Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [90]
Sam was lying on the floor of a pink-walled room, her body almost lost in a garden of growths that reminded the Doctor of overripe kidneys. Things were moving in the squishy undergrowth, their bald, slippery heads occasionally bobbing up into view. The largest of the antibody creatures hovered above Sam’s head, its arms extended towards her neck. The being looked almost like an embryo, a half-finished humanoid with stunted limbs and an over-developed forehead. Its skin was like wrinkled plastic, the colour of blood.
The Doctor actually had to catch his breath. Only after he’d recovered himself did he notice the way the thing was looking at him.
It was staring right out of the screen, its huge black eyes trying to force themselves into a squint. As the Doctor watched, a smile appeared on the antibody’s face. The mouth was tiny, little more than a slit, and the Doctor found it hard to believe it was attached to a digestive system, or to a larynx of any kind. But its lips were moving all the same.
It was mouthing words at him. The antibody was linked to the security systems, the Doctor realised. It knew he was watching it on the pixscreen. For the briefest of moments, the Doctor was sure the face looked familiar. Something about the way its features were aligned, but...
There was no sound from the pixscreen. The Doctor’s hands flew across the master console, searching for a volume control. By the time he found it, it was almost too late.
‘– but it’s me,’ the thing on the screen gurgled. ‘It was me, all the time.’
Manjuele checked the corridor outside the shrine. No life, no movement. Everyone was at the auction, apart from the bitches who’d gone down to the vault. Good.
He grinned at the skulls as he went back into the shrine, just to remind them that they were dead and he wasn’t. Then he crossed over to the dais, and slipped the biosampler over his knuckles.
‘Got a present for you,’ he said, to whatever Spirits might have been listening.
He unscrewed the tips of the biosampler’s collection valves. The stuff inside stank like sour milk. Manjuele didn’t know what it was called, but Justine had told him it was a liquid you could use for storing biodata, which was all the detail the Little Brother needed. He held his hand out. Big red spots of gunge dripped from his knuckles and hit the dais, then started mixing with the stuff that was already there.
‘Ashes to ashes,’ Manjuele said. He always said that, when he did a rite. He didn’t know why.
Once the new biomass had sunk in, he slid the knife out of his pocket. He didn’t have to use the knife, for this part of the ritual. He could have used the sampler, like Justine always did, but Manjuele felt more comfortable with the knife. It was the same one he’d used to cut his ID scar into his face, a lifetime ago. The family liked to talk about “fetishes” – yeah, OK, so the word still made him snigger – and he liked to think of the knife as his own private little fetish.
He rolled up his left sleeve, exposing his forearm, where the skin was crisscrossed with scar tissue. He found a patch that looked like it could still bleed properly, and drew the knife across it. There wasn’t any pain. He’d done this too many times for there to be pain.
The blood dripped onto the dais. The second the juice touched the biomass, the walls of the shrine started to hum. Manjuele always liked to imagine it was the skulls doing the humming, not the shrine’s engines. When he and the Cousin had cut open the Corporation man on the dais, the day they’d left Dronid, the walls had screamed, really really screamed.
The stuff on the dais bubbled. That was the shrine at work, Manjuele knew, taking the UNISYC woman’s biodata to pieces, analysing it, and using the engines to make the right connections through space-time. Manjuele said a prayer, in his own native language. The family was good about stuff like that. They let you talk to the Spirits whatever way you liked.
A shape fazed into existence in front of him. Like a little hologram, a fuzzy blue humanoid figure, hovering about a half a metre