by Stephen Cole
‘You can’t have been happy when we turned up,’ Ben said cockily.
‘The presence of any excess organisms in the complex would destabilise the ritual,’ DeCaster said in his flesh-crawling voice. ‘Three more had to die.’
‘It might’ve been Frog if she’d managed to kill herself,’ Polly murmured. ‘But when Haunt saved her, you killed Joiks instead.’
Creben turned to Ben and indicated the giant angel. ‘Lucky for your party those things couldn’t distinguish between us and you.’
Haunt nodded, her voice still devoid of any feeling. ‘Denni’s webset was destroyed with the rest of her. I didn’t think we’d need it.’ Now she actually addressed Polly directly: ‘When the construct took Lindey instead of you, I made sure we kept the webset safe.’
‘And once it became apparent that Shel was an artificial intelligence, he was next to be slaughtered,’ the Doctor said, looking sickened. ‘A cyborg simply wouldn’t do.’
‘It turned out well that the three of you came here from nowhere,’ Haunt admitted. ‘You could wear the web as well as anyone else.’
‘And a good thing for you that the cleansing process happened to drive out your cyst, hmm?’ Haunt didn’t react, but the Doctor nodded. ‘You fell desperately ill. A most ingenious way of diverting suspicion away from you. Yes, you’ve been very clever,’ he proclaimed graciously, as he painfully stood back up. ‘But are you really so keen to give your body to one of these creatures, hmm?’
‘There’s been no going back for me, Doctor,’ Haunt said coldly. ‘Not for a long, long time.’
The Doctor clicked his tongue, then turned his back on Haunt and addressed DeCaster as he would a waiter who had given poor service. ‘But isn’t all this a little small-scale, hmm? I can believe your ragged band of Schirr dissidents might need to skulk in the shadows like this, but the Morphieans have the might of an entire quadrant…’ He tailed off, a wily smile on his face. ‘Only they don’t, do they?’ He turned to the construct, gripped his lapels and tipped back his head. ‘You’re dissidents yourself, aren’t you!’
The cherub looked at him blankly.
‘The old links between our peoples never truly died,’ said DeCaster. ‘Certain factions in Morphiea have been pressing for the expansion of the Morphiean empire on a corporeal level. We have let them taste the feel of flesh. Naturally, they want more.’
The Doctor would not look at him. He concentrated on the giant stone baby. ‘Will you not speak to me, sir?’
‘Our rulers are not mindful of the Earth’s expansion.’ Polly shuddered at the return of the angel’s dry, dead voice. ‘They would let humans seed the entire Quadrant, content to operate on the intangible planes.’ The statue’s face remained blank – clearly the Morphiean hadn’t got much of a handle on emotion – but it made a horrible crackling sound, like bones breaking, that Polly took to be laughter. ‘We shall not surrender all claim to the physical for all eternity to make way for animals.’
‘There, you see?’ The Doctor looked at Polly and the others. ‘It is some wayward faction only that has been making these terror attacks on the Earth. In league with the Schirr all along.’
Creben had already cottoned on. ‘The rest of Morphiea couldn’t give a damn about us.’
‘This complex will travel to the heart of the Quadrant,’ DeCaster continued in his purring voice. ‘We will use the renewed strength your lives will give us and the amplified power from the joining ritual to crack the Morphiean mind force wide open, to suck out its secrets …’ He licked his lips with a fat leathery tongue. ‘With our allies then in dominance over all Morphiea we shall begin our assault on humanity in earnest.’
Polly saw two more Schirr had appeared in the new doorway behind the TARDIS, their raw, shiny skin gleaming in the bright light.
‘The prelude to the ritual is complete,’ said one.
As if this was some ominous signal, the rest of the Schirr shifted down from their platform, slowly and painfully, eyes sunken and white. They tramped past Haunt, who did not flinch, and took up positions at the various consoles. Polly held on tight to Ben’s hand, shrank into him as the creatures lumbered by.
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.
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 any more. ‘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.’
