Dr. Who - BBC New Series 25 (20 page)

In the narrow passage, less than three metres away, were three scorpions. They were each the size of small dogs, each twisted and deformed and covered in blackish lumps. One was crouched on the ground, legs wide apart as though readying itself to spring, and the other two were clinging to the right-hand wall.

As though angered by the light, the scorpion on the ground extended its claws and hissed like a snake, raising itself on its misshapen legs and swaying from side to side.

‘Cover your ears,’ the Doctor muttered, and adjusted the controls on the sonic. Immediately it made a hideous screeching sound. Donna clapped her hands over her ears, feeling as though someone was drilling into the top of her skull. The walls of the tunnel seemed to shake. Dust sifted from the ceiling.

The Doctor strode forward, teeth gritted, sonic held at arm’s length. The scorpion on the ground reared up on its back legs, body quivering. It looked for a moment as though it was being physically repelled by the terrible sound, and then it turned and scuttled into the darkness.

Moving awkwardly, hampered by their zytron distorted bodies, the other scorpions scrambled away too, disappearing into crevices in the walls.

The Doctor readjusted the sonic so that it was once more warbling at its usual level. He pulled a series of faces, as if testing the elasticity of his skin. ‘Well, that’s one way of clearing your sinuses,’ he said.

They moved forward again, the group behind the Doctor clustered more closely together now, their heads darting left and right, as if imagining all kinds of scuttling monstrosities in the shadows.

Abruptly the Doctor came to a halt in front of a blank section of stone wall.

‘Why have we stopped now?’ Donna asked nervously.

‘We’re here,’ the Doctor said.

‘Where’s here?’

He turned and grinned at the others, his face a deathly blue mask in the light from the sonic. ‘You’ll like this,’ he said.

He touched the sonic to the wall and instantly the rock transformed into a porthole-like opening, which seemed to be composed of the spiky, overlapping petals of some exotic flower.

‘What’s that?’ gasped Cameron.

‘That,’ said the Doctor grandly, ‘is the door to an alien

spaceship.’

‘Are we going inside?’ Ranjit breathed, eyes wide.

‘Some of us are,’ the Doctor said.

It was decided that the Doctor, Gandhi and Ranjit would enter the ship, whilst Donna, Gopal and Cameron would try to find and free the prisoners. The Doctor sonicked the now-exposed door of the ship, the boys gasping and Gandhi clapping his hands in wonder as the ‘petals’ folded smoothly back, revealing a gleaming black chamber full of thick loops of cable and shiny tangles of machinery.

The Doctor fiddled with the sonic until it began to make a slow but steady beeping sound, then handed it to Donna. ‘The prisoners will be somewhere in this cave system,’ he said, ‘within a stasis barrier contained behind a glamour shield. The sonic has been tuned in to pick up the energy emissions. It’ll beep faster the closer you get, slower if you start moving away. When the beeps become a continuous noise you’ll know you’re there.’

‘Then what?’ Donna asked.

‘Then you turn it to setting 59-A. That should get you in. Oh, and you’d better have these.’ He gave her the torch and the matter relocator he had taken from the gelem warrior’s chest. ‘You might need an alternative escape route. The relocator will take you back out onto the slope where we came in.’

‘What about you?’ she asked.

‘I’ll have the TARDIS. Hopefully. See you in a bit.’

‘Good luck,’ she said, giving him a hug.

He clicked his tongue and winked at her. ‘You make

your own luck in this game.’

‘I think this is it,’ Donna said.

The journey through the caves had been tense but uneventful. Once or twice they had heard scuffling movements in the darkness, but they hadn’t seen anything.

It had been easy to follow the signal of the sonic. Each time they came to a fork they simply took one turn or the other and listened to the beeps. If the beeps sped up, they knew they were on the right track. If they slowed down, they retraced their steps and took the alternative route.

It had taken twenty minutes of tramping through stifling darkness before the beeps turned into what Donna would have described as a continuous note. She stopped and looked around. They appeared to be nowhere special.

