Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [126]
A large, hulking, angular shape blocked the light at the end of the tunnel. Qixotl juddered to a halt, and raised his hands.
‘OK, OK, so I’m trying to bail out,’ he said. ‘Not much of a problem for you guys, yeah? I mean, you let me get through, we’ll forget this ever happened.’
The Kroton rumbled forward. Qixotl saw a second, identical shape moving into position behind it. Oh, good grief. How many of the things were there around here?
He took a step back. ‘All right, I get the idea. You want me to give myself up, maybe help you out. Fine, whatever you say. You want to know where the Relic is? I can show you. No problem.’
‘I-den-ti-fy-yourself,’ gurgled the first Kroton.
‘What? Oh, right.’ Qixotl lowered his hands, and straightened his tie. ‘Qixotl. Mr Qixotl. Your boss knows me.’
‘Qi-xo-tl.’ The Kroton’s head swung a little to the left, then a little to the right. Qixotl guessed it was getting in touch with E-Kobalt, checking his ID. ‘Qi-xo-tl. Mis-ter. You-have-been-i-den-ti-fied.’
‘Good. Right. Lovely.’
‘You-are-un-im-portant.’
‘Er, sorry?’ said Mr Qixotl.
The Kroton opened fire.
The burst was short, a puff of concentrated crystal that spurted from one of the Kroton’s arms and licked against Qixotl’s chest. There was no pain.
Qixotl gawped at the Kroton. ‘What did you do that for?’ he tried to say.
He tried. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t even breathe. He felt like someone had surgically extracted most of his throat. Then he looked down.
His chest wasn’t there. There was a hole, almost a perfect circle, reaching from nipple to nipple. The front of his suit had been chewed away, as had his skin, as had the flesh underneath, as had most of his ribcage. There was no blood, though. The hole was rimmed with silver-tinted frost, and inside his chest the organs looked like they’d been freeze-dried.
Many thoughts went through Qixotl’s head in the next few nanoseconds. However, whichever way he looked at it, he kept coming back to the fact that no humanoid life-form could possibly survive with a wound like that.
The Krotons advanced. Qixotl fell to his knees, and clawed at his chest, desperately trying to knead the flesh back together with his fingers. In all honesty, though, it was never really a great survival plan. He was dying. That much was fairly obvious.
So he dropped to the ground, and let his body get on with it.
13
A-LES-SON-IN-AN-A-TO-MY
...physiologically, at least, the Krotons are among the least understood beings in Mutters’ Spiral. Our galaxy is well-stocked with carbon-based life, and even silicon-based species, though rare, have been thoroughly researched, catalogued, and dissected over the years. Krotons, however, are something else.
The Kroton Absolute evolved from a form of quasi-organic tellurium-based crystal, native to a world commonly known as Krosi-Apsai-Core, though the empire which gave it that name has long since fallen. Originally, the crystal was predatory in nature, a gestalt life-form capable of creating “slaved” sub-beings out of its own biological mass. Though these individual units were not in any way sentient, they were adaptive enough to be able to nullify, or even to mimic, the innate offensive/defensive abilities of the species they preyed on.
However, when alien elements were introduced to Krosi-Apsai, the ecosystem went to pieces. The world was occupied by a militant capitalist humanoid culture [see p.349], which arrived in search of fresh territory, mineral wealth, and all the other things humanoids usually look for when they turn up on a new planet. The invaders soon set their servo-robots to work on Krosi-Apsai... a territorial challenge the crystal gestalt couldn’t possibly ignore.
Until this point, the crystal had been unable to develop sentient consciousness, its structure being much too crude to mimic any complex organic neural system it might