Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [123]
Homunculette pushed himself between the Doctor and the vault. ‘That’s got to be the Relic. How are we going to shift it?’
Qixotl got back on his feet. ‘Not a problem. There are antigravs strapped to the bottom of the box, and there’s a navicom in the lid. Sound-activated.’
‘Really?’ said the Doctor. He put two fingers in his mouth, and whistled.
‘It only responds to me...’ Qixotl began. But he didn’t bother finishing the sentence. Slowly, very slowly, the casket lifted itself off the ground, and drifted across the vault towards them. The Doctor remembered the Hand of Omega, and all the happy hours he’d spent taking it for walks when he’d first made a home for himself on Earth.
The Relic floated right up to him, then lowered itself onto the ground. The other bidders took a step backwards.
‘Good boy,’ the Doctor said, patting the casket on the lid. He hoped nobody could tell how much he was squirming.
At the bottom of the artron by-product waste-shaft, the puddle was still remembering.
Specifically, it was remembering its first attempt at mating. Once the mating process had been completed, it had felt something detonate in its bigger-than-planets womb, a burst of life, a second micro-universe forming within the micro-universe of Marie’s body. A second TARDIS. Near-infinity inside near-infinity.
The puddle remembered the sense of combined hatred, rage, and disappointment when the Time Lords had taken the infant TARDIS away, extracting it from the womb before it had even grown its first power cell. They’d put it into suspension, trapping it inside one of their little pan-dimensional boxes. It was only a child, they’d said. It needed proper supervision.
She’d never seen the infant again.
Another break in the memories.
Then Marie was in the ziggurat, her weapons systems bringing themselves on-line. She told them to stop, but they refused to listen. She felt the shell of her body opening up. New impulses, new responses.
She knew who Trask was working for. She knew who the Shift was working for. In some part of her cognitive core, she even understood what the Shift was planning, and guessed what it would try to do if it failed.
The memory acid had been dispersed. Marie’s past was lying in pools around the interior of her body, each part remembering something, no part remembering everything. The puddle congealed, becoming a semi-solid, then threw out feelers, tiny shoots of grey ooze that probed the bottom of the shaft. The memory acid had been designed to be adaptive, self-repairing, and self-reliant. The puddle knew it had to find the rest of Marie’s identity. It knew it had to put her back together again.
One of the feelers attached itself to the side of the shaft, and dragged the rest of the puddle’s mass after it. Slowly, very slowly, the puddle began to climb.
Homunculette’s guest room looked like a military barracks. Cousin Justine experienced a brief twinge of satisfaction when she saw it. A few centuries ago, a Time Lord’s guest room would have been a monument to opulence, all Ionic columns and gold trimmings. But here, the fittings were grey and functional, and the air on the other side of the doorway stank of male hormones instead of incense. This is what half a millennium of warfare can do to a race, Justine decided. And nobody deserved it more than the Time Lords.
From the corridor, she watched Homunculette bending over his TARDIS, staring into the machine’s eyes as if she were a sick kitten. ‘She’s getting better,’ Homunculette grumbled. ‘I can see the memory patterns coming together in the iris monitors.’
‘Let’s move,’ said Little Brother Manjuele.
Justine nodded her agreement. ‘If you’re quite ready, Mr Homunculette? We are under attack, after all.’
Homunculette turned to glare at her. ‘I’m ready. Help me get her up.’
‘I beg your