Ten Little Aliens

by Stephen Cole

  It was strange, Ben decided. The soldiers could only be around his age, but they seemed somehow so much older. He thought about making a run for it back to the TARDIS, but not for long. Outnumbered three to one, with no weapons and the Doctor’s stamina to contend with, how far could they get?

  Suddenly it seemed that everyone started talking at once.

  The soldiers burst out into angry, frightened discussions, with several dark looks in Ben’s direction. Haunt began questioning Joiks, whose answers brought fresh mutterings in the ranks. The bloke with the tattooed face looked especially gutted.

  And then Frog was pulling Ben roughly away from Polly’s arms. He yelled at her to let him go, a complete waste of breath. The Doctor was gripping Polly firmly by the shoulders as Roba and the nimble redhead closed in on them, guns raised. He was keeping her close to him but hushing her questions and protests, taking in each exchange around him with swift movements of his head, like some big worried owl.

  Then the biggest tremor yet practically took them all off their feet.

  When the rumbling and the vibration finally began to die down, Ben could hear a new noise beneath it. A weird, haunting two-tone melody, a ghost’s idea of an emergency siren. As one by one they heard the sound, so each person in the passage fell silent.

  ‘It’s coming from the control centre,’ the Doctor declared imperiously. ‘Marshal Haunt, might I suggest we go there at once?’

  She pushed past the Doctor, breaking into a run, Shel at her side and most of the squad falling in behind her.

  ‘Looks like you’re getting what you want, old man,’ said Roba. He started hustling the Doctor along after them, while the silent redhead steered Polly, protesting noisily, by the arm. Frog motioned that Ben should follow them.

  They trooped back through the vaulted cavernous chambers and the flea-ridden ceilings, past the statues and the slates, the ghostly alarm growing louder, more penetrating.

  And with it, something else.

  A resonant hum growing in power.

  VII

  ‘Let go of me, would you?’ Polly snapped to the skinny woman who was clearly a lot stronger than she looked.

  ‘You’re breaking my arm.’

  ‘And you’re breaking my heart.’ The skinny woman’s cultured voice was like cut glass. She propelled Polly into the control centre.

  ‘Easy on her, Lindey,’ said Shade.

  ‘The delicate flower’s making you wilt is she, Shade?’ the dark-haired, neat-looking man inquired.

  ‘She’s a civilian, Creben, and there’s no need to mistreat her,’ Shade said coolly. But he couldn’t hide the faint blush beneath his blackened cheeks. Polly tried to catch his eye, to smile and thank him, but he avoided her gaze. Ben, on the other hand was actively seeking it out. He didn’t look happy, probably because the squat little witch with the gun was standing so close to him, her hand pressed down on his shoulder. Polly tried to give this ‘frog’ a look she hoped would show exactly how impressed she was, but the woman didn’t even glance up.

  Looking away, Polly’s heart leapt as she saw the TARDIS, just where they had left it. But she caught sight of the crowd of corpses on the platform, and quickly averted her eyes.

  Unlike everyone else. Shade and Tovel, and the man with the broken nose she’d glimpsed earlier, had all noticed the horrible display themselves, and were staring in disbelief.

  The alarms grew ever louder. Finally Lindey let go of Polly’s arm, but only so she could cover her own ears. The noise was almost overpowering now.

  Creben turned, pale-faced, dragged his gaze over to Tovel.

  ‘All this is Schirr design, isn’t it?’ he yelled.

  Tovel simply nodded. Then he jogged over to one of the consoles built into the wall. Shade and Creben looked at each other uneasily. Frog and the man with the broken nose stood close together, apparently unmoved by the commotion.

  Her whole head ringing with the sound, Polly looked round in panic for the Doctor. Only when the black man stepped aside could she see him standing, head cocked to one side, absolutely still.

  ‘I tried to tell them, Doctor,’ Polly shouted. ‘Before, there was a noise, a light, a vibration...’

  ‘Quiet,’ Haunt snapped. She shouted over to Tovel: ‘Can you make sense of the controls?’

  ‘The girl was right; Tovel yelled back. ‘I think some sort of takeoff’s been initiated, that the engines are starting up.’

