Doctor Who: Sontaran Experiment (6 page)

Harry thrust the stone he was carrying under the victim’s feet to help support his weight. ‘All right, old chap,’ he murmured. ‘I’ll soon get you some water.’

Harry searched feverishly among the rocks, but he knew it was quite pointless. Everything was scorched and bone dry. He had seen no pools or streams anywhere. He ran back to the dying man, and listened intently to the spasmodic fluttering of his failing heart.

‘Did the... the Golem thing do this to you?’ he asked.

The young man tried to shake his head, staring at Harry with glazed, bloodshot eyes. ‘Not... not Golem...’ he croaked with a shudder, ‘Son... Sontaran...’

Harry frowned, trying hard to understand the prisoner’s cryptic utterances. ‘Sontaran?’ he echoed. The word meant nothing to him.

The young crewman nodded feebly and began to murmur between desperate snatches of breath, ‘Sontaran...

in the hollow... Experiments with the others... others dead... Scavenger comes... at night... we were helpless...’

Harry clenched his fists in fury at the plight of the dying youth.

‘Virtually dehydrated, poor chap,’ he muttered. He knew full well that despite all his medical expertise, there was nothing he could do. The young crewman would not last another hour. ‘I’m going to get help,’ he murmured gently. ‘You’re going to be just fine...’ Reluctantly, he turned away.

Dry-mouthed, and with a funny feeling in his stomach, Harry struck out through the maze of outcrops and gullies to try and locate the circle of spheres and, hopefully, to find the Doctor. He hardly dared imagine what Sarah’s fate would be if he failed.

The Sontaran had dragged Sarah into a roofless alcove almost completely concealed between sheer rock buttresses which formed a narrow entrance less than a metre wide.

The smooth, sheer walls towering into the sky were veined with filaments of coloured strata, and the floor of the alcove was carpeted with what looked like brilliant mosses.

Despite her apprehension, Sarah could not suppress a gasp of wonder at the unexpected beauty of the place.

Styr loomed in the entrance, barring any escape. ‘Lying is useless,’ he threatened. ‘When I waylaid the Galsec craft there were nine survivors: you were not among them.’

Sarah stood in the centre of the chamber, massaging her bruised wrist. ‘So?’ she challenged, her jaw jutting defiantly forward.

‘I ask you once more,’ Styr rasped. ‘What is your planet of origin?’

‘I’ve told you—Earth,’ Sarah repeated.

Styr raised his thick, powerful arms and clenched his enormous talons. ‘There has been no intelligent life on Earth since the time of the Solar Flares,’ he roared.

‘Oh, I’m much older than the Solar Flares,’ Sarah sniffed with mock haughtiness.

Styr’s hog-like nostrils expanded, ejecting a stream of clammy, rancid vapour. Amazed at her own courage, Sarah forced herself to face her monstrous captor without flinching.

‘That is not possible,’ Styr bellowed.

Sarah shrugged. ‘There’s no point in getting all steamed up about
me
,’ she retorted. I’m really quite insignificant.’

For a moment the Sontaran, powerful and menacing though he was, seemed disconcerted by Sarah’s defiant manner. Then he suddenly lurched forward towards her, his eyes glowing red and hissing like two gas-jets.

‘According to our data, you. should not exist,’ he gasped.

‘Therefore we must investigate the implications of your presence here, and make the necessary corrections.’

Sarah imagined the huge rubbery lungs inflating and collapsing like vast bellows as the Alien’s hollow gasps echoed round the alcove. ‘Corrections to what?’ she asked, standing her ground with hands on hips.

‘To the project,’ Styr breathed, towering over her.

Sarah fought against the feeling of nausea welling in her stomach. ‘Project?’ she inquired, determined to play for time, and to glean as much as she could before being subjected to whatever fate the Sontaran intended for her.

Styr swung heavily round and tramped towards the opening between the rocks. ‘It will not concern you,’ he rasped. ‘You will not exist.’ Raising a massive arm, Styr adjusted something set into one of the flanking buttresses.

At once, a faint barrier like thick uneven glass appeared across the entrance to the alcove. Styr bared his curved, metallic teeth in a leathery, reptilian grin. ‘But first,’ he concluded, ‘we shall discover what you are made of...’ Then he turned and lumbered away.

