‘Got woken up by all that fuss with the stranger,’ Orlo explained. ‘Thought I’d make an early start on getting Professor Benson another one. Feisty little beggar.’ Candy pulled the sacking back – to reveal an otter in a cage, much like the ones at the back of the room, only smaller. It pulled back its black lips and hissed at them, incisors gleaming in the light.
‘Something’s got ’em spooked,’ Orlo added.
‘Maybe it’s the Doctor,’ Col ventured. ‘A spaceship landing out there’s bound to scare ’em a bit.’
He leaned in towards the cage – and a small, dark paw shot out through the wire mesh, razor-sharp claws extended, and slashed at him.
‘Whoah!’ he cried, jumping back. ‘See what you mean, Orlo.’
‘Something’s wrong,’ said Candy quietly, peering at the otter. It glared back at her viciously and let out a low, throaty growl. ‘Something’s seriously wrong.’
Martha tried not to look at the skeletons, but they drew her gaze to them. Even when she screwed her eyes shut so she couldn’t see their grinning faces, they were still there. In her head. Screaming.
She felt sick and realised she was shivering. Not because it was cold, but because, no matter how much she tried, she couldn’t help but think that these skeletons – these people – had been brought here like her. It wasn’t like she hadn’t had plenty of experience of skeletons and bodies and the mess and gore that the human body was capable of producing. After all, she was almost a doctor – and she’d seen enough death travelling with the Doctor. But she usually knew the histories of the people and bodies she’d examined, dissected. At the very least, she knew how they’d died. The fact that these had met their end on an alien planet, in an animal’s nest, alone and probably terrified, made all the difference. Maybe this was a taste of her own future.
The growing light had revealed the chamber in more detail. At the other side was a small hole, through which a constant stream of otter-like things came and went, growling and grunting to themselves. They all looked the same, and Martha couldn’t work out how many of them there might be. Occasionally, they would sit up on their back legs and watch her, their tiny eyes black as pitch. Sometimes, one or two of them would descend to the bottom level of the pit where black water slopped and swayed – as if there were something just under the surface, moving slowly. Usually, though, they just stared and growled.
She couldn’t just sit here, she realised. Maybe that’s what had happened to the others – they’d just sat there until they’d died, and then the otters had stripped the flesh from their bones.
Suddenly, the two by the edge of the pool jumped and scampered up onto the top level. They reared up on their back legs, squeaking and muttering.
Only then did Martha hear it: a deep sucking, slurping sound from below. Flecks of orangey-pink light, streaming through the canopy overhead, danced on the surface of the black water. And then it parted and slid aside as something reared up out of the pool.
Martha drew herself back against the wall of soil behind her. She cried out, instinctively, and saw the otters flinch.
It was as though the inky waters themselves were rising up. A tentacle, starting out thinner than her wrist and quickly growing to something wider than her waist, reared up in front of her. Water streamed and dripped from its glossy surface and it waved around in the air in front of her. Martha was reminded of a snail’s eyestalk as it probed the air in the chamber, turning around, seeking, hunting.
Hunting her.
Slowly, it extended further, and Martha could see tiny granules streaming inside it as it came to rest just a foot from her face. And then, like a striking snake, it plunged towards her.
FIVE
It was icy cold, and Martha took a sharp breath in as the thing struck her face. But it was blocking her mouth and nose, squirming and writhing as though it were trying to enter her throat.
Desperately, she grabbed at it with her hands: it was shiny and hard like leather, yet viscous and flowing like oil, and her fingernails made no difference.
With slow and inexorable force, the tentacle pushed her back against the wall, flowing around her head. She could feel it creeping slowly over her ears as she struggled, smothered in its grasp. Dizziness washed over her as the oxygen in her lungs began to run out. In her panic, Martha kicked out at it. It felt like kicking a tree.
This is it, thought Martha through the fear, through the red haze clouding her mind. She dug her fingernails into the soil at her sides. This is it.
Her life didn’t flash before her eyes. There were no visions of her family, no Mum, no Dad, no Leo or Tish. No Doctor. There was just the redness and the cold and the pain in her chest.