There were rocky walls on either side and a craggy ceiling a couple of metres above their heads. She turned the sonic to setting 59-A, as the Doctor had instructed, and touched it against the left-hand wall. When nothing happened she walked across to the right-hand wall and tried again.

Instantly the wall shimmered and disappeared.

In front of them was a wide black tunnel sloping downwards over jagged rocks.

‘Is it just me or is there a red glow ahead?’ she asked.

Gopal nodded.

‘It looks like a fire,’ said Cameron.

Donna switched off the sonic and turned on the torch.

‘Everyone OK?’ she asked.

Gopal and Cameron nodded.

‘Come on then.’

They made their way down over the large, jagged

rocks, which formed a series of natural shelves and plateaus. Donna felt like a mouse negotiating a giant, crumbling staircase. The red glow grew brighter as they descended, so much so that Donna turned off the torch and put it back in her pocket. As they drew closer, they realised that the red glow was also accompanied by a crackling and humming, like the sound made by the wires linking electricity pylons on a rainy day.

Eventually the slope levelled out and the tunnel narrowed slightly. The three of them moved cautiously forward, the crackling red glow now filling the arch ahead.

It wasn’t until they were standing under the arch itself that the view opened out before them. It was like walking along a cliff-top and not being able to see the crashing waves below until you went right up to the edge and peered over.

Donna gasped. Below her was a cavern the size of a football stadium. It was surrounded by a fiercely crackling red barrier, and it was filled with people – hundreds, perhaps thousands of people. Most of them were huddled silently together in groups. Some were clustered around meagre fires that they had somehow managed to light.

Donna looked around at the array of red-lit faces and saw shock, fear, dejection.

In a bitter voice Gopal said, ‘When the cave is full, Darac-7 will ship these people to where the Hive Council are creating their secret army, and then he will use his gelem warriors to harvest more. As long as the Hive Council keep paying him, the harvest will continue.’

Donna thought of the way the Ood had been treated on the Ood-Sphere. This was just as sickening. She was about to say so when Cameron cried, ‘I can see Mother and Father and Becharji! And Ronny and Adelaide! Look!’

He was pointing to the right, almost jumping up and down in his excitement. Even amongst all these people, the Campbells were not too difficult to spot. They were standing in a close-knit group, whereas almost everyone else was sitting, added to which they were dressed differently to most of the people around them.

Cameron’s high-pitched voice must have carried down to the cavern below, because all at once Donna saw people looking up, pointing at them. The low buzz of chatter, barely discernible before above the crackling hum of the barrier, now rose in volume as news of their presence spread through the crowd.

‘We’ve been spotted,’ Donna said. ‘We’d better go and let ’em all out before they start thinking we’re the ones who trapped ’em here.’

They picked their way down the final rubbly slope to the base of the cavern. There was a surge in the crowd as people moved forward to meet them.

Word must have filtered back to the Campbells that Cameron was there because, by the time they reached the bottom of the slope, Ronny was shouldering his way to the front of the crowd, closely followed by Adelaide, his parents and Becharji.

‘What in Heaven’s name are
you
doing here?’ Ronny asked in astonishment.

Cameron grinned. ‘We’re rescuing you.’

‘Stand back,’ Donna said, holding up the sonic. ‘This thing’s loaded.’

Hoping that setting 59-A would work not only on the glamour but on the barrier too, she stepped as close as she dared and pointed the sonic at it. The crowd drew back, murmuring concernedly as the activity of the barrier seemed momentarily to increase. Donna gritted her teeth as red sparks flew in all directions, fizzing like angry sprites. Then ragged holes appeared in the barrier, until suddenly, with a final furious crackle, it collapsed.

There was a moment of shocked disbelief as – aside from a little firelight and the glow of the sonic – the cavern was plunged into darkness. Then people began to cheer and whoop and wave their hands in the air. Donna turned the sonic off as Ronny stepped forward.

