Doctor Who_ Winner Takes All - Jacqueline Rayner [49]
‘Just out of interest,’ said the Doctor, addressing Frinel. ‘I know I can’t get her out of the Mantodean stronghold cos she’ll explode, but what’re you going to do if I just make her walk around in circles for a bit?’
Robert didn’t understand what the Doctor was talking about. But he understood Frinel’s reply.
‘That is what this human is here for,’ he said, indicating Robert. ‘If you do not perform satisfactorily – then we kill him.’
* * *
FIFTEEN
Rose felt sick, dizzy and woolly‐headed, and she wanted to shut her eyes and hold her stomach until the feelings passed. She couldn’t. It felt as if she was encased in concrete, unable to move. Like in a nightmare, where you’re trying to run but your legs won’t do a thing. But she knew that she was awake.
Her vision gradually cleared, and the nausea more or less subsided. She’d materialised inside the Mantodean stronghold, or so she assumed. Unable to twist her head round, she could see only the door in front of her and bits of the wall surrounding it – but at least she could move her eyeballs. After a bit of concentration, she found she was able to blink too. She tried speaking, but could produce nothing more than a noise in her throat. Something to practise, though.
She wondered if the Doctor was seeing what she was seeing. Was he sitting in front of a screen, gazing at an image of that very door, those very bits of wall? She assumed that the disc on her forehead had some sort of camera inside, as well as the technology that enabled the Doctor to control her.
Suddenly, almost without her realising it, her right arm began to move. She didn’t feel it at all, it might have been being pulled up by a piece of string for all the internal awareness she had. Her fist clenched. Was he going to make her hit something? Then suddenly her thumb popped bolt upright, at ninety degrees from her fist. She stared at her hand. The Doctor was giving her a thumbs‐up sign.
All very well for you, Doctor, you’re not the one doing a Lady Penelope in a pyramid full of deadly two‐metre praying mantises.
There were symbols on the door, little touch panels that she could make nothing of. Luckily her arm knew what to do. Click, click, click, click, and the door slid open. Her legs took her through to the other side, and then stopped abruptly. Her head jerked down. In front of her was a pit. A pit deep enough that she couldn’t see the bottom. If she’d been made to take just one more step further…
She tried to see where she had to go now – were there paths to either side? But her legs were beginning to tense up, her knees were beginning to bend… Surely he couldn’t be expecting her to jump across! It must be at least eight metres wide. No problem to a giant praying mantis, but even Denise Lewis couldn’t do that from a standing start! What on Earth was he playing at?
And then she was flying.
She didn’t know how to describe it, and it was over before she’d even begun to process the experience. Something gave her power, the thing which had taken her limbs out of her own control had enabled her muscles to be exploited to their full potential.
It was monstrous, horrific, and totally exhilarating.
There was no time to think of it further; her legs were marching onwards, taking her down a dark, narrow corridor. There was a turning off to one side, and her body started to head towards it. Then an equal force started to pull her back. She stood in limbo, each force resisting the other. What was this? It felt like… it felt like the Doctor was trying to take her one way, but the controls wouldn’t let him. It felt like a tug‐of‐war was taking place inside her, using her internal organs as the rope. She remembered bits that the Doctor had said, how there must be safeguards to stop people bumping into each other and blowing the fiction of the game. Perhaps the discs on their foreheads acted similarly to like poles of a magnet or something, repelling each other if they got too close. The Doctor had managed to override them when she and Mickey were playing the game in the underground