And then, as she felt her body sag, there was a lightness, a feeling of letting go. Somewhere, way away in the distance, she could see a faint, blue light. Was that… was that where she was supposed to go? Into the light?
Then, suddenly, the light was gone, the coldness ripped from her and something pale burst out of the darkness.
‘Martha Jones!’ bellowed a voice that must have been her father’s. ‘Where are your Wellingtons?’
Martha took a huge, huge breath and the darkness swallowed her up again.
‘Get her out,’ ordered the Doctor, lifting the young woman’s body up towards Ty and the others. They hesitated. ‘Now!’ he shouted, his face as dark as storm clouds.
Ty stepped back as three of the men who’d come with them to find the Doctor’s ship rushed forwards and manoeuvred the unconscious girl – Martha – up and out of the otters’ nest.
‘What was that?’ asked Ty as Martha was laid gently on the rain-soaked ground and the Doctor leapt nimbly out through the hole he’d made in the nest’s canopy. The otters had scattered as the Doctor had crashed in.
‘This?’ The Doctor brandished a small, pen-like device in his hand – the device that had, somehow, made the… the thing... wrapped around Martha’s head pull away and vanish into the water at the bottom of the nest.
‘No – that,’ Ty said, pointing back into the ruined nest.
The Doctor shook his head as he knelt down beside Martha and checked her pulse and breathing. ‘Oh that? No idea. But at least we know it’s not very partial to focused ultrasound, don’t we?’
The Doctor pulled back Martha’s eyelids to check her pupils. He seemed satisfied, and nodded.
‘She’ll be fine.’ He paused and brushed at the hair on her temples. A pattern of tiny, red dots – pinpricks of blood – was visible. ‘Not so sure about this, though,’ he added, his voice low and concerned.
‘Um, why’s she dressed like that?’ Ty asked, realising even as she said it that it probably wasn’t quite the right thing to say under the circumstances. Martha was wearing an extremely dirty, extremely ripped silk ball-gown, and on her hands were elbow-length gloves. Ty couldn’t imagine clothing more unsuited to Sunday. Was this how adjudicators dressed?
But the Doctor didn’t answer, sitting back on his haunches and peering down through the hole in the roof of the nest.
They’d been tramping through the dawn-lit forest for almost half an hour, on their way to rescue the Doctor’s ship – his TARDIS, as he’d called it – when suddenly he’d stopped.
‘Hear that?’ he said, holding up a hand for silence.
Ty hadn’t heard anything.
‘It’s Martha!’ he’d shouted, before haring off.
Ty and the others could only race after him. By the time they’d caught up with him, he was standing in the bottom of an otter nest, the roof caved in where he’d smashed through it. And he was holding out the pencil-thing with a glowing, blue tip – holding it against…
Ty didn’t know what he’d been holding it against. All she could see in the gloom of the nest was something long and thick and dark, like a massive, glassy tentacle. Underneath it, as she peered closer, she could see arms… and legs… and then realised that it was a person.
And then suddenly the tentacle thing had pulle
d away and whipped back into the darkness with a mighty splash of water, drenching the Doctor and Martha.
‘That thing,’ he mused. ‘I take it you’ve not seen it before?’
‘Never,’ Ty replied. ‘And what was it doing in an otter nest?’
‘Could it be some sort of symbiote? Something that lives with them, shares their nest? Maybe it’s a pet. Maybe that’s why you’ve never seen it?’
‘Could be,’ Ty considered. ‘But I’ve seen inside a couple of nests before and never seen anything like that.’
‘Well, we’ll sort that out later – we’ve got to get Martha back to the settlement. If I were you, I’d take a look at the skeletons in there.’
‘Skeletons?’
Ty glanced over into the ruined nest, and saw gleaming bones in the shadows on the other side of the pool.
‘They might well be the people you lost in the flood,’ the Doctor said.
She nodded, trying not to think about the implications of that statement. ‘What about your ship?’
The Doctor threw her a dark look. ‘I think that can wait, don’t you?’
