Part 26 (2/2)

He couldn't see much, though. Whiteness from here to the edge of the world. A landscape made from six-hundred kinds of snow, s.h.i.+ning in the sunlight, but never getting round to thawing. There was no night, he'd been told, not here. Something to do with some aurora or other. The sky was lit by stripes of orange and turquoise, brilliant psychedelic arcs that reached from horizon to horizon. The first scouting mission that had been sent here had gone mad. When the Nth Platoon had been a.s.signed to the planet, the troops had wired neural suppressors into the eyes of their human suits, to blot out the psychological side-effects of the light.

He tried moving his head. His neck didn't seem to want to turn, but he managed to force it.

That was when he saw the rest of his body, sprawled out in front of him, the snow already starting to bury his limbs. He wanted to close his eyes, but his eyelids didn't respond to the command. The torso of the human suit had split open, revealing the churning ma.s.s of his true body inside. One entire arm had come loose, and his bioma.s.s was spilling out of the sleeve in slicks of brilliant pink. One of the suit's legs had been torn off, as well, but he couldn't see whether he was leaking out of the wound there.

Every part of the suit had been armoured. Every flake of skin had been sprayed with bulletproof plasticrene. It hadn't made one bit of difference. The sergeant had sent him out on a recon sweep, and the combat satellite had located him while he'd been away from the rest of the platoon. It had fired on him, once, from somewhere in the upper atmosphere, then it had left him alone. Perhaps it had thought he wasn't likely to be much of a threat, with his spinal column shattered, his skin broken open, and the body inside slowly freezing.

A cl.u.s.ter of silhouettes appeared on the horizon in front of him, tiny smears of black against the blazing white background. He guessed, he hoped, it was the rest of the Nth Platoon, the sergeant and all her little boot-lickers. He thought of calling out to them, but he guessed there wasn't much point.

Then everything started to fade to black. His eyelids were closing, he realised. The software controlling his face had finally figured out that his eyes needed rest, occasionally.

He wondered if he'd be able to wake up again.

Darkness.

'...have to leave him here. OK. Get your palm-scans tuned, this is going to be the hard part.'

He was conscious again, but he didn't have the strength to open his eyes. Besides, he knew what he'd see. The sergeant, in her head-and-shoulders-above-the-rest human suit, coated in spray-on armour from top to toe. The troops had found him, and it sounded like they weren't thinking of taking him with them.

Military procedure. Of course. There hadn't been s.p.a.ce for a doctor inside the transit capsule, so the wounded could go and die on their own time, as far as the sergeant was concerned. He could hear the sounds of boots, scrunching against the ice. The other members of the platoon, obviously, getting tooled up for the big a.s.sault. They'd be checking their palm-scans, giving the terrain the once-over. They'd be looking nervous, too. Sweating deep red inside their suits.

'Right,' said the sergeant. 'It's like we thought. No signs of ground-based forces. We can a.s.sume the satellites are still in effect, so don't drop your cloaks. Looks like the enemy can bypa.s.s them anyway, but you've got to live in hope.'

There was a grumble of discontent from the troops. Not loud enough to be considered mutinous, naturally.

'And you can stop that, as well,' the sergeant growled. 'OK. The Time Lords say the enemy installation's over on the north side of the big ridge, and I'm not going to argue with them. It's s.h.i.+elded, so we'll need to find it for ourselves, the palm-scans aren't going to do us a lot of good. Any questions?'

n.o.body said anything.

'Great. So let's move. And stop staring at him like that. He's not going anywhere.'

More grumbling. Then more scrunching. The sound of marching feet.

They were walking away from him. Well, obviously they were walking away from him, it wasn't as if he were an indispensable part of the mission or anything. He was light infantry. Cannon fodder. Only here because he knew how to fire a staser without shaking his own arm off. One of a million stupid recruits who'd been primed to shoot at anything they were told to shoot at. The Gabrielidean military didn't like people who asked questions, and neither did the Time Lords.

No, he thought. No, not here. I know where I want to die, and it's not here, on some freezing alien rock n.o.body's even heard of. I don't want to leak out into the ground. I don't want to be a bioma.s.s popsicle. I want to die where it's warm. I want to die in the pool where I was born. I want to die like a Gabrielidean.

He opened his mouth to tell the Nth Platoon this, but all that came out from between his artificial lips was a long, high-pitched wail. If any of his comrades noticed it, they must have thought it was the wind, because he didn't hear any of them turn around. The scrunching faded away, became part of the planet's background noise.

He didn't have the energy to scream any more. He let his vocal cords go slack, and felt himself drifting off to sleep again.

Darkness.

He awoke to the sound of whispering. Not the normal sort of whispering, not the sort you could hear through the ears of a human suit. It sounded like it was trapped under the skin of the world, below the surface of everything you could see or feel. Words were trying to come up for air, but it felt like there was a layer of ice between him and them, hard as the ice under his back.

He was being discussed. He knew when people were talking about him, and they were talking about him now. A few of the sentences broke the surface, bobbed around on the edges of his hearing.

'...an ideal subject?' somebody asked.

'...is getting close now,' somebody else said.

'...makes no difference... until the Doctor... perfect opportunity...'

But it was too much of an effort, trying to understand them. His body was still oozing out of the suit, staining the snow pink underneath him. Soon, there'd be nothing left of him. He didn't have the energy to think about imaginary voices.

He let his senses sink back into the ice.

Darkness.

When he regained consciousness, he wasn't alone.

He couldn't see his visitor. His head was locked in position, the joints frozen in his neck. But there was someone pacing up and down behind him, shoes crunching against the snow. There was a tap-tap-tapping, the sound of a stick probing the ground, testing to see how solid it was.

Suddenly, the crunching stopped.

'Are you awake?' a voice asked.

He concentrated on the voice, but he didn't recognise it. It sounded like it came out of a humanoid mouth real humanoid, so it wasn't another Gabrielidean in a suit and it was tinged with an accent he couldn't quite place. There was no native life on this planet, he'd been told, and the enemy weren't supposed to have any troops here, only automatic defences. Did the voice belong to an alien, then? An outsider?

It took him a full minute to get the suit's vocal cords working. 'I'm awake,' he croaked.

The alien made a few more crunching sounds behind him. Crouching down, presumably. 'I wasn't expecting to find anybody here. The rest of your platoon's gone. I should think they're going to get help.'

He almost found that funny. Evidently, the alien was trying to rea.s.sure him, though he had no idea why.

'Who are you?' he asked.

'I'm an observer. A spectator. An interested party. Trust me, I'm not important.'

'You're a Time Lord?'

'Ah. Well, I'm not working for the High Council, if that's what you mean.'

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