Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies Part 8

Cogan nodded enthusiastically. 'Yes. Yes. I mean, I should think. But if it's an escape pod, its chronometry... that is, it doesn't seem contemporaneous with... what I'm saying is, I think it travelled through time to get here. And there are traces of Silverberg energy. Very, very surprising. Yes.'

Martinique leaned back in her swivel chair, and laughed. 'Silverberg energy. Signs of psychic activity. Fringe science, Professor.'

'No, no, it's true,' fl.u.s.tered Cogan. 'In which case, the pod may not have needed navigational systems. It may have been guided by... well, by the mind of... of whoever was inside it. The same principle as a psyche-guided missile, but navigating through four dimensions. Very complex. Very complex.'

Tchike s.h.i.+fted his weight from one b.u.t.tock to the other. The notion of time travel disturbed him. He had personal reasons for that, of course. Five years ago, he'd erased all the official records of the Doctor's existence from the UN files. These days, n.o.body below the rank of Brigadier even knew the old interferer existed. The Time Lords were mentioned in The Eye-Spy Book of Alien Monsters The Eye-Spy Book of Alien Monsters, but that was all.

'You see our problem, then?' the General said, addressing the rest of the Conclave. 'We have every reason to think the pod was occupied when it crashed. Now watch this.'

We're seeing the walls of the hangar zip past. We're seeing everything in flashes of khaki and gun-metal grey. A figure in sungla.s.ses moves out in front of us, but the cameraman's fist jumps into the frame, and cracks the man-in-black across the jaw before he can finish drawing his gun.

And we notice something else. The camera doesn't stop moving, so we only see it for a split-second, but it's there, no doubt about it. As we lurch towards the exit, we pa.s.s an open doorway, the entrance to a side-chamber. We glimpse the people at the threshold, looking up at the camera with surprised looks on their faces.

They're dressed differently to the other personnel here. Not men-in-black, not technicians. They wear coveralls, so they look more like sanitation workers than anything else. There are four of them, and between them they carry a stretcher.

On the stretcher is a bag, a chrysalis of transparent plastic, sealed, tagged, and air-proofed. Inside the bag is a body.

The camera spins. The picture freezes.

There was a long silence.

'What happened to Kortez?' asked Martinique, finally. 'I mean, I'm a.s.suming he didn't get out alive.'

Tchike laughed. Or at least, he grunted, which was as close to a laugh as he ever came. 'Obviously he got out alive, Doctor. Or we wouldn't be sitting here watching this. Would we?'

Martinique looked cynical. But then, she always did. She was on the brink of being an old woman these days, her hair the colour of steel wire, her suit making her look more like a company director than a xen.o.biologist. 'He got out? From that place? With all those MIBs around?'

'I'm not at liberty to discuss the Colonel's tactics, Doctor. If you feel your security clearance isn't good enough, you'll have to take the matter up with the Marshal.'

'You mean, he did did have inside help?' have inside help?'

General Tchike growled at her. 'Dr Martinique, you're here as a consultant on extraterrestrial concerns. I'd hoped you'd be more interested in the body than in UNISYC's American connections.'

Martinique sighed. 'What do you want me to say? Presumably, it came out of that casket. But it's a corpse, I can't see what use it'll be to the Americans. It's not going to be telling them any secrets, is it?'

Tchike grinned his most hostile grin, and reached into the top pocket of his uniform jacket. 'No? Then you don't believe the alien's DNA might be of value, for example?'

'Well... if you're a research scientist, maybe.' Martinique narrowed her eyes. 'Why? What do you know?'

'I know, Doctor, exactly what that alien is. And I know exactly what it represents. Shortly after Kortez returned to Geneva, we received this. I found it on my desk. n.o.body knows how it got there.'

Tchike drew the card out of his pocket. Even in the dim light of the War Room, it sparkled. The same way the casket in the cinevid had sparkled.

'An invitation,' he said, before anyone could ask. 'This card tells us the exact nature of the body in the Colonel's film. It doesn't give us a name, but it gives us enough clues. And it tells us how we can get our hands on it, even though the Americans have moved it to the Toy Store. What I want to know is, what kind of creature would send us something like this?'

4.