The hospital, the Doctor was relieved to see, was better equipped than he’d expected, considering the losses that the settlers had faced – a low, wide bungalow, partly constructed from prefabricated plastic panels, partly from wood, sitting at one edge of the square. The main ward was empty when the Doctor arrived. Martha was rushed to a bed and covered up with a blanket.
‘This is Dr Hashmi – Sam Hashmi,’ Ty introduced the Doctor to the short, elderly man who came over briskly as they arrived. ‘Dr Hashmi – this is, erm, the Doctor.’
‘And this is Martha,’ said the Doctor swiftly. ‘She’s suffered hypoxia,’ he said, and pulled aside the hair on Martha’s temples. ‘But the lack of oxygen’s not what’s worrying me – what d’you reckon this is?’
Sam peered closer at the speckle of red dots.
‘Puncture wounds? Has she been attacked by something?’
‘Oh yes!’ said the Doctor sourly. ‘A very big something. A very, very big something.’
‘What?’
‘Well if I knew that, I wouldn’t be calling it “a very big something” would I?’ he snapped and shook his head. ‘Please, just do what you can for her, Dr Hashmi.’
Sam set about taking Martha’s pulse and blood pressure before hooking her up to a body monitor whilst the Doctor stood back and watched, arms folded.
‘She’ll be fine,’ Ty said, putting a hand on his shoulder. ‘I’m sure of it.’
Suddenly, Candy came rushing in.
‘Professor Benson!’ she said. ‘They said you’d gone out to…’ Her voice tailed off as she saw Martha. She glanced at the Doctor and then back at Ty. ‘Who’s that?’ she whispered.
‘That,’ the Doctor answered without turning, ‘is Martha. My friend.’
‘Oh,’ said Candy. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Someone’s going to be,’ muttered the Doctor. ‘Or something.’
There was a long and awkward pause, and then the Doctor suddenly spun on his heel.
‘Right!’ he announced. ‘Tell me all you know about these otters.’
Col had said they didn’t need any more otters for a while, but Orlo found them fascinating enough to just watch. The weird thing was that they didn’t seem to bear grudges. He’d caught and taken, what, over two dozen by now. And despite that – despite the way they struggled and scratched when he caught them – it didn’t seem to make them more wary of him. He reckoned it was because he never hurt them and always let them go. In fact, crazy though it sounded, Orlo wondered if, somehow, the otters weren’t actually pleased that he caught them. It made no sense, except that it was always the slower, more aggressive ones that he managed to catch (the cleverer ones just ran rings round him) – and when they were released, they were always smarter and more peaceable.
Let Professor Benson work that one out.
He squatted down at the top of a gentle rise, sheltering from the growing sun under a tree, and watched a couple of dozen of the otters diving in and out of the water, the light sparkling off their water and their silvery bodies. He could watch them all day.
Suddenly, all at once, the little fellers stopped their play. From where he was, he could hear squeaking and chittering, and saw that they were all looking at him. Some of them were standing upright in the shallows, others were along the bank, on all fours or up on their hind legs. And then – and this is when Orlo dropped his sandwich – they turned, as one, and looked back into the swamp. Automatically, Orlo followed their gaze. For a moment, he wondered what they’d heard or seen, but then something gleamed through the tops of the trees, something artificial.
Orlo raised his hand to shelter his eyes, squinted, and realised what he was seeing: it was a curved, mirror-like piece of metal, arcing over like a dolphin in mid-leap.
It was one of the fins of the One Small Step, the ship the colonists had arrived in. The ship that had been washed away in the flood. The ship that they never thought they’d see again.
And the otters were leading him to it.
‘Orlo brought this one in this morning,’ Candy said, pointing to the new otter.
It had been installed in one of the cages in the zoo lab and seemed to have calmed down a little. But it stared out at Ty, the Doctor and Candy suspiciously, with baleful little eyes. Col stood to one side, watching. Candy reckoned that he was still a bit wary of the Doctor: he kept looking him up and down, as if trying to work out what made him tick.
‘He said it was a real handful,’ Candy said.
‘What are they like normally – when you catch them, that is?’ The Doctor leaned forward and made squeaking noises at the otter. It glared back at him.
