Ten Little Aliens: 50th Anniversary Edition

by Stephen Cole

  Though the piercing notes of the alien klaxon had reached their climax, everyone in the chamber whirled round to face her.

  ‘Look!’ she shouted. ‘The bodies. The alien bodies. There were ten of them when we arrived, now there’s only nine. One of them’s gone!’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  DESTINATION UNKNOWN

  I

  THE KLAXONS CUT off.

  The sudden silence in the cavern was almost physical in its strength. Ben felt a slight stirring in his stomach, the ground pitched a little and he felt a quick pang of homesickness. Motion. They were at sea.

  What the hell was happening here?

  Lindey turned to Shel. Her voice sounded too loud, unnatural in the silence. ‘Could this all be part of the training simulation?’

  Shel didn’t answer. Ben reckoned he was a bit of a Doctor-type in that he didn’t like to commit himself if there was a chance he could be wrong.

  Haunt, who had been deep in thought, standing almost statue-like since the klaxons stopped, seemed to come to a decision. ‘All right, everyone. Deactivate websets.’ Even her best sergeant-major bellow couldn’t mask the worry in her voice. ‘We can no longer be sure this is a training exercise. Now, I don’t want you thinking to make yourselves look good for Cellmek. I want you thinking to save yourselves and your team. No more recording.’

  The soldiers gave muted assent. As Ben watched, fingers were placed to a particular spot on the metal band around their foreheads. So the headgear wasn’t just for show. The mixed looks on the soldiers’ faces as they removed the websets ranged from scandalised pleasure to worried and just downright guilty. It put Ben in mind of how him and his mates had been at school when his older brother taught them how to swear. You were dying to do it but knew it was breaking the rules. And changing you, too, somehow.

  Shel spoke up, more confident now he was on familiar ground. ‘Regulations state that as senior officers, we remain recording in all conditions of combat, unless our imminent capture dictates we erase all recording.’

  ‘I’m aware of that, Shel,’ Haunt said icily. ‘Naturally, I exclude ourselves from the order.’

  The bloke with the marked face who’d been goggling at Polly was now turning a less enthusiastic eye on the corpses on the platform and the one in the chair. ‘Were there nine bodies here before, Marshal?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘No, Shade, there were not.’ Haunt crossed over to the corpses on the platform. Shel, Roba and Shade immediately followed her. Ben glanced at the Doctor, who was engrossed in some computer readout with that Tovel geezer, and at Polly who was just hiding her face in her hands. He decided to get a closer look at the bodies, and to make sure Haunt wasn’t getting ready to blame any of them for this.

  Any thought that Polly must be mistaken vanished in an instant. The tableau had clearly changed. There was a clear gap towards the right-hand side. The Schirr had been clutching his bloody head with both hands. Now he had gone, while his two neighbours hadn’t moved a muscle. With nothing between them they looked blankly at each other with milky eyes, red pupils fixed in what Ben had taken to be the moment of their sudden death.

  ‘But they can’t be, can they,’ he said, thinking out loud. Shade looked at him blankly, and Ben took in the black blotches that covered the man’s face. ‘Dead, I mean.’

  ‘With wounds like that?’ Haunt gestured to the guts spilling from one of the bodies, frozen in midfall. ‘How could they survive?’

  ‘It’s got to be a trick.’ Ben wasn’t letting this go. ‘Special effects.’

  ‘We ran a scan,’ Shel told him. He sounded as calm and unfazed as ever as he studied the empty space on the platform where the creature’s huge feet had been standing. ‘These are real corpses.’

  ‘Don’t forget the one in the chair,’ said Roba. He spat on it to make his point, and Ben watched the liquid dribble down the huge pink head. ‘We can see that’s for real.’

  ‘How could a corpse come back to life,’ Shade muttered. ‘Maybe Ben’s right, they’re not dead. Maybe this force field is really some kind of cryogenic –’

  ‘They’re dead,’ Shel informed him flatly, and held out a palm-sized gadget. ‘Would you like to check the displays?’

  Shade shrugged. ‘You’re science officer.’

  ‘It’s more likely the corpse simply disintegrated when the systems started up,’ stated Shel. ‘Some resonance in the vibration may have interfered with the stasis field in some way.’

  Haunt nodded, perked up a bit. ‘Yes, that would make sense.’

