Gwen picked it out tentatively. It was exactly the same as the one she had found in the bathroom cabinet back in the flat, with the exception that this one contained both the ‘Start’ and the ‘Stop’ pills.
‘Look what I’ve found,’ she said, walking out of her room and into Jack’s.
‘Look what
His room was exactly the same as hers, except that there was a body on the examination trolley. It was a woman. She was spread-eagled, head lolling off one edge, legs and arms hanging off the others. There was nothing peaceful about it: she looked like an abandoned doll.
‘Client?’ Gwen asked.
‘Receptionist,’ Jack corrected. ‘She’s wearing a name tag.’
‘I guess she was killed by Ringo out there.’
Jack shook his head. ‘No marks on her neck, and look at her mouth.’
Gwen leaned closer. The receptionist’s mouth was wide open, locked in an endless scream, and there was blood around her lips. Some of it had trickled down her cheeks, leaving crimson stripes behind.
‘Oh good God. Don’t tell me-’
‘That Ringo climbed out through her throat, probably rupturing something along the way? Owen can confirm it in an autopsy, but that’s my reading of the situation.’
‘What the hell are we dealing with?’ Gwen asked.
Jack turned towards the door leading out into the lobby.
From out of the shadows, something black launched itself at his face, its skin torn where it had wrenched itself free of the staples that had been holding it to the desk.
Jack’s hand came round holding his Webley revolver. His finger moved a fraction of an inch, and the creature blew apart as the gun made a sound barely louder than the power stapler. Shreds of flesh and droplets of liquid splattered against the walls.
‘Something that just doesn’t know when to quit,’ said Jack.
The device Toshiko was looking at now — the third of the similar alien devices she had found the time to examine — was the one found in the wreckage of an alien escape pod near Mynach Hengoed in the 1950s. That was before she was even born, she reflected. It was flatter than the rest, lenticular, with sharp projections all the way around the edge, some of which had been knocked off over the years as it was moved from crate to crate. It was an orange colour, and had a hole right through the centre. Holding it in her hand, Toshiko thought it was slightly heavier on one side than the other, but she had no more idea about its function than about the rest of the devices in the series.
The series. That was how she was thinking of them. They were all different shapes, sizes and colours, but they were obviously related to one another. Made by the same hands, she was sure. Well, perhaps not hands. Made by the same claws, or tentacles, or mandibles. It didn’t matter. She was convinced there was a consistent style running through them.
And perhaps more than just a consistent style.
Voices were echoing through the Hub from the Autopsy Room — Owen’s personal domain — distracting Toshiko’s attention from the device she held. It sounded like Jack, Owen and Gwen were arguing. Jack and Gwen had come rushing back from the Scotus Clinic looking like something had happened, but they’d headed straight into the medical section without saying anything to her. She’d tried to tell them about the image of the creature inside the girl, but Jack had snapped something about it being ‘old news’ and kept on walking.
Ianto had followed on a few minutes afterwards, wheeling a body in on a gurney. He too went past Toshiko without acknowledging her existence. Part of her had wanted to follow on to see what all the fuss was about, but she felt awkward. They would tell her when they needed to. When she could help.
Toshiko wondered if there was something technical she could be doing now, but she couldn’t think of anything and neither Jack nor any of the others had made any suggestions. Having processed Marianne’s medical scans, Toshiko had found herself at something of a loose end, which is why she had returned to looking at the alien devices matching the one that had been found in the nightclub where the young men had died.
Toshiko sometimes wondered whether the others truly felt she was part of the team. They valued her technical knowledge — she knew that — but there were times she felt as if she wasn’t part of the decision-making process. Excluded from the action. Marginalised.
Perhaps she just wasn’t outgoing enough. She certainly didn’t join in the banter as much as the others did. She sometimes felt awkward at the informality of the Torchwood team — she was used to working in a more formalised environment. It was her fault that she didn’t integrate with the team. She wished she knew how to do something about it, but she didn’t.
Sighing, Toshiko slid the device beneath the scanner head that she had rigged up. It contained sensors that would examine the device in various spectra — microwave, infra-red, ultra-violet and others — and integrate the results together into one picture. Having already done this twice before on two of the other devices, she felt that she had it down to a fine art. And the changes she had made to the software would speed the process up.
As her computer laboured to integrate the various pictures it was receiving, Toshiko tried to hear what the argument was about, but she couldn’t make any of the words out. Gwen appeared to be pleading with Jack about something, while Jack was being firm and Owen was throwing in the occasional jibe. Tension was seeping out of the medical area, and Toshiko could feel her shoulders and neck becoming tighter in sympathy. She hated conflict, especially in the Hub where things should have been calm and contemplative.
‘Is that one of the objects from tunnel sixteen, chamber twenty-six, shelf eight, box thirteen?’
She jumped at the sound of the voice behind her. Twisting on her seat, she realised that Ianto was standing in the shadows.
‘I signed it out,’ she said defensively.
‘I didn’t mean to question you.’ He stepped forward. ‘I’m just glad that someone is taking an interest in the Archive. All too often we find these things, give them a cursory examination, then put them in a box and forget about them. It’s nice that someone cares enough to pull them out every now and then and see if we can’t find out something new.’
Toshiko opened her mouth to say something, although she wasn’t entirely sure what, but her computer chimed softly. The integration routines had finished their work. She turned to view the screen. Ianto moved up to stand at her shoulder.
‘What, if you don’t mind me asking, is that?’ he asked.
Based on what she had seen in the other two devices, Toshiko was pretty sure she knew exactly what it was. An image. A portrait of an alien creature, looking straight out of the screen at her, formed of components within the device: alien analogues of wires and capacitors, transistors and resistors, integrated circuits and power sources.
This picture was subtly different from the other two. The head was flatter than would be normal for a human, with a vertical slit for a mouth and eyes set at either end of a rugby ball-shaped head, but the head looked plumper than in the images from the other two devices; drooping less at either end and not as wrinkled. The mouth — if that was what it was — seemed more pronounced. If anything, the whole picture looked
‘I think,’ she said carefully, ‘it’s someone’s life story.’
SIXTEEN
‘This is like performing brain surgery on a fucking
Reaching out to a table on one side, where he kept his surgical tools on a metal tray, he retrieved a pair of forceps. With these in his left hand he could hold the pill steady while he gently drew the scalpel across the top of the pill. It left a fine incision behind. Something oily welled up through the incision.
‘Interesting,’ he murmured. ‘I thought this was a dissolvable sugar coating, like you get on some headache pills, but it’s more like a harder version of gelatin. It’s flexible. With a bit of luck, I might just…’ His voice tailed off