  Polly noticed the Doctor steeple his fingers and smile almost smugly at the news. His eyes were like dark buttons, gleaming in the oily light.

  ‘Takeoff?’ echoed the man with the broken nose. ‘That’s garbage. We’re in the middle of a rock, how can we be taking off?’

  ‘A section of this complex has been designed to break free of the main planetoid; explained the Doctor impatiently.

  The oriental man nodded like he understood. ‘Those earlier tremors signalled the primary phase of the separation.’

  The Doctor nodded vaguely and bustled over to Tovel. ‘Can you compute where we are going?’

  Polly couldn’t hear the rest of his words over the scary whistling of the alarm. But she caught Lindey’s breathy voice close in her ear.

  ‘What is this place? Where the hell did nine dead Schirr spring up from?’

  Polly frowned, and forced herself to look again at the corpse in the chair and the bodies on the dais, to count them properly.

  She screamed.

  Though the piercing notes of the alien klaxon had reached their climax, everyone in the chamber whirled round to face her.

  ‘Look!’ she shouted. ‘The bodies. The alien bodies. There were ten of them when we arrived, now there’s only nine. One of them’s gone!’

  Chapter Five

  Destination Unknown

  I

  The klaxons cut off.

  The sudden silence in the cavern was almost physical in its strength. Ben felt a slight stirring in his stomach, the ground pitched a little and he felt a quick pang of homesickness.

  Motion. They were at sea.

  What the hell was happening here?

  Lindey turned to Shel. Her voice sounded too loud, unnatural in the silence. ‘Could this all be part of the training simulation?’

  Shel didn’t answer. Ben reckoned he was a bit of a Doctor-type in that he didn’t like to commit himself if there was a chance he could be wrong.

  Haunt, who had been deep in thought, standing almost statue-like since the klaxons stopped, seemed to come to a decision. ‘All right, everyone. Deactivate websets.’ Even her best sergeant-major bellow couldn’t mask the worry in her voice. ‘We can no longer be sure this is a training exercise.

  Now, I don’t want you thinking to make yourselves look good for Cellmek. I want you thinking to save yourselves and your team. No more recording.’

  The soldiers gave muted assent. As Ben watched, fingers were placed to a particular spot on the metal band around their foreheads. So the headgear wasn’t just for show. The mixed looks on the soldiers’ faces as they removed the websets ranged from scandalised pleasure to worried and just downright guilty. It put Ben in mind of how him and his mates had been at school when his older brother taught them how to swear. You were dying to do it but knew it was breaking the rules. And changing you, too, somehow.

  Shel spoke up, more confident now he was on familiar ground. ‘Regulations state that as senior officers, we remain recording in all conditions of combat, unless our imminent capture dictates we erase all recording.’

  ‘I’m aware of that, Shel,’ Haunt said icily. ‘Naturally, I exclude ourselves from the order.’

  The bloke with the marked face who’d been goggling at Polly was now turning a less enthusiastic eye on the corpses on the platform and the one in the chair. ‘Were there nine bodies here before, Marshal?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘No, Shade, there were not.’ Haunt crossed over to the corpses on the platform. Shel, Roba and Shade immediately followed her. Ben glanced at the Doctor
, who was engrossed in some computer readout with that Tovel geezer, and at Polly who was just hiding her face in her hands. He decided to get a closer look at the bodies, and to make sure Haunt wasn’t getting ready to blame any of them for this.

  Any thought that Polly must be mistaken vanished in an instant. The tableau had clearly changed. There was a clear gap towards the right-hand side. The Schirr had been clutching his bloody head with both hands. Now he had gone, while his two neighbours hadn’t moved a muscle. With nothing between them they looked blankly at each other with milky eyes, red pupils fixed in what Ben had taken to be the moment of their sudden death.

  ‘But they can’t be, can they,’ he said, thinking out loud.

  Shade looked at him blankly, and Ben took in the black blotches that covered the man’s face. ‘Dead, I mean.’

  ‘With wounds like that?’ Haunt gestured to the guts spilling from one of the bodies, frozen in midfall. ‘How could they survive?’

  ‘It’s got to be a trick.’ Ben wasn’t letting this go. ‘Special effects.’

