Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [81]
God, she thought. I never knew I was such an ugly kid.
The whole vault shuddered. The brick wall cracked open from floor to ceiling. Sam threw herself towards the corridor, through a small garden of Bregman-faced flowers. Pink tendrils reached out for her through the hole in the wall, their buds popping open and releasing more of the meat-babies into the air. Sam glanced over her shoulder as she reached the mouth of the tunnel. The babies were at various stages of development, some toddlers, some little more than embryos, but all of them were tiny little Sams.
More games with biodata. It wasn’t hard to figure out what was happening here. The vault was using Sam’s own biodata to create defences, as a way of protecting the mysterious Relic. She didn’t know why the defences were so complicated, though. If Qixotl had wanted to get rid of intruders, he could have just put some kind of laser-screen around the casket and fried anyone who got too close.
But then again, there were a lot of alien species in the ziggurat, and some of them were probably laser-proof. So, if the defences turned your own biodata against you, they were bound to find something you were susceptible to. Yeah, that made sense. The vault knew every weakness Sam had. Even the babies... human beings were funny about babies, Sam knew that. Babies were supposed to be pure, innocent, lovable. Most humans would have had trouble fighting babies, they’d feel like they were committing a cardinal sin, however pig-ugly the sprogs were.
Something grabbed Sam’s foot. She didn’t know what. She fell, face-first, into the offal-flavoured undergrowth. Before she could even think about getting up again, she felt something hovering above her head, breathing cold air down her neck. She tried to turn onto her back, but whatever had snared her was holding onto her legs, winding itself around her thighs. She managed to squeeze out of its grip, eventually, but by then she was already cornered.
The thing hovering over her was baby-shaped, and its siblings were bobbing up and down around it, arranging themselves into some kind of attack formation. The babies floated down towards her face, their chubby little arms outstretched. Sam wondered if they’d developed teeth yet.
Homunculette had stopped struggling. Whatever the cultists had used to tie him up, it wasn’t going to budge. At the training complex on Gallifrey XII, the War Cardinals had taught him the basics of escapology; generations of Time Lord renegades, he’d been told, had discovered that there was no skill in all the universe more important than the ability to get out of tight corners. Homumculette had been cynical at the time. Escapology, he’d thought, hadn’t helped most of the Time Lords get off the original homeworld before it had been wiped.
He was even more cynical now. He lay on his side, on the floor of the anteroom, the two Faction Paradox lunatics standing guard over him. The man seemed intent on finding a reason to kick Homunculette in the stomach every few minutes, while the woman still looked as serene as ever.
The witch. Homunculette felt it burning up his nervous system again, the fury of the righteous, the memory of Marie’s broken face. There was only room for one idea in his head right now, and the idea was revenge. Everything else was background noise.
The male cultist kicked him once more, and Homunculette screamed at him in Old High Gallifreyan, but the shout seemed like nothing next to the howling of the birds outside the ziggurat.
‘What are you going to do with him?’ somebody asked. It was the human Colonel, Homunculette realised. The man was standing somewhere behind him.
Cousin Justine considered the question for a moment. ‘We believe we should respect the beliefs of our host. We will leave judgement of Mr Homunculette to Mr Qixotl.’
‘He’s on his way,’ said a new voice.
Homunculette wriggled around until his face pointed towards the doorway. Two individuals had entered the anteroom. One, the one who’d spoken, was the idiot with the curls and the laughable fashion sense. The other wasn’t