DEATH, DEATH, AND GOOD GRIEF MORE DEATH

The hall was full of dead people, although the Doctor wasn't sure if they knew they were dead. They certainly didn't seem too perky, anyway. They were pale, even the ones who hadn't been white while they'd been alive, and their clothes had been worn down to nothing, bleached of all humanity by Time, Motion, and the sundry other forces governing this part of the universe.

One of the dead men shuffled up to the Doctor, and kicked him over with the toe of his boot. The Doctor rolled onto his back. He couldn't see the walls of the chamber, not from down here on the floor. The edges of the room were in shadow, and he was sure the corners were s.h.i.+fting around of their own accord, defying all the known laws of architecture while they knew n.o.body could see them. Ominous shapes hovered just outside his field of vision, their faces concealed by the darkness. The Doctor squinted, tried to bring them into focus, but all he could make out were the silhouettes of high collars and black robes.

The darkness, he realised, was what the shapes had instead of fas.h.i.+on sense. They had to remain unseen. If they were seen, they'd be real, and if they were real, they'd lose their power. The dead were their slaves, the ones who moved in the light while the puppet-masters slithered around in the corners.

The whole scenario was familiar. The Doctor wondered if it was all a memory, dredged up from one of his past lives. Or even...

'Oh, no,' he said. 'Don't tell me it's a premonition.'

'Is he human?' inquired a voice from the back of the hall.

The slave, the puppet, the dead man, looked down his nose at the Doctor. He was Caucasian, his skin tinged a nasty green. Not Martian green, just nausea green. His hair was slicked back, yet somehow messy at the same time. s.p.a.ce-time anomalies I can deal with, the Doctor told himself, but paradoxical hairstyles?

'I told you,' the dead man said. His voice made the Doctor think of dying slugs. 'The security in this place is a mess.'

'It's all right,' the Doctor told him.

The dead man looked alarmed. 'What?'

'It's all right. I know how you feel. I was a slave, too.' He had no idea why he'd said that, but it seemed to fit the situation.

The dead man turned, towards the shadowy figures in the shadowy corners. 'He's mad. What did you do to him?'

'Nothing. He pa.s.sed out as soon as I took him on board myself. If he's that sensitive to my secure array, he must be time-aware.' The voice was female. Steady. The Doctor noted more than forty small details in the enunciation that gave the voice away as synthetic.

A sigh from the darkness. 'Let's all calm down a moment here, yeah? Security's fine, Mr H, everything's on the level. Just a little bit of a misunderstanding, OK?'

'You're saying this idiot's another one of your bidders?' The dead man made a sickly coughing noise that sounded a bit like "hah". 'How many more surprises have you got lined up for us, Qixotl?'

'Look, I think what's happening here is, we're all getting a bit tensed up. Right? We need to sit back for a while and, y'know, take stock.' The Doctor concentrated on the voice. It came from one of the shadowy figures, but...

He sat bolt upright. The dead man jumped back, a look of sheer panic splattering itself across his features.

'I'm not here!' the Doctor shouted.

Five pairs of eyes blinked at him. At least one of them, he guessed, was artificial.

'I mean, I'm not where I thought I was,' the Doctor explained. 'Some form of hallucination, probably. I'm sorry, I thought you were all timeless beings of unlimited evil, and I'd come here to defeat you.'

There was a stony silence. The Doctor had a good look around. The chamber was small-ish, certainly not the grand hall he'd imagined. The walls were made out of ersatz stone, but there was an incongruous c.o.c.ktail bar stuck in one corner. The leather chairs didn't exactly fit the style of the place, either.

There were eight other life-forms in the room. Two were human, wearing contemporary military uniforms. UNISYC insignia on their breast pockets, the Doctor noted. Then there were the Paradox cultists he'd seen earlier. The fifth individual was the woman who'd accosted him in the corridor, the one whose face had opened up and swallowed him, and yes, he'd have to think about the ramifications of that at some point. Next to her was a rumpled little man who looked like he wanted to be somewhere else. The Doctor got the impression he'd wanted to be somewhere else ever since he'd been born.

Then there was the dead man. Now the Doctor was seeing things a little more clearly, the man seemed much healthier than he had done. He still looked a bit under the weather, and he still smelled like he'd washed in eau de chemical spillage, but other than that, he could almost have been human.

