Ten Little Aliens: 50th Anniversary Edition

by Stephen Cole

  ‘Then let us help you,’ the Doctor implored him. ‘By close study –’

  ‘Study Frog all you want,’ Roba shouted. ‘I’m finding Shel. Gonna make him put a stop to whatever’s doing this to me.’ He backed away towards the exit, fired off another couple of laser bolts into the floor in front of them as he squeezed through the barricade.

  ‘We’ll find you, Roba,’ Haunt yelled.

  ‘Or the angels will,’ Creben added.

  ‘Anyone comes looking for me knows what they get.’ Roba fired one more blast, high over their heads, and ran from the room.

  Tovel started to follow.

  ‘No,’ said Haunt. ‘Let him go. Let him calm down. Then we’ll go after him.’

  Ben looked worried. ‘I wondered what was up with him. Don’t reckon he’ll ever calm down.’

  ‘He will, when he realises it’s hopeless.’ Haunt gave a sideways glance at Frog. ‘And besides. This proves the need for those examinations.’

  Polly saw the Doctor nod thoughtfully. Haunt led her off to behind the depleted row of frozen Schirr corpses, a grisly audience to watch them undress with sightless eyes.

  *

  III

  Ben looked enviously at Creben’s toned, muscular body. He was a regular Charles Atlas on the sly. There wasn’t a mark on him.

  Creben returned the favour with an unenthusiastic inspection. ‘You’re clear.’

  Ben turned to the Doctor, who was doing up his shirt, and gave him a thumbs-up. The Doctor nodded cheerfully, so presumably he had passed muster too. Now he motioned that Tovel should undress.

  ‘You want to check Shade?’ Creben asked.

  ‘Not a lot.’ Then he saw Shade was rising from his couch. If he looked too far to his right, he could probably see Haunt and Polly giving each other the once-over. Well, he’d soon fix that little game.

  ‘Kit off, sunshine,’ Ben said cheerily, positioning himself carefully so Shade was looking well away from the bodies on view. But Shade wasn’t showing much interest in anything. There was a frown on his face deeper than his few remaining scars. ‘What’s up? Didn’t like the film?’

  ‘The webset was Lindey’s,’ he said, and tapped his fingers distractedly against the metal band. ‘Her trip through the tunnels. Nothing that could help us.’ He fixed Ben with his green eyes. ‘You should’ve seen her there. Every move was textbook, every decision… She had a smart mouth, sure, but the way she carried herself… She never even had to try…’

  ‘What’re you talking about?’ Ben asked.

  Shade looked like he was going to start blubbing, but for himself or for Lindey Ben couldn’t tell. ‘I thought we hated each other, me and her. But I guess we each just wanted what the other had.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ Ben said awkwardly. ‘You’d better show me what you’ve got now, Haunt’s orders. And don’t worry, I’m not about to hold anything and ask you to cough –’

  ‘No. Not me too.’

  The anguished voice was barely recognisable as Tovel’s.

  ‘I’m so very sorry,’ the Doctor said, holding up his hands in a calming gesture. ‘So desperately sorry.’

  Tovel was topless, hugging himself. Ben saw straight away the patch of globby alien flesh on the small of his back.

  ‘Marshal Haunt,’ Tovel shouted, between loud, shuddering breaths.

  Haunt bobbed around the corner of the macabre exhibit of alien bodies, Polly – kit on again – right behind her. At least she was all right.

  ‘It’s happening to me too.’ Tovel offered his hands to Haunt as if expecting her to handcuff him.

  She didn’t move to take them.

  ‘You should restrain me,’ Tovel insisted.

  Haunt shook her head emphatically. ‘Just make sure you hold on to yourself, Tovel.’

  ‘No need for cuffs if you wait a while, Tovel,’ a new voice called.

  Ben stared in amazement as he realised where the call had come from. ‘Frog?’ He jogged over to her shadowy corner of the room, the others, Tovel included, close behind him.

