Another Life Page 9

  ‘When we met outside the Surer Square, I thought that you’d be S.I.T.’

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Owen, knowing already.

  ‘Safe in taxis,’ Egg said. He indicated Owen’s clothing. ‘The whole medieval thing going on here, I didn’t think you were looking to pick anyone up. And then I started to think you might be a gay man. Dressed up like that, with the false-looking boobs and everything. Not that that’s a problem,’ Egg added hurriedly. There was a pause which felt like he was pondering this. ‘Though I did meet one strange woman earlier who kept asking me to open hailing frequencies. Do you think that’s some sort of code?’

  ‘Don’t even go there,’ said Owen. He had taken the Mage’s sunglasses out of his pocket, and put them on to look at Egg.

  Egg chose exactly the same moment to leap abruptly to his feet. He stared at his watch. ‘Oh God, no! My shift’s due to start. Sorry, gotta go.’ He offered Owen a theatrical shrug. ‘Laters, mate.’ And with this, he twisted on the spot and spiralled out of existence.

  Owen stared at the empty space where Egg had been. Only it wasn’t Egg, he now knew. The sunglasses had confirmed his growing suspicion. The text floating in the air around the avatar’s head had revealed him to be m.tegg@caerdyddnet.net, connected to Second Reality with an IP address in Cardiff.

  The name should have given it away earlier, even before the coincidences of what had been said. Egg Magnet. Megan Tegg.

  She was the girlfriend he’d walked out on in London six years ago. What was Dr Megan Tegg doing in Cardiff?

  ELEVEN

  Someone was shaking him, pushing on his shoulder. The instinct was to lash out with his elbow. He resisted that temptation while he tried to orient himself.

  Owen was still wearing the helmet-mounted display, and his head rested on the keyboard of his work station. When he lifted his head, the image displayed by the helmet didn’t change: it was the two-dimensional screensaver, which told him in stark digital numbers that the time was 05.58.

  Oh shit. He’d dozed off while playing Second Reality. After a period of inaction, the game had obviously disconnected him and then his computer screensaver had kicked in on timer.

  He struggled out of the helmet. The same screensaver on his desktop computer screen clicked over to 05.59. The rest of the room was in shadows, the main lights not lit and most of the other terminal screens still switched off.

  When Owen’s eyes adjusted to the contrast, he realised it was Ianto who’d woken him by pushing his shoulder. It wasn’t like him to touch Owen, to touch any of them really. The lad could throw the Torchwood SUV into a hairpin turn, knock a Weevil down with a well-placed blow, and run a hundred metres like Christian Malcolm. But he wasn’t the sort to put a comforting arm around someone or punch them playfully on the arm, and he’d die rather than hug you. Ianto never gave a second look to Gwen or Toshiko. And Jack was always hitting on him, so he was probably gay, hiding in the closet with the lights off and hoping no one could hear him breathing.

  Ianto looked at Owen sheepishly. ‘I didn’t think anyone was in this early. I thought I’d better wake you before…’ He trailed off and looked over his shoulder. From elsewhere, in the R&R area, came the distinctive sound of Jack whooping with delight to the sound-effect noises of a handgun.

  ‘Yeah, right. Sorry,’ Owen muttered.

  Ianto gave him his serious look. ‘You don’t want to get addicted to this, do you?’

  ‘Don’t you start,’ mumbled Owen. ‘You’re as bad as Tosh. No, I was… um… testing some new software for her.’

  ‘I understand,’ Ianto nodded solemnly. ‘Are those breasts part of the test, then?’

  Owen looked down at his hands. Instead of seeing the blue data-gloves, he could see Glendower Broadsword’s deerskin gloves. Second Reality had logged him out, but Toshiko’s 3-D rendering software and projectors were still active. And so Owen still sported a magnificent pair of tits. Ianto’s smile looked like it might split his face in half.

  ‘All right, yeah,’ Owen warned. Ianto had obviously rumbled that he’d not been working hard all night. Perhaps he could brazen his way out of this. ‘So what? I met someone online who was interested in cybersex.’

