by Steve Cole
‘You will have heard stories, perhaps, of the aftermath of Kotturuh attack,’ said the AI. ‘Some shattered survivors plant their dead in the ground in the hope they will grow again. Or launch them into space in the hope they will some day reach wiser healers than ours. Or preserve them as best they can so as to convince themselves that some form of life endures …’
The crowd was starting to grow restless, upset. Where is all of this going? thought the Doctor.
The images overhead switched off and the AI glowed more brightly. ‘We are here today because we offer a way to escape this anguish.’ The heckling subsided. ‘A way to reject the Kotturuh’s “gift” of death that will allow your lives to go on just as they always have. It is—’
‘Lifeshroud!’ The voice rumbled out from the sky like thunder over a rippling montage of inspiring images – Kotturuh ships vanishing! Bodies of the dead disappearing! Children smiling and looking up to clear and radiant skies!
And while people were looking at the cavalcade of images above, a girl shimmered into existence in the middle of the stage.
The Doctor could tell from the fast breathing, from the sheen of sweat on her sandy-yellow skin, that the girl was real. She stood in a canvas bodysuit, over which she wore a golden chainmail vest overlaid with transparent layers of printed circuits. Connecting cables coiled down her thighs and around her upper arms. On her head, over a mane of hair like wild green seagrass, she wore a sort of golden skullcap, its edges bristling with fibre-optic strands that disappeared into the skin around her face. The girl looked about 15. Her features were sharp and thin except for the owl-like eyes, round and liquid amber.
The Doctor began to push his way through the crowd for a closer look.
‘Lifeshroud can offer YOU salvation,’ the AI declared. ‘Lifeshroud is a unique protective exoskeleton with matter-transmission capability. Its Organo-Dynamic force screens repel one hundred per cent of necrotic actions. While you wear the Lifeshroud, you will endure forever just as nature decreed – because Death Can’t Touch It.’
The slogan striped the seething flies above.
‘Some of you may know of the farming planet, Destran, whose abundance of crops has fed the inner worlds of the Destrel System for centuries. Only two years ago, the Kotturuh brought down death on Destran – leaving both farmer and crop to endure no more than forty summers.’ The AI gestured to the figure quivering on the stage. ‘This is a child of Destran. Her name is Estinee. In a matter of weeks she is condemned to die. It is a death sentence that can only be lifted by the Complete Organo-Dynamic Systems technology of … LIFESHROUD.’
Andalians swapped nervous, hopeful glances.
Estinee spoke, the stage itself amplifying her words. ‘The Kotturuh came to Destran … they took life from everything: people, plants and livestock. Anything older than the life-limits they imposed died.’ She lowered her head. ‘I was touched by a Kotturuh.’
A murmuring buzzed through the crowds, swift as the flies through the air.
‘They marked her for death,’ the AI intoned. ‘But if she wears her Lifeshroud and maintains it correctly, Estinee will go on to lead the life she was meant to – her forever life. Purposeful. Endless. Unstoppable.’
‘How does it work?’ The Doctor cupped his hands over his mouth and raised his voice. ‘I mean, I can stand here and say my coat stops a combine harvester, but until people see proof, why should they believe me?’
‘The gentle-being at the front doubts the efficacy of Lifeshroud! A test is in order.’ The AI held out its hand and a stubby tool with a square nozzle. ‘This is an energy probe, used in heavy industry to separate hard minerals from those with lower melting points. I shall now demonstrate the Lifeshroud’s Complete Organo-Dynamic Systems in action by exposing the child of Destran to the energy probe’s output …’
‘What?’ The Doctor frowned. ‘Wait—’
A beam of intense white light shone out from the probe’s nozzle. Estinee screamed – but then a golden haze haloed about her, deflecting the beam. From the front row the Doctor could feel the heat, and clocked the scorch marks blackening the stage floor. Estinee held out her arms like a gymnast concluding an Olympic routine. Her breathing grew hoarse and ragged. Her skin began to bubble and peel. The gathered Andalians were transfixed, marvelling, jaws hanging slack.
