Doctor Who_ Relative Dementias - Mark Michalowski [58]
At his touch, a panel slid aside in the top, revealing controls and more displays. Curiouser and curiouser, he thought.
He stood up, tapping his chin with the handle of his umbrella. It was dear that someone was using the processing power of the human brains in the chamber. Joyce had been sure that they’d been performing calculations related to frequency.
The only thing now, the Doctor thought, was to find out exactly what those calculations were. He fished in his pocket for the implant he’d removed from Joyce’s neck and sat down on one of the vacant couches.
Megan buckled up her black leather tunic with fierce determination, tucked the static pistol into her belt and slung the pulse rifle over her shoulder. It had been a long time since she’d dressed like this, used the rifle; shooting squirrels with an air-rifle just wasn’t the same. She gave it a once-over to make sure it was in perfect working order, tied back her dirty blonde hair and checked herself in the bedroom mirror. The business, she thought, just the business: apart, obviously, from the purple and yellow of the bruising on her face, and the fact that she couldn’t hold one eye open properly. But she’d do, she smiled to herself, thinking how shocked the residents would be if they could see her – slack, loopy old Megan, armed to the teeth. She knocked back another painkiller.
Since she and Sooal had arrived, she’d had precious little chance to exercise her combat skills: dragging the residents in from the garden for tea, listening to their interminable stories of how ‘it wasn’t like this in my day’ and wiping shitty arses had blunted her edge, she was sure. She’d grown soft and sloppy.
She’d never have been caught out in the kitchen if her reflexes hadn’t been dulled by three years of ministering to Graystairs’
residents. She had to keep reminding herself that she and Sooal had come here for a reason.
Megan slipped into the corridor and down the stairs to the kitchen, treading cat-light, pausing as she heard Harry and George heading down for breakfast. She smiled cruelly to herself: George was going to get one hell of a shock now that Harry’s treatment was complete, but it would be his turn soon enough. As they passed, she headed on into the kitchen. She went to activate the transmat but found to her surprise that it was already active. Perhaps Sooal was aboard the ship, sorting out the mess with the processors. With a last look around, she stepped through.
Behind Megan in the kitchen, the storecupboard door swung open silently, just a crack. A pair of eyes peered out.
It was time to move.
Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong.
As the darkness closed in on the Doctor, he could feel the fine metal tendrils of the implant worming their way into his spine and up through the base of his brain. He hadn’t thought that they might be confused by the alien wiring and structure of his brain, but he could sense that they were baffled, not finding the medulla, the pons, all the structures that they used as signposts to guide their way. A jolt of pain stabbed down his spine as they touched nerves that they never expected to encounter, analysing the signals they were picking up and moving on. Searching.
Around him, billowing up out of the past, out of the centuries of memories stored in his head, he suddenly saw Leela’s face, named with a fur-trimmed hood. Thick flurries of snow sleeted across his vision as the smell of scotch came to him. Then it all vanished in a soundless pop. The blind, mindless fingers of the alien device continued to probe his brain, unaware of the memories they were stimulating.
With a sudden flare of pink light, and with blinding