Doctor Who_ Wetworld - Mark Michalowski [48]
‘Before,’ she said slowly, trying to keep her speech simple. ‘Where were you?’ She gestured around at them.
‘Before?’
‘Before you found me. Before you brought me here. After the leader hurt you. Where were you?’
‘Square nests,’ one of the otters said.
Square nests? What the Dickens were ‘square nests’?
But no explanation was forthcoming from the otters.
‘So why have you brought me here?’
‘Why?’ echoed an otter. Martha sighed. Clever the otters might be, but they weren’t what she’d call intelligent. Or should it be the other way around?
‘Me,’ Martha gestured. ‘Here,’ She paused. ‘Why?’
‘Help us,’ said the otter. ‘Help you.’
A bout of squeaking and squeeing ensued and then three of the otters rushed off through a hole in the side of the nest. They returned a few moments later, rolling something the size of a football in front of them. As they pushed it up against Martha’s feet, she realised that it was made of a sort of wickerwork, like the roof of the nest. En-couraged by the otters, she picked it up, but it was too dark to see what was inside it – and then, suddenly, the whole thing moved in her hands and she dropped it.
More cautiously this time, she pulled it back towards her and peered through the mesh of reeds. Inside, only just visible, something glis-tened wetly, shifting about.
‘Why would these slime creatures want us?’ Ty asked the Doctor. ‘And what did Col mean about them wanting our intelligence?’
The Doctor tapped his finger against his lip, his eyes narrow. ‘It makes a certain kind of sense,’ he said eventually. ‘What Col said about intelligence, and what I experienced last night.’ He pulled out his spectacles, fiddled with them for a few moments, and then put them back. ‘What d’you know about SETI?’ he asked.
‘Another word for a sofa?’ Candy suggested.
The Doctor put his spectacles on and peered acidly at her over the top of them.
‘Something to do with whales?’ Ty ventured. ‘Cetaceans?’
He peered again and shook his head.
‘What are they teaching people in schools these days?’ He whipped his glasses off again. ‘Come on – we’ve got work to do,’ he said suddenly. He spun around and his fingers dabbed at the video table: the overhead lights came on as the screens went dark. The Doctor raced around Ty to the door.
‘Where are you going?’ she said, jumping to her feet.
‘Where are we going, you mean,’ replied the Doctor, halfway out of the room.
Ty shook her head and followed, Candy bringing up the rear.
‘OK,’ Ty called, trying to catch up. ‘Where are we going?’
‘We,’ he called back over his shoulder, ‘are going to the same place that they’ve taken the others.’
‘Their nests?’
The doors ahead slammed open as the Doctor strode out into the orange daylight.
‘Nope,’ he shouted. ‘The river.’
Ty managed to catch up with him, and Candy jogged to fall into step with him on the other side.
‘How d’you know they’ve gone there?’
He tapped the side of his head.
‘That’s one of the things the proteins told me.’
‘One of them?’ Ty asked. ‘So they are encoding information?’
He pulled a disparaging face.
‘As information encoding goes, it’s all a bit shoddy – a bit make-do-and-mend. The Urzhers on Mustack would have been able to encode a whole symphony, the complete works of Tschubas and a recipe for chocolate cake into the proteins I injected into myself. But our slimy little friends aren’t quite up to the Urzhers’ standards.’ He waved his fingers in the air dismissively. ‘Rather amateur, actually – but I suppose it did its job.’
‘Which was. . . ?’ asked Ty, clearly starting to get annoyed with his vagueness.
The Doctor rounded the corner and headed into the main square.
Ty and Candy ran to keep up.
‘They wanted us all fired up, angry, acting on instinct,’ he explained.
‘It helps to override our intelligence, our free will. My guess is that they’re still experimenting, still trying to work out the right proteins, the right RNA strings to pull our strings. Oooh!’ He glanced at Candy.
‘Remind me to use that one again. Where was I? Oh yes,’ he plunged on. ‘I think they