The Doctor held out his hand. 'I apologise. You're alive after all. My mistake.' The man took another step back, and shot a nervous glance at the woman with the unfolding head. The Doctor retracted his hand, then struggled to his feet, making a big song and dance out of the movement. Giving himself time to think. "Bidders", the man in the smelly suit had said. "Bidders". These people had all been invited here, presumably by the nervous-looking individual. Therefore...

'I'm here for the auction,' he announced. There was a long silence. Those a.s.sembled in the room stared at him blankly. The Doctor crossed a couple of metaphorical fingers.

Then all eyes turned on the nervous man. He squirmed accordingly.

Qixotl. That was the name the not-actually-dead man had used. The Doctor strode forward, his hand outstretched. 'You must be Mr Qixotl. Nice to meet you, at last. I've been looking forward to this for, oh, ages, I should think.'

Another tense moment. Then Qixotl took his hand. The Doctor wasn't sure, but he thought he felt a degree of relief in Qixotl's shake. 'Yeah, hi. Glad you could, y'know. Make it.'

The bigger-on-the-inside woman spoke again. 'Explain. If he's invited, why doesn't he have an invitation?'

The Doctor and Qixotl exchanged glances. 'Oh, mine must have got lost in the post,' the Doctor blathered. He had no idea why Qixotl was going along with the bluff, but he wasn't going to argue the point. He cast his eyes around the room, looking for an excuse to derail the conversation, and his gaze settled on one of the humans, the man in the UNISYC outfit with the officer's stripes on his shoulder. 'Sergeant... Colonel Colonel Kortez!' the Doctor exclaimed. 'So good to see a familiar face. Still reading up on the Zen Buddhism?' Kortez!' the Doctor exclaimed. 'So good to see a familiar face. Still reading up on the Zen Buddhism?'

The Colonel looked startled. By his side, the other human shuffled her feet. 'You know me?'

The Doctor bobbed his head. 'Of course, you wouldn't remember. I've changed so much since the last time we met. I'm the D'

'Er, right, yeah,' coughed Qixotl. He kept clearing his throat, loudly, until he was sure the Doctor wasn't going to say any more. 'We should have some kind of social event, get everyone introduced properly, yeah? Maybe a nice get-together up in the roof garden or something. In the meantime, why don't we all go back to our rooms and get a bit of rest? Only one more party to get here before we can start the bidding, and then, y'know...'

'There was one party to come before he he arrived,' the nonorganic woman pointed out, nodding towards the Doctor. arrived,' the nonorganic woman pointed out, nodding towards the Doctor.

'Uh-huh. Right. Well, I might have miscounted. Anyway, the point I'm making is, I think we're all a teensy bit on edge, and we need to... oh, no.'

The Doctor turned to see what Qixotl was gaping at. A familiar shape had appeared in the doorway, and was staring at the individuals gathered in the room, obviously not knowing whether to say h.e.l.lo or make a run for it.

"Eep", went Sam's wrist.w.a.tch.

The Doctor coughed, politely. 'This is my travelling companion, Miss Jones of London. Sam, come in. We were all getting acquainted. Almost.'

Sam looked as if he'd just told her he was going out to have dinner with Mr and Mrs Dras.h.i.+g. When she raised her hand, in greeting, she looked like she was on the verge of holding up the other hand and surrendering.

'Hi,' she said, weakly. 'Look, I'm sorry, I'm totally lost here. What's going on. Do?'

'Well, anyway,' said Mr Qixotl. He practically shouted it, desperate to stop Sam finis.h.i.+ng the sentence. The Doctor shot him a puzzled look.

Almost imperceptibly, Qixotl shook his head. A gesture that said: not now. Talk later. Alone.

And in that one moment of contact, there was a kind of understanding. A split-second of recognition. Technically, the Doctor knew, Time Lords weren't supposed to be able to recognise each other after they'd regenerated. But it happened, all the same. No matter how much your face changed, there'd be something left over, something too subtle to put your finger on. That was what he felt now. Not that he was sure Qixotl was another Time Lord, but he knew, one way or another, they weren't exactly strangers.

