Shining Darkness Read online

  Mesanth took a couple of steps back, allowing Ogmunee forwards, just behind the robot.

  What happened in the next few seconds, Donna wasn’t quite sure. A horrendous howl shattered the clammy silence of the tunnel and something huge and dark surged out of the side of the passage, striking the bimbot and slamming it up against the opposite wall with a screech of metal and a crash that echoed away into the blackness.

  Ogmunee jumped back, his torch skittering away across the floor like some mad, terrified firefly. He bumped into Donna who fell back against Mesanth.

  As her eyes tried to adjust to the darkness, Donna saw faint sparkles of light come from the robot as part of its face fell away, clattering to the ground.

  ‘Back! Back!’ cried Mesanth, whirling on his three feet and pushing Donna away, leaving Ogmunee at the front.

  ‘Use your gun!’ shouted Donna as, dimly, she saw thrashing tentacles oozing out into the passage.

  Suddenly, the roaring subsided, and, glancing past Ogmunee, Donna saw that the creature’s tentacles had vanished back into the opening in the tunnel. Sprawled on the floor, its spine snapped and folded back on itself, was the robot. A few more crackles of light danced within the circuitry of its head as it turned towards them. Despite the fact that it was a robot, Donna felt vaguely sick. It was the movement of the head that made her act.

  ‘Help it!’ she cried.

  She looked at Mesanth, to see that he was staring at her in disbelief.

  ‘Help it!’ she said again, her voice lower and more angry, now that the lizard man seemed to be ignoring her.

  ‘It’s a robot,’ grunted Ogmunee swinging the beam from his torch over it.

  ‘It’s injured,’ Donna said, unable to believe their lack of concern.

  ‘It’s damaged,’ corrected Ogmunee.

  Donna just glared at him.

  ‘Keep your eye out for that thing,’ she said. ‘And your gun for that matter.’

  And before anyone could stop her, she crept forwards, keeping her back to the wall against which the broken robot lay. Something inside it whirred pitifully.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Donna said quietly, risking a quick glance down at it. ‘You’ll be OK.’

  ‘What is she doing?’ she heard Ogmunee whisper, disbelievingly, to Mesanth.

  ‘I’m trying to help it,’ she answered, trying to keep the fear out of her own voice. At any second, the creature could be back. She checked that Ogmunee was keeping her back covered.

  ‘How are you?’ Donna whispered to the robot, realising that this could well be the bimbot that Garaman had instructed to break her finger. Strangely, it didn’t seem to matter. ‘You’re going soft,’ she whispered to herself as it clicked and sparked pathetically and raised a shuddering arm towards her.

  For a moment, everything was silent – and then, unmistakeably, Donna heard the sound of the creature in the darkness, a deep, stomach-churning roar. She leaped to her feet and backed away, pushing Ogmunee and Mesanth behind her. Something dark and sinuous flicked out of the tunnel towards them, smacking against the wall and sending little puffs of dust into the air.

  ‘Move!’ she cried, wishing that Ogmunee would use his gun. She felt the breeze from one of the creature’s tentacles as it thrashed about, briefly catching the light from Mesanth’s torch.

  ‘Shoot it!’ Donna called as Ogmunee pushed alongside her and raised his arm. Glancing down, she saw the tip of his weapon glow a deep cherry red and there was a ferocious howl from up ahead.

  ‘You’ve hurt it!’ cried Mesanth.

  ‘Well, d’uh!’ shouted Donna. ‘That is rather the point!’

  Ogmunee fired again, and they heard the creature roar in pain.

  ‘Keep firing,’ Donna said.

  ‘Maybe we’ve hurt it enough,’ whimpered Mesanth.

  ‘Not as long as we can still hear it, we haven’t.’

  ‘I don’t like this,’ Mesanth said, and Donna could hear the distress in his voice.

  The tentacled thing seemed to have gone quiet, though whether it was dead or just licking its wounds, Donna wasn’t certain.

  ‘Isn’t there another way through?’ Donna asked Mesanth, who started fiddling with his scanner. The cold light lit up his face from below, and she could see his lips trembling.

  ‘This is the only way through,’ he said. ‘That creature is obviously a guard dog.’

  ‘So we either go on and try again, or we go up and back to the ship?’

