Doctor Who_ Halflife - Mark Michalowski [81]
‘It’ll be a very shallow pool then,’ muttered Fitz. ‘No diving in the deep end.’
Fitz raced through the events that had happened to him, and the Doctor added his own tale.
‘So where’s Trix now, then?’ he asked – but to Fitz it sounded perfunctory, as though he felt he were duty bound to ask.
Fitz stared pointedly at Sensimi until she looked away. ‘Hopefully, she’s on her way here now,’ he said. ‘Oh, and I had a dream.’
Sensimi gave a little snort.
‘It might be nothing, but. . . ’ He paused, suddenly feeling very silly for what he was about to say – particularly in front of Calamee, for some reason. He briefly described it to the Doctor, who nodded and hmmed throughout.
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‘Mean anything to you?’ Fitz asked.
Sensimi raised a knowing eyebrow but he ignored her.
‘Nothing. . .
specific. But. . . ’ The Doctor paused, his eyes screwed up thoughtfully. ‘It has a sort of resonance. D’you know what I mean? It feels like it should mean something. Something on the tip of my memory, so to speak.
Fitz, how have you been feeling recently – I mean, apart from being attacked, knocked out, etcetera etcetera?’
‘Shell shocked, I suppose. Why?’
The Doctor shook his head and started pacing again.
‘It’s a shame Trix isn’t here now. Has she made any comment to you about you not acting normally?’
‘Nothing that stands out. Why?’
‘Just an idea – but we really need an independent observer to verify it.
Someone who knows us both.’ He gave a huge shrug. ‘But she’s not here so we’ll just have to carry on regardless, won’t we? I started to tell you about the analysis of the night beast’s DNA, didn’t I? And Nessus’s. Well, there’s something very odd about it.’
‘I wondered when we’d get around to that,’ said Calamee, who’d plonked herself down gracelessly in a chair by the side of Sensimi’s writing desk, and was fiddling with a gold pen she’d found.
‘It’s very clean,’ said the Doctor, stressing the word in a way that suggested that this wasn’t normal and hurtled off into lecture mode, telling them about
‘junk codons’, redundancy and all sorts of genetic safety measures. ‘But the night beasts don’t have any of that,’ he said triumphantly – by which time, everyone was beginning to flag.
‘So what you’re saying is. . . ’ prompted Calamee with some circular, cut-to-the-chase, hand movements.
‘What I’m saying is that the night beasts aren’t natural. Well, not totally natural. It’s as though someone’s fiddled with their DNA, gone through it to remove all the junk, streamlined it.’
‘Someone,’ said Fitz. ‘As in a person.’
‘Or a thing,’ added Calamee.
‘Exactly!’ said the Doctor with a grin. ‘I’d originally assumed – as I think did the Esperons – that the night beasts are natives. And it’s true that there are elements in their DNA that they share with a few samples of local plant and insect life that I analysed. But whoever, or whatever, has tampered with their DNA – perhaps that energy wave, since it seems to have a similar effect – has cleaned it up, has removed lots of the redundancies, lots of the safeguards.
These night beasts were designed – designed to have a short life. I can’t prove it – not without more evidence or more samples – but I get the feeling that 146
they’re designed for particular tasks. The clincher is that, as far as I can tell, they can’t reproduce.’
‘Poor buggers,’ muttered Fitz, trying to work out where this was going (or indeed, where it had all been.)
‘So,’ interrupted Sensimi. ‘What are they for?’
‘Soldiers, perhaps. Yes. Maybe drones, workers, guards – something like that. Although the one in your cellar doesn’t look particularly aggressive.’
‘Now you mention it, the one that me and Trix found was almost chatty.
With me at any rate. And guarding what?’
‘Ah. . . that is the question, isn’t it?’ The Doctor glanced at the clock by Sensimi’s bed. ‘Right!’ he declared in his best Sherlock Holmes manner, one finger raised theatrically. ‘Enough fannying about here. We’ve done what we came for – alerted the authorities. Now it’s time