The green light helped, thought Ace. The colours of the battlefield were missing, the red, the pink and grey. And the butcher-shop smell, always startling, always new. Instead, it was green, as though they were in some deep forest and not a continental basement, green and smelling of greenness, the smell of mucking about in the front garden as a small child, making the leaves and sticks have wars with one another.
She found herself looking at her fingers, bending them back and forth.
Imagining the components underneath, the tendons and bone and nerves.
The Doctor was wandering about the lab like a kid in a particularly grue-some toy shop. He gestured at half-formed bodies, bumpy spheres like giant peas, lumpy machine-creatures growing on fat vines. 'Gatekeepers,' he said, 'Seekers. Hoppers. Communications devices. All based on a fusion of human and Ship flesh. Much of it's meant to be grafted onto a human user, on a temporary or permanent basis.'
'Hoppers?'
The Doctor pointed out a huge, crablike organism, pulsing slowly against a wall as though it were asleep. 'For short transdimensional hops. Ship's advanced so much . . . '
'By stealing technology.'
175.
'Yes. And four thousand heads are better than one. Fortunately, there's still one thing it hasn't worked out how to do.'
'Kadiatu said it wanted to process everyone who ever lived.'
'And to do that you'd need a TARDIS. And a lot of patience.'
'What if we just waited?' said Ace. 'Wouldn't Ship just explode or something, once too many minds had been stuffed into it?'
'The damage to space-time would already be done.' The Doctor had stopped at a fat brownish-green lump, sitting on a chair in the corner. 'A-ha.'
'What's that?'
'It's a model of Ship's brain,' he said. He knelt down beside the chair, pulled out a fountain pen, poked the thing. It quivered like a plateful of jelly. 'Just what I'm looking for.'
Benny and Ace sat in Nicolas's front room while the Doctor did squishy things with his pet brain. Benny was perched on the counter, legs dangling over the side. Ace sat on the floor.
'We'll get him back,' said Benny.
'Hmm?'
'Your Egyptian chap.'
'Yeah.'
'What was what's he like?'
Ace shrugged. 'Nothing special. He saved my arse, though.'
Silence for a bit.
'What's he planning, do you suppose?'
'Hmm?'
'The Doctor. I suppose he is planning something,' said Benny. 'In the great tradition of planning something.'
'And not telling us about it. Yeah. Definitely.'
Every inch of Kadiatu's skin was covered in the green stuff. Tiny green fibres, twitching, moving alive.
'Do you know what it is?'
'Nah. Only that he expected me to give him those marbles. That's why he left them for me. He filed the plan away at random in his head, and used the marbles as a mnemonic to retrieve them.'
They crawled they crawled and crawled, over her, under her and into her.
Her mouth was full of them. She would have to scream through a jungle if she wanted to scream.
176.
Her body was riddled with the virus. The tentacles should be shrivelling, dying. They weren't.
'Clever trick.'
'Yeah. Did Kadiatu tell you what she was up to?'
'Creating a virus to kill Ship. She killed the implant they put in her.'
'Of course that's why the Ant came for her. They like to tinker, don't they?
They put an implant in the Doctor, too.'
'Grief! They did what?'
'That's why he didn't want you to tell him anything.'
Benny eyed Ace. 'Are you kosher?'
'I'm fine. But I think I've guessed Kadiatu's plan. Ship kidnaps her, and she infects it with the virus.'
Benny nodded. 'That's what I think she was planning.'
Half a dozen Ants watched the process. She was suspended perhaps ten feet above the floor, at the centre of a twisty mass of little tentacles, all alike. Why wasn't it working? And they were doing something, doing something to her, changing her Modifying her!
I'm not a machine! she tried to shout. she tried to shout. I am not a MACHINE! I am not a MACHINE!
It's a sort of competition,' said Ace. 'Which one of them will beat the bad guy first?'
'This is no time for games,' said Benny.
