by Mark Morris
They got halfway there, then three-quarters, then suddenly they had no more than twenty paces to go. It was still quiet, the coldness welcome now on Turlough’s hot skin, his face running with sweat beneath the handkerchief that he wore over his mouth and nose. They came to a momentary halt, a natural pause before the final push for home. The Doctor took the TARDIS key from his pocket, gave Turlough a brief nod and they stepped forward again.
A shadow loomed from behind the TARDIS. Turlough faltered, gripping the Doctor’s arm, but the Doctor merely patted him absently on the hand and took another step forward.
And then all at once, away to their left, a section of metal wall, some twenty feet square, crashed down like a drawbridge.
Turlough’s heart gave such a lurch that he thought he was going to drop dead on the spot. He all but leaped into the Doctor’s arms, who himself swung round, instantly alert.
Dust was spiralling up from the section of collapsed wall.
Beyond, there was only blackness.
The shadow behind the TARDIS bulged again, and suddenly something was emerging from it. Turlough couldn’t help it - he screamed. The creature now scuttling into the semi-darkness of the cargo bay was like something from his worst nightmare. Its torso was roughly the size and shape of a bull’s - powerful and huge-shouldered, packed with muscle.
However it moved on eight jointed, black, crablike legs, and from the tip of its hind-quarters a massive scorpion-like tail curled upwards into the air like a giant black question-mark.
Its face, bristling with the quills that covered the rest of its body, was studded with bulging black eyes like those of a spider. As it moved forward with a hideous balletic grace to position itself between the two time travellers and the TARDIS, Turlough became aware that more of the gigantic arachnids were scurrying from the square of blackness where the section of wall had fallen down, moving forward to surround himself and the Doctor. Turlough was petrified, but the Doctor calmly doffed his hat and said, ‘Good morning.’
The creature that had emerged from behind the TARDIS
raised itself up on its legs so that its face was a good eight feet above the ground, opened a flap-like mouth beneath its myriad eyes and made a furious hissing sound, like water dumped on a pan of hot fat.
Part Three
Falling Prey
The creatures advanced slowly, tightening the circle around the two time travellers. As they moved, the bristles that covered their bodies rustled like wind through dry leaves, and their ‘feet’ clicked on the metal floor like tap shoes. The hot, musky stench of them was almost overwhelming.
Turlough, already light-headed with fear, felt certain he was going to pass out. He only managed to avoid it by clutching tightly to the Doctor’s arm. He glanced at the Doctor and saw that his eyes were closed, his face serene. What did that mean? Had he already accepted his fate and put himself into some kind of self-induced trance - perhaps so that when the creatures began to tear them apart he wouldn’t feel a thing?
If so, it was grossly unfair. Why should Turlough have to suffer alone?
He squeezed the Doctor’s arm as hard as he could. Then, when that didn’t work, he shook him. He tried to speak the Doctor’s name, but his saliva had thickened to a gum that glued his tongue to the floor of his mouth. He tried to close his eyes, to blot everything out as the Doctor had done, but terrible though it was, he couldn’t not watch what was going to happen. Any moment now, he expected the creatures to rush forward, making that awful hissing sound. The only thing he felt he could hope for was that his demise would be mercifully quick.
All at once the legs of the creature that had first appeared, the one blocking the way to the TARDIS, seemed to buckle slightly. The creature staggered sideways as if drunk, its legs scraping and clattering on the ground as it tried to right itself. It cocked its head in a curiously dog-like way and this time its hissing sounded like an expression of bewilderment.
Turlough stared at the creature, dumbfounded, then gradually became aware that the others were behaving the same way. They were blundering against one another like cattle in the dark, hissing confusedly. One, at the outermost edge of the circle, was barged by its tottering fellows with such force that it crashed sideways to the ground, black legs pedalling frantically at the air.
