Doctor Who_ Set Piece - Kate Orman [92]
‘That’s crazy!’
‘I’m not –’
‘I’ll come with you.’
‘I think it’s only for one person.’ Ace struggled with the loops and tentacles of the hopper.
‘It looks like Giger threw up on it,’ said Benny. ‘Are you sure you know how to –’
Ace’s head snapped back as the hopper closed on her body, wrapping its ropy tentacles around her chest. She grunted through clenched teeth. Benny 178
grabbed at the organism, but it had settled across Ace’s shoulders like a malev-olent backpack.
‘No, no, it’s alright,’ Ace coughed. She stood for a moment, working out how to breathe in the grip of the thing. ‘It’s supposed to do that.’
‘How do you know?’
‘It just told me.’ Benny looked at her in horror. ‘You’d better stay here in case either of them come back.’
‘Just a –’
‘And anyway, if it’s Kadiatu, better I go than you.’ Ace drew an evil-looking gun out of her jacket – a flechettethrower, the one she called her Flash Gordon gun.
‘Don’t be stupid, you’ve seen the way she moves! She’s genetically engineered, she probably knows forty-one ways to kill you with a paper-clip.’
‘She’s not going to be expecting me to follow her,’ said Ace. ‘And neither is he.’
‘Look, you shouldn’t –’
‘Benny,’ said Ace, ‘I’m going to do it.’
‘Good luck,’ said Benny lamely.
‘Luck,’ said Ace, ‘has nothing to do with it.’
179
Chapter 15
Hurt/Comfort
Q.
What goes bang thud, bang thud, bang thud, bang thud, bang thud, bang thud, bang thud, bang thud, bang thud, bang thud, bang thud, bang thud, bang thud?
A.
A Time Lord committing suicide.
(Graffito, Prydonian Academy)
The Doctor woke up.
His wrists were bound behind his back. It felt like electrical wire. He was lying at an odd angle on the floor. Living floor, tasting of salt and vegetation.
Kadiatu’s fingerprints were bruised into his shoulder.
He shrugged, trying to get more comfortable. Oh – ankles tied as well. She wasn’t taking any chances.
He was wearing a uniform. The dun fabric was coarse against his skin.
Oh, no.
It had all been a dream, hadn’t it?
He pressed his cheek against the cool floor. He had never left Ship. He couldn’t escape outwards, so he had escaped inwards. Saving Ace, meeting Kadiatu, all of it, a pitiful fantasy.
Then the ganglion in his shoulder burst into life. He twisted in his bonds, tiny flashbulbs going off in his field of vision.
That had been done to him after he’d left Ship. Afterwards.
It had been in Kadiatu’s cellar – they’d used hoppers to transport the medical equipment. They’d implanted a tiny seed in the ganglion, a little fleck of Ship’s living matter. The living thing had grown, slowly coiling itself around the sensitive nerve cluster, sucking sugar out of his blood. And now it was ready to germinate.
He could have wept with relief.
The hopper’s movement felt like being shoved through a wall. But it was better than the free fall through the raw stuff of the Vortex. Ace stumbled across the rough floor, the machine convulsing around her chest.
181
Ace looked herself up and down. All her bits were where they should be.
She turned quickly, arm loosely bent, pistol aim taking in every corner of the room . . . no corners. It was a great curving hall, the inner wall studded with tall neon tubes.
Empty. Silent. No. A sound like little bells – dripping water.
The air was crisp, like the puff of dampness as you opened the fridge. Oh, yes, she had been here before.
Benny was stooped over the Doctor, frantically trying to get a response out of him. Blood was trickling from his mouth and nose, sluggishly. His eyes had flickered shut.
They were going to do the same thing to the Doctor that they did to Kadiatu.
She had to be there. She had to stop it. And yet, the pit of her stomach was still spinning – not from the jaunt through the ether, but from the knowledge that she wasn’t going to be able to stop it. Because he meant for this to happen.
Benny and she had sometimes joked about switching off the gas in the TARDIS in case he tried to shove his head in an oven. But she’d been in that dark three a.m. place