Ten Little Aliens Page 27

  The closest of them, staring at some sort of scanner screen, piped up in a rasping, forty-a-day voice: ‘We are nearing closest approach.’

  ‘Our time is at hand,’ said DeCaster. ‘Our powers reach their zenith. Doctor, we cannot delay.’ His pink eyes grew redder, and his voice rose. ‘With the work we do this day, we take the first step to liberate all Schirr from the ghettos, from the barbaric constraints of Earth repatriation. We shall have the means to take human stock and make them Schirr, then drive out their minds to give Morphiean intelligences a physical provenance.’ He paused, gloating. Your empire shall be our empire.’

  ‘So, Doctor,’ Haunt said quietly. Polly saw she looked almost uncomfortable. ‘Will you let this end now?’

  All eyes were on him.

  He bowed his head and nodded. ‘Take me to the propulsion chamber.’

  ‘Why there?’ DeCaster demanded.

  ‘I will show you,’ the Doctor said tartly, ‘when we arrive.’

  ‘You can feel its pull, can’t you, Doctor?’ Haunt studied him closely. ‘Even here. Hypnotic, isn’t it?’

  DeCaster nodded. ‘We controlled the tremors to block off all visible approach to the chamber,’ he hissed. ‘We feared its pull would lead you all to a premature death feeding its hunger.’

  ‘It almost did,’ Ben muttered, turning to Tovel. ‘That weird hypnosis thing when we broke through the rockfall -’

  He was cut off as the room echoed with a crazed, high-pitched shriek.

  ‘Frog? You all right, girl?’ Ben started forward, but Haunt fired another shot over his head, warning him back. She looked round in alarm.

  Polly saw the corner where they’d left her was empty now.

  Frog could move again. She was coming to their rescue.

  One of the Schirr lurched to one side, fell face down on the floor. It choked and retched, it was dying. Polly’s heart leaped, Frog’s counter-attack had begun.

  Only when it turned over, arching its back, thumping the floor with swollen fists in pain and frustration, did Polly realise the fallen Schirr was Frog. There was little that was human about her now, all but consumed by the blistering alien flesh.

  ‘See,’ DeCaster told his brethren over Frog’s whimpers of agony. ‘It is fascinating, is it not, to compare the differing speeds with which the metamorphosis occurs.’ He grinned evilly at Polly. ‘But you will all fall to us in the end. You have no choice.’

  Polly, still holding tightly on to Ben’s hand, felt a creeping feeling under her palm. She looked down and screamed, let go of Ben like he was red hot.

  ‘My hand,’ whispered Ben, staring in horror. ‘Crikey, Pol, look at my hand! I’m changing!’

  Polly didn’t need to look. She had felt the slimy, dead texture of the Schirr skin that coated it. She hugged herself tightly.

  The Doctor looked anxiously back at them. ‘Fight it, my boy!’ he shouted. ‘You must fight, all of you.’ He looked meaningfully at Polly. ‘It is not yet the point of no return. We can still reverse this, hmm? Turn it around?’

  Polly, her senses still numbed with shock, stared at him blankly.

  ‘No more talk,’ rasped DeCaster. He pushed the Doctor towards the secret door in the wall. Haunt was already walking through it, leading the way.

  ‘No, Doctor, come back!’ yelled Polly. She wanted to run after him, to somehow get him back, to explain exactly how they could turn things around. But he was already gone.

  ‘The old man will not delay us long,’ DeCaster announced solemnly at the threshold. ‘We shall return. Construct: see that the two humans in the tunnels are gathered and brought here. They are nearly turned to us. The joining shall be all the quicker.’ The stone angel nodded, and DeCaster turned his attention to his disciples. ‘Guard the humans,’ he instructed, and a smile almost split his face open. ‘Your new, exquisite bodies stand before you. Gloat over their good, clean flesh.’

  The glass in the ceiling glowed brighter as he passed through the doorway. The split in the rock lingered on behind him.

  The chamber fell quiet, save for Frog’s choking sobs, and the laborious breathing of the Schirr. Slowly, arthritically, the creatures shambled closer. The cherub looked on dispassionately, a statue in the centre of the room.