The Doctor’s eyes popped open so suddenly that it seemed to snap his head back. For a moment he stared straight ahead as if hypnotised, then he blinked and his features relaxed. He looked around him with an expression of mild curiosity. ‘Interesting reaction,’ he murmured.
Turlough, his mouth still too dry to speak, gripped the Doctor’s arm even tighter. The Doctor winced and looked at him. ‘Would you mind not doing that.’
With a gargantuan effort, Turlough tore his lips apart and tried to speak. The pressure made him feel as though his head was about to burst, but he managed to croak out the word, ‘TARDIS.’
His companion’s lack of urgency made Turlough want to shake him. The Doctor glanced around once more, then nodded slowly. ‘In the circumstances, that might be the most prudent course of action.’
He walked unhesitatingly forward towards the giant arachnid, which looked utterly disorientated now, stumbling around in a drunken circle, as if chasing its huge, swaying tail. The Doctor gave the creature a wide berth, Turlough cringing behind him, clutching the sleeve of his coat like a small child hanging on to its mother’s skirts. Calmly the Doctor fitted the key into the lock and opened the door. As Turlough plunged gratefully inside, the Doctor turned back briefly, raised his hat and said, ‘Sorry, must dash.’ Then he followed Turlough inside.
Once inside the console room, Turlough tore the sweaty handkerchief from his face, slumped against the wall, then sank to the floor in a quivering heap, roundels pressing uncomfortably into his back. Shudders of reaction flowed through his body as the Doctor pottered around the console like an old man in his garden shed, making minor adjustments with little nods and grunts of self-satisfaction.
Turlough allowed his head to droop into his cupped hands and for a while he simply sat there, eyes closed, waiting for the reaction to run its course. At last he opened his eyes and raised his head, and saw the Doctor standing with his hands in his pockets, regarding him patiently. Feeling that the onus was on him to speak, Turlough swallowed and said, thickly,
‘Those things out there... what were they?’
The Doctor removed his hands from his pockets and put them on the edge of the console, leaning forward like a speaker at a lectern. ‘I haven’t encountered them before,’ he said, ‘but I’m almost certain they were Xaranti. They’re a species of intergalactic scavengers with no particular technological or cultural identity of their own. They move through space in the hijacked vessels of other species, perpetuating their own race by subjecting the crews of the ships they capture, and the populations of the planets they invade, to an infection so aggressive that it forces their victims’ bodies to transform. As they absorb other species physically, so they absorb their knowledge too.’
‘They’re parasites, in other words,’ Turlough said.
‘Precisely.’
Turlough shuddered. ‘Those things didn’t look capable of piloting ships. They seemed so... savage.’
Oh, there’s far more to the Xaranti than those creatures out there. They’re simply the hunter-gatherers. The brains behind the operation will be at the heart of the community, well hidden and well protected. When a member of a particular species becomes a Xaranti, they don’t so much lose their knowledge and their memories as store them. In effect, their new bodies become processing plants for the information they store, and once processed the Xaranti secrete this information as a kind of... colourless gloop.
These various secretions, which are quite literally knowledge and memory given physical form, merge to form a separate living, thinking entity, a controlling intelligence for the creatures who spawned it.’
Turlough was frowning, struggling to grasp all this. ‘So you�
�re saying these creatures create their own queen?’
‘Exactly!’ the Doctor cried with an air of triumph, as if Turlough had finally grasped a concept that had been eluding him. The Xaranti warriors are not themselves designed to use the knowledge they absorb, so instead they create a giant, communal mind which assimilates all the information fed to it and which controls and directs their actions. It’s a perfect symbiotic relationship.’ He beamed, as if he himself was the one responsible for such an extraordinary genetic feat.
Turlough shook his head in wonderment. ‘It’s very clever,
‘he said.
‘Clever?’ said the Doctor indignantly. ‘It’s staggering!’
‘I suppose so,’ said Turlough dryly, beginning to regain a little of his composure, ‘though what the Xaranti do is only the biological equivalent of other species building computers to solve problems that they’re unable to solve themselves.’
