Free Torchwood: Slow Decay by Andy Lane

involved. It was the closest thing to an open and shut case she’d seen for a long time, except for motive. And motive would get lost along the way. The deaths would be blamed on drugs, or cults, or gangs, or something. Once the police knew they weren’t looking for anyone else, they would wind the investigation down. Only Torchwood would know that the entire event, all five deaths, were due to kids using, or misusing, a piece of alien technology.
    Toshiko was down on the firing range.
    It was a darkened room, about fifty feet long and thirty wide, starkly illuminated by striplights suspended from an arched ceiling of old red bricks. A flat counter ran across the room at waist height, ten feet from the nearest wall. Partitions divided the bench into sections at which the Torchwood team would stand when they were conducting their regular firearms training, or when one of them was testing some suspected alien weapon they had found. On the other side the room was empty. The far wall contained a set of Weevil-shaped targets, some singed by laser fire and proton blasts, one still soggy from the time Owen had fired an alien fire extinguisher at it by mistake.
    Toshiko was alone in the firing range. Alone, apart from two white mice.
    One of the mice was in a small perspex cage on the bench, just in front of Toshiko. It was cleaning its whiskers with almost obsessive care. The other one was in another small perspex cage on a table in front of one of the distant targets. It was running up and down, sniffing at the corners and seams of its cage, stretching up to check the holes in the top.
    Also on the bench, clamped in place so its longitudinal axis pointed towards each of the mice, was the lavender-coloured alien device.
    Toshiko had two video cameras, one on each side of the room, recording her every move. One was set for long shot, the other for zoom. Jack wouldn’t miss anything… in case her experiment went wrong.
    Somewhere in the Archive, there was a section devoted to the records left behind by other Torchwood members; ones who had been carrying out experiments, just as Toshiko was. Ianto had showed her where it was, once upon a time. Videos. Photographs. An ancient daguerreotype. And one scratchy old wax cylinder that, Ianto told her, contained a man’s voice talking very calmly up to the point when he suddenly let out the most God-awful scream that Ianto had ever heard.
    Toshiko had no intention of only being remembered for the record of an experiment gone wrong. And even if she was, she wouldn’t be remembered for a scream. She would be remembered for the longest, loudest, most unexpected stream of profanities ever recorded by Torchwood.
    Using a laser pointer, she lined the alien device up carefully with the two mice: one just a few inches away, the other across the room. She was pretty sure that she had the thing aimed the right way: the overlaid images she had taken of the inside were ambiguous, but she had enough experience of analysing alien technology to know the difference between a transmitter and a receiver, no matter how many light years away they had been fabricated.
    The mouse in the far cage was starving. Toshiko hadn’t fed it for several hours, and she could tell by the way it was climbing the sides of the cage that it was desperate for food.
    ‘I’m probably going to regret asking this,’ a voice said from the doorway, ‘because when I ask similar questions of Owen I get some rather disturbing answers, but what are you doing in here with two white mice and an alien device?’
    Toshiko looked around. Ianto was standing in the doorway.
    ‘I’m trying to confirm a theory,’ she said. ‘I think this is an emotional amplifier. I think it can actually transmit emotions over long distances.’
    ‘And you’re trying this out with mice, which are not, as far as I know, renowned for their emotions.’
    Toshiko smiled. ‘Hunger is an emotion,’ she said.
    Ianto entered the room and glanced at her