Part 5 (1/2)

'So why are you risking your body down here with us, then?' she asked. 'How come you didn't go down the Intelligence route?'

He turned and smiled at her, but the shadows were doing unflattering things with the neat, sharp lines of his face. 'It took me time to realise where my true interests lie.' His gaze lowered from her eyes, flicked up and down her. 'Besides, maybe there are some bodies worth taking risks for.'

She shone the torch straight in his eyes. 'You can stop right there.'

He was about to retort, but she shushed him. 'Hey. Behind you.'

Creben turned, and saw what her torch beam had illuminated. 'Symbols of some kind,' he noted.

Lindey touched the wall with her fingers. 'The rock's been smoothed out...'

'The better to carve into, presumably,' Creben said dryly.

'Forgive my humble stab at military intelligence.'

'Forgiven, and best forgotten.'

She gave him the smallest of smiles. 'There are other ways to get security and prestige, you know. Without risking your body or your mind.'

Creben raised an eyebrow. 'Use someone else's?'

Lindey decided she would have to watch Creben.

'This carving,' he said. 'Perhaps it's a sign.' He smiled, that smug little grin of his. 'Hungry cannons, this way.'

Lindey didn't smile back at him as they continued down the tunnel.

Haunt and Shel pushed on through the chambers.

The next room, and the next, were much the same, except they also contained less stylised sculptures of outsized angels moulded into their ceilings and at the base of each pillar.

In each dank chamber they pa.s.sed through they found more and more of the strange carvings cl.u.s.tered together as if for warmth.

Haunt noticed Shel was gripping his gun so tightly his knuckles were showing white. 'The increasing numbers of statues,' she said, 'suggests we're nearing somewhere important, would you agree?'

Shel nodded. 'Whatever it is, I think we might've reached it.'

There was a recess in the rock ahead of them. Drawing nearer, they saw a silver door embedded in the slate. Haunt kicked it open to reveal a tunnel big enough for a single person to move through at a time.

'If we go through there and something's waiting for us,'

Shel muttered, 'we won't stand a chance.'

'I'll go in first,' Haunt said. 'Wait here and cover this entrance while I take a look. I don't want anything following me in here that isn't you.'

Shel nodded, and Haunt walked away into the pitch-blackness.

VIII.

The TARDIS doors opened with the usual penetrating hum, and with the added beeping of some device that was depressurising the control room.

Ben felt a bit of a prat in his new astronaut gear. It was more like a wetsuit than a s.p.a.cesuit, and made from a dull green quilted material which felt a little too snug for comfort in all the wrong areas. The worst of it was the headgear; like looking out from a crystal ball.

'How do I look?' Polly's voice crackled in his ears over the suit's communicators.

Ben turned and whistled at the sight of Polly in her skintight daffodil-yellow suit. 'Let's just say I hope this bleedin' goldfish bowl don't steam up easily.'

'Come along you two,' came the Doctor's voice, disapprovingly. 'We don't know quite what's out there, so stay close to me.' So saying, he led the way out of the s.h.i.+p, fussing and pulling at his own s.p.a.cesuit, which was dark blue. It was hard to believe he had his usual clothes on beneath the thermal material; his body looked thin and wasted and his head disproportionately big through the gla.s.s helmet as a result. The old boy really did look like a buzzard now.

Ben and Polly followed him out, then the Doctor closed the doors. The comforting light spilling out from the control room narrowed to a slit then vanished altogether.

'Don't lock them, Doctor,' Ben suggested as casually as he could. 'You never know, we might need to get back inside in a hurry.'

The Doctor nodded vaguely.

For a few seconds the blackness was absolute. 'Dark, isn't it,' said Polly. He felt her lightly grip his arm, and gave her hand a comforting squeeze he hoped she could feel through her quilted gloves.

Then the Doctor flicked on his torch. The beam revealed small s.n.a.t.c.hes of the cavernous room they stood in, and from them, Ben tried to build a picture of their surroundings.

The room, or cave, or whatever it was, was five-sided. The walls were built from layers and layers of dark stone, and scaled by ornate metal trellises that gleamed like gold. Above these, what looked to be ducting reached right around the room at the point where the walls sloped up to the high, arched ceiling. Slabs of gla.s.s had been set into this roof, hundreds of them, and they winked and signalled back at the Doctor whenever he shone his torch in their direction.

Closer to ground level, banks of weird-looking machinery squatted beneath the trellises. Symbols carved in the slate above presumably denoted the function of each set of controls in whatever language they spoke here.

'Fascinating,' the Doctor said fervently. 'The functionality of a control room but with the trappings of a shrine...'

Ben was considering the ramifications of this when the Doctor's torchlight fell on a cowled shape hunched over a console right beside them, overlooked until now by the far-stretching beam. He felt Polly's grip on his arm tighten and her distorted scream in his ears nearly deafened him.

Ben took a few steps back, instinctively.

A hideous alien face was staring out at him from under the cowl. Its eyes were wide like a fish's, unseeing.