Ten Little Aliens Read online

  The Doctor, who had remained surprisingly quiet, broke in at last. ‘There still remains the issue of the well-placed traitor in a position of authority. Perhaps Shel was in fact

  investigating that person.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Or one of their agents.’

  Agents? Ben looked nervously around the huddle of soldiers.

  ‘That’s enough.’ Haunt sounded a little shaky as she plucked the webset from Frog’s forehead. ‘We’d better watch this for ourselves.’

  ‘You don’t trust me?’ Frog said coldly. ‘This is still me, you know.’

  For how much longer, thought Ben gloomily, scratching the back of his neck. How long till nothing’s left of any of us?

  The cheery thought led to another.

  ‘So where’s Denni’s webset then?’ he asked aloud. ‘If she died first, why wasn’t nothing of hers hidden away down there with the others?’

  ‘Maybe it was, and you just didn’t find it,’ Polly suggested.

  ‘No wait...’ Creben looked at Haunt. ‘If Shel’s not behind this -’

  ‘- Then Roba’s chasing after the wrong person,’ finished Tovel.

  ‘That’s not what I meant,’ Creben told him coldly. ‘If Shel’s not responsible for bringing us here, somebody else is.’

  Haunt swore. ‘And who went conveniently missing right at the start of all this, without a trace? Who’s been moving about freely as a result ever since, making this nightmare happen?’

  ‘It fits,’ said the Doctor. ‘Yes, it fits.’

  Ben stared at him. ‘Denni.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  They Do It With Mirrors

  I

  Polly felt she could weep with frustration. Just as she thought she was getting things straight in her head, another suspect came to light. She came over to Ben, leaving the others to talk worriedly among themselves.

  ‘If only we could just get into the TARDIS and leave,’ she said bitterly.

  ‘The Doctor’ll -’

  ‘Oh, don’t just say that the Doctor will think of something, Ben!’ Polly snapped.

  He looked like she’d just slapped him round the face.

  ‘Sorry, Ben,’ she sighed, and he shrugged. Polly glanced up at the Doctor. He was back rummaging inside the damaged console. Couldn’t stay away from the thing. ‘It’s just, sometimes I wonder what he -’

  The Doctor clapped his hands. ‘Yes! Yes, of course, that is it. Time! It explains everything. Time held still.’

  Ben shot Polly a knowing glance. ‘What are you talking about, Doctor?’

  ‘The stasis field. The bodies there are caught in a single moment of time.’ He pulled out some components from the charred guts of the console. ‘I’ve seen circuits like these in the TARDIS systems.’

  ‘Then the Schirr aren’t dead, only frozen in time?’ Polly peeped round nervously at the corpses. ‘What about when Shel scanned them?’

  ‘The bodies are outside our own time frame. To the scanner they would have no relevance - and so appear entirely inert.

  Dead. But as you say, that is not necessarily the case.’

  ‘Then those navigational crystal things we need to turn around could be in there too!’ Polly realised.

  ‘Very possibly,’ the Doctor agreed. He paused, took hold of his lapels, looking oddly pleased with himself. But by this time, Haunt had come over with Creben, Shade and Tovel, and she didn’t look happy at all.

  ‘We haven’t got time to waste on any more speculation,’ she said heavily.

  ‘This isn’t speculation, it is fact.’ The Doctor generously included the newcomers in his explanation. ‘Frog said she believed Shel was trying to tell me something. Indeed he was.’

  He gestured to the console. ‘These controls do not operate the stasis field. They cannot, the connections have been severed.’

  Haunt frowned. ‘Damage from the explosion when Shel -’

  That’s what I thought, at first. But the severance of the circuitry is too precise to have been caused randomly.’ He turned to Ben. ‘Would you be so good as to prise open the metal box beneath the console for me, hmm?’

  Shade offered him a knife, like the one Frog had used on herself, and Ben crouched beneath the console, baffled.

  ‘Dunno what you expect to find, Doctor. Looks like a bomb went off here.’

  ‘What is inside?’ the Doctor asked, looking up at the ceiling.

  Ben re-emerged holding a large, thick chunk of what looked like yellowish glass.

  ‘That’s all?’ asked Polly.

