The Forgotten Army (8 page)

'Is that it?' Amy said. 'Grrrreat. Top advice.'

81

DOCTOR WHO

The Doctor pointed to a crocodile, and they both went very quiet.

Tiptoeing past, the Doctor whispered to Amy when they were well clear of the reptile. 'I don't think he remembered me... Never do a deal with a crocodile, Amy. They tend to eat the contract.'

Amy laughed. 'You expect me to believe everything.'

Finally, they reached the large animal enclosure. The mammoth's cage had been clumsily covered with white plastic sheets, and a double fence closed the area off.

The Doctor looked at Amy. 'One more chance. Keep out signs are like a red rag to a bull for you. I'm sure you can get through here.'

Amy grinned, stepped forward, casually lifted the fence from its support, and stepped through the gap. 'I've never paid for a festival yet.'

Pushing up the bars, the Doctor tore the white plastic sheet down, and found himself face to face with the Polar Woolly Mammoth.

'Whoa! It must have been watching us through the sheets.

That's some eyesight it's got.' The Doctor took his sonic screwdriver out and shone it into the mammoth's eyes.

This is beautiful work,' he said. 'Exceptional. It must have taken years to make an iris and a pupil that work as well as this. And the tusks! Yep, hardened dead hair, definitely real.'

82

THE FORGOTTEN ARMY

'So what's fake about it?' Amy asked. As she did, the mammoth let rip a fart. That smells pretty real to me.'

The Doctor was staring absentmindedly into the distance.

'I wonder...' He fiddled with his sonic screwdriver and shone a green light onto the mammoth's fur.

Where the beam touched the fur, the light seemed to linger, as if the sonic screwdriver had caused the fur to glow.

'What are you doing, Doctor?' Amy asked.

The Doctor was too focused on his task to answer. 'This is just amazing...' Swinging up on the bars of the enclosure, the Doctor stood above the beast, and lit the mammoth with a large torch. All of the creature was glowing a mysterious green, phosphorescent in the dark of the Zoo.

'Where did you get that from?' Amy wondered, looking at the torch.

'Big pockets. Not really relevant at the moment.'

'You want me to ask about the fur?'

'It's not fur. Can't be. Ordinary fur doesn't glow. And not just with the sonic, it's any light source that sets it off.

Whatever else is real about this, the fur definitely isn't. Looks like some kind of nano-fibre-optic technology, something that certainly wasn't around in the mammoth's time.'

'Unless all the mammoths were alien robots.’ Amy suggested.

83

DOCTOR WHO

The Doctor grinned. 'I'll take you there some day, you can find out for yourself.' As he spoke, he was fiddling with his sonic screwdriver, and a beam of light shone into the mammoth's ear, which began to twitch bizarrely.

'Ha! I've got it! But I think this is about to get very embarrassing indeed.'

The Doctor leapt down into the enclosure with the mammoth, and opened the gate from the inside to let Amy in.

He kept talking as he shut it carefully behind her. 'Very, very embarrassing. I expect they'll be blushing when they have to explain themselves.'

'Tell me what you mean.' Amy gave him a friendly punch on the arm. Although not so friendly it didn't hurt him a bit.

'Hey, spaceman, you're not making sense!'

Rubbing his shoulder, the Doctor went on. 'Sorry, sorry, am I talking out of sequence again? So many things in my head sometimes they just come out in the wrong order. I'm not mad, just got a very busy mind. But just as real fur can't be activated with sonic technology, a real mammoth doesn't have oil in its ear joints. In fact, it doesn't have "ear joints" at all. And you certainly can't make it do this...'

Just as he'd made the oil in the Zoo's gate hinges explode, the Doctor aimed the sonic screwdriver at the place where the mammoth's ear met its head. A strange high-pitched whirring filled the air. As the machinery inside the mammoth started to vibrate,

84

THE FORGOTTEN ARMY

the mammoth's fur shook, rippling all over its body like a cat under a hairdryer. The whirring changed to a keening screech that increased in intensity the longer the Doctor aimed the sonic screwdriver at the beast.