Sarah waited for a moment and then ran towards the opening. Even before she reached it she knew there was no escape. The narrow space between the buttresses wobbled like a distant heat haze, and the air surrounding it crackled as if with a fierce electric charge. She sank down disconsolately in the centre of the mossy floor, utterly alone. Harry had disappeared and the Doctor was lying injured—or perhaps even dead—at the bottom of the pit.

There seemed to be no hope for her. She was completely at Styr’s mercy.

As her hands ruffled the moss around her, she suddenly glanced down and then examined the multicoloured

‘carpet’ more closely: it was not moss at all, but a vast cluster of tiny ends of wire. She sprang up and peered closely at the walls of the alcove: what appeared to be intermingling veins of different rock strata were in fact wire elements embedded in the rock surface. Just as she stretched out her hand to touch them, the whole alcove seemed to suddenly come alive around her.

With a thunderous tearing sound, the surrounding rock began to bulge and twist into nightmare shapes. Gigantic gnarled faces with bottomless pits for eyes, and grinning mouths bristling with razor-edged fangs, burst out at her from the heaving walls of the alcove. Bubbles of loathsome, oozing liquid seeped from thousands of tiny fissures and formed into strands of molten rock—thin as cobwebs—

which enveloped her like a cocoon. It seemed to Sarah that unmentionable horrors which had lain hidden at the back of her mind all her life were suddenly becoming reality all around her.

She flung herself onto the undulating floor and covered her face and screamed as the rock reared up in waves and folded around her, engulfing her slowly like a huge, bellowing maw...

The Doctor was eagerly exploring the depths of the pit using the sonic screwdriver—switched to photon emission mode—as a torch.

‘Fascinating,’ he muttered as the sharp beam illuminated a cluster of bubbles of rock swelling out of the cavern wall like huge boils. ‘A sudden release of pressure in the magma...’ he mused, sweeping the beam over the glassy surfaces. ‘The temperatures must have been colossal...’ He tapped one of the bubbles with his finger. ‘Certainly not the Piccadilly Line,’ he murmured, sniffing the warm sulphurous air. ‘Smells more like the basement of the Savoy... which reminds me,’ he suddenly cried, ‘I haven’t had any breakfast...’

The Doctor listened intently to the mingling echoes of his voice until they had died away. ‘Sounds like the Whitehall warren,’ he exclaimed, directing the sonar-photon beam into a gaping black opening above his head.

Then stumbling across the mound of shattered rock, he seized the dangling end of the scarf.

‘This is no time for idle speculation,’ he told himself, giving the scarf a sharp tug. It immediately fell in a series of snakelike coils around him. For a moment, the Doctor stared at it with a mortified look and then glanced up at the edge of the pit, five or six metres above him.

‘Harry couldn’t have gone
that
way,’ he muttered. He scrambled back and peered up into the dark shaft again.

The sonic torch-beam revealed protruding spurs of rock studding the twisting sides of the shaft before it curved away into darkness. With a few quick movements, the Doctor deftly fashioned a small lassoo with one end of the scarf. He then flung it into the shaft several times, as high as he could. At last it hooked itself round one of the projecting spurs and the Doctor pulled the loop tight.

‘Hope I don’t burst in on a Cabinet Meeting,’ he grinned, and hoisted himself rapidly into the booming honeycomb of tunnels.

Harry lay flattened amongst a dense mass of gigantic thorns, oblivious of their piercing sting as he strained his ears to locate the direction of the eerie humming. He had searched for what seemed like hours to find a way out of the crater, trying to use the massive red sun as a bearing, but in vain. Then the sinister throbbing of the robot had startled him and sent him diving into the nearest cover. He thought he also heard the hoarse cries of several men echoing through the gullies.

To his relief the sounds faded away after several minutes and Harry emerged, tugging the poisonous-looking spines out of his hair and hands. He made his way along a broad ridge which looked familiar, scanning the terrain for some recognisable feature.

Suddenly the ground seemed to gape open and an ear-shattering scream exploded into the air in front of him. He found himself teetering on the brink of a deep crevasse between tall pillars of rock. Thirty metres below him lay Sarah Jane, her hands clutching her head, writhing in agony. For a moment Harry could not move. Then he half rolled, half fell down the steep slope of the ridge into the ravine, and searched frantically along the base of the range of buttresses until he found the narrow opening into the bottom of the crevasse.

