It was too big to swallow, but she sensed the thing to do was to pop it in her mouth anyway. It fitted surprisingly well and disintegrated on her tongue. She felt like a cloud of hot dust had drifted up her nostrils and a sticky, tingling sensation enveloped her larynx and slid into her stomach.
Without warning, Metro City vanished.
Chris looked up into Forrester"s hard brown eyes, filled with uncustomary hatred. He felt he was about to burst into tears. "I .
. . didn"t know what . . . We should have gone for help, I said so, I . . . I thought you were dead!"
Her expression was resolute. She brought up the gun again.
"You know what I had to do to my last partner, don"t you Chris?" He nodded dumbly, but she told him anyway. "He went bad on me and I had to punish him." She flipped the gun"s 33 setting to "kill" with what seemed like a deliberately orchestrated click. "Now, my definition of "bad" is leaving a fellow officer to die. I hoped I wouldn"t have to do this again."
Chris tried to crawl away, to do something productive, but he was paralysed. He felt something hard and round in his right hand, but he didn"t know what it was. "Come on Roz," he implored, his breathing hard, voice trembling, "you"re not serious about this. I mean, after all we"ve been -"
"No use pleading!"
She was really going to do it. "We"re supposed to be friends!"
"You"re no friend of mine, you backstabber!"
The end of the barrel was an inch from his nose. He began to panic. There was nothing to lose. " I love you I love you!" Chris screamed, the confession torn unwillingly from his heart and hanging accusingly between them.
She pulled away and hesitated, just for a moment.
Chris was blinded by tears and his cheeks were burning with the embarra.s.sment of his outburst, but he knew that this might be his only chance. He lashed out with his feet and, luckily, took Roz"s legs from under her. She fell. Chris scrambled up, leapt over her and ran.
"You can"t escape me!" The voice was already far behind him, echoing around the tunnels as though she was everywhere at once. He didn"t look back.
There was another insect thing on the next walkway. Without stopping to think, he leapt into the water and waded across instead. He took a pot-shot at the monster as it leaned over the safety rail, its legs thrashing in frustration. The blast did no physical harm, but it made Chris feel better. Then he was on solid ground again, heading towards the null-gray shaft which would finally take him away from this nightmare. Through those heart-bursting, unbearably extended seconds, he expected nothing more than to see some terrible creature step out before him, blocking his salvation. No such thing happened.
Chris. .h.i.t the back wall of the shaft panting, allowing his over-exerted body to collapse against it. He realized some. thing was wrong as he reached the floor. He wasn"t rising. The anti-gray 34 unit wasn"t functional.
Trapped in the confined s.p.a.ce, Chris jumped to his feet alertly. Too late. Roz was in the doorway, weapon aimed. A bolt struck his shoulder, twisting him and slamming him back into the wall. He hit the ground again with a lurch of his stomach and the world began to slip away a second time.
It was entirely as a reflex action that Chris Cwej, in his last second of consciousness, put the tablet into his mouth.
"I need two volunteers," the Doctor had said, "for a potentially dangerous mission." Bernice remembered, smiling. How nice of him to ask for once. "I want Benny to be one. She"s had some limited experience with this sort of problem. Who else?" She had rolled her eyes then, although she didn"t mind really.
She was standing now in an uncomfortably shallow niche, which had been scooped out of a sheer glacial wall. Before her, a chasm beckoned, stretching endlessly in all directions.
Particularly, it seemed, downwards. She inched back from the vertiginous drop, shivering, her eyes closed. Her mind was strangely numb but she could feel broken fragments of memory a.s.sembling themselves into a fairly coherent picture.
"Okay, Doctor, what"s the scoop this time?"
"A simple repair job."
"On the TARDIS?"
"No. The universe."
"Aha. And I"ll just bet the guarantee"s expired."
The sky-bike was crammed into the s.p.a.ce with her. It had changed its shape to a more spartan, functional a.s.semblage of white tubing. A skimmer. Benny liked the old model better.
Still, there was no computer now; that was some consolation.
She wondered if the vehicle had been responsible for lifting her here, but instinctively she knew that that was not the case.
The crystalline surface of the niche"s back wall was hard, sharp and cold, yet it receded at her cautious touch as if whatever mountain she was trapped in was malleable to her very will. It was in this way, coc.o.o.ned by dreams and half-realities, that Benny realized she had arrived. Straight through what seemed to be solid matter.
35."A breach has opened," the Doctor had explained to his three companions. "A semi-natural thing, a fluke accident, perhaps caused by the Timewyrm or by the Monk"s machinations with the timestream. Maybe even Gabriel and Tanith created it as a by-product of their existence. That doesn"t matter. What does is that this phenomenon may have serious repercussions. It has created a gateway between our own reality and a fictional sub-dimension."
Roz had scoffed at that apparently nonsensical idea. Chris had frowned and awaited the Doctor"s further information. Bernice had found the concept both a realistic and a chilling one. In answer to her worried question, the Doctor had confirmed that, yes, this alien realm was the one which had once housed that mysterious and deadly place, the Land of Fiction. "If we don"t rectify this fault, the physical laws we know may change beyond recognition."
