by Mark Morris
Dozens of feet, many of them wearing black boots into which were tucked green army fatigues, were approaching his hiding place. They did not hurry, had no need to do so.
Turlough knew that all was lost, but still he couldn’t bring himself to crawl out from under the car and give himself up.
He wished he could sink into the ground. His stomach cramped with dread. A pair of boots broke off from the rest and approached the car. They stopped in front of the vehicle.
The owner of the boots dropped down on to one knee and peered under the car. Turlough found himself face to face with the Doctor’s friend, Sergeant Benton. Benton’s face looked red and blotchy as if he had been out in the sun too long. There was a cloudy darkness, like the reflection of storm clouds, swimming in his eyes.
Benton grinned and saliva gleamed on his blocky white teeth.
‘Boo,’ he said in a rasping voice.
Since entering the R and D unit Tegan had barely said a word. Mike, keeping a surreptitious eye on her, had noticed her clenched, troubled expression. He had noticed the way she moved too, slowly and tentatively, like someone in pain who was determined not to show it. Several times he had asked her if she was OK, and had received a brief nod and a preoccupied, ‘Fine.’ Now she was sitting against the wall in the dormitory area, staring into space and taking deep breaths as though resting after an exhausting journey.
‘Is your friend all right?’ Charlotte asked, glancing across the room. ‘She looks very pale.’
Mike had been helping the medical staff tend to those patients most in need of care and attention. He started to nod, then glanced around and drew Charlotte aside.
Speaking quietly, he said, ‘Well, actually, no she’s not. She’s been infected by this... this virus or whatever it is.’
Charlotte looked alarmed. You mean she’s changing into one of those things? Like my Dad did?’
Mike pulled a face. ‘Keep your voice down. We don’t want to start a panic.’
‘Sorry,’ whispered Charlotte. ‘But what’s going to happen when she becomes... uncontrollable?’
‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,’ said Mike. ‘For the moment she’s harmless enough.’
Tegan chose that precise moment to give a loud groan and slump sideways in a dead faint. Mike rushed to her, Charlotte close behind him. Placing his hand gently beneath Tegan’s head he lifted her back up into a sitting position.
‘Tegan,’ he said, quietly but urgently, ‘Tegan, can you hear me?’
Her lips moved soundlessly for a moment, then in a thick, clotted voice, she said, ‘We are Xaranti.’ Her eyelids fluttered, then parted. The eyes beneath were completely black.
Mike didn’t realise they had drawn an audience until he heard the collective gasp from behind him. He turned to see the doctor and nurse who had tended the Doctor’s wounds, plus several curious patients, stepping back, shocked expressions on their faces. Next moment Max Butler barged through the crowd, looking harassed. ‘What’s going on here?’
he demanded - then he caught a glimpse of Tegan’s eyes a split-second before she closed them again.
‘Oh my God,’ he breathed.
‘She’s fine,’ Mike said hastily. ‘She just needs to rest.’
‘Rest?’ Max said, eyes wide with incredulity. ‘She’s got the plague, man! You’ve got to get her out of here!’
‘There is no plague,’ scoffed Mike. ‘This is a water-borne infection. It can’t be passed from person to person.’
‘How the hell do you know that?’ Max demanded.
‘I just do, that’s all.’
Max shook his head. ‘No. You’ve got to get her out of here.
We can’t take the risk.’
There was another collective gasp as Mike unholstered his gun and pointed it at the ceiling. ‘We can and we will. Tegan is my personal responsibility. And I assure you, Max, that if she tries to harm anyone here, I’ll shoot her. Is that good enough for you?’
Turlough sat on the sand with his back against the TARDIS
door, the faint tingling vibration from the time machine like an echo of the trembling dread in his stomach. He had had no choice but to lead the Brigadier, Benton and four UNIT
troops back to the fun-fair, where the TARDIS stood like a curio between two stalls. The hybrids had loaded the TARDIS
on to the back of an army truck and driven it down to the beach, where it now stood, dwarfed on the outside at least, beside the vast dripping hulk of the usurped Morok craft.
Turlough and the TARDIS were bait for the Doctor - or at least insurance against his departure.
Once again Turlough glanced fearfully at the guns that the quartet of soldiers were pointing at his head. The soldiers’
metamorphosis was continuing apace; their eyes now contained a swirling blackness that came and went, like storm clouds scudding across the moon. Turlough tried to avoid eye contact with any of his captors for fear of antagonising them. He knew how violent and unpredictable those infected by the Xaranti virus could become and didn’t want to give them any kind of an excuse to blow his head off.
They had been waiting for twenty minutes and now Turlough was growing increasingly jittery. He wondered how long the Brigadier was prepared to hang around, what would happen if the Doctor didn’t show up at all.
At first, when the tingling in his back increased, Turlough thought it was due to the fact that he had been sitting in the same position for too long. Then the tingling became a shuddering, and an instant later was accompanied by the trumpeting bellow of the TARDIS’s engines. Irrespective of the guns that were being levelled at him, Turlough scrambled away from the TARDIS and twisted round just in time to see it fade and disappear, dragging the cacophonous din of its de-materialisation with it.