‘Miss Donna, I could hug you,’ he exclaimed.

She sized him up. He was a good-looking bloke. ‘Well, don’t let me stop you,’ she said.

Suddenly she was surrounded by people grinning and slapping her on the back. Already some were streaming up the rocky slope towards the arch above, intent on finding a way out. Some were lighting matches to see by, others grabbing glowing bits of wood from the fires. Despite the near-darkness and the fact that most of them probably didn’t have a clue where they were, the mood was one of jubilation at suddenly finding themselves free.

Adelaide had lifted Cameron up and was spinning him around, laughing. Sir Edgar, Mary and Ronny were bombarding Donna with questions.

Suddenly the air in the cavern shimmered in a dozen

different places, and people began to panic as gelem warriors appeared in their midst. All at once there were people running in all directions. Many of them slipped and fell, tripping over rocks in the semidarkness, or knocked over in the rush to escape.

The gelem warriors waded forward, swinging their arms, ripping and tearing with their hands. Evidently the disabling of the barrier had been detected.

‘Come on,’ Donna said, herding the Campbells before her. ‘Leg it.’

They joined the throng of people scrambling up the rocky slope towards the arch above. Almost immediately, however, it became obvious that Sir Edgar and his wife, unused to physical exertion, were moving too slowly to escape the clutches of the advancing gelem warriors.

Much as she loathed the thought of leaving all the freed prisoners to fend for themselves, Donna held up the matter relocator the Doctor had given her. ‘We’ll have to use this,’ she shouted to Gopal.

‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘I have this.’ He produced the transmat pod which the Doctor had altered with his sonic.

He placed it on the ground, twisted something on top of the device and crackling threads of yellow-white light suddenly leaped from an aperture in the top.

Remembering what had happened earlier, Donna hastily placed the matter relocator she was holding on a nearby rock. Although the Doctor had reconfigured the settings on this particular device, she didn’t want to risk getting zapped like the gelem warriors in Gopal’s apartment had done.

Just as before, the tendrils of light sought out the matter relocator discs in the centre of the gelem warriors’ chests.

As the light hit them, the warriors began to jerk and shudder before crashing lifeless to the floor. Although Donna knew that the creatures were not in any real sense alive, it was still disturbing to watch them keel over and die.

Eventually Gopal switched off the device and nodded at the unaffected disc sitting on the rock. ‘Now we can use the matter relocator to get out of here,’ he said.

Donna looked down into the cavern. Most people were scrambling up the slope towards the arch now, or streaming through the tunnels in search of the openings that led out on to the hillside, but there were still several dozen people down below, who had either been battered unconscious by the gelem warriors or were too badly injured to move.

‘I’m not leaving anybody behind,’ she said.

Gopal nodded. ‘You are right, of course. But we don’t know how many people the matter relocator will carry.’

‘Then let’s find out,’ she said.

‘What will you do when you find the creature, Mr Doctor?’ Ranjit whispered. ‘Will you kill it?’

The Doctor looked disapproving. ‘Course not. You can’t go through life killing things just cos you don’t agree with them. Isn’t that right, Mohandas?’

Gandhi nodded. ‘Violence solves nothing. Even when it seems to do good, the benefit is only temporary, whereas the evil it does is permanent.’

‘There you go,’ said the Doctor. ‘Couldn’t have put it better myself.’

‘So what
will
you do, Mr Doctor?’ Ranjit asked.

‘Jaw-jaw not war-war.’

Ranjit shook his head. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘I’ll
talk
to it,’ the Doctor said. ‘We’ll have a nice sit down and a little chat. Always the best way.’

‘And if it does not listen?’

‘I’ll
make
it listen. I’ll talk until it does. I’m good at talking. Never stop once I get going. Jabber jabber jabber, that’s me. I’ll tell you this, Ranjit, by the time I’m done, it’ll be begging me to let it put right what it’s done, just to shut me up. Here we are.’