Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [131]
‘Doctor, please try to listen.’ It wasn’t the psychosis speaking, the Doctor realised. He became aware of something else inside his split-second universe, another intelligence squeezing itself into the cracks. The Spirits howled and gnashed their teeth, obviously considering the intrusion to be rude.
‘Marie,’ thought the Doctor, knowing she’d be able to hear the thought.
Marie flexed the muscles of her pan-dimensional body, in a gesture the Doctor took to be a nod. ‘I know who you are, Doctor. I had a long time to consider the situation. Or at least, parts of me did. It wasn’t easy, working it all out. Not with my mind in that many pieces.’
‘Homunculette said you were out of action.’
‘A lot of my systems are still off-line. My memory isn’t complete yet. But I can move. I know what you’re doing, incidentally. Your plan to get rid of the Krotons. It’s novel, I’ll give you that much.’
The Doctor gave her the telepathic equivalent of a smile. ‘I thought I could control the shrine. I was wrong. Can you complete the plan for me? If you materialise –’
‘No. My structure isn’t stable enough.’ Marie hesitated for a moment. ‘But I can help you. I can connect my telepathic circuits to those of the shrine. The technology’s compatible, I think. I can get the shrine under control for you. You should be able to pilot it from where you are. Incidentally, did you know there’s a smudge on your psychic template? It seems to be some kind of psychological dysfunction.’
‘So it told me,’ the Doctor said. ‘Don’t worry, it’s only a bit of random angst. It’ll sort itself out once this is over. If you’d be so kind as to engage the telepathic circuits...?’
‘Consider it done,’ said Marie.
Then the Spirits began to wail. Not their usual mindless screeching, the Doctor noted, but a cry of sheer frustration. They could feel the intruder in the systems, keeping them in check, bending the shrine to her will. Within moments, Marie had finished the job. The racket died down. The split-second universe cracked open, letting in pure molten time, first as a trickle, then as a deluge.
Things started to move in the universe outside. Sam’s mouth was closing. More worryingly, the Kroton was rolling through the doorway, its intake tube drooping from a split at the front of its body.
The Doctor stretched his nervous system, reaching out for the inner circuitry of the shrine. With all the energy his consciousness could muster, he ordered it to dematerialise.
Through the senses of the control growth, E-Kobalt watched the dynatropes move into firing positions around the City. The vessels were equipped with hyperbolic resonators, capable of cycling through every conceivable frequency in under a second, shaking apart anything from humanoid flesh to reinforced durilinium. More effective than simple dispersion weapons, E-Kobalt decided. Naturally, the devices had been grown on the looms of Quartzel-88, like so many of the Kroton Absolute’s greatest creations.
And to think, pondered E-Kobalt, that I offered the Qixotl unit weapons like these in exchange for the Relic. A folly. It was so simple to capture the Relic by force.
The thought made it uneasy, for some reason. E-Kobalt tried to pin the feeling down, but it kept slipping through the links of its cranial unit. The grand notion was still throbbing away in its brain; kill the bipeds, smash the City. But then there was that other idea, smaller, yet just as intense, keeping a check on its aggressive instincts. Get the Relic first. Whatever you do, get the Relic first.
E-Kobalt wasn’t used to thinking this way. Its brain wasn’t exactly subtle, but it was at least capable of weighing up multiple options. Never before had it thought anything with so much clarity. Destroy, but wait. Destroy, but wait.
The sky turned black. It happened without warning, and it happened in a second.
In their dynatropes, the Warspear pilots panicked. E-Kobalt felt their vibrations on the fringes of its own mind, and for the first few seconds of the crisis