  ‘That is all that is needed,’ said the Doctor, still staring upward, an evangelical expression on his face. ‘Look up at the roof. Look.’

  ‘More glass,’ said Tovel.

  ‘That is how they send the signal,’ the Doctor said triumphantly.

  ‘What are you talking about, Doctor,’ Creben scowled.

  ‘The stasis field is operated from the platform. It has to be.’

  The Doctor seemed to be trembling with excitement as he stalked over to the display of Schirr bodies. Their albino eyes seemed to glare at him, full of hate, as he examined them. ‘It must be concealed above.’ He waved a hand frantically. ‘Will someone please examine the Schirr bodies from above?’

  ‘This is ludicrous,’ Creben complained, but Haunt waved him into silence.

  Tovel offered Ben a bunk up. He didn’t look happy, but he took it, and started to scrabble up the invisible wall like a French mime.

  ‘There’s nothing,’ Ben reported when he reached the top.

  ‘Just a lot of bald heads.’

  ‘But there must be something,’ the Doctor insisted.

  ‘Wait...’ Ben tapped at something none of them could see.

  ‘There’s a tiny bit of glass here. Can’t shift it, it must be frozen too.’

  ‘That is it,’ the Doctor hissed in triumph. ‘The relay they have been using.’

  ‘But it’s titchy, it looks like it just dropped here or something!’

  ‘It is all they need to turn the stasis field on or off.

  Somehow they can transmit power through this material... a signal.’ He nodded to himself, certain of what he was saying.

  ‘Of course, there would almost certainly be some spillage…’

  ‘Spillage of what?’ Creben looked at him dubiously. ‘Of

  time?’

  ‘Quite so,’ the Doctor told him.

  ‘So that’s why we can’t get inside the TARDIS,’ Polly heard Ben mutter. ‘We don’t have the time!’

  ‘And why Pallemar seemed to be dead, but wasn’t,’ Polly whispered back. ‘He must’ve been caught up in it too!’

  Even with all this, the Doctor wasn’t ready to stop astounding his audience yet. He addressed Haunt directly.

  ‘Can’t you see? Whenever the stasis field is activated or deactivated, it must have a curious effect on our own perception of time.’

  ‘That’s how DeCaster and Pallemar vanished without us noticing?’ asked Polly.

  ‘Precisely.’ The Doctor beamed at her. ‘What took them many minutes, passed for us in just a few moments, yes.’ He turned back to Haunt. ‘It seemed to us you had been gone only a short time when you returned - but in fact, a good deal of time had passed.’

  ‘So why didn’t the Schirr use this time difference to attack us?’ Haunt inquired.

  The Doctor gestured over at Frog. ‘Clearly they have a use for us.’

  ‘Well then, how come I ended up in the tunnels, right when we arrived?’ Polly asked, hoping her head could handle all of this.

  ‘A hidden doorway in the rock?’ wondered the Doctor. ‘Yes, again, if it’s frozen in a single point of time until used, no one would be able to detect it.’

  ‘‘Ere, Tovel,’ Ben said. ‘That room where we went up against them statues for the first time...’

  He nodded. ‘We seemed to come right through the rock.’

  ‘And there were pieces of that glass hanging down there too,’ Ben said triumphantly.
/>
  ‘They’re all over the place,’ Haunt realised. ‘So the Schirr can move around safely with no chance of being discovered.’

  ‘And Denni, it would seem,’ Creben added, grudgingly accepting the supposition.

  ‘But you said the Schirr had been put in the engines of this thing,’ Polly complained.

  ‘Whatever was supposed to happen to us here,’ the Doctor said thoughtfully, ‘it appears we have become mired in a struggle for power between Schirr and Morphieans...’

  ‘Look out!’ yelled Shade.

  Polly’s heart leapt. As she turned, the control room was plunged into blackness. Blinding blue current sparked and spluttered along the golden trellises that snaked round the walls. The ducting smoked, and the air filled with filthy fumes.

  In the sputtering light she saw the stark silhouette of a giant angel, flying towards them.

  II

  Roba staggered down the dark, dank tunnels with a familiarity that made him uneasy. He was becoming at home here, a new creature that belonged to the shadows.

