Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [40]
There was the echo of an explosion. Then came the explosion itself. Then absolute silence.
Mr Qixotl didn’t even flinch. He’d felt the aftershock before the blast. As if the detonation had been so important, it had announced its coming long before it had actually arrived.
It was Homunculette who broke the silence. His eyes were bulging out of his skull, now. ‘We’re under attack,’ he hissed.
Mr Qixotl swallowed. ‘It was nothing, Mr H. Really, it was nothing. Maybe one of the matter augmentors backfiring, yeah?’
‘Would that represent any real threat to our safety?’ asked Cousin Justine. Her voice was calm and quiet, so everybody ignored her.
‘You think I don’t know what an attack sounds like?’ Homunculette shrieked. ‘That was some kind of plasma burst, or... I don’t know...’
‘Dimensional incursion,’ said the individual Qixotl knew full well had to be the Doctor.
Homunculette spun around to face him. ‘What?’
‘You heard the echo. A minor rupture in local space-time, I’d say.’ The Doctor shrugged. ‘Not that I’m claiming to be an expert.’
Homunculette was practically boggling his face off. ‘Dimensional incursion? What kind of ludicrous technobabble is that supposed to –’
Unexpectedly, he fell silent.
‘Marie,’ he gargled. And suddenly, he was at the doorway, having bounded across the room with a single step.
Qixotl gave a sheepish grin, and made sure everybody in the room got to see it. ‘Technical hitch,’ he told the reps. Then he followed Homunculette out into the passageway.
Homunculette found Marie’s body in the main corridor, at the junction between the guest room passage and the ziggurat entrance. He didn’t recognise it as a body, to begin with. The first thing he saw was the hatstand, propped up against the wall between the torches. After that, he saw the tiles, patches of off-white flooring torn out of the TARDIS interior and scattered along the corridor. A sofa clogged up the side-passage to Homuculette’s right; he identified it as the shabby red one from Marie’s secondary console room, but only half of it seemed to be there, the other being embedded in the corridor wall. An upturned bookcase lay beyond the sofa, vomiting out shredded pages covered in scrawls of High Gallifreyan.
Marie was
she was lying there. Not an object
Marie – the dead heart of Marie – lay at the centre of the junction, her spine pressed against the floor, her head tilted at an angle that made her look as though she’d broken her neck. The entire left side of her body was missing. It was as if someone had drawn a line, a smooth contour, from her cheek to her ankle, and torn away everything on one side of it. Her left arm was gone. So was a lot of her face.
She was a person
his companion
she was his dead
Marie’s right eye was intact. The left eye was in place, but the skin had been torn away, leaving a pearl of pure black that didn’t even bother pretending it was organic. A thing, instead of an organ. An object.
She was
she was not an object. She was a person. She was
she was his companion. His dead
he was bending over her, knees pressing against the broken tiles, the fabric of his suit soaking up cold liquid from the floor. Water. Pooling around her body. Sucked out of the purification system that had been part of
dead companion
and there were footsteps, wet footsteps. Mr Qixotl, the humans, the man in the ridiculous velvet jacket, and
He looked into her eyes, tried to look into her eyes, found himself staring into her head instead. Nothing but static inside her
and Mr Qixotl was leaning over his shoulder, gawping at the wound in Marie’s side, standing in her lifeblood, her water supply, without even an apology. The man in the velvet jacket was hovering behind him. Spectators. Vultures. Homunculette reached out for Marie, wanting to press his hand