  It didn’t to Ben, but he supposed they should be grateful for any explanation, no matter how incomprehensible it sounded.

  ‘Maybe the force field’s there to keep the bodies safe.’ Before Ben could be shot down in flames like Shade he quickly carried on: ‘You know; they can’t bury them, so they keep them up here.’

  ‘So where’s this piece of rock going to?’ Haunt fixed him with a dark stare. ‘Some deep space cemetery?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Ben said. ‘We don’t know nothing, do we?’

  ‘Double negative,’ Shel muttered, staring at the empty space between the corpses at the end of the line. ‘That would suggest we know everything.’

  Haunt looked at him, thoughtfully.

  *

  II

  ‘Look at Shadow over there.’ Lindey’s voice was soft, conspiratorial in Polly’s ear.

  ‘Shadow?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Lindey plucked her switched-off headband from her buzz of red hair, and tucked it into her belt. Then she spat in her palm and slicked back her tufty fringe. ‘Adam Shade the Shadow. Just look at him.’

  Polly chose not to look in the direction of the bodies. ‘I don’t think it’s nice to call him names just because of his accident.’

  ‘Accident?’ At first, Lindey acted like she didn’t know what Polly was talking about. Then she nodded knowingly. ‘Oh, sure. He didn’t waste much time going for the sympathy vote, did he? But we don’t just call him names because of his accident. Go on, look at him. Haunt’s little shadow.’

  ‘You’re soldiers,’ Polly said primly. ‘Aren’t you meant to follow the person in charge?’

  ‘Follow her orders, sure. Not follow her round like a lost lamb. He probably thinks that if he acts like a good little boy, it’ll never happen again. But just look at his face.’ Lindey smiled, showing a line of neat pointed teeth. ‘The one thing he can never be is whiter than white.’

  ‘All right,’ Haunt called out to her troops. ‘I’ll accept a corpse can maybe reduce itself to dust, but not one of my own squad. We need to find Denni.’

  ‘Or what’s left of her,’ Lindey muttered.

  ‘And while we’re searching we can gauge how big a fragment has separated from the main mass of this rock. But first, we need to know if the ship is still accessible.’

  ‘I’m afraid your ship will be quite out of reach by now,’ said the Doctor.

  ‘And just how would you know?’ growled Roba.

  ‘Surely, my boy, you don’t imagine this whole area has detached itself for no reason? That you stumbled upon these dead criminals by chance?’ He turned to Haunt and Shel. ‘When was this place constructed?’

  ‘We don’t have access to that kind of information,’ Haunt said impatiently.

  ‘Very well then, by what process was this asteroid chosen for your training exercises?’ All the Doctor needed was a barrister’s wig, Polly decided.

  ‘I made available to Pentagon Central the experiential records of each soldier in the squad,’ said Shel. ‘Their computers then ascertained what further training experiences were needed to take the AT squad into elite class, and selected a suitable location.’

  ‘Dumb computers,’ Roba snorted.

  The Doctor shook his head. ‘The computer, sir, is only equipped to take decisions according to the caprices of its programmers.’ He surveyed his audience haughtily. ‘You were expected here. All this is an elaborate trap that has closed around you.’
<
br />   ‘Around us, you mean,’ said Ben with feeling.

  ‘Yes, quite so.’ At once the Doctor’s smugness vanished, and he looked suddenly distant. ‘I hardly think a means of escape will be left to us.’

  ‘While I’m sure you know everything, Doctor,’ Haunt said dourly, ‘I think we’ll check for ourselves.’ She turned to her soldiers. ‘Shade, Lindey, go back to the ship, check it out. Roba, Frog, get out there and guard that doorway. Anything coming our way, I want to know about it.’

  Silently, they obeyed.

  ‘And remember,’ Haunt called after them. ‘There could be one, maybe two droids still out there in our share of this rock. Watch yourselves.’ She turned to Polly. ‘You claim you left this room by another exit.’

  ‘I don’t claim anything.’ Polly crossed to stand by Ben’s side. ‘It’s true.’

  ‘Creben. Joiks. Find another door.’ Haunt gestured broadly around her with her rifle. She waved it around so naturally, like the thing was a part of her.

  Creben moved smartly away and Joiks slouched off to investigate in the other direction, his heavy-set face troubled.

