Doctor Who_ The Also People - Ben Aaronovitch [111]
She sat up and turned towards the Doctor who was still engaged in his psychic bootstrapping.
The grubs had eaten away the table's base almost to nothing and the Doctor was staying upright literally on willpower alone. She was going to suggest that he order his own liquid nitrogen but she didn't dare break his concentration.
'Quickly,' she said to the table, 'I'll have another flask of –' Before she could finish the base of her table gave an ominous creak and Bernice remembered suddenly what the precise effects of extremely low temperatures on rigid polymer structures was. 'Oh, cruk,' she said.
The column supporting her table didn't so much snap as shatter, pitching Bernice, tabletop and all into the sand. Even as she tried to scramble up and make for the nearest chair a heaving mass of grubs seemed to rear out of the sand in front of her face.
There was a sound like heavy rain on concrete and the beach exploded into a blizzard of sand.
The rain sound turned to hailstones as something, too fast and small to see, hammered into the grubs and obliterated them.
'What now?' wailed Bernice.
'Don't worry,' she heard the Doctor calling, 'the cavalry have arrived.'
Cautiously Bernice climbed to her feet and looked around. The sand around her was pitted with thousands of tiny impact craters. Further up the beach, near where she and the Doctor had started their picnic, puffs of sand blew up, as it, whatever it was, picked off the closest surviving grubs. The Doctor was smiling at her, still sitting calmly on the tabletop. Bernice glanced down and saw that the support column had been chewed right through. The Doctor followed her eyes downwards and frowned. The table top started to wobble.
'Oh dear,' he said, and was pitched backwards onto the ground.
Laughing, Bernice helped him to his feet and dusted him down. 'I liked the business with the liquid nitrogen,' he said. 'Very clever.'
A wasp whine made them duck and a tiny drone, the size of a marble, came to a halt in front of their noses. 'Hi,' said the drone, 'my name is !X and I'll be handling your defensive requirements for the moment.'
'Pleased to meet you,' said the Doctor.
'And believe me when I say we reall y mean that,' said Bernice.
'If you would be so good as to remain here,' said !X, 'a travel capsule will arrive shortly to meet your evacuation and medical needs.'
The tiny drone buzzed off back down the beach. There were more small explosions in the sand as it took care of the remaining pockets of grubs. 'We need a sample,' the Doctor called after it.
'Must have been a ship,' he told Bernice. 'Only a ship would have the fabrication resources necessary to create biological weapons.'
'We'd better tell God then,' said Bernice. She realized that the Doctor was staring at her.
'Who else knew we were coming here?' he asked.
He didn't have to say anything else. She knew exactly what he was thinking.
AM!xitsa made a classic drone mistake; it had forgotten that to actively scan a mind was to, in effect, open a two-way channel of communication with it. The drone would never have made the same mistake with another machine but aM!xitsa thought it was dealing with a biological brain.
Modified yes, but still essentially the same old bundle of neurons that biologicals were so attached to. When Kadiatu's counter intrusion measures struck at aM!xitsa's through its own scanners, the drone was wide open and unwary.
The attack was severe enough to cause aM!xitsa's entire central brain core to shut down as a defensive measure. The drone had just enough time to appreciate the fractal elegance of Kadiatu's attack before everything went black.
It recovered to find itself lying on the packed earth floor of the hut and an incredible 3.6
seconds missing from its internal chronometer. Drunkenly, aM!xitsa lifted off, lurched sideways and smashed a hole in the side of the hut. Lost a bit of fine impeller control there, it thought. An internal diagnostic would