Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [83]
The heads kept leering down at Bregman, reflecting every single one of her imperfections back at her. The floor trembled beneath her backbone, but she didn’t bother getting up. There didn’t seem much point trying to stay alive any longer. Not now she knew what she was really worth.
The dinosaur was still busy sawing the heads off the vestal virgins. That was a relief, anyway. Right now, it wouldn’t have surprised Qixotl if the figures had jumped out of the tapestry and gone walkabout in the ziggurat. The security centre hadn’t been touched since he’d been here with the Doctor, but somehow the place felt alien to him now, like an old friend who suddenly wasn’t speaking to him any more.
Naturally, he’d lied to E-Kobalt. The toucans weren’t screeching because of the spaceship. The racket they were making was louder than a simple intruder alert. Something had activated the deeper defences of the ziggurat. Someone had reached the vault.
Mr Qixotl told the console to give him a visual scan of what was happening down on the lowest level. Immediately, the pixscreen was filled with an image Qixotl could only have described as disgusting. He squinted at it for a good half a minute before he realised what he was looking at. It was the interior of a human intestinal tract, blown up to absurd proportions.
He asked the console for an overview of the vault. Oh, right, now it made sense. Two of the humans had reached the Relic. How they’d got that far, Qixotl wasn’t sure. Maybe it had been something to do with the corpse. The Doctor had a thing about humans, according to the old stories; something to do with his retroactive ancestry, apparently. The telepathic bits of his brain could have latched onto the humans, even after death. The stiff might have summoned them, sent out a psychic SOS, probably not even realising it was dead and therefore didn’t actually need rescuing. But if the body could shut off most of the defences around it, just using its residual psychic ability... well, it was no wonder the Time Lords thought they could turn it into a weapon.
Even the corpse hadn’t been able to shut down the core defences, though. Qixotl called up another visual. There she was, the UNISYC woman, being menaced by her own head, times six. Oddly, the heads were staring her out instead of attacking her.
Qixotl asked the console for a diagnostic. According to the figures on the pixscreen, the systems had analysed her biodata, and found her greatest weakness to be psychological, not physical. Specifically, she had an inferiority complex the size of the Crab Nebula. She was young, she was fit, she was healthy, but she thought she was a complete wreck on the verge of total bodily collapse. She had a bunch of appearance-related neuroses, too, which was only to be expected in a culture as media-aware as Earth’s. The planet’s TV transmissions were full of icon-images, Qixotl had noticed, cybernetically enhanced movie legends and smoother-than-life pop stars, all plastic surgery and computer airbrushing. That kind of thing always got ape-descendants a bit paranoid.
In light of all this, the systems had decided not to kill the UNISYC woman. Instead, they were bombarding her with stimuli designed to trigger an industrial-strength nervous breakdown. In short, the vault was driving her mad. Being trapped in a labyrinth based on the design of her own large intestine was all part of the process.
Mr Qixotl goaded the master console into giving him the low-down on the other human. It turned out to be the Doctor’s little assistant. No surprises there,