell terrible; Rhys liked them, and this was all for him.

  She crossed the room to the light switch and turned the lights down, just a little bit more, then went across to Rhys’s pride and joy, the stereo stack system that he’d bought, piece by piece, from an audio specialist in Cardiff, and set the CD going. The Flaming Lips burst from the speakers in a fanfare of confusion. Quickly she pressed the stop button and selected something quieter from the rack. Suzanne Vega; that should do. As the strains of ‘Luka’ drifted across the room she allowed herself to relax. Just a little bit.

  Just two things left. One of them was Rhys.

  She had texted him earlier, and told him he needed to be home by seven p.m. He’d texted back saying that he was in the centre of town on a job, but he’d be back on time. It was five to seven now, and she was beginning to get a little edgy.

  Which reminded her. The alien device. She didn’t want to
be edgy when that was switched on. Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath and held it, then let it out gently, visualising her tension flowing out of her with the breath. It worked: she could feel muscles that she didn’t even know were tense letting go and she could feel her fingers unclenching.

  She had put the alien tech beneath the candle, in the middle of the table. She wanted it somewhere central, and that was the best place. It even looked like something decorative, albeit something one might buy from a seaside craft shop to remember a holiday by, rather than pick out of an Ikea catalogue. For a while she had thought of hiding it in the room, or beneath the table, but that had seemed wrong. Having it in plain sight somehow made her feel like she wasn’t actually manipulating Rhys’s feelings without him knowing.

  Of course, explaining to Jack how wax had spilled on it was going to be tricky, but she had until tomorrow to think about that.

  Gwen quickly ran her fingers over the blister-like controls on the ribbon encircling the device. Gwen had been listening carefully when Toshiko had been demonstrating the device, and she was sure she remembered what to touch in order to get a generalised amplification of emotion within a few feet of the device. All she had to do was think sexy thoughts, and hopefully Rhys should pick up on them. His sexy thoughts would echo back to her, and with luck they might not even get to dessert. Which was a shame, because she’d prepared a coffee crème brûlée, just in case. Well, she’d bought a coffee crème brûlée at the supermarket at least, and it had been expensive. Well, they were on a two-for-one deal, but it was the thought that counted.

  Gwen took another deep breath. Was this right? Was she doing the right thing? In the short time that she’d been with Torchwood she’d seen what happened when people took alien devices home and tried to use them. It rarely ended well, and Jack came down hard on anyone who tried — but this was her and Rhys. This was their future. Jack didn’t understand, he didn’t have a life of his own, as far as Gwen could tell, but if Gwen lost Rhys then she would have lost the one anchor she had to the real world. Despite the risks, despite the danger, she had to try.

  Things between her and Rhys weren’t exactly bad, they just weren’t good. They weren’t the way she remembered them being, when they first met and fell into bed. The sex wasn’t the ‘wild, sweaty, so desperate for deep penetration that clothes got ripped’ kind any more. It was more the ‘it’s been a week and we really should have a romp even though we’re both knackered’ kind. And that was only one step from the ‘let’s not bother, eh?’ kind.

  A horrible thought occurred to Gwen. The definition of getting old was that you’d already made love for the last time in your life, but you hadn’t realised yet.

  At which point, just as she got into the wrong frame of mind, she heard Rhys’s key in the lock.

  For a moment, all Toshiko could see, illuminated by the orange ceiling lights of the tunnels, was the bulky, stooped shape of a Weevil. Then her eyes adjusted and she saw that it was Ianto. Only Ianto, wearing a suit and looking like he belonged there, in the darkness, underground.

  Physics. Light and shade, and the electrical reactivity of cells in the eyes. That’s all it was. Keep telling yourself that.

  ‘Ianto?’ Her voice was shriller than she would have liked. ‘What are you doing down here?’

  He glanced casually back into the shadows behind him, and then turned back to Toshiko. ‘I’m… auditing the Archive,’ he said carefully. ‘The records from the early years of Torchwood are pretty vague. I try and get down here as often as I can and correlate the contents of the boxes with the files we keep in the Hub. You’d be surprised at the stuff I’ve discovered we have but don’t know about, or don’t have but think we do. There’s stuff here going back to 1885. I was just checking the chamber we have set aside for the remnants of Operation Goldenrod. Were you part of that?’

  She nodded, remembering with a shudder the sheer chaos of Operation Goldenrod. It had been before Gwen had joined them, when Suzie was still part of the team. Toshiko had been working for forty-eight, perhaps seventy-two hours, on a hugely complex piece of alien technology that kept reconfiguring itself while she worked, but what she remembered, above all else, was the people that had been melted together during sexual congress by Goldenrod; their flesh joined, teratological monstrosities that Owen had to try to separate surgically leaving, for the most part, deformity and death behind him.

  Ianto raised an eyebrow. ‘And what about you, Tosh? What are you looking for down here?’

  ‘That device we recovered from the nightclub — I think it’s part of a set. According to the files, we have several more of them in a box.’ She waved vaguely down the tunnel. ‘Down there somewhere. Tunnel sixteen, chamber twenty-six, shelf eight, box thirteen.’