  ‘Soon you won’t be able to move at all!’ The voice would’ve been Doris Day’s if she’d grown up in the Bronx. It couldn’t belong to a knockabout like Frog.

  ‘She can talk again,’ Polly said quietly.

  Ben grinned broadly. Until he actually saw Frog. He tried to keep the smile fixed in place for her, but it was hopeless.

  The skin on her hands, neck and chin had turned shiny and spongy. Beneath her combat suit her body had grown bulkier. It was pressing up against the material, pulsing all over. But her face was the worst. While the scars had faded to soft, pale channels in her skin, her features were coarsening, growing larger. Like her face was an inflated mask over the real thing.

  ‘I’ve got this to look forward to.’ Tovel’s voice cracked as he spoke, leaving the words midway between timid question and bleak statement.

  Ben looked dead ahead as Tovel pulled on the top part of his combat suit, hiding the diseased flesh from view.

  Frog’s thickening lips twitched in a coy smile as her eyes darted from face to face.

  ‘Kill me before it comes to this,’ Tovel whispered. Ben hoped that was more of a general prayer than an instruction to any of them.

  ‘Don’t be scared, Tovel,’ said Frog. ‘I’m not. Not any more. This thing is healing me.’

  ‘Stop this,’ Haunt warned her.

  ‘I can’t move, but I think I’ll be able to, soon. It’s making me strong.’

  Ben told himself this was Frog’s cheerful optimism, though it sounded more like a threat coming from this bloated creature.

  ‘You didn’t think so before,’ Polly reminded her. ‘You wanted to… to hurt yourself.’

  Frog nodded. Her new double chins wobbled like jellies. ‘Yeah, well… swings and roundabouts, I guess.’

  ‘My dear,’ said the Doctor. He alone was acting as if everything was fine, with no cause for alarm. ‘I can see you’re excited, but you’re really not well, no. Not well at all. You should be resting.’

  ‘So you don’t wanna know my news, then?’ she said, almost shyly.

  Everyone waited expectantly. Ben could tell Frog was savouring this, the centre of attention at last.

  ‘This webset. It ain’t Lindey’s…’

  ‘Duh,’ said Shade. ‘I had hers.’

  ‘…but it’s not Denni’s either.’

  Ben felt a tingle drive up his spine.

  Frog chuckled. ‘It’s Shel’s.’

  She got, Ben imagined, her desired reaction. Everyone stared first at her, then at each other, transfixed.

  ‘Shel’s?’ Haunt’s face was stony.

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘But he’s a cyborg, an artificial intelligence,’ Haunt argued. ‘How could he wear the web like the rest of us?’

  ‘He didn’t,’ said the Doctor. ‘Such enfeebling devices reduce the whole tract of human experience to a digital impression, a stream of ones and zeroes.’ He chuckled. ‘Since Shel’s mind functions digitally also, I imagine he would interface with the webset far more efficiently.’

  ‘Think you mean, used to interface,’ said Frog, with a crafty smile. ‘He’s dead.’

  Creben stared. ‘Dead? How?’

  ‘He was ripped to shreds by the statues and flushed down some big glass toilet.’

  ‘So they got him too,’ said Polly.

  ‘Good riddance,’ muttered Shade.

  Frog tutted. ‘Oh, but was it?’

  ‘Could you just skip the mystery theatre,’ Haunt snapped. ‘Say what you’ve got to say.’

  ‘He didn’t put a foot wrong. Not once, from start to finish.’ Frog seemed to have sobered up suddenly. Her fingers stroked the webset. ‘Being Shel was weird. Boring. No feelings, no thoughts, just reactions, decisions. Then he got sick, confused… couldn’t speak.’ Frog looked at the Doctor. ‘That panel he wasted. I think he was trying to tell you something. And he didn’t run far before they got him. They were hiding in the dark, a whole
bunch.’

  No one said anything for a few moments, trying to make sense of the revelations.

  ‘But…’ Haunt looked like her view of the world had clouded over. ‘But if he wasn’t here to set this up, what was he doing here?’

  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 we
re 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.