Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [27]
The female newcomer lifted her veil, and removed the mask she wore beneath the fabric. It was real bone, Homunculette realised, the front half of a genuine skull. The face under the mask was young, unquestionably human. The woman was in her twenties, her cheekbones sharp triangles under a layer of pale white skin. Red hair was drawn back across her forehead and tied behind her neck. Her eyes were soft, wide, green. Her features weren’t as harsh as you’d expect for someone who walked around dressed as a dead bat. To Homunculette, she looked more like a child than anything else. Ready to believe whatever fairy stories she liked the sound of.
‘Good afternoon,’ she said, politely. Her voice was soft. Cultured. ‘My family name is Cousin Justine. This is Little Brother Manjuele. The Spirits are with us, and we hope you’ll behave accordingly.’
The security centre was, logically, the best-defended part of the ziggurat; from here, you could shut off all the City’s defences, including the ones around the Relic. Mr Qixotl knew – hoped, anyway – the systems would be homing in on him as he shuffled towards the chamber, taking the appropriate biological samples. As always, he experienced a moment of pure paranoia at the doorway of the room, and thought about what might happen if the defences didn’t recognise him for some reason. Nothing tried to rip his head off as he stepped through the doorway, though, so he calmed down a bit.
He’d been in Trask’s room when the alarms had sounded. He’d been able to hear the toucans, even from the depths of the ziggurat, screeching their parson’s noses off out in the forest. Trask had kept talking, regardless.
Mr Qixotl. I have an offer. A personal offer. To make. To you.
Qixotl should have broken off the conversation right there and then, should have scurried off to check the defences. But it was hard, getting away from Trask. Yeah, sure, he made you feel like every living cell in your body wanted to be on the other side of the planet, but when it came to making your muscles move... when you were around Trask, the atmosphere always felt kind of sticky, like the air had died and putrefied in his presence.
Better this way. In private. A private meeting.
So Qixotl had stood there, like a great fat dead thing, watching Trask’s jaw bobbing up and down until he’d finished his spiel. He still hadn’t got to grips with the deal Trask had suggested. Most of the bidders would be offering technology, weapons data, information, but Trask...
Qixotl. Think. Think about this. Very carefully.
The security centre was, like every other room in the ziggurat, made out of mathematically replicated stone. But the other areas were built for the comfort and convenience of the guests, whereas the security centre was designed to be as repulsive as possible. Currents of cold air swept around the walls, pumped into the chamber through hidden ventilation shafts, the oxygen laced with negative ions, so you felt like there were things crawling over your skin all the time. Bronze gargoyles squatted in the corners, making disgusting rasping noises and breathing out noxious fumes. The room was hung with tapestries, too, depicting various scenes of degradation, mutilation, and humanoid sacrifice. Mr Qixotl had programmed the fibres to move about when they knew no one was looking, so the eyes didn’t so much follow you around the room as keep looking over your shoulder in a “behind you!” kind of way.
In the centre of the chamber was the master console. It looked seriously out of place here, 100 per cent state-of-the-art designer hardware, too complex to disguise as a chunk of stone. Mr Qixotl shambled across to the controls, and tapped his foot impatiently as a customised pixscreen began to rise from the surface of the console. The pixscreen gave him the low-down. Something had materialised near the City wall, in resonance with the Brigadoon circuit. Two biological units had left the capsule,