  ‘I’m changing; Ben said again in disbelief, his voice cracking. ‘What am I going to do? I’m changing.’

  ‘We’re all changing,’ whispered Creben. ‘The effect’s speeding up, the closer we get to the heart of Morphiea.’

  ‘No!’ Polly insisted, tears rolling down her cheeks. ‘I’m not changing. I’m not!’

  ‘It’s on your neck,’ Shade croaked. He turned away from her, and she saw a clump of sticky pink flesh smeared over the back of his head like putty.

  Polly threw her arms round Ben, crying for them both as the Schirr lumbered closer.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Towards Zero

  I

  ‘Keep away,’ Shade shouted in warning, as the Schirr dragged themselves closer.

  Ben could see why their pale, bloodshot eyes held such a hunger. Their skin was baggy and pallid, muscles all over their bodies twitched uncertainly. They were weak, so they were going to take strength from him and Polly, and the others.

  ‘Ben,’ Polly murmured breathlessly in his ear. ‘I just realised what the Doctor said, about still being able to turn things round.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ he whispered back. He shut his eyes. He just wanted to enjoy holding her close for as long as possible.

  ‘He meant I still have the navigational crystals,’ said Polly.

  ‘We can turn this whole rock around, literally. If we were travelling away from Morphiea, maybe the infection would fade.’

  ‘Where do we need to put the crystals, then?’ asked Ben, looking over his shoulder now at Creben and Shade.

  ‘Tovel’s the pilot,’ said Creben. ‘I understand the basic principles, but...’

  ‘Even if we did know, we wouldn’t stand a chance,’ Shade muttered. ‘D’you think they’ll just stand there and watch us try?’

  ‘What have we got to lose?’ Ben kept his voice low. ‘We can either die for these things or die fighting against them.’

  ‘Wait - they can’t kill us, can they?’ Creben reasoned. ‘Or there won’t be enough of us to go round.’

  ‘You cannot die,’ said one of the Schirr, its voice a wet hiss like air escaping a punctured tyre. It may have been old but it wasn’t deaf. ‘Our cellular hold on you is too strong.’

  ‘Well then,’ said Ben, glaring at the exhausted creature.

  ‘There’s nothing you can do to us, is there?’

  ‘But you can feel pain,’ said another, the one with the chain-smoker’s voice. ‘Terrible pain. Must I slit you open, right down the middle? Force you to watch your wound as it slowly, agonisingly heals?’

  The stone angel padded lightly towards them. Ben froze. He felt like he was the statue under its cold, blank stare.

  ‘Pain,’ the cherub said, its voice dry as deadwood as it leaned in closer to Ben. ‘Yes, we enjoy the study of pain.’

  Ben flinched from the cold bulk of the angel, picturing its face covered with Joiks’s blood. As he pulled back, he heard the sinister sound of stone wings scything through the air, getting closer. Seconds later, two of the cherubim swept into the room through the pentagonal doorway. One held Roba in its arms like a sleeping baby, the other dangled Tovel by his arms. But Ben was only able to tell them apart by the colour of what little human skin remained. The shiny, hairless sticky flesh of the Schirr had swamped them, bulged through rips in their combat suits.

  The angel turned away, distracted by the newcomers. Tovel and Roba were placed gently on the ground.

  ‘That settles it,’ said Creben savagely. ‘You think we stand a chance with three of those things in here?’

  ‘There’s got to be a way,’ said Ben. But he saw his right hand going the same way as his left, swelling, his fingers like frying sausages filling with hot fat.<
br />
  Polly shook her head. Ben saw her face was getting bloated, her lips thickening to the size of slugs. ‘It’s no good, Ben,’ she slurred. ‘Not this time.’

  Ben didn’t want to believe it. He looked over at the grisly remains the angels had brought in with them. Roba was lying in a twitching heap on the floor, but Tovel was on all fours, staring around dumbly.

  ‘Oi! Tovel!’ hissed Ben.

  The soldier looked up at the sound of his name, and Ben breathed a sigh of relief. There were still human eyes beneath the thick brows. Tovel shuffled over on his hands and knees.

  The Schirr, and the angels, watched him go. They seemed fascinated, like children watching where a clockwork toy will go next.

