Ten Little Aliens Read online

  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 on to 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 an
d 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.

  XI

  ‘What is it, Doctor?’ Ben asked, his voice cracking high in alarm. He turned away from the hideous, glistening head of the thing, sickened.

  But before the Doctor could reply, a low rumbling note sounded in the cavern, not carried by the spacesuits’

  helmets.

  ‘There’s air in here,’ Polly realised, holding on to Ben now with both arms. ‘If we can hear something outside the helmets, there must be air, to carry the sound.’

  ‘Indeed,’ muttered the Doctor. A faint display flickered over the glass of his helmet. ‘Yes, and I believe it’s breathable.’

  ‘But Doctor,’ Ben protested, ‘you said -’

  ‘- that there was a vacuum in here, yes,’ said the Doctor irritably. ‘It would seem the situation has changed.’

  ‘It’s getting lighter, too,’ breathed Polly. The globe of her helmet knocked against Ben’s as she looked around.

  Ben swallowed hard. ‘She’s right, Doctor.’ The broken glass above them was glowing now, magnifying the light the Doctor had thrown at the ceiling a hundred times.

  Another deep, sonorous tone rang out, and the grating of metal on rock.

  Polly looked terrified. ‘What’s happening?’

  The Doctor came over to stand beside them, gesturing to the far wall where a pentagonal shape glowed with a cold sodium brightness. ‘It would appear a doorway is opening.’

  Ben ripped the helmet from his suit and gulped down musty air. ‘Something’s coming?’

  ‘Coming to get us!’ Polly breathed as she took off her own space helmet and gripped it tightly in both hands. ‘To get us like it got that horrible thing there!’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said the Doctor, heavily. ‘And I wonder, did these unfortunate creatures here share in its fate?’

  The Doctor was gesturing to a glassy rectangular shape standing on a raised flat dais beside the TARDIS. They’d missed it in the dark. Now, in the rippling sparkle of the growing light, Ben watched transfixed as grotesque nightmare shapes began to form inside the glass. Dark shadows gradually resolved themselves into twisted humanoid figures the same size and shape as the dead thing in the chair.

  The space helmet slipped from Ben’s fingers and cracked open on the ground.

  He was staring at monsters, frozen in glass at the moment of violent death.

  Chapter Three

  Death Comes as the End

  I

  There were nine of the creatures. They were massive, alien.

  The heavy lumpen faces were contorted in pain. Each one was dressed in once-white robes now caked black with dried blood.

  Ben turned to Polly. She stared at the waxwork-like horrors for a few moments, then screamed.

  The door in the wall had ground almost fully open. Golden light spilled into the chamber through the pentagonal entrance.

  ‘Quiet, Pol!’ Ben hissed, grabbing hold of her and turning her away from the gory sight.

  ‘Quickly,’ the Doctor rapped, cutting Polly off in mid-yell.

  ‘Back to the TARDIS!’

  Ben tried to manhandle Polly, still clutching her space helmet, into the police box. But something was wrong. She wouldn’t shift. ‘Come on girl, pick your feet up,’ he urged her, fighting down the panic rising inside him.

  ‘I can’t move, Ben,’ Polly cried. ‘I want to, but I can’t!’

  Ben felt his head start to spin, and a noise like rushing water in his ears. He left Polly and turned round to call for the Doctor to help him. The light shining through the doorway lit up the glass that housed the bloody figures. The Doctor was silhouetted against the glow. Slowly, awkwardly, he took a few steps towards Ben.

  Ben turned back to Polly and found she’d vanished.

  He gaped. ‘Doctor? Polly, she’s just... gone.’

  ‘Impossible, my boy,’ the Doctor said weakly, as he removed his own space helmet and placed it on the ground.

  ‘She can’t just have disappeared. We merely did not see her leave.’

  ‘What’s the difference? She’s gone!’ Ben felt stricken. The roaring noise became thicker in his ears. ‘And a few seconds ago she couldn’t move anywhere!’

  But even as he spoke, the noise in Ben’s ears ebbed away, as did the dizziness. The Doctor fell into
Ben’s arms suddenly like a puppet with cut strings. Ben sagged a little under his weight, but the Doctor soon recovered; Ben imagined the furious look the old man gave him was designed to cover his embarrassment at collapsing. A moment or so later his expression softened, and he looked at Ben with evident concern. Then he turned to face the open doorway, shielding Ben behind him.

  A burly figure walked out of the light, dressed in a dark grey military uniform, holding a box in one hand and a dirty great gun in the other. The gory display case was between them for a few moments, then the figure moved into plain view, looking around cautiously.

  ‘Stone me,’ Ben muttered. ‘It’s a bird!’

  The woman looked in their direction and froze. Light glinted off a sort of metal band she wore round her forehead.

  ‘She’s seen us,’ murmured the Doctor. He took a step forward, his hands going automatically to where his lapels would’ve been beneath his suit and floundering as they tried to grip the quilted fabric. ‘Madam,’ he began, ‘forgive me, I do hope our presence here doesn’t come at an unpropitious time?’

  The woman stared at them in absolute shock for a moment.

  Then she raised her gun.

  II

  Polly stared about fearfully. It was dark. Cold. One minute she’d been with Ben and the Doctor, and the next...

  It all seemed a blur. She’d wanted to get away, so desperately, wanted to run headlong from the opening door in the wall. She’d had a feeling of flight, of disorientating movement, and then found herself here, all on her own. The fishbowl-like space helmet rocked gently on the ground at her feet.

  It was a cave or something, deep underground. She’d gone to some caves once, nice and safe touristy caves, when she was eight. She’d run about the place in a bright red raincoat pretending she was a lost damsel, that there was no one else down there with her except for dragons. Except then, when she strayed too far from the crowd, when the fantasy became too scary, there was a daddy to rush back to, grown-up hands to hold. Now she was on her own. Not even with any dragons. Definitely no dragons, she told herself.