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 younger.
‘I think,’ she said carefully, ‘it’s someone’s life story.’
SIXTEEN
‘This is like performing brain surgery on a fucking Smartie,’ Owen muttered as he bent over his autopsy table. He rested a scalpel on top of the yellow pill in the table’s centre and pressed down gently. The pill slipped away and skittered to one side, bouncing off the table’s metal lip.
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 as he moved the forceps around, getting a better grip on the tablet. Manipulating the scalpel carefully, he extended the incision to the sides of the pill, then slipped the blade beneath the coating and prised it away from the interior. Oil spilled slowly out. In less than a minute, he had removed the coating entirely, stripping it away from the thing that had been hidden inside.
‘I hate soft centres,’ he said.
‘What have you got?’ Jack asked from the balcony.
‘Well, it’s not Turkish Delight, that’s for sure.’ Reaching out to the tray again, he picked up a pen-like device with a lens and a light at one end. He pointed it at the thing on the autopsy table and pressed a button on the side of the device. The plasma screen above his head faded within a few seconds into a high-definition close-up of the thing. The tip of Owen’s scalpel was just visible at the edge of the screen, the size and shape of a garden trowel.
‘Oh hell,’ said Gwen. She put a hand to her mouth. ‘You know what we’re looking at, don’t you?’
The thing was no more than a centimetre long, and curled into a comma. It was charcoal in colour, with irregular blue stripes, and looked like three very small worms, all joined together at one end. A tiny fuzzy cloud that might have been thousands of minute, translucent, fibres surrounded the free ends. The small teardrop of oily liquid that had surrounded and protected it was spreading out across the metal topography of the table.
Jack nodded. ‘Yeah. Yeah, I do.’
‘It’s an egg,’ Owen said. He used the scalpel to unfold the foetal creature. ‘It’s not a pill at all; it’s an egg. A fucking egg. And this is the embryo inside.’
‘But…’ Gwen seemed to run out of words. ‘But why?’ she finished eventually. ‘Why would anyone knowingly swallow an egg, especially if it turns into something like that?’
‘They don’t do it knowingly.’ Jack clenched his hands on the rail of the balcony, hard enough that Owen heard the metal creak. ‘And I think they do it so they can lose weight. Tell her, Owen.’
‘I’m guessing that the life cycle of this thing, whatever it is, is similar to that of our own, our very own, tapeworm,’ Owen said. He leaned closer, fascinated by the thing on the table in front of him. ‘It’s probably activated by the acidic contents of the stomach, hatches, then makes its way to the intestine and latches on. It sucks up nutrients, drawn from whatever the host has been eating. There’s so sign of a mouth, so I’m guessing it absorbs the partially digested food through its skin.’