Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [114]
Number Thirteen moved through the vessel like liquid, like a flood that had been building up for millennia. It crashed in waves across the decks, across the computer systems, and across the crew. Not technically fluid, nothing that could accurately be called ‘matter’ in any form. Just a deluge of potential life, a force that had been given thousands of years to decide what form it wanted to take, but still hadn’t made up its mind. On some decks, it stampeded through the corridors like a herd of cattle. On some decks, it moved like a worm, burrowing its way through the walls whenever it reached a dead end. On some decks, it even seemed to have a face. AKA the Metamorph had been able to take on any number of shapes, but only Number Thirteen could be all of those shapes at once.
It didn’t think like a Gallifreyan now, of course. It thought like everything it had eaten and absorbed over the years, ten thousand different ideas tearing through its mind at once, so the only thing it could be sure of was that it was still hungry. It ate the Remote as it crashed over them, and added their life patterns to its own bulk. The crewmen didn’t die, naturally, because death was unthinkable to Number Thirteen. They were still alive, there in the guts of the energy mass, and as things turned out most of them were happier that way. Their flesh and bones were dissolved into raw biomass, but their potential became part of the greater whole of Number Thirteen, and for beings who’d spent their lives hooked into the media systems of Faction Paradox this wasn’t an entirely new experience.
Once Number Thirteen had filled up every corridor, and squeezed its way into the every last niche of the ship, it realised that it’d have to break out of this place if it wanted to learn anything else. So it simply breathed in, sucking the black metal walls of the vessel towards the centre of its body. The ship shook for a few moments, trying to resist the pressure, then crumpled like a plastic cup.
* * *
Magdelana was standing at the town gate when the Remote ship vanished. She’d been there for a good ten minutes, pressing her back against one of the big wooden gateposts, listening to the conversation in the square without getting involved. She hadn’t understood much of what she’d heard, about the showman and his ‘regenerations’, but she understood the basic problem.
The offworlders were linked to other times, not just other planets. The Doctor, the freaks, the Remote… none of them belonged to Dust, not like the townspeople did. Not like Magdelana did. The desert had swallowed up this planet’s history, but these people lived outside of history altogether.
She looked up as soon as she heard the crunching sound, and covered her face when she saw the walls of the ship buckling, to fend off any debris that might have rained down on her. There wasn’t any, though. The ship was being sucked inward, and every single rivet, every single piece of scarred black plating, was being carefully drawn up into…
Into whatever it was that now hovered over the town wall. Magdelana couldn’t be sure exactly what she was looking at, but it reminded her of the geek she’d met, buzzing with so many different animal hormones that you couldn’t tell what species it was supposed to be. You’d be able to see it even if you were blind, she realised. You’d be able to feel it inside your head, scratching against your senses. It was alive, and it was hungry, and the very last fragments of the ship were sucked into it as Magdelana watched, until the thing filled up the sky with a kind of light that was just as all-consuming as the darkness the Remote had brought with them.
She remembered the roaches that had clustered around her father’s body, the way they’d sucked at the blood on the floorboards of the old house. She remembered the rush of animal adrenaline when