As Harry ran through the slit, a gigantic fist sent him flying back into the ravine. He sprawled in the undergrowth, knocked almost senseless. When he managed to sit up, he saw Sarah crouching in the middle of the alcove, her hands tearing wildly at her hair and her eyes fixed upon some invisible horror at which she was screaming soundlessly, her whole face contorted.

Harry staggered towards her and was once again sent reeling and flailing like a broken puppet back into the reeds. His head spinning and his nose bleeding, he crept towards the opening a third time and sank to his knees, staring at Sarah through the shimmering, invisible barrier.

He put out his hand cautiously. It met a wall of solid, vibrating air.

‘Sarah... I can’t reach you... I just can’t get in...’ he called weakly. He watched helplessly as Sarah began to make panic-stricken movements as if she were fighting for breath. ‘What on earth is that creature doing to you?’ he gasped, wiping the blood from his nose and lips. Sarah had gone completely rigid, her face a frozen mask. Harry tottered to his feet.

‘Don’t you worry, old thing,’ he cried. ‘I’ll get you out of there if it’s the last thing I do. Just let me get my hands on that animated lump of rubber. He’ll need more than his magic words and charms before I’m through with him...’

But Sarah did not hear Harry’s desperate threats as he stumbled away into the rocks in search of her tormentor.

She fought to stay afloat in the raging sea which suddenly burst around her. The waves threw her spreadeagled into the icy wind, and then dropped her like a stone into freezing green chasms which closed over her. Stinging fingers of salt water and her own, gale-whipped hair lashed and blinded her. The wind tore the breath out of her lungs and drove it shrieking through her head. Vast, unnameable creatures thrashed in the depths around her, threatening to crush her between their dark flanks as she sank and sank...

Just as she was on the point of losing consciousness, the wild movements abruptly ceased. Sarah found herself lying motionless on a vast plain of scorching sand, her whole body paralysed. She felt her skin splitting and crackling in the ferocious heat, curling layers of it peeling away from her like the skins of an onion. When she tried to cry out, her parched throat uttered a series of rasping croaks which rang in the emptiness around her. The gigantic disc of the sun swelled until it filled the entire sky. She felt her eyes shrivelling in their sockets, and as she gasped for air her lungs filled with molten lead which rapidly solidified, transforming her into a mummified metal figure, lying rigid in the endless desert...

Styr gloated over Sarah’s suffering with cold, contemptuous amusement as he adjusted the array of instruments massed around the circular Survey Control Module, buried deep in the heart of the enormous, spherical Sontaran spacecraft.

‘Such puny creatures...’ he breathed, his eyes glinting in fascination as Sarah’s terror-stricken features; zoomed into closeup on the shimmering monitor panel. At the back of his partly organic, partly mechanical mind there lurked serious doubts about the origin of this female human and her associates. They did not fit into the picture of Earth as a sterile, abandoned planet, the theory which the Sontaran Strategic Council had sent him to confirm.

However, Styr’s sadistic delight in torture seemed to have blinded him to the true purpose of his Assessment Expedition. He stared at Sarah’s exhausted, motionless face.

‘A brief respite...’ he gasped, his talons twitching with impatience. ‘We must not destroy such an interesting specimen too quickly.’

At that moment, Sarah’s body began to quiver in rapid feverish spasms, her hands making frantic brushing movements in the air. Styr punched several switches on his console and peered more closely.

‘Aaaaaaaaagh,’ he nodded, his eyes glowing in anticipation. ‘The Formicidae...’ He watched the monitor panel intently, making constant adjustments to the instruments surrounding it. Sarah was staring at the ground in panic and shuddering convulsively. Styr’s wheezing breath quickened and he uttered a rattling gurgle of delight. ‘Strange to be so affected by such minute creatures,’ he muttered, slowly turning a calibrated disc a full quarter circle with his clumsy, three-pincered hand.

‘Let us see what happens if we make them rather larger...’

and he leaned eagerly towards the monitor panel so that its fluorescence played a menacing greenish aura over his wobbling features.

An urgent bleeping signal suddenly sounded from a small device clamped to Styr’s belt. Hissing with frustration and rage, he snatched the communicator from its holder. ‘Earth Survey,’ he snapped, his eyes still fixed on Sarah’s struggling form. On the communicator’s display there appeared the squat, domed head of a Sontaran identical to Styr himself.