Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [59]
‘It’s underneath us,’ the Doctor murmered. ‘Down in the catacombs under the ziggurat. The voice I heard. A telepathic trace. That’s why it didn’t want to talk to me, because it knew... because I knew... I couldn’t be allowed to communicate with myself. Not from beyond the grave.’ A sudden thought struck him. ‘Are you sure I’m dead?’
Qixotl laughed, then realised it was in bad taste, and pretended he’d been clearing his throat. ‘Yeah, pretty sure.’
‘But I’m still telepathically active. I know, I know, Time Lords are supposed to be active after death, residual psychic power and so forth, but to be that good a transmitter... maybe I’m feigning death. Maybe it’s something to do with my respiratory bypass system. I’ve done it before.’
‘You’re hyperactive even as a corpse, Doctor. That’s why you’re worth so much, yeah?’
Corpse. The Doctor shuddered, but not visibly. Did the man really have to use that word? Body, he could deal with. Cadaver, even. But corpse...
‘Where’s the control centre of this City?’ he growled.
Even he was amazed how threatening he sounded. Qixotl looked suitably startled. ‘It’s, er, on the next level down. But you can’t go there.’
‘The dead can go anywhere.’ The Doctor raised his eyes to the ceiling. ‘And I said I didn’t believe in ghosts,’ he said, addressing any major supernatural powers who might have been passing by.
At least the man looked human. When he’d crept into the shrine, he’d been wearing the bat-skull over his face, but now the mask was off. He was, Bregman judged, even younger than Cousin Justine had been. His skin was rough, tanned, pockmarked, pulled so tightly across his face that he seemed almost as skeletal as his headgear. He had dark hair, tied into a ponytail at the back of his head, and there was a small scar across his forehead. Bregman guessed it was self-inflicted. She remembered the videocasts she’d seen of the urban tribes in Little São Paolo, on the west coast of the Canadian Fed. Drop-outs who identified each other by the scars they wore. The man... Little Brother something... looked just like one of the gang-runners, Brazilian features and all. Only his eyes didn’t fit the stereotype. Pale blue. Aryan blue. Contacts, maybe.
The Little Brother kept moving forward. Bregman kept backing away. He was taller than she was, and probably combat-trained. His clothes weren’t ideal for action – he looked really, really uncomfortable in that suit – but then, Bregman’s body wasn’t ideal for action, either.
‘I don’t want to be here!’ she squawked. Then her heel caught against something on the floor behind her, and she tumbled backwards.
After a few moments, Bregman found herself staring up at the pitch-black ceiling of the shrine. Her backside ached more than her backbone, so at least it had been a good fall. There was a wet patch under her hand, as if she’d fallen into a puddle.
The face of the Faction cultist materialised above her head. A smile stretched itself across his lips. The smile made his mouth look like another ceremonial scar.
‘You on the slab,’ he drawled.
Bregman twisted her head to one side. She realised she was lying on the dais at the centre of the chamber. From here, she could make out the details of the rust patterns, geometric figures that looked as though they’d leaked straight out of someone’s veins. She figured out why her hand was wet, at last.
‘Blood,’ she said.
‘No blood,’ the Little Brother told her, the smile-wound opening up a little. ‘Biomass. We take that from one of the Corp’ration. Took a whole day, cutting that son-of-a-bitch open.’
‘Oh, God,’ Bregman croaked. The Time Lord, Homunculette, had said something about Faction Paradox being a voodoo cult. Voodoo was illegal in most parts of the world these days, after what had happened in Haiti in the ’40s, and most of what Bregman knew came from the old schlock movies. Voodoo ritual involved the use of biological matter, everybody knew that. You used people’s hair and toenail clippings to cast spells against them. You used blood to activate the