Torchwood: Slow Decay by Andy Lane Page A

albeit something one might buy from a seaside craft shop to remember a holiday by, rather than pick out of an Ikea catalogue. For a while she had thought of hiding it in the room, or beneath the table, but that had seemed wrong. Having it in plain sight somehow made her feel like she wasn’t actually manipulating Rhys’s feelings without him knowing.
    Of course, explaining to Jack how wax had spilled on it was going to be tricky, but she had until tomorrow to think about that.
    Gwen quickly ran her fingers over the blister-like controls on the ribbon encircling the device. Gwen had been listening carefully when Toshiko had been demonstrating the device, and she was sure she remembered what to touch in order to get a generalised amplification of emotion within a few feet of the device. All she had to do was think sexy thoughts, and hopefully Rhys should pick up on them. His sexy thoughts would echo back to her, and with luck they might not even get to dessert. Which was a shame, because she’d prepared a coffee crème brûlée, just in case. Well, she’d bought a coffee crème brûlée at the supermarket at least, and it had been expensive. Well, they were on a two-for-one deal, but it was the thought that counted.
    Gwen took another deep breath. Was this right? Was she doing the right thing? In the short time that she’d been with Torchwood she’d seen what happened when people took alien devices home and tried to use them. It rarely ended well, and Jack came down hard on anyone who tried – but this was her and Rhys. This was their future. Jack didn’t understand, he didn’t have a life of his own, as far as Gwen could tell, but if Gwen lost Rhys then she would have lost the one anchor she had to the real world. Despite the risks, despite the danger, she had to try.
    Things between her and Rhys weren’t exactly bad , they just weren’t good . They weren’t the way she remembered them being, when they first met and fell into bed. The sex wasn’t the ‘wild, sweaty, so desperate for deep penetration that clothes got ripped’ kind any more. It was more the ‘it’s been a week and we really should have a romp even though we’re both knackered’ kind. And that was only one step from the ‘let’s not bother, eh?’ kind.
    A horrible thought occurred to Gwen. The definition of getting old was that you’d already made love for the last time in your life, but you hadn’t realised yet.
    At which point, just as she got into the wrong frame of mind, she heard Rhys’s key in the lock.
    For a moment, all Toshiko could see, illuminated by the orange ceiling lights of the tunnels, was the bulky, stooped shape of a Weevil. Then her eyes adjusted and she saw that it was Ianto. Only Ianto, wearing a suit and looking like he belonged there, in the darkness, underground.
    Physics. Light and shade, and the electrical reactivity of cells in the eyes. That’s all it was. Keep telling yourself that.
    ‘Ianto?’ Her voice was shriller than she would have liked. ‘What are you doing down here?’
    He glanced casually back into the shadows behind him, and then turned back to Toshiko. ‘I’m… auditing the Archive,’ he said carefully. ‘The records from the early years of Torchwood are pretty vague. I try and get down here as often as I can and correlate the contents of the boxes with the files we keep in the Hub. You’d be surprised at the stuff I’ve discovered we have but don’t know about, or don’t have but think we do. There’s stuff here going back to 1885. I was just checking the chamber we have set aside for the remnants of Operation Goldenrod. Were you part of that?’
    She nodded, remembering with a shudder the sheer chaos of Operation Goldenrod. It had been before Gwen had joined them, when Suzie was still part of the team. Toshiko had been working for forty-eight, perhaps seventy-two hours, on a hugely complex piece of alien technology that kept reconfiguring itself while she worked, but what she