Slow Decay - By Andy Lane Page 0,3

Nobody was allowed to touch them. The risk was too great.

After all, they all remembered Suzie, and what had happened to her when she discovered that she could temporarily raise the recently deceased.

Thoughts of Suzie led Owen on to thinking about the other members of the team. Owen probably spent more time in their company than anyone else in his life, but he still felt as if he knew virtually nothing about them. What about Captain Jack Harkness, for instance: the enigmatic leader of the team? From things he said, and more things he left unsaid, Owen sometimes suspected that Jack was as alien as some of the things that drifted through the Rift, and yet there were other times when he seemed more grounded, more part of the moment than anyone else he knew. And Toshiko, the technical expert who could strip a device she’d never seen before down to wires and bits of metal, then put it back together again just the way it had been, but who didn’t know the first thing about how people worked. And Gwen. Beautiful Gwen…

The sound of the main door bursting open broke his concentration. Gwen rushed in, unbuttoning her blouse. For a moment, Owen was stunned. It was as if his dreams were coming to life.

‘Gwen… er… this is… Look, I thought…’

She glared over at him. ‘Down, Rover. I’m running late, and I need to get changed to go out. I left my glad rags here earlier.’ She dashed across towards one of the side rooms. ‘I completely lost track of time.’ She vanished out of the Hub, but he could still hear her voice. ‘Bloody Jack. I just went up to deliver a message from Tosh, but he kept me talking. Where is Tosh, by the way?’

‘She’s out trying to triangulate some signal she discovered.’

‘Great.’ She appeared again in the Hub, buttoning up a jacket over a silk blouse. She looked taller, and there was a tock-tock as she walked that suggested she’d exchanged her trainers for a pair of heels.

‘So what are you all dressed up for then?’ smirked Owen.

She glanced over at him. ‘You know the Indian Summer?’

‘Up on Dolphin Quay?’

‘That’s the one.’

“Contemporary Indian cuisine with a special touch, derived from the intimate geographical knowledge of our chefs”. That one?’

‘That one. I’m meeting… some people there tonight. I’ll take the scenic route, I think. It’ll save me a twenty-minute walk. In high heels.’

Without any hesitation, Owen said, ‘Hold on, I’ll come with you.’

‘To the Indian Summer? Dream on!’

‘No – out the scenic route.’ He looked at his watch. ‘It’s time for me to go, anyway.’ Getting up from his bench, he crossed to an area of flagstones in the centre of the underground space, picking up the remote control from a nearby bench as he went.

After a few moments, Gwen joined him. They had to stand close together to fit onto the flagstone, and Owen couldn’t help noticing that Gwen was holding her body tense, ensuring that nothing touched him, no folds of cloth and no bare skin. Fair enough – if that’s the way she wanted to play it. He pressed a button on the remote and suddenly the Hub was falling away from them as the flagstone rose noiselessly into the air. Within seconds they were high enough above the ground that a fall would have seriously injured them, but a faint pressure pushed them towards each other. A faint pressure that Gwen was obviously resisting.

A faint breeze stirred Owen’s hair. He glanced up, to where a square of darkness was approaching them, set in between the lights of the ceiling. The dark square grew larger, and then they were plunging into it: a slab-sided tunnel which took them upwards, the stone passing fast enough to rasp the skin from their fingers if they touched it.

And then they were somewhere else. They were standing together in the Basin, shadowed by the massive sheet-metal waterfall that stood in the centre, sprayed by the wind-borne water that curved away from it. The sky was dark and starred, with wisps of cloud floating on the breeze. Owen could smell baking bread, roasting food and, strangely, candy floss. Crowds parted around them like a shoal of fish moving to avoid an unfamiliar presence in their ocean, not looking at them, not even aware that they had appeared from the depths of the earth.

‘Jack told me that something had happened here, once,’ Gwen said softly. ‘Something was here that had the