"If I"m going to wind up facing Doctor Doom again," she had said, "you can forget it." She hadn"t meant that either.
She remembered the generator and felt for it in the pockets of her coveralls. It was there all right, lending some measure of tangible credence to her still hazy recollections. The readout on the small green box"s flat display told Benny that she had arrived here with six minutes to spare. It told her that Chris was a worrying eight hundred metres from his destination. It told her nothing about the Doctor.
"The transdimensional rift has formed its own protective barrier: a large, solid crystal, the size of a small moon. It"s composed entirely of fictional energy and is thus immune to a.n.a.lysis and to most forms of attack. Even the TARDIS can"t land within its ma.s.s. Its one weakness is the intelligent mind.
With that, we can sculpt its raw material into an infinite variety of forms. We can make the crystal open for us, penetrate to its heart and set up a force field around the original breach."
A simple enough plan, Bernice had thought. Three people, three field generators. Each to enter the crystal from separate points on its surface. The fictional forces would besiege them with whatever could be plucked from their minds, but with the 36 help of a little hypnotic suggestion and a powerful mindblocking drug taken at a crucial moment, they could feasibly reach the centre. Once there, they could operate the generators simultaneously, to form an impenetrable field which Roz, stationed in the TARDIS, could control. Contract the field and, as the Doctor had put it, pow! pow! The energy would be forced back to where it had come from, the leak plugged. The energy would be forced back to where it had come from, the leak plugged.
Not quite so simple in practice. Already, Benny could see shapes hanging over the chasm. They were insubstantial, like smoke phantoms on the wind, but she was positive she had seen her own face, briefly, and her father"s. She was at the heart of the crystal and the gap before her was roiling with the substance of an unfamiliar plane. It had seemed invisible before only because there had been nothing to dictate its form. With the Doctor"s drug beginning to wear off, Bernice could feel her every thought threatening to become real again.
It occurred to her momentarily that, without a guiding intellect, there was no way the crystal itself should have formed.
She dismissed that notion. It was comparatively unimportant now.
The Doctor had warned against the medical danger of taking two tablets. He had only provided one. Benny"s time in this place was limited and her journey back would no doubt be as unpleasant as the one here.
If her colleagues didn"t appear soon, it would also be in vain.
Their mission couldn"t be completed.
Chris was beginning to feel like a character in a bad sci-fi anthology series: each time he thought he"d woken up, he found himself dreaming all over again. This time, he was encased in some form of clear crystal, like a fly in amber. There were dry tears on his cheeks, his shoulder and head hurt like h.e.l.l and he was no longer sure if Roz was dead or alive - or even if he"d humiliated himself before her as he feared he had. But as he fought back a claustrophobia-induced panic at his situation, the memories of what he recognized as reality began to filter into his mind, and this at least gave him some form of perspective.
He was in trouble. That much he knew. He remembered the 37 Doctor"s briefing, recalling his ire rising when Roz told him that she was the logical candidate for the job. They had tossed a coin for it in the end, Chris partic.i.p.ating for all the wrong reasons. To prove himself, to look good in front of the others.
Where had that got him?
Chris concentrated and the crystal shrank back, leaving him in a small hollow large enough to stand in and move around a little. "No problem, Doctor," he remembered joking. "I"ll dream of fluffy bunnies and pink marshmallows." Yeah, right. And not, for instance, of marauding insectoid monsters and a partner who . . .
Best not to think about it.
Chris pulled the generator from his coverall pocket. His heart sank as he checked it. Eight hundred metres from the crystal"s centre. Bernice, he saw, was there already; she"d be getting impatient. And he had used his mindblocker. He was on borrowed time.
Chris didn"t know whether, without his skimmer, he could reach the centre before the dreamscape a.s.serted itself again.
That thought worried him. His throbbing shoulder testified to the fact that - taken from his own fantasies though it may be - the nightmare world was a very real and dangerous place.
Perhaps he"d dream of fluffy bunnies this time?
Seconds ticked by, marked by the beading of sweat on his forehead. He didn"t dare go forward, but he was reluctant to admit defeat too. He didn"t want to go back.
Chris"s dilemma was settled in a second. A horribly familiar smell wafted across his nostrils and set his nasal hairs on end.
Ammonia and blood. He had run out of time already.
As he turned to leave, he dropped the generator. Perhaps he was close enough already. The Doctor might be able to rig up something to activate the device remotely.
Never mind that now, his mind screamed. Run!
Chris ran, and the crystal obligingly opened before him.
Something clicked in one ear and he fancied he could hear the echo of some distant creature"s chirping.
Chris screwed his eyes shut and doubled his speed.
38.Benny knew that she couldn"t wait much longer. Her readout told her that Chris - or rather, his generator - hadn"t moved at all for the past fifteen minutes. Either he had dropped the device or . . . she hated to even consider the alternative.
There was still no sign of the Doctor, which worried her even more.
She heard laughter: the manic, high-pitched chortle of the Quiz. This time, she recognized it as her own voice, heightened by insanity and amplified back at her. "If this is what compiling a book of bad twentieth-century jokes does for the psyche," she muttered, "I"m getting" out of publishing at the first opportunity."
