Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [39]
Here in the ziggurat, of course, the ability would have been useless. The Shift was a nonorganic, impossible to predict. Trask was a post-organic, his motives unclear, though Marie had her suspicions about where his loyalties lay. The minds of the humans were easy to fathom, in themselves, but exposed to so many unpredictable elements, there was no way of knowing for sure which way they might jump.
And now there was the intruder. Marie had scanned his body when he’d been inside her secure array, she’d run the usual genetic and morphic tests. The newcomer was a Time Lord, his biodata too complex to unravel without a deeper scan. Another non-linear influence. And Qixotl had stopped the stranger identifying himself, his social manipulations had been obvious even to Marie’s decaying personal protocols. She’d have to talk this through with Homunculette at some point.
Briefly, Marie wondered whether it was worth learning how to sigh convincingly. She was sure it was what an organic would have done at this stage.
She stopped at a junction, halfway along the main corridor of the ziggurat. At the back of her mind – at the back of the organic part of her mind, the part that existed in simple fourdimensional space, the part that acted as a real-world anchor for the rest of her body – something shifted to one side, moved like a rocker switch.
Her deep-level sensory systems had been activated. Senses buried close to her power core were reaching up through the interior dimensions, up towards her skin. Feelers ripped open the soft non-matter between the outer shell and the inner body, tearing at the physical connections of Marie’s forebrain. Things too large and subtle to manifest themselves in the material world tried to force their way along a conduit the width of her spinal column.
A moment of confusion. Marie hadn’t activated the deep senses, not consciously. She wondered if there’d been some kind of system fault, the sort of hitch the organic part of her brain couldn’t get a fix on. Or had she given the activation order without knowing it? If so, the instinct could only have come from the lower reaches of her body, from the depths of the artron engines, or the buried reflexes of the fluid links.
She ordered the deep senses to deactivate. Wait until we’re outside, she told them. Not here. Too much interference in the ziggurat, feedback from the block transfer material. The information would be blinding, deafening, more than her surface mind would be able to process.
But her systems refused to listen. Marie felt the shell of her body opening up. New impulses, new responses.
– Qixotl was covering something up.
– There was another Time Lord in the ziggurat.
– She knew who Trask was working for.
– She knew who the Shift was working for.
These were the thoughts the deep senses were responding to. Not her conscious commands. The rest of her body, the rest of the ship, was trying to unravel the secrets of the Unthinkable City, the codes of logic that governed the movements of Qixotl’s other guests. She felt like a tiny head on a bloated body. A mass of data with a humanoid face.
This was paranoia, then. This was panic. Marie unfolded, the interior structures of the TARDIS wanting – demanding – to be set free. She felt her arms unravel, revealing weapons systems the size of small moons. Targeting mechanisms, operating on the universe’s most complex dimensional levels, began searching the area for suitable victims.
There was something outside. Outside the ziggurat, beyond the material layers of this planet. Waiting for all the delegates to assemble, waiting for the pieces to fall into place. It was a trap, it was all a trap, and very soon the trap would be sprung. Was Qixotl part of it? Was the other Time Lord?
Random particles of matter were thrown up out of Marie’s power core, manifesting themselves as droplets of hard sweat on her