Then, with a loud thunk, a little hatch sprung open on the side of the mammoth, just below its ear. Inside the white fur, and below the skin, was hidden an intricate machine of shining metal and whirring levers. A delicate spiral of cogs and levers connected each muscle. From a distance it looked like the inside of an expensive watch, or the innermost workings of a town clock. The mechanism was sparkling clean, glinting in the moon light. Where the ear met the head, there was a masterpiece of engineering. Amy could see wires, pistons and sensors, and things she'd never seen in her Technology class in school. The Doctor whistled, as if he couldn't help but admire the boldness of a plan that involved someone disguising alien technology as a mammoth.

With another blast of the sonic screwdriver, the cogs started to rattle, then stopped entirely. A few levers twitched, then there was a loud bang, and they settled down. The Doctor waited and watched.

I think that's shut it down...' He looked delighted. 'This is so much better than just burgers! It was a disguise all along!

How brilliant! Just brilliantly stupid! Imagine the poor creatures that made this. They came to Earth, went to the trouble

85

DOCTOR WHO

of disguising their spaceship, but, they got it wrong! It's the twenty-first century, and they built a spy robot pretending to be a mammoth!'

'Says the Time Lord disguised as a geography teacher.'

'Shut up, I look cool - you should pay more attention, Leadworth girl.' The Doctor went up to the shiny hatch.

'Still, the Shadow Proclamation could be tied up for years debating this. Sending a robot spy craft down, pretending to be an extinct animal, no doubt looking for something or other. I guess it was meant to scope out the planet for a suitable invasion... I'm just amazed they got the colour wrong.'

'Do you ever stop talking?' Underneath everything. Am y thought she could hear a stomp-stomp-stomp. She was worried by what she'd heard, but couldn't quite trust her ears.

'I don't think it's deactivated...'

Amy felt a tingle run down her spine. She listened again, and was sure she could hear the sound of heavy footsteps, getting louder and louder, building in size and reach.

In the cage next to them, an elephant started to trumpet in panic, bashing the bars of his cage, eager to get away.

'Just listen!' Amy implored. There it was again. Stomp.

Stomp. Stomp. Still quiet, but definitely getting closer.

'What could be making that noise?'

86

THE FORGOTTEN ARMY

she asked. 'Did you say anything about a Trojan horse?'

'No, that would be impossible. There's barely room in there for...' The Doctor looked at the size of mammoth. 'Well, maybe one or two people.'

They both started to back away.

The noise came again. STOMP. STOMP. STOMP.

'But that sounds like hundreds of feet marching.’ Amy insisted.

The Doctor nodded grimly. 'Like an army. Could be some kind of TARDIS technology... A different dimension, but I'd have noticed. Maybe it's a temporal gateway, but the readings are wrong.

Amy looked at the Doctor. 'Doctor, what if they wanted the fur to be wrong? What if they wanted to make it rare so it'd be brought here? What if they wanted to be caught?'

Ever nearer, and even louder - STOMP! STOMP! STOMP!

Then the noise stopped.

It was so quiet Amy was sure she could hear her own heartbeat.

Very, very quietly, the Doctor and Amy moved their heads to listen to the mammoth. There was a sound like a key being turned in a lock.

FATOOM! The entire belly of the mammoth hit the floor.

The Doctor and Amy gazed in wonder. The mammoth had been split neatly in half and now

87

DOCTOR WHO

looked like a dismantled toy - normal on top, but all of its lower half descended to the floor. Bright lights blazed out from within the mammoth and, finally, its innards were revealed. The inside of the mammoth looked like a gleaming alien spaceship. The muscle and skin had been no more than a thin shell around a metal body, packed with fantastic-looking alien technology.

'Whoa. What is that?' Amy looked at the Doctor as, with a loud creak, the head of the mammoth turned to face them. 'I thought you said it was turned off.'

The Doctor shrugged. 'Looks like I was wrong.'

'Will it shoot?' Amy asked.

