Slow Decay - By Andy Lane Page 0,26

nodding.

Owen suddenly perked up. ‘I could do with one of those.’

‘You already have one of those,’ Jack said. ‘It’s called “common sense”. You ask yourself the question “Does she want a shag?” And your common sense chips in with the answer: “No, of course she doesn’t. I’m unshaven and seedy. She would rather stick knitting needles in her eyes.”’

‘Moving on, before there’s blood on the floor,’ Gwen continued, ‘the video footage is ambiguous, but my best guess is that someone walked across the beam: some local kids looking for a fight. The experiments Tosh did suggest that the device has quite a wide beam. Their aggression got amplified locally. Craig and his mate, Rick Dennis, suddenly got wound up. The emotions might even have got fed back to the local youths, who found themselves getting angrier and angrier. The whole thing just spiralled out of control. Someone made a comment, someone else threw a punch, and within moments there were knives out and beer bottles being smashed. They probably didn’t even realise what they were doing.’

‘Positive feedback,’ Toshiko said. ‘The device probably has some kind of safety cut-out to prevent that kind of unstable situation, but they just didn’t know enough about the device to activate it.’

‘All in all,’ Jack concluded, ‘raging hormones compounded by a badly understood alien device. If I had a nickel for every time that’s happened around here…’ He sighed. ‘OK. Once Toshiko’s finished her investigations, and once Toshiko and Gwen have visited that junk shop to check for other tech, we write it all up and file it all away. Case closed. Good work everyone. Now, what about the other thing – the dead Weevil? Owen?’

‘I’ve concluded my remote autopsy, based on a close examination of the photos,’ Owen said, straightening up. ‘The creature exsanguinated – it bled to death. The wounds on its face and neck were almost certainly responsible. Someone or something had been chewing chunks of flesh from it, both before and after it died. Something quick and strong.’

‘Another alien life form?’ Gwen asked. ‘Some kind of super-predator?’

‘I’m not sure,’ Owen said. ‘I’ve done some sculptures of the tooth-marks, based on an extrapolation of what’s in the photographs. You’d expect a super-predator, especially an alien one, to have large, sharp teeth, for ripping and tearing. What I’ve got looks remarkably like human teeth. Small incisors.’

‘Human teeth?’ Toshiko was shocked. ‘You mean, a human being took down a Weevil with its bare hands?’

‘Bare teeth,’ Owen corrected. ‘That’s the way it looks.’

‘I doubt that any of us could take a Weevil by ourselves,’ Gwen said. ‘Are we looking for a gang who hold it down while one of them has a feast? Or was it wounded, or sick?’

‘I don’t think Weevils get sick,’ Owen said. ‘They have an amazing physiology. They can digest almost anything, and their immune system is in some strange way an expansion of their digestive system into the rest of the body. Anything that gets inside their tough skin – bacteria, viruses, bullets, knives, stakes, whatever – gets digested. Rapidly.’

‘Which doesn’t answer the question,’ Jack said grimly. ‘What killed and ate this particular Weevil? If there’s something out there that’s rougher and tougher, even if it’s human – especially if it’s human – we need to know about it.’ He turned to Toshiko. ‘When we found the body, you said that the Weevil we have in captivity here in the Hub somehow knew that one of its compatriots had died. D’you really think that’s possible?’

Toshiko shrugged. ‘Owen and I were here last night, and the Weevil down in the cells started whistling. That’s all we know.’

‘They’ve never whistled before,’ Jack said. ‘Not that I’ve heard, anyway.’

‘It was weird,’ Owen said, shivering. ‘Mournful.’

‘Beware of ascribing human feelings to aliens,’ Jack said. ‘It’s a classic mistake. They don’t think like us, they don’t feel like us, they don’t react like us. It’s hard enough working out what a cat is thinking, let alone something from another planet. Anthropomorphise at your peril.’

‘That should be our motto,’ Owen said. ‘I’ll get some T-shirts made up.’

‘It’s been a hectic twenty-four hours,’ Jack continued as if Owen had said nothing. ‘The alien tech thing is over, as far as I can see, so we can concentrate on the dead Weevil. With the autopsy over, there’s no obvious plan of action apart from keep an eye on the situation, and intervene if we think there’s something developing. The worry is that whatever ate the Weevil doesn’t stop