Then the probe switched off and Estinee fell to her knees, groaning with pain. The AI’s voice rose like a preacher’s as it closed the sales pitch. ‘This is the power to cheat the touch of Death in any form!’ it boomed. ‘This is the power of Lifeshroud! We have Lifeshrouds adapted for Andalian physiognomy in stock today! One size fits all. Simply click-scan the symbol overhead with your outer-world trade stamp to make payment and your Lifeshroud will be delivered automatically …’
The symbol in the sky, like a QR code painted by Salvador Dali, flashed and flickered as Andalian hands shot up to scan and buy. Robotic vending machines spun out like drones from inside the stage, speedily distributing Lifeshrouds to those who’d purchased. Estinee was trying to smile through her tears, the gold haze fading from her chainmail now. ‘Lifeshroud saved me,’ she cried, all but adding a Hallelujah! ‘Fully charged, it will save you too!’
The Doctor stared around at the sudden frenzy in the plaza. He felt he’d wandered into the Old Wild West just as a travelling medicine show had come to town, and now everyone was snapping up elixir for its promised health benefits. He looked back at Estinee. ‘Hello. Sorry to interrupt again!’ he shouted. ‘But after absorbing a blast of energy like that you need a medical. And I’m the Doctor!’ He pulled out the sonic screwdriver ready to play it over her.
But the AI stretched out a hand and its metal fingers closed on his wrist. ‘Please put away your diagnostic device. No scanning of Lifeshroud technology is permitted at this time.’
‘I don’t care about your tech!’ He tried to pull free but the grip was too strong. ‘It’s Estinee I’m worried about!’
‘Please put away your diagnostic device,’ the AI repeated. Then the synthetic voice was replaced by one altogether earthier – someone real speaking over shortwave audio circuits. ‘Estinee, it’s coming quicker than we thought.’
Estinee looked suddenly terrified. ‘What?’
‘I’m moving out, activate your—’
The voice cut out as the AI’s head exploded in a shower of fierce red sparks. Estinee was knocked over backwards by the blast and the Doctor was thrown sideways. He hit the ground, ears ringing.
And through scattering Andalian crowds, he saw the impossible.
A familiar creature was striding through the melee, holding some sort of laser gun. A tall, slim figure, incongruous in black dinner suit and grey dress gloves. A white ball hung at his chest, attached to a fleshy cord that stretched past the black bow tie into the red, twitching fronds that dangled from the lower portion of his face.
It was an Ood.
Chapter Three
The Doctor’s hearts bumped faster. For a second he was back on snowy Davies Street, eyes locked with a vision of Ood Sigma, chosen of the Ood Brain, staring at him in silence. But no, he was sure now that this was a different creature; what was it doing here, billions of years before the Ood Brain even came to exist?
And was he aiming for the robot, thought the Doctor, or for me?
‘The weapon is shown to be fully functional, Mr Ball,’ the Ood announced, seemingly to no one in particular. ‘Now our private test of the Lifeshroud can begin.’
Estinee had propped herself up on one elbow. Frantically she slapped her fingers against a red marble sewn into the chainmail hem of her Lifeshroud, over and over. But the Ood fired his laser straight at her in a continuous burst. She shook in the coruscating beam as again the golden glow enveloped her: but her hair went up like gunpowder, and her exposed flesh rippled and puckered.
‘Stop it!’ the Doctor bellowed. He jammed the sonic against the nearest mobile vending machine and it went haywire, accelerating into the Ood. It
smashed into him, knocking him to the ground, and left him half-buried in Lifeshrouds. Andalians completed the job, piling in to grab their goods.
Estinee was shaking on the stage, groaning. The Doctor climbed up to examine her and her wide, pale eyes met his. The ashen skin around them was already regenerating.
‘No trick, then. It really works.’ Gently he lifted her into his arms. The stage began to fold itself back again, and the Doctor leapt back down into the plaza.
The Ood pushed the vending bot away and sat up, his red eyes blazing into the Doctor’s.
‘Hold on, Estinee,’ the Doctor muttered, spitting out flies as he started away. ‘We’ve got to run.’
‘No, I don’t need a doctor!’ Estinee was still dazed. ‘Leave me on the stage.’
The Doctor glanced back as the huge metal cockroach of the closed-up stage rocked back, reassembled, and then faded in a trail of yellow light leaving only the buzzing flies. ‘Can’t. Sorry.’
