Doctor Who_ The King of Terror - Keith Topping [84]
Snatches of conversation from the next room floated through to him between long periods of brooding silence.
The instant he heard the word ‘Jex’, however, he knew exactly what they wanted him for.
Sometime early in the evening Eva came into the small room where he was chained tip and sat on a chair opposite him. She crossed her long legs, provocatively, and smiled at Turlough’s obvious discomfort.
‘Hello little man,’ she said. ‘Back in the land of the living, I see?’
Turlough didn’t feel like indulging in casual conversation. ‘I imagine you’ll have taken what you wanted from me by now?’ he asked sullenly. ‘That’s presumably why you’re no longer torturing me in that padded cell you’ve got behind your bedroom?’
‘And what might that be?’
‘My DNA,’ Turlough replied, wiping the amused smile from Eva’s face. ‘I know who you are, and I know what you want from me.’
Turlough one, Intergalactic Sadists nil. Extra time being played.
161
Eva stood and crossed the room, towering over Turlough, the sharp points of her ‘I’m dead hard, me’ shoes digging into his shins. ‘That sounds like knowledge that should be shared,’ she said and kicked him viciously in the ribs.
Turlough winced, but grinned back at her in futile defiance. ‘Knowledge is power, right? The Jex are all dying, everybody from here to Andromeda knows that. You want to make Earth your new home and repopulate the planet. Nice plan but, I’ve got to tell you, it’s been tried before and it’s failed miserably every single time. Just a wild stab in the dark by the way . . . ’
The woman knelt beside Turlough and ran her fingers down his cheek, made rough to the touch by the five-day growth of stubble. ‘Go on,’ she whispered.
‘I’m not your plaything you know,’ Turlough announced angrily. ‘You don’t just wind me up and set me going.’
‘Go on,’ repeated Eva as she dug her fingernails into the flesh of Turlough’s arms. ‘Or I shall have to punish you.’
This amused Turlough. ‘I bet you’d enjoy that, wouldn’t you?’ he asked.
Then he answered her with almost chilling accuracy. ‘You want to repopulate Earth, but to do this you’ll have to change the planet’s physical make-up because it’s wet and it’s cold and it makes breathing difficult for anybody without the necessary lungs. And believe me, I know that better than most. You should try playing rugby in the middle of January, ankle deep in snow in just a pair of shorts. That’d teach you a thing or two about torture techniques.’
The woman was obviously surprised that Turlough had learned so much about the project. Her hand moved to Turlough’s scarred torso, where strips of his flesh had been peeled from his chest during the early stages of the experimentation. ‘You must understand,’ she began, ‘that I was an unwilling party to what was done to you. I would have been perfectly happy if they had just disintegrated you and taken your DNA that way. Would have been so much simpler for all concerned. And much less painful.’
‘I’m sure,’ agreed Turlough sarcastically. ‘But then, you wouldn’t know how much I knew. Or the Doctor. Or UNIT. Would you? Well we know everything,’
he announced grandly. ‘We know that you’re using the plutonium to make bombs that you’re going to explode in the atmosphere. That will set off a chain reaction that will create an irradiated world with a much higher atmospheric pressure and temperature, more conducive to your needs. How am I doing so far?’
‘Very well,’ Eva said, heading for the door. ‘You’re a clever little boy, aren’t you?’
Turlough glowed with pride, as if he had just been awarded first prize in some pointless athletic competition. ‘But of course you need to keep some humans alive to work as, let’s say, a slave labour force . . . ’
162
‘Such an ugly term, I feel. We prefer to think of those lucky survivors as helping the greater Jex cause.’
Turlough tried to pull away from the radiator but the chains held him firmly to it. ‘Humanity will not allow you to enslave