Ten Little Aliens: 50th Anniversary Edition (6 page)

Ben frowned. ‘Spacesuits?’ He couldn’t imagine the Doctor in full Yuri Gagarin gear.

‘Oh yes, the TARDIS is very well equipped, you know.’ He chuckled and turned to Polly. ‘And they come in a range of colours, my dear.’

Polly clapped her hands. ‘Fab!’

‘But we don’t know if it’s even safe out there,’ Ben protested.

‘Don’t fuss, my boy,’ said the Doctor. ‘I must take some readings, some measurements for the log… it shouldn’t take us very long…’

*

VI

Haunt turned to Shel. ‘Is all this part of the simulation?’

Shel stared blankly back at her.

‘You programmed the tactical computers, fed through the droids’ orders. You must know something about the testing ground.’

‘The location was selected entirely by Pentagon Central,’ Shel stated. ‘Were I to be given any advance knowledge of the simulation, it would be rendered less effective. I know as much as you do.’ He paused. ‘However, it seems to me that certain aspects of the architectural style would suggest a Schirr influence.’

Haunt nodded. ‘Go on.’

Shel shrugged. ‘Ruins found and reconstructed after the destruction of the northern continents share several of the features we have observed here.’

The golden doors led onto a corridor, and were flanked by a set of large bronze double doors; neither of which they had been able to open. The corridor came to a kind of hall hollowed from the slates and silts of the asteroid’s mantle, palatial both in size and decoration, like some kind of ancient tomb for long-dead kings. The walls were jagged, gleaming damp and black in the glare of torchlight. Huge stone statues of abstract figures, vaguely humanoid, loomed out at them from the shadows. The fat, thick leaves of the faintly glowing plant covered the ceilings. From out of the seaweed-like morass, tapestries of cut glass hung down from the high-vaulted ceilings. They caught the torch beams and fooled with the bright light, passing it from shard to shard.

‘It would make sense to incorporate Schirr architecture in the testing ground’s design,’ Shel commented. ‘DeCaster and Pallemar’s dissenters are the only significant threat to Earth’s Empire besides the Morphiean Quadrant. It makes the
battleground
more relevant.’ He paused. ‘If we knew anything of Morphiean constructs, Pentagon Central would doubtless have drawn inspiration from them…’

Haunt was no longer listening to Shel. Instead she checked for team vitals on her scanner.

And swore.

The grid, instead of showing four neat pinprick pairs glowing close to those of herself and Shel, was an insane constellation of lights.

She waved it in Shel’s face. ‘Must be a fault. Try your own.’

Shel scrolled through different screens until the same lunatic pattern of lights appeared. He met Haunt’s gaze steadily. ‘It would seem this entire place is alive.’

Even as Shel spoke, Haunt noticed a small swift movement by her feet, and froze. For a second she thought she’d imagined it, but then she saw the movement again, arcing past her eyes. A tiny bead of light hopped onto the back of Shel’s hand. She slapped her own hand down on the back of his. Then she peered at a pale smear on her palm.

‘Some kind of insect,’ she remarked. Its body was a translucent sack, half emptied on her skin. ‘It hopped like a flea.’

Shel peered at the insect. ‘It’s like nothing I’ve seen,’ he whispered. ‘Must live on the plants. Though how any life could survive here…’

‘We’re here, aren’t we?’ Haunt retorted. ‘It’s just a part of the place. Part of the simulation.’ Another grain of light hopped past, fleeting in the corner of her vision. ‘A distraction. Here to keep us on edge.’

Shel nodded uncertainly. ‘It has to be. In any case, our instruments are picking up their life-signs.’

‘And swamping our own team’s stats. The scanners are useless down here. We can’t track each other.’

Shel nodded. ‘Hopefully, neither can anything else.’

Haunt raised the comms bracelet to her lips. ‘Creben.’

‘Unit One responding, Marshal.’ The voice snapped back immediately, cutting tinnily through the dank air. ‘Our scanners are all messed up. Thousands of life-signs.’

‘Bugs,’ Haunt whispered. ‘This place is crawling with insects.’

‘Marshal. The walls are thick with them.’ Lindey’s voice sounded shriller than normal. ‘There’s plant life of some kind on –’

‘I know. Check up on everyone else, see if it’s the same story. Report back.’

‘Marshal.’ It was Creben’s voice that signed off.

