Part 27 (1/2)

'And you're not one of the enemy?'

'That depends where you're standing,' said the alien. 'Enough about me. What about you?'

He ll of a question. 'I think I'm dying,' he said.

'Hmm. You're badly wounded, certainly. Your suit's never going to dance again. But I don't think the damage to your inner body is irreparable.'

'You're a doctor?'

A pause. 'You should try to relax. Stay still. Stay calm. Wait for help.'

'There isn't going to be any help,' he said. And he could tell the vocal cords were starting to malfunction, because the words sounded flat, empty, and metallic.

The alien tutted. 'There's always help, somewhere in the universe. There's an old story about a tailor, a fieldmouse, and a hatpin...'

So the alien started telling him the story. He tried to follow it, he did his best not to think about what was happening to him, but everything was so hard to focus on, tailors and fieldmice and hatpins, and once upon a time there was the cold, and it was so cold it almost hurt, even though there were no working nerves left in his body, and it was so hard to see, so hard to stay awake...

Darkness.

'...hear me?' said the alien.

Somehow, he managed to open his eyes. There were shapes in front of him, blobs of pink and black, but his retinae were starting to mist over, so he couldn't tell which parts of his body he was looking at. There was a man-sized outline standing over him, and he took it to be the alien, although the figure was too blurry to make out any details.

'Blacked out,' he said.

'Yes. I thought so.' The alien blur s.h.i.+fted a little. 'Try to stay conscious. I'm sorry I can't do more for you myself. I don't really know much about Gabrielidean biology. One of those things I never got around to reading up on. Liquid life-forms aren't really my forte.'

He tried moving one of his limbs, to see if he still could. He didn't feel anything, though, so he had no way of telling if he'd succeeded. 'Injector,' he told the alien. 'Need a medical injector.'

'Yes. That's a thought.' The alien blur wobbled. Patting the pockets of a jacket, maybe. 'Ah. I thought perhaps I could improvise one out of a human hypospray kit, but I don't seem to have a human hypospray kit on me. I'm sure I owned one, at some stage. I wonder where I put it? Bearing in mind that this is an emergency, it'll probably be in the last place I look. Isn't it always the way? I did have a winklegruber neural parameter predictor, once. Always came in handy in situations like this.'

'A what?' he said. There was an ugly grinding noise from his throat when he spoke.

'A winklegruber neural parameter predictor,' the alien elaborated. 'Very useful piece of technology. You tell it what you're looking for, and it works out the last place you'd think of searching. All you have to do then is look where the predictor tells you to look, and you're bound to find whatever it is you're after.'

Well, the alien was doing a good job of keeping him distracted, anyway. 'Use it now,' he hissed. 'The predictor. You could use it now.'

'Oh, I don't have it any more. I lost it. I would search for it, of course, but...'

'...it's going to be in the last place you look,' he said, and he was frankly amazed he could still manage whole sentences like that.

'Precisely.'

He tried to nod. As a result, the head of his human suit rolled right off its shoulders and landed face-down in the snow.

'Are you all right?' asked the alien.

'Yes. Please. Tell me something.'

'Go on.'

'Help isn't really coming, is it?'

There was a period of silence, during which he almost blacked out again. 'I don't know,' the alien said, eventually. 'The others in your platoon were killed by the satellites. I'm sorry. I should think your people will be sending an emergency capsule soon. They'll want to find out if there are any survivors.'

He tried to look up, but he couldn't. He was seeing through the eyes of a severed head, staring down at the snow underneath him. There was nothing but white. A universe of white. He felt his senses switching themselves off, in a desperate attempt to shut out the blankness.

'Thank you,' he said.

'You're welcome,' the alien told him, softly.

Darkness.

When he next regained consciousness, he was alone, but at least there were colours in front of his face again. Somehow, his human head had been turned on its side. He wondered if the alien had done it. To let him have one last look at the world around him.

Simia KK98. He didn't even know why he was here. Until yesterday, he'd never been posted anywhere further afield than Terra Neutra. All of a sudden, the government was mobilising the wars.h.i.+ps, making plans for full-scale planetary a.s.saults. Something to do with some deal they'd made. The Time Lords were asking the Gabrielideans to send units all over the galaxy, taking out an installation here, a weapons dump there. The Nth Platoon had been dispatched to KK98 because, apparently, their enemies felt the planet to be of strategic importance, and already had a small automated outpost there. If the platoon had survived the mission, it would have been sent straight to Dronid, in time for the big offensive. Dronid. Or ”War Zone One”, as they were calling it now.

The snow started blowing up again. He couldn't feel it on his skin, but he could see the flakes sticking to his eyeb.a.l.l.s. He couldn't even close the lids. Perhaps he'd been better off lying face-down, after all.

There was nothing more for him to see. He decided to detach his brain from the suit. Human senses weren't going to do him much good now.

He flexed a nerve, tugged himself free of the false skin. The head shut itself down.

Darkness.

Darkness. This wasn't a memory any more. He was here, in the depths of the darkness, being taken apart, thought by thought. There were others here, he could see them, even though he no longer had any eyes. They were the ones he'd heard whispering. The ones who'd rescued him from Simia KK98. They were gathered around what was left of his true body, gazing down at him with pale, hard faces. They were all dressed in robes, flowing robes with high collars...

Time Lords? The Time Lords wore costumes like these, he'd heard. Had his allies rescued him? Was it really that simple?

'...process seems to be working,' one of the robed figures was saying. 'It's the same kind of procedure we're using to make the anarchitects, but applied to a living subject. Not difficult, once you know how to handle the Celestis' technology.'

'Won't he turn against us when he finds out who we are?' another asked.

'It. Not he. It's purely conceptual. Gender doesn't mean anything to it, now.'

'But will it turn against us?'

No. No. Not Time Lords. Those weren't the robes of the High Council. They were parodies of Gallifreyan costumes, worn by beings that had nothing but contempt for Time Lord society. Which could only mean...