by Dan Abnett
He ran around it, cursing, colliding with people running the other way. He’d lost sight of her. Where was she?
From outside, bursts of gunfire began to chatter. The panic went up a gear. People were screaming. An oil drum went over in a swirl of sparks and cinders. Two pick-ups collided as they tried to drive for the same door.
Still running, Griffin pulled out his radio. ‘Close in! Secure the zone! She’s here! Repeat, she’s here!’
Martha and Mathieu ran headlong with the crowd. There was gunfire outside. It sounded as if a whole army was storming the warehouse.
‘Have you got transport?’ she yelled at him.
‘Yes, yes! Come on!’
When a raid hit a market, you just got yourself out. Every man for himself, that was the rule. Get out, vanish. Worry about the others later. If you stopped to help someone, you weren’t helping yourself.
But this girl – Martha – had probably saved lives with her warning. A lot of lives. She’d pre-empted the raid. She’d got them all moving before the UCF was in position.
So he wasn’t going to leave her.
Mathieu had an old Citroën van parked near the west door of the warehouse. They ran to it, and Mathieu jumped in and started the engine as Martha climbed in on the passenger side.
‘We’ve got to move!’ Martha cried.
‘I know! I know!’ Mathieu replied, fighting to find first gear.
Martha heard a series of dull thumps, like the sound of someone flicking stiff cardboard with their fingers. She realised that bullets were thumping into the van’s rear bodywork. She glanced in her door mirror and saw the big UCF agent with the scarred face sprinting up behind them. He was firing his pistol. Martha yelped and flinched as the sidelights of her window shattered. A bullet creased the dashboard.
Mathieu lurched the van forward, his foot down. Blue smoke boiled from the tyres. They hurtled towards the west door, knocking over stacked cartons of tinned fruit. In her door mirror, Martha could see their pursuer. He was fit and powerful, and the length of his stride was keeping him close behind the van as it accelerated. He fired his Glock again, the rounds punching into the van’s rear doors.
‘He’s right behind us!’ Martha yelled.
‘I know,’ said Mathieu. ‘Hold on.’
The old van’s rear lights had long since been smashed. When Mathieu hit the brakes, there were no red lights to warn of the sudden stop.
At full stretch, Griffin suddenly realised that the van had slammed to a halt. He collided with the rear doors at full tilt and bounced off them onto the ground, dazed.
Mathieu threw the van forwards again, and accelerated out of the west door into the night.
Behind them, Griffin picked himself up and reached for his radio.
***
Trucks and cars were fleeing the warehouse in all directions. They drove fast, without lights, risk balancing risk.
Not everyone would make it. The UCF reaction force had swept in and already blocked some of the routes south. Heavy gunfire rattled and flashed in the night.
Mathieu wrenched on the steering wheel to avoid a slower-moving market truck, then left the road completely. Martha clung on. They jolted across an old playing field and out through a gate onto a service road that ran between derelict factory units and a patch of waste ground.
‘Look out!’ Martha cried.
A UCF truck had swung out at them, headlights blazing. There was gunfire. Mathieu tried to turn, but a tyre blew out and the van went into a skid. It tore through a chain-link fence, left the ground briefly, and then rolled and bounced down an embankment onto the waste ground.
‘Any sign?’ asked Griffin.
Rafferty scrambled up the embankment from the wrecked van. The area was bathed in floodlights from UCF vehicles.
‘Nothing,’ said Rafferty. ‘Though there’s some blood in the cab. Someone’s hurt.’
‘They can’t have gone far,’ said Griffin.
He turned to UCFA Brunol. ‘Close this entire zone down. Full deployment. Lock everything down. We’ve got two hours before dawn. She’s not getting away this time.’
‘Hold still,’ said Martha.
‘Leave it,’ Mathieu replied.
‘You’ve got chips of windscreen glass in your face,’ she said, ‘so hold still.’
‘We’ve got people who can do this,’ said one of the women watching them. Her name was Sylvie.
‘I’m a doctor,’ said Martha.
The survivor camp Mathieu had brought her to was about five miles west of Surcourt. They’d reached it at first light. It was a ruined factory, with no sign of life or habitation, but ingeniously concealed doors led down into an extensive basement level where over fifty people lived.
They had a water supply, provisions, a serviceable latrine, and they’d even built a ducting system to channel cooking smoke out without giving away their location.
‘More than one of us had grandparents in the Resistance,’ Mathieu said. ‘Stories get handed down. Stories. Ideas. Techniques.’
‘I’ve got some stories of my own,’ said Martha.
‘Maybe you start with the obvious one,’ said a man called Yves. ‘Who are you?’
‘She’s a wanted person,’ said a woman called Lisel. ‘The UCF are after her. Mathieu shouldn’t have brought her here.’
