DARK PROGENY.

STEVE EMMERSON.

Part One

Through envy of the devil came death into the world.

Wisdom of Solomon ch. 2, v. 24

11.9.2847 [Earth Standard] Ceres Alpha

A scream exploded out of her as Veta Manni sensed the oncoming pain like a rapidly expanding storm. It hit. Ripped through her. Subsided and left her shivering and gasping for air. She chased rivers of sweat from her face and tried to prepare for the next giant wave. Her body was a wreck. Muscles and sinews torn apart by the tornadoes that struck one after another. A relentless, perpetual torture. She thought she must have experienced heights of agony well up there in the outer reaches of human tolerance.

And it was building again. She gritted her teeth and clenched her fists. The pain came with terrifying intensity. She lost her grip. Howled and screamed and produced animal sounds that weren't her voice. She was so entirely lost in the suffering now that she felt she'd left her body and was crashing around in a tumultuous sea of pain.

Josef watched his wife undergoing her private torment, and the fear tore at his throat. His insides were knots. He took her hand, feeling powerless to help. As the pain died away, she gripped his hand tight and gasped for air. He leaned in close and kissed her cheek, then found her eyes imploring him.

'More drugs,' she pleaded.

Josef shook his head sorrily. 'They won't let you. Too dangerous.'

'I can't go on, Joe.'

'Course you can,' he told her, forcing a smile into his face. But he wasn't so sure. She was visibly weakening now. Wet with sweat and quivering with a mixture of exhaustion and fear. Her eyes were dark hollows, full of dread thoughts. He swallowed back the compulsion to sob and tried to force down inside him the feelings that were screaming to get out.

The past six months had been a huge strain on both of them. Even before today, and the panic of the baby arriving a whole two months early, Josef had long been gravely worried for his wife and their child. It had been one endless catalogue of terrors. The abnormal scans, the changes in Veta, the intense 11.9.2847 [Earth Standard] Ceres Alpha 7.bouts of sickness. His wife had gone from being a blissful prospective mum to a physical and psychological wreck in the s.p.a.ce of those six immeasurable months.

Sensing movement behind him, Josef turned to find Dr Pryce in the doorway, regarding them with a curiously absent look as if his mind were elsewhere.

There were two nurses behind him, and a man in a suit whom Josef didn't recognise. Pryce's face abruptly broke into a disarming smile and he stepped into the room to look over Veta.

'Everything going all right?' Pryce asked, not bothering to introduce the nurses and suited man who'd followed him in and now stood observing Veta's naked bottom half with a keen scrutiny.

Josef threw the sheet over his wife's legs and nodded uncertainly. For a moment there was only the sound of Veta's coa.r.s.e breathing as she prepared for the next contraction. Then she began to scream and Josef grasped her hand, this time feeling her squeeze so hard he thought she was going to crush the bones in his fingers. The scream lasted for ever, and all Josef could do was watch the suffering so obvious in her contorted face. This wasn't his wife. His wife was a pretty girl, not this snarling, screeching, crimson-faced monster.

The wave subsided and Josef was relieved to feel the pressure on his fingers release. Veta was sobbing gently now, and she watched him through her tears for a moment before recovering her voice.

'Next time,' she hissed, ' you you can have the baby.' can have the baby.'

So, thought Fitz, this is panic stations. OK. Just maintain that cool and aloof exterior. Try not to appear too obviously fazed. And for G.o.d's sake don't look as though you're about to scream scream! Even though the TARDIS is shrieking through the vortex and the Doctor looks like he's gonna completely lose it any moment.

This sort of thing happens every day in the TARDIS. Par for the course. Just another humdrum day in the life of a swashbuckling time gypsy.

The Doctor lay flat on his back under the half-dismantled control console.

A mess of wires spilled out to engulf him, and as he worked he was forced to keep disentangling his arms. Fitz gazed anxiously at the TARDIS manual that was wedged open on the edge of the console. The Doctor had peered into it maniacally before plunging on his ridiculous little trolley into the tangle of wires. The baffled look on his face while he read the manual had not inspired in Fitz a very great deal of what might be termed 'confidence'.

The Doctor extricated himself with a chatter of trolley wheels.

8.

'Pa.s.s me that sonic wrench wrench,' he yelped as a small shower of sparks went off like a Roman candle at the side of his head.

Fitz didn't know what the h.e.l.l a sonic wrench was among all that weird-looking clobber in the Doctor's toolbag. He plucked out a likely-looking gizmo and offered it over.

In return, he received a baffled gaze from the Doctor.

'The sonic wrench sonic wrench,' the Doctor repeated.