  ‘We ran a scan,’ Shel told him. He sounded as calm and unfazed as ever as he studied the empty space on the platform where the creature’s huge feet had been standing.

  ‘These are real corpses.’

  ‘Don’t forget the one in the chair,’ said Roba. He spat on it to make his point, and Ben watched the liquid dribble down the huge pink head. ‘We can see that’s for real.’

  ‘How could a corpse come back to life,’ Shade muttered.

  ‘Maybe Ben’s right, they’re not dead. Maybe this force field is really some kind of cryogenic -’

  ‘They’re dead,’ Shel informed him flatly, and held out a palm-sized gadget. ‘Would you like to check the displays?’

  Shade shrugged. ‘You’re science officer.’

  ‘It’s more likely the corpse simply disintegrated when the systems started up,’ stated Shel. ‘Some resonance in the vibration may have interfered with the stasis field in some way.’

  Haunt nodded, perked up a bit. ‘Yes. That would make sense.’

  It didn’t to Ben, but he supposed they should be grateful for any explanation, no matter how incomprehensible it sounded.

  ‘Maybe the force field’s there to keep the bodies safe.’

  Before Ben could be shot down in flames like Shade he quickly carried on: ‘You know; they can’t bury them, so they keep them up here.’

  ‘So where’s this piece of rock going to?’ Haunt fixed him with a dark stare. ‘Some deep space cemetery?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Ben said. ‘We don’t know nothing, do we?’

  ‘Double negative,’ Shel muttered, staring at the empty space between the corpses at the end of the line. ‘That would suggest we know everything.’

  Haunt looked at him, thoughtfully.

  II

  ‘Look at Shadow over there.’ Lindey’s voice was soft, conspiratorial in Polly’s ear.

  ‘Shadow?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Lindey plucked her switched-off headband from her buzz of red hair, and tucked it into her belt. Then she spat in her palm and slicked back her tufty fringe. ‘Adam Shade the Shadow. Just look at him.’

  Polly chose not to look in the direction of the bodies. ‘I don’t think it’s nice to call him names just because of his accident.’

  ‘Accident?’ At first, Lindey acted like she didn’t know what Polly was talking about. Then she nodded knowingly. ‘Oh, sure. He didn’t waste much time going for the sympathy vote, did he? But we don’t just call him names because of his

  accident. Go on, look at him. Haunt’s little shadow.’

  ‘You’re soldiers,’ Polly said primly. ‘Aren’t you meant to follow the person in charge?’

  ‘Follow her orders, sure. Not follow her round like a lost lamb. He probably thinks that if he acts like a good little boy, it’ll never happen again. But just look at his face.’ Lindey smiled, showing a line of neat pointed teeth. ‘The one thing he can never be is whiter than white.’

  ‘All right,’ Haunt called out to her troops. ‘I’ll accept a corpse can maybe reduce itself to dust, but not one of my own squad. We need to find Denni.’

  ‘Or what’s left of her,’ Lindey muttered.

  ‘And while we’re searching we can gauge how big a fragment has separated from the main mass of this rock. But first, we need to know if the ship is still accessible.’

  ‘I’m afraid your ship will be quite out of reach by now,’ said the Doctor.

  ‘And just how would you know?’ growled Roba.

  ‘Surely, my boy, you don’t imagine this whole area has detached itself for no reason? That you stumbled upon these dead criminals by chance?’ He turned to Haunt and Shel.

  ‘When was this place constructed?’

  ‘We don’t have access to that kind of information,’ Haunt said impatiently.

  ‘Very well then, by what process was this asteroid chosen for your training exercises?’ All the Doctor needed was a barrister’s wig, Polly decided.

  ‘I made available to Pentagon Central the experiential records of each soldier in the squad,’ said Shel. ‘Their computers

  then

  ascertained

  what

  further

  training

  experiences were needed to take the AT squad into elite class, and selected a suitable location.’

  ‘Craphole computers,’ Roba snorted.

  The Doctor shook his head. ‘The computer, sir, is only equipped to take decisions according to the caprices of its programmers.’ He surveyed his audience haughtily. ‘You were expected here. All this is an elaborate trap that has closed around you.’

