Doctor Who_ Ten Little Aliens Part 5

'So why are you risking your body down here with us, then?' she asked. 'How come you didn't go down the Intelligence route?'

He turned and smiled at her, but the shadows were doing unflattering things with the neat, sharp lines of his face. 'It took me time to realise where my true interests lie.' His gaze lowered from her eyes, flicked up and down her. 'Besides, maybe there are some bodies worth taking risks for.'

She shone the torch straight in his eyes. 'You can stop right there.'

He was about to retort, but she shushed him. 'Hey. Behind you.'

Creben turned, and saw what her torch beam had illuminated. 'Symbols of some kind,' he noted.

Lindey touched the wall with her fingers. 'The rock's been smoothed out...'

'The better to carve into, presumably,' Creben said dryly.

'Forgive my humble stab at military intelligence.'

'Forgiven, and best forgotten.'

She gave him the smallest of smiles. 'There are other ways to get security and prestige, you know. Without risking your body or your mind.'

Creben raised an eyebrow. 'Use someone else's?'

Lindey decided she would have to watch Creben.

'This carving,' he said. 'Perhaps it's a sign.' He smiled, that smug little grin of his. 'Hungry cannons, this way.'

Lindey didn't smile back at him as they continued down the tunnel.

Haunt and Shel pushed on through the chambers.

The next room, and the next, were much the same, except they also contained less stylised sculptures of outsized angels moulded into their ceilings and at the base of each pillar.

In each dank chamber they pa.s.sed through they found more and more of the strange carvings cl.u.s.tered together as if for warmth.

Haunt noticed Shel was gripping his gun so tightly his knuckles were showing white. 'The increasing numbers of statues,' she said, 'suggests we're nearing somewhere important, would you agree?'

Shel nodded. 'Whatever it is, I think we might've reached it.'

There was a recess in the rock ahead of them. Drawing nearer, they saw a silver door embedded in the slate. Haunt kicked it open to reveal a tunnel big enough for a single person to move through at a time.

'If we go through there and something's waiting for us,'

Shel muttered, 'we won't stand a chance.'

'I'll go in first,' Haunt said. 'Wait here and cover this entrance while I take a look. I don't want anything following me in here that isn't you.'

Shel nodded, and Haunt walked away into the pitch-blackness.

VIII.

The TARDIS doors opened with the usual penetrating hum, and with the added beeping of some device that was depressurising the control room.

Ben felt a bit of a prat in his new astronaut gear. It was more like a wetsuit than a s.p.a.cesuit, and made from a dull green quilted material which felt a little too snug for comfort in all the wrong areas. The worst of it was the headgear; like looking out from a crystal ball.

'How do I look?' Polly's voice crackled in his ears over the suit's communicators.

Ben turned and whistled at the sight of Polly in her skintight daffodil-yellow suit. 'Let's just say I hope this bleedin' goldfish bowl don't steam up easily.'

'Come along you two,' came the Doctor's voice, disapprovingly. 'We don't know quite what's out there, so stay close to me.' So saying, he led the way out of the s.h.i.+p, fussing and pulling at his own s.p.a.cesuit, which was dark blue. It was hard to believe he had his usual clothes on beneath the thermal material; his body looked thin and wasted and his head disproportionately big through the gla.s.s helmet as a result. The old boy really did look like a buzzard now.

Ben and Polly followed him out, then the Doctor closed the doors. The comforting light spilling out from the control room narrowed to a slit then vanished altogether.

'Don't lock them, Doctor,' Ben suggested as casually as he could. 'You never know, we might need to get back inside in a hurry.'

The Doctor nodded vaguely.

For a few seconds the blackness was absolute. 'Dark, isn't it,' said Polly. He felt her lightly grip his arm, and gave her hand a comforting squeeze he hoped she could feel through her quilted gloves.

Then the Doctor flicked on his torch. The beam revealed small s.n.a.t.c.hes of the cavernous room they stood in, and from them, Ben tried to build a picture of their surroundings.

The room, or cave, or whatever it was, was five-sided. The walls were built from layers and layers of dark stone, and scaled by ornate metal trellises that gleamed like gold. Above these, what looked to be ducting reached right around the room at the point where the walls sloped up to the high, arched ceiling. Slabs of gla.s.s had been set into this roof, hundreds of them, and they winked and signalled back at the Doctor whenever he shone his torch in their direction.

