by Dave Rudden
RUN, the clock flashes at her. RUN.
Oh, right. Yes.
It’s too cramped in here to run, so Osgood has to do a sort of awkward sideways scamper between the boxes and out past the monster as it writhes on the floor. It’s only at the door that she pauses, wondering whether she should also take the clock.
I knew there were other uses, she thinks with surprising calm. Maybe I should –
That’s when the second creature grabs her from behind.
Osgood’s feet leave the ground. She spins, catching a lazy, panoramic view of a snarling thing filling the corridor behind her, and then she lands in a graceless explosion of pain.
It threw me, Osgood thinks from the floor, and for a second is absurdly glad Nova wasn’t there to see it. I can’t believe it threw me.
It is gaunt, and sinewy, and so tall it needs to hunch over to keep clear of the ceiling. Something about its squat skull strikes Osgood as familiar, but inevitably her gaze is more drawn to the blood dripping from its claws. There is pain, sharp and sudden, in her left arm.
The creature advances … then freezes, as a distant roar echoes down the hallway.
Osgood freezes too. It is not a sound one might imagine coming from a human throat.
The creature blinks at her through blood-marbled eyes, then turns and pads away. The squat monster follows, pausing only to pop its shoulder back in place and give Osgood a resentful glare.
She resists the urge to apologise, then gets up herself.
Horrible creatures leaving? Good, she thinks. Horrible creatures leaving because they’ve been summoned by something worse? Less good.
This, Osgood decides, would never happen to Nova.
The fourth clone does not look up at the sound of footsteps. Instead, it continues to glare miserably at the crates it has torn apart.
Drip.
Nothing.
Nothing but trinkets and baubles. Each one stinks of failure. Of defeat. There is no greater curse. No greater fear for a race that is bred for victory.
Drip.
This place is enormous. Deserted. They could search it for years and never come close to finding the power cube. The bone disk affixed to the clone’s chest feels heavy as a neutron star. It was created to find victory, and instead –
Drip.
With adder-quickness, the fourth clone reaches out to catch the drop of blood before it hits the floor. Slowly, very slowly, it raises its head.
Sontaran features are not built for a wide range of expressions, and yet somehow the second clone manages embarrassment. It raises its bloody claw and points back the way it came.
There is someone else here.
Someone native to this place. Someone who knows how it works. Someone who will share the location of the power cube, and then the clone will ram an empire’s worth of soldiers down this grey little planet’s throat.
‘Go,’ the fourth clone growls. Words are coming to it. That is good. It will need them for the interrogation. ‘Bring them to me.’
Petronella Osgood is taking stock.
She is also hiding under a table in the storeroom beside her office. It isn’t a long-term strategy, but it’s the only thing she can think to do right now. It’s Christmas Eve. The place is deserted. Her phone doesn’t work and the messaging software on her tablet is locked to internal. An external attack should have activated the perimeter security system, but it clearly hasn’t, and Osgood has no idea how to activate the system herself.
I’ve … Her arm hurts a lot. She is fighting tears. I’ve only been here a month.
She takes a puff of her inhaler, and the familiar chalky taste calms her enough to peel back her tattered sleeve and take a look at her wounded arm.
OK. OK. It isn’t life-threatening … Although, the sight of it spins her head a little. Focus. She needs to clean it. Bind it. There’s probably a risk of infection too, but Osgood is going to have to survive first.
I should be at home. The thought stings her as she rummages through boxes, looking for bandages. The house all thick and soft with the smell of mulled wine, things burning because Dad’s distracted by thinking about how to redesign the oven.
And Nova – bloody Nova – would have her feet up, and Petronella would be peeling the –
‘Sontarans,’ she says aloud, suddenly remembering the taut olive skin and domed heads from her Major Alien Threat briefings. ‘They’re Sontarans.’
Clone warriors. Class 5 Aggression Rating. But Sontarans are all short … Aren’t they? The thing that had thrown her was anything but.
This is something new, or something old come again, or something she hasn’t got the clearance to know about, running around the most dangerous warehouse on Earth. And all that is standing in its way is Petronella Osgood, tear-smeared and anxious, one whole month on the job. Not Douglas, who spends his spare time practising with Ice Warrior swords, or Niki, or her dad. What is she supposed to do, just stumble upon –
Osgood stares into the box.
There isn’t anything special about the scarf, except that there seems to be rather too much of it. In the washed-out light of the Grey Archive, its bright yarn seems to almost glow.
Osgood is alone. She is facing an unknown foe, with unknown plans, and has nothing to defend herself with. She is out of her depth. She is in grave danger.
This, she decides, is what being in UNIT is all about.
One end of the scarf is tied tight round her arm to slow the bleeding. There’s still about five metres of it left, so Osgood picks up some scissors … and then, on some unknown impulse, decides to wrap the excess round her neck instead.
It’s time to go to work.
Simplicity, the fourth clone thinks. It all comes down to simplicity.
That’s why enemies underestimate the Sontarans. Other races love complexity. They wear it like a badge of honour. The designers of this place obviously believed complexity would protect them but, as always, simplicity cuts through.
