Free Torchwood: Slow Decay by Andy Lane Page A

experimental set-up. ‘So one of these mice is hungry, and the other one isn’t? And you want to see if you can project the hunger from one to the other?’ He raised his eyebrows, looking at the small plate Toshiko had put to one side. ‘Left to myself, I would have picked cheese. I notice you’ve gone for the rather more unusual chocolate-smeared-with-peanut-butter option.’
    ‘I’ve worked with mice long enough to know that cheese is a cliché born of old Tom and Jerry cartoons,’ she replied.’ ‘If you really want to tickle a rodent’s taste buds, you want peanut butter and chocolate.’
    The mouse on the bench beside her wasn’t paying much attention. It had spent the past hour gorging itself on food. Now it just wanted to clean itself up and sleep it off.
    ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Everything is set up.’ She took a last look at the video cameras, to check the right lights were on, and then moved across to the device.
    ‘Based on the interior structure,’ she said to Ianto, ‘the button that activates the device is here.’ She indicated a wider section in one of the raised ribbons that criss-crossed the device. ‘In fact, there are two buttons: one to activate the power and a separate one to operate the receiver and transmitter combination, placed far enough apart that a careless finger can’t accidentally touch them both together. It has to be deliberate – first one button, then the other, and probably within a set period of time.’
    Toshiko picked up the piece of peanut butter-smeared chocolate and slipped it through a hole in the top of the nearest perspex cage. It turned as it fell, landing sticky side down. The mouse in the cage glanced at it incuriously, and went back to cleaning its whiskers.
    Toshiko pressed the first button on the device, and then the second one.
    The ribbons along the side of the device glowed with a subtle apricot colour. Toshiko stepped backwards so that the video cameras could get a better view.
    The mouse in the container on the far side of the firing range didn’t react. It kept on climbing the sides of its cage, desperate to get at the food and satisfy its hunger. The nearest mouse, however, sat bolt upright, ears pricked, whiskers pointing forward eagerly. A sudden blur of motion and it was on the chocolate, tearing at it with tiny teeth, turning it over and over with its paws, wolfing down big chunks of the peanut butter. It was acting as if it was starving, as if it hadn’t eaten for hours.
    Toshiko reached out to touch the power buttons again. The apricot glow faded away.
    The mouse rocked back from the chocolate. It brought its paws up in front of its tiny nose in an almost comical double-take, seemingly surprised at the peanut butter that was smeared across them. Convulsively it began cleaning its whiskers all over again. The chocolate lay, ignored, where it had fallen.
    ‘Point definitively proven’, Ianto said, impressed.
    The area was mostly office blocks with wide glass frontages and lobbies that were all rose marble and lush tropical plants. Few cars passed by, and those that did were either chauffeur-driven, high-end hire cars or lost. No bus routes came that way: there was too much risk of hoi polloi getting in. Any old Cardiff pubs that had survived the blitzing and rebuilding of the area had been gentrified into wine bars or gastropubs catering for the office workers of a lunchtime. No chance of an eighty-year-old bloke with his dog nursing a pint of mild and bitter all night while watching a game of darts, Rhys guessed. The entire place was probably like a ghost town come nine o’clock.
    A board in the lobby of the block that Rhys had entered contained a list of all the companies that occupied the offices. Half of the block appeared to be empty: an indication of the way businesses were being priced out of Cardiff by increasing rents.
    A uniformed man, sitting at a rose marble desk that seemed to have been extruded from the ground rather than