Part 13 (2/2)

With a gargantuan effort, Turlough tore his lips apart and tried to speak. The pressure made him feel as though his head was about to burst, but he managed to croak out the word, 'TARDIS.'

His companion's lack of urgency made Turlough want to shake him. The Doctor glanced around once more, then nodded slowly. 'In the circ.u.mstances, that might be the most prudent course of action.'

He walked unhesitatingly forward towards the giant arachnid, which looked utterly disorientated now, stumbling around in a drunken circle, as if chasing its huge, swaying tail. The Doctor gave the creature a wide berth, Turlough cringing behind him, clutching the sleeve of his coat like a small child hanging on to its mother's skirts. Calmly the Doctor fitted the key into the lock and opened the door. As Turlough plunged gratefully inside, the Doctor turned back briefly, raised his hat and said, 'Sorry, must dash.' Then he followed Turlough inside.

Once inside the console room, Turlough tore the sweaty handkerchief from his face, slumped against the wall, then sank to the floor in a quivering heap, roundels pressing uncomfortably into his back. Shudders of reaction flowed through his body as the Doctor pottered around the console like an old man in his garden shed, making minor adjustments with little nods and grunts of self-satisfaction.

Turlough allowed his head to droop into his cupped hands and for a while he simply sat there, eyes closed, waiting for the reaction to run its course. At last he opened his eyes and raised his head, and saw the Doctor standing with his hands in his pockets, regarding him patiently. Feeling that the onus was on him to speak, Turlough swallowed and said, thickly, 'Those things out there... what were they?'

The Doctor removed his hands from his pockets and put them on the edge of the console, leaning forward like a speaker at a lectern. 'I haven't encountered them before,' he said, 'but I'm almost certain they were Xaranti. They're a species of intergalactic scavengers with no particular technological or cultural ident.i.ty of their own. They move through s.p.a.ce in the hijacked vessels of other species, perpetuating their own race by subjecting the crews of the s.h.i.+ps they capture, and the populations of the planets they invade, to an infection so aggressive that it forces their victims' bodies to transform. As they absorb other species physically, so they absorb their knowledge too.'

'They're parasites, in other words,' Turlough said.

'Precisely.'

Turlough shuddered. 'Those things didn't look capable of piloting s.h.i.+ps. They seemed so... savage.'

Oh, there's far more to the Xaranti than those creatures out there. They're simply the hunter-gatherers. The brains behind the operation will be at the heart of the community, well hidden and well protected. When a member of a particular species becomes a Xaranti, they don't so much lose their knowledge and their memories as store store them. In effect, their new bodies become processing plants for the information they store, and once processed the Xaranti secrete this information as a kind of... colourless gloop. them. In effect, their new bodies become processing plants for the information they store, and once processed the Xaranti secrete this information as a kind of... colourless gloop.

These various secretions, which are quite literally knowledge and memory given physical form, merge to form a separate living, thinking ent.i.ty, a controlling intelligence for the creatures who sp.a.w.ned it.'

Turlough was frowning, struggling to grasp all this. 'So you're saying these creatures create their own queen?'

'Exactly!' the Doctor cried with an air of triumph, as if Turlough had finally grasped a concept that had been eluding him. The Xaranti warriors are not themselves designed to use the knowledge they absorb, so instead they create a giant, communal mind which a.s.similates all the information fed to it and which controls and directs their actions. It's a perfect symbiotic relations.h.i.+p.' He beamed, as if he himself was the one responsible for such an extraordinary genetic feat.

Turlough shook his head in wonderment. 'It's very clever, 'he said.

'Clever?' said the Doctor indignantly. 'It's staggering!'

'I suppose so,' said Turlough dryly, beginning to regain a little of his composure, 'though what the Xaranti do is only the biological equivalent of other species building computers to solve problems that they're unable to solve themselves.'

'Not at all. Any old fool can build a computer. This is more like mentally-deficient parents purposely creating a super-intelligent child to take charge of their lives.'

Turlough raised his eyebrows as if he couldn't be bothered to argue, and nodded towards the doors. 'So what happened to those creatures out there?'

