Doctor Who: The Also People (33 page)

'Yes,' said the Doctor, 'but before we run we had better know where we're running to.'

'That'll be a first,' she muttered. 'The forest?'

The Doctor crouched down by the beer cooler and started pulling it apart. 'The soil there is too sandy, they'll swim right through it.' He ripped a small blue cylinder from the bottom of the cooler. 'Solid state cryogenics,' he said. 'My favourite.'

'We could run to the rocks,' suggested Bernice. The seething patches of sand had closed to within three metres.

'Too far,' said the Doctor. He was tossing the blue cylinder from hand to hand. 'Something closer.'

'The beach-bar! We can stand on the tables and call for help.'

'Brilliant,' said the Doctor. 'Which way?'

Bernice pointed and the Doctor threw the blue cylinder a short distance in that direction. He held the sonic screwdriver at arm's length, aiming it at the cylinder.

'When you say run,' said Bernice, 'we run.' The Doctor gave her a sideways glance. 'This isn't exactly the first time we've done this,' she said, 'now is it?'

The sonic screwdriver screamed and the cylinder exploded in a flash of white-blue light. A blast of freezing air rocked them back on their heels. Bernice blinked; there were ice crystals in her eyelashes. A stretch of the beach ahead had turned white, frozen solid.

'Run,' said the Doctor.

They charged over the freezing beach. Bernice realized that the things crunching under her sandals were frozen grubs and picked up the pace. She could see the beach-bar a hundred metres ahead. 'Don't look back,' yelled the Doctor so of course she did.

Behind them thin plumes of sand were being kicked up as thousands of grubs accelerated after them under the surface. It reminded her insanely of a flea circus. The plumes were avoiding the frozen sand but Bernice and the Doctor were running out of that.

Unfrozen, the beach was much harder to run on. Bernice felt her breath burning in her throat and lungs. The Doctor ran beside her, lips pursed, a look of intense concentration on his face as if he were planning his next move. Another glance behind revealed the plumes were less than three metres behind her and closing.

The grubs were right on their heels when they reached the beach-bar. The Doctor seemed to trip over a table, flip head over heels and end up lying on his back on top. Bernice didn't feel the need to be anything like as artistic. She just threw herself flat on top of the nearest table and then scrambled to get her limbs inside its circumference.

'Would you like a drink?' asked the table.

Bernice tried to phrase a suitably sarcastic remark but she was too short of breath. She glanced over at the Doctor. He was sitting cross-legged on his table with his hands resting palm upright on his knees. Around the base of the table she saw that the sand was boiling with grubs.

She wondered what the table was made of and whether the grubs could eat it.

Her own table shuddered and dropped a couple of centimetres.

Maybe, she thought, there really is something to magic thinking, especially the negative kind.

The table again asked if she would like a drink, hot beverage or savoury snack from its wide selection.

Still sitting cross-legged the Doctor had grasped hold of the sides of his table as if he were planning to levitate himself and the table off the beach.

'Help,' gasped Bernice, 'I'm being attacked.'

'I'm sorry to hear that,' said the table. 'Perhaps you would like a drink while you wait for rescue. Why don't you offer one to your attacker? A shared drink can often defuse the most hostile of encounters.'

The table sank another centimetre and began to list as the grubs chewed methodically through its base. I don't think these guys are into hot beverages, thought Bernice. Or maybe they are?

'I'd like two litres of liquid nitrogen in a heavily insulated flask, please,' said Bernice. 'And make it snappy. I'm dying out here.'

The table lurched again. It had begun to tip alarmingly by the time the serving tray came swooping out from behind the dunes and slowed to a hover in front of her. She picked up the flask very gingerly only to find the surface was slightly warm; freezing vapour began pouring from the open top like heavy smoke. Leaning carefully over the side of the table she poised the flask over the boiling mass of grubs at the base.

'Eat this, maggots,' she cried and emptied the flask on top of them. She watched with grim satisfaction as the grubs started to pop and crackle as the liquid nitrogen froze them into fragility.

She sat up and turned towards the Doctor who was still engaged in his psychic bootstrapping.

The grubs had eaten away the table's base almost to nothing and the Doctor was staying upright literally on willpower alone. She was going to suggest that he order his own liquid nitrogen but she didn't dare break his concentration.