‘Doctor!’ Turlough called in indignance and despair, but it was too late.
The TARDIS was gone.
For a few moments Turlough stared at the place where the TARDIS had stood, unable to believe his eyes. He realised that the Doctor must have reached it before they had, must have been inside it all the time it was being transported down to the beach. His disbelief, however, was more due to the fact that his friend had left him at the mercy of this bunch of gun-toting lunatics. Surely it wouldn’t have taken much for the Doctor to have snatched the door open and dragged him inside? He could have done it before the soldiers were even aware of what was going on.
He turned his attention once more to his captors, whose expressions of shock were almost comical. Then blackness swarmed into the Brigadier’s eyes as he turned them on Turlough and the surprise was replaced with cold, hard fury.
Like a chain reaction, the same expression spread through the soldiers and, as if responding to some unspoken command, they each tilted their heads to regard him.
Turlough, on his knees in the sand, cried out in terror as they threw down their weapons and rushed towards him.
The TARDIS had barely travelled any distance at all. The Doctor had merely allowed the pull of the Xaranti queen to guide his movements and had set the coordinates accordingly. As the TARDIS re-materialised, he patted the pockets of the spare jacket he had procured from the TARDIS
wardrobe then pulled a lever on the console. When the doors opened with a faint hum, he drew himself to his full height and stepped determinedly out into Hell.
He was surrounded by Xaranti, by the stink of them, their bodies pressed together so tightly that it was like standing on a tiny island in a sea of dark, spiny flesh. Xaranti scuttled over one another, their legs pistoning the air; they clung to the walls like scorpions; hung from the metal roof-supports high above his head.
As he took a step forward, they regarded him balefully with their black, unblinking eyes, but they did not attack. Indeed, they edged backwards on either side as he slowly advanced, creating a narrow channel through which he could walk, increasing the crush of their already tightly packed bodies.
Perhaps they had orders from their queen to le
t the Doctor through, or perhaps they simply recognised him as one of their own. Certainly, his physical transformation was advancing rapidly. His eyes were swimming with blackness, the buds of spines were visible on the backs of his hands and on his neck, and the space between his shoulder blades was already starting to bulge.
The room in which the TARDIS had materialised was large and functional, evidently some sort of security clearance chamber ahead of the energy core that was the ship’s heart.
Several hundred yards away, at the end of the channel that the Xaranti had created for him, the Doctor could see a door of dull metal, emblazoned with Morok symbols. Beside it was what had evidently once been some sort of security access panel, now a cannibalised jumble of wildly contrasting technologies. On the metal wall above the door was a large embossed symbol that resembled a flaming star, depicted in vivid purple.
The Doctor did not recognise the literal significance of the symbol, but he did recognise a danger sign when he saw one.
Nevertheless he strode forward calmly, confidently, almost regally, head held high, back as straight as the hump between his shoulder blades would allow, hands clasped loosely behind him. When he reached the door he examined the access panel and traced its meanderings to a bulbous metallic nodule that he guessed might have been Kraal in origin. He twisted it and the door slid open.
The corridor beyond was little more than a metal tube with a grilled walkway along its centre. At the far end was another door and another cannibalised control panel. Ignoring yet another star symbol - this one larger and situated right in the centre of the door - the Doctor again operated the access panel. This door, too, slid open and the Doctor stepped through.
The energy core that powered the ship’s engines was enclosed in a heavily shielded metal tube, like a vast central pillar, which ascended through a circular shaft in the floor and stretched up to the high ceiling. The grumbling throb of the engines themselves, ticking over somewhere below, made the floor vibrate beneath his feet. Dominating the wall-space of this huge room was a densely packed mass of control panels, again stretching from floor to ceiling, which were accessible via a series of ladders and gantries set at regular intervals.
Intertwined with all this technology, smothering it, communing with it, becoming it, was what the Doctor had come to think of as the Xaranti queen.
It was not a quantifiable life-form as such, but a vast formless entity, an accumulation of the thoughts and emotions and memories of myriad races made flesh. The stuff it was made from was not solid, but free-flowing like liquid glass, iridescent patterns constantly swirling within it. It oozed and curled above and in front of the Doctor, aspects of the many different races whose minds it had absorbed over the years forming briefly within the malleable stuff of its being, as if attempting to break free, before sinking back into the flux. The Doctor saw eyes and claws and mouths; the suggestion of a fur-covered limb; a patch of warty flesh. The impressions were too swift and too vague for him to recognise any of the species depicted, but each and every one of them looked briefly familiar.
‘Good afternoon,’ he said as the ‘queen’ coiled and rippled.
‘Any chance of a chat?’
The stuff quivered and then bulged in front of him, a vast bubble forming on its surface. The Doctor imagined it bursting and spattering him with goo, but he stood his ground.
The bubble elongated, formed into a gluey tentacle which probed almost hesitantly towards his face. It halted a few feet away from him and almost immediately the tip began to thicken and swell, as if the tentacle were a hollow tube and more of the stuff was being pumped through it.
Slowly, at the end of the tentacle, a shape began to form.