'I was only trying to communicate with them,' said the Doctor, as if he was being accused of something. 'I think my message must have interfered with their instructions and confused them.'

Turlough pushed himself to his feet, approached the console, and after a moment's hesitation turned on the scanner screen. The Xaranti were still milling about outside, though looked to be getting themselves back together again now, their movements more coordinated. He shuddered at the sight of their spiny bodies, and the legs - like huge inverted black Vs - that supported them, and switched it off again. 'Where are they from, Doctor?' he asked, trying to sound brisk, business-like.

'Originally from an unnamed planet in the Tau Ceti system, but that was destroyed several centuries ago in their war with the Zygons. Both races are nomadic now, but no doubt the conflict will continue until one or both of them have been wiped out.'

He shook his head sadly. Turlough said, 'The Xaranti are on a recruitment drive then?'

'Perpetually,' said the Doctor.

'Then I suppose we'll have to stop them, won't we?'

The Doctor looked at Turlough, his face giving nothing away. 'What do you suggest?'

Turlough tried to look confident. 'From what you've told me, they must be vulnerable through their queen. Couldn't you pilot the TARDIS directly into the queen's lair and destroy it?'

The Doctor shook his head. 'She'll be heavily protected, and she won't allow her warriors to be caught out telepathically a second time.'

'Well... why not simply blow the s.h.i.+p up then? Humans have got nuclear technology, haven't they?'

'We're inside a Morok battle cruiser,' the Doctor pointed out.

'So?'

'It has reflective melganite s.h.i.+elding. A nuclear warhead would not even so much as dent it.'

Turlough scowled, irritated. 'Well, if there's nothing we can do, we might as well just get out of here and leave the Xaranti to it.'

The Doctor blinked at him in astonishment. 'Who says there's nothing we can do?'

'Are you sure you're all right?' Mike asked gently.

For almost half a minute Charlotte didn't answer. She sat in the front pa.s.senger seat, staring unseeingly at her sandaled feet, hands resting slackly in her lap. Mike waited patiently, and at last she slowly raised her head. She was a pretty girl, but even the first time he had met her, Mike had noticed tell-tale signs of strain around her mouth and eyes.

Now she looked haunted. The skin around her eyes looked bruised, the eyes themselves like bore-holes into her wounded soul. The wound was fresh now, and though Mike knew that in time it would heal, he knew also that the scar of it would always be with her.

'Yes,' she whispered as though it was required of her.

'What would you like to do now?' Mike asked, and immediately thought how inappropriate his question sounded. He imagined Imogen Maybury, Charlotte's mother, leaning forward from the back seat and snapping, 'What do you suggest? The fun-fair? The beach? Or perhaps we should take in a show?'

Mike glanced at Imogen, and although she showed no sign of doing or saying anything of the sort, he felt an urge to modify his question. Almost stumbling over his words he said, 'Would you like me to take you back to the... the boarding house?'

Charlotte paused, then gave a single nod. It looked as though it was taking her a great deal of effort even to communicate and Mike felt ashamed for imposing on her. He should be taking charge, not putting the onus on her to make decisions. She was what... seventeen, eighteen? And yet Mike had observed that between mother and daughter, it was Charlotte and not Imogen who took on the natural role of protector. It was Charlotte who had - eventually - spoken to the policemen and to Mike; she who had accepted Mike's offer of support; she who had put her arm around her mother's shoulders and walked with her to the car.

It was Charlotte, too, who had walked across the car park with Mike to the ominous, antiseptic environment of the police mortuary and identified her brother's body. Mike had seen many victims of violent death in his military career, but Charlotte's presence had made this experience one of his worst. The morticians had done their best to hide the gruesome nature of Chris Maybury's injuries, but the way they had pulled the white sheet almost primly up to his nose so as to hide the fact that his bottom jaw had been all but ripped from his skull, made it worse, somehow, than seeing the full extent of what had been done to him.

When Mike looked at Charlotte to see how she was coping with it all, he saw that her face was almost as white as her brother's. Crossing her arms tightly beneath her b.r.e.a.s.t.s as if for protection, she edged right up to the viewing window and gazed with vacant eyes into what they could see of Chris's dead face.

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