Doctor Who_ Set Piece - Kate Orman [3]
Why is this happening to me? Why do you need my help? How do I know you’ll keep your word?
‘How does the process work?’ asked Ms Cohen.
∗ ∗ ∗
7
The spacecraft was full of Ants, scurrying across the textured floors, their metallic bodies scattering the dull bioluminescence of the ship’s veins. There were more men and women in uniforms like Meijer’s. Had he been a prisoner, like her? Could she strike a deal to stay alive as long as him?
She got a uniform too, beige and long-sleeved like Meijer’s, but without the stains and the peaked cap. Now she followed him through the corridors, past rough walls built out of enormous oblong cells covered in a tough organic sheath.
The stuff was cool to the touch – plant, not animal. Even the computer screens were alive, irregularly shaped membranes lighting up from inside with alien symbols.
While Meijer stopped to chat with another hired hand, she watched a butterfly the size of her fist crawling up the wall. When she looked closer, she saw the metallic sheen of its wings, the tiny tools built into its face. It was repairing a piece of damaged organic circuitry, uncurling a proboscis into a slit in the stuff of the wall.
The design of the ship was economical, a doughnut sliced into sections – one computer room, one processing area, cold storage, a shuttle bay, the kitchen and storage areas. Everything was interconnected by short, low, narrow corridors. It was an Ant farm, not designed for human occupants.
‘Where do the Ants come from?’
‘We don’t know,’ said Meijer. ‘They’ve been doing this for a long time. There are thousands of alien minds in the computer.’
‘They’re still alive in there?’
Meijer shrugged. ‘The process draws out memories, information, thought patterns. But in pieces. We don’t keep the whole mind.’
‘What do you do with, what do you do with the subjects when you’ve finished?’
‘We don’t keep the whole mind,’ said Meijer again.
They had come to one of the pale-coloured sliding panels that indicated a door. It looked like a two-inch slab of skin stretched across the doorway, a complex growth of controls embedded in the stuff. There were two more hired hands outside the room, one smoking a cigarette with the Cortese logo, the other sitting on the floor with her back to the wall, watching the door. Ms Cohen saw that the clump of controls was – loose? Damaged? Meijer said,
‘We’ve had to replace that three times.’
He touched the panel and the door slid open. There was a shimmering in the doorway, like air over bitumen. Meijer did more things to the panel, and the force shield vanished.
She had expected something else. Something more, some hero resisting his captors with fierce defiance, not a pitiful lump under a silver blanket. Subject 8
24 huddled in the middle of the room, staring into nothing.
With a jolt, she recognized the man who had been staring into hyperspace.
Ms Cohen remembered.
He held a glass of sparkling mineral water in his hand. He lay in a deckchair with a blanket draped over his legs as he stared up at the see-through wall.
From time to time he took a sip of the drink, keeping his eyes on the view.
She watched him for a while. A woman came up to him, and they exchanged a few words. For a moment, the woman swivelled her neck skywards to follow his gaze. She was wearing a red jacket that Ms Cohen had seen in the ship’s stores that morning, window-shopping to pass the time.
And here he was in this featureless, egg-shaped room. No – there was a sort of bunk, a recess in the organic stuff of the wall, and some sort of facilities in the corner . . . but he was sitting in the middle of the cell, staring, not focussed on anything. Focussed on nothing. He didn’t even know they were there.
Meijer passed her a handscan.
The little machine had come from the
Cortese, but the Ants had done things to it. Metal and plastic had been fused with whorls of cellulose. There were three abortive legs growing from one side of the monitor screen, dry to the touch.
Number 24 had been