More than anything else, the uncomfortable night had convinced Fitz that he had learned enough to pa.s.s on to the Doctor. He wanted to be back in a real bed, somewhere utterly unreal. He thought back wistfully to some of the far-flung places he"d visited with Sam and the Doctor, before the TARDIS had got so hooked on dropping them all in it in a variety of c.r.a.p Earth locations.
First chance he got, he decided, he would have a go at helping the prisoner. Quite frankly, it would serve Leitz right for putting Fitz to such trouble. He grinned at the thought. Putting one over on the smarmy b.a.s.t.a.r.d would be worth the effort.
And after that, he would leg it as fast as he could.
Fitz went into the cafe to scrounge some food and drink before his great escape, completely oblivious of the thin tendrils of mist that were creeping around the corner at the end of the street.
Unlike a normal fog, this mist stayed low to the ground, wispy fingers wrapping themselves around stone and wood as if to pull its main body along.
Instead of rising invisibly from the ground, it was approaching with stealth.
"Doctor," Bearclaw called.
"Yes?" Garcia and the Doctor answered together. "Sorry," the Doctor said.
"What is it, Bearclaw?" Garcia asked.
"There"s something both of you should see upstairs." Garcia and the Doctor exchanged glances, then followed Bearclaw up to the corridor that linked all the tiny wards. "The clock"s started again," he noted.
"Had it stopped?" the Doctor asked urgently.
"Yeah, but the weird thing is the pendulum was up at one side."
"Excellent!" the Doctor enthused. "I was rather expecting something like this."
So much for being all cut up about the blonde, Bearclaw thought. Still, how many friends had he he lost? War did that to you. lost? War did that to you.
Garcia kept pace with the Doctor as Bearclaw led them along to a room at one end. "There were three men... Well, they looked kind of like three men, anyway. They came in here. There was something weird about them. It was like there was nothing under their gowns."
"You mean they were naked?" Garcia asked, raising an eyebrow.
"No, I mean there was nothing in the gap between the hems of their gowns and the floor. No feet, no legs, nothing."
"Ghosts?" Garcia scoffed.
"Not ghosts," the Doctor whispered. He had opened the door a crack, and was peeping through the gap. "Look at this."
Garcia joined him, but Bearclaw hung back. "I"d rather not. Not again."
Garcia saw four occupied beds crammed into the tiny room. Three figures in green robes were cl.u.s.tered round the bed occupied by, if Garcia recalled correctly, a man who had a fractured skull. They looked pretty much like surgical nurses to him, though he didn"t recall any being slated for duty in here today.
Garcia was about to go in and ask the three nurses whether they needed his help, but the Doctor stayed him with an arm across his chest. "Shh. Watch."
"What do you mean "watch"? They might need some " Garcia"s voice faded, as he realised there was something odd about the trio. They were all a little on the short side, for one thing. Their postures were odd, too: poised like ballet dancers, but effortlessly so.
Abruptly, their bodies suddenly stretched and narrowed into flickers of light, which danced around each other for a moment before vanishing. Then they were gone, and so was the wounded man who had been in the bed.
Garcia rushed over, prodding the still-warm bedclothes. "What the h.e.l.l!" He looked at the Doctor. "We"d better raise the alarm "
"About what?"
The Doctor was shaking his head. "Were those Germans?"
"h.e.l.l no... I dunno. What was that thing with the lights, and...?"
The Doctor drew him aside with a hand on his shoulder. Evidently he didn"t want to disturb any of the other patients. "I"m not sure. It could"ve been a transmat energy discharge, I suppose, but "
"A what? What are you talking about?"
"A means to travel long distances instantaneously. But it just didn"t seem right... I wonder whose side they"re on."
Garcia grabbed the Doctor"s arm; he was determined not to let go until he got a straight answer. "A few minutes ago you said you were expecting something like this. You know more than you"re telling."