  The fleas bugged him more now than ever, though, as they hopped and crawled over his skin. He tried to keep his Schirr hand covered, but the insects seemed drawn to it.

  He paused, panting for breath, and held it up. It was alive with the creatures.

  Roba smacked it into the wall, as hard as he could again and again, grunting with pain. He heard his knuckles crack and break, and took a bitter satisfaction. If something wanted to take his body, he’d mess it right up for them first.

  He only stopped when the pain swamped his stung senses.

  Sobbing, he took a long, miserable look at the broken hand.

  The fleas had gone, shaken loose, hopped away.

  Two heavy footsteps ground into the scree that carpeted the tunnel floor.

  Roba looked up to see one of the stone cherubim towering above him, still as a statue. He yelped and fell backwards, retreated on his elbows, gazing up into the cold, blank face of the creature.

  In two more steps it caught up with him. Roba had backed himself up against a wall. The angel reached out for his chest, its fingers curved hooks, ready to tear him open.

  But instead it reached for the webset dangling uselessly from his belt.

  Roba barely dared to breathe as the monstrous angel plucked the headband away, studied it a moment. Then it smiled serenely, leaned in close to him. Its stone fingers were cold as old bones as it gently fitted the webset around his forehead.

  Its blank, wide eyes looked into his own. Roba kept closing his, hoping it would go away, a child’s wish: I can’t see you, you can’t see me. But each time he opened his eyes a fraction it was there still. Maybe it would think he was asleep, or dead. But every time he sneaked the glance the angel hadn’t moved. It was right up close and it was still smiling.

  Roba heard dragging footsteps. Something was lurching down the tunnel towards him. He and the angel waited for it to arrive, together.

  III

  ‘Open fire!’ Haunt roared, as the colossal winged creature drifted closer through the smoke and the shadows.

  Polly saw the thing lit up in yellow flashes as Tovel, Shade and Creben joined their marshal in firing off blast after blast from their rifles. Its pallid, inhuman face glared emptily at her, as incapable of fear as anything else. It had been built grotesquely from some mysterious flesh that did not seem to feel the gunfire that should’ve charred it to ashes. She willed the rifle-fire to hurt it somehow, to send it flapping round the room like a caged bird looking for release. But it only drew closer and closer, resisting all attempts to drive it back.

  The Doctor ducked down so as not to obscure the line of fire and scuttled over to Polly. They clung to each other, looking up helplessly together.

  ‘Your launcher,’ Tovel shouted at Shade over the fizzing cacophony of the rifle fire. ‘Use your grenade launcher!’

  Polly remembered the way the weapon had brought down the roof when the robot had been chasing her. She felt a sudden surge of hope. ‘Yes, Shade, come on, you can do it!’

  But Shade ran past her in the opposite direction, and was swallowed up by the darkness. She stared after him in shocked disbelief.

  ‘Come back,’ the Doctor demanded, outraged. ‘Come back at once, sir!’

  To Polly’s amazement, Shade did - carrying the grenade launcher.

  ‘I left it back there,’ he explained curtly, and dropped to one knee.

  He aimed the launcher.

  Polly looked up into the elongated, colourless mask of the giant cherub’s face. It began to smile.

  Then she clamped her hands over her ears as Shade fired the grenade.

  The angel silently exploded into a billion pieces.

  A billion insects.

  Polly choked as the black, smoky air became thick with fleas. She tried to hold her breath but they were everywhere, falling like hard rain, crawling and hopping in her hair, over her face. She thought she would be sick.

  ‘What the hell was that,’ yelled Frog from a pitch-black corner. ‘I know none of you wants to look at me, but...’

  ‘The fleas,’ the Doctor called out urgently, cutting her off.

  He lit a match, and Polly saw his pale face flicker into focus.

  ‘They are the life from which the Morphieans fashion their constructs! The weed must sustain them when they’re not in use...’

  ‘They really did turn this place against us,’ said Haunt.

  ‘Shade, check on Frog and fetch some light. The rest of you, stay wary.’ In the thick gloom Polly watched as Haunt brushed a mass of the insects from her face, spat out a mouthful. ‘Doctor - wherever those things are, they can swarm into angels?’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid so,’ the Doctor told her. He cupped a hand round his match.

