Doctor Who: Shining Darkness (8 page)

‘Maybe it’ll have learned its lesson,’ Ogmunee said when he saw it.

‘Yeah,’ added Donna, ‘or maybe it’ll just be ten times as angry.’

But as they approached the broken robot again, the cavity of its head still sparking and flickering, there was neither sight nor sound of the beast.

‘Help me!’ called Donna, slipping an arm under the broken robot. She glanced back to check that Ogmunee was keeping an eye on the side tunnel where the creature had come from before. But neither of them moved to assist her.

‘Can you speak?’ she asked the robot, its arm still shuddering. It turned its head – the face still creepily half-missing – towards her.

‘Pri-pri-primary functioning imp-imp-impaired,’ it stuttered.

Its voice was dull and raspy and so at odds with how Donna had expected such a glamorous creation to speak.

‘Can you stand?’ she asked, realising that the robot was too heavy for her to lift, despite its size-zero measurements.

‘Mo-mo-motor functions failed,’ it said, and Donna wasn’t sure whether she imagined the hint of sadness in its voice. It was a robot, after all, and robots didn’t feel sadness.

‘We have to keep moving,’ Mesanth said.

‘Can’t we transmat it back up to the ship?’ asked Donna, extricating her arm from underneath it. ‘Get it repaired?’

‘Too deep,’ Mesanth said. ‘And we only have one augmenter.’

‘One what?’

Mesanth patted his pouch.

‘Transmat augmenter. We need it for Garaman to get a lock on the segment when we find it. Otherwise we’d have to drag it up to the surface.’

‘Well use it on… on her, and get Garaman to beam down another.’

Ogmunee pushed forward and before Donna could stop him he aimed his thermal gun at the bimbot. With barely a pause, he pressed the button, and the robot’s head fizzed brightly – like an ember caught in a breeze – and
then
went dark. Its head lolled and its whole body sagged against the wall and lay silent and dead.

‘You killed it!’ said Donna darkly.

‘It was a tool, it was broken, and it was holding us up,’ Ogmunee corrected her. ‘It was holding
you
up.’

Donna got to her feet, barely able to contain the anger she felt.

‘It could have been repaired,’ she said slowly, spacing the words out for effect, right into Ogmunee’s face, not caring about the fact that he weighed at least twice as much as she did and had a gun in his hand.

‘We have others,’ he retorted. ‘Now move!’

‘Or what? You’ll shoot me too?’ She stood her ground, squaring up to him. ‘Come on then, what’s stopping you big man?’

‘He will not shoot you,’ Mesanth intervened. ‘You’re organic. We do not kill organics.’

‘No,’ said Donna determinedly, facing the lizard man and his gleaming eyes. ‘You just threaten to break their fingers off, don’t you?’

Mesanth said nothing, but turned away, as if too ashamed to admit the truth of Donna’s accusation. Ogmunee gave an annoyed sigh and, brandishing the torch, strode off down the passage. Donna stared at him for a few moments before catching Mesanth’s eye.

‘Nice company you keep,’ she said.

And with a final glance at the dead robot, she headed on into the tunnels.

‘YOU DO REALISE
,’ said Li’ian as the darkness of the tunnels folded in around them after their materialisation, ‘that Boonie’s never going to want to let you go?’

‘The trick with the transmat?’ asked the Doctor cheerily. ‘Oh, that was nothing!’

‘It’s let us beam straight down into the tunnels,’ Li’ian pointed out, handing a torch to the Doctor. ‘You’re turning out to be quite a catch, you know, what with that and the sensors. What other little gems have you got up your sleeve, eh?’

‘Oh, keep me around long enough and you’ll find out. Besides, it was the only way to get Boonie to let me come down with you.’ The Doctor glanced up at the shape of Mother, hulking alongside him.

‘And how’re you doing, Mother?’ he asked.

With a faint whirr of gears, Mother’s head tipped to face him. Behind the impassive steel shutters of her face, her eyes glowed red.