‘Fallomax took it back – to the Polythrope, our ship. She must think I’m on it.’
‘Was it her voice I heard through the robot?’ The Doctor looked at Estinee as he pushed a path through the scrum of Andalians. ‘Fallomax sends you out to get half-killed while she stays safely on board?’
Estinee didn’t seem to be listening, slapping blindly again at the round buttons in her chainmail top. ‘The ’Shroud’s teleport isn’t working.’
‘Must have gone kaput in the heat of that blast. It’s a miracle you didn’t.’
Estinee grabbed hold of his lapels. ‘Doctor, what did you say? Get me to the astroport. To the Polythrope.’ Tears were welling in her big eyes, running black with ash; she shook them away crossly. ‘It hurts. I don’t die but it hurts so bad and I have to get clear …’
‘There must be a local hospital—’
‘I told you I don’t need a doctor. Get me to the Polythrope.’ She moaned, still shaking with pain. ‘We shouldn’t have done this show. I told her. Too much. Too close.’
The Doctor glanced back through the thronging crowd and the fly-swarm. He saw the Ood coming after them, translation sphere clutched in its scorched glove. The silver ball crackled with power, and Andalians in the Ood’s way went down like sacks of cracked jade.
‘Our friend’s still after us.’ The Doctor quickened his step with Estinee in his arms and managed to sonic open the doors to one of the dusty, rusty hovercars waiting at the side of the road. He bundled Estinee into the passenger seat, but she instantly rolled across to the driver’s side and shoved the Doctor back out.
‘Oi!’ the Doctor shouted, as Estinee started up the engines.
‘Thanks for the lift,’ she shouted.
The Ood was barely 20 metres away now, swinging up his gun. Sonicking open the rear door, the Doctor managed to scramble inside as a laser blast scorched across the roof and cracked the thick blue glass of the window.
‘One good lift deserves another!’ the Doctor shouted.
‘Fine. Just stop interfering.’
‘You might as well say, stop breathing.’ Another laser blast rocked the hovercar. ‘But maybe wait till I’m wearing one of your Lifeshrouds …’
Estinee wasn’t listening, her fist pressed into what looked like a box of brown custard, manipulating the controls. With a sputtering whoosh of unlikely motors, the car leapt up into the air, flying in a sickening spin. The Ood fired again and again, sizzling bolts that smashed tiles from the turrets and towers about them.
‘Aren’t you a bit young to drive?’ the Doctor called, fighting to stay upright in the rear seat.
‘Apparently I’m old enough to die in a few weeks,’ she shot back as she turned clumsily and accelerated away.
The Doctor supposed that when you were meant to live for always you could take your time growing up. The new generations’ childhoods would be fleeting and fearful. He felt a deep spark of anger for what the Kotturuh had done: taking innocent lives running to nature’s clock and imposing their own grim limits on them.
Then something like a rugby ball made from bronze suddenly swept into view alongside the driver’s door, scattering flies, ticking and crackling. A fierce blue glow formed an iris in its centre.
‘Company!’ warned the Doctor.
Estinee convulsed her fist in the interface and the hovercar dropped down and banked left. There were more Andalians in the street, staring up in horror at this noisy intrusion racing between the tightly spaced buildings. The rugby ball soon caught up with them. It was watching Estinee through the window.
The Doctor scanned the device with the sonic. ‘Powered by radioactive decay of some element I’ve never heard of,’ he reported. ‘And clockwork.’
‘It’s a tracker,’ said Estinee.
‘Andalian?’
‘Not their style. I reckon it belongs to that thing that shot me.’ Estinee looked back at him, and he saw that her face was fully healed. ‘Everyone wants to get hold of our Lifeshroud—’
As if for emphasis, the tracker hurled itself at the driver’s window, cracking the glass. Estinee swerved, and with a wrench of stone on metal the car tore the top from a tower, raining tiles like confetti in its wake. The engines’ angry flutter was trailed by a rasping whine.
‘Get us higher!’ the Doctor yelled. ‘Make for the desert.’
But the tracker had flown above them now. It smashed down against the hovercar’s roof and they dipped lower, skimming the rooftops like a boat over a stone ocean. Ancient stone exploded into dust beneath them. A hunk of rubble struck the windscreen and the outside world was lost in a spider’s web of fractures.
