Doctor Who_ Sleepy - Kate Orman [10]
‘What you really want to know is, what do we do if one of us is... possessed, the way that he was?’
Chris wished he could tell what she was thinking. ‘Maybe it only does that to aliens.’
‘Look,’ Roz said, ‘we just don’t know enough, all right?
We don’t know where the virus came from or what it’s for, and, until the Doctor finds that out, we can’t make any assumptions. All we can do is wait.’
Abruptly, she turned and smacked an armoured fist into the tree trunk, showering him with splinters.
‘Sorry,’ she said, as he flapped his fingers in his hair, looking startled. ‘I hate monsters that are too small to shoot.’
Benny found the Doctor in Byerley’s microbiology lab, sleeves rolled up, arms sheathed in long latex gloves. She sat down on a stool across the room, waited until he finished streaking the bacterial samples he was working on.
‘How’s it going?’
‘Our current theory,’ said the Doctor, snapping off the gloves, ‘is that the virus is symbiotic with the soil bacteria. It’s nonsense, unfortunately. I’m fine.’
Benny laughed. ‘You are, aren’t you?’
‘I am now. Thanks for watching over me.’ The Doctor washed his hands, rolled his sleeves back up. ‘Come on, let’s go and steal some of Byerley’s coffee.’
They lounged about in the colony doctor’s office, drinking the medic’s special blend, smuggled from Earth in his luggage. ‘Can I ask you something?’ said Bernice.
The Doctor nodded.
‘Why did you ask me about having children?’
‘Did I?’ He closed his eyes, trying to bring the moment back. ‘I really have no idea.’
‘Well, I’m not planning on it.’
The Doctor nodded, looking uncomfortable. ‘It would be difficult.’
Benny put down her cup. ‘I thought about it. After you asked. I realized I had no idea how I felt. But then we brought that little girl here this morning. And I suddenly knew I wasn’t going to have any kids.’
‘Oh,’ said the Doctor. ‘You mean, not while you’re travelling with me?’
She shook her head. ‘The poor thing could be turned into a fungus one week, taken over by aliens the next... I couldn’t stand it.’
‘It’s bad enough,’ said the Doctor gravely, ‘having to watch it happen to your friends.’
Benny hugged him suddenly, almost making him spill the coffee. ‘Gack,’ he said.
He put down the cup carefully, put his hands on her shoulders. ‘If you’re serious about this,’ he said, ‘we can drop you off somewhere.’
‘Maternity leave?’ She shook her head. ‘Something else I realized. I’m not ready to lose you yet.’
They pushed their foreheads together. ‘I just wish there was something more I could do here,’ whispered Benny.
‘We’ve been to so many worlds. But this world is so new, so fragile. Like a new child. Can’t we help them?’
‘We will,’ said the Doctor softly, ruffling her hair. ‘And I know something you could do.’
Later. He stood alone in Cinnabar’s cybernetics lab. He picked up the end of the gurney’s neck-strap, rolled the fabric between his fingers contemplatively.
He hadn’t worried about the needlestick at all. It had been careless of him — not concentrating on one thing at once, that was always his problem in laboratories. But there shouldn’t have been anything in human blood that could affect him.
The memories had started surfacing a few hours later.
Just flashes, tiny moments. Someone else’s memories.
Infuriatingly, he couldn’t remember any of them now. But he remembered how they’d kept repeating over and over, like a melody he couldn’t get out of his mind.
Roz had been the first person he had told. He knew that she’d do whatever was necessary, without hesitating.
Byerley had taken it all in his stride — both the fact that there were viral particles in the Doctor’s blood, and that his new patient just looked human. In this time period, ‘alien’ still meant scaly and green. But, when the Time Lord had asked Byerley to keep it to himself, he’d looked at him long and hard and then agreed.
It had grown steadily worse. He would be so caught up in the foreign memories that he forgot where he was for minutes at a time. That was when he and