Slow Decay - By Andy Lane Page 0,30

on the table. An emotional amplifier, Toshiko had said. Something that took emotions and boosted them.

She and Rhys could do with a bit of boosting. Everything between them seemed trivial these days. Where was the grand passion they had started off with? When they made love, it was comfortable, nice, friendly. When they argued it was as if they just didn’t have the energy any more.

Gwen ran her hand across the blistered surface of the device. She should be getting it back to the Hub before Jack realised she had taken it. She’d had a good reason, of course, and Mitch had learned nothing from it about aliens, or about Torchwood – but Jack frowned on Torchwood staff taking alien technology out of the Hub once it had been booked in.

And yet…

Gwen wondered what it would be like to make love with this device amplifying every feeling, every caress. What would an orgasm be like with this device accentuating the rush of sensation? What would it do to her? What would it do to Rhys?

Would it, could it, save their relationship?

She slipped the device into her handbag.

She was sure Jack wouldn’t miss it for another few hours.

SIX

The further one went from the central atrium of the Hub, the darker it got. Toshiko had been walking for fifteen minutes now, along tunnels lined with damp red brick liberally scattered with circular blemishes of yellow fungus. Lights had been attached to the ceiling at some stage in the past – by Ianto perhaps, or by one of his predecessors – and linked by cables. They cast a strong orange light in a perfect circle underneath them, casting long shadows from the small blemishes in the brickwork, and leaving pools of darkness halfway between each pair of lights. For Toshiko, walking along the tunnel was like walking through an eternal sequence of rapid sunrises and sunsets, days and nights in rapid succession, leading her either forwards in time or backwards as she moved: she wasn’t sure which.

It was a peculiar fantasy, and Toshiko wasn’t normally prone to fantasies. She considered herself a rationalist. Physics was all there was, as far as Toshiko was concerned: everything, in the end, came down to the movements of molecules, of atoms, of elementary particles and, ultimately, quantum energy twisted into multi-dimensional loops and strings.

She and Owen often had this argument, late at night, when there was nobody else around in the Hub. Owen tried to persuade Toshiko that her belief in quantum physics, loop theory and superstrings was itself a faith, given that she couldn’t actually buy them off eBay (and, as far as Owen was concerned, everything he needed in life could be bought online or obtained from a bar). In response, Toshiko logically proved to Owen that biology – the science he had spent his life following – didn’t exist, being partly biochemistry, which was just a branch of chemistry, and partly classification of forms, which was just stamp collecting. And chemistry itself was just a branch of physics because it depended on how atoms and molecules interacted. Owen got really tetchy when she got to that point in the argument, and either put his headphones on and turned the music up loud or just stalked off in a huff. And that left Toshiko feeling like she had lost the argument, because the last thing in the world she wanted was for Owen to stop talking to her, and that was something that physics just couldn’t explain.

Openings in the brick walls on either side of her provided glimpses of large, brick-lined chambers, some containing piles of crates and some row upon row of metal shelving filled with anonymous boxes. It was the Torchwood Archive; Ianto’s domain, where the various bits of alien technology that Jack and the team had found, confiscated or otherwise obtained were now stored. Not for any particular purpose, but just to keep them out of the way.

A shadowy figure stepped from an opening ahead of her, and Toshiko stopped dead, putting a hand to her mouth to suppress a sudden scream.

Gwen lit the aromatherapy candle in the centre of the dinner table. Sandalwood and cedar-wood: that should set the right mood, if the search she had done on the Internet before popping out to the shops meant anything at all.

As a thin trail of smoke drifted up towards the ceiling, she stood back and looked at the table. The sweet white wine was open and cooling in the ice bucket, the