Part 25 (2/2)
'She's fine,' Mike said hastily. 'She just needs to rest.'
'Rest?' Max said, eyes wide with incredulity. 'She's got the plague, man! You've got to get her out of here!' Max said, eyes wide with incredulity. 'She's got the plague, man! You've got to get her out of here!'
'There is is no plague,' scoffed Mike. 'This is a water-borne infection. It can't be pa.s.sed from person to person.' no plague,' scoffed Mike. 'This is a water-borne infection. It can't be pa.s.sed from person to person.'
'How the h.e.l.l do you know that?' Max demanded.
'I just do, that's all.'
Max shook his head. 'No. You've got to get her out of here.
We can't take the risk.'
There was another collective gasp as Mike unholstered his gun and pointed it at the ceiling. 'We can and we will. Tegan is my personal responsibility. And I a.s.sure you, Max, that if she tries to harm anyone here, I'll shoot her. Is that good enough for you?'
Turlough sat on the sand with his back against the TARDIS door, the faint tingling vibration from the time machine like an echo of the trembling dread in his stomach. He had had no choice but to lead the Brigadier, Benton and four UNIT troops back to the fun-fair, where the TARDIS stood like a curio between two stalls. The hybrids had loaded the TARDIS on to the back of an army truck and driven it down to the beach, where it now stood, dwarfed on the outside at least, beside the vast dripping hulk of the usurped Morok craft.
Turlough and the TARDIS were bait for the Doctor - or at least insurance against his departure.
Once again Turlough glanced fearfully at the guns that the quartet of soldiers were pointing at his head. The soldiers'
metamorphosis was continuing apace; their eyes now contained a swirling blackness that came and went, like storm clouds scudding across the moon. Turlough tried to avoid eye contact with any of his captors for fear of antagonising them. He knew how violent and unpredictable those infected by the Xaranti virus could become and didn't want to give them any kind of an excuse to blow his head off.
They had been waiting for twenty minutes and now Turlough was growing increasingly jittery. He wondered how long the Brigadier was prepared to hang around, what would happen if the Doctor didn't show up at all.
At first, when the tingling in his back increased, Turlough thought it was due to the fact that he had been sitting in the same position for too long. Then the tingling became a shuddering, and an instant later was accompanied by the trumpeting bellow of the TARDIS's engines. Irrespective of the guns that were being levelled at him, Turlough scrambled away from the TARDIS and twisted round just in time to see it fade and disappear, dragging the cacophonous din of its de-materialisation with it.
'Doctor!' Turlough called in indignance and despair, but it was too late.
The TARDIS was gone.
For a few moments Turlough stared at the place where the TARDIS had stood, unable to believe his eyes. He realised that the Doctor must have reached it before they had, must have been inside it all the time it was being transported down to the beach. His disbelief, however, was more due to the fact that his friend had left him at the mercy of this bunch of gun-toting lunatics. Surely it wouldn't have taken much for the Doctor to have s.n.a.t.c.hed the door open and dragged him inside? He could have done it before the soldiers were even aware of what was going on.
He turned his attention once more to his captors, whose expressions of shock were almost comical. Then blackness swarmed into the Brigadier's eyes as he turned them on Turlough and the surprise was replaced with cold, hard fury.
Like a chain reaction, the same expression spread through the soldiers and, as if responding to some unspoken command, they each tilted their heads to regard him.
Turlough, on his knees in the sand, cried out in terror as they threw down their weapons and rushed towards him.
The TARDIS had barely travelled any distance at all. The Doctor had merely allowed the pull of the Xaranti queen to guide his movements and had set the coordinates accordingly. As the TARDIS re-materialised, he patted the pockets of the spare jacket he had procured from the TARDIS wardrobe then pulled a lever on the console. When the doors opened with a faint hum, he drew himself to his full height and stepped determinedly out into h.e.l.l.
He was surrounded by Xaranti, by the stink of them, their bodies pressed together so tightly that it was like standing on a tiny island in a sea of dark, spiny flesh. Xaranti scuttled over one another, their legs pistoning the air; they clung to the walls like scorpions; hung from the metal roof-supports high above his head.
As he took a step forward, they regarded him balefully with their black, unblinking eyes, but they did not attack. Indeed, they edged backwards on either side as he slowly advanced, creating a narrow channel through which he could walk, increasing the crush of their already tightly packed bodies.
