Torchwood: Slow Decay (34 page)

What made the image unique was the other alien with the designer: a smaller version, with deer-thin legs and eye-extensions that pointed upwards, like a ‘Y’.

A son? A daughter? Something for which there was no word in any Earth language, perhaps, but Toshiko got the impression that it was an offspring of some kind. And that the designer was very proud.

In the end, she thought, the slow decay of the body didn’t matter. We all continue on, renewing ourselves, through our offspring.

They are what matter.

They are what survive.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to: Stuart Cooper, for contacting me in the first place, and for helping me refine the plot; Gary Russell and Mathew Clayton, for making the book a pleasure to write; Peter Anghelides and Dan Abnett, for the support network; and Steve Tribe, for a superb, friendly and detailed copy-edit.

Also available from BBC Books:

TORCH WOOD

ANOTHER LIFE

Peter Anghelides

ISBN 978 0 563 48653 4
UK £6.99 US$11.99/$14.99 CDN

Thick black clouds are blotting out the skies over Cardiff. As twenty-four inches of rain fall in twenty-four hours, the city centre’s drainage system collapses. The capital’s homeless are being murdered, their mutilated bodies left lying in the soaked streets around the Blaidd Drwg nuclear facility.

Tracked down by Torchwood, the killer calmly drops eight storeys to his death. But the killings don’t stop. Their investigations lead Jack Harkness, Gwen Cooper and Toshiko Sato to a monster in a bathroom, a mystery at an army base and a hunt for stolen nuclear fuel rods. Meanwhile, Owen Harper goes missing from the Hub, when a game in
Second Reality
leads him to an old girlfriend…

Something is coming, forcing its way through the Rift, straight into Cardiff Bay.

Featuring Captain Jack Harkness as played by John Barrowman, with Gwen Cooper, Owen Harper, Toshiko Sato and Ianto Jones as played by Eve Myles, Burn Gorman, Naoki Mori and Gareth David-Lloyd, in the hit series created by Russell T Davies for BBC Television
.

TORCH WOOD

BORDER PRINCES

Dan Abnett

ISBN 978 0 563 48654 1
UK £6.99 US$11.99/$14.99 CDN

The End of the World began on a Thursday night in October, just after eight in the evening…

The Amok is driving people out of their minds, turning them into zombies and causing riots in the streets. A solitary diner leaves a Cardiff restaurant, his mission to protect the Principal leading him to a secret base beneath a water tower. Everyone has a headache, there’s something in Davey Morgan’s shed, and the church of St Mary-in-the-Dust, demolished in 1840, has reappeared – though it’s not due until 2011. Torchwood seem to be out of their depth. What will all this mean for the romance between Torchwood’s newest members?

Captain Jack Harkness has something more to worry about: an alarm, an early warning, given to mankind and held – inert – by Torchwood for 108 years. And now it’s flashing. Something is coming. Or something is already here.

Featuring Captain Jack Harkness as played by John Barrowman, with Gwen Cooper, Owen Harper, Toshiko Sato and Ianto Jones as played by Eve Myles, Burn Gorman, Naoki Mori and Gareth David-Lloyd, in the hit series created by Russell T Davies for BBC Television
.