Doctor Who_ Ghost Light - Marc Platt [35]
‘Best not to move him,’ he advised.
‘He fell against that,’ said Ace, pointing to the membrane with the Geiger counter.
‘And disturbed whatever’s hibernating inside,’ the Doctor concluded, reaching forward to examine the cracks in the membrane’s crust through which light was seeping.
‘Don’t touch it!’ yelled Josiah, who suddenly found himself staring back down the muzzle of Ace’s gun.
‘You’re scared of it too, just like the others,’ she said.
‘Because he knows what it is. Don’t you, Josiah?’ added the Doctor. ‘No one builds an observatory this deep. You can’t see many stars down here.’
Josiah was beginning to breathe unsteadily again.
‘There’s an energy escape,’ he pleaded. ‘I must stabilize it!’
The Doctor was making his way across the chamber towards the two shapes by the cell door. ‘Don’t worry. I always leave things until the last minute,’ he said, peering at the inanimate monstrosities in their formal evening dress. ‘These husks: they’re some of your old cast-offs, I take it?’
‘They attacked me and Nimrod,’ said Ace.
The Doctor smiled. ‘You couldn’t have been introduced properly.’
‘You’re insane!’ shouted Josiah. ‘If the membrane is broken...’
‘Yes?’ said the Doctor, but Josiah just scowled and fell silent.
‘There’s something well vicious behind that door too that’s controlling the husks,’ added Ace.
The Doctor approached the cell door and looked in at the spyhole.
‘Vicious, like most maltreated caged animals,’ he said.
It was pitch black inside and it smelled unpleasantly of uncleaned stables. The bolt was not closed. In the darkness, he could hear something breathing gently.
Perhaps it would be better to slide the bolt home.
‘Yeah, but even that bottled out when I threatened to smash the membrane,’ boasted Ace.
‘You did what!’ hissed Josiah.
‘Ace!’ The Doctor spun round from the door and the girl looked down shamefaced at the floor, embarrassed by the carelessness of her admission.
The Doctor smiled at Josiah and walked across to the desk at the centre of the chamber.
‘Sounds like a fine kettle of fish all set to boil over,’ he observed. Whether by accident or design he rested his hand on the brass buttons on the desk top.
The whole chamber groaned as the screens set in its walls flared into life. Ace saw unknown figures and shapes spinning across their surfaces. Indeed, the haze of the chamber seemed to draw the patterns swirling out into the air before them. Forgetting her prisoner, Ace crossed the chamber to stare fascinated beside the Doctor.
‘Genetic codes, DNA, RNA and chromosome indices,’
he observed. ‘You’ve done a lot of exploring down here, haven’t you, Josiah?’ he added, still engrossed.
Suddenly — at last, the Doctor would have thought —
Ace understood what she was looking at.
‘It’s a stone spaceship!’ she cried.
‘Hmm,’ concurred the Doctor, ‘and the owner won’t be too happy when it wakes up.’
‘I am the owner,’ insisted Josiah’s voice from behind them.
The Doctor’s solution was triumphant.
‘No, you’re not. You’re just part of the cargo.’
He spun on his heel and saw Josiah aiming a pistol which he had just extracted froom the desk drawer at them.
‘You’re so smug and self-satisfied, Doctor,’ he sneered.
‘I try,’ the Doctor said quietly.
Ace brought the Geiger counter up in answer to the pistol.
‘Drop it,’ she ordered.
Josiah shook his head.
‘I’m not a simpleton. And that device is a radiation detector, not a gun.’
Using the pistol, he directed them towards the crystalline console in front of the membrane.
‘You’re going to help me stabilize the energy loss, or most of southern England goes up in the firestorm.’
The shadow in the core had begun to stir again; plumes of steam trickled from the vents. Around them, the stone walls of the ship growled their protest as the symbols danced off the screens into the miasma.
The terrified Control creature watched its enemy and his prisoners from the spyhole. Like a balance of scales, the links between the two could not be broken, even as the distance between them grew ever