Free Skypoint by Phil Ford

Whatever she and Owen had come to SkyPoint to find, she knew it was just a few feet away, in the ducting above her head.
    Why has it stopped? What’s it doing?
    Suddenly she felt as if she was being watched. As if whatever was up there in the ducting was looking straight through the metal at her, waiting to see what she would do.
    Toshiko forced herself to shake off the notion. But she slipped the computer module into the messenger bag and drew the automatic from the small of her back. Then her ears strained for the slightest noise. She heard nothing. She counted the seconds with the beats of her heart. As a minute passed, there was still only silence, and it was as if she had imagined the whole thing.
    She ran the torch beam along the ducting. Three metres further on there was what looked like an inspection hatch. She had noticed a stepladder back in the janitor’s room. Her stomach turned over: the last thing that Toshiko wanted to do was climb into that steel tube with whatever was up there waiting for her . It wasn’t just the thought of something unknown, possibly alien and almost certainly dangerous up there. Toshiko wasn’t much good in confined spaces. UNIT had made sure of that when they cooped her up for six months in a cell that had been just 1.2 metres square. She knew without any doubt that if Jack hadn’t shown up when he did and made her that offer to join Torchwood, then one day the UNIT guard that brought her food would have found her dribbling and crazy in the corner.
    But that had been a while back now, and she had coped with a hell of a lot more than being shut in a box. She got the stepladder and set it up beneath the hatch, her ears still straining for the slightest noise from above. She climbed the ladder and wished to God that she had telekinetic powers or a third hand – she was going to need the torch to see by and that meant she had to put the gun away while she opened the catches to the duct. For a moment she thought about getting Owen. Sure, that would be the sensible thing – but she still had a point to make.
    She listened again, turning her head a little so that her ear was so close to the metal, so close to whatever was on the other side of it.
    She heard nothing.
    Quickly, she shoved the gun back into her waistband and snapped open the catches to the inspection hatch. She held the hatch in place against the body of the torch and listened some more as she retrieved the weapon. In her mind she rehearsed what she was going to do next.
    Duck. Drop the hatch. Go for it.
    Toshiko held her breath. There was still no sound from within the steel duct.
    Then she did it like she had rehearsed it.
    She moved fast, her muscles beating her synapses – getting it done before she had time to think twice.
    The stench hit her even before her head was through the hatch, and she knew what she was going to find in there ahead of the torchlight falling on it.
    It was, in fact, only the stench that told her.
    What lay along the narrow steel channel, illuminated by the flashlight beam, looked nothing like human remains, but that stink was unmistakeable. More than once she had come across what was left of people that had been savaged by Weevils – they were messy killers but had the good sense to hide what they left behind. Generally, Weevils found a good hiding place and packed it with bodies until there was no room to pack any more. Torchwood would come across a mass grave of Weevil kills on average once every couple of months. But you only had to smell one to remember the stink.
    But this was no Weevil kill. Toshiko stood on the stepladder, the flashlight in one hand, her gun in the other and regarded the stinking mess a few feet away from her. She didn’t know what had killed this poor bastard – or bastards.
    What she saw was a shapeless gelatinous mess that looked mottled and grey in the light of the flashlight, streaked with veins and splotches of red-brown. Here and there, patches of hair clung to