  ‘Tovel,’ Haunt went on. ‘You’re the pilot. Can this really be a kind of ship?’

  ‘Sure it can,’ Tovel replied.

  Ben looked confused. ‘But how can it steer or whatever, if it’s just a dirty great rock?’

  The Doctor ignored him and turned to Tovel. ‘Young man, would you agree that technology of this sort would need some kind of primed navigational matrix in order to move through space?’

  Tovel raised his eyebrows. ‘Yeah. It’s Schirr technology. They load up crystals with cartographic info, all pre-programmed, and burnt into the systems at launch. But the crystals are gone. We’ve no way of knowing where we’re headed.’

  ‘We’re on the edge of Morphiean space,’ Haunt said. ‘Any infringement on their territory could be construed as open warfare.’

  ‘Who are these Morphieans?’ asked Polly.

  Tovel looked at her. ‘So we can take it you had no relatives on Beijing Minor, then.’

  ‘We, er, have been out of circulation, you could say,’ the Doctor told him with an apologetic smile.

  ‘Refugees,’ Haunt reminded Tovel.

  ‘In a few years we could all be.’

  Polly didn’t understand what Tovel meant, but found herself shivering anyway.

  ‘The Morphieans are the geezers with the magic, the Spooks,’ Ben piped up. ‘That bunch on the dais are called Schirr, and they’ve been ripping off the Morphieans’ secrets, see Pol? The Morphieans want them back. And since the Schirr are part of Earth’s Empire now, the Morphieans are having a pop at us for not putting the lid on them.’

  The Doctor gave Ben a withering look. ‘Succinctly put.’

  Polly was grateful for Ben’s summary, but still confused. ‘How did the Schirr get these secrets in the first place?’

  ‘We learned from the pacified Schirr that centuries ago, the Quadrant was active in this sector; before their isolationist stance,’ Tovel told her. ‘Certain Schirr elements still practised the Morphiean black arts, and none better than DeCaster. He’s become a hero, a god to these primitives.’

  Shel spoke up. ‘Over the last ten years he has used Morphiean rituals to commit the most devastating terrorist acts against Empire.’

  ‘Whole worlds,’ said Haunt, ‘just gone up in flames.’

  Polly thought she got it. ‘And once the Morphieans realised what was happening, they started reprisals with worse magic?’

  ‘Much worse,’ said Tovel.

  Polly’s voice rose a little in panic. ‘And we could be heading straight for them! We can’t tell!’

  ‘How can these crystals have gone? We’ve only just set off.’ Ben suddenly clicked his fingers. ‘’Ere, maybe the stiff did the business while we were all out of the room – then he dissolved.’ He swung round to face the dais, half-expecting the missing figure to have suddenly sneaked back in.

  ‘Not likely, is it,’ said Tovel.

  ‘In any case, the countdown started ages ago,’ Polly said.

  ‘According to you,’ Haunt pointed out.

  ‘It’s true, we told you,’ said Ben hotly, his fingers feeling for Polly’s hand. ‘She just disappeared somewhere!’

  Haunt sneered. ‘Just like you appeared out of thin air.’

  ‘You can see our craft for yourself, madam,’ the Doctor said impatiently, gesturing to the TARDIS.

  ‘Where were you standing,’ asked Haunt, ‘when you disappeared?’

  ‘It was dark, I’m not sure.’ Polly frowned. ‘Over by the bodies there, somewhere near the TARDIS. I was trying to get away from them.’

  ‘Marshal, these two were here when we arrived,’ Shel said, his voice flat and emotionless as he looked at the Doctor and Ben. ‘It’s possible they could have set our destination and then hidden the navigational crystals.’

  ‘Oh, come off it,’ Ben protested.

  ‘The systems were dead until you entered,’ the Doctor agreed tetchily. ‘The area was pressurised, as you well know.’

  ‘But we don’t know how long you were here before us,’ Tovel said, without, Ben was pleased to see, a good deal of conviction.

  ‘We’re wasting time!’ the Doctor said. ‘Even without the crystals I’m sure I can decipher the residual coding in the navigational circuits.’

  ‘You can?’ Tovel looked surprised. ‘Care to show me how?’

  ‘Wait,’ Haunt ordered. ‘Scan them, Shel.’

  Shel waved some weird-looking device over the Doctor. Then he stuck it in Ben’s face. Ben felt dizzy for a few moments.

