Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [19]
So Bregman followed him in.
The tunnel was strangely comfortable. No carpets or furnishings, but comfortable anyway. The walls were smooth, unmarked by the spaceman carvings, and somehow the light from the torches managed to make the place look cosy instead of horrifying. The corridor felt like it had been air-conditioned, although there weren’t any visible signs of ventilation. The chic of an Incan ruin, thought Bregman, but with all the mod cons thrown in.
The passageway widened out in front of them, eventually becoming a four-way junction. The Colonel stopped moving. The man had a vaguely bemused look on his face, Bregman noticed. But then, he usually did. When things weren’t what they seemed.
‘You’re correct, Lieutenant,’ Kortez told her.
‘Sir?’
‘We should have been met. Recon.’
‘Recon? Colonel, I don’t –’
‘You will stay here, at the point we will refer to as junction number one. You will wait for my return, or for the arrival of the party we’re due to meet. Is that clear?’
‘Yeah, but... I mean, is that our best option, Sir? If we’re separated...’
‘This is not to be considered a hostile environment, Lieutenant. This is a mission of diplomacy. We are not to anticipate aggression of any kind.’
Bregman coughed apologetically. ‘Yes, Sir.’
Kortez nodded, then marched off along the passageway directly ahead. Bregman watched the way he moved. Stiff limbs, mechanical movements. He walked like he talked, she thought. She tried squinting into the darkness in front of him, but she couldn’t see the end of the passage, not from here.
‘Terrific,’ she hissed, as soon as he was out of sight. She wrapped her arms around herself. Not that she was cold. You couldn’t be cold, out here in the Indies. She felt exposed, though, had done ever since she’d arrived on the island. Being here, in the alien stronghold, didn’t make her feel any more secure.
Alien. Oh, Jesus, yes. Kortez had seen someone on the roof, he’d said, but he hadn’t gone into detail. At the very least, Bregman should have asked. Somebody human? Somebody humanoid?
She remembered the book, the little pocketbook, the one she’d been issued with when she’d been awarded 19-L security clearance by UNISYC Central. Typical of UNISYC, it had been called The Eye-Spy Book of Alien Monsters, and between the covers there’d been profiles of every ET species the organisation had ever shot at. The Cybermen had been on the first page, unsurprisingly, but the book had gone on to describe such obscure and exciting species as the Martians, the Selachians, the Krynoids, the Hurgalnooks, the Bandersnatchers, and the Rock-Eating Yellow-Bellies.
She’d been ordered to memorise the book, then eat it. Only later, when she’d gained 20-L clearance, had she been informed that the book was a credulity test. Only a handful of the BEMs in it were real. The rest had been invented by some idiot in Central’s Training Division. The first sign of insanity, her superiors had chuckled, was when you read the book and believed every word of it.
Oh, and you weren’t really supposed to eat it, either.
Somebody spoke.
Bregman panicked.
‘Hello?’ she said. She turned, checked the corridor, saw nothing.
Somebody spoke again.
Too quietly to make out the words, though. Come to think of it, there might not have been any words. Or even any noises.
No noises. Bregman tried to get a grip on what she was thinking. She’d definitely heard something, but it was as if the sound had gone right into her skull, not stopping at her ears first. Subsonics, then? She tried to identify the direction the non-sound had come from, and decided on a side-passage, the one to the left.
Uh-huh. But this was a real horror flick