It’s the blood. The identical stretches of corridor might fool normal scanners, but all the clones have are their claws and their senses and – like any predator worth its salt – they can smell the prey’s blood in the air. It is, the fourth clone imagines, a delightfully simple solution. A Sontaran solution.
It looks forward to meeting one some day.
The creatures lope along a corridor, pausing every so often to sniff and snort. It is so dead and grey here that the smell of fresh blood stands out on the air like scarlet paint on a white wall. They follow the smell through cluttered storerooms and conference rooms, turning left and right almost by instinct.
The prey must be panicking. It’s left smears on nearly every doorway they pass.
The fourth clone freezes, hand hovering above a door handle. There’s a fingerprint of human blood on it. That was why it chose this door over the other three in the room. Stepping backwards lightly, it motions the third clone forward. The clone obeys, the growls of its two heads not quite in sync, seemingly unworried by its siblings taking positions as far away as possible.
It sniffs at the blood, then it turns the handle.
Many races have invented gravity bubbles. There is a whole room full of them in the Grey Archive. Osgood has chosen one with RAF printed on the side. It feels like a good omen.
And, as the third clone opens the door, it activates, and a device meant to propel a Mark IV Spitfire through the vacuum of space ignites in the confines of a government-standard corridor.
Osgood doesn’t stop to watch the results. She is already running, as fast and as quietly as she can.
The fourth clone sighs, picking himself up off the floor. Ahead, where there was once a wall and a door and a very briefly surprised clone, there is now a perfect sphere carved out of the architecture. He wonders briefly whether the device imploded or exploded … And then he wonders when he started thinking of himself as a he.
A few centimetres away, the floor ends in a ragged fringe of carpet. Exposed wiring s
parks. Masonry dust drizzles from the ceiling. Carefully, the clone leans forward.
What he should be looking at is the floor below. That’s how buildings work. But instead there is an infinite ravine of corridors, all attaching and reattaching to each other like surgery conducted by invisible hands. It looks a little like clockwork, except clockwork doesn’t churn reality and make you want to throw up.
A few metres across the gap, the corridor continues. There is a spot of blood on the carpet.
Mocking them.
Enticing them.
It’s too much for the first clone. Growling hungrily, the squat creature flings itself across the gap and down the corridor like a cannonball of muscle and stringy drool.
‘Gravity bubble,’ the fourth clone murmurs, watching his sibling smash down a door head first. ‘Provides gravitational lift by anchor-linking to the planet’s core. I imagine activating one in the midst of a complex spatial fold is rather like poking a stick through the spokes of a bike.’ He thinks for a moment. ‘Except that the stick is gravity. And the bike is the universe. It’s punched a hole right down through the maze.’
The second clone is almost vibrating, caught between the desire to serve and the desire to hunt.
‘What … mean?’
The fourth clone realises he has no idea. That’s the problem when a cloning pool isn’t drawing on a live subject for inspiration. It has to use other DNA to plug the gaps. Just as his siblings are a meld between Sontaran biodata and whatever else was in the pool’s servers, so too is he a mixture of scraps and fragments and … memories. Memories that are not his. Memories of arrogance. Of anger. And of loneliness, so deep and bitter the clone can taste it in the back of his throat.
It is a horribly familiar feeling.
Victory.
Victory must be found. Victory will cure him. The longer he and it are separated, the more his head begins to feel like the swirling vortex below. The more he feels like he might come apart.
‘It means,’ he says eventually, ‘I know how to catch them.’
It is beginning to occur to Osgood that there is such a thing as a plan being too successful.
You want them to chase you, she reminds herself for the fifth time, rummaging through another storeroom for something – anything – that might be useful. If they’re chasing you, they’re not thinking about all the alien technology they could be chasing instead.
Somewhere distant, the squat clone lets out a bestial roar. There is the sound of a door smashing inwards, and another howl, this time of utter frustration.
Two corridors away, Osgood thinks, kneeling under a desk to pick up a polished silver sphere and compare it to the image on her tablet. Or three maybe?
There’s something a little reassuring about the fact that, for an advanced race of warrior clones, her pursuers don’t seem interested in technology more complicated than the claws on the ends of their fingers. Then again, Osgood’s only been here a month, and she managed to turn a gravity bubble into a landmine with five minutes and a hairpin. She dreads to think what someone with any actual experience might be capable of.
No, focusing on her is good. Or it will be, if this is what I think it is …
Osgood knows she’s been tremendously lucky so far. Her tablet has a list of everything in the archive, but anything really nasty is above her clearance level, a fact which never bothered her before but now feels like a serious gap in her CV. So, she is relying on the archive’s rather fantastic backlog, and hoping there are dangerous things here nobody has got to yet, or things that were deemed un-dangerous that she can re-dangerous.
What’s worrying her is that she seems to be quite good at it.
And then the squat clone bounds on to the desk above her head, and all her other concerns go and hide.
The wood creaks under the clone’s weight.
Osgood goes rigid. Afraid to move. Afraid to breathe.
In contrast, the clone is deafening, even at rest. Osgood can hear its sinews flexing under its skin. She can hear the meaty crunch of its joints as it lowers itself into a crouch. She can even hear its heart, bludgeoning itself against the barrel of its chest.
