Dancing the Code Part 13

She was trying to sound flippant, but her voice was hoa.r.s.e and shaky. Jo glanced at her, realized that this time she was supposed to be the knowledgeable one. She swallowed, wished that the Doctor was with her. He would probably know what planet it came from, what species it was, and what you had to spray on it to make it go away. All she could think of was, 'I don't think it's entirely organic.

At least, I've never seen anything organic that had rotor blades.' She swallowed, aware that she wasn't making much sense. 'It's certainly extraterrestrial in origin, though,' she concluded. 'No one on Earth could have made it or grown it.'

'What are you talking about?' Vincent's voice. Jo turned, saw him crouching on top of the sandbags. He was staring at the alien, his mouth open. Evidently he had been too concerned with destroying it to notice what it was until now. Jo wondered what the Doctor would have had to say about that.

'It's not from Earth,' said Catriona.

'What do you mean, not from Earth?' asked Vincent, still staring at it. 'You mean it came from Mars?'

'Probably much further than that,' said Jo.

Vincent started to laugh, was stopped by a sharp glance from Catriona. 'Jo knows what she's talking about.'

He stared at her for a moment, then looked up and scanned the sky, as if he were expecting to see a fleet of invading s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps. Jo stifled a giggle; but Vincent noticed. He jumped down from the sandbags, grabbed her arms, started shaking her.

'What have my people done to deserve this, eh? First the Kebirians bomb us and do not care what the world thinks and now we are invaded from Mars! What is happening to us? Is this the luck that you have brought us, eh?'

'Vincent!' Catriona had a hand on his arm. 'Vincent! Stop it, it's not Jo's fault.'

Vincent stopped shaking Jo, but continued to stare, his green eyes bright, a fleck of foam at the corner of his mouth.

There was a splintering sound from the body of the alien. Vincent instantly let her go, swung his gun to cover the body. Jo heard the click of the safety catch. The splintering sounds continued and cracks began to appear in the blue-black carapace. Golden fluid bubbled out, and a sweet, pungent scent filled the air.

Catriona was staring at it, a frown on her face. 'It is the same smell,' she said. 'Roses and cloves.' She gripped Jo's arm. 'We need to burn the body. Now.'

'Burn it?' asked Vincent. 'Is it poisonous?' He still seemed bewildered.

Jo, alerted by a faint whickering sound, turned and looked at the sky behind them. Several dozen of the helicopter-like objects moved into view over the wall, long ropes trailing beneath them. 'More of them,' she said simply.

'Quickly!' yelled Vincent. 'Inside the gun turret!'

He pushed Jo up to the entrance; she almost fell inside. She collided with someone in the darkness, said, 'Sorry.'

Outside, there was a stutter of machine-gun fire. Catriona's voice screamed, 'Vincent!' Jo rushed to the doorway, saw Vincent entangled in rope-like tentacles, dangling several feet above her head.

There was a gun in his hand. As Jo stared, he dropped it towards her.

She caught it awkwardly, almost dropped it herself.

'Fire it!' he shouted. He was level with the top of the wall now.

'Quickly!'

Jo took aim at the back of the gaping mouth in the creature's belly, where most of the tentacles seemed to be anch.o.r.ed. Fired.

The gun almost jumped out of her hands. She saw Vincent drop past her, slowly, as if in a dream. Heard his body thump on to the sandbags. Then the tentacles lashed, caught on to her arms. The gun was s.n.a.t.c.hed from her hands, flicked away. Jo felt her body being hauled upwards. Desperately, she tried to cling to the wooden lintel of the doorway, but her grip was broken by the overwhelming force of the tentacles. She saw Vincent sitting up, ten feet below her, looking half-stunned. Catriona climbed over him, almost dragged him to the door, flung him inside, then reached out for Jo.

'No!' yelled Jo. 'Get inside or it'll get you too!'

Catriona still reached upwards but Jo's body was jerked around so that she was looking up into the huge, tooth-filled maw of the alien.

She had a brief glimpse across the settlement, saw two of the aliens with their webs of tentacles hovering over the hospital, saw patients, bodies, nurses, all entangled in the tentacles, all rising. Then a wall of teeth cut off her view.

- I did try to save those people please G.o.d I did try I did try to save those people please G.o.d I did try - - And then the teeth closed around her.

