Taken away."
Ben thought the bloke sounded a bit South African. He recalled now that Joiks and Denni were the two Haunt hadn"t been able to contact.
"I reckon she"s dead."
"Dead?" Frog"s bulging eyes narrowed.
"Something came at us in the dark. I tried to hold on to her, but whoever it was just s.n.a.t.c.hed her away." Joiks glowered up at Ben. "Must"ve been this one. What did you do with her?"
"I ain"t done nothing to no one since I got here!" Ben protested.
Frog pulled Joiks back to his feet. You sure she"s dead?"
"Maybe," Joiks said, apparently without irony.
"Try "maybe not"," Frog said flatly. "Whatever happened to Denni, it wasn"t either of these two. They were with me."
Joiks looked at her like she was mad. Then he scowled at Ben and the Doctor and clenched his big fists. "Who the h.e.l.l are "these two", anyway?"
"These three, you mean."
Ben shut his eyes and groaned. "Terrific," he muttered.
"Marshal Misery"s come back to haunt us."
Her words sank in. Three?
"Ben! Doctor!"
Now Ben spun round in disbelief. Stood bright and beaming next to Haunt was Polly. She was flanked by a right array of bruisers, and her daffodil-bright s.p.a.cesuit was covered in dirt, but that aside she looked perfect as ever. He rushed to bundle her up into his arms, and Polly ran forward to meet him, managing to snag the Doctor into the clumsy embrace as well.
Ben gently pulled away from Polly. "Good to see you."
"What happened, my child?" the Doctor asked.
But before Polly could speak, Haunt put a gun to her head, with a look that warned her to keep quiet. "Frog, why aren"t these two locked up in the ship?" Ben wasn"t sure it was possible for anyone to look more peed off than she was.
While Frog started to explain, Ben took in the figures lined up behind her. He was definitely feeling like the odd man out around here. Maybe he should start standing on tiptoes. The two soldiers who"d marched her along with Haunt looked the type you wouldn"t want to tangle with. One of them seemed to have weird tribal markings all over his face, which made his otherwise undistinguished features far more formidable.
Behind them stood Roba and Shel and two more soldiers, a stocky, sly-looking man and a thin girl who would"ve been dead tasty if someone hadn"t tried to cut her red hair with a lawnmower. All of them carried backpacks and wore the weird headbands.
It was strange, Ben decided. The soldiers could only be around his age, but they seemed somehow so much older. He thought about making a run for it back to the TARDIS, but not for long. Outnumbered three to one, with no weapons and the Doctor"s stamina to contend with, how far could they get?
Suddenly it seemed that everyone started talking at once.
The soldiers burst out into angry, frightened discussions, with several dark looks in Ben"s direction. Haunt began questioning Joiks, whose answers brought fresh mutterings in the ranks. The bloke with the tattooed face looked especially gutted.
And then Frog was pulling Ben roughly away from Polly"s arms. He yelled at her to let him go, a complete waste of breath. The Doctor was gripping Polly firmly by the shoulders as Roba and the nimble redhead closed in on them, guns raised. He was keeping her close to him but hushing her questions and protests, taking in each exchange around him with swift movements of his head, like some big worried owl.
Then the biggest tremor yet practically took them all off their feet.
When the rumbling and the vibration finally began to die down, Ben could hear a new noise beneath it. A weird, haunting two-tone melody, a ghost"s idea of an emergency siren. As one by one they heard the sound, so each person in the pa.s.sage fell silent.
"It"s coming from the control centre," the Doctor declared imperiously. "Marshal Haunt, might I suggest we go there at once?"
She pushed past the Doctor, breaking into a run, Shel at her side and most of the squad falling in behind her.
"Looks like you"re getting what you want, old man," said Roba. He started hustling the Doctor along after them, while the silent redhead steered Polly, protesting noisily, by the arm. Frog motioned that Ben should follow them.
They trooped back through the vaulted cavernous chambers and the flea-ridden ceilings, past the statues and the slates, the ghostly alarm growing louder, more penetrating.
And with it, something else.
A resonant hum growing in power.
VII.
"Let go of me, would you?" Polly snapped to the skinny woman who was clearly a lot stronger than she looked.
"You"re breaking my arm."
"And you"re breaking my heart." The skinny woman"s cultured voice was like cut gla.s.s. She propelled Polly into the control centre.
"Easy on her, Lindey," said Shade.
"The delicate flower"s making you you wilt is she, Shade?" the dark-haired, neat-looking man inquired. wilt is she, Shade?" the dark-haired, neat-looking man inquired.
"She"s a civilian, Creben, and there"s no need to mistreat her," Shade said coolly. But he couldn"t hide the faint blush beneath his blackened cheeks. Polly tried to catch his eye, to smile and thank him, but he avoided her gaze. Ben, on the other hand was actively seeking it out. He didn"t look happy, probably because the squat little witch with the gun was standing so close to him, her hand pressed down on his shoulder. Polly tried to give this "frog" a look she hoped would show exactly how impressed she was, but the woman didn"t even glance up.
Looking away, Polly"s heart leapt as she saw the TARDIS, just where they had left it. But she caught sight of the crowd of corpses on the platform, and quickly averted her eyes.
Unlike everyone else. Shade and Tovel, and the man with the broken nose she"d glimpsed earlier, had all noticed the horrible display themselves, and were staring in disbelief.
