Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [41]
‘You – promised – security,’ he said. His voice was a long, strangulated gurgle. Qixotl looked scared, started to back away. Homunculette stood, felt the urge to stand up and hit the man, to crack his head against the wall and keep cracking until the wound was as big as Marie’s.
‘She’s a TARDIS,’ said the curly-haired man. He was staring into Marie’s body, transfixed. Surprised.
Alien vulture. It felt almost like a violation, like the man was unravelling every mystery of Homunculette’s companion.
Curly-hair jumped back, as a filing cabinet squeezed itself out of Marie’s wound and shunted itself across the corridor. The matter left inside her was forcing its way out, piece by piece. Pus from the wound.
‘She was attacked,’ Homunculette said. He knew there was some kind of feeling in his voice, but he didn’t know what it was supposed to be.
Curly-hair looked up at him. ‘Maybe not. I’m sorry, I know you’re upset. But this doesn’t look like an attack from the outside. I don’t know of any weapon that could cause an incursion like this. It looks like the damage was done by something internal.’ He looked down at Marie again. ‘Did... Marie... have weapons systems? Defences?’
‘She was my companion,’ Homunculette whined. ‘Of course she had weapons systems.’
The man nodded. ‘I think something triggered them. Altered them in some way. Her own weapons took her apart from the inside.’
‘Erm, right.’ Mr Qixotl’s voice. Even his words sounded like they were trying to sneak away. ‘Maybe we should think this through a bit more, y’know, carefully...’
Homunculette closed his eyes. ‘Get her back to our room,’ he said. He felt fluid trickling down his fingers, and knew it was blood. He’d been clenching his fists, scraping open his skin with his nails. When he opened his eyes again, the curly-haired man was still examining Marie, a gormless expression on his stupid alien face.
‘A TARDIS,’ he muttered. ‘Well well well.’
Another poxy corridor, thought Sam. Great.
After the explosion, things had quietened down a bit. According to the Doctor, they’d stumbled across some kind of alien auction, arranged by the impossibly shifty Mr Qixotl, although nobody had bothered telling Sam what was up for grabs here. Qixotl was supposed to be a scheming interplanetary mastermind, but to Sam he’d looked and sounded more like a reject from Only Fools and Horses. Things weren’t going well for him, obviously, as the Doctor had gatecrashed the party and one of the other clients had spontaneously self-destructed in the middle of the ziggurat.
‘But that’s not the worst thing,’ the Doctor had told Sam, after Qixotl had helped the woman’s companion carry off her body. Her body had consisted not just of an actual corpse, but several pieces of furniture, as well. ‘She wasn’t human. She wasn’t even organic. She was a TARDIS.’
‘A... hold on. You’re winding me up.’
‘I told you before. A fully-functioning TARDIS can look like anything. A motorbike, an Ionic column –’
‘– a sedan chair. Yeah, you’ve given me the lecture. When you said “anything”, I didn’t know you meant anything anything. I didn’t know you meant people anything.’
‘That’s because our TARDIS isn’t advanced enough to have a fully-developed personality matrix. Marie – that was her name, by the way – must have been much more complex.’
Sam hadn’t commented on the way the Doctor had said “our” TARDIS instead of “my” TARDIS. Touching, that. ‘You mean, she was a newer model?’
‘Very new. So new, in fact, she doesn’t even exist yet.’
Sam had blinked. ‘Sorry, is this a weirdzo time travel thing I’m missing the point of?’
‘The future, Sam. We Time Lords can’t investigate the future of our race. We’re like the oracles of ancient Greece, really. We can prophesy everything except our own destinies. Mr Homunculette is a Time Lord, one from an era in Gallifrey’s future. How far in the future, I’m not sure.’
‘Is that bad?’
‘Bad?’ The Doctor had looked as though