Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [69]
Qixotl didn’t move. ‘Doctor, look, I don’t think you should... y’know...’
‘Oh, there’s nothing to be worried about. It’s quite dead.’
‘Dead? You’re sure?’
‘I’m sure. Take a look.’
So Qixotl took a look.
In fact, when he was within spitting distance of the shape, he even convinced himself to reach out and touch it. The surface of the thing was as cold as the wall had been, and coated with the same kind of crystal-frost. Qixotl couldn’t be sure, in this light, but he couldn’t see the tell-tale markings of a member of the Dalek race. No eye-stalk, no sucker-arm, no bumpy bits around the base. ‘Is it a...?’ he began.
‘I don’t know.’ Qixotl sensed the Doctor was frowning. ‘It was alive, or partly alive. A life-form with an outer metallic shell and an organic interior. But in this state, it’s impossible to say for certain what species it belonged to.’
Qixotl kept prodding the surface of the shape. He felt the dome at the top of its body crack under his fingers. ‘What happened to it?’
‘Its cellular structure has been totally reconfigured. The outer shell’s brittle, the casing’s been turned into semi-solid crystal. There, you feel that?’ The Doctor grabbed Qixotl’s hand, and forced him to stroke one side of the dead thing’s body. Qixotl felt an enormous hole there. ‘Something’s forced its way into the interior and extracted the biomass inside.’
Qixotl pulled his hand away. ‘What are you saying here, Doctor?’
The Doctor patted the corpse on the top of its dome. ‘I don’t know whether this started out life as a Dalek or not. But whatever it was, it’s effectively been peeled and eaten.’
Kathleen was still moving, in spite of the obvious minor injuries. Sam was out of breath by the time she reached the bottom of the stairs, but the Lieutenant, who’d effectively taken the non-tiring way down, still seemed quite active. There was blood all over her face, and the stuff was still seeping out of the cuts on her forehead. The way she crawled, Sam guessed most of her joints had been twisted out of position.
Sam trotted up the corridor ahead of her, and stopped right in the woman’s path. Kathleen came to a halt at her feet. Her face was terrifying. Battered stupid, but still determined as hell. She looked like she’d just seen the oasis on the horizon.
‘He’s here,’ Kathleen croaked.
Sam crossed her arms. ‘Kathleen, you’ve just bounced down two flights of stairs on your head. You’re lucky you didn’t break your neck.’
‘No. He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t let it happen.’
‘Who wouldn’t?’
‘The voice,’ said Kathleen.
She was listening out for something, Sam realised. So she listened, too. I never give advice, never, thought Sam. But there are terrible things in the universe, things that... wait a minute, she was thinking rubbish. Concentrate, she told herself. You’re getting distracted. But if you could touch the alien sand, and hear the cry of strange birds, and watch them wheel in another sky, then we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it, until it seems that I’m some kind of galactic yo-yo...
‘Can you hear it?’ Kathleen asked.
Sam suddenly remembered what the Doctor had said, when they’d been exploring the ziggurat together. ‘Are you psychic, at all?’
The corridor opened out a few metres ahead of them. The room at the end seemed darker than the other parts of the ziggurat Sam had seen. Kathleen had already slithered past her, and now she was getting close to the entrance, slowly pulling herself to her feet. Sam hurried after her.
The room ahead was, in short, a vault. It wasn’t as bad as the Faction’s shrine, but it was getting there. The walls were the colour of soot, made out of what looked like slime-encrusted brick. Huge rusting nails had been hammered into the blocks, and hung with iron chains for no particular reason. It was supposed to look like a dungeon, Sam realised. The torches only seemed to illuminate the edges of the room, leaving a great puddle of darkness at the dead centre of the chamber.
And in the middle of the darkness was a casket. It glowed, but the glow only lit