Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [117]
Darkness.
***
‘...hear me?’ said the alien.
Somehow, he managed to open his eyes. There were shapes in front of him, blobs of pink and black, but his retinae were starting to mist over, so he couldn’t tell which parts of his body he was looking at. There was a man-sized outline standing over him, and he took it to be the alien, although the figure was too blurry to make out any details.
‘Blacked out,’ he said.
‘Yes. I thought so.’ The alien blur shifted a little. ‘Try to stay conscious. I’m sorry I can’t do more for you myself. I don’t really know much about Gabrielidean biology. One of those things I never got around to reading up on. Liquid life-forms aren’t really my forte.’
He tried moving one of his limbs, to see if he still could. He didn’t feel anything, though, so he had no way of telling if he’d succeeded. ‘Injector,’ he told the alien. ‘Need a medical injector.’
‘Yes. That’s a thought.’ The alien blur wobbled. Patting the pockets of a jacket, maybe. ‘Ah. I thought perhaps I could improvise one out of a human hypospray kit, but I don’t seem to have a human hypospray kit on me. I’m sure I owned one, at some stage. I wonder where I put it? Bearing in mind that this is an emergency, it’ll probably be in the last place I look. Isn’t it always the way? I did have a winklegruber neural parameter predictor, once. Always came in handy in situations like this.’
‘A what?’ he said. There was an ugly grinding noise from his throat when he spoke.
‘A winklegruber neural parameter predictor,’ the alien elaborated. ‘Very useful piece of technology. You tell it what you’re looking for, and it works out the last place you’d think of searching. All you have to do then is look where the predictor tells you to look, and you’re bound to find whatever it is you’re after.’
Well, the alien was doing a good job of keeping him distracted, anyway. ‘Use it now,’ he hissed. ‘The predictor. You could use it now.’
‘Oh, I don’t have it any more. I lost it. I would search for it, of course, but...’
‘...it’s going to be in the last place you look,’ he said, and he was frankly amazed he could still manage whole sentences like that.
‘Precisely.’
He tried to nod. As a result, the head of his human suit rolled right off its shoulders and landed face-down in the snow.
‘Are you all right?’ asked the alien.
‘Yes. Please. Tell me something.’
‘Go on.’
‘Help isn’t really coming, is it?’
There was a period of silence, during which he almost blacked out again. ‘I don’t know,’ the alien said, eventually. ‘The others in your platoon were killed by the satellites. I’m sorry. I should think your people will be sending an emergency capsule soon. They’ll want to find out if there are any survivors.’
He tried to look up, but he couldn’t. He was seeing through the eyes of a severed head, staring down at the snow underneath him. There was nothing but white. A universe of white. He felt his senses switching themselves off, in a desperate attempt to shut out the blankness.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘You’re welcome,’ the alien told him, softly.
Darkness.
When he next regained consciousness, he was alone, but at least there were colours in front of his face again. Somehow, his human head had been turned on its side. He wondered if the alien had done it. To let him have one last look at the world around him.
Simia KK98. He didn’t even know why he was here. Until yesterday, he’d never been posted anywhere further afield than Terra Neutra. All of a sudden, the government was mobilising the warships, making plans for full-scale planetary assaults. Something to do with some deal they’d made. The Time Lords were asking the Gabrielideans to send units all over the galaxy, taking out an installation here, a weapons dump there. The Nth Platoon had been dispatched to KK98 because, apparently, their enemies felt the planet to be of strategic importance, and already had a small automated