Qixotl looked away, and forced a smile between his lips. 'Well, anyway,' he repeated. 'Time for a quick recess before things get into full swing, OK? Good.'

The Doctor glanced around the room. The others were muttering among themselves, looking slightly thrown. He spotted the Amazon woman slipping out through the doorway. So smooth, no one else had even noticed her going.

'I'd like to know one thing,' said the female Paradox cultist. Her voice was soft. Curious, rather than threatening. In the same way vivisectionists are "curious", the Doctor mused. 'Who, precisely, does this agent represent?'

'Me? Oh, I'm independent.' The Doctor slapped his head. 'Of course! I knew I was missing something.'

All eyes were on him again. 'Eight people,' the Doctor went on. 'I noticed eight people when I woke up, but I only counted seven. Who did I miss?'

There was a long pause. The Doctor looked around, but the faces of the other "bidders" were blank. Finally, he found the answer to his question written in the cracks of the nearest wall.

YOU'RE VERY PERCEPTIVE, read the cracks. MOST PEOPLE WOULDN'T EVEN HAVE ACKNOWLEDGED MY EXISTENCE.

'Erm, have you met Mr s.h.i.+ft?' murmered Qixotl. He sounded almost embarra.s.sed.

Somewhere in her consciousness, Marie had entire subsystems devoted to interpersonal dynamics. Vast neural canyons, full of raw psychology and unprocessed information. The systems hadn't ever been used. At least, not to their full potential. Marie had been brought into being after the start of the war (brought into being, not actually constructed; 103 TARDIS units were designed to reproduce in a manner that was almost organic), and in wartime, social engineering wasn't really a priority. The psychological systems were so finely honed that, at 100 per cent efficiency, they could predict every thought in organic minds with a margin of error of less than 1.3 millifreuds.

Here in the ziggurat, of course, the ability would have been useless. The s.h.i.+ft was a nonorganic, impossible to predict. Trask was a post-organic, his motives unclear, though Marie had her suspicions about where his loyalties lay. The minds of the humans were easy to fathom, in themselves, but exposed to so many unpredictable elements, there was no way of knowing for sure which way they might jump.

And now there was the intruder. Marie had scanned his body when he'd been inside her secure array, she'd run the usual genetic and morphic tests. The newcomer was a Time Lord, his biodata too complex to unravel without a deeper scan. Another non-linear influence. And Qixotl had stopped the stranger identifying himself, his social manipulations had been obvious even to Marie's decaying personal protocols. She'd have to talk this through with Homunculette at some point.

Briefly, Marie wondered whether it was worth learning how to sigh convincingly. She was sure it was what an organic would have done at this stage.

She stopped at a junction, halfway along the main corridor of the ziggurat. At the back of her mind at the back of the organic organic part of her mind, the part that existed in simple fourdimensional s.p.a.ce, the part that acted as a real-world anchor for the rest of her body something s.h.i.+fted to one side, moved like a rocker switch. part of her mind, the part that existed in simple fourdimensional s.p.a.ce, the part that acted as a real-world anchor for the rest of her body something s.h.i.+fted to one side, moved like a rocker switch.

Her deep-level sensory systems had been activated. Senses buried close to her power core were reaching up through the interior dimensions, up towards her skin. Feelers ripped open the soft non-matter between the outer sh.e.l.l and the inner body, tearing at the physical connections of Marie's forebrain. Things too large and subtle to manifest themselves in the material world tried to force their way along a conduit the width of her spinal column.

A moment of confusion. Marie hadn't activated the deep senses, not consciously. She wondered if there'd been some kind of system fault, the sort of hitch the organic part of her brain couldn't get a fix on. Or had she given the activation order without knowing it? If so, the instinct could only have come from the lower reaches of her body, from the depths of the artron engines, or the buried reflexes of the fluid links.

She ordered the deep senses to deactivate. Wait until we're outside, she told them. Not here. Too much interference in the ziggurat, feedback from the block transfer material. The information would be blinding, deafening, more than her surface mind would be able to process.

But her systems refused to listen. Marie felt the sh.e.l.l of her body opening up. New impulses, new responses.

Qixotl was covering something up.

There was another Time Lord in the ziggurat.

She knew who Trask was working for.

She knew who the s.h.i.+ft was working for.