Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [48]
Sam tried to distract her. ‘Speaking of the Colonel, don’t you think we should tell him what we’re doing...?’
‘He’s meditating. It’s like hypnosis, you can do serious damage to someone’s psyche if you wake them up early. Hey, Sam?’
‘Yeah?’
‘I think we’ve found something.’
Kathleen had moved a few paces up the corridor, and now she was standing in front of one of the open doorways, staring into the room on the other side. She had the same vaguely sick look Sam had seen on her face in the cocktail lounge.
With less than absolute confidence, Sam skipped up to her side, and peered through the doorway. Several hundred skulls peered back at her.
There was power in the circuits again, light across the dome of the console room. Homunculette moved around the curve of the wall, pressing his hands against the access panels of Marie’s inner body. Generally, Homunculette didn’t have much of a soft touch; he rarely got more sensitive than being able to tell the difference between ethanol and stain remover. But this was different. This was...
Marie. He closed his eyes, felt the bastard tear ducts bulging behind the lids again, and wondered, in the few bits of his brain that stayed logical, why the ducts hadn’t been evolved out of the Time Lord biosystem centuries ago. He could feel the life left in Marie’s body, the traces of sentience buried in the material of the wall. Her mind was in pieces. Somewhere in her depths, Homunculette knew, there’d be the memory record of her last moments. Her last moments as a complete entity.
He had to find it. To know what she’d been thinking. To share what she’d experienced, even. He knew she’d been attacked, and he knew who’d attacked her, so the information wasn’t actually useful, as such. It was personal thing. One way or another, he had to feel he’d been with her when it had happened.
Homunculette opened his eyes again, forced himself to look around the console room. The room was intact, now he’d used the drone clamps to stabilise Marie’s architectural core, but the systems were still a mess. Every TARDIS existed on millions of levels, a lot of them too subtle for even the Time Lord mind to perceive; the structure of the console room was only a model of the true heart of the ship, scaled down to fit into its user’s senses. Marie was sick, you could tell that at a glance, because the access panels lining the walls looked buckled and burnt, as if the room had been gutted by fire.
Ridiculous, of course. The fabric of a TARDIS could stand a full-on thermonuclear blast without so much as a scorch mark. The singed panels were there for the sake of appearance, the ship’s way of letting Homunculette know something was wrong. As if he’d needed telling. By the same token, the floor had turned the colour of ash, and fractured electrical cables hung limply from the ceiling, tiny blue sparks jumping from break to break.
Hovering in the centre of the room was a full-length hologram of a single humanoid figure. Getting the hologram projection system back in order had been a nightmare, and Homunculette had almost literally been forced to hammer the circuits into submission with a sonic monkey-wrench. Even now, the hologram was pale, bleached, slightly blurry. When Marie had been attacked, her external interface had been ruptured. Homunculette had rectified that before he’d done anything else. He’d programmed the chameleon circuit to reform her outer body, healing over the wound.
The hologram was linked to the chameleon circuit, and displayed an image of the way Marie looked on the outside. She was shorter than she had been, blonde, pale-skinned. She wore a dark blue uniform, with a silver badge and a dinky little hat. Marie’s default setting, these days. A year or so ago, Homunculette had taken her to twentieth century London, and while they’d been there the chameleon circuit had jammed. As a result, Marie had been