  Ianto’s smile evaporated in an instant, and a fleeting look of panic flashed over his features. This was a more extreme reaction than Owen had anticipated, but it was pleasing nonetheless to wipe that smirk off his face. Perhaps Ianto was more prudish than he thought. One of those valley boy Welsh Presbyterians, no doubt. Chapel every Sunday. They wouldn’t like him being gay, would they? Churchgoer… yeah, that would explain why he was wearing his smart suit at this time on a Sunday, at the crack of dawn. ‘What are you doing here so early, Ianto?’

  Ianto looked shifty. ‘I might ask you the same thing, Dr Harper.’ There was another big whoop from the R&R area that suggested Jack had reached another level. ‘But perhaps I won’t.’

  With a swipe of his hand, Owen disconnected Toshiko’s equipment. Glendower’s costume dissolved into the ether around him. ‘If at first you don’t succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.’ He gestured towards Jack. ‘Has he been here all night?’

  ‘No,’ replied Ianto. ‘He got back about thirty minutes ago.’

  Owen nodded and moved off.

  In the R&R area, he found Jack was enthusiastically engaged in a shooting game. It had amused him some months previously to install Zombie Death alongside the other twenty-year-old arcade titles like Asteroids and a pinball machine themed around Bat Out Of Hell.

  ‘Jack!’ Owen adopted a tone of breezy familiarity. Better to try and blag it at this stage. ‘How are you getting on?’

  ‘I’m wiping you off the scoreboard buddy,’ Jack replied. ‘All those high scores you had? Not any more!’ He hefted a plastic gun, designed like an old-style revolver and attached by a stout cable to the base of the arcade game. On the display screen, a phalanx of the slavering undead menaced a cowering crowd of hospital patients and nurses. ‘Tosh told me about her 3D game technology. But you know, I’m kinda traditional about these things. Prefer the classic look. Retro.’

  You’re telling me, thought Owen as he studied Jack’s collarless shirt and braces.

  ‘I thought I’d try it left-handed today,’ continued Jack nonchalantly, ‘to give you a chance.’ He loosed off a brisk string of shots. The machine pinged in approval as the zombies exploded into dusty pixels on the screen. Jack gave another great whoop of celebration. ‘Oh yeah! See that?’ He pulled Owen closer to the machine and tapped the screen with his finger. ‘That means I get an extra life. But…’ He affected to look forlorn. ‘… I can’t stay here all day. OK, you take it from here.’ He tossed the gun in a short arc through the air so that Owen could catch it. Owen decided he wasn’t going to be fazed by this challenge, and took up position in front of Zombie Death.

  Jack stopped at the door on his way out, and considered Owen’s posture. ‘Have you done something to your tits?’

  Owen couldn’t stop himself touching his chest self-consciously. ‘No. I switched the game off.’

  ‘Well, you gotta start working harder on those pecs, buddy. I can recommend a good gym. Is the Wildman autopsy done?’

  Owen tried not to let his ‘Oh, shit!’ feeling show on his face. He still had to complete that, because he’d got sidetracked by Second Reality. ‘Sure, I’ll finish up shortly,’ he lied. While Owen was looking at Jack, in the Zombie Death game his character was dragged to the ground by the attacking monsters and devoured.

  Jack laughed. ‘Bring the results to the Boardroom in an hour.’ He turned his back on Owen as he left the area. ‘Or sooner if you run out of lives.’

  The walk in from Riverside normally took less than half an hour. But today, there were repeated delays. The night-time thunderstorm had not eased off so, after kissing Rhys goodbye over his cornflakes, Gwen grabbed a taxi outside their flat in the hope of staying dry. A two-mile walk turned into a five-mile drive, but she was held up as even the norm
ally light Sunday morning traffic ground to a halt along the drenched Penarth Road. Finally, she stood for a few moments on the paving stone by the stainless-steel water tower, waiting to descend into the Hub. Through the rain, she studied the armadillo shape of the Millennium Centre. ‘Creu Gwir fel gwydr offwrnais awen,’ the text read. ‘Creating truth like glass from the furnace of inspiration.’ It always amused her to read these words while she was concealed in the deceptive invisibility of the paving stone that led into the even more secret underground facility of the Torchwood Hub.

  Jack waved away her apologies for lateness as she entered the Boardroom, and then indicated her seat. Toshiko returned to studying her laptop, where she was making notes in one window, studying some calculations in another, and displaying live video feeds in two more.

