Doctor Who_ Peacemaker - James Swallow [54]
Everything he said was right. On another day, I might have turned my back and let him do it.’
‘But you didn’t,’ sniffed Godlove. ‘You were oh-so merciful, weren’t you?’
‘Because I want something from you,’ he said, steely-eyed. ‘I saved your life. Now you save Martha’s.’
Godlove took a step back and gave the Doctor a look up and down.
‘No, not just yet,’ he began. ‘First you and me are gonna deal.’
The vertical shaft was narrow and rough-hewn. Traversing down it scraped thin strips of flesh from the hands of the longriders, leaving 131
traces of watery, polluted blood on the rocky walls. Kutter fell hard the last few yards and landed poorly on a flat stone in the middle of the passageway. His leg snapped with a wet crack and he hauled himself up without any apparent evidence of pain. Tangleleg surveyed the mine tunnel they had emerged in as Kutter sat briefly, manipulating the mechanisms of his gun.
After a moment, he aimed the weapon at the broken bone and pulled the trigger. A haze of glittering energy washed over the leg and the bio-engrams worked at the damaged tissue and bone, knotting it back together. The process took longer than it should have; the hosts the two Clades had gathered for their operation on the third planet were of poor quality. The organic system of the two dead outlaws, already pushed far beyond their normal function, animated only by injections of brute power and alien technology, would soon reach the point of uselessness. Sustaining them, finding animal flesh to feed them, was becoming a problem.
Considering this, Kutter buzzed the data to Tangleleg, who replied in the affirmative. It was important that they complete the mission within the next planetary rotation. After that point, they would need to co-opt new hosts and that could prove difficult. Already, they had clogged their memory systems and combat functions with the rem-nants of the human forms they had stolen. Kutter still thought of itself as Hank Kutter to some degree, even though all that remained of that man was dead and gone. All that existed now was just a walking corpse in thrall to an intelligent weapon, masquerading as a person –and Hank Kutter’s memories and personality were just a thin layer grafted onto the predatory mind of the Combat Module. It was pure chance that the outlaw was a being with the same kind of violent nature as the Clades. It made the control easier to facilitate, gave the Clades a way to conceal themselves among the dominant species of the planet.
While Kutter repaired himself, Tangleleg found where the tunnel branched, one route falling away down a shallow incline, the other staying level. The Clade weapon’s tactical computer calculated that the objective would most likely be on the lower levels of the mine, in 132
the zones deeper underground that afforded the most protection.
But it was important to be certain. Tangleleg dropped into a crouch, peering into the darkness with his heat-ranged eyes. Against the cool blue of the rocks he spotted a faint stripe of green; a small reptile hiding behind a stone, cold-blooded but still visible to him.
Tangleleg’s hand shot out and snatched up the rattlesnake, catching the animal in the cage of his fingers. Its mouth gaped and bit at him, curved razor fangs going deep into his bloodless skin. The longrider was dimly aware of venom being deposited in his flesh, but ignored it. The millions of hair-thin wires threaded through Tangleleg’s blood vessels by the Clade would doubtless absorb the toxins, anal-yse them, perhaps even store the molecular formula on protein chain data-strings for replication, if it proved lethal enough. The Clades were always looking for new weapons, after all.
Ignoring the snake’s angry clatter, the longrider held the reptile and placed the muzzle of his gun to its head. A dozen tiny sensor cords snapped out and stabbed the animal, rooting into its nervous system. Through a secondary information feed, Tangleleg drew sensations from the dying snake’s primitive mind. The process only worked on lower phylum