  ‘Tovel,’ Ben whispered, as he crouched to help him up. He realised he couldn’t even feel his hands anymore. ‘Listen.

  Those navigational whatsits, can you still work them?’

  Tovel stared at him blankly. Ben signalled that Polly should show him one of the gemstones. She wriggled her sleeve and one fell into her palm.

  ‘We’ve got the crystals, do you remember?’ Ben whispered.

  ‘If we make a distraction, you can steer this rock out of here!’

  Tovel looked at Ben helplessly. He was hairless and mute, his features distorted beyond all recognition. That’s me, thought Ben. That’s going to be me, any time now.

  Then Tovel nodded. His eyes were gleaming.

  That’s going to be me, Ben thought again, determined now.

  Never giving up.

  II

  Haunt looked dead ahead as she led the Doctor along the secret tunnels that branched off to the propulsion chamber.

  She’d spent so much of the last day scurrying around these pitch-black passages. Doubling back on herself, setting the asteroid complex in motion, hiding the navi-gems as instructed... wishing sometimes that she could hide too. But no matter how dark a corner she found, there was, predictably, no escaping from herself.

  Nor, it seemed, from the Doctor’s questions.

  ‘You’ve explained what you have done,’ he said to her, ‘but not why.’

  Haunt didn’t turn round. She could hear the heavy, measured tread of DeCaster following on behind them. ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘It seems that nothing matters to you. Nothing at all. Can that be true?’

  She walked on in silence.

  ‘You’re betraying billions of lives. You know that, and yet it would seem to make no difference to you. I’m curious as to why.’

  It wasn’t much further to the propulsion units.

  ‘I witnessed your entombment on Toronto,’ the Doctor said gently. ‘I couldn’t help but overhear.’ He sounded tired, strained, not just in the way he struggled for breath, but in his speech. She found she slowed her pace a little to let him draw closer. But she kept her gun cocked and ready.

  ‘It wasn’t the Empire forces that tunnelled down and rescued you, was it?’ he murmured. ‘It was the Schirr.’

  She nodded, and let out a long breath she didn’t realise she’d been holding. ‘Ashman died of his injuries. I was close to following him. Took the last of the pills as an overdose. But they found me.’ She stopped for a moment, tried to swallow down the tight band that constricted her throat. Heard the heavy footsteps and set off again.

  ‘The woman, there. Killed when the grenade went off.

  “They’re in,” she said. She didn’t mean there were Schirr in the building. She meant they were inside our computer systems. Setting up this rock, everything, even then, ready for this time. And they needed someone on the inside to make it happen.’

  ‘You agreed?’ the Doctor asked her.

  ‘I was dying. Their physicians seemed to heal me, then they let me go. They never explained anything, never spoke. Just put me back in the ruins of that place.’

  They went on, step after heavy step.

  ‘How could I tell anyone I’d been saved by the Schirr? That I’d let them kill my Ashman -’ She clenched her fists, closed her eyes. ‘That I let them kill my commanding officer, and then allowed them to put me back together again? They’d have court-martialled me.’ Now she turned to the old man, angry at the memories, angry at him. ‘And I wasn’t through.

  Not with the army, not with the Schirr. I tore through those bastards on twenty worlds. I made sure they’d regret keeping me alive. I killed thousands of them.’

  ‘And yet it was never enough,’ the Doctor said, like he understood, like he was some kind of shrink or something.

  Step after step in the darkness. DeCaster trudging on too, getting closer.

  ‘When I took out New Jersey,’ Haunt whispered, ‘when DeCaster and his stinking Spook sciences had us beat and there was no way out. When I pressed the button and nuked the planet... I wiped out a million. Just like that.’

  ‘How many of your own kind did you kill in the process?’

  the Doctor murmured.

  She ignored him. ‘The Army couldn’t condone it, of course.

  But I was too high-profile to be tried. They made me a marshal and retired me to training duties with the minimum of fuss.’

  Haunt recognised the blue tinge of the propulsion units bleeding into the blackness, quickened her step slightly.

  ‘War changed,’ she went on, ‘I watched it change. No more battlegrounds. No more front lines. Just terrorists. Anywhere, everywhere. And who dies, in their thousands, every time?

