‘Torchwood?’ Rhys asked, face and tone neutral.
‘What’s Torchwood?’ Lucy asked.
‘I’m guessing it’s some kind of elite police group working in counter-terrorism,’ Rhys went on. ‘Something like that. Am I right?’
‘Close enough,’ Gwen said, picking up the mobile. The display just had the word Torchwood, followed by a postcode. Somehow, despite the fact that the LCD screen only had one font, Torchwood looked heavier, more menacing. ‘Rhys — I…’
‘I know.’ He reached out and touched her hand. ‘Go. Go and come back safely.’
‘Thanks. I love you.’
‘I love you too.’
She got up and walked out, not even bothering to change her blouse, because that’s what happened when Jack called. It was never convenient and never negotiable, but it was always, always important.
As the door of the flat swung shut behind her, she could hear voices talking. Voices talking about her.
Driving through Cardiff, she checked the street map with one hand by the crimson glow of the setting sun. The reference took her down near the docks, to an area she remembered from her time in the police. A place where old newspapers went to die, where rusty cranes towered black and insectile against the sky, where it always seemed to be dark and it always seemed to be raining.
She parked and went in search of the team. She found Owen and Toshiko standing on the concrete jetty overlooking the turbulent black water of the river. The SUV was parked a few feet away, next to a warehouse made out of some kind of angular corrugated iron. Toshiko was holding a portable scanner of some kind. It looked like she had detached it from the car. Her face was underlit by ghostly red light.
‘Well met by moonlight, proud Titania,’ Owen said.
‘I’m guessing there’s a porn version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that you’ve seen,’ Gwen riposted. ‘It’s the only way you’d get to know any Shakespeare.’
‘I studied the play at school, if you have to know.’ He sounded hurt.
‘And?’
‘OK, and there’s A Midsummer Night’s Wet-Dream, but I swear I haven’t seen it. Not for years.’
Gwen just looked at him.
‘You can’t even get it on DVD,’ he trailed on. ‘I think they only ever released it on Betamax.’
‘Where’s Jack?’ Gwen asked Toshiko.
Toshiko glanced up. Gwen followed her gaze.
Jack was standing on the roof of the warehouse, coat billowing out behind him. His gaze was beaming out across the water like a psychic lighthouse.
‘How does he get up to those places?’ Gwen muttered. ‘If I try to follow him I just get out of breath, but he’s as fresh as a daisy.’
‘I think he teleports,’ Owen replied.
‘Floats.’ Toshiko was looking at the screen of the scanner again. ‘Anti-gravity devices in his boots.’ She looked up to meet Gwen’s eyes. ‘I am joking, of course. He was there when we arrived.’
‘Which leads to the very important question: what are we doing here?’
‘There’s some kind of activity in the Weevil population,’ Owen said. ‘Suddenly they all appear to be moving — lots of sightings across the city. We thought for a while they were tracking something, but Toshiko’s analysed their movements, and she thinks they’re being tracked. Something’s got them spooked.’
‘Something’s got the Weevils spooked?’ Gwen frowned. ‘That’s not a something I’d like to meet on a dark night.’ She looked around in sudden realisation. ‘On a jetty. By a river. Oh God, we’re looking for whatever it is that’s hunting the Weevils aren’t we?’
‘Whatever killed that Weevil we found the other day,’ Owen said, ‘is nasty. Very nasty. It’s kind of the chief predator, and that’s not something we want in Cardiff. So we’re going to have to track it down, subdue it and take it back to the Hub. Without, needless to say, anyone noticing. And without getting attacked by the Weevils whilst we’re at it.’
‘And tomorrow,’ Toshiko muttered unexpectedly, ‘world peace and a solution to the Riemann Hypothesis.’
Jack was standing over by the edge of the wharf, although Gwen hadn’t seen him move from the warehouse roof. Somewhere behind him, across the water, a spotlight was pointed towards them, outlining Jack in white fire, casting his dark shadow across the concrete and the tarmac and the weeds.
Gwen nodded towards the device that Toshiko was holding. ‘What’s that thing do, then?’
‘It tracks Weevils,’ Jack replied.
‘I didn’t know we could track Weevils.’
‘I think-’ Toshiko began to say.
‘Owen tells me their body temperature is lower than humans,’ Jack went on. ‘They’re not quite cold-blooded, but they’re not far short. Toshiko figured out a way to use overhead infra-red imagery from military satellites to track anything of a certain size that’s moving at a walking or running pace and has a lower than normal body temperature.’
‘Assuming there aren’t many penguins on the loose in Cardiff,’ Owen added, ‘and, let’s face it, stranger things have happened — we should be able to sort out the Weevils from the chavs.’
‘Excuse me-’ Toshiko interrupted.
‘If we can do that,’ Gwen said, picking her way carefully through the words, because she knew that she was missing something, ‘then surely we can clear the Weevils out. Save some lives.’
Jack shook his head; the light behind him magnifying the gesture into a dramatic shadow-play. ‘They spend time indoors, and Toshiko can’t track them there. And besides, I need to know how they move, how they live, how they breed, in order to determine their social structure.’
‘And what good is that going to do?’
Toshiko looked from Gwen to Jack. ‘Excuse me, but-’
‘That way,’ Jack continued, ‘I can work out a way of getting rid of all of them for good. It’s like snails. You can step on individuals from now until doomsday, but if you know they don’t like moving across sharp objects then you can scatter crushed eggshells around the edges of your garden and they’ll never come in again. I need to find the Weevil equivalent of crushed eggshells.’
‘Will you all please stop talking?’ Toshiko snapped. ‘I have something to say!’
‘Go ahead, Tosh,’ Jack said. ‘We’re listening.’
‘I’m detecting twelve signals which I believe are Weevils. They are all moving in the same direction, at roughly the same speed. Eight of them are either moving through the warehouses near us or moving across the roofs. The other four are moving beneath us. I think they must be in sewer pipes.’ She paused, examining the scanner. ‘There is a time-lag between the thermal signatures being detected by the satellites and this scanner receiving the processed signal, but I think all of the Weevils are now either here or they have passed us.’
‘But if they’ve passed us…’ Owen started.
‘Then we are caught between them and whatever is chasing them,’ Jack finished.
Something snarled at them from the end of the wharf.
NINE
Toshiko could smell the Weevils before she could see them: a rank odour, like the elephant house at the zoo. Whatever it was, it made her nose wrinkle and her eyes water.
The display on the sensor receiver showed that they were being flanked on three sides: two Weevils somewhere in, beneath or on top of the warehouse; three more that had to be climbing under the wharf or swimming in the bay if they were anywhere; and another three in the darkness behind them. All eight Weevils were moving fast. Toshiko glanced around, but she couldn’t see any sign of them.
Was this how the victims of the Weevils felt? A moment’s nervousness, a prickling on the back of the neck, looking around to see nothing, and then teeth sinking into the neck, tearing the flesh apart, shredding it. And then the hot splatter of blood on the face and the arms and the chest? And then darkness. Was that how it was?