  Owen stared at Gwen from where he stood at the plasma screen, bristling with ill-concealed irritation at having his presentation interrupted.

  ‘Death rejoices,’ Jack said. ‘Why was he so happy about it?’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Gwen said.

  ‘It’s what you see in some mortuaries,’ Owen told her. ‘Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae.’ The Latin words sounded strange in his London accent. ‘It means “This is the place where death rejoices to teach those who live.” You know, to cheer them up that they’re cutting into dead people.’

  ‘Only this guy…’ Jack’s casual gesture encompassed several images of the dead Wildman before them. ‘… he didn’t look worried about dying at all, last I saw of him.’

  ‘He changed his mind about that, after the first fifty feet,’ observed Owen.

  Gwen frowned at this. ‘Well, who really wants to die, eh? Like that programme about smoking last night on Channel 4, eh Tosh?’

  Toshiko didn’t look up from her laptop computer. ‘I wouldn’t know. I don’t watch TV.’

  ‘No TV at night?’ Gwen affected astonishment. ‘God, I don’t know what me and Rhys would do without watching telly.’

  ‘Talk to each other, maybe,’ suggested Toshiko.

  Owen coughed. ‘Shall I start this all over again, then?’ He was asking Gwen, rather than Jack. Jack was just smiling, amused by Owen’s reaction.

  ‘I’ll catch up,’ Gwen reassured him. Owen was looking pretty rough this morning. She’d seen him roll into the Hub before, looking like he’d slept in his clothes, lost his razor, and come straight in without changing. But this morning the circles under his eyes were almost as dark as the stubble on his chin. At least he looked a bit better than Wildman’s corpse in the autopsy pictures.

  It was only a few months now since Gwen had seen her first autopsy. She’d never had reason to attend one as a police officer, and she’d always dreaded the day that she’d have to. She’d heard the stories of strapping lads from her station who’d collapsed onto the scrubbed mortuary floor on first witnessing the clinical dissection of a dead body. Lads like Jimmy Mitchell, throwing up their canteen lunch. So her first autopsy had been here at the Hub, when she’d watched Owen dissect a woman of sixty-five who’d managed to get on the wrong side of a Weevil.

  Owen had delighted in making Gwen help him, testing the new girl, trying to make her collapse or weep or throw up or just run from the mortuary. She’d determinedly refused to give him that pleasure. She’d approached the whole thing with the detachment she brought to bear when examining a scene of crime. Observing the hanging scale for weighing removed organs, with a round clock-face marked off in kilos and a stainless-steel pan underneath – that was like the one she weighed her fruit in at Tesco. A Bunsen burner on a counter was the same as she’d used at school. The severed grey remains of brain, heart, bowels in jars around the room were harder to dismiss. OK, they were like the specimens in GCSE Biology. She had survived the ordeal and been pleased by her own calmness and by Owen’s obvious disappointment.

  That night, back home, when the normality of the sofa and the chicken chow mein and EastEnders on the telly had calmed her, she’d suddenly remembered the old woman’s pale grey eyes, revealed when Owen had casually peeled back the lids. And to Rhys’s surprise, Gwen had rushed to their bathroom and vomited so hard and so long that she’d ended up dry-retching, nothing left to spew into the toilet bowl.

  That was then. Now, she was hardened to it. Or was she simply harder?

  ‘I used that Bekaran deep-tissue scanner for some of these,’ Owen was explaining, ‘so I could get some initial snaps without any invasive procedures.’ The images were displayed on the wall screen, bright red and cream images of flesh and blood and bone. ‘Amazing, innit? It’s like it peels away the outer layers, or makes them invisible, or something.’

  Toshiko looked up idly from her laptop screen. ‘So why bother with the autopsy, then? Even without that, you’ve got MRI scans, ultrasound, nuclear medicine, molecular testing… It’s not hard to work out how he died, is it? His head hit the pavement at thirty miles an hour. Case closed.’

  ‘Wait and see,’ Owen admonished her.