The Doctor looked suddenly shifty. "Everybody knows more than they tell. You know what you had for breakfast yesterday, or your mother"s favourite food, or what books you read in school. Why would you mention any of them unless you felt them worth telling?"
Bearclaw nodded. "Come on, Doctor. I wanna hear who those people were."
The Doctor thrust his hands in his pockets. "I"m not sure. There is a possibility, but that can"t be right... Surely they must be extinct by now..."
She felt as if she had been falling for hours, yet couldn"t really say in which direction she was travelling. It was actually quite relaxing to float along through the shadows as the tunnel swished by. She thought it was a shaft or tunnel, anyway. She couldn"t actually see the walls, but it somehow gave the impression of being a circular tunnel.
She thought it was odd that she didn"t feel afraid, and wondered why not. She knew that ordinarily she should be terrified by something like this. But no matter how much she tried to feel fear or any other emotion she couldn"t.
Ahead, there was an orange speck, like a sun setting far off in the distance. She wondered if that was why she felt so calm maybe she wasn"t really moving and this was just some sort of tunnel vision. Concussion or something. It was growing larger, though; one of them was approaching the other, though she couldn"t tell which.
It wasn"t just a sunset... There was a golden light within the orange, and silver within that... Before she had a chance to think about it, or perhaps as a result of thinking about it, it had grown larger, surrounded her and swallowed her up.
The lighting was so bright that she couldn"t even tell whether she was indoors or outside. But the brightness didn"t hurt her eyes. Whoever had set this up knew their stuff. It was clean, clinical. Some kind of hospital, maybe... I"ve been abducted. Aliens. "No weird stuff."
"The only thing weird around here, young lady, is you."
She took a sharp breath, bracing herself for the pain she expected to come. It never did, and she relaxed. Perhaps her nervous system had just packed in... She was sure sure there ought to be pain: getting shot at point-blank range and lying in a snowy field had to hurt, didn"t it? there ought to be pain: getting shot at point-blank range and lying in a snowy field had to hurt, didn"t it?
Apparently not, as far as her body was concerned.
Anyway, she didn"t think she was lying down, now, though she didn"t seem to be standing either. It was more like being suspended in the air, without being able to feel whatever was holding her up. She didn"t feel anything under her feet, but she sensed movement of some kind when she made a walking motion with them.
In front of her, silvery images danced in a strange nonlight. There was a baby among them, and little girl, and other figures more familiar. They were her. Somehow they were all her, and somehow she was seeing them both one at a time and all at once. It made her head spin, seeing all these figures of herself without even knowing who she was.
Maybe that was the point, she thought, as memory hit her like a punch. Now she remembered. Terrific.
Her name was Samantha Angeline Jones, and she was dead.
Leitz was busy transcribing all the data he had gathered from observations of his prisoner, ready for transmission to his superiors at Wewelsburg. Some judicious editing was necessary, of course: he wanted to make sure he held something back for later, just in case.
He was sure the Inner Circle who met there would much rather be conducting this research in the castle itself, but there seemed to be some geographical limitations at work. This was the only place where good specimens were currently to be found.
So much the better for him.
Leitz had started the war as a fervent n.a.z.i. He was well educated, and knew that joining the SS was a political expediency to work his way up faster than his peers. Now he had almost carte blanche carte blanche to research exactly as he pleased. to research exactly as he pleased.
Even the prospect of execution for failure didn"t bother him now. He had held back enough material as insurance to be certain that he could simply lie and get away with it. If all else failed, he was sure some other nation would consider his researches worth keeping him alive for.
There was a sudden crash of firing outside. Leitz leapt to his feet as gunfire erupted in the fields. Surely the Americans hadn"t gathered forces for a counterattack so quickly? Or could it be...?
He s.n.a.t.c.hed up a Schmeisser and dashed out of his command truck into what the British called a "peasouper" of a fog. He was sure there had been no hint of it earlier.
There were screams and shots from the streets all around. Something black and indistinct flashed past and Leitz fired instinctively, but it was gone immediately, with no sign of whether he had hit it.