‘Y’know,’ mused the Doctor, ‘I’d have a rethink on the red.’ He pulled a face. ‘Never a good colour for eyes, red. Trust me. You’ve never met the Ood, have you?’

Mother stayed silent, staring down at him. Something hummed and whirred inside her vast head.

‘I wouldn’t antagonise her,’ murmured Li’ian.

‘Really? Oh, I think Mother’s a lot more friendly than she makes out.’ He turned back to the robot and winked. ‘Aren’t you?’

There was no reply, so the Doctor shrugged and wiggled his torch around.

‘Right!’ he said brightly. ‘Allons-y!’ He stopped. ‘Smells like someone’s been having a barbecue around here. Come on!’

The Doctor strode off ahead, with Li’ian and Mother bringing up the rear.

For such a whopping great metal thing, Mother was surprisingly quiet, thought the Doctor, as he followed the light of his torch beam. Which was probably a good thing, considering that they were sneaking around in tunnels on an alien planet; considering that they wouldn’t be the
only
ones sneaking around in tunnels on an alien planet.

The Cultists had an hour’s lead on them; and, although the Doctor knew that without his own special brand of transmat fiddling they’d have to beam down to the surface and make their way underground, he didn’t want to waste any time. Donna was – he hoped – still aboard their ship; and if they managed to find what they were here for and get away before he could find them, he might lose her for ever.

Coming to the Andromeda galaxy had been his idea, and he was beginning to wonder whether he hadn’t made a big mistake. They’d barely gone twenty metres into the dark passage when the Doctor brought them up sharply.

‘Whoa!’ he said, raising a hand. ‘Barbecue anyone?’

He cast the pool of light from his torch around in front of him. Blocking most of the tunnel, a huge, smouldering mass lay in their path. Spirals of smoke curled upwards from it, forming a thick layer at the top of the passage. He put a hand over his mouth.

‘What is it?’ asked Li’ian, moving alongside him.

‘An animal, I think – well, it used to be. Either it’s been playing with matches or someone decided that they’d rather it was an ex-animal. Not much we can do for the poor thing now, I’m afraid.’

In silence, they squeezed past the charred remains, trying not to breathe in too much of the smell of charred meat that was now so much less appealing than it had been before. Mother didn’t seem to share the Doctor and Li’ian’s distaste for actually walking
on
it – behind him, he heard her massive metal feet crunching and squelching on the poor beast’s remains.

Beyond the creature’s lair, the tunnel roof became decidedly lower – the Doctor and Li’ian only had to dip their heads slightly, but Mother was too tall for that: instead, she dropped to all fours and trotted along behind them like a great big metal cow.

Just ahead of them, something grabbed the Doctor’s attention: the broken and charred corpse of a robot, slumped against the wall.

‘What have we here, then?’ he whispered, dropping to a crouch beside the machine. Popping his glasses on, he took the melted head and turned it in his hands, like a doctor investigating a patient’s neck problems.

‘Still warm,’ he commented without turning. ‘Looks like whatever weapon finished off that thing back there was used on this one. See?’ He turned the half-melted face, with its cavity of dead circuitry, towards Li’ian. Behind her, in the darkness, there was a faint whine from Mother.

‘The Cultists?’ whispered Li’ian, flicking her torch along the tunnel, but there was no sign of movement.

‘That’d be my guess. From what we saw of the creature back there, I’d guess it didn’t build these tunnels. So either it’s an intruder here, a pet… or maybe some sort of guard-dog. Maybe the Cultists came across it and killed it.’

‘And the mechanical?’

The Doctor shrugged.

‘Maybe the creature got to it and it was destroyed when they fired on it?’

The Doctor unfastened the clothing of the robot, whipped out his sonic screwdriver, and within seconds had access to the robot’s chest cavity.

‘Completely dead,’ he said after a few moments. ‘Thought there might have been some flicker of life, backup circuitry or something.’ He sighed and stood up, taking off his glasses. ‘Nothing.’ He looked back at Mother, still on all fours, her face tipped at an angle as she looked at the robot. ‘Sorry, Mother.’

