Free Doctor Who: Shining Darkness by Mark Michalowski

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-looking 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