  ‘We aren’t leaving here without the segment,’ Ogmunee said, catching Mesanth’s eye. He hefted the thermal gun in his hand, pointedly. ‘So put away your scruples, Mesanth. The projector hurt it, so we know it’s not invulnerable.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Donna. ‘But neither are we.’

  Cautiously, the trio moved back towards where the damaged bimbot lay, Mesanth bringing up the rear, Ogmunee at the front. As they made their way, Donna’s foot caught on something and she waved her torch around until she found what it was: a scorched, crisped piece of tentacle.

  ‘Maybe it’ll have learned its lesson,’ Ogmunee said when he saw it.

  ‘Yeah,’ added Donna, ‘or maybe it’ll just be ten times as angry.’

  But as they approached the broken robot again, the cavity of its head still sparking and flickering, there was neither sight nor sound of the beast.

  ‘Help me!’ called Donna, slipping an arm under the broken robot. She glanced back to check that Ogmunee was keeping an eye on the side tunnel where the creature had come from before. But neither of them moved to assist her.

  ‘Can you speak?’ she asked the robot, its arm still shuddering. It turned its head – the face still creepily half-missing – towards her.

  ‘Pri-pri-primary functioning imp-imp-impaired,’ it stuttered.

  Its voice was dull and raspy and so at odds with how Donna had expected such a glamorous creation to speak.

  ‘Can you stand?’ she asked, realising that the robot was too heavy for her to lift, despite its size-zero measurements.

  ‘Mo-mo-motor functions failed,’ it said, and Donna wasn’t sure whether she imagined the hint of sadness in its voice. It was a robot, after all, and robots didn’t feel sadness.

  ‘We have to keep moving,’ Mesanth said.

  ‘Can’t we transmat it back up to the ship?’ asked Donna, extricating her arm from underneath it. ‘Get it repaired?’

  ‘Too deep,’ Mesanth said. ‘And we only have one augmenter.’

  ‘One what?’

  Mesanth patted his pouch.

  ‘Transmat augmenter. We need it for Garaman to get a lock on the segment when we find it. Otherwise we’d have to drag it up to the surface.’

  ‘Well use it on… on her, and get Garaman to beam down another.’

  Ogmunee pushed forward and before Donna could stop him he aimed his thermal gun at the bimbot. With barely a pause, he pressed the button, and the robot’s head fizzed brightly – like an ember caught in a breeze – and then went dark. Its head lolled and its whole body sagged against the wall and lay silent and dead.

  ‘You killed it!’ said Donna darkly.

  ‘It was a tool, it was broken, and it was holding us up,’ Ogmunee corrected her. ‘It was holding you up.’

  Donna got to her feet, barely able to contain the anger she felt.

  ‘It could have been repaired,’ she said slowly, spacing the words out for effect, right into Ogmunee’s face, not caring about the fact that he weighed at least twice as much as she did and had a gun in his hand.

  ‘We have others,’ he retorted. ‘Now move!’

  ‘Or what? You’ll shoot me too?’ She stood her ground, squaring up to him. ‘Come on then, what’s stopping you big man?’

  ‘He will not shoot you,’ Mesanth intervened. ‘You’re organic. We do not kill organics.’

  ‘No,’ said Donna determinedly, facing the lizard man and his gleaming eyes. ‘You just threaten to break their fingers off, don’t you?’

  Mesanth said not
hing, but turned away, as if too ashamed to admit the truth of Donna’s accusation. Ogmunee gave an annoyed sigh and, brandishing the torch, strode off down the passage. Donna stared at him for a few moments before catching Mesanth’s eye.

  ‘Nice company you keep,’ she said.

  And with a final glance at the dead robot, she headed on into the tunnels.

  ‘You do realise,’ said Li’ian as the darkness of the tunnels folded in around them after their materialisation, ‘that Boonie’s never going to want to let you go?’

  ‘The trick with the transmat?’ asked the Doctor cheerily. ‘Oh, that was nothing!’

  ‘It’s let us beam straight down into the tunnels,’ Li’ian pointed out, handing a torch to the Doctor. ‘You’re turning out to be quite a catch, you know, what with that and the sensors. What other little gems have you got up your sleeve, eh?’