‘Not at all. Any old fool can build a computer. This is more like mentally-deficient parents purposely creating a super-intelligent child to take charge of their lives.’
Turlough raised his eyebrows as if he couldn’t be bothered to argue, and nodded towards the doors. ‘So what happened to those creatures out there?’
‘I was only trying to communicate with them,’ said the Doctor, as if he was being accused of something. ‘I think my message must have interfered with their instructions and confused them.’
Turlough pushed himself to his feet, approached the console, and after a moment’s hesitation turned on the scanner screen. The Xaranti were still milling about outside, though looked to be getting themselves back together again now, their movements more coordinated. He shuddered at the sight of their spiny bodies, and the legs - like huge inverted black Vs - that supported them, and switched it off again. ‘Where are they from, Doctor?’ he asked, trying to sound brisk, business-like.
‘Originally from an unnamed planet in the Tau Ceti system, but that was destroyed several centuries ago in their war with the Zygons. Both races are nomadic now, but no doubt the conflict will continue until one or both of them have been wiped out.’
He shook his head sadly. Turlough said, ‘The Xaranti are on a recruitment drive then?’
‘Perpetually,’ said the Doctor.
‘Then I suppose we’ll have to stop them, won’t we?’
The Doctor looked at Turlough, his face giving nothing away. ‘What do you suggest?’
Turlough tried to look confident. ‘From what you’ve told me, they must be vulnerable through their queen. Couldn’t you pilot the TARDIS directly into the queen’s lair and destroy it?’
The Doctor shook his head. ‘She’ll be heavily protected, and she won’t allow her warriors to be caught out telepathically a second time.’
‘Well... why not simply blow the ship up then? Humans have got nuclear technology, haven’t they?’
‘We’re inside a Morok battle cruiser,’ the Doctor pointed out.
‘So?’
‘It has reflective melganite shielding. A nuclear warhead would not even so much as dent it.’
Turlough scowled, irritated. ‘Well, if there’s nothing we can do, we might as well just get out of here and leave the Xaranti to it.’
The Doctor blinked at him in astonishment. ‘Who says there’s nothing we can do?’
‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ Mike asked gently.
For almost half a minute Charlotte didn’t answer. She sat in the front passenger seat, staring unseeingly at her sandaled feet, hands resting slackly in her lap. Mike waited patiently, and at last she slowly raised her head. She was a pretty girl, but even the first time he had met her, Mike had noticed tell-tale signs of strain around her mouth and eyes.
Now she looked haunted. The skin around her eyes looked bruised, the eyes themselves like bore-holes into her wounded soul. The wound was fresh now, and though Mike knew that in time it would heal, he knew also that the scar of it would always be with her.
‘Yes,’ she whispered as though it was required of her.
‘What would you like to do now?’ Mike asked, and immediately thought how inappropriate his question sounded. He imagined Imogen Maybury, Charlotte’s mother, leaning forward from the back seat and snapping, ‘What do you suggest? The fun-fair? The beach? Or perhaps we should take in a show?’
Mike glanced at Imogen, and although she showed no sign of doing or saying anything of the sort, he felt an urge to modify his question. Almost stumbling over his words he said, ‘Would you like me to take you back to the... the boarding house?’
Charlotte paused, then gave a single nod. It looked as though it was taking her a great deal of effort even to communicate and Mike felt ashamed for imposing on her. He should be taking charge, not putting the onus on her to make decisions. She was what... seventeen, eighteen? And yet Mike had observed that between mother and daughter, it was Charlotte and not Imogen who took on the natural role of protector. It was Charlotte who had - eventually - spoken to the policemen and to Mike; she who had accepted Mike’s offer of support; she who had put her arm around her mother’s shoulders and walked with her to the car.