Sonic wrench. OK. Wrenches are big things, right? Something big with a big handle and some sort of futuristic soundy-looking thing on one end. . . As Fitz gazed in consternation into the bag, he saw the Doctor's hand reach across and grasp something that looked neither anything at all like a wrench, nor anything at all like a sonic thing. The Doctor swivelled on his trolley and disappeared smartly back under the centre console, knees stuck up and right foot tapping furiously as he worked.

'You haven't found the problem then yet?' Fitz asked the Doctor's legs.

The tapping foot increased the tempo of its tapping.

'Things are all under control,' the Doctor's m.u.f.fled voice rea.s.sured him from inside the wire-spewing console.

'But you don't know what, exactly, the problem is, yet?' Fitz pressed.

The foot stopped tapping and the legs brought the Doctor back out on his trolley. Face smeared with greasy brown marks, hair wild and matted with what looked to Fitz like grey cobwebs, the Doctor regarded Fitz in silence for a short while before he spoke again.

'If I knew exactly what the problem was,' he said evenly, 'I would have fixed it by now.'

'Doesn't this TARDIS have some sort of self-diagnostic system?' Fitz demanded. 'A "fault locator" or something?'

'It does,' the Doctor muttered, apparently trying to keep the cap screwed tight on the bubbling irritation inside him.

'So why not use that to tell you what's wrong?'

'It's faulty.'

'The fault locator's on the blink?'

' Everything's Everything's "on the blink".' "on the blink".'

Fitz paced about the console room, slapping a clenched fist repeatedly into the palm of his other hand. He felt like a jack-in-the-box with the lid nailed down. And some snotty kid shaking the box madly trying to get it to work.

'Can't I I take a look at it?' he asked finally. take a look at it?' he asked finally.

11.9.2847 [Earth Standard] Ceres Alpha 9.The Doctor sat upright on the trolley and wiped his forehead on the back of his sleeve.

'If there was anything you could do to help, Fitz, I would have told you.'

'This is ridiculous,' Fitz said in frustration. 'I feel like a spare '

'Why don't you go check on Anji?' the Doctor suggested.

Anji! Probably dead by now. But sure check on her. See how many of her life signs are still registering on that stupid little telly the Doctor had hooked her up to. With a resigned nod, Fitz swept across the cluttered console room.

He threw himself through the doors and down the main corridor that led to their quarters. Steeling himself outside Anji's room, he entered to find her lying perfectly still on the bed.

Perfectly still. No rising and lowering of her chest. No rapid flickering of the eyes as if in dream-troubled sleep. No nothing!

He checked the monitor and noticed that the heartbeat had restarted, but now the electrical activity in the brain was flatlining extremely worryingly.

Some of the other blips of light were way too high, most were way too low.

He reached out to touch her wet face. It was red and coated in perspiration, but she was cold as an ice cube. Fitz pulled his hands away when he realised how violently his fingers were shaking and thrust them back into his pockets.

The screaming TARDIS he could stand. The Doctor's manic dancing about he could cope with. Against all the myriad hysterical provocations snapping at his heels today he had managed to sustain a brave face. But this inability to do do anything was too much. It was breaking his resolve, crumbling his fac anything was too much. It was breaking his resolve, crumbling his fac ade, cracking him up.

In vexation, he kicked the stand that supported the monitor and all the readings flared into life at once. His heart bounced about inside his chest, while he stood and watched the monitor return to its old, pathetic state. Her signs were all over the place. But mostly on the floor. So what now?

Fitz found himself sc.r.a.ping the bristles around his chin. He delved into his pockets for a ciggy but was irked to find them empty except for a slip of paper he'd picked up in one of the deserted corridors this morning. It looked like a sheet of paper currency, and he'd intended asking the Doctor how many packets of f.a.gs it would buy on whichever planet it hailed from. But that was before all this emergency stuff had erupted out of nowhere.

First, Anji feeling suddenly violently sick and throwing up all over the kitchen where they were all sipping orange juice together. Then the TARDIS lurching and spinning throwing them, the crockery and the sick all over the place.

Both Anji and the TARDIS had gone downhill fast from there. It was hard to 10believe that was only a couple of hours ago. It felt to Fitz as if he'd spent the last week in frenzy mode, and he wasn't sure how much more of this battering his composure could take.

He found himself patting his trouser pockets distractedly, then the breast pocket of his shirt. Nothing.

Anji made a low groaning sound and Fitz was abruptly kneeling at her side, grasping her hand and patting it nervously. Her eyes were moving again. For the first time in nearly an hour. But, when she opened them, Fitz was dismayed to see that they were completely black inside, as if the pupils had spread like an oil slick to fill her entire eyes. She gazed about blindly.

