Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [100]
‘Doctor?’
The Doctor didn’t move.
‘Doctor? What’s going on?’ Behind him, he heard the rustling of dried biomass as Sam tried to pick herself up off the floor. He felt his fingers tightening around the shaft of the screwdriver.
‘Alien bodies,’ he whispered.
‘That’s the sonic screwdriver, isn’t it? I thought it got trashed by the Zygons.’
The Doctor nodded. Sam was back to normal already, if you could ignore the catch in her throat. Curious as ever, always ready to ask awkward questions about the technical details.
‘That was the mark five screwdriver,’ the Doctor muttered. ‘This is the mark one.’
‘The mark one?’
‘Yes. It was destroyed centuries ago.’
A pause. ‘Then how...?’
The Doctor motioned for her to be silent. He didn’t feel up to explanations right now. In front of him, the remnants of the antibody began to liquefy. ‘It’s a Time Lord tool. Time doesn’t work the same way for Time Lord tools.’ He turned, at last, and saw that Sam had managed to stand, although her legs didn’t look too stable. ‘We have things to do.’
Her eyes widened. ‘Kathleen!’
‘Where is she?’
Sam pointed to a nearby wall. The wall was pink and organic, obviously not an original part of the vault’s architecture. The material, like everything else here, was in a state of decay.
The Doctor took one last look at the antibody before it melted away into nothingness. Then he raised the screwdriver again, and set to work on the wall.
The labyrinth had started to stink of old meat. Little Brother Manjuele kicked a couple of the plants in his path as he made his way along the tunnel, and they exploded on impact, spewing their insides out all over the floor. Manjuele grinned. Some of the plants had Bregman’s face, so he got a kind of buzz out of seeing the bitch’s head burst open over and over again. It wasn’t anything personal. Back in Little São Paolo, he’d seen some of his best friends broken by uniform sluts like her. Electric batons on the streets, matchsticks under the fingernails in the police cells.
The ceiling split open, and something dropped through it, stopping a couple of centimetres in front of his face. He jumped back, but it turned out to be another potato-shaped copy of the UNISYC woman’s head, dangling from a thick pink tendril. It looked dead, so Manjuele punched it aside. If he’d guessed right, the vault had only grown the plants to make Bregman feel bad about herself.
Jesus, that was pathetic. Was that all it took to make the bitch go laa-laa? The vault was going to have to do a hell of a lot better than that if it wanted to stop him. Come to think of it, as soon as he’d got here, the labyrinth had started dying. Maybe the vault had given up, thought Manjuele. Maybe it knew he was too tough a customer to send over the edge like that.
Maybe. Hell, you never knew.
At last, he reached the end of the passage. It opened out into a wide chamber, the wall opposite made of solid brick, although spores had squeezed themselves out of the cracks between the blocks. In the middle of the room, on the other side of a garden of dead flesh-flowers, was a silver casket.
Manjuele laughed out loud. The Relic. Getting to it had been easy, real easy. He stepped out into the chamber with his biggest and baddest grin on his face. The grin felt funny, though, stretched across these mouth muscles.
‘Kathleen?’ said a voice.
Manjuele stopped grinning, and whirled around.
To his left, the chamber ended in a wall of rotting pink biomass. The wall had been cut open down the middle, and two figures stood in the opening. One was the guy in the green velvet jacket, the one Justine had told him was a renegade Time Lord. The other was the blonde who’d arrived with him. They were taller than Manjuele remembered, though. The man seemed huge, and even the girl looked like she could put up a good fight. It took the Little Brother a second or two to figure out why. He was looking through Bregman’s eyes now, and Bregman was shorter than he was. So, everything looked bigger.
The girl stumbled forward, her arms outstretched.