'You're right.' Ace swung her legs over the edge of the counter, jumped down. 'I'll go and see what he's doing.'
Not a machine, I'm not, I, machine not, I Ace opened the door of the lab a crack. Inside, the Doctor was sitting in lotus position, meditating. The living light of the room stained his face green, picking out the lines of tension.
It took her a moment to realize that he was hovering an inch or two off the floor. Carefully, she closed the door.
After a while the Doctor realized he was sitting on the cold floor, head resting in one hand. He opened his eyes, massaging his forehead with the tips of his fingers.
That was everything he could do. It was up to Kadiatu now.
Almost silently, with just a tiny bamf bamf of air, she materialized in front of him. of air, she materialized in front of him.
177.
He was moving even as he took in her new appearance. She wore a sleeve-less hired hand coverall, her long arms exposed. Bright green threads ran down the lines of her muscles, like streaks in marble. One of her eyes was brilliant green, almost luminescent in the shadows of the lab.
He rolled and was on his feet. She was reaching down to grab him, moving like electricity, fingers raking cloth as he shrugged his jacket off and fled across the lab.
Fast, faster than human, but not fast enough.
She caught up with him as he reached the cellar steps, closing a hand on his shoulder like a metal clamp. She spun him around.
He was still trying to pull loose when she smacked the heel of her palm into his left collar bone.
He went utterly limp, only her grip holding him vertical. She wrapped an arm around his waist and hoisted him into her arms. The cellar door was opening, slowly, then faster, speeding up as her brain slowed back into normal time. A silhouette: Ace was coming through.
Kadiatu vanished in another puff of air.
Ace ran right through where she had been standing.
'Cruk!' she shouted, stumbling on the floor of the lab.
Benny came through the door behind her. 'What happened?'
'They got him! Kadiatu came and got him! She's taken him back to that little ship of horrors!'
'Cruk!' Benny picked up the Doctor's jacket. 'Double cruk! We shouldn't have left him alone!'
'We thought they were on the same side, remember?'
'We still shouldn't have left him.'
'They'd done,' said Ace, her face twisting in revulsion, 'they'd done something to her. She was part, she was part vegetable.'
'Oh God. That's what they're going to do to him him.'
Ace looked around, grimacing, desperate. 'One of these. I'll use one of these.' She went to the wall, unhooked the hopper.
'That's crazy!'
'I'm not '
'I'll come with you.'
'I think it's only for one person.' Ace struggled with the loops and tentacles of the hopper.
'It looks like Giger threw up on it,' said Benny. 'Are you sure you know how to '
Ace's head snapped back as the hopper closed on her body, wrapping its ropy tentacles around her chest. She grunted through clenched teeth. Benny 178 grabbed at the organism, but it had settled across Ace's shoulders like a malev-olent backpack.
'No, no, it's alright,' Ace coughed. She stood for a moment, working out how to breathe in the grip of the thing. 'It's supposed to do that.'
'How do you know?'
'It just told me.' Benny looked at her in horror. 'You'd better stay here in case either of them come back.'
'Just a '
'And anyway, if it's Kadiatu, better I go than you.' Ace drew an evil-looking gun out of her jacket a flechettethrower, the one she called her Flash Gordon gun.
'Don't be stupid, you've seen the way she moves! She's genetically engineered, she probably knows forty-one ways to kill you with a paper-clip.'
'She's not going to be expecting me to follow her,' said Ace. 'And neither is he.'
'Look, you shouldn't '
'Benny,' said Ace, 'I'm going to do it.'
'Good luck,' said Benny lamely.
'Luck,' said Ace, 'has nothing to do with it.'
179.
Chapter 15.
Hurt/Comfort
Q.
What goes bang thud, bang thud, bang thud, bang thud, bang thud, bang thud, bang thud, bang thud, bang thud, bang thud, bang thud, bang thud, bang thud?
A.
A Time Lord committing suicide.