‘Normally,’ answered Ty, ‘they’re fairly docile. Sometimes they put up a bit of a struggle, but they calm down quite quickly.’ She indicated one of the others, a plump little thing, with a greyish splodge on its right ear, happily curled up asleep. ‘This one is our oldest resident. Brought him in last week. He was aggressive when we brought him in, but now he’s a real sweetie – and very bright: he’s got the maze down to under a minute.’
‘The maze?’
She showed him a large side room, the floor laid out with a complex, wall-to-wall maze, half a metre high. The roof of it was a crazy-paving of mismatched plastic sheets to stop the otters just jumping over the walls to get to the food at the far end of the room. At various points along the route, there were levers and pulleys and sliding panels to operate to further test the otters’ brainpower.
‘We used it as a test of how bright they are. We don’t really have the resources for anything else. Food goes at one end, an otter at the other, and we time how long it takes them to get to it. When we first brought him in, it took him almost an hour, and boy was he snappy about it.’
‘That’s not unusual, surely?’ the Doctor frowned. ‘Most intelligent creatures do that. It’s called learning – start off bad, get better. Even humans are quite good at it.’
Ty pulled a face. ‘I’m a zoologist, Doctor – I’ve worked with animals for years, and with people before that. And there’s something just wrong about this: it’s the speed with which their learning curve increases – and then suddenly plateaus out after about two days. If the otters were capable of learning so quickly, it’d be them building a city here, not us.’
‘Oh, don’t judge alien species by your own,’ the Doctor said, making a sucking noise. ‘There are as many types of intelligence and learning as there are worlds out there.’ He took the clipboard from her and scanned it, and again Candy saw the sharpness in his eyes. ‘Still, I see what you mean. The otters have clearly evolved to fill an environmental niche, and their speed of learning is a bit at odds with it, I’ll grant you.’
Candy cut in. ‘I wondered if it was us.’
‘Us?’ Ty was puzzled.
‘You think proximity to humans is making them smarter?’ said the Doctor. ‘“Brains by os
mosis.” As ideas go, it’s not a bad one, but you’d think that they’d carry on getting smarter, wouldn’t you? Oh hello – what’s this, then?’
Candy peered around Ty as the Doctor moved closer to the new arrival’s cage. He pulled something out of his pocket and she saw that it was the torch he’d had out in the forest. He aimed it at the wall behind the cages and turned it on. A spot of bright blue light appeared on the wood. The otter gave a threatening little grrrrr at the Doctor’s device and burrowed into the leaves in the cage.
‘What are you looking at?’ asked Ty, trying to see. ‘Oh.’
She stopped. Because highlighted by the Doctor’s torch, scratched into the wall, was a shape: a rectangle, about twice as tall as it was wide, with a little bump on the top.
‘What is it?’ whispered Candy. ‘Did the otter do it?’
‘It’s the right width for one of their claws,’ said the Doctor, tracing the outline of it with the beam from his device.
‘But what is it?’ repeated Ty.
‘That,’ said the Doctor, a very worried edge to his voice, ‘is my spaceship. That’s the TARDIS.’
‘Looks like it’s our lucky day, then,’ came an out-of-breath voice from the door. They both turned to see Orlo, sweating and panting and supporting himself on the doorframe. ‘Because now we’ve got two ships! I’ve found the One Small Step!’
Martha moaned and opened her eyes. She was lying in some sort of hospital ward – a pretty basic one, she had to admit, but a hospital ward nonetheless. Most of it seemed to be made out of wood. Basically, a big log cabin.
A wide window on the other side of the room gave out onto a view of low, spaced-out houses, built of a mishmash of wood and bits of plastic and metal. It looked like a lowtech Butlins. The light outside was very strange, though. Dull orange, like some sort of weird twilight. Martha wondered how long she’d been here, and whether she’d slept through a whole day. Of course, she realised, that meant nothing. A day on another planet could be any length, couldn’t it? And the night she’d spent in the chamber had seemed pretty short. As the memory came back to her, she suddenly felt her face grow cold and clammy. The hairs on her arms stood up as though an icy shadow had passed over her.
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