'Doctor?'

'It's me.'

'I can't see.'

'You'll be fine. Don't worry. The Doctor's got it all sussed. Don't worry. You get some rest.'

She tried to rise, but slumped back with a blast of air. Fitz watched her closely. The eyes were inert under their lids, but her chest was moving again now. He glanced at the monitor and realised that all her signs were almost back to normal except the bottom one, which the Doctor had said was something to do with her trace telepathic centres. That one was dancing about here, there and everywhere with a life all its own. Fitz waited for it to settle down, but when it refused he looked back at Anji and watched the nothingness happening behind her eyelids.

The thought struck him that she had quite a beautiful face. Her lips were sort of full and straight both at the same time, and they pouted at him without actually pouting, if that was at all possible. His attention strayed again to her chest, and he watched her b.r.e.a.s.t.s rise and sink slowly. He found it difficult to drag his eyes away, then mentally kicked himself for even considering staring at her like that.

Letting go of her hand, he jumped to his feet and marched from the room.

Back at the dismantled console, the Doctor worked furiously. Fitz squinted at the Doctor's fingers as they moved with ferocious dexterity among the remaining controls.

'So,' Fitz said chattily, trying to paper over the cracks he could feel developing, 'what's happening?'

'Don't worry,' the Doctor said in a rea.s.suring tone without looking up for even an instant. 'It's all under control.'

' What's What's all under control?' all under control?'

11.9.2847 [Earth Standard] Ceres Alpha 11.The Doctor's eyes met his for the briefest fleeting moment, and Fitz wished they hadn't.

'This is really bad, isn't it?' Fitz asked him straight.

'Bad- ish ish, yes.'

'You haven't got the faintest idea what you're doing, have you?'

Now the Doctor shot him a black look, dark curls violent above his brooding eyes. He pointed to a small monitor that jutted up out of the surface of the console.

'That's the problem,' he announced, and Fitz heard a trace of something akin to awe in the Doctor's voice.

Rounding the console, Fitz stared hard into the monitor. All he could see was a computer-generated 3-D image of a coiling multicoloured shape suspended against a black background. It could have been anything.

'What is it?'

'A virus,' the Doctor told him.

'A computer virus?'

'Rather more than that, I suspect. I think the TARDIS has contracted the same disease as Anji.'

For a good few moments Fitz said nothing. His pummelled brain threw the idea around and around and got absolutely nowhere with it. Then he heard his voice stuttering.

'How can the TARDIS catch a disease?'

'She's more than a machine,' the Doctor reminded him. 'In fact it's possible that Anji caught the virus from from the TARDIS. I'm guessing here, but, going by the way it's affected Anji's telepathic centres, it could be that that's how it's transmitted.' the TARDIS. I'm guessing here, but, going by the way it's affected Anji's telepathic centres, it could be that that's how it's transmitted.'

'So now you know what the trouble is, you can cure it, right? You are are a doctor.' a doctor.'

But the Doctor was shaking his head. 'No no no no no. Not that simple. I've tried everything.' He flung his arms open in an expansive, defeated gesture.

'I've thrown the entire manual at it, but it's still very obstinately there there. It's in everything. I'm not sure what I can try next.'

'Meanwhile Anji is dying and we can't land,' Fitz reminded him angrily, as if the Doctor might have forgotten.

He found the Doctor's eyes searching his again. This time they were those of a little boy lost. Perhaps it was his fear for Anji's survival. Perhaps it was something else. Fitz had often wondered at the depth of the bond the Doctor shared with his TARDIS. Maybe the same virus had affected him. Maybe he he 12 12was disintegrating like his ship. Momentarily, the Doctor was not the man Fitz knew. Momentarily, he seemed almost too human.

Veta screamed. The machines they'd attached to her screamed. The medics dashed about the room checking readings and yelping information and instructions at one another. Dr Pryce was sweating now, not at all the calm and imposing man that Josef Manni knew.

Josef felt stupid, standing there in the corner gazing into the mayhem. He wished he could do do something. Or get out and go haring down the corridors screaming himself. Watching the mult.i.tude of agonies his wife was being forced to endure, feeling so utterly useless to help, made him feel like a sick voyeur. something. Or get out and go haring down the corridors screaming himself. Watching the mult.i.tude of agonies his wife was being forced to endure, feeling so utterly useless to help, made him feel like a sick voyeur.

He suddenly didn't want to be here any more. He needed air. He needed to be alone. But Veta's words of the last few months came back to haunt him ' I think something's seriously wrong, Joe. I think something really bad's gonna I think something's seriously wrong, Joe. I think something really bad's gonna happen. I can happen. I can sense sense it it. . . '