The night was silent: too silent for the Brigadier's liking. He looked at the sky, watched the slow movement of a satellite against the brilliant background of stars. Perhaps it was the one that had taken Mike Yates's photographs. Whatever. It was rea.s.suring, somehow, that there was something man-made up there, even if there wasn't anything alive at ground level.

'Come along, Brigadier. We haven't got time for stargazing.'

The Doctor was striding ahead again, not waiting for a reply. The Brigadier set off after him, rubbing at his back, which he'd twisted slightly when his parachute landed.

The Doctor was carrying a small electronic device with a flickering purple light. He'd described it as an anti-electron something field something; when asked to clarify he'd started talking about probability waves, meson-electron whatchimacallits and an experiment with a dead cat; when the Brigadier had finally interrupted him and asked what the device actually did did, in practical terms, the Doctor had said that it located living organisms.

'So we should be able to find an oasis?' he'd asked.

'We'll find,' the Doctor had replied, 'the nearest large concentration of living organisms.'

The Brigadier hadn't liked the sound of it, and he still didn't. The Doctor was being pedantic again and in the Brigadier's experience that always meant trouble. In this case, he suspected it meant that they were going to the black tower they'd seen before the plane crashed; a suspicion that was reinforced by the fact that they were now climbing a steep, rocky trail. True, it was too dark to see what lay ahead, but there was definitely something obscuring the stars in that part of the sky.

Well, he thought, I suppose it's what Anton Deveraux was sent to investigate in the first place. Then he remembered what had happened to Anton Deveraux, and his pulse quickened uncomfortably.

Suddenly he heard a sound above the regular crunching of their boots on the pebbly rock. A mechanical sound, a whickering sort of noise, like -

The Doctor stopped, held up his hand. The Brigadier heard it clearly then: helicopter rotors. He saw a chain of red lights, moving slowly out over the desert to the west.

'Helicopters!' he said aloud, immensely relieved. 'Well, Doctor, it looks like we're going to get a lift. The Kebirian government must have come to its senses at last.'

The Doctor shook his head, stepped quickly sideways, crouched down so that he disappeared from sight.

'I suggest you take cover, Brigadier.'

'Why? You don't think they're unfriendly?' He couldn't quite believe that the Kebirians would send a fleet of helicopters to find and kill UN personnel. The worst that could happen was that they'd be arrested and spend a few hours in a prison cell. It would all be sorted out in the morning. It certainly had to be better than wandering around in the desert, relying on one of the Doctor's erratic electrical devices to find a place that they might not want to find anyway.

'Get down, man!' hissed the Doctor.

The Brigadier stepped off the track, almost fell over a rock. He felt the Doctor's arm grab his, was steered into the shelter of a large boulder.

'Look, Doctor, I really don't think we have anything to be - '

'Listen!'

The Brigadier listened. The whickering noise was a little closer and louder: and, yes, there was something odd about it.

'No engines,' he said after a few moments.

The Doctor nodded, his face illuminated faintly by the glowing dial of the device he was carrying.

'That's because they're not mechanical devices, Brigadier. They're organic.' He gestured at the device: a bright purple arrow pointed in the direction from which the 'helicopters' were coming. He fiddled with something on the side of the box, and the arrow s.h.i.+fted slightly.

'Hmm. That's strange.'

'What's strange, Doctor?'

But the Doctor didn't reply, simply adjusted the box further. The arrow swung round and pointed at the Brigadier.

'They don't seem to be particularly intelligent. In fact they're considerably less intelligent than you are, which is somewhat surprising in the circ.u.mstances.'

The Brigadier blinked. 'Really, Doctor! I'm not as stupid as all that, you know.'

Again the Doctor didn't reply. He just pushed a switch on the side of the box and handed it to the Brigadier.

'Right, old chap. Just follow the arrow and you should be there by morning.'

The Brigadier looked at the box, frowned. 'Should be where, exactly?'

'That oasis you were talking about.' The Doctor grinned, clapped him on the shoulder. 'It's only a couple of miles from here. Or at least, there are people there, so there ought to be some water.' He stood up, so that all but his boots disappeared from view.

The Brigadier stared up at him. 'And where are you going?'

'Oh, just going to have a look around, old chap.' He stepped away into the darkness. The sound of the 'helicopters' was quite loud now.

The Brigadier stood up too. 'Look, Doctor, I ought to come with you. As the officer responsible for this mission - '

'- you should be back in Kebir City as soon as possible, sorting out all those political complications you were so good as to explain to me earlier today. And no doubt getting Captain Yates and his men out of prison, too. Now get down out of sight before they realize that there are two of us.'