The alarms grew ever louder. Finally Lindey let go of Polly"s arm, but only so she could cover her own ears. The noise was almost overpowering now.
Creben turned, pale-faced, dragged his gaze over to Tovel.
"All this is Schirr design, isn"t it?" he yelled.
Tovel simply nodded. Then he jogged over to one of the consoles built into the wall. Shade and Creben looked at each other uneasily. Frog and the man with the broken nose stood close together, apparently unmoved by the commotion.
Her whole head ringing with the sound, Polly looked round in panic for the Doctor. Only when the black man stepped aside could she see him standing, head c.o.c.ked to one side, absolutely still.
"I tried to tell them, Doctor," Polly shouted. "Before, there was a noise, a light, a vibration..."
"Quiet," Haunt snapped. She shouted over to Tovel: "Can you make sense of the controls?"
"The girl was right; Tovel yelled back. "I think some sort of takeoff"s been initiated, that the engines are starting up."
Polly noticed the Doctor steeple his fingers and smile almost smugly at the news. His eyes were like dark b.u.t.tons, gleaming in the oily light.
"Takeoff?" echoed the man with the broken nose. "That"s garbage. We"re in the middle of a rock, how can we be taking off?"
"A section of this complex has been designed to break free of the main planetoid; explained the Doctor impatiently.
The oriental man nodded like he understood. "Those earlier tremors signalled the primary phase of the separation."
The Doctor nodded vaguely and bustled over to Tovel. "Can you compute where we are going?"
Polly couldn"t hear the rest of his words over the scary whistling of the alarm. But she caught Lindey"s breathy voice close in her ear.
"What is this place? Where the h.e.l.l did nine dead Schirr spring up from?"
Polly frowned, and forced herself to look again at the corpse in the chair and the bodies on the dais, to count them properly.
She screamed.
Though the piercing notes of the alien klaxon had reached their climax, everyone in the chamber whirled round to face her.
"Look!" she shouted. "The bodies. The alien bodies. There were ten of them when we arrived, now there"s only nine. One of them"s gone!"
Chapter Five.
Destination Unknown
I.
The klaxons cut off.
The sudden silence in the cavern was almost physical in its strength. Ben felt a slight stirring in his stomach, the ground pitched a little and he felt a quick pang of homesickness.
Motion. They were at sea.
What the h.e.l.l was happening here?
Lindey turned to Shel. Her voice sounded too loud, unnatural in the silence. "Could this all be part of the training simulation?"
Shel didn"t answer. Ben reckoned he was a bit of a Doctor-type in that he didn"t like to commit himself if there was a chance he could be wrong.
Haunt, who had been deep in thought, standing almost statue-like since the klaxons stopped, seemed to come to a decision. "All right, everyone. Deactivate websets." Even her best sergeant-major bellow couldn"t mask the worry in her voice. "We can no longer be sure this is a training exercise.
Now, I don"t want you thinking to make yourselves look good for Cellmek. I want you thinking to save yourselves and your team. No more recording."
The soldiers gave muted a.s.sent. As Ben watched, fingers were placed to a particular spot on the metal band around their foreheads. So the headgear wasn"t just for show. The mixed looks on the soldiers" faces as they removed the websets ranged from scandalised pleasure to worried and just downright guilty. It put Ben in mind of how him and his mates had been at school when his older brother taught them how to swear. You were dying to do it but knew it was breaking the rules. And changing you, too, somehow.
Shel spoke up, more confident now he was on familiar ground. "Regulations state that as senior officers, we remain recording in all conditions of combat, unless our imminent capture dictates we erase all recording."
"I"m aware of that, Shel," Haunt said icily. "Naturally, I exclude ourselves from the order."
The bloke with the marked face who"d been goggling at Polly was now turning a less enthusiastic eye on the corpses on the platform and the one in the chair. "Were there nine bodies here before, Marshal?" he asked quietly.
"No, Shade, there were not." Haunt crossed over to the corpses on the platform. Shel, Roba and Shade immediately followed her. Ben glanced at the Doctor, who was engrossed in some computer readout with that Tovel geezer, and at Polly who was just hiding her face in her hands. He decided to get a closer look at the bodies, and to make sure Haunt wasn"t getting ready to blame any of them for this.
Any thought that Polly must be mistaken vanished in an instant. The tableau had clearly changed. There was a clear gap towards the right-hand side. The Schirr had been clutching his b.l.o.o.d.y head with both hands. Now he had gone, while his two neighbours hadn"t moved a muscle. With nothing between them they looked blankly at each other with milky eyes, red pupils fixed in what Ben had taken to be the moment of their sudden death.
"But they can"t be, can they," he said, thinking out loud.
Shade looked at him blankly, and Ben took in the black blotches that covered the man"s face. "Dead, I mean."
"With wounds like that?" Haunt gestured to the guts spilling from one of the bodies, frozen in midfall. "How could they survive?"
"It"s got to be a trick." Ben wasn"t letting this go. "Special effects."
"We ran a scan," Shel told him. He sounded as calm and unfazed as ever as he studied the empty s.p.a.ce on the platform where the creature"s huge feet had been standing.
"These are real corpses."
"Don"t forget the one in the chair," said Roba. He spat on it to make his point, and Ben watched the liquid dribble down the huge pink head. "We can see that"s for real."
"How could a corpse come back to life," Shade muttered.
"Maybe Ben"s right, they"re not dead. Maybe this force field is really some kind of cryogenic -"