Doctor Who_ Set Piece - Kate Orman [9]
A very small pile of things: a slingshot, some coins, a dog-eared paperback.
Debris. The debris of a life that would never be completed. A jade brooch and a toffee wrapped in paper. A life that had been stolen by the Ants.
Ms Cohen went through everything they’d taken from the subject’s pockets and cried and cried and cried.
Meijer found her, much later, crumpled in a corner. ‘We got him,’ he said.
‘Kitchen storage. Hiding in a fridge. A force field failed, let him out. We’re still trying to work out why.’
She didn’t reply. Meijer squatted down beside her. She held a drawer in her lap, labelled 39. It was empty.
‘You didn’t keep anything,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing left.’
Meijer didn’t say anything. He reached out and put a hand on her leg, just above her knee.
‘Why do you bother keeping any of it at all?’
‘The Ants like to go through the stuff, see if there’s anything worth tinkering with. We decided to keep his things in case there was anything important there.’
‘You better not have hurt him.’ She shuddered. ‘You better leave him alone.
I want him to stay alive. I want to stay alive.’
She put the lid back on the box. Meijer took his hand away.
‘Don’t worry, lady,’ he said. ‘They’re just having a quiet word with him. They won’t do too much. I promise.’
They killed him, of course.
Meijer woke her up to tell her. She was curled on the medical bench, arms wrapped around the modified lap-top.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It was an accident.’
She started crying again.
‘I told them to be careful. They were careful. Caldwell says he just keeled over. I guess it finally got too much for him.’
19
‘No.’
‘He was dead as a Dalek, lady. I checked him myself.’
‘No.’ She sat up, and the lap-top fell, crunching on the floor. ‘No. He’s not dead.’
‘Cruk it, lady!’
‘Listen to me.’ She grabbed his collar. ‘This is just another escape. Don’t you get it? The process. His mind turns off automatically when you try to scan it.
Meijer, he can switch himself off.’
‘Oh,’ said the hired hand, ‘shit!’
Ms Cohen walked forwards slowly, holding the handscan at arm’s length, keeping it close to the wall, almost touching the cuticle.
They were right at the edge of the doughnut-shaped ship. The hull was two layers of the same stuff as bacterial spore walls, close to indestructible. They trapped a layer of air between them. It wasn’t the most efficient insulation.
She could feel the cold of space leaking through outer wall, air blanket, inner wall. A sandwich. Just big enough for a man to fit inside.
Meijer watched her, his arms folded tightly, his sweat-soaked cap gripped in one hand. ‘Is it –’
‘Shhh.’ She put a finger to her lips.
There were places where meteorite strikes had dented the hull, even a dirty scar where living sealant had flowed in to plug a hole. Ms Cohen had heard about life-forms that lived in space, but she had never believed that life could be strong enough to handle the vacuum, the cold, the sudden impacts and changes in gravity. But then, life could take a lot.
A hired hand came running up, panting in the silence. ‘She was right. A panel’s gone from the airlock – some maintenance alarms went off when it cycled.’
Meijer and Ms Cohen exchanged glances. Either 24 had been blown out into space, or –
The scanner shrieked. ‘Here!’ she snapped. A trio of hands leapt forward, carrying long squeeze-tubes like pointed squashes. You couldn’t cut through that wall with tools – even a laser would take hours. The squeeze-tubes spat blobs of enzyme on to the wall, and the hired hands spread the sizzling stuff around with fat gloves.
They caught the chunk of wall as it came free, blood or sap oozing onto the floor. A gust of freezing air blew into the corridor. Ms Cohen dropped her handscan and caught 24 as he tumbled stiffly out from the dark space inside.
His hair and eyebrows were full of frost.
‘He’s still with us,’ she said, snatching up the scanner. ‘Oh Jesus,