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By Root 757 0

multiple eyes there was often only one hole and you couldn’t rely on finding it at the first attempt. She stared at the bony chitin ridges behind the small head with its acid-loaded fangs and its clicking, quivering jaws. If she went for somewhere among those ridges she might be able to sever the brain-body links immediately and then she would have a chance to find a way to kill the brain before any defensive responses kicked in. But it was possible that those thin spaces between the ridges were just as strongly shelled as everything else, in which case she would be committed to a useless attack and she would waste all the advantages of surprise. Above her the Doctor was busy lowering himself from the branch. He seemed determined to join in, despite the fact that being ripped to pieces was all he could manage to do from there. She had to decide what to go for. Now.

She leapt the last few feet and, holding the front ridge with one hand, plunged the knife in behind it with the other. She felt the tip scrape on the unyielding chitin. She was wrong: the crevices were not open down through to the soft interior organs. She planted her fret on the top edge of the front body, clasped her knees against the narrow ridges and this time, using both hands on the knife, she stabbed harder into the same place. It made no impression. She could not penetrate the tough shell of the exoskeleton. She dragged the knife along the crack, feeling for the weak parts she was still certain must be there. The ridges and gaps had to be for movement and that meant they had to be jointed or hinged or flexible – and that meant they had to be weaker, if she could only find one of them before the animal woke up to what she was doing.

The Doctor, meanwhile, had come into the creature’s range of perception far enough finally to drive it into a fury of action. With a shuddering lurch it stiffened its legs and pushed its body further away from the tree. Then, still firmly anchored in place, it rocked forward with a jerk, thrusting forelegs upward at the Doctor’s dangling feet.

The suddenness of the animal’s first movement took Leela by surprise. She lost her footing and began to slip but she had been trained never to lose her knife and she held on to it instinctively. It was twisted in the crevice and it was only this that stopped her from falling off. She scrambled back into position and as the animal ravened towards the Doctor she felt the ridged crevice widen slightly. It was stretching open.

So that was how it worked: she had been right after all. She shoved the knife home and slashed the sharp edge through cartilage, strings and arteries, cutting first one way and then the other until nothing resisted the blade. A mixture of green and brown gore was welling up over the ridge as Leela clambered the last few feet and drove the knife into a soft notch at the back of the animal’s head, just behind its mouth parts. She twisted the knife, working and stabbing until she was sure that if the brain was there it was mush. She jumped to the nearest branch then, and clung to it waiting for the twitching and thrashing that would tear the animal out of the tree and hurl it crashing to the ground. But nothing happened.

There were no death throes. The animal simply stopped functioning as though it had been turned off. The hooks at the end of its legs remained set firmly into the tree, and it stayed stiffly where it was.

‘Next time I tell you not to do something,’ the Doctor said, lowering himself on to one of the creature’s outstretched forelegs and using it as a ladder to climb down to the lower branches, ‘you could at least pause for a moment before doing it.’

Leela smiled. ‘I thought I should hurry. You looked as though you were planning to choke it to death with your foot.’

‘Do you notice,’ the Doctor asked, looking closely at the dead louse, ‘that it seems to have no parasites, and apart from what you’ve done to it there are no signs of damage of any kind? It’s perfect.’ He climbed on down towards the ground. ‘Are you coming, or did you want the head as