The effect was like an impressive display of glass-blowing.
The shape started as a blob, which eventually extended limbs of its own before beginning to acquire definition. Within minutes a perfect but featureless humanoid form stood in front of the Doctor, though, like a new-born, remained attached to the main body of the ‘queen’ via a clear gel-like umbilicus.
The figure could have been constructed from clear glass and filled with colourless, constantly moving oil if it wasn’t for the facial features which drifted haphazardly within it, incessantly forming and fading and re-forming, as if attempting to settle on the correct location. Eyes of many different shapes and hues, as many as a dozen at a time, blinked lazily from the flux of the creature’s being. Several mouths suddenly opened in the figure’s limbs and torso, and one even opened in its head, albeit from the area where its left eye would normally be.
The mouths spoke in unison, though each used a different voice. There was a gruff male voice; a lilting female one; another that was sexless and sibilant. ‘I trust that this form meets with your approval, Doctor?’ the figure said.
The Doctor shrugged. ‘I never judge by appearances.’
The mouths smiled. ‘Then that is something we have in common. To we Xaranti, all forms, all species, have something to offer us. We celebrate the great variety of life forms in the Universe.’
The Doctor’s face hardened. ‘That’s not the same thing at all. You don’t appreciate variety for its own sake. You celebrate it only because of what it adds to yourselves. By recreating other species in your own image, you’re making mockery of life, denigrating the essence that makes each race unique.’
‘We liberate other species, Doctor,’ the figure said. ‘We do not destroy them. They grow stronger through us.’
‘No,’ the Doctor snapped, his face flushing with anger. ‘You don’t liberate, you enslave. You absorb their individuality into this great repository of yours and turn them into mindless drones, creatures driven by nothing more than negative rudimentary emotions and a basic hive mentality. Conquest through absorption. It’s what the Cybermen do, and the Wirrrn. It’s the most heinous crime in the universe.’
‘Soon you will become part of us, Doctor,’ the figure said, its voices imbued with smugness. ‘Soon you will celebrate the fact that all life exists within us just as we celebrate it.’
‘I don’t think so,’ the Doctor replied quietly.
‘You have no choice, Doctor. You are becoming us.’
‘I’m afraid that’s where you’re wrong,’ the Doctor countered. ‘I’ll never become you. I’ll never join you. I’ll never see life through your eyes. In fact, I’m here to offer you the chance to withdraw the infection you’ve set in motion on this planet and leave before I get cross. Rather sporting of me, I think you’ll agree.’
‘Withdraw the infection?’ The voices chuckled. ‘It is already too late, Doctor.’
‘There’s an old Earth saying - it’s never too late. But then you probably already know that.’ Steel entered the Doctor’s voice. ‘You know as well as I do how you can withdraw the contagion.’
‘Do we?’ the voices said innocently.
‘Yes. You can think it back.’
The Xaranti queen did not respond immediately and the Doctor smiled and nodded. ‘I’m right, aren’t I? There are no toxins, no germs, no bacteria involved in this infection of yours. It’s psychological warfare, a thought-plague. You simply release this gloop of yours into the water where it’s ingested or absorbed, firstly by marine and then by animal life. The gloop contains telepathic suggestions encoded at a molecular level, which then persuade the host body that it is metamorphosising. It’s an impressive feat, I’ll give you that, making people change physically simply by planting the belief that they’re going to do so inside their heads, but it’s ultimately flawed. Because when it comes down to it, it’s simply a question of mind over matter. All it takes is a stronger mind than your own to expose the whole process for the sham it is.’
The Xaranti queen spoke, and just for an instant its many voices seemed to coalesce into something deep and melodious, before splitting once again into its constituent parts. ‘You are a clever man, Doctor. How did you come by your discovery?’
‘Oh, process of elimination,’ said the
Doctor airily. ‘There was nothing very clever about it really. I ran some of the infected material through an exhaustive programme of analysis in the TARDIS, but could find no physical reason why the infection was taking place. In desperation I dug out an old lash-up of mine which reproduces thoughts as images, and decided that if I couldn’t read the stuff physically I’d try reading it mentally.’ He smiled. ‘The results were extremely interesting, as I’m sure you can imagine. Improvisation has always been my watchword.’
If the figure had been human it might have shaken its head in dismissal. ‘Your discovery is not important,’ it said.
‘Nothing has changed.’
‘Oh, it has,’ the Doctor insisted, and, reaching into his jacket pocket, drew out a flask of clear liquid and held it up.
Did the eyes opening and closing lazily within the iridescent flux widen a little in alarm, or was that simply the Doctor’s imagination? Certainly its many voices sounded wary. ‘What is that?’
‘Antidote,’ said the Doctor brightly. ‘I threw it together in the TARDIS.’ He unstoppered the flask and drank the contents in three gulps.
The effects were almost instantaneous. The cloud of Xaranti infection faded from the Doctor’s eyes, the spines on his hands and neck withered and shrank until there was no evidence that they had ever been there, and the hump on his back deflated, enabling him to draw himself once more to his full height.
‘You see?’ he said, holding the flask up. ‘Mind over matter.’