Haunt lowered the bracelet, and she and Shel waited in silence. More and more of the insects hopped and jumped around their feet, on their combat suits, through the air around them. She felt her wrist-comm vibrate.

‘Well, Creben?’

‘Same story in each direction. Except for Unit Three. They’ve got some weed, but no fleas.’

Shel frowned.

Haunt spoke back to the bracelet. ‘Denni.’

‘Unit Three responding.’ Denni’s voice sounded flat and calm.

‘Tell me what you see.’

‘It’s completely dark here now,’ Denni said. ‘Marshal, our scanner’s useless.’

Haunt looked up at Shel. ‘The websets won’t function in total darkness, will they?’

‘Not well,’ he replied. ‘It’s optic stimulation that triggers the record.’

Haunt nodded. ‘All right, Denni. Report back if the situation changes.’

‘Marshal.’

Haunt indicated to Shel they should move on. More of the dark slate had been piled up into craggy pillars at regular intervals; they looked as if they had grown from the stone. Two of them, monstrously large and each topped with an angular
crest
, flanked a large circular doorway that seemed to lead from this vast chamber to another.

One of the insects hopped onto the back of Haunt’s hand. She brushed it off, crushed it as she did so.

She and Shel walked inside.

VII

More than the fat white insects that flicked around them, the shadows were getting to Lindey. Cast by the gently glowing leaves, dull and shifting over the darker rock, they played tricks on your eyes. Years in the Zero-Gs had left her accustomed to most battlegrounds in space, to fighting in the stark, unchanging light of stars and moons. This cramped gloom and her slow, careful steps made her feel heavy and uncomfortable, like she and Creben were trapped in an endless mire.

She checked her scanner for the hundredth time. She willed the flickering mass of lights on the scanner to vanish, to reveal ten healthy heartbeats huddled close together.

‘What the hell are we doing here?’ she asked Creben softly.

‘Making sure we don’t end up as cannon fodder for the Empire,’ he answered quietly, barely moving his lips.

Lindey raised an eyebrow, impressed by the honest answer. ‘So you make Elite and stay away from the front line?’

‘The war with Morphiea won’t be like that,’ he told her. ‘We can’t nuke their strongholds, kill their troops, batter them into submission like we did the Schirr. It’ll be a cold war. The coldest the Empire’s ever known.’

‘You have a talent for melodrama,’ Lindey told him lightly. ‘So, what, it’s going to be special operations only in the Elite for you? Counter-intelligence, espionage…’

While Lindey poked her torch beam into random nooks and corners in the rock, Creben’s light cut through the darkness
with
surgical precision. ‘I’m going to use my mind, if that’s what you mean, yes.’

‘So why are you risking your body down here with us, then?’ she asked. ‘How come you didn’t go down the Intelligence route?’

He turned and smiled at her, but the shadows were doing unflattering things with the neat, sharp lines of his face. ‘It took me time to realise where my true interests lie.’ His gaze lowered from her eyes, flicked up and down her. ‘Besides, maybe there are some bodies worth taking risks for.’

She shone the torch straight in his eyes. ‘You can stop right there.’

He was about to retort, but she shushed him. ‘Hey. Behind you.’

Creben turned, and saw what her torch beam had illuminated. ‘Symbols of some kind,’ he noted.

Lindey touched the wall with her fingers. ‘The rock’s been smoothed out…’

‘The better to carve into, presumably,’ Creben said dryly.

‘Forgive my humble stab at military intelligence.’

‘Forgiven, and best forgotten.’

She gave him the smallest of smiles. ‘There are other ways to get security and prestige, you know. Without risking your body or your mind.’

Creben raised an eyebrow. ‘Use someone else’s?’

Lindey decided she would have to watch Creben.

‘This carving,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it’s a sign.’ He smiled, that smug little grin of his. ‘Hungry cannons, this way.’

Lindey didn’t smile back at him as they continued down the tunnel.

Haunt and Shel pushed on through the chambers.

The next room, and the next, were much the same, except they also contained less stylised sculptures of outsized angels
moulded
into their ceilings and at the base of each pillar.

In each dank chamber they passed through they found more and more of the strange carvings clustered together as if for warmth.

Haunt noticed Shel was gripping his gun so tightly his knuckles were showing white. ‘The increasing numbers of statues,’ she said, ‘suggests we’re nearing somewhere important, would you agree?’

Shel nodded. ‘Whatever it is, I think we might’ve reached it.’

