Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [116]
He opened his mouth to tell the Nth Platoon this, but all that came out from between his artificial lips was a long, high-pitched wail. If any of his comrades noticed it, they must have thought it was the wind, because he didn’t hear any of them turn around. The scrunching faded away, became part of the planet’s background noise.
He didn’t have the energy to scream any more. He let his vocal cords go slack, and felt himself drifting off to sleep again.
Darkness.
He awoke to the sound of whispering. Not the normal sort of whispering, not the sort you could hear through the ears of a human suit. It sounded like it was trapped under the skin of the world, below the surface of everything you could see or feel. Words were trying to come up for air, but it felt like there was a layer of ice between him and them, hard as the ice under his back.
He was being discussed. He knew when people were talking about him, and they were talking about him now. A few of the sentences broke the surface, bobbed around on the edges of his hearing.
‘...an ideal subject?’ somebody asked.
‘...is getting close now,’ somebody else said.
‘...makes no difference... until the Doctor... perfect opportunity...’
But it was too much of an effort, trying to understand them. His body was still oozing out of the suit, staining the snow pink underneath him. Soon, there’d be nothing left of him. He didn’t have the energy to think about imaginary voices.
He let his senses sink back into the ice.
Darkness.
When he regained consciousness, he wasn’t alone.
He couldn’t see his visitor. His head was locked in position, the joints frozen in his neck. But there was someone pacing up and down behind him, shoes crunching against the snow. There was a tap-tap-tapping, the sound of a stick probing the ground, testing to see how solid it was.
Suddenly, the crunching stopped.
‘Are you awake?’ a voice asked.
He concentrated on the voice, but he didn’t recognise it. It sounded like it came out of a humanoid mouth – real humanoid, so it wasn’t another Gabrielidean in a suit – and it was tinged with an accent he couldn’t quite place. There was no native life on this planet, he’d been told, and the enemy weren’t supposed to have any troops here, only automatic defences. Did the voice belong to an alien, then? An outsider?
It took him a full minute to get the suit’s vocal cords working. ‘I’m awake,’ he croaked.
The alien made a few more crunching sounds behind him. Crouching down, presumably. ‘I wasn’t expecting to find anybody here. The rest of your platoon’s gone. I should think they’re going to get help.’
He almost found that funny. Evidently, the alien was trying to reassure him, though he had no idea why.
‘Who are you?’ he asked.
‘I’m an observer. A spectator. An interested party. Trust me, I’m not important.’
‘You’re a Time Lord?’
‘Ah. Well, I’m not working for the High Council, if that’s what you mean.’
‘And you’re not one of the enemy?’
‘That depends where you’re standing,’ said the alien. ‘Enough about me. What about you?’
He ll of a question. ‘I think I’m dying,’ he said.
‘Hmm. You’re badly wounded, certainly. Your suit’s never going to dance again. But I don’t think the damage to your inner body is irreparable.’
‘You’re a doctor?’
A pause. ‘You should try to relax. Stay still. Stay calm. Wait for help.’
‘There isn’t going to be any help,’ he said. And he could tell the vocal cords were starting to malfunction, because the words sounded flat, empty, and metallic.
The alien tutted. ‘There’s always help, somewhere in the universe. There’s an old story about a tailor, a fieldmouse, and a hatpin...’
So the alien started telling him the story. He tried to follow it, he did his best not to think about what was happening to him, but everything was so hard to focus on, tailors and fieldmice and hatpins, and once