Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [3]
1
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
East Indies ReVit Zone, 15:06 (Local Time)
There were things in Lieutenant Bregman’s hair, and she was pretty sure they were trying to make nests in her scalp. The bugs were the worst thing. The heat, she could deal with, even if her shirt now showed sweat stains where she didn’t even know she had glands. The dirt, she could deal with, even if the treetops kept dribbling toucan-guana onto her shoulders and her trousers were covered in several exciting new varieties of animal excrement. The tedium, she could deal with, even if she’d been walking through the rainforest for so long that she was starting to see hidden messages in the bark.
She tugged at her hair, pulling out a few black strands stuck together with four-day-old hairspray, and felt the insects squirming between her fingertips. They started biting their way into her hand, so she went “ugh” and tossed them into the undergrowth.
Six metres up ahead, Colonel Kortez stopped, turned, and looked back at her.
‘Insects,’ she said. ‘Sir.’
The Colonel nodded. His face reminded Bregman of one of the stone heads on Easter Island, a near-rectangular block of skull with a frown that looked like it had been chiselled into place. Bregman saw his eyes start to glaze over again. ‘Insects,’ he agreed. ‘The insects aren’t what they seem. Be alert, Lieutenant.’
‘Yes, Sir. I will, Sir.’
So far on this expedition, the Colonel had named over fifty different things that were “not what they seemed”, from the natives they’d met at the last village outpost to the small mammals nesting in the forest canopy. Kortez had been in UNISYC for over thirty years, according to his ident sheet; he’d been part of the ISC division during the Cyberbreaches in the ’30s, he’d been at Saskatoon when the Republicans had issued their ultimatum against Canada. If the rumours at UNISYC Central were true, he’d also been shot at by prehistoric lemur-people and survived an assassination attempt by an android assassin posing as the Norwegian Minister for Health.
The human brain, Bregman reflected sagely, is not designed to deal with that kind of thing. She briefly wondered if she’d end up like him one day, another victim of Displacer Syndrome, two steps away from a padded cell and seeing robot assassins peeking out from behind the bushes.
Kathleen Bregman had been part of UNISYC for nine of her twenty-seven years, and – with the exception of the pickled exhibits in the Little Green Museum – had never seen an extraterrestrial. She was quite happy to keep it that way, as well. God knew, they were bad enough when they were stuffed and dipped in formaldehyde.
Suddenly, the bugs were back in force, sticking hot pins into her scalp. They were sucking her blood, Bregman was sure of it, and she felt skinny enough already without any more of her body mass being taken away. At the last outpost, she’d tried to buy some insect repellent from the village medicine man, but he’d ended up selling her a box of aspirin he’d insisted had been made from the roots of local mystic herbs, despite the fact that the packet had been marked with the name of a leading multinational drugs company and a sell-by date of 23/4/2064.
‘What for you go into great dark-heart forest?’ the medicine man had asked, pretending he couldn’t speak proper English just in case they turned out to be tourists.
Colonel Kortez had puffed out his chest, so the man could see the insignia on his shirt pocket. ‘We’re searching for the places of the ancients,’ he’d intoned, like it had been some kind of holy mission. ‘We’re looking for the Unthinkable City.’
Amazingly, the medicine man had kept a straight face. ‘You go to next longhouse,’ he’d said. ‘See Kamala the Shop. He know. He know all about secret of City.’
Kamala had turned out to be a wrinkled, dry-roasted native who ran a souvenir shop, its main line being t-shirts bearing the legend I SAW THE UNTHINKABLE CITY AND LIVED!, plus maps showing where the best UFOs could be sighted. Bregman had