  Not the soldiers. Not the enemy. The innocents.’ She laughed mirthlessly. ‘How can we stop that? We can’t stop that.’

  They turned a corner in the passage. The light was deepest blue, shot through with a harsh brightness like sunlight.

  ‘But a war,’ said the Doctor, his voice harsher now, ‘a good old-fashioned war, with a foe you can see, an enemy you can touch and kill... That is acceptable, is it, hmm?’ He seemed furious. ‘That is desirable?’

  Something in Haunt finally broke. She muscled him up against the jagged slate of the wall and leaned in close. ‘If the Spooks want bodies, let em have bodies,’ she snarled in his face, mindful of DeCaster getting closer and closer. She realised she had her hand round the Doctor’s throat. ‘Least we can see them, then. Least we can kill them. They can burn just as well as us.’

  ‘That’s no justification,’ he said, fighting for breath. ‘You know very well it isn’t.’

  ‘I know your kind,’ she spat at him. ‘I knew it from the moment we met. The lump of butter that won’t melt in your mouth. The roses you come up smelling of every time.’ She sneered, shook her head. ‘I was damned the second the Schirr saved my life.’

  ‘No,’ the Doctor gasped as he clawed feebly at her hands, his eyes tightly shut. She slackened her grip. ‘No,’ he said more firmly. ‘You lost someone dear to you and never let yourself recover. You withdrew into yourself, withdrew from life, until nothing mattered at all. The Schirr didn’t cause that change in you. You did it yourself.’

  ‘Oh, you’re funny.’ She stared at him, breathless. ‘You think I didn’t know there’d be a price for my life? That they’d want something from me in return? It’s so obvious.’ Her hand slid down to her side.

  The Doctor stared at her. ‘The cyst?’

  ‘It was theirs,’ she whispered. ‘They grew it in me.

  Malignant. No way to remove it save the way you saw.’

  He met her gaze, grave and unflinching. He acted like he understood now. Like he wasn’t afraid. ‘And over the years it’s slowly taken control of you. Led you to this pass.’ His bony hand gripped her wrist and he spoke urgently. ‘But it’s gone from you now! Now you can fight their conditioning, prevent this evil -’

  DeCaster was approaching the tunnel bend. Coming into the light.

  ‘No, Doctor. It’s for the best, all this.’ She let her forehead rest against the Doctor’s chest. ‘When we’re all a part of them... We’ll start a real war. A proper war, one we can win.’

  She couldn’t suppress a sudden smile. ‘And even if w
e don’t... I won’t be scared any more.’

  ‘You’re mad,’ he said quietly in her ear. ‘Quite mad.’

  She heard the rasping breath of DeCaster as he rounded the corner. Straightened up, but a fraction too late. His pink eyes looked furious, the pupils dilated to red specks.

  ‘Has he explained what he has done?’ the Schirr enquired.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘he hasn’t.’

  The Doctor looked up at the Schirr and smiled weakly.

  ‘Through here,’ he croaked. ‘I will show you, sir.’

  ‘Why so feeble,’ DeCaster wondered. His voice was sticky, seductive. ‘I smell youth in you. Can the body be so frail when the mind is so...?’ He trailed off mid-sentence. Then he seized the Doctor by his coat and lifted him off the ground.

  ‘Yes, of course. I see it now.’

  ‘What?’ Haunt asked nervously. ‘What is it?’

  ‘He is holding back the paralysing pulse with his mind.’

  Haunt stared at the old man. ‘It’s not possible.’

  ‘Such power we shall have in this little creature when he is ours,’ breathed DeCaster. ‘But look at him now, he is so tired.’

  The Schirr dropped the Doctor to the tunnel floor. He scrambled up, a pathetic figure, limping along towards the light, trying to get away.

  ‘Let go, little creature,’ DeCaster shouted after him. ‘Let go, and the joining can be completed.’

  Haunt saw two of the Spook constructs stride up out of the blue mist that swirled through the propulsion chamber. They towered over the Doctor.

  ‘I asked for them to appear as angels, Doctor,’ she called out to the old man, ‘and they did. I could never understand God. But angels are different. They can be evil as well as good, can’t they?’

  The Doctor staggered back from the constructs. They caught him with ease.