  He ran through the images on the display. Many of the pictures showed Wildman’s corpse with its arms spread, skin flayed back, the chest exposed and the abdomen open. The traditional Y-shaped incision had been made from shoulders to mid-chest and on down to the pubic region. Wildman’s head had struck the bus, and then he had landed on his front. His face was smashed into an unrecognisable pulp, even after it had been cleaned up. Owen explained that he’d considered removing the brain through the big hole in the front of the skull, rather than the more conventional second incision across the head just below and behind the ears. ‘He’s not gonna end up in an open casket, that’s for damned sure,’ agreed Jack.

  There were more pictures. Owen had cut the cartilages to separate the ribs from the breastbone. ‘They were smashed up on landing,’ he explained, ‘and when I entered the abdominal cavity you could see that the large intestine had been lacerated by a penetrating injury sustained on impact. So freeing up the intestine took some time. Nothing of great interest for most of the organs. No bacteria in the blood. No interesting results from the bile and urine analysis. Non-smoker, slightly enlarged liver suggests he enjoyed a drink. No indication of drug use, prescription medicines or poisons.’

  Jack drummed on the table. ‘You’re saving up the best bits for last, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Owen with relish. He put up some new images. ‘Examination of the oesophagus, stomach, pancreas, duodenum, and spleen. Non-human elements there…’

  ‘That creature that he threw up at Jack,’ interrupted Gwen.

  ‘Genius,’ said Owen laconically, and continued as if nothing had been said. ‘There’s also an alien device inserted in his spine. Attached to the spinal column, actually, quite near the top. And here it is.’

  He produced the thing with a flourish. It was spherical, about the size of a large marble, but with a dull chrome finish. There were three short spiked attachments to one side of it, which Gwen assumed were how it had been fixed in place. Toshiko took it from Owen, and placed it into a small black container about the size of a box of matches. She that to her laptop, and started to scan its contents. ‘Is that round thing what killed Wildman, then?’

  Owen rolled his eyes. ‘He died of concrete poisoning. What do you think killed him?’ To make his point, he flashed back to a SOC picture that showed the mangled remains of Wildman, sprawled in the street. ‘Technically, you know, we’d call that a depressed skull fracture and cerebral bleeding.’

  ‘What about that stuff you were saying yesterday about the spinal fluid?’

  Owen flicked back to his notes. ‘Confirmed what you thought, Jack. The blood and skull fragments and brain fluid were from three different DNA sources, including that smelly bag of shit we found yesterday.’

  Gwen stiffened in her chair, and felt her face flush with anger again. ‘That bag of shit was a person.’

  ‘Not any more,’ Owen replied.

  ‘All right,’ interrupted Jack. ‘Good work on the autopsies
, Owen. Tosh, what have you got?’

  Toshiko smiled. ‘Search results are coming through.’ She touched her keyboard and her screen replaced Owen’s on the huge plasma display on the wall.

  Owen sat down and stared at the screen with envious eyes. ‘Look at that,’ he said. ‘She gets the jobs that take her a couple of minutes and then this whizz-bang technology does the grunt work for her while she sits back and does her nails. Why do I get all the jobs that mean spending two hours up to me elbows in someone else’s cold dead guts?’

  Toshiko patted his arm on the table to make him shut up. ‘It’ll take a while, because it has to do a content search on multimedia databases around the UK. Oh, and Jack, I had no luck with that search you asked about yesterday. No UK hospital examinations or autopsies contain info about binary vascular system. Negative for overseas hospitals too. I did the last three years, like you suggested. Shall I extend to five?’

  Jack shook his head. ‘Never mind. Stay focused on the current problem.’ But Gwen could see Jack was trying to hide his disappointment. That wasn’t like him, he preferred to encourage and support his team. ‘What else have you got?’

  ‘I checked out the security reports from the place Wildman worked, the Blaidd Drwg nuclear facility. Do you think it’s too much of a coincidence that a number of their new, experimental nuclear power packs have gone missing?’

  Jack’s eyes widened. ‘Didn’t see that on the evening news.’

  ‘Well, it’s not something they’ve made public, obviously,’ admitted Toshiko. ‘I wonder what…’

  Her voiced trailed off as an extraordinary figure entered the room. The inflated white suit and cumbersome cylindrical helmet made it difficult for him to get through the doorframe. When he managed this small feat, he waddled across the meeting room towards them. Gwen could hear his breath hissing through a speaker to one side of the helmet. It took her a moment to see through the visor that it was Ianto.