Estinee shouted her frustrations at the controls. ‘They’re going to take us down!’
The Doctor climbed into the passenger seat and punched a hole in the splintered windscreen. Thousands of flies blew straight inside, blinding, suffocating. The landscape outside corkscrewed past through the black swarm; the Doctor glimpsed ancient temples raised from the blue desert sands. Estinee’s mouth was wide open in a fly-choked scream.
Like a dying beast in its death throes the hovercar ploughed through a sand dune and smashed sidelong into a pyramidal shrine steeped in spires and bell towers. The noise of the impact was deafening, gut-punching. The Doctor felt his bones turn to stabbing pains. The world went dark, and when his eyes snapped back open he realised some protective field must’ve kicked in to save him from injury. Estinee lay sprawled upside down in the footwell, but she was breathing, and the coils of the Lifeshroud were flickering gold.
‘Estinee?’ The Doctor spat out thick mouthfuls of flies. ‘Estinee, you all right?’ He realised the bronze rugby ball was back, hovering at the broken window beside him, scanning again. Sore and exhausted, he jabbed the sonic at the drone and in the blaze of baleful blue it dropped to the ground. ‘Who sent you?’ he demanded. ‘Well?’
‘You destroyed our temple,’ came a sad, ponderous voice.
The Doctor looked up to find Andalians emerging from the other strange church-like buildings in this quarter of the world. They stared at the wreckage and clung together in shock, chanting a dirge under their breaths.
‘I’m sorry,’ the Doctor began. ‘No one was hurt—?’
‘Nothing is destroyed on Andalia,’ said the man, his beak turned down in almost pantomime dismay. ‘We outgrew our gods in childhood but we honour their place in our history.’
‘Oh, me too. I honour history like you would not believe …’ Then words seared into his head with such force he gasped. Words on a tombstone, a legend glaring from a screen: Captain Adelaide Brooke, 1999–2059 …
It was Estinee’s voice that made him open his eyes. ‘Help.’ She was stirring in the wreck. ‘Someone, help …!’
The Doctor turned from the shell-shocked crowd. Waving his arm through the flies, he staggered over to the shattered hovercar. ‘It’s all right, Estinee. I was trying to help, remember? I’m the Doctor.’
‘Can’t get me.’ She was gazing past him, mumbling, up at the sky. ‘
Not again. Please. Not again …’
‘What not again?’ The Doctor turned to follow her gaze.
The sky rained down on him: a hard, sudden scatter of bits of black. The Doctor pulled his coat up over his head until the bombardment stopped. The Andalians’ dirge died out in gasps and whispers.
And he saw then that the air was clear of flies. Because the insects lay now in a thick carpet of black all around.
They were dead.
‘Please, not again!’ Estinee screamed.
The Doctor stared as dark shapes and symbols scratched themselves impossibly into the sky. He couldn’t make sense of them, couldn’t decipher them consciously. But he sensed a vast, inchoate power building in the atmosphere. ‘Estinee, what is …?’
He never finished, as the Andalians about him started to scream and shake. Skin sagged from their shrivelling forms and limbs twisted into bony sticks – as if age and decay held back for millennia had finally burst their banks. The Doctor saw a woman nearby collapse, reached out to her – but she was dust in a moment. He doubled over as if every cell in his body had been stuck with pins.
Suddenly a creature stood, bulky and intimidating among the dying and dead. The Doctor saw it through a haze, as if even the air and light were trying to shy away.
The creature stood two metres tall on thick tentacle-legs that squirmed like maggots, giant and engorged. Jellyfish eyes, lit like dying embers, swivelled behind an intricate veil. The hard carapace of its body was dressed in scarlet velvet embroidered with skeins of ash that flashed and glittered. Six fingers flexed on both skeletal hands, as though beckoning the dark to come down over Andalia.
As distant screams and shrieks rang out to silence, the creature’s voice was like a breath from the morgue: ‘Judgement has been passed. The gift is given.’
‘Who are you?’ The Doctor took a bold step towards the creature that stood so haughtily among the fallen and chose his pronoun with more precision: ‘What are you?’