Doctor Who_ Set Piece - Kate Orman [90]
Benny waited impatiently at the top of the stairs. Ace stifled a sneeze. The Doctor was peering about, not focussed on anything, as though trying not to give away what he was really interested in by being interested in everything.
He absently held on to Kadiatu’s lab notes, the folders full of dog-eared pages, filled with scribbly student writing.
174
‘Fascinating cult, the Setites,’ he muttered, around a couple of barley sugars.
‘They kept going until the early twentieth century, you know, passing the little bits and pieces of Osiran technology down the line.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Bernice, almost stamping her foot with impatience.
‘Sutekh killed the last of them. And then I killed him. He wasn’t forgotten, though. Set-worshippers turn up again in California in the seventies, on Eri-dani in the twenty-fourth century.’ The Doctor ran his finger along the top of the counter, coating his fingerprint with thick dust. ‘The enemy. The outsider.
A powerful archetype.’
‘It depends,’ said Ace, ‘on what you’re the enemy of.’
The Doctor swivelled. ‘You ended a sentence with a preposition. You can’t do that.’
Ace slowly grinned.
They had reached the top of the stairs. ‘It’s a sort of laboratory,’ said Benny.
‘Kadiatu said she had developed a virus.’
‘No, she didn’t look well.’
‘No. She planned to –’
The Doctor held up a finger. ‘Loose lips sink ships,’ he said. Benny frowned, but stayed silent.
They looked at the bodies and the body parts, the blisters of green fluid, the writhing things and the growing things.
The green light helped, thought Ace. The colours of the battlefield were missing, the red, the pink and grey. And the butcher-shop smell, always startling, always new. Instead, it was green, as though they were in some deep forest and not a continental basement, green and smelling of greenness, the smell of mucking about in the front garden as a small child, making the leaves and sticks have wars with one another.
She found herself looking at her fingers, bending them back and forth.
Imagining the components underneath, the tendons and bone and nerves.
The Doctor was wandering about the lab like a kid in a particularly grue-some toy shop. He gestured at half-formed bodies, bumpy spheres like giant peas, lumpy machine-creatures growing on fat vines. ‘Gatekeepers,’ he said,
‘Seekers. Hoppers. Communications devices. All based on a fusion of human and Ship flesh. Much of it’s meant to be grafted onto a human user, on a temporary or permanent basis.’
‘Hoppers?’
The Doctor pointed out a huge, crablike organism, pulsing slowly against a wall as though it were asleep. ‘For short transdimensional hops. Ship’s advanced so much . . . ’
‘By stealing technology.’
175
‘Yes. And four thousand heads are better than one. Fortunately, there’s still one thing it hasn’t worked out how to do.’
‘Kadiatu said it wanted to process everyone who ever lived.’
‘And to do that you’d need a TARDIS. And a lot of patience.’
‘What if we just waited?’ said Ace. ‘Wouldn’t Ship just explode or something, once too many minds had been stuffed into it?’
‘The damage to space-time would already be done.’ The Doctor had stopped at a fat brownish-green lump, sitting on a chair in the corner. ‘A-ha.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s a model of Ship’s brain,’ he said. He knelt down beside the chair, pulled out a fountain pen, poked the thing. It quivered like a plateful of jelly. ‘Just what I’m looking for.’
Benny and Ace sat in Nicolas’s front room while the Doctor did squishy things with his pet brain. Benny was perched on the counter, legs dangling over the side. Ace sat on the floor.
‘We’ll get him back,’ said Benny.
‘Hmm?’
‘Your Egyptian chap.’
‘Yeah.’
‘What was – what’s he like?’
Ace shrugged. ‘Nothing special. He saved my arse, though.’
Silence for a bit.
‘What’s he planning, do you suppose?’
‘Hmm?’
‘The Doctor. I suppose he is planning something,’ said Benny. ‘In the great tradition of planning something.’
‘And not telling us about it. Yeah. Definitely.’
Every inch of Kadiatu’s skin was