Part 26 (1/2)

'The natural order. The laws of balance all flesh must obey. All things are ordained, even this.' The Colonel slid the backpack off his shoulders as he moved, and by the time he reached the bottom of the stairway his hand was already rummaging through the contents. 'I have something. Something to aid the cause in the struggle to come. A token of our destiny.'

The Doctor looked between the stairway and the Colonel, as if trying to work out whether this conversation could possibly be more important than chasing the alien. 'Will it help me move faster, at all?'

Kortez finished rummaging, then held out his hand. Sam peered at the object sitting in his palm. It was a circle of metal, the same shape as a discus, and about the same size. The thing was Saab-black and Saab-smooth, but marked with a series of fuzzy pink pictograms around the rim. The symbols flashed and changed as Sam watched, though they didn't seem electronic. They looked more like they'd been painted on.

The Doctor seemed alarmed. 'A bomb?'

'Yes. Saskatoon. You remember, Doctor. It was a good day. We made sure the will of the eternal consciousness was done.'

'A thermosystron bomb,' breathed the Doctor. 'I thought I made sure they were all destroyed.'

Kortez nodded. 'They were. Except for this.'

'You didn't report it to the General?'

'Destiny. I knew that somehow, some day, this device would have a greater part to play in the web of karmic fate. Today is that day. We must stop the enemy. It's the will of the one true mind of all things.'

Sam coughed nervously. 'Er, Doctor...?'

The Doctor swept up the bomb, then slipped it into his pocket. 'Thank you, Colonel. Now, if you'll excuse me?'

He darted up the steps. Sam watched the Colonel turn away before she followed. The man looked content. Satisfied. Like he thought he'd done his duty, and done it well.

Sam drew level with the Doctor halfway up the first flight of stairs. 'He's mad, isn't he?' she asked.

'He's a little upset,' the Doctor admitted. 'Saskatoon was a very difficult affair.'

'You mean, he's mad.'

'Well, in a manner of speaking.'

'And that stuff about destiny?'

'His imagination's getting the better of him. There's no room for destiny in a universe this small.' The slightest of frowns appeared on the Doctor's face. 'With one or two notable exceptions.'

They reached a small landing on the first floor up. Various gloomy archways led to various gloomy corridors, and there was a stairway up to the next level off to one side. 'What about the bomb?' Sam queried. 'I thought you didn't like using weapons. Especially not those those sorts of weapons.' sorts of weapons.'

'I don't. But if somebody's going to be walking around with a piece of Selachian maximum impact implosive in his pocket, I'd rather it was me than the Colonel. Oh.'

The Doctor froze. Sam froze, too.

They were at the bottom of the next stairway by now. Standing at the top of the flight, on the second-floor landing, was the alien Sam had seen waddling past the guest room. It had turned to face them, and now it was covering the lower landing with one of its wobbly limbs. The arm ended in a thick tube, Sam saw, open at the end. It reminded her of a bazooka. Big, chunky, lethal-looking.

The Doctor grabbed the sleeve of her t-s.h.i.+rt. It tore as he tugged it, but the tug was enough to make her stumble back towards the top of the last stairway. They ducked through the archway, as the landing in front of them was filled with a dense white smoke. Sam squinted into the haze. No, it wasn't smoke. It was a cloud full of crystals. Tiny, razor-edged crystals.

The cloud began to settle. She heard the sound of heavy footsteps, climbing the stairs above them. Sam moved forward, to re-enter the landing.

The Doctor pulled her back again. Shaking his head, he reached into his jacket, and pulled out what seemed to be the first thing that came to hand. It was a fairy-cake, covered in fluff. The Doctor looked puzzled, clearly having no idea where the item had come from.

He lobbed the cake onto the landing. As it flipped through the air, small holes opened up in its surface, as if hundreds of tiny invisible mouths were trying to get at the currants. By the time it hit the ground, the cake was nothing more than a collection of crumbs.

'Each of the crystals is a miniature corrosive device,' the Doctor mumbled. 'A cloud of them is enough to gnaw an organic life-form to the bone in seconds. They disperse the waste material as dust. The corrosive's more powerful than I expected, though. Even after the cloud settles, the atmosphere's still deadly. Now we know what happened to the s.h.i.+p's pilot.' He nodded towards the walls of the landing. The stone there was covered in a thin sheen of crystal. Parts of the wall were starting to drip like melted wax.

'So, how do we get past?'

'We don't. The stairway's going to be a deathtrap for a good while yet.' The Doctor looked up at the ceiling. Sam got the impression he was trying to stare through the stone and watch what was happening on the roof. 'Let's hope the s.h.i.+ft decides to leave now. If it really is determined to complete its mission, things could get very nasty indeed.'

Sam, of course, didn't understand a word of this.

E-Kobalt-Prime extended its pincer attachment, then eased it into the control growth, which by now had firmly taken root inside the black s.h.i.+p's systems. At the Kroton's touch, the hatchway sealed itself shut, and the floor began to ripple, very gently, as the vessel's engines were brought on-line.

E-Kobalt could not, in all honesty, have been called unhappy. The auction hadn't gone well, but that hardly seemed important now. It no longer saw any reason to communicate with the other bidders. It had always believed carbon-based life to be unreliable, and events in the ziggurat had proved that all its worst ideas about alien animals had been correct.

Diplomacy had failed, but the City's defences were down. E-Kobalt had discovered this on the stairs, when it had tested its weapons attachment and filled the air with corrosive. The humanoids wouldn't be able to pursue it now. They would be destroyed, cleanly and efficiently, and the Relic would become the property of the Kroton Absolute.

That one single idea, that simple devotion to the most basic of military instincts, was now the linchpin of E-Kobalt's entire psyche. It issued another order to the control growth. The engines throbbed, and the black s.h.i.+p began to lift itself off the roof of the ziggurat.

Meanwhile, in the darkest depths of the Kroton's subconscious, the s.h.i.+ft allowed itself the conceptual equivalent of a satisfied nod.

THE s.h.i.+FT'S STORY

Darkness, no easily discernible time

They were taking him apart. The thought should have scared him more than it did, but then, it wasn't the worst thing that had happened to him today. He could still remember how it felt to lie under a Day-Glo yellow sun, with snow blowing into the cracks in his body. He could even remember knowing he was about to die. A gentle, creeping feeling. Not a single moment of horror, not the way he would have imagined it.

They were taking him apart. Soon, there wouldn't be anything left of him, not anything you could touch. Almost idly, he noticed that he didn't have a brain left. He didn't know how he could think without a brain, but he seemed to be getting by.

Before, he'd been a person, one insignificant little element of the Gabrielidean Nth Platoon. Now, he was even less than that. Just the idea of a person. A set of memories with no one to remember them. A thought without a head.

He concentrated on the memories. He let himself remember his final hour of life in the material universe.

Darkness.

He was cold. He would have been in pain, if all his senses had been working, but he was lying with his back against the ice, and the temperature had short-circuited most of the nerves across his torso. The nerves of his human suit, anyway. His real body sloshed around inside the skin, doing its best to keep itself warm. His brain was still hooked into the suit's nervous system, so he was feeling the cold the way a human would have felt it. Looking at the world through human eyes.