Doctor Who_ Corpse Marker - Chris Boucher [7]
‘Happening, Captain?’ Simbion sounded vague. Obviously she had been drinking, as Toos had suspected.
‘We just had a power-down.’
‘Power-down?’
‘If I wanted an echo, Simbion, I’d shout in an ore scoop. I was trapped in total darkness outside my quarters - why was that exactly?’
‘I don’t know, Captain.’
‘Of course you don’t.’ Toos put as much withering scorn into her voice as she could summon up. ‘Stupid question.’
‘The system transfer’s gone without a hitch,’ Simbion went on with the imperturbable good nature of the cheerful drinker.
‘There’s been no power-down. Must have been an isolated glitch.
You want me to check the section?’
‘Could you walk this far without help?’
‘I could bring a robot,’ Simbion sounded as though she might be suppressing a fit of the giggles.
‘Be careful, Simbion,’ Toos purred. ‘What’s left of your share can still be redistributed. This tour could end up costing you money.’ She broke the connection and went to take her bath.
In the passageway outside Toos’s quarters the robot stood for a moment and then, as it had been instructed, it turned away and walked quickly back into the bowels of the mine.
The Doctor had walked along the narrow gantry and peered through the observation ports of five more of the green-lit chambers before he was satisfied that what he was seeing was unlikely to be a coincidence or a trick of the light.
In each of the chambers six individuals, three identical men and three identical women, were floating totally immersed in faintly luminous green liquid. They looked to be unconscious and although they all seemed to be breathing there was nothing linking them to an air supply.
They didn’t look to the Doctor like gill-breathers so either this was a breathable liquid or these were different to the normal run of air-breathing bipedal clones. That wasn’t the only obvious oddity. They were all fully clothed in uniform smocks and leggings and as far he could make out it was only the colours of these outfits which differentiated any one batch of six individuals from another. It was remarkable too that given the similarity of features and the standard body coverings there was still no doubting that there were three males and three females in each set.
But why would they be put in what were probably resuscitation or preservation tanks with their clothes on anyway?
It struck the Doctor that this might just be one of those deeply conformist societies whose disciplines involved a rigid dress code and whose repressions included a horror of nakedness. He hoped not. It was his experience that such societies tended to violence and Leela already had more than enough tendencies in that direction.
Was it possible that this was a deep space transport full of colonists in suspended animation? he wondered. The behaviour of the TARDIS had not suggested that and the instruments had excluded it but, looking round at the four slightly curved walls of the building which came together in a flattened dome high above him, the Doctor was no longer sure. ‘Anything’s possible,’ he said aloud, ‘until you prove it isn’t.’ The acoustics told him nothing new. He stepped up the volume. ‘Eliminate the impossible,’ he quoted at the top of his voice, ‘and whatever’s left, however improbable, must be the truth.’ Still no surprises. It was the sort of sound effect you might expect to get back from any large utility space built for something other than concerts or theatrical performances.
He shrugged. ‘Of course Conan Doyle knew the answers to begin with,’ he said to himself. ‘And that always helps.’
As he stared through yet another port he noticed that there was a change going on. The group inside this chamber had begun to move. There were small quiverings of hands, heads twitched suddenly, legs and arms made slight swimming motions. And it was all happening in sync. Each member of the group was doing exactly the same thing at exactly the same time.
It was like a perfectly coordinated underwater ballet performed by a troupe of mechanically precise water-dancers. He checked another chamber. The same