Part 11 (2/2)

'All this is Schirr design, isn't it?' he yelled.

Tovel simply nodded. Then he jogged over to one of the consoles built into the wall. Shade and Creben looked at each other uneasily. Frog and the man with the broken nose stood close together, apparently unmoved by the commotion.

Her whole head ringing with the sound, Polly looked round in panic for the Doctor. Only when the black man stepped aside could she see him standing, head c.o.c.ked to one side, absolutely still.

'I tried to tell them, Doctor,' Polly shouted. 'Before, there was a noise, a light, a vibration...'

'Quiet,' Haunt snapped. She shouted over to Tovel: 'Can you make sense of the controls?'

'The girl was right; Tovel yelled back. 'I think some sort of takeoff's been initiated, that the engines are starting up.'

Polly noticed the Doctor steeple his fingers and smile almost smugly at the news. His eyes were like dark b.u.t.tons, gleaming in the oily light.

'Takeoff?' echoed the man with the broken nose. 'That's garbage. We're in the middle of a rock, how can we be taking off?'

'A section of this complex has been designed to break free of the main planetoid; explained the Doctor impatiently.

The oriental man nodded like he understood. 'Those earlier tremors signalled the primary phase of the separation.'

The Doctor nodded vaguely and bustled over to Tovel. 'Can you compute where we are going?'

Polly couldn't hear the rest of his words over the scary whistling of the alarm. But she caught Lindey's breathy voice close in her ear.

'What is this place? Where the h.e.l.l did nine dead Schirr spring up from?'

Polly frowned, and forced herself to look again at the corpse in the chair and the bodies on the dais, to count them properly.

She screamed.

Though the piercing notes of the alien klaxon had reached their climax, everyone in the chamber whirled round to face her.

'Look!' she shouted. 'The bodies. The alien bodies. There were ten of them when we arrived, now there's only nine. One of them's gone!'

Chapter Five.

Destination Unknown

I.

The klaxons cut off.

The sudden silence in the cavern was almost physical in its strength. Ben felt a slight stirring in his stomach, the ground pitched a little and he felt a quick pang of homesickness.

Motion. They were at sea.

What the h.e.l.l was happening here?

Lindey turned to Shel. Her voice sounded too loud, unnatural in the silence. 'Could this all be part of the training simulation?'

Shel didn't answer. Ben reckoned he was a bit of a Doctor-type in that he didn't like to commit himself if there was a chance he could be wrong.

Haunt, who had been deep in thought, standing almost statue-like since the klaxons stopped, seemed to come to a decision. 'All right, everyone. Deactivate websets.' Even her best sergeant-major bellow couldn't mask the worry in her voice. 'We can no longer be sure this is a training exercise.

Now, I don't want you thinking to make yourselves look good for Cellmek. I want you thinking to save yourselves and your team. No more recording.'

The soldiers gave muted a.s.sent. As Ben watched, fingers were placed to a particular spot on the metal band around their foreheads. So the headgear wasn't just for show. The mixed looks on the soldiers' faces as they removed the websets ranged from scandalised pleasure to worried and just downright guilty. It put Ben in mind of how him and his mates had been at school when his older brother taught them how to swear. You were dying to do it but knew it was breaking the rules. And changing you, too, somehow.

Shel spoke up, more confident now he was on familiar ground. 'Regulations state that as senior officers, we remain recording in all conditions of combat, unless our imminent capture dictates we erase all recording.'

'I'm aware of that, Shel,' Haunt said icily. 'Naturally, I exclude ourselves from the order.'

The bloke with the marked face who'd been goggling at Polly was now turning a less enthusiastic eye on the corpses on the platform and the one in the chair. 'Were there nine bodies here before, Marshal?' he asked quietly.

'No, Shade, there were not.' Haunt crossed over to the corpses on the platform. Shel, Roba and Shade immediately followed her. Ben glanced at the Doctor, who was engrossed in some computer readout with that Tovel geezer, and at Polly who was just hiding her face in her hands. He decided to get a closer look at the bodies, and to make sure Haunt wasn't getting ready to blame any of them for this.

Any thought that Polly must be mistaken vanished in an instant. The tableau had clearly changed. There was a clear gap towards the right-hand side. The Schirr had been clutching his b.l.o.o.d.y head with both hands. Now he had gone, while his two neighbours hadn't moved a muscle. With nothing between them they looked blankly at each other with milky eyes, red pupils fixed in what Ben had taken to be the moment of their sudden death.

'But they can't be, can they,' he said, thinking out loud.

Shade looked at him blankly, and Ben took in the black blotches that covered the man's face. 'Dead, I mean.'

'With wounds like that?' Haunt gestured to the guts spilling from one of the bodies, frozen in midfall. 'How could they survive?'

'It's got to be a trick.' Ben wasn't letting this go. 'Special effects.'

'We ran a scan,' Shel told him. He sounded as calm and unfazed as ever as he studied the empty s.p.a.ce on the platform where the creature's huge feet had been standing.

'These are real corpses.'

'Don't forget the one in the chair,' said Roba. He spat on it to make his point, and Ben watched the liquid dribble down the huge pink head. 'We can see that's for real.'

'How could a corpse come back to life,' Shade muttered.

'Maybe Ben's right, they're not dead. Maybe this force field is really some kind of cryogenic -'

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