Doctor Who: BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures [006] - Alien Bodies by Lawrence Miles

Author:Lawrence Miles
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science-Fiction - Doctor Who
ISBN: 9780563405771
Publisher: BBC Books
Published: 1997-11-13T23:00:00+00:00

8

THE BODY POLITIC

The vault had, in a very real sense, come to life. And it wasn’t happy.

The walls were screaming. Earlier, Bregman had heard the toucans shrieking their heads off in the rainforest, and now the same kind of sound was filling up the vault, a squawking, screeching, cackling noise that seemed to come from every direction at once. The voice from inside the casket fell silent.

Bregman turned, searching the vault for the source of the screaming, but all she saw was Sam, standing in the doorway behind her. Frozen. Like a rabbit caught in headlights. Bregman guessed she probably looked the same way herself.

Then the walls began to blossom. Shoots forced their way out of the cracks in the stone, their stems shot through with deep red arteries, and buds the colour of dead flesh broke open before Bregman’s eyes. The blooms had petals like flowers, but they were scarred and wrinkled like old skin. Something moved under Bregman’s feet, and she stumbled backwards, until her spine was pressed against the side of the casket. In front of her, the floor rippled, as organic tendrils pushed the slabs aside and reached up towards the torchlight.

Bregman started stomping on the growths, trying to mash them back into the ground. It wasn’t really a rational response to the situation, but what the hell? Now the voice had abandoned her, she didn’t have anything to do except panic. She looked up as she stamped, hoping to make eye contact with Sam again, but Sam wasn’t there. The vault had changed shape around her. New walls had grown out of the stonework, curtains of pink fleshy material that stretched between the floor and the ceiling, held in place by columns of living muscle.

She’d obeyed the voice without question. She’d been weak. In shock, maybe, after what had happened in the shrine. The voice had latched onto that weakness, had used it to pull her here through the corridors of the ziggurat. Now she was waking up, at last, only to find that she had no way of getting out again.

Come to think of it, why had she gone to the Faction’s shrine in the first place? Had the voice led her there, too? Had she ever been in control of her own body?

At her feet, a cluster of saplings reared up out of the floor, their buds swelling in front of Bregman’s face until each one was the size of her head. The buds were the colour of scar tissue. They weren’t plants, Bregman realised. Back at the gate of the Unthinkable City, Kortez had told her there was a bio-induction system in place on this island, pumping new genetic material into the ecosystem. The same kind of device was at work here in the vault. Something was seeding the area with living matter, squeezing blood out of the stone. No human-made machine could have done the job this fast, though. It took months, years, for a bio-induction system to have a visible effect on an environment.

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