Concerned, he headed towards the source of most of the noise.
It wasn"t so much like experiencing memories as watching them from afar. Or watching a movie of them. It was a lot more creepy than that, though, as each image sparked a memory of a physical sensation, or an emotion.
She tried to turn away, but, no matter which way she faced, the visions were still in front of her.
Although she recognised herself, and recognised many of the images that flashed past her, there were others that were simply... wrong. Like someone had borrowed her body and told her about it after putting it to their own use. This had to be a trick. Yes, that was it. This was some kind of trick.
Or a nightmare, she supposed. Did people dream when they were unconscious or when they were dead like they did when they were asleep?
With that thought, light flared around her.
Sam shifted slightly, and the side of her face came out of the light. She blinked, feeling a smooth hard surface under her back. The light above seemed to be some kind of beam, shining down on her from the ceiling. A lamp? Like in an operating theatre? Then she"d been right, hadn"t she. What had they...?
She moved aside, to see out of the light. The ceiling around the light source was smooth and earthy, perhaps of stone. It was puzzling, but at least it was definitely a physical place. Maybe she wasn"t dead. Maybe.
She seemed to be lying on some kind of stone altar or sarcophagus. Gingerly, in case the movement would make her giddy, she swung herself into a sitting position.
She felt no ill effects, and stood, the stone floor smooth against her feet. Sam looked down at herself. Something was very odd. She"d expected to find herself undressed, somehow, but there was an irregular area of pure white skin between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and another on her hip and on her thigh. She touched the white area of her chest. The feeling from that area of skin was perfectly normal, but her fingertips sent a different report. It just wasn"t quite right. This skin was much finer and smoother than any human skin had a right to be, she thought, different even from the perfection she"d been given by the Nanites back on Bel. That was as close as she could come to rationalising the difference.
The white patches precisely marked the wounds she had sustained, and she shivered at the memory. She thought a bit more: surely that couldn"t be right? It certainly wasn"t scar tissue, which you might expect to form over such wounds... No entry or exit holes, no bleeding...
But then you"d also expect to be dead after being shot in the heart at point-blank range and left in a field for the snow to bury you.
Wouldn"t you?
Fitz had stumbled over a corpse as soon as he emerged from the Cafe Scholzen. In spite of the sounds of gunfire, this body hadn"t been shot: it was an SS trooper with scratches on his face, and eyes bulging with terror.
Whatever had attacked the man hadn"t been deterred by his gun, and if his expression was anything to go by Fitz wasn"t in a hurry to meet it. It somehow seemed natural to automatically think of the thing as an "it" rather than a person. A person couldn"t have done this.
A shot boomed, and Fitz heard the most bizarre and unnatural howl of his life in return. Something flashed past him on its way to the soldier who had fired; all he got was a jumbled impression of unpleasant chitin and legs that were too angular and spindly for comfort. Then it and the man were gone, leaving only an insane gurgling scream and the smell of blood hanging in the damp air.
Sod this for a game of soldiers, Fitz thought. Time for his hastily planned, and barely thought-out, great escape.
Sam had found some clothes hanging on the wall. They were light unis.e.x trousers and shirt, but surely not a coincidence in exactly her size. Despite not trusting anything here, she put them on. She couldn"t remember feeling more utterly vulnerable.
As she explored the room, she began to wonder if she was inside a pyramid or something. The place had that sort of look about it. There was a dark doorway on one wall, and Sam had no choice but to go through it. It was the only visible exit.
The tunnel led down and along, finally emerging on to a causeway of dressed stone. Now Sam got the first real chance to see that, to put it mildly, she wasn"t in Kansas any more.
The rock that it was carved from was smooth and cool to the touch. In fact it was quite pleasant and comfortable. Eventually the causeway moved out of the rock into clear sunlight, and Sam turned to look back.
