Doctor Who_ Relative Dementias - Mark Michalowski [59]
In a flash of utter darkness, it was suddenly gone, leaving him with a strange taste in his mouth, wondering whether the whole thing had just been an artefact of the silent, probing silver worms, still working their way through the damp, alien soil of his brain. He wanted to leap up, rip the wires from his head.
But it was only then he realised that, unfortunately, his brain hadn’t been so alien that the filaments hadn’t been able to disable his voluntary nervous system. He hadn’t expected that.
He’d assumed that the sleepers were simply drugged to keep them in place. It was a mistake, he knew, that could well cost him his life, since he was now totally vulnerable.
He pushed thoughts of the eye and the leaves aside and turned his senses outwards as the intruders in his head drew closer to their goal. Although he couldn’t open his eyes, he could hear, he could smell and he could touch. The sour odour of rust and mildew filled his nostrils, laced with the tang of ozone and rank, stagnant water. The ship seemed more alive than ever, a soundscape of dripping water, shifting metal plates and footsteps. Footsteps?
He felt his hearts speed up.
He wasn’t alone.
In his pocket, Sooal’s datapad began to bleep frantically. He’d picked out three of the residents as replacements for the missing processors and was about to find Steve or Menzies to have them taken down to the ship. Puzzled, he pulled out the datapad and stared at the display with growing incredulity: the activity of the array had shot up by eighty percent.
Got you! Megan laughed to herself as she saw the diminutive figure of the Doctor on the couch. Sooal must have beaten her to it.
His face was beaded with sweat, his dark, straggly hair plastered to his forehead. She noticed the hat, set jauntily atop the interface column. Her eyes ran over the displays set into its shiny surface and gave an appreciative chuckle. The probes were having difficulty, it seemed, in locating the Doctor’s frontal cortex. Some of the readings didn’t make any sense. Maybe this interface was damaged – perhaps Ace had wrecked it when she’d rescued the other three processors. Sweet irony!
The instruments indicated quite clearly that the Doctor was only half an hour away from a total neural collapse. Gleefully whistling, she set off for the airlocks. One down, one to go.
The suit had been designed for use in the vacuum of space, where the air in it would balloon it out – not for the depths of the sea where the water pressure would smooth it across her body like a second skin, icy cold and claustrophobic. Pockets of trapped air formed bubbles, clustering around Ace’s stomach and her rucksack, rising into the rigid helmet. As she rose swiftly through the dark waters, watching the dim lights of the ship recede below her, she tried to recall what little she knew about
‘the bends’: nitrogen bubbles accumulating in the blood vessels and joints as the sudden drop in pressure brought it out of solution in her blood. She felt her lungs swelling rapidly with the breath she didn’t realise she was holding. Remembering something she’d heard about diving, she breathed out steadily with a low ‘Aahhhh’, swallowing every few seconds as she felt the pressure building up rapidly and painfully in her ears. The thought that, as she rose, nitrogen bubbles in her veins could be conspiring to kill her chilled her more than the coldness of the water around her. She couldn’t remember all the symptoms of the bends, but she knew they were painful. She started breathing in and out rapidly as the world around