Doctor Who_ Deep Blue - Mark Morris [49]
Turlough, his mouth still too dry to speak, gripped the Doctor’s arm even tighter. The Doctor winced and looked at him. ‘Would you mind not doing that.’
With a gargantuan effort, Turlough tore his lips apart and tried to speak. The pressure made him feel as though his head was about to burst, but he managed to croak out the word, ‘TARDIS.’
His companion’s lack of urgency made Turlough want to shake him. The Doctor glanced around once more, then nodded slowly. ‘In the circumstances, that might be the most prudent course of action.’
He walked unhesitatingly forward towards the giant arachnid, which looked utterly disorientated now, stumbling around in a drunken circle, as if chasing its huge, swaying tail. The Doctor gave the creature a wide berth, Turlough cringing behind him, clutching the sleeve of his coat like a small child hanging on to its mother’s skirts. Calmly the Doctor fitted the key into the lock and opened the door. As Turlough plunged gratefully inside, the Doctor turned back briefly, raised his hat and said, ‘Sorry, must dash.’ Then he followed Turlough inside.
Once inside the console room, Turlough tore the sweaty handkerchief from his face, slumped against the wall, then sank to the floor in a quivering heap, roundels pressing uncomfortably into his back. Shudders of reaction flowed through his body as the Doctor pottered around the console like an old man in his garden shed, making minor adjustments with little nods and grunts of self-satisfaction.
Turlough allowed his head to droop into his cupped hands and for a while he simply sat there, eyes closed, waiting for the reaction to run its course. At last he opened his eyes and raised his head, and saw the Doctor standing with his hands in his pockets, regarding him patiently. Feeling that the onus was on him to speak, Turlough swallowed and said, thickly,
‘Those things out there... what were they?’
The Doctor removed his hands from his pockets and put them on the edge of the console, leaning forward like a speaker at a lectern. ‘I haven’t encountered them before,’ he said, ‘but I’m almost certain they were Xaranti. They’re a species of intergalactic scavengers with no particular technological or cultural identity of their own. They move through space in the hijacked vessels of other species, perpetuating their own race by subjecting the crews of the ships they capture, and the populations of the planets they invade, to an infection so aggressive that it forces their victims’ bodies to transform. As they absorb other species physically, so they absorb their knowledge too.’
‘They’re parasites, in other words,’ Turlough said.
‘Precisely.’
Turlough shuddered. ‘Those things didn’t look capable of piloting ships. They seemed so... savage.’
Oh, there’s far more to the Xaranti than those creatures out there. They’re simply the hunter-gatherers. The brains behind the operation will be at the heart of the community, well hidden and well protected. When a member of a particular species becomes a Xaranti, they don’t so much lose their knowledge and their memories as store them. In effect, their new bodies become processing plants for the information they store, and once processed the Xaranti secrete this information as a kind of... colourless gloop.
These various secretions, which are quite literally knowledge and memory given physical form, merge to form a separate living, thinking entity, a controlling intelligence for the creatures who spawned it.’
Turlough was frowning, struggling to grasp all this. ‘So you’re saying these creatures create their own queen?’
‘Exactly!’ the Doctor cried with an air of triumph, as if Turlough had finally grasped a concept that had been eluding him. The Xaranti warriors are not themselves designed to use the knowledge they absorb, so instead they create a giant, communal mind which assimilates all the information fed to it and which controls and directs their actions. It’s a perfect symbiotic relationship.’ He beamed, as if he himself was the one