There was a recess in the rock ahead of them. Drawing nearer, they saw a silver door embedded in the slate. Haunt kicked it open to reveal a tunnel big enough for a single person to move through at a time.

‘If we go through there and something’s waiting for us,’ Shel muttered, ‘we won’t stand a chance.’

‘I’ll go in first,’ Haunt said. ‘Wait here and cover this entrance while I take a look. I don’t want anything following me in here that isn’t you.’

Shel nodded, and Haunt walked away into the pitch-blackness.

VIII

The TARDIS doors opened with the usual penetrating hum, and with the added beeping of some device that was depressurising the control room.

Ben felt a bit of a prat in his new astronaut gear. It was more like a wetsuit than a spacesuit, and made from a dull green quilted material which felt a little too snug for comfort in all the wrong areas. The worst of it was the headgear; like looking out from a crystal ball.

‘How do I look?’ Polly’s voice crackled in his ears over the suit’s communicators.

Ben turned and whistled at the sight of Polly in her skintight daffodil-yellow suit. ‘Let’s just say I hope this bleedin’ goldfish bowl don’t steam up easily.’

‘Come along you two,’ came the Doctor’s voice, disapprovingly. ‘We don’t know quite what’s out there, so stay close to me.’ So saying, he led the way out of the ship, fussing and pulling at his own spacesuit, which was dark blue. It was hard to believe he had his usual clothes on beneath the thermal material; his body looked thin and wasted and his head disproportionately big through the glass helmet as a result. The old boy really did look like a buzzard now.

Ben and Polly followed him out, then the Doctor closed the doors. The comforting light spilling out from the control room narrowed to a slit then vanished altogether.

‘Don’t lock them, Doctor,’ Ben suggested as casually as he could. ‘You never know, we might need to get back inside in a hurry.’

The Doctor nodded vaguely.

For a few seconds the blackness was absolute. ‘Dark, isn’t it,’ said Polly. He felt her lightly grip his arm, and gave her hand a comforting squeeze he hoped she could feel through her quilted gloves.

Then the Doctor flicked on his torch. The beam revealed small snatches of the cavernous room they stood in, and from them, Ben tried to build a picture of their surroundings.

The room, or cave, or whatever it was, was five-sided. The walls were built from layers and layers of dark stone, and scaled by ornate metal trellises that gleamed like gold. Above these, what looked to be ducting reached right around the room at the point where the walls sloped up to the high, arched ceiling. Slabs of glass had been set into this roof, hundreds of them, and they winked and signalled back at the Doctor whenever he shone his torch in their direction.

Closer to ground level, banks of weird-looking machinery
squatted
beneath the trellises. Symbols carved in the slate above presumably denoted the function of each set of controls in whatever language they spoke here.

‘Fascinating,’ the Doctor said fervently. ‘The functionality of a control room but with the trappings of a shrine…’

Ben was considering the ramifications of this when the Doctor’s torchlight fell on a cowled shape hunched over a console right beside them, overlooked until now by the far-stretching beam. He felt Polly’s grip on his arm tighten and her distorted scream in his ears nearly deafened him.

Ben took a few steps back, instinctively.

A hideous alien face was staring out at him from under the cowl. Its eyes were wide like a fish’s, unseeing.

It was lying in a mass of dried blood.

IX

‘Come on out, Kay-Deeeeees. I got a mouthful of laser waiting just-for-yooooou…’

‘Shut it, Frog.’ Roba’s gun pointed the way ahead through the darkness. ‘You know, I hate your crazy voice already. If you’re a frog, swallow some of these damned bugs.’ He looked down at her in the gloom, her bulging eyes, stubbly head, her twisted grin. He wondered how she just carried on, as messed up as she was. Then his sympathy snapped into annoyance as she started up her crackling warble again and waved her rifle about.

‘We should take out every one of these bugs, Roba.’

‘You’re crazy.’

‘Every one of them.’ She slapped a hand over a mass of them quivering on the wall, and wiped it down the curve of her hip. ‘Get some numbers on the scanner we can count.’

Roba shook his head again. ‘Why’d I get paired with you?’

‘Just lucky, honey.’

‘
You
ain’t.’

Frog shrugged. The half-smile stayed on her lips as usual.

A few metres later, the tunnel ended in big, bronzed double doors. ‘Bet they lead someplace bad,’ Frog observed.