  ‘Oh, keep me around long enough and you’ll find out. Besides, it was the only way to get Boonie to let me come down with you.’ The Doctor glanced up at the shape of Mother, hulking alongside him.

  ‘And how’re you doing, Mother?’ he asked.

  With a faint whirr of gears, Mother’s head tipped to face him. Behind the impassive steel shutters of her face, her eyes glowed red.

  ‘Y’know,’ mused the Doctor, ‘I’d have a rethink on the red.’ He pulled a face. ‘Never a good colour for eyes, red. Trust me. You’ve never met the Ood, have you?’

  Mother stayed silent, staring down at him. Something hummed and whirred inside her vast head.

  ‘I wouldn’t antagonise her,’ murmured Li’ian.

  ‘Really? Oh, I think Mother’s a lot more friendly than she makes out.’ He turned back to the robot and winked. ‘Aren’t you?’

  There was no reply, so the Doctor shrugged and wiggled his torch around.

  ‘Right!’ he said brightly. ‘Allons-y!’ He stopped. ‘Smells like someone’s been having a barbecue around here. Come on!’

  The Doctor strode off ahead, with Li’ian and Mother bringing up the rear.

  For such a whopping great metal thing, Mother was surprisingly quiet, thought the Doctor, as he followed the light of his torch beam. Which was probably a good thing, considering that they were sneaking around in tunnels on an alien planet; considering that they wouldn’t be the only ones sneaking around in tunnels on an alien planet.

  The Cultists had an hour’s lead on them; and, although the Doctor knew that without his own special brand of transmat fiddling they’d have to beam down to the surface and make their way underground, he didn’t want to waste any time. Donna was – he hoped – still aboard their ship; and if they managed to find what they were here for and get away before he could find them, he might lose her for ever.

  Coming to the Andromeda galaxy had been his idea, and he was beginning to wonder whether he hadn’t made a big mistake. They’d barely gone twenty metres into the dark passage when the Doctor brought them up sharply.

  ‘Whoa!’ he said, raising a hand. ‘Barbecue anyone?’

  He cast the pool of light from his torch around in front of him. Blocking most of the tunnel, a huge, smouldering mass lay in their path. Spirals of smoke curled upwards from it, forming a thick layer at the top of the passage. He put a hand over his mouth.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Li’ian, moving alongside him.

  ‘An animal, I think – well, it used to be. Either it’s been playing with matches or someone decided that they’d rather it was an ex-animal. Not much we can do for the poor thing now, I’m afraid.’

  In silence, they squeezed past the charred remains, trying not to breathe in too much of the smell of charred meat that was now so much less appealing than it had been before. Mother didn’t seem to share the Doctor and Li’ian’s distaste for actually walking on it – behind him, he heard her massive metal feet crunching and squelching on the poor beast’s remains.

  Beyond the creature’s lair, the tunnel roof became decidedly lower – the Doctor and Li’ian only had to dip their heads slightly, but Mother was too tall for that: instead, she dropped to all fours and trotted along behind them like a great big metal cow.

  Just ahead of them, something grabbed the Doctor’s attention: the broken and charred corpse of a robot, slumped against the wall.

  ‘What have we here, then?’ he whispered, dropping to a crouch beside the machine. Popping his glasses on, he took the melted head and turned it in his hands, like a doctor investigating a patient’s neck problems.

  ‘Still warm,’ he commented without turning. ‘Looks like whatever weapon finished off that thing back there was used on this one. See?’ He turned the half-melted face, with its cavity of dead circuitry, towards Li’ian. Behind her, in the darkness, there was a faint whine from Mother.

  ‘The Cultists?’ whispered Li’ian, flicking her torch along the tunnel, but there was no sign of movement.

  ‘That’d be my guess. From what we saw of the creature back there, I’d guess it didn’t build these tunnels. So either it’s an intruder here, a pet… or maybe some sort of guard-dog. Maybe the Cultists came across it and killed it.’

  ‘And the mechanical?’

  The Doctor shrugged.

  ‘Maybe the creature got to it and it was destroyed when they fired on it?’

  The Doctor unfastened the clothing of the robot, whipped out his sonic screwdriver, and within seconds had access to the robot’s chest cavity.

