Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [129]
There’d been a biosampler lying on the floor next to the control dais. It was a disgusting piece of apparatus, the same kind of voodoo science he’d seen on Dronid, but he’d been glad to see it there all the same. It meant he wouldn’t have to use a penknife. The thought had been bothering him ever since he’d come up with the plan.
‘Doctor? You’re not going to do what I think you’re going to do, are you?’
The Doctor slipped the biosampler over his fingers, and felt the metal rings close around his knuckles. ‘If I know you well enough to think I know what you’ll be thinking I’m thinking about, Sam, then... actually, I don’t know. You’re distracting me. Stop it.’
‘Sorry.’
The Doctor took one last look around the shrine. The technology was no more complex than that of the TARDIS, but the operating system was different. He had to perform the ritual as if it were a holy duty. It was the only way of getting the shrine to understand him.
He dropped the shard of Kroton crystal onto the dais. There was a pause, and for a moment he thought the plan wasn’t even going to get past stage one, but then the shrine started humming in his ear. It wasn’t used to crystalline biomass, the Doctor concluded.
‘I’d like to say a few words on this solemn occasion,’ he intoned. ‘Rabbits rabbits rabbits. Let sleeping dogs lie. There’s many a slip ’twixt a cup and a lap. Boiled beef and carrots.’
‘What?’ said Sam.
The Doctor shushed her. If it sounded like a ritual, he reasoned, it’d probably be enough for the shrine. He pulled back the sleeve of his jacket, and pressed the spines of the biomsampler against the skin. Sam looked suitably appalled.
Was this the right thing to do? Yes, it might be the only way to stop the Krotons destroying the Unthinkable City, but could he, in all conscience, feed his own biodata to the shrine? After all, wasn’t the whole point of the exercise to stop his biodata falling into the wrong hands?
No no no. There was no choice. He was trying to find an excuse not to go through with the rite, that was all.
He drove the spines into the flesh of his forearm. There was a hissing, popping sound, as his biodata was encoded into the buffer fluid inside the collection valves. The biosampler would only be making a surface scan, the Doctor knew, but it’d be enough to complete the rite. And hopefully, not enough to be useful to the Faction, after all this was over.
The skulls hummed a little louder, anxious to be fed. Their moaning melded with the rumbling outside, as the Kroton rolled along the corridor towards the shrine. The Doctor held out the hand with the biosampler attached, and flexed the muscles in his fingers. The fluid plopped onto the dais.
The Spirits came.
The Doctor felt the air freezing up in his lungs. He hadn’t expected it to happen this quickly. Maybe it was him. Maybe the Spirits knew he was a Time Lord, and knew he had no place here. They were circling him, surrounding him, their invisible bodies spilling from the dead mouths of the skulls, the babble of all Space and Time dripping from their tongues. He turned his head, but his muscles were slow to respond. When he finally managed to focus on Sam, she was frozen, her mouth locked open, her eyes caught in mid-blink.
Time was slowing, just for him. The Spirits were squeezing themselves into the cracks between one moment and the next, building themselves a tiny continuum there, a split-second universe that only he and they could inhabit. This was absurd, the Doctor reminded himself, of course it was absurd. There were no Spirits, everybody knew that. There were just the forces of Space and Time, uncaring and impersonal; only Faction Paradox would be mad enough to turn them into gods. But here, in the shrine the Faction had built, it was impossible to think of them any other way. Yes, legend claimed there had been a Grandfather Paradox, once, but if so, then why was there no record of his existence in the High Council’s files? It was all rumour, rumour and