  ‘Around us, you mean,’ said Ben with feeling.

  ‘Yes, quite so.’ At once the Doctor’s smugness vanished, and he looked suddenly distant. ‘I hardly think a means of escape will be left to us.’

  ‘While I’m sure you know everything, Doctor,’ Haunt said dourly, ‘I think we’ll check for ourselves.’ She turned to her soldiers. ‘Shade, Lindey, go back to the ship, check it out.

  Roba, Frog, get out there and guard that doorway. Anything coming our way, I want to know about it.’

  Silently, they obeyed.

  ‘And remember,’ Haunt called after them. ‘There could be one, maybe two droids still out there in our share of this rock. Watch yourselves.’ She turned to Polly. ‘You claim you left this room by another exit.’

  ‘I don’t claim anything.’ Polly crossed to stand by Ben’s side.

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘Creben. Joiks. Find another door.’ Haunt gestured broadly around her with her rifle. She waved it around so naturally, like the thing was a part of her.

  Creben moved smartly away and Joiks slouched off to investigate in the other direction, his heavy-set face troubled.

  ‘Tovel,’ Haunt went on. ‘You’re the pilot. Can this really be a kind of ship?’

  ‘Sure it can,’ Tovel replied.

  Ben looked confused. ‘But how can it steer or whatever, if it’s just a dirty great rock?’

  The Doctor ignored him and turned to Tovel. ‘Young man, would you agree that technology of this sort would need some kind of primed navigational matrix in order to move through space?’

  Tovel raised his eyebrows. ‘Yeah. It’s Schirr technology.

  They load up crystals with cartographic info, all pre-programmed, and burnt into the systems at launch. But the crystals are gone. We’ve no way of knowing where we’re headed.’

  ‘We’re on the edge of Morphiean space,’ Haunt said. ‘Any infringement on their territory could be construed as open warfare.’

  ‘Who are these Morphieans?’ asked Polly.

  Tovel looked at her. ‘So we can take it you had no relatives on Beijing Minor, then.’

  ‘We, er, have been out of circulation, you could say,’ the Doctor told him with an apologetic smile.

  ‘Refugees,’ Haunt reminded Tovel.

  ‘In a few years we could all be.
’

  Polly didn’t understand what Tovel meant, but found herself shivering anyway.

  ‘The Morphieans are the geezers with the magic, the Spooks,’ Ben piped up. ‘That bunch on the dais are called Schirr, and they’ve been ripping off the Morphieans’ secrets, see Pol? The Morphieans want them back. And since the Schirr are part of Earth’s empire now, the Morphieans are having a pop at us for not putting the lid on them’

  The Doctor gave Ben a withering look. ‘Succinctly put.’

  Polly was grateful for Ben’s summary, but still confused.

  ‘How did the Schirr get these secrets in the first place?’

  ‘We learned from the pacified Schirr that centuries ago, the quadrant was active in this sector; before their isolationist stance,’ Tovel told her. ‘Certain Schirr elements still practised the Morphiean black arts, and none better than DeCaster.

  He’s become a hero, a god to these primitives.’

  Shel spoke up. ‘Over the last ten years he has used Morphiean rituals to commit the most devastating terrorist acts against Empire.’

  ‘Whole worlds,’ said Haunt, ‘just gone up in flames.’

  Polly thought she got it. ‘And once the Morphieans realised what was happening, they started reprisals with worse magic?’

  ‘Much worse,’ said Tovel.

  Polly’s voice rose a little in panic. ‘And we could be heading straight for them! We can’t tell!’

  ‘How can these crystals have gone? We’ve only just set off.’

  Ben suddenly clicked his fingers. ‘Ere, maybe the stiff did the business while we were all out of the room - then he dissolved.’ He swung round to face the dais, half-expecting the missing figure to have suddenly sneaked back in.

  ‘Not likely, is it,’ said Tovel.

  ‘In any case, the countdown started ages ago,’ Polly said.

  ‘According to you,’ Haunt pointed out.

  ‘It’s true, we told you,’ said Ben hotly, his fingers feeling for Polly’s hand. ‘She just disappeared somewhere!’

  Haunt sneered. ‘Just like you appeared out of thin air.’