There was another whine from her. Whether it was just a response to his apology or to the fact that it was a robot
they’d
found dead, he wasn’t sure. Although he had a good idea…

Donna was beginning to wonder how much farther they had to go: since the encounter with the tentacled thing and the destruction of the robot, they seemed to have been walking for miles. In silence. She was still simmering over the destruction of the robot and Mesanth and Ogmunee’s cavalier treatment of it. She knew that they had no great love of robots – that much had been clear from their attitudes aboard their ship. As Garaman had said: robots were tools. And that particular tool could well have been the one that had been about to break off her little finger. But still… it didn’t seem quite right, abandoning it like that when they could have beamed it back up to the ship for repair. Maybe she was getting silly and sentimental. After all, before this trip the only robots she’d encountered had been pretty unfriendly, either intent on kidnapping her, killing her or ruining her clothes. Or, like the bronze god on Uhlala, just plain rude. Maybe Garaman had a point. Maybe robots
were
just machines, just faking being human or intelligent or sentient or whatever they called it. Nothing made of circuits and cogs and metal could really feel, could it?

Ogmunee – the big, butch show-off that Donna realised he was – had moved to the front of their little party, waving his torch and the thermal gun around like some sort of silly Rambo. There had been no sign of the Jaftee – the people that lived here. Donna wondered whether they hadn’t all been eaten by the thing with the tentacles.

‘Ahh,’ said Mesanth, breaking the silence and making Donna jump. He was looking down at the glowing screen of his detector. ‘Not far now.’

Suddenly, Donna heard a squeaking, chattering noise from up ahead. She tensed up, half expecting another tentacle-monster to throw itself at them. But instead, as they turned a corner, they found themselves on a wide, rocky ledge looking down into a broad, circular chamber.

Well over a hundred metres across, the floor was stepped in a series of rings, like an amphitheatre, all hewn out of the same sandy rock as the tunnel walls. Scattered around the chamber, singly or in groups, were dozens of squat little monkey-things. A bit like chimpanzees, their arms were much shorter and more powerful-looking and their heads and shoulders were covered with long, coppery-coloured hair that flowed down their backs.

‘Oh,’ said Mesanth simply, the disappointment evident in his voice. ‘Where is it? It should be here.’

He consulted his scanner again.

‘Hmm…’ he trilled. ‘One hundred and twenty metres that way.’ He waved his right arm vaguely.

‘Why isn’t it here?’ said Ogmunee. ‘It should be here. We left them worshipping it.’

‘Maybe they got bored with it,’ Donna suggested. ‘Not like it actually
does
anything, is it?’

Mesanth shook his head worriedly.

‘But they were so excited about it,’ he said. ‘So in awe of it. Of
us
.’

‘Maybe they’ve locked it away for safekeeping,’ Ogmunee said.

‘Let’s hope so,’ trilled Mesanth, but Donna could hear the concern in his voice.

Had the Cult of Shining Darkness done a bit more research on the Jaftee, they’d have discovered that they collected religions like other people collected china ornaments or pictures of the Queen.

In fact, they often had two or three on the go at once, quite often mutually incompatible. It wasn’t that the Jaftee actually
believed
any of them – oh no, they were too smart, too rational for that. They knew that it was nonsensical to believe in some mysterious, invisible, all-powerful being (or beings) that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, were actually interested in the lives of such tiny and insignificant beings as themselves.

But – so the Jaftee reasoned – the pinnacle of sophistication and cleverness was to believe in something totally and utterly
without
proof.

Anyone, they thought, could believe in something when there
was
proof: anyone could believe in gravity when they saw things fall to the ground; anyone could believe in the power of a sun when they saw how it warmed and burned; anyone could believe in the ferocity of the temple beast when you saw it gobble up your best friend for not getting out of the way quickly enough. No: it took a very special kind of person to believe in something when there wasn’t the teeniest shred of evidence for it.

And so, considering themselves pretty special people all round, the Jaftee were always on the lookout for new religions, new things to worship, new rituals, new
nonsense
.