Closer to ground level, banks of weird-looking machinery squatted beneath the trellises. Symbols carved in the slate above presumably denoted the function of each set of controls in whatever language they spoke here.

'Fascinating,' the Doctor said fervently. 'The functionality of a control room but with the trappings of a shrine...'

Ben was considering the ramifications of this when the Doctor's torchlight fell on a cowled shape hunched over a console right beside them, overlooked until now by the far-stretching beam. He felt Polly's grip on his arm tighten and her distorted scream in his ears nearly deafened him.

Ben took a few steps back, instinctively.

A hideous alien face was staring out at him from under the cowl. Its eyes were wide like a fish's, unseeing.

It was lying in a ma.s.s of dried blood.

IX.

'Come on out, Kay-Deeeeees. I got a mouthful of laser waiting just-for-yooooou...'

'Shut it, Frog.' Roba's gun pointed the way ahead through the darkness. 'You know, I hate your crazy voice already. If you're a frog, swallow some of these d.a.m.ned bugs.' He looked down at her in the gloom, her bulging eyes, stubbly head, her twisted grin. He wondered how she just carried on, as messed up as she was. Then his sympathy snapped into annoyance as she started up her crackling warble again and waved her rifle about.

'We should take out every one of these bugs, Roba.'

'You're crazy.'

'Every one of them.' She slapped a hand over a ma.s.s of them quivering on the wall, and wiped it down the curve of her hip. 'Get some numbers on the scanner we can count.'

Roba shook his head again. 'Why'd I get paired with you?'

'Just lucky, honey.'

'You ain't.' ain't.'

Frog shrugged. The half-smile stayed on her lips as usual.

A few metres later, the tunnel ended in big, bronzed double doors.

'Bet they lead someplace bad,' Frog observed.

XI.

'What is it, Doctor?' Ben asked, his voice cracking high in alarm. He turned away from the hideous, glistening head of the thing, sickened.

But before the Doctor could reply, a low rumbling note sounded in the cavern, not carried by the s.p.a.cesuits'

helmets.

'There's air in here,' Polly realised, holding on to Ben now with both arms. 'If we can hear something outside the helmets, there must be air, to carry the sound.'

'Indeed,' muttered the Doctor. A faint display flickered over the gla.s.s of his helmet. 'Yes, and I believe it's breathable.'

'But Doctor,' Ben protested, 'you said -'

'- that there was a vacuum in here, yes,' said the Doctor irritably. 'It would seem the situation has changed.'

'It's getting lighter, too,' breathed Polly. The globe of her helmet knocked against Ben's as she looked around.

Ben swallowed hard. 'She's right, Doctor.' The broken gla.s.s above them was glowing now, magnifying the light the Doctor had thrown at the ceiling a hundred times.

Another deep, sonorous tone rang out, and the grating of metal on rock.

Polly looked terrified. 'What's happening?'

The Doctor came over to stand beside them, gesturing to the far wall where a pentagonal shape glowed with a cold sodium brightness. 'It would appear a doorway is opening.'

Ben ripped the helmet from his suit and gulped down musty air. 'Something's coming?'

'Coming to get us!' Polly breathed as she took off her own s.p.a.ce helmet and gripped it tightly in both hands. 'To get us like it got that horrible thing there!'

'Perhaps,' said the Doctor, heavily. 'And I wonder, did these unfortunate creatures here share in its fate?'

The Doctor was gesturing to a gla.s.sy rectangular shape standing on a raised flat dais beside the TARDIS. They'd missed it in the dark. Now, in the rippling sparkle of the growing light, Ben watched transfixed as grotesque nightmare shapes began to form inside the gla.s.s. Dark shadows gradually resolved themselves into twisted humanoid figures the same size and shape as the dead thing in the chair.

The s.p.a.ce helmet slipped from Ben's fingers and cracked open on the ground.

He was staring at monsters, frozen in gla.s.s at the moment of violent death.

Chapter Three.

Death Comes as the End

I.

There were nine of the creatures. They were ma.s.sive, alien.

The heavy lumpen faces were contorted in pain. Each one was dressed in once-white robes now caked black with dried blood.

Ben turned to Polly. She stared at the waxwork-like horrors for a few moments, then screamed.

The door in the wall had ground almost fully open. Golden light spilled into the chamber through the pentagonal entrance.

'Quiet, Pol!' Ben hissed, grabbing hold of her and turning her away from the gory sight.