  ‘What’s to stop them reforming right now?’ Polly asked, fingers pulling dozens of the things from her hair.

  ‘It would seem the creature came here to deliver a message,’ said the Doctor. ‘Now it has done so, it is no longer needed.’

  ‘Message?’ Ben looked at him like he was raving mad.

  The Doctor gestured to the flickering screens with his free hand, right the way around the room.

  A single angular symbol, a kind of spiral, was glowing on each.

  Then a bright, white glow spread through the control chamber. Polly flinched from the sudden light. Shade had placed some kind of high-tech lantern on the ground between them all.

  ‘What kind of a message is that?’ Tovel said in a strained voice.

  ‘It means “life”,’ said Haunt.

  Everyone turned to look at her. Polly noted the surprise on the Doctor’s face. He blew out his match.

  ‘Seen it a thousand times. The symbol denotes a Schirr life on their combat scanners.’ She gave a crooked smile. ‘See one of those wink out, you got another dead. Sweet as blowing out birthday candles.’

  ‘OK. So what does it mean?’ asked Shade.

  ‘Life support, maybe,’ Tovel suggested. ‘Those sparks, the lights going out...’

  ‘Those things have decided to stop mucking about then,’

  Ben said.

  ‘But there are so few of us now,’ said Creben, ‘If they wanted us all dead why not just attack us in force here?’

  ‘Maybe they knew we had the grenade launcher,’ Tovel said, ‘Seems to be the only thing we’ve got they’re vulnerable to.’

  Ben sighed. ‘So they cut off the life-support systems.’

  ‘Surprised you didn’t recognise the sign yourself, Creben,’

  said Haunt. ‘You saw it only a matter of hours ago.’

  Creben looked uncomfortable. ‘Marshal?’

  ‘You and Lindey. I viewed it through her eyes, on her webset.’

  ‘I didn’t really study the carvings in any detail,’ said Creben. ‘Back then we were looking for Schirr cyphers and droids.’

  ‘Seem almost cuddly now, them robot things,’ joked Ben to Polly.

  ‘Then if you’
ve seen the carving, you can lead us to it, hmm?’ The Doctor’s gaze flicked between Haunt and Creben.

  ‘We approached it along a tunnel close to the ship,’ Creben said, ‘but the tunnel caved in when our section separated.’

  ‘All these tunnels interconnect.’ Haunt looked around at her troops. ‘We’ll just have to find it, that’s all.’

  ‘That could take us days,’ Ben argued.

  ‘And we’re getting closer to Morphiea all the time,’

  whispered Polly.

  Haunt shrugged. ‘We’ll have to split up.’

  ‘Move through these tunnels alone?’ The Doctor looked sourly at her. ‘With the constructs poised to destroy us?’

  Ben agreed. ‘Not to mention Denni roaming about, a Schirr or two and poor old Roba off his rocker.’

  ‘We’ll cover more ground faster,’ Haunt said flatly. She hesitated. ‘But I have an idea of how we might be able to watch out for each other.’

  The Doctor looked at her shrewdly. ‘The websets?’

  Haunt nodded. ‘It’s been done before. In the pacification riots on Idaho it saved the lives of our entire squad. Instead of using the websets to record what we saw, we used them to

  transmit to the other wearers. See and communicate from each other’s perspective.’

  Creben raised an eyebrow. ‘How?’

  ‘Practice,’ said Haunt dryly. ‘But if it’s a technical answer you’re after...’

  Polly was almost amused to see Haunt turn hopefully to the Doctor to provide one.

  ‘May I study a webset, please?’ The Doctor held out his hand, and Haunt gave him Lindey’s. He pulled a jeweller’s glass from his pocket and scrutinised the circuitry in a metal band. If he was aware that all eyes were on him he remained entirely unflustered. ‘Yes... Yes, it’s quite straightforward really. Any receiver can be turned into a transmitter, of course, it’s a simple matter of reversing certain polarities...’

  He slid open a compartment in the headband that contained what looked to be tiny tools, and removed one.

  ‘How would we switch between different viewpoints?’ asked Creben. ‘If you turn our brains into transmitters, we’ve no way of regulating the strength of the signal. Any one person’s perspective could swamp the others.’