she was happy with her address being given out.
‘Of course, she works with you, doesn’t she? Which reminds me — I forgot to ask. For the records. Where is it that you work?’
Rhys gave Doctor Scotus the name and address of the transport and shipping company, wondering why he felt faintly uneasy about it. Perhaps it was the eagerness with which Scotus typed the address into his computer, a half-smile on his face. Eventually, the Doctor looked up.
‘Thank you, Mr Williams. It’s been a pleasure meeting you. The tablets are yours — please feel free to call if you have any questions, or need any advice. You can settle up with my receptionist on the way out: we accept all main credit and debit cards. It’s a one-off payment — no ongoing commitment required. And, as I said, we do offer a no-quibble money-back guarantee. So far, nobody has taken advantage of it.’
‘Thanks for your time.’ Rhys reached out to shake Doctor Scotus’s hand.
He could feel Doctor Scotus watching him all the way to the door.
‘All right — what is it?’ Mitch said, weighing the alien technology in his hand.
‘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 cafe 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
‘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
‘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
‘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