It was Charlotte, too, who had walked across the car park with Mike to the ominous, antiseptic environment of the police mortuary and identified her brother’s body. Mike had seen many victims of violent death in his military career, but Charlotte’s presence had made this experience one of his worst. The morticians had done their best to hide the gruesome nature of Chris Maybury’s injuries, but the way they had pulled the white sheet almost primly up to his nose so as to hide the fact that his bottom jaw had been all but ripped from his skull, made it worse, somehow, than seeing the full extent of what had been done to him.
When Mike looked at Charlotte to see how she was coping with it all, he saw that her face was almost as white as her brother’s. Crossing her arms tightly beneath her breasts as if for protection, she edged right up to the viewing window and gazed with vacant eyes into what they could see of Chris’s dead face.
A man wearing a surgeon’s gown and cap, his mask resting on his chest like a small bib, was standing in the white-tiled room beside the trolley. He watched Charlotte’s impassive face through the glass for a little while, then stepped forward and bent towards a microphone.
‘Miss Maybury,’ he said gently, ‘can you confirm that this is the body of your brother, Christopher John Maybury?’
Charlotte gave no sign of having heard the police surgeon.
Mike reached out and touched her bare arm.
‘Charlotte,’ he said. ‘Is it Chris?’
Apart from her lips, no part of her body moved. ‘It doesn’t look like him,’ she said bleakly.
‘So it’s not Chris -’ began Mike.
Her head snapped round and the expression on her face was awful to see. Part anger, part confusion, part horror, but all of it for the moment mostly repressed, crushed down by numbing shock. ‘No,’ she said, her voice rough and exhausted as if she was close to breaking, ‘it is him. It just...
doesn’t... look like him.’
Her face crumpled and she bowed her head. She looked to be weeping tearlessly and soundlessly. Mike reached out again and this time put his hand on her back. Feeling her bra strap beneath her pink top he withdrew it immediately, flushing with embarrassment.
Annoyed at himself, he glanced at the police surgeon, nodded and raised his eyebrows, silently asking the question: Is that all you need? Can we go now? The police surgeon nodded back and Mike said, ‘Come on, Charlotte, let’s get out of here.’
Charlotte blinked up at him, then looked blearily at her dead brother through the glass once again. ‘What will they do with him?’ she asked plaintively.
‘Nothing,’ said Mike, caught off guard by the question.
‘Will they look after him?’
‘Of course they will. Come on.’
Charlotte had to sign a couple of forms and then they were outside, blinking in the sunshine. As Mike dr
ove her and her mother back to the boarding house, he had to fight down a constant urge to apologise for all the people they could see enjoying themselves. There were kids eating ice-creams; couples walking hand in hand on the promenade; shrieks of delight accompanying the blare of music from the fun-fair; groups of rowdy young men sitting outside pubs, drinking beer.
By the time they pulled up in front of Ambrosia Villa, Mike felt as if he was sweating not from the heat but the silence.
He cut the engine and looked at Charlotte, who had either fallen asleep or merely closed her eyes to blot everything out for a while. Glancing into his rear-view mirror, he saw Imogen sitting stiffly in her seat, staring into the distance.
‘Mrs Maybury?’ Mike said quietly. When there was no response he raised his voice a little. ‘Mrs Maybury, we’re here. Would you like me to come with you while you speak to your husband?’
Imogen’s eyes flickered as if with fear. ‘I can’t,’ she whispered.
Mike was considering how to respond when Charlotte murmured, ‘I’ll do it.’
Mike looked at her. She hadn’t moved, but her eyes were open. ‘Charlotte, you’ve done enough,’ he said gently.
‘I’ll do it,’ she said more fiercely. ‘I’ll do it now.’
Mike was naturally mild-mannered, but he couldn’t help feeling a flash of irritation towards Imogen Maybury. He understood how utterly devastated she must feel, but all the same surely she should not continue to allow the full burden of responsibility to fall on the shoulders of her teenage daughter. He glanced again at Imogen in the rear-view mirror, but she failed or refused to meet his eye.
‘Look, Charlotte, are you sure you want to go through with this?’ he asked after a moment.
