Part 20 (1/2)

'Like a snail,' she said. 'When it reared up to attack, did you see a mouth?'

'Can't say I was really looking,' Chalfont replied. 'But thinking back, no.'

Sam nodded.'Doctor's lessons are paying off, I think.' He did not know what she meant by that, but before he could ask, she carried on. 'I'll bet that they just ingest food - you know, without having to chew. Probably something in this sludge dissolves things.' She looked back at him again, with a thin smile.'Dissolves people.You.'

Chalfont shuddered. 'Not a particularly pleasant thought, thank you.'

He stopped suddenly and Sam looked first at him and then back towards the tunnel entrance.

Someone was standing there.

'Oh, great,' Chalfont muttered. 'Now the SSS agents have come to arrest us for trespa.s.sing.'

Kyle watched with horror from behind a rock as the slug creatures emerged from the tunnel entrance. He closed his eyes fearfully, and when he opened them, the creatures were gone. Kyle stared down the road where he had come from, but there was no sign of them.

He crawled around from behind his rock and noticed the pools of slime on the roadway. They coalesced into one large pool and then the trail led to the edge of the road, where it stopped. If they had crawled on to the sandy surface of the roadside, maybe the slime had dried out instantly or been absorbed.

Sam and the man she had been following had gone into the tunnels.

Maybe they'd seen those creatures...

Or been attacked!

Kyle ran full pelt towards the tunnel entrance and then stopped. Kneeling some way down, just visible in the rather useless low light, was Sam.

'Sam!'he called.

Another figure, probably the man, emerged from the right. 'Who are you?'

he called.

'It's OK, Torin,' Sam said. ”That's Kyle. He's all right, as they go on this planet. Come on down, Kyle. The weather's lovely.'

Once again, he didn't actually understand what she was talking about, but he strode purposefully inside - and stepped into the sticky substance.'Ugh,'

he muttered and lifted his foot up.

'Don't touch it!'yelled Sam.'It may be dangerous.'

She ran up to him, carefully avoiding the slime. 'Hiya,' she smiled. 'Good of you to join us. Did you see -'

'Yeah,' said Kyle. 'But they just went on to the sand rather than stay on the road and I lost track of them. What were they?'

'No idea.' Sam started walking back towards the other man, Torin. (Surely not that boring newshound Torin Chalfont? Why wasn't he interviewing the d.u.c.h.ess or whatever it was he did?) 'But I'm sure the Doctor would know.'

Sam suddenly stopped and pointed at the hovering bag beside Kyle.'Hey,'

she said,'you got a container in there of any sort?'

'Lunch box?'

'Cool. Let's have it.'

Kyle opened his bag and removed his lunch box. It was a small red plastic cube and contained one small piece of fruit. Sam took it from him, removed the lid and popped the fruit in her mouth. 'Great. Starving. Thanks.' She then scooped a bit of the hardening slime up with her'sonic screwdriver which I half-inched from the Doctor' - whatever a 'sonic screwdriver' was, but she'd shown it to him earlier that morning - and flopped it into the box, resealing the lid. 'Keep that in your floating friend, will you?' she said. Kyle resealed his bag.

Torin Chalfont (yes, it was him - as his eyes adjusted to the light Kyle recognised him from the holos) offered a hand, which Kyle took and they introduced themselves.

'C'mon, guys, I want to get that sample back to the Doctor.'

They began to go back to the tunnel entrance.

Torin Chalfont relaxed. These seemed to be intelligent young people - Sam especially.

As she pa.s.sed him, he bent over to look at the slime again. To think, it could have enveloped him. If Sam was right, it might have killed him.

Tentatively he reached to it with his right hand, and poked at it a bit, but it was rock hard now.

All it did was make the tip of his finger tingle. As he drew his hand back, there was a minute resistance, bit like tacky paint or glue. But that was all.

'C'mon, Torin; called Sam.'What are you doing?'

'I hurt my ankle,' Chalfont lied, pretending to rub it, then stood up.'It's OK now, though.'

As he went to catch up with the other two, he froze. There was a voice.

Whispering.

He opened his mouth to ask Sam and Kyle if they had heard it but decided not to. No. It was his discovery.

He tapped his finger with his thumb, checking to see if it was still tacky. It was - a bit of the slime had attached to his finger. But it wasn't eating his flesh - so Sam had been wrong about that.

It just itched a bit.

Some way beneath the surface of the planet was the solar generator that powered everything on Micawber's World.

However, right now, a small but significant amount of energy was being bled off and serving another cause.

Attached to the generator was a vast ball of the Wirrrn larval mucus, with more spread over the walls and floor and cavernous ceiling. It covered everything bar the generator itself - about twelve centimetres thick.

Organic tubes had been burrowed into the generator and were attached at the other end to this wall of mucus. This gave the mucus a permanent orange glow, which pulsated as if it were breathing.

A metre or so above the generator, hanging but supported by numerous mucus membranes, was the wirrrn Queen. Amber eyes gazed down at the Swarm Leaders scurrying beneath her, carrying out her mental commands, broken occasionally by spoken chirps of anger or demands for extra attention.

She had travelled a long way - having been the Queen for many centuries, she had been there when the Wirrrn embarked upon their journey from Andromeda. She had colonised many planets along the way, leaving behind sp.a.w.n. Swarm Leaders and the occasional Secondary Queen. She had placed her eggs inside more alien species than she could have imagined existed within the confines of just one small galaxy.