Chapter Eight
Yahs clicked softly down a gang to the Chamber of the Sleepers, his thick thorax light behind him, his long child's body bouncing spryly on sharp thin legs.
Tlik tliktliktlik
Tliktliktlik tlik
Tlik tliktliktlik
Tliktliktlik tlik
The door came up on him, a sudden breath of release, a quick throw of light around a frame of soft greys and pearly slit-like windows.
He placed a white foreleg against the door, making his flesh solid for an instant.
T-tlik.
Scraping his claw against the door lock, he thinned his presence again, then stepped through the door.
He was dead.
He needed no lock.
Wiggling the rest of him through the molecules of the door, he shook his thorax as if to wring water from the tip, then popped the rest of the way into the Sleeper Chamber.
He looked up to the rows and rows of Sleepers, silvery casings stacked in honeycombs, all around the room; this area was filled with them. He remembered, there used to be the skitter of new hatchlings scampering down below. It was where they'd kept the feeding maze, where the old would sleep in comfort, to be eaten when they could no longer run.
Tlik, tlik-tlik.
Tlik.
Tli…
Scuuuuuuh.
Vents. Thousands of vents, flapping open, slapping shut.
The Time Lord had come, promising salvation from the years without sun, the endless black starvation. The sickly stars that seemed to swim through their heads without rest, blinking away their sanity.
Yahlasindrintalaasidvora. She had tried. She had built the Scaffold.
Then the pirates had come. They ravaged all but the Sleeper Chamber.
She brought them, she must have. They'd only come after the Scaffold failed…
If he could only access the Sleepers' memories, but those had been lost to him long before the Doctor had arrived.
She would not get the Sleepers. She would not get the records.
The Doctor was kind, but necessity…
Yahs clicked his forelegs together, rubbing soft hairs before covering his head with both feet and bowing forward.
"The Doctor must not find the records," he said to the billion silver tombs, "find him first!"
Then his body lifted, dissipating into fog that curled into the pipes and tubing, slipping into the cracks of panels, swimming through the streams of filtered mercury coolant toward the Time Lord's presence outside.
"There, the thread of his essence!" Yahs exclaimed, bodiless as he flew through the circuitry of the ship toward the outside cams, specifically the fourteenth, "just a little more, and…"
Inhabiting the number fourteen camera perched on the bend of the roundest part of the hull, near the Drive Chamber, Yahs caught a grainy glimpse of the seventh camera turning opposite the others, sparking a little as it dragged a bit of live wire back and forth across the hull.
"Closer, closer my kin! What did he find?"
The camera honed in, taking Yahs with it as the lens retracted outward, focusing, focusing, blurring and refocusing. Soon, dull smoky clouds retreated into blackness ringed in clear light- the lens of a lone camera.
A body in a spacesuit.
"Female of the species…" Yahs muttered, "but she died below… I thought she was lying…"
Then a wave of unfamiliar feeling crackled through his being, and he surged out of the camera, back into the wires.