Doctor Who_ Longest Day - Michael Collier [37]
Vasid shuffled off into the dark with a low moan of panic.
***
The Doctor skidded to a halt. There were sticky brown marks on the floor and walls outside the personnel cabins, and the doors had been smashed in with hideous force.
'You could've showered first,' tutted the Doctor, surveying the damage.
'Although I rather suspect we've taken the liberties here.' There was no sign of Vasid in what the Doctor assumed was the man's room. The floor was strewn with data disks, holovids, pornography and dirty clothing, but the Time Lord guessed that, apart from the huge holes in the cupboard doors, this was a fairly normal state of affairs. The room next door had to be Anstaar's, neat and clean-smelling. Every hiding place had been kicked in, every door ripped off.
'Oh, well. Perhaps they're just a little grumpy at being woken up so early.'
The Doctor deliberated on what to do next. He had to get Sam back. That was his number-one priority. But he had to find out what was going on here, and that meant talking to whoever had done this damage and left the tracks. That was number-one priority, too. And Hirath wasn't stable, and there was no telling what might happen if he didn't sort that out, so that also was number-one priority. And that ship was on its way. And Vasid of course...
Hmm.
The Doctor stared down at his battered old shoes and clicked his fingers as he headed cautiously back to the control room. He'd had an idea.
***
Vasid groped his way through the mire of brown sludge sucking and grasping at him from the floors and walls. He looked behind him but it was hard to tell if he was being followed along here.
He stopped still, and strained to see or hear anything in the threatening gloom. His heartbeat sounded ridiculously loud in his ears, his breathing ragged and rasping.
Then he heard something else. A quiet, regular squelching. Something was making its way towards him.
Vasid bit his lip and pulled himself onward down the corridor. There was a faint luminescence ahead to his right, bluish in hue. He didn't know whether to avoid it or head straight for it, but with the creature close behind, doubling back or standing still really didn't seem like much of an option.
He splatted and slid through the thick sticky grease around him until he reached the light, spilling out from a large room which seemed cleaner, cooler than the fetid corridor. A sickbay of some kind?
The room was empty. He walked inside, noticing that the lower temperature had hardened most of the filthy muck. He walked over to the far side of the room, looking for another door, a way out, or a hiding place.
Then he realised the room wasn't empty. Something was there, a figure on a long, black couch in the far corner. He moved towards it with a growing feeling of dread, as if someone else were moving his body.
It was a man, stripped naked. Dozens and dozens of glistening metal blades and pins were slid under the skin on the torso and the arms, tiny wires no thicker than hairs connecting them to a large, glassy sphere glowing with alien energy. The skin from the nape of the neck to the top of the head had been peeled away, and sticking out from the dull grey bone of the skull were hooks and strings and wires leading to small black cubes set into the walls. One eyeball hung out on its stalk, an object like a glass spider squatting over the iris, puncturing the eyeball's base with tiny needles from which oozed a thin grey liquid. A large spike was driven through the flesh beneath the chin, and a taut mesh of steel threads - sewn from inside the lower jaw through to the base of the spike near the drill-holed neck - held the mouth open.
Vost hadn't run anywhere. These creatures had come for him.
Vasid's scream yanked his own mouth open. A tiny voice hiding in the back of his head timidly asked a question of his old employer over the noise of his anguish: what manner of creature could have done this?
When he turned, he saw it, towering above him. The violence and coldness in its huge eyes, the fatty