  ‘Ah.’ Ianto took her by the elbow and guided her back down the tunnel, the way she had come, away from the chamber where he had been working. ‘You’ve come too far. It’s a little confusing, down here. Let me help you orientate yourself.’

  They walked back, Ianto holding Toshiko’s elbow all the way. Something made a noise behind them, a movement, a scuffling, but when Toshiko turned her head she couldn’t see anything. And Ianto didn’t turn his head.

  It was a rat. Just a rat. That’s what Toshiko told herself.

  ‘This chicken is delicious. What did you do with it?’

  Gwen smiled. Suzanne Vega was still playing softly in the background, the alien tech was glowing a soft amber, which had surprised her but fortunately blended in with the candle, and Rhys was wolfing everything down with an enthusiasm she hadn’t seen for ages. ‘Nothing, really. I just marinated it for a while.’

  ‘There’s nothing “just” about that. It’s inspired genius. And it certainly makes a change from the usual pasta in sauce.’ He took another sip of his wine. ‘We used to eat like this a lot,’ he said reflectively. ‘We used to cook together, remember? We’d buy a recipe book and go through the recipes, one by one. Sometimes they were great, and sometimes they were… well, not so great… but they were always interesting.’

  ‘Remember the turkey with chocolate and chilli pepper sauce?’ Gwen giggled.

  ‘Which might have worked if we’d read the recipe properly and used dark chocolate instead of milk? I remember.’

  ‘Give us some credit, we were drunk.’ She wasn’t sure if it was the wine or the alien tech, but she was feeling like she was slightly out of control now as well. Or possibly she and Rhys were synching together, so in a sense they were both controlling each other. Whatever: it was a nice feeling.

  He was laughing now. ‘What about the Brie wedges in breadcrumbs?’

  ‘Which we left in the deep fat fryer for so long that the Brie just melted away and all we had left were these breadcrumb shells that tasted faintly of cheese!’

  ‘What was the silliest thing we ever cooked?’ Rhys asked. He reached out a hand and placed it over the back of Gwen’s hand in a gesture of familiarity that took her breath away momentarily, it was so unexpected.

  Gwen smiled at him, catching his eye for longer than they usually managed these days. ‘The pork, paprika and pears, when the pears just cooked down to this porridge-y mush?’

  His gaze locked with hers. ‘No. No, I think it was the Cuban lamb. The one where the recipe said we had to marinade it in Coca Cola before barbecuing it.’

  ‘Oh! Oh!’ A sudden memory made her eyes widen. ‘Surely it was the peanut butter and apple soup?’

  Rhys nodded. ‘Yes! Oh God, didn’t we do that for a dinner party?’

  ‘Rebecca and Andy came over. You found the recipe in a vegetarian cookbook. You were so proud of it.’

  ‘And it was so thick and stodgy that none of us actually wanted our main course.’ His fingers curled around her hand, touching the soft palm, stroking down to her wrist. ‘Oh, Gwen, when did we stop having so much fun?’ he asked softly.

  She sighed. ‘When I got a promotion, and you got a promotion, and we both ended up working silly hours just so
we could get together enough money to pay the bills and take an exotic foreign holiday, once a year, just to keep ourselves sane.’

  ‘Looking back, we may have made the wrong choice, somewhere along the line. No promotion, and a week in Criccieth every August. How does that sound?’

  ‘It sounds like hell. Have you ever been to Criccieth?’

  Rhys looked down at the remains of his chicken. ‘Lovely though that is, I’m not sure I could finish another mouthful.’

  ‘You usually clear your plate. What’s wrong?’

  He shrugged, avoiding her eyes. ‘I thought I could do with losing a few pounds.’

  Gwen reached out and placed her hand over his.

  ‘I wouldn’t complain,’ she said, ‘but that doesn’t mean I don’t find you shaggable just the way you are.’

  Gwen could feel a slight tugging in her hand, as if Rhys subconsciously wanted to pull her towards him. Or was it subconscious? There was a slight curve to his lip, a certain glint in his eye, that sent a tingle through her, from her head to her toes but lingering somewhere around her middle. She could feel her nipples getting hard, rubbing against her dress. ‘Er, you know I did dessert?’

  ‘Get thee behind me, temptress.’

  ‘I was rather hoping to have you behind me,’ she said, enjoying the way his eyes widened.

  ‘We could always bring the dessert with us,’ he said, teasingly. ‘I could lick it off your… stomach. And your breasts.’

  ‘It’s crème brûlée,’ she breathed. ‘I need to caramelise the sugar.’

  Rhys stood up at the same time Gwen did.

  ‘The way I’m feeling right now,’ he said, pulling her towards him, ‘heat isn’t going to be a problem.’

  As Gwen felt his fingers spread themselves through her hair, pressing her lips hard against his, she in turn pressed herself hard against him. They stumbled together towards the bedroom, not even noticing the amber light that pulsed in time with their heartbeats, from the dining table.