Doctor Who_ Relative Dementias - Mark Michalowski [102]
Sooal’s fists were clenching; Ace wondered if he would be angry and stupid enough to attack the Annarene.
‘A tracer was planted on your ship and then we followed you here,’ the female Annarene continued. ‘One team was assigned to observe your operations at this location, another at the site of your ship’s landing. Then an we needed to do was to wait for you to revive the Tulks’ memories, and obtain the codes. Now that they are in your possession, travel will be made to the landing site, the inputting of the codes into the control sphere will be completed, and the weapons will be ours.’
The control sphere! For Ace, it all suddenly fell into place.
‘So you did trash the boat and steal John’s find!’ she snapped without thinking, sudden outrage at the damage inflicted on the brothers’ boat flaring up in her.
‘Ace!’ hissed the Doctor, and she turned to him, feeling her face burn red. He gave a sigh and rolled his eyes.
‘What? It’s true – and if you’d let me, I could have told you they were up to something when we first met them!’
She glared at the Annarene – who were looking puzzled.
Well, she assumed they were puzzled: considering they were just things wearing squelchy artificial faces, it was a bit hard to tell.
But they were glancing at each other, clearly confused by what she’d...
Oh bog, she thought. Big mistake.
She glanced at her watch, and realised why the Doctor had given her that look: it hadn’t happened yet. The Annarene on Kelsay hadn’t trashed the boat yet; they hadn’t stolen the control sphere. In fact, if she remembered things correctly, they were still in their cottage. That’s what the Annarene in the Orkneys had meant when he’d thanked her.
She looked at the Doctor. He couldn’t have known what she knew – but she could see that he’d read her expression. After being a good girl and keeping her gob shut all this time, she’d blabbed about the future, blown it all. She thought she’d been so clever, so smart. Duh! Ace. Just duh!
‘I am confused,’ said the female Annarene, fixing her eyes on Ace. ‘The control sphere is not yet in our possession – has it been detached from the stasis chamber?’
‘Sorry,’ Ace bluffed wearily, knowing even as she did that she was convincing no one. ‘I must be getting confused. Forget I said anything.’
‘Contact the other team,’ the female said to the male.
‘Ascertain whether the control sphere is in their possession, and if they have searched the boat.’
The male nodded. ‘And the humans?’
‘Imprison them with the Caarian – until we have the control sphere and the stasis chamber, they should be kept alive. But first...’
For a moment, Ace wondered who this ‘Caarian’ was – until she realised that they meant Sooal. He glowered at the Annarene.
In other circumstances, she might have commented on how seething anger actually gave a little colour to his cheeks.
The woman wriggled her neck – strangely, impossibly – and Ace heard a soft, wet, splitting sound, like a melon slowly being pulled apart. The Annarene reached behind her head and Ace winced, as the woman’s fingers dug into the flesh at the base of her skull. Her face went suddenly slack, becoming nothing more than a mask as she pulled, peeling the fleshsuit over her head. It came away with a reluctant sucking, clinging to her face. The creature – Ace couldn’t thing of it as a her any more – shook its head sharply, disengaging the last threads of the fleshsuit, and the mask fell loosely across her chest, blood-matted hair dribbling down her jacket.
The creature underneath lifted its head – its bony, orange head, crested with two rows of darker bumps, like split peas, running back from the forehead – and the