Doctor Who_ Wooden Heart - Martin Day [5]
She nodded, and he waved his hand over the keypad like a magician with a wand. A glow of light, a briefly oscillating noise as the screwdriver doubtless tried every possible combination under the sun, and then the door hissed open.
The room beyond was almost identical to the first. The final pose of the body it contained couldn’t have been more different, however. If the first prisoner they had stumbled across had perhaps died in his sleep, this one had pushed himself into the corner of the room and pulled his knees up to his chest. Though slumped now, Martha could imagine the arms being coiled tightly over his ears and eyes, trying to block out… What?
She shivered. ‘Any signs of trauma?’ she asked.
The Doctor leant forward. ‘No… Nothing obvious.’
‘The life support must have failed.’
‘But the computer says life support’s been ticking over with barely a problem since it first came into service.’
They tried the next cell, and the next, and the next. Each contained a body, shrivelled by the unique atmospherics of the craft. It was not obvious why any of them had died. The Doctor and Martha checked a few more, finding yet more corpses, some apparently sleeping, some apparently frozen as if in flight from an unseen terror. None, of course, could escape, for each cell had remained resolutely locked. As the Doctor observed, the entire place seemed ruthlessly efficient – it was a testament to human ingenuity that it was all still working after so long.
‘I don’t think we’re going to find anything more here,’ said the Doctor.
Martha was relieved – she didn’t much fancy spending the rest of the day checking the other cells. There were hundreds of them, and there was no reason to expect that any of them would be any different from those they had already examined.
‘We need to find the technical area,’ said the Doctor. ‘There’s a limit to what the computer systems I can hack into from here can tell me.’
Martha risked a glance over her shoulder as she walked. ‘All these prisoners… Were they criminals or political activists or captured soldiers or…?’
‘Yeah, that’s one of the questions I’m keen to answer,’ said the Doctor. ‘If we can –’
He stopped suddenly, Martha almost running into the back of him.
‘Did you hear that?’ he whispered, his head darting from side to side.
‘What?’ Martha hissed, suddenly more on edge. The only thing worse than exploring a mausoleum full of bodies was the idea that someone or something in there wasn’t quite dead yet.
‘I thought I heard something,’ said the Doctor. He paused for a moment, then carried on walking, head held high, as if nothing was the matter. ‘Oh, well, not to worry,’ he said loudly.
‘Not to worry?’
‘This place has been shut up for a hundred years,’ he continued. ‘No movements, no disturbances – and then we come along, breathing in the air, opening doors, generally making a nuisance of ourselves…’
‘Speak for yourself,’ said Martha.
‘Plenty of creaks and groans, but absolutely nothing to worry about!’ He grinned brightly, and just for a moment Martha was taken in by his broad smile – the sort of innocent grin that, on Earth, usually went with scraped knees and Sorry, miss, my mate’s just hoofed our football over your garden wall, you don’t mind if we go and get it, do you…?
Then she noticed that she couldn’t see one of the Doctor’s hands.
‘You’ve got your fingers crossed behind your back, haven’t you?’
The Doctor was immediately on the defensive. ‘Who, me? Fingers crossed? Nah, never!’
Only moments later did his left hand emerge to start inputting the correct settings