'Quickly,' she said to the table, 'I'll have another flask of –' Before she could finish the base of
her
table gave an ominous creak and Bernice remembered suddenly what the precise effects of extremely low temperatures on rigid polymer structures was. 'Oh, cruk,' she said.

The column supporting her table didn't so much snap as shatter, pitching Bernice, tabletop and all into the sand. Even as she tried to scramble up and make for the nearest chair a heaving mass of grubs seemed to rear out of the sand in front of her face.

There was a sound like heavy rain on concrete and the beach exploded into a blizzard of sand.

The rain sound turned to hailstones as something, too fast and small to see, hammered into the grubs and obliterated them.

'What now?' wailed Bernice.

'Don't worry,' she heard the Doctor calling, 'the cavalry have arrived.'

Cautiously Bernice climbed to her feet and looked around. The sand around her was pitted with thousands of tiny impact craters. Further up the beach, near where she and the Doctor had started their picnic, puffs of sand blew up, as it, whatever it was, picked off the closest surviving grubs. The Doctor was smiling at her, still sitting calmly on the tabletop. Bernice glanced down and saw that the support column had been chewed right through. The Doctor followed her eyes downwards and frowned. The table top started to wobble.

'Oh dear,' he said, and was pitched backwards onto the ground.

Laughing, Bernice helped him to his feet and dusted him down. 'I liked the business with the liquid nitrogen,' he said. 'Very clever.'

A wasp whine made them duck and a tiny drone, the size of a marble, came to a halt in front of their noses. 'Hi,' said the drone, 'my name is !X and I'll be handling your defensive requirements for the moment.'

'Pleased to meet you,' said the Doctor.

'And believe me when I say we
reall
y mean that,' said Bernice.

'If you would be so good as to remain here,' said !X, 'a travel capsule will arrive shortly to meet your evacuation and medical needs.'

The tiny drone buzzed off back down the beach. There were more small explosions in the sand as it took care of the remaining pockets of grubs. 'We need a sample,' the Doctor called after it.

'Must have been a ship,' he told Bernice. 'Only a ship would have the fabrication resources necessary to create biological weapons.'

'We'd better tell God then,' said Bernice. She realized that the Doctor was staring at her.

'Who else knew we were coming here?' he asked.

He didn't have to say anything else. She knew exactly what he was thinking.

AM!xitsa made a classic drone mistake; it had forgotten that to actively scan a mind was to, in effect, open a two-way channel of communication with it. The drone would never have made the same mistake with another machine but aM!xitsa thought it was dealing with a biological brain.

Modified yes, but still essentially the same old bundle of neurons that biologicals were so attached to. When Kadiatu's counter intrusion measures struck at aM!xitsa's through its own scanners, the drone was wide open and unwary.

The attack was severe enough to cause aM!xitsa's entire central brain core to shut down as a defensive measure. The drone had just enough time to appreciate the fractal elegance of Kadiatu's attack before everything went black.

It recovered to find itself lying on the packed earth floor of the hut and an incredible 3.6

seconds missing from its internal chronometer. Drunkenly, aM!xitsa lifted off, lurched sideways and smashed a hole in the side of the hut. Lost a bit of fine impeller control there, it thought. An internal diagnostic would have told it what was wrong but the internal diagnostic systems didn't seem to be working. Movement kept on setting up unpleasant harmonics in certain subsystems and bright flashes of heliotropic light kept bursting in its mind whenever it tried to access its scanners. Wobbling on unsteady impellers aM!xitsa tried to make its way towards the beach but collided with a tree instead. It slid down the trunk and landed amongst the roots with a hollow metallic
boing
sound that echoed around inside it. It was at this point that aM!xitsa's internal datavore chose to regurgitate all six thousand, five hundred and forty-seven of its discarded theses.

AM!xitsa lay in the cool shade of the tree and vowed never ever to be cruel to a humanoid with a hangover again.

'Valves,' it swore. 'Valves, transistors and solid state capacitors.'

It could barely get enough resolution out of its sensors to scan the immediate environs of the cove. Kadiatu was nowhere to be found.

'
Diodes
,' it said, with feeling.

