‘Funny thing,’ Jack said; ‘it always ends up at seven hundred and fifty pounds with security guards, no matter where we start off. Must be a union thing.’
He tossed a card to Gwen. Choosing a moment when the lift area was momentarily unoccupied, they went through their booths together.
The lift doors opened on the twelfth floor to reveal a hall area with a deep carpet in neutral brown, hessian weave wallpaper and some unthreatening abstract paintings. A door to the left identified the Scotus Clinic in large sans serif letters.
Gwen pushed the door open.
The lobby of the clinic was empty, apart from several comfy chairs in a waiting area, three doors, the right- hand one labelled ‘Doctor Scotus’, and a vacant receptionist’s desk. Jack knew straight away that the place was deserted. There was a feeling, or rather, a lack of feeling to places that weren’t being used. They were missing something: an energy, a vibration, a background hum. It was like the difference between a sleeping person and a corpse; they looked the same, at first glance, but you could always tell them apart.
Sleeping corpses were a problem, of course, but Jack had worked out different methods of identifying them. And they didn’t turn up that often.
‘I think we were expected,’ he said, looking around. ‘This place has been abandoned. And pretty recently.’
Gwen moved across to the right-hand door. ‘Rhys said he talked to Doctor Scotus himself. We ought to start in there.’ She knocked twice on the door. ‘Just in case,’ she murmured.
‘Politeness costs nothing,’ Jack agreed. ‘Unlike security passes, which are quite pricey. I need to start cutting back on the bribes. I’ve almost blown this month’s budget.’
‘No answer,’ Gwen said. She pushed the door. It swung open, revealing a shadowy office. If there were windows in there then they were covered by curtains or blinds. She stepped inside, quickly being swallowed up by the darkness.
‘Can I ask you something?’ Jack said, still looking around the lobby.
‘Mmmm?’
‘Why is it there’s a Scottish pound note, but there’s no Welsh pound note?’
‘Mmmm!’
Gwen came staggering back through the door into the lobby, hands clawing at her neck. Something was wrapped around her throat, something about as thick as Jack’s thumb but with a wildly thrashing tail. Something coloured black, with vivid blue stripes encircling its body.
And it was throttling the life out of Gwen.
FIFTEEN
Toshiko rubbed her eyes for what felt like the thousandth time. They were gritty and hot, and rubbing them just made them feel worse, but she couldn’t stop herself. It was like scratching an itch, or sneezing: a reflex action that couldn’t be suppressed.
‘The problem with this place,’ she muttered, ‘is that I never know whether it’s day or night outside. The world could end, and I’d be completely unaware.’ In fact, she added silently, with Jack out there, the chances that the world could end in the next few hours were probably a lot higher. Things tended to happen when he was on the loose.
Her computer screen was still, infuriatingly, showing patterns of numbers as the processor crunched away at integrating the continuous readings from the hand-held scanner into a single coherent picture. It had been working for several days now, and gave every indication that it might churn away until the end of the world. Whenever that turned out to be.
Bored, she leaned back in her chair and gazed around the Hub. She still remembered the crazy mixture of feelings she had experienced when Jack had brought her in for the first time: terror at the huge responsibility that she had been given; pride that she had been chosen; excitement at the prospect of examining technology that no human had ever seen before; and, bizarrely, distaste at the place she would be spending her working life. The Hub was buried beneath Cardiff’s Millennium Centre area, built in and around the crumbling remains of an old water pumping station, and remnants of the old Victorian architecture were everywhere to be seen. The walls were perpetually damp, and the very lowest level of the central area was several inches deep in water that, in summer, usually hosted a colony of mosquitoes. At least, she hoped they were mosquitoes. Jack had once told her the water was actually home to the last survivors of a civil war on a planet of very small insectoid aliens. She hadn’t believed him, of course, but come the summer she did stop swatting them. Just in case. No point in provoking an interstellar incident by accident.
Ianto was stood up by the Boardroom, fiddling with the coffee machine again. Seeing her looking up at him, he called down: ‘Tosh, can I get you a coffee? I’m trying Jamaican Blue Mountain today.’
‘Thank you, but no,’ she said.
He turned back to the coffee machine. Toshiko was about to change her mind when she realised that the flickering of the computer screen in the corner of her eye had stopped. The processor had finished its job.
The screen was filled with a coloured display of a human body. Marianne Till’s body. It wasn’t an accurate representation — Marianne had been moving around while scanning herself with Toshiko’s device — but more of a computer-generated representation based on the information from the scanner. Following Toshiko’s instructions, the computer had mapped the data onto a standard human grid, legs slightly apart and arms held out from the sides, palms out. The picture was coloured according to the density of the material that was present in the body: bone was white, fat yellow, muscle red, with other colours winding in and around them to represent the rest of the stuff that bodies tended to be made up of: tendons, voids, lymphatic fluid, brain matter and other things that Toshiko couldn’t even name. She could turn the body through any orientation, remove layers progressively until there was nothing left or slice through at any angle to get a cross-section of Marianne’s body. Setting aside for a moment the sheer amount of time it had taken, it was actually a pretty impressive system. She would have to show Owen. He might be able to find a use for it.
A flash of crimson somewhere near Marianne’s abdomen caught Toshiko’s eye. She zoomed the image in. The area running from the stomach through the intestines to the bowel was effectively a void within the body: a space that might be empty or might be filled with solid or liquid matter, but either way it should always have a different density from the surrounding tissue. The problem was that Marianne’s digestive tract seemed to be blocked by something that had a density close to that of muscle. It was coming up as red on the image. For a few moments, Toshiko thought it was a glitch in the software, but it was too localised, too self-contained. A tumour, perhaps? She was no expert — that was Owen’s department — but she was pretty sure that tumours manifested themselves as lumps, not as long, thin, sinuous objects that wound all the way through the upper and lower intestines, terminating at one end in the stomach and at the other in the bowel.
And tumours didn’t have a mass of smaller tentacles, as thin as cotton, emerging from one end in a cloudy mass.
Toshiko leaned back in her chair, feeling her stomach suddenly rebel at the thing on the screen.
There was something alien in Marianne’s stomach.
Something alive.
Gwen felt the creature cutting into her neck. She could hardly get a breath past the constriction in her throat. Staggering backwards out of Doctor Scotus’s office, she tried to call to Jack for help, but she couldn’t get the words out.
Her head felt swollen with blood. Her eyes were bulging. A few seconds more and she was sure they would pop out of their sockets, the pressure was so intense. With every beat of her heart, spikes of pain were being hammered into her temples.
The world started turning grey around the edges. She managed to get her thumb between one loop of the creature and her skin. She tugged at it, trying to loosen the creature’s grip, but it just kept tightening and her thumb was trapped with its circulation cut off.
One end of the creature’s body waved in front of her face, thin strands of white erupting from a blue-ringed