The tunnel had been cut into a large mesa, set in a huge circular lake, the waters far more blue than she"d ever seen in nature, at least on Earth. There were buildings on top; she had a vague impression of pillars and golden domes, too, though she couldn"t make them out really clearly.
The causeway descended across the lake to a wide expanse of rolling green hills. Even from here, she could make out flower meadows, and forests straight out of a Disney cartoon.
At the very edge of the horizon were jagged mountain peaks, almost lost in a fine haze. She squinted, wishing she had a pair of binoculars or something. The haze was odd, like rainbows merging together or some kind of energy field set up around an artificial environment.
Resisting the obvious conclusion (though she could see the Sunday Sport Sunday Sport headline now alien afterlife stole my soul!) and with nowhere else to go, she continued down to the lake sh.o.r.e. Sam froze, as a creature loped into view and crouched almost within touching distance. Whatever it was, it didn"t look like anything she would expect to find in any artist"s impression of heaven. headline now alien afterlife stole my soul!) and with nowhere else to go, she continued down to the lake sh.o.r.e. Sam froze, as a creature loped into view and crouched almost within touching distance. Whatever it was, it didn"t look like anything she would expect to find in any artist"s impression of heaven.
The face had a sharpness to it, from forehead to chin. The jaw swept back from the chin in a very triangular shape, and the crown of the white-haired head was strangely flattened. It looked to Sam not unlike the effect you might get by shaving the face of a cat. Jewel-like eyes looked into hers. And, like a cat, she could imagine this creature capable of cruelty both playful and innate. The rest of it seemed humanoid enough, though it may have had a more alien muscle structure under its velvet and leather clothes.
It straightened, and she realised the crouch wasn"t a sign of hostile intent, but just its legs absorbing the impact of dropping from above. "Forgive me," it said. "I did not mean to alarm you." Its mouth was moving as if singing, and strange lights seemed to be flicking just beyond her vision, but at least she heard its voice in English.
"Welcome," it said.
Fitz ducked into the tent and quickly reversed course. The guard was staying on duty, despite the fuss outside. Fitz hurried over to a small workbench where equipment for maintaining the tent and generators was kept. Unnoticed, he selected a large spanner from a toolbox there, then returned to the tent, this time more openly. The guard turned, raising his gun, anxiously, but then relaxed. "What"s going on?" he asked.
"I"m here to relieve you," Fitz said, ignoring the guard"s concern. "There"s some hot food waiting back in the cafe."
The guard looked relieved at the thought that all the commotion wouldn"t cheat him of his dinner, but he didn"t move. "Thanks, but Leitz is a stickler for details. You"re new, but you"ll learn." He turned away, as if about to speak to the prisoner, and Fitz lunged forward.
Fitz hit him in the back of the neck with the spanner, and the guard dropped. "There"s a lesson for you," he muttered.
He hopped over the unconscious body, and switched off both the generators, afraid that the bars were probably electrified or something. Next he opened the cage. Sam would be proud of me, he thought. Go free, strange thing. The prisoner didn"t move. Fitz stood in the doorway, wondering if he was too late and it was dead.
It must have realised it was being watched, because it suddenly moved, two slitted eyes looking right into Fitz. Before Fitz even realised it was about to move, the prisoner had uncoiled and was almost nose to nose with him.
Fitz bit off a yell and tried to pull himself together, reminding himself that it was the people outside outside the cage he ought to be frightened of. the cage he ought to be frightened of.
Now that the prisoner was so close, Fitz found he could see clearly again. It was a man, lean and stringy, with piercing green eyes and flowing red hair. "Help me," he asked softly. "Free me."
Fitz stepped back, but had recovered enough to stay facing the prisoner. "That was the general idea. But Jeez, did you scare me!" Fitz put out a hand to help the red-haired man up. From the way he was acting, Fitz was prepared to have to put a lot of physical effort into moving him, and as a result almost overbalanced; the man couldn"t weigh more than a couple of stone, despite seeming perfectly healthy.