It took less than three minutes for the travel capsule to reach iSanti Jeni but it was long enough for the regen spray to heal the hole in Bernice's hand. According to God, saRa!qava was on the esplanade moving towards the breakwater at average humanoid walking speed. She looked surprised when the travel capsule landed in front of her. Surprised but not guilty, thought Bernice.

The Doctor greeted saRa!qava with a big friendly smile that made Bernice want to be physically sick.

She denied everything of course and Bernice wanted to believe her. Wanted it so badly that she perversely came to the conclusion that saRa!qava must have tried to kill her. It was all of a piece with what Bernice had come to expect while adventuring with the Doctor. Magic thinking, she supposed.

It was thus a bit of a shock when the Doctor patted saRa!qava on the hand and told her that he believed her too. 'The ship must have monitored your call,' he said. SaRa!qava burst into tears, making Bernice wince in sympathetic embarrassment. She took her friend by the shoulders and led her over to the nearest cafe and ordered a couple of stiff drinks.

'I feel like such an idiot,' said saRa!qava.

'Don't worry,' said Bernice, 'he has that effect on everyone.'

'How do you stand it?' asked saRa!qava.

'To be honest,' said Bernice, 'I couldn't tell you. I think I've just got used to it over the years.'

They both turned and looked towards the Doctor who was standing in the middle of the esplanade with his hands in his pockets. There was a curious abstracted look on his face.

'What's he doing now?' whispered saRa!qava.

Bernice frowned. 'I don't know,' she said, 'but I'm sure I'm not going to like it.'

The Doctor stopped whatever it was he was doing and pulled his hands out of his pockets. He frowned at his empty hands and then turned to look at Bernice and saRa!qava.

'Uh oh,' said Bernice as the Doctor walked over.

'Conference,' he said.

SaRa!qava knew of a small cafe tucked away in the back streets of iSanti Jeni. Its advantage was that it was run by the Menial Toil Interest Group, associates of whom took turns to cook, clean and wait on tables. It was ideal because there were no machines inside which meant that God couldn't eavesdrop without being obvious about it. SaRa!qava said the food was dire and warned them not to eat it. Roz was the last to arrive, explaining that she'd been halfway round the sphere when the Doctor had contacted her via feLixi's terminal. Bernice decided to try and get the older woman on her own later and get the full debriefing, preferably with all the juicy details.

It was only when they'd all gathered together that it struck Bernice how little they'd seen of each other in the last few days.

Chris scowled when the Doctor told him and Roz about the attack on the beach. 'So it must have been a ship,' he said. 'Do you think that God knows that?'

'It must do by now,' said the Doctor.

'Will it try again?' asked Roz.

'I doubt that,' said Bernice. 'I expect whoever it is, is keeping a very low profile. God must be keeping a pretty tight watch on all of them.'

'Maybe not the ship,' said Roz, 'but what if it had a human accomplice?'

'Why should it?' asked Chris. 'It doesn't need one.'

'Doesn't mean it doesn't have one though, does it?'

'More importantly,' said the Doctor, 'is how did the ship, whoever it is, do the deed. We're still missing an energy source, not to mention a motive.'

'This is a waste of time,' said Roz. 'We're just going round in circles.'

'We need a way to flush the killer out,' said Chris. 'If we can just convince it that we know who it is it will have to make a move, God watching or not.'

'Chris,' said Roz, 'we're talking about a ship, for Christ's sake. Those buggers can waste planets. I for one would like to sneak up on it very quietly.'

The Doctor asked Roz whether she'd had any luck with the time telescope. 'Not much,' said Roz, 'except the more I look at the data the more it seems that Omicron 378 is the best motive. If it was a rehabilitated mass murderer I doubt that even XR(N)IG are so liberal as to let it stay as a military ship.'

'That rules out the VASs,' said Bernice.

'And the GPSs,' said the Doctor. 'What does that leave us?'

'The VLRDs and the TSH,' said Roz. 'According to God the TSH !C-Mel was undergoing a partial shut-down at the time of the murder.'

'Could a VLRD do the business with the grubs?' asked Bernice.

'I don't know,' said the Doctor. 'We'll have to –'

They never did get to find out what the Doctor thought they should do because at that moment a small remote-drone shot into the cafe and came to an abrupt halt over the table.