Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [20]
Alien monster. Sobering thought, around here. Bregman stopped moving.
The side-passage was much like the main corridor, but there were doorways on either side, half a dozen in all. She couldn’t make out the far end of the corridor, although that was where the sound seemed to be coming from. Ahead. Ahead, and down.
She listened. No, she didn’t need to listen. And it wasn’t subsonics, it went deeper than that. If the sound was reaching her brain without touching her ears... telepathy? Maybe. Bregman had been given a “what to do in case of psionic attack” lesson at the college in Geneva, but the advice had been vague; even Central still wasn’t sure about the psychic stuff. She tried to remember which of the aliens in the Eye-Spy book were supposed to have telepathic abilities. The Time Lords did. The Quirkafleegs did. Or were they made up?
Bregman suddenly found she was moving again, wandering towards the source of the noise. She stopped.
She stopped right next to one of the doorways.
There was movement from the room inside. Bregman turned her head.
As far as she could make out, the room was almost entirely bare. But then, the furnishings weren’t the first thing on her mind. There was a simple bunk on the other side of the chamber, opposite the doorway, a single figure perched on its edge. The figure’s feet were on the floor, its shoulders hunched, its features lit by the guttering torches.
It was human. Humanoid. Male. Wearing clothes. What kind of clothes? Bregman found it hard to care. It had a head, a normal-shaped head, and the face...
The face moved as she watched. The skin broke open before her eyes. Folds unfolded, wrinkles readjusted themselves. Sharp white objects, hard and solid, emerged from the flesh.
Smiling. That was all it was doing. Smiling. Oh, God. The face was just a face, a normal face, but everything that made a human being really human had been sucked out of it. It was as if her mind couldn’t accept this collection of features as a face at all. She could only see it as a lump of skin and bone, couldn’t attach any humanity to it, the way you were supposed to when you came face-to-face with another living thing.
The man on the bed kept smiling. A dead man’s grin. Like he knew what the rest of the world would think of him, and didn’t much care. Bregman felt muscles twitch behind her cheeks. She realised some part of her unconscious had responded to him, was trying to smile back. At the same time, her hand was reaching for her belt, trying to find her gun.
But of course, she wasn’t carrying a gun. This was a mission of diplomacy. This wasn’t to be considered a hostile environment.
‘Biodata,’ said the Doctor.
‘What a-huh about it?’ said Sam.
‘I knew there was something wrong as soon as we stepped out huh-huh of the TARDIS. We Time Lords have certain huh mechanisms built into our own biodata. It makes us huh-hun very sensitive to distortions in the biodata around us.’
‘You mean a-huh like DNA, right?’
‘Not just DNA. When I say biodata huh-huh I mean something that goes deeper than huh-huh-huh simple genetics. In every cell of every organism, there’s a mine of information waiting to be huh accessed. For example, supposing you travel through a huh-huh fourdimensional huh feedback loop in the TARDIS. Because of the various huh energies released by the loop, the experience of the huh-huh-huh-huh journey will be encoded into the very huh essence of your biology. If you know how to read it, you can discover the most remarkable things from huh biohuhdatahuh.’
‘I didn’t a-huh know that.’
‘No. Well. The human race doesn’t really have much need for advanced biodata technology. Genetics is the only huh-huh thing your species really cares about. Of course, genetic information does form part of your biodata huh matrix, but it’s not all there is to it.’
‘And you reckon a-huh a-huh a-huh someone’s a-huh fiddled with the biodata of these