There was nothing more she could do here. She popped the generator back into her pocket and straddled the skimmer. "It looks like we"ve lost this game." Then, with all the mental force she could muster, Benny punched a straight pa.s.sage through the cavern wall and started the engine. She would get as far as she could before the drug wore off completely.
Already, the buildings of Metro City were beginning to reappear.
Chris no longer knew what he was doing.
He didn"t know how he had entered the Undertown, why its dark walkways were full of insectoid alien predators, or even why he didn"t just turn around and leave. What he did know was that he was alone, and that he was in deadly serious trouble.
The power pack in his blaster was exhausted so that all he could do now was run and keep an eye out over his shoulder for the sudden death which seemed unavoidable. His eyes streamed in the continual onslaught of pungent ammonia and he wished with all his heart that Roz was here. Or the Doctor.
Then, suddenly, a creature was upon him, striking out from the invisibility of shadow, and Chris was down, the insect"s legs pinning him, choking on his own blood, feeling the skin of his throat tearing. He threw his a.s.sailant off with one last push of his straining muscles and he got to his feet, barely able to see as the word merged into a kaleidoscope of colours.
He found his way towards a side pa.s.sage, feeling for the 39 walls, expecting a second attack at any time. Then he walked into a wall and realized he had groped his way right down a dead end. He turned, but there was no chance of retracing his steps. The insect was blocking the tunnel entrance. Chris shrank back against the hard, cold, immovable brick.
As the monster closed in, he prepared to fight. Hand-to-hand, if need be. He lashed out, but his fist was taken and held. Chris saw the blurred shapes of four more creatures, cl.u.s.tered behind the first. There was no way out.
The insect deliberately drew back its foreleg for the killing thrust. Its colleagues chattered with what sounded like excitement. Chris closed his eyes and fought back the powerful urge to scream. He would face his death with dignity, at least.
The insect"s poisonous claws stabbed through him and became embedded in the brickwork beyond.
Chris Cwej was still waiting for that final blow when his molecules were rea.s.sembled, some two hundred and fifty thousand miles away.
40.
5.
Mesozoic Mash
In the same moment that Jason operated the Lizard-Monster Eradication Device, the lights in Politik Darnak"s office blinked out. In the ensuing darkness and silence, he emitted an involuntary whine and shrank back, afraid that this was all some plan on the aliens" part to kidnap or murder him.
Then the lighting was restored, albeit to the dim level of emergency reserves, and Darnak saw that his visitors had not moved at all. He dropped with relief into his padded chair and mopped his brow, embarra.s.sed at his panic.
"What happened?" asked Jason of his colleague. "Did we cause a power drain or something?"
"There"s no way we could have done. The machine is entirely self-energizing." The man caught Darnak"s wide-eyed expression and added, deliberately it seemed: "By springs."
"It"s the lizards," said Darnak, a cold feeling crawling over his skin. "They"ve sabotaged the Citadel"s power supplies, they must have done. They"re attacking!"
Jason looked at him with the air of someone addressing a particularly stupid child. "If it was lizards," he said reasonably, "then you"ve nothing to worry about. We destroyed them, remember?"
Darnak stared at him, dumbfounded. Jason smiled back. The Politik finally tore his gaze away, bustled over to the communications board and called up the Captain of the Guard, demanding to know what had caused the outage. He was in need of a swift dose of reality, bad news or not.
The Captain"s reflective helmet hid his features from Darnak"s scrutiny; his voice betrayed his worry none the less.
"We"ve got intruders in the power grid, sir. I don"t know how, 41 but they managed to get past security. They"ve shorted out all primary systems."
Darnak gripped the console. It felt wet beneath the dark, shivering skin of his hands. "Lizards?"
"Actually, no sir. It"s humans. Looks like Mortannis"s lot.
They"re demonstrating out front too, equal rights for reptiles and all that. I sent a contingent to break it up."
"And you didn"t inform me?"
"You told me not to disturb you."
"You fool! We"re being set up for a lizard attack, can"t you see? It was rumoured for tomorrow - they"ve brought the d.a.m.n thing forward!" He cut the connection with a sharp punch, then sat back and shook as he realized he had no idea what to do.
The Superior, he thought. She"ll have to get out of bed for this! But what if he had guessed wrong? What if he looked stupid for disturbing her?
He turned, his eyes involuntarily meeting Jason"s. The young man shook his head in faint disbelief. "We told you, Darnak: the lizards are all dead. We disintegrated them."
Darnak boiled over, clawing at his own cheeks in impotent frustration. "You"re telling me it"s that easy? I don"t believe . . .
I can"t . . . will you stop playing these games!" He tailed off into a series of incoherent splutterings, and barely registered the ominous darkening of Jason"s features.
The next second, he was bolt upright, eyes staring like a frightened rabbit"s and brain racing, trying to work out what new threat was a.s.sailing him. He could feel the whole office shaking, but he couldn"t see any obvious cause. Had the lizard people developed some potent new form of attack?