Doctor Who_ Sleepy - Kate Orman [32]
Dot, presumably. Yes — there was the tiny sound of her translation drone, buzzing nervously about. He wondered what was going on inside her head.
His shoulders ached. He was lying at an angle against the base of a tree, his arms pulled sharply backwards. There was something cold around his wrists. He guessed it was optical cable.
Pretend to stay unconscious? The painful tingling of the blaster had almost left his body, which meant he must have been out for a couple of hours at least. That meant that wherever Dot had brought him was reasonably secure; he couldn’t expect rescue soon.
He stretched and opened his eyes. Dot was sitting on a fallen trunk six feet away, watching him intently, the blaster rifle held in her lap.
‘I hope you don’t mind if I use spoken English,’ he said.
‘But the best signing I could manage from this position would be a sort of mumble.’
Dot put the blaster down beside her, leaning it against the trunk in easy reach. «I know you’re not human,» she signed, walking across the ground towards him.
‘No, I’m not. I suppose you’ve been trying to read my mind while I was unconscious.’
«No. I took that from C-I-N-N-A-B-A-R’s mind.» She squatted down beside him. Her hair was starting to come untucked from its tidy bun, stray locks falling down over her face. Her eyes were intense.
‘Dot,’ said the Doctor. ‘You mustn’t do this.’
«Tell me why this colony is being used to test the virus.»
‘I don’t know why. It may not even be a test, I don’t know.’ Her mind was a tiny thing, fragile and fluttering, so alien, so human. There was a roaring in his ears.
He kept thinking about the time Tegan had told him about getting a moth caught inside her ear when she was a child, waking up screaming with this unknown thing inside her head, its wings beating against her skull in a frantic torrent of sound. When they’d got it out at the hospital, she had been amazed that something so tiny could have seemed so loud.
Dot’s madness was gathering, a storm ready to break.
‘I’ve been trying to help!’
«I don’t believe you.»
‘Dot,’ he said quietly, ‘you’re not the only one who feels as though they’re losing their mind. Don’t do this.’
«You’re not used to being frightened, are you?» She reached out, stroked his face with her fingers. He jerked back, but she continued to touch him, as if fascinated by the effect she was having.
‘Right now,’ said the Doctor, shutting his eyes tightly,
‘you’re just barely holding yourself together. I can feel it, Dot.
We’ve been touched by the same taint. You’ve been hanging on, all this time, hearing the voices — hearing them. So loud.
So strong. Never stopping. But you’ve hung on. Imagine what will happen if you try to read an alien mind.’
She took her hand away.
‘Don’t do this to yourself,’ he said.
«If you’re really innocent,» answered the drone, «let me see it in your mind.»
‘No!’ he snarled. ‘My thoughts are my own. You have no right to them!’
Her anger kept her at it. The pressure in his head was growing, making him tug uselessly at the cable, trying to turn away from her. «I don’t know who you are. Or why you’ve chosen to do this to us. But you don’t have the right.»
‘You don’t know the first thing about telepathy,’ he gasped. ‘You don’t know what you’re doing!’
«I knew enough to read Captain Kamotja’s mind. She’s innocent. That means someone else must be monitoring the experiment. When Dione-Kisumu gets here — you didn’t want me to know it was them, did you? — I want to be able to show them a signed confession from one of their agents.»
‘What have you done?’
«When their Director receives a personal complaint from the President of Australian Solar, I’m sure she’ll send a team to investigate.»
She took his face in her hands. Their blue eyes locked.
Now, she shouted inside his head, you tell me what I want to know.
‘No! Stop! ’
I’m not going to stop until you tell me.
He twisted in her grip as his left eye started to’ bleed.
‘ Chris! ’ Roz screamed. She swore and ran after him, skidding to a halt ten feet from the wall of flames even as he disappeared