That doesn’t sound healthy, thinks the part of her not inwardly screaming in terror. How long do clones live?
There is one connector left on the device in her lap – a device that, along with gravity bubbles, would probably be locked away somewhere if the archive wasn’t extremely behind. All Osgood can do is stare down at it, even as a long line of drool extends into view from the creature perched inches above her head.
She could just do it. She could just click it in. The plan had been to leave it on the floor for the creature to find, but that’s not going to work now.
I’ll throw it.
Osgood has only the barest idea of the device’s range, but even if she is caught in its effect, isn’t that better than dying?
I can’t die at Christmas, she thinks, grasping the connector in her shaking fingers. It’ll ruin it for Dad.
And that’s when the tablet in her pocket lets out a cheerful little beep.
A number of things happen in quick succession.
First, Osgood bangs her head on the bottom of the desk.
Second, she slams the connector home and flings the device as far away from her as she can.
Third, the clone lets out a shriek like a strangled cat and lunges so powerfully after the little silver sphere that it upends the entire desk.
Predator instincts, Osgood thinks, with a hint of triumph, before suddenly realising there’s about to be what one can only describe as an ‘area of effect’, and she’d be best off outside of it. She dives across the floor just as the creature, neat as an acrobat, snags the device out of the air and spins to face her, a mad grin on its squashed Sontaran face.
‘Weapon!’ it barks, holding the silver sphere high.
‘Actually,’ Osgood says, as it starts to vibrate, ‘it’s a memory filter.’
‘Actually,’ Osgood says, as it starts to vibrate, ‘it’s a memory filter.’
‘Actually,’ Osgood says, as it starts to vibrate, ‘it’s a memory filter.’
‘Actually,’ Osgood says, as it starts to vibrate, ‘it’s a … memory filter,’ she finishes, and then shivers from toe to nose as if she’s just been dunked in cold water. Everything is swimmy and strange for a moment, then snaps back into focus.
‘Must have been on the fringe of it,’ she says out loud, more to make sure her brain is working than anything else. ‘Which means … Oh.’
The squat clone is standing in front of her, still holding the silver sphere. Every other second, it twitches. It has, she realises, the exact expression of someone who has walked into a room and then promptly forgotten what they came in for, over and over again.
‘Sorry,’ she says, then backs slowly out of the room.
Three corridors later, Osgood remembers her tablet. She ducks into a storeroom, inwardly cursing herself for not thinking to put the device on silent when she was hiding from monsters. When she pulls it from her pocket, there’s a missed call on the messaging server. The internal server. There’s someone else in the archive.
Osgood opens the server – checking the tablet’s volume first – then returns the call.
It rings once, twice …
Please be security. Please be security.
‘Hello?’
Osgood swallows. ‘Hello?’
‘Please help me!’
The voice is male and terrified. Osgood doesn’t recognise it, but that doesn’t mean anything. The archive is a big place.
‘Stay calm,’ Osgood stammers, wondering whether she is speaking to the speaker or to herself. What do I say? What am I supposed to – ‘What’s your name?’
There is a pause.
‘Luke. Luke Rattigan.’
‘Hi, Luke.’ Osgood winces at her own forced cheerfulness. ‘I’m Petronella. Listen. We’re under –’
The next voice she hears is a l
ow, burbling growl.
‘No more chasing. No more tricks. Now, you come. Or we kill this boy.’
The line goes dead. A moment later, a location ping comes through on the server. Osgood stares at it for a very long time, and then brings up the search function on her tablet.
A casual observer might find little difference between the reception of Section 314 and that of Section 315 next door, or indeed from any other reception area in this part of the Tower. The grey of its floor tiles and the beige hue of its ceiling lights are government issue, as are the cheap plastic chairs in a line against the wall.
The swirling vortex the gravity bubble punched through its floor, however, is not.
Petronella Osgood has never really been any good at casually observing things. On her first day here she noticed the tremble in the air, the subsonic hum of hidden machines. And now, stepping out from between the second and third shelves into the reception of Section 314, Osgood can’t help but notice that the hum has changed to an angry buzz.
Luke Rattigan stands on the edge of the vortex, dressed in a lab coat, slacks and a slightly mismatched jumper – basically the closest thing the Grey Archive has to a uniform. The creature hunched behind him is the curved-spine scarecrow who threw Osgood so casually earlier, its head a grinning lump of sinew and meat. It has Osgood’s blood on one hand, and Luke’s throat in the other.
‘It …’ Luke can barely get a word out around the thing’s long fingers. ‘It wants a Sontaran power cube. It says if you find it, they’ll let us go.’
Osgood’s fingers are white where they grip her scarf.
‘Want,’ the beast growls. ‘Want …’ It pauses, and something Osgood could swear is embarrassment crosses its face. ‘Want the …’
‘The cube,’ Luke finishes helpfully. ‘Do you know where –’
‘Do you think this is the original?’ Osgood asks.
The monster blinks. Luke stares at her in shock.
‘The corridors. The maze. Did it all start here, before they stretched it out? Or is this room a copy of somewhere else too?’