  Shel opened his mouth to speak, but no sound came out. He looked a bit dizzy himself. Maybe it was catching, thought Ben.

  ‘Cl… Clear, Marshal. No power source detected.’

  Haunt frowned at Shel. ‘You all right?’

  ‘I’ll check the girl.’ He moved over to Polly as if nothing had happened. But by the uneasy look between Haunt and Tovel, clearly something significant had.

  ‘Nothing,’ Tovel observed, and Shel turned away impassively.

  ‘As you see, we were telling the truth,’ said the Doctor. ‘Nevertheless, you were quite right to check. The crystals must be on board somewhere.’ He smiled icily at Shel. ‘Concealed by whoever set this vessel in motion.’

  ‘Why can’t they be on the part we left behind?’ Ben asked.

  ‘Without them,’ Tovel explained, ‘this ship can’t change course. Ever.’

  ‘It’s a one-way journey,’ said Polly quietly.

  ‘Indeed, that’s quite possible.’ The Doctor steepled his fingers and turned his eyes to the vaulted ceiling high above. ‘But to where are we travelling, hmm? Let us consider the facts.’

  Haunt looked at him warily. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Firstly, it would seem the Schirr infested this training area and subverted its functions to accommodate their own. If we are travelling under the guidance of their systems it is unlikely we shall be entering Morphiean space. To do so would mean certain suicide for DeCaster and his followers.’

  ‘Yeah, but they’re already dead, Doctor,’ Ben interrupted.

  ‘Precisely, my boy. But the flight of this asteroid, and the timing of its take-off, would have been determined before the bloody conflict that consumed them took place.’

  ‘They’ve turned this whole place against us,’ Haunt breathed. ‘They must mean to use it as a weapon.’

  Shel considered. ‘DeCaster’s intent has always been hostile to Earth and Empire. Outwardly, our appearance, size and mass suggests a simple meteor.’

  ‘This rock could steer smoothly into orbit around an Earth world,’ said Tovel, catching on, ‘then drop out of the sky on any continent before anyone can react.’

  Polly just stared at him, horrified.

  Ben was still scratching his head. ‘But if they had all this planned on the automatics, why stay behind? Why fight among themselves?’

  ‘A power stru
ggle of some kind?’ wondered Shel. ‘Perhaps Pallemar wanted to take control.’

  Haunt nodded, a faraway look in her eyes as if she were somehow watching the bloody events unfold. ‘Pallemar was placing the others in the stasis field. They didn’t know how long they would have to wait for the next training squad. They planned to use our ship to escape in once the trap was sprung, marooning us here. But Pallemar must’ve realised that with DeCaster stuck in stasis, he could set himself up as the leader.’ She nodded with sudden conviction. ‘The scum won’t even stay loyal to their own kind.’

  ‘The scenario would seem to fit,’ said the Doctor. ‘Except for one thing. If such a squabble took place at the end, unexpectedly… why are the crystals not in evidence?’

  Tovel clicked his fingers. ‘Of course. One of the Schirr must have them! If we can breach that stasis field, we can simply take the crystals back and change course as we wish.’

  ‘Scan the corpses, Shel,’ said Haunt.

  All eyes were on Shel as he waved the wand-like device around the dais.

  And shook his head.

  ‘No power source, Marshal,’ he stated.

  Polly felt sick as her hopes plummeted. She noticed the Doctor nod his head, just a fraction, as if he’d suspected as much all along.

  III

  Lindey led the way through the narrow passage in the rock that led to the doorway. Shade wished it was him staying behind to guard it.

  ‘Watch out for dead Schirr,’ he called lightly to Roba and Frog.

  Roba said nothing. Frog gave him an obscene gesture.

  Shade headed off through the glittering shadows of the complex, Lindey just behind him. He felt exposed without his webset, hated having such freedom to think. Without the mission to trammel his thoughts, they were escaping all over.

  Half the bullring had collapsed in on itself. The route back to the ship, along with another tunnel, was buried forever. Shade saw that some of the weed had been shaken down from the crumbling ceiling by the tremors. A cloud of fleas hopped round his feet. He watched them jump, fascinated. Going about their business, unaware giants were gathered around them.

  ‘Shadow?’ asked Lindey lightly.

  He couldn’t stop staring.