Chapter Eleven
The little bits of Jack were sizzling on the floor of the crèche room.
Sizzle.
Sizzle.
Sizzle.
Occasionally, a little light would flow back and forth between the pieces of seared Time Agent meat, buzzing back and forth with a blue pulse that screamed through the cells with the cold burn of mercury.
Back and forth.
Back and forth.
Back and forth.
One by one, the bits of flesh began to attract each other, crawling toward their partners in a grisly dance, trailing nothing behind them as they edged closer to becoming whole again.
Ghostly claws soon coalesced over Jack's hands, followed by a crowd of thick carapace around the chunked midsection… while foggy mandibles chittered over his mouth, forming even as his teeth jumped back into his jaw and his muscles rewove themselves.
"Find them!" the many voices of the pirates sang from his mouth in a numb, mindless chorus, "no one leaves this ship alive!"
His possessed eyes, one still dangling from the left socket by a bunch of nerve fibers, settled on Yahlas, still wearing the Doctor's body in the crèche.
He looked down at his unfamiliar hands, confused for a moment to find soft pink flesh rather than the hard white sleekness of keratin, but then he smiled, curled his fingers into fists, and reached into the crèche, tangling his hands in the Doctor's sweat-drenched hair.
"Wakey, wakey, little man," the pirates screamed from Jack's throat.
Then he heaved, pouring more of the sick grey fog into the effort.
Soon, tendrils became tentacles, and tentacles became writhing thick coils of grey-blue ectoplasm, all pulling at the Time Lord in the crèche, and perhaps Yahlas with him, every tube, every wire, every panel, booming out in a blast of flesh and bone and metal and showers of cold silvery fluid.
A thick wet plop, a splash of mercury, dark blood raising bruises on the pale skin, all ended in a crash, and déjà vu.
He reached in again, pulling on the power coupling supplying the creche, the last barricade to his revenge on the bitch who had killed them. Him? Them.
His body shot back against a wall as the great tube tore, sparking fiercely, and a vision of a blue box in a large darkened area deep below the Drive Chamber filled their thoughts.
Yes… escape… they would escape in the box… but what had been down there? They'd never had a chance to reach that room, till now. There would be an access in the Sleeper Chamber, though- every Xja ship had one. And they had been Xja, once, before the bitch Yahlas had organized the normal Xja against them. Before she'd built the crèche as a defense against the dark surety of their raids.
Jack laughed his way down the hall to the Chamber of the Sleepers, his throat humming with a thousand clicks and cackles, body churning with the sweet revenge of a thousand dead pirates, warmed at the thought of the destruction they would soon wreak in the room below.