'Don't be ridiculous,' the Doctor replied. 'It's a mammoth, it doesn't have laser guns. It will gore us with those tusks...'

Amy failed to feel reassured.

With a loud hiss, the mammoth's belly was swathed in smoke, and from within the haze came the sound of boots marching, many times louder than before. STOMP! STOMP!

STOMP! Hundreds of boots, stamping hard as they marched along the metal insides of the beast.

Above this barbarian sound, they could hear a high-pitched

'Left, right, left, right, left, right'.

As the stomp got louder, the animals of the Zoo were getting restless, uniting in fear, as a mood of chaos spread in the chilly air. The unholy cacophony

88

THE FORGOTTEN ARMY

of bellows, yowls and panicked growls echoed around the enclosures.

Amy instinctively took a step back, freaked by the massed cries of the Zoo animals.

The Doctor took a step forward. 'Now that is interesting.'

He peered into the hazy light. 'Someone has put an entire army in there. There's something coming out, Amy, down here, look!'

He dived onto his belly, and Amy joined him on the floor.

They were now at eye level with the metallic lower half of the beast. As the smoke cleared, they could see that on top of the living muscle was what looked like the deck of an aircraft carrier. It was marked up with arrows, tiny lettering labelled Muster Points and Lift Zones. With a whirring noise, tiny gun turrets rose out of the deck and swivelled to point at the Doctor and Amy.

Everything stopped.

Amy looked to the Doctor. 'Should we, er, be so close to it?'

'Probably not...' the Doctor agreed.

They started to get to their feet, but it was too late.

The mammoth let out a massive blast from its trunk, and the entire Zoo fell silent. It sounded like no animal Amy had ever heard, as if someone had combined the hunting cry of a hungry wolf howl, with the deathly rattle of a cat screech and the murderous growl of a grizzly bear. This was a 89

DOCTOR WHO

bloodthirsty call. But it was no animal sound... This was alien.

When it faded, Amy took her hands away from her ears.

'What was that?'

'I think we're about to find out...' the Doctor replied.

Green-tinged energy beams zapped from the bottom of the mammoth to the top, illuminating the inside with a crackly glow. The beams joined together, weaving around each other, until they formed a living, swirling sphere of green energy. Burning like a poisonous star, the plasma whirl of green light grew in strength, becoming brighter and brighter.

Amy shielded her eyes, as it swelled to twice its size and then shrank back down to its burning core. There followed a massive explosion of green energy, zooming out across the Zoo like a shockwave, making the animals ripple as it passed through them. It was a ripple that never lost its power. A wave that kept on crashing. Unstoppable, it spread out from the Zoo and made its way across New York.

At first nothing changed.

That felt weird,' Amy told the Doctor. 'It was like I was weightless for a second.' She waved her hand in front of her face. 'All my fingers working, and still not webbed. All looking good.'

'Amy, you know we said the Zoo was in the 90

THE FORGOTTEN ARMY

middle of the city... How accurate do you think that was?'

'It's pretty much the middle of Manhattan, halfway down the island, and right in the centre. Oh...' Amy stopped when she realised what the Doctor was thinking. 'So that green thing... this is probably where they wanted to set it off from?'

The Doctor nodded back towards the belly. 'This wasn't a mistake. This is an invasion.'

The marching noise had stopped. And standing in formation on the deck of the belly was a phalanx of hundreds of tiny, vicious alien soldiers.

91

The aliens had heads like angry trolls, all hairy and mean, and wore huge spiked helmets like the Kaiser's army in the First World War. Their short bodies were festooned with weapons: vicious curved swords, stabbing daggers, hand grenades and the most extraordinary guns Amy could ever have imagined.

A high-pitched voice yelled 'Present Arms!' and the massed ranks of aliens raised the guns so they were aiming right at the Doctor and Amy. Their leader marched forward through the rows of alien soldiers, holding himself like a man who knows his rightful place is in command. He carried a baton, and had a magnificently plumed red helmet. As he passed each row, he bellowed at the troops, making 93

DOCTOR WHO