  ‘Completely dead,’ he said after a few moments. ‘Thought there might have been some flicker of life, backup circuitry or something.’ He sighed and stood up, taking off his glasses. ‘Nothing.’ He looked back at Mother, still on all fours, her face tipped at an angle as she looked at the robot. ‘Sorry, Mother.’

  There was another whine from her. Whether it was just a response to his apology or to the fact that it was a robot they’d found dead, he wasn’t sure. Although he had a good idea…

  Donna was beginning to wonder how much farther they had to go: since the encounter with the tentacled thing and the destruction of the robot, they seemed to have been walking for miles. In silence. She was still simmering over the destruction of the robot and Mesanth and Ogmunee’s cavalier treatment of it. She knew that they had no great love of robots – that much had been clear from their attitudes aboard their ship. As Garaman had said: robots were tools. And that particular tool could well have been the one that had been about to break off her little finger. But still… it didn’t seem quite right, abandoning it like that when they could have beamed it back up to the ship for repair. Maybe she was getting silly and sentimental. After all, before this trip the only robots she’d encountered had been pretty unfriendly, either intent on kidnapping her, killing her or ruining her clothes. Or, like the bronze god on Uhlala, just plain rude. Maybe Garaman had a point. Maybe robots were just machines, just faking being human or intelligent or sentient or whatever they called it. Nothing made of circuits and cogs and metal could really feel, could it?

  Ogmunee – the big, butch show-off that Donna realised he was – had moved to the front of their little party, waving his torch and the thermal gun around like some sort of silly Rambo. There had been no sign of the Jaftee – the people that lived here. Donna wondered whether they hadn’t all been eaten by the thing with the tentacles.

  ‘Ahh,’ said Mesanth, breaking the silence and making Donna jump. He was looking down at the glowing screen of his detector. ‘Not far now.’

  Suddenly, Donna heard a squeaking, chattering noise from up ahead. She tensed up, half expecting another tentacle-monster to throw itself at them. But instead, as they turned a corner, they found themselves on a wide, rocky ledge looking down into a broad, circular chamber.

  Well over a hundred metres across, the floor was stepped in a series of rings, like an amphitheatre, all hewn out of the same sandy rock as the tunnel walls. Scattered around the chamber, singly or in groups, were dozens of squat little monkey-things. A bit like chimpanzees, their arms were much shorter and more powerful-lo
oking and their heads and shoulders were covered with long, coppery-coloured hair that flowed down their backs.

  ‘Oh,’ said Mesanth simply, the disappointment evident in his voice. ‘Where is it? It should be here.’

  He consulted his scanner again.

  ‘Hmm…’ he trilled. ‘One hundred and twenty metres that way.’ He waved his right arm vaguely.

  ‘Why isn’t it here?’ said Ogmunee. ‘It should be here. We left them worshipping it.’

  ‘Maybe they got bored with it,’ Donna suggested. ‘Not like it actually does anything, is it?’

  Mesanth shook his head worriedly.

  ‘But they were so excited about it,’ he said. ‘So in awe of it. Of us.’

  ‘Maybe they’ve locked it away for safekeeping,’ Ogmunee said.

  ‘Let’s hope so,’ trilled Mesanth, but Donna could hear the concern in his voice.

  Had the Cult of Shining Darkness done a bit more research on the Jaftee, they’d have discovered that they collected religions like other people collected china ornaments or pictures of the Queen.

  In fact, they often had two or three on the go at once, quite often mutually incompatible. It wasn’t that the Jaftee actually believed any of them – oh no, they were too smart, too rational for that. They knew that it was nonsensical to believe in some mysterious, invisible, all-powerful being (or beings) that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, were actually interested in the lives of such tiny and insignificant beings as themselves.

  But – so the Jaftee reasoned – the pinnacle of sophistication and cleverness was to believe in something totally and utterly without proof.

  Anyone, they thought, could believe in something when there was proof: anyone could believe in gravity when they saw things fall to the ground; anyone could believe in the power of a sun when they saw how it warmed and burned; anyone could believe in the ferocity of the temple beast when you saw it gobble up your best friend for not getting out of the way quickly enough. No: it took a very special kind of person to believe in something when there wasn’t the teeniest shred of evidence for it.

  And so, considering themselves pretty special people all round, the Jaftee were always on the lookout for new religions, new things to worship, new rituals, new nonsense.