Before the Brigadier could reply, the Doctor sprinted away, his boots crunching on the loose rock. Beyond him, a line of red lights moved across the sky, dim shapes behind them. The Brigadier saw the eyes above the lights, and crouched down.

Within less than a minute the lights were near enough to cast a faint glow over the track. To his amazement, the Brigadier saw the Doctor jumping up and down on the track, waving his flight jacket at the approaching whatever-they-were as if he were a matador prancing in front of a bull. But the aliens took no notice, merely soared overhead and onward towards the dark shadow ahead of them.

In the last of the light, the Brigadier saw that the Doctor had set off after them at a run.

The tower was silent by the time the Doctor approached it, the flyers long since settled.

No doubt, thought the Doctor, they had disgorged their burdens already. All the more reason to hurry.

He approached the wall at a brisk trot. When there was a clattering noise to his left, he didn't worry about it too much: he had expected sentries. He didn't even flinch when a muscular arm wrapped itself around his neck and tried to throttle him. He simply broke the hold with a basic Venusian Aikido manoeuvre, then sprinted for the wall.

He almost made it. Just as he jumped up, his hands ready to grasp holds on the wall, a huge pair of mandibles closed heavily around his chest.

They squeezed, and the Doctor felt his ribs cracking.

'Now hold on old chap -' he managed to wheeze. He had expected them to try to communicate, not simply kill him.

But as the mandibles squeezed still harder, he began to realize that he might have made a serious miscalculation.

Book Two

Copy Dancing

Eleven.

The dawn was clear and cold. Filaments of pink cloud streaked a dark blue sky, congregating in the north where they merged with a continuous sheet of white. To the west, the high peaks of the Hatar Ma.s.sif were already bloodstained by the sun; to the south, the jumbled rocks fell away to the great stone plain of Al-Giltaz, which was still in darkness. Tahir Al-Naemi stared out over the plain, breathed deeply of the cool, dry air. Behind him, metallic ticks sounded from the engine of his jeep as it cooled. Faintly, beyond that, a clattering of pots and a murmuring of voices told him that everything in the encampment was well.

He looked up at the sky, wondering if he would see a falcon. When he had been a boy, he had dreamed of hunting with falcons. Every morning, just after dawn, he had sneaked out of his father's house and gone down to the market, where the birds waited to be sold. Tahir had admired their beautiful plumage, the fierce intelligence in their yellow or amber eyes, the clean fast death in their beaks and claws.

He had envied the handlers, their heavy gloves, their weatherbeaten faces, their love of the birds.

Then had come the Revolution, and Tahir had learned that death is not fast and sharp and clean, but slow, messy, ugly. Gangrene in the wounds, flies in a pool of blood and s.h.i.+t. The falcons were replaced by vultures, and by bored French soldiers, leaning on their guns, waiting. When the French left, the Kebiriz came. For a time Tahir and his family had been favoured: whilst his father was the Sakir Sakir Mohammad in law as well as in name, whilst he spoke in the parliament, at least they were not hara.s.sed in the streets. Mohammad in law as well as in name, whilst he spoke in the parliament, at least they were not hara.s.sed in the streets.

But their friends died, or were murdered. Then the parliament was dissolved and Tahir's family were forced to leave Giltat, in one of the 'desert resettlement schemes' of which Khalil Benari was so proud.

Within a year, his mother died of typhoid and his brother from a soldier's bullet. Tahir decided to fight back and, reluctantly, after much prayer, his father decided to help him.

So the killing began. And it was never clean, it was never perfect, it never came with the swiftness of the falcon. Tahir woke sometimes from dreams where he was swimming in blood, swimming without hope of reaching the sh.o.r.e. It was then that he knew he was lost, that the war could bring no victory that would give him back the better life, the life he had lived when he was a boy.

But then, on some mornings, mornings like this when the wind had been from the north and the sky was clear of dust, when the air was sharp and clean and smelled almost as it had when he was young, Tahir imagined he could hear the twitter of the birds again, imagined he could see them stretch their wings and fly far above the desert. He knew then that his dreams had not been lost, because they were still living in the hearts of the children: the scruffy, dirty children of Giltat and Burrous Asi were carrying his dreams. It was then that he swore he would fight on, that he would kill as many people as necessary, that he would drown the desert in blood if he had to - so that the dreams could come true, one day, for his people. So that they would not be wasted.