Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [114]
‘So, how do we get past?’
‘We don’t. The stairway’s going to be a deathtrap for a good while yet.’ The Doctor looked up at the ceiling. Sam got the impression he was trying to stare through the stone and watch what was happening on the roof. ‘Let’s hope the Shift decides to leave now. If it really is determined to complete its mission, things could get very nasty indeed.’
Sam, of course, didn’t understand a word of this.
E-Kobalt-Prime extended its pincer attachment, then eased it into the control growth, which by now had firmly taken root inside the black ship’s systems. At the Kroton’s touch, the hatchway sealed itself shut, and the floor began to ripple, very gently, as the vessel’s engines were brought on-line.
E-Kobalt could not, in all honesty, have been called unhappy. The auction hadn’t gone well, but that hardly seemed important now. It no longer saw any reason to communicate with the other bidders. It had always believed carbon-based life to be unreliable, and events in the ziggurat had proved that all its worst ideas about alien animals had been correct.
Diplomacy had failed, but the City’s defences were down. E-Kobalt had discovered this on the stairs, when it had tested its weapons attachment and filled the air with corrosive. The humanoids wouldn’t be able to pursue it now. They would be destroyed, cleanly and efficiently, and the Relic would become the property of the Kroton Absolute.
That one single idea, that simple devotion to the most basic of military instincts, was now the linchpin of E-Kobalt’s entire psyche. It issued another order to the control growth. The engines throbbed, and the black ship began to lift itself off the roof of the ziggurat.
Meanwhile, in the darkest depths of the Kroton’s subconscious, the Shift allowed itself the conceptual equivalent of a satisfied nod.
THE SHIFT’S STORY
Darkness, no easily discernible time
They were taking him apart. The thought should have scared him more than it did, but then, it wasn’t the worst thing that had happened to him today. He could still remember how it felt to lie under a Day-Glo yellow sun, with snow blowing into the cracks in his body. He could even remember knowing he was about to die. A gentle, creeping feeling. Not a single moment of horror, not the way he would have imagined it.
They were taking him apart. Soon, there wouldn’t be anything left of him, not anything you could touch. Almost idly, he noticed that he didn’t have a brain left. He didn’t know how he could think without a brain, but he seemed to be getting by.
Before, he’d been a person, one insignificant little element of the Gabrielidean Nth Platoon. Now, he was even less than that. Just the idea of a person. A set of memories with no one to remember them. A thought without a head.
He concentrated on the memories. He let himself remember his final hour of life in the material universe.
Darkness.
He was cold. He would have been in pain, if all his senses had been working, but he was lying with his back against the ice, and the temperature had short-circuited most of the nerves across his torso. The nerves of his human suit, anyway. His real body sloshed around inside the skin, doing its best to keep itself warm. His brain was still hooked into the suit’s nervous system, so he was feeling the cold the way a human would have felt it. Looking at the world through human eyes.
He couldn’t see much, though. Whiteness from here to the edge of the world. A landscape made from six-hundred kinds of snow, shining in the sunlight, but never getting round to thawing. There was no night, he’d been told, not here. Something to do with some aurora or other. The sky was lit by stripes of orange and turquoise, brilliant psychedelic arcs that reached from horizon to horizon. The first scouting mission that had been sent here had gone mad. When the Nth Platoon had been assigned to the planet,