Perhaps they had orders from their queen to let the Doctor through, or perhaps they simply recognised him as one of their own. Certainly, his physical transformation was advancing rapidly. His eyes were swimming with blackness, the buds of spines were visible on the backs of his hands and on his neck, and the s.p.a.ce between his shoulder blades was already starting to bulge.
The room in which the TARDIS had materialised was large and functional, evidently some sort of security clearance chamber ahead of the energy core that was the s.h.i.+p's heart.
Several hundred yards away, at the end of the channel that the Xaranti had created for him, the Doctor could see a door of dull metal, emblazoned with Morok symbols. Beside it was what had evidently once been some sort of security access panel, now a cannibalised jumble of wildly contrasting technologies. On the metal wall above the door was a large embossed symbol that resembled a flaming star, depicted in vivid purple.
The Doctor did not recognise the literal significance of the symbol, but he did recognise a danger sign when he saw one.
Nevertheless he strode forward calmly, confidently, almost regally, head held high, back as straight as the hump between his shoulder blades would allow, hands clasped loosely behind him. When he reached the door he examined the access panel and traced its meanderings to a bulbous metallic nodule that he guessed might have been Kraal in origin. He twisted it and the door slid open.
The corridor beyond was little more than a metal tube with a grilled walkway along its centre. At the far end was another door and another cannibalised control panel. Ignoring yet another star symbol - this one larger and situated right in the centre of the door - the Doctor again operated the access panel. This door, too, slid open and the Doctor stepped through.
The energy core that powered the s.h.i.+p's engines was enclosed in a heavily s.h.i.+elded metal tube, like a vast central pillar, which ascended through a circular shaft in the floor and stretched up to the high ceiling. The grumbling throb of the engines themselves, ticking over somewhere below, made the floor vibrate beneath his feet. Dominating the wall-s.p.a.ce of this huge room was a densely packed ma.s.s of control panels, again stretching from floor to ceiling, which were accessible via a series of ladders and gantries set at regular intervals.
Intertwined with all this technology, smothering it, communing with it, becoming becoming it, was what the Doctor had come to think of as the Xaranti queen. it, was what the Doctor had come to think of as the Xaranti queen.
It was not a quantifiable life-form as such, but a vast formless ent.i.ty, an acc.u.mulation of the thoughts and emotions and memories of myriad races made flesh. The stuff it was made from was not solid, but free-flowing like liquid gla.s.s, iridescent patterns constantly swirling within it. It oozed and curled above and in front of the Doctor, aspects of the many different races whose minds it had absorbed over the years forming briefly within the malleable stuff of its being, as if attempting to break free, before sinking back into the flux. The Doctor saw eyes and claws and mouths; the suggestion of a fur-covered limb; a patch of warty flesh. The impressions were too swift and too vague for him to recognise any of the species depicted, but each and every one of them looked briefly familiar.
'Good afternoon,' he said as the 'queen' coiled and rippled.
'Any chance of a chat?'
The stuff quivered and then bulged in front of him, a vast bubble forming on its surface. The Doctor imagined it bursting and spattering him with goo, but he stood his ground.
The bubble elongated, formed into a gluey tentacle which probed almost hesitantly towards his face. It halted a few feet away from him and almost immediately the tip began to thicken and swell, as if the tentacle were a hollow tube and more of the stuff was being pumped through it.
Slowly, at the end of the tentacle, a shape began to form.
The effect was like an impressive display of gla.s.s-blowing.
The shape started as a blob, which eventually extended limbs of its own before beginning to acquire definition. Within minutes a perfect but featureless humanoid form stood in front of the Doctor, though, like a new-born, remained attached to the main body of the 'queen' via a clear gel-like umbilicus.
The figure could have been constructed from clear gla.s.s and filled with colourless, constantly moving oil if it wasn't for the facial features which drifted haphazardly within it, incessantly forming and fading and re-forming, as if attempting to settle on the correct location. Eyes of many different shapes and hues, as many as a dozen at a time, blinked lazily from the flux of the creature's being. Several mouths suddenly opened in the figure's limbs and torso, and one even opened in its head, albeit from the area where its left eye would normally be.
The mouths spoke in unison, though each used a different voice. There was a gruff male voice; a lilting female one; another that was s.e.xless and sibilant. 'I trust that this form meets with your approval, Doctor?' the figure said.
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