‘I couldn’t leave her outside,’ said Mathieu, wincing slightly as Martha’s tweezers removed another lump of glass from his cheek. ‘Besides, her warning saved lives. It would have been a slaughter.’
‘It’s bad enough,’ said Yves. ‘There are dozens dead, dozens more arrested. The whole zone is locked down. Patrols everywhere. We’ll have to stay underground for weeks. No foraging. No resupply. Food will go short.’
‘That’s if they don’t find us anyway,’ said Lisel.
Martha could hear the despair in their voices. She could see the hollow looks on their faces, the fear in their eyes, especially the younger ones, and the children.
They made her think of Aleesha.
‘Listen,’ she said, ‘listen to me…’
Breathing Space
Martha felt a thrill of anticipation whenever she stepped from the TARDIS. With the Doctor anything was possible. Their last stop had been the holiday planet of Nacre, where the beaches had seemed endless and twin suns had warmed the clear blue water. It had been fantastic.
But not, she thought, gazing down, anything like as fantastic as Earth.
The Doctor said something and, although he was standing right next to her, Martha barely heard a word. It was impossible to drag her eyes away from the globe that shone through the oblong display window stretching right the way around the curved room. For all the wonders she had seen during her travels, there really was no place like home.
‘I said,’ a voice murmured into her ear, ‘are you going to stand there gawping all day? We’re not on holiday any more, you know.’
Martha sighed, remembering the tranquillity of Nacre. Not to mention the attentions of the hotel’s extremely handsome waiters. Pity the Doctor couldn’t sit still for more than five minutes or she’d still have been there.
‘And there was me thinking you knew how to show a girl a good time.’
‘This is a good time.’ The Doctor’s reflection grinned at her in the glass. ‘Come on, who wants to laze around on a beach when there’s a mystery to solve? Those transmissions the TARDIS intercepted. The whale song – ring any bells?’
Reality came crashing back, and Martha remembered where they were. On a space station; a big one, if the endless but eerily deserted corridors were anything to go by. The large, round room they were in reminded her of those old images of NASA mission control. Curved rows of workstations radiated from a central hub, each occupied by a man or woman peering into monitors.
Martha half-expected to see guards approaching. But she and the Doctor might have been invisible for all the attention anyone paid them.
If only she knew why the TARDIS had bro
ught them here, materialising in a storage hangar in the depths of the station. It obviously had something to do with those strange signals, which had sounded to her like whale song. Maybe they came from the giant spacecraft she could see. There were hundreds of them, drifting across the planet so slowly they hardly seemed to be moving.
‘Those ships, are they human or alien?’
‘You lot don’t have ships that big in 2088.’ The Doctor squinted at them. ‘Anyway, they’re not ships.’
‘Then what are they?’
‘No idea.’
‘I thought you knew everything.’ Martha peered out again and recoiled as a metallic sphere bristling with antennae rushed through space towards her. She took an involuntary step back, expecting it to smash through the glass, sighing with relief when it veered away at the last moment and disappeared. ‘What was that?’
‘Oh, just one of the monitor probes.’
Martha jumped. It wasn’t the Doctor who’d answered. She spun round.
A kindly-looking elderly man with thick glasses and receding hair smiled at her. The smile faltered slightly. ‘Sorry, I don’t think we’ve met. I take it you’re one of the new arrivals. I’m Conrad Morris—’
‘Professor Morris!’ The Doctor grabbed the man’s arm. ‘I’m such an admirer of your work. Martha, this is the genius who rewrote the rulebook on bioengineering. Then tore it up and wrote a completely new rulebook!’
‘Oh, nonsense!’ Morris protested, but he looked rather pleased.
‘John Smith,’ the Doctor said, flashing his psychic paper. ‘This is my associate Doctor Martha Jones. Sorry we’re late, couldn’t resist the duty free shop.’
Morris barely had time to acknowledge Martha before the Doctor was steering him away from the window. ‘Now where was I? Oh yes! Those huge things in the sky, the signals – don’t really have to say much more, do I?’
‘Indeed not. There’s still a lot of data to analyse, as you can imagine, but the provisional results are extremely promising. In fact, far better than we could possibly have imagined – it seems the Benefactors were not exaggerating.’
Martha was lost. ‘What’s going on here? And who are the Benefactors?’
‘Have you been underground for the last month?’ Morris asked, not unkindly.
‘Actually, yeah, she has,’ the Doctor said, ‘deep underground, testing this new theory about stalactites. Or was it stalagmites? Which are the ones that grow down? Anyway, never mind! You were going to tell Martha about the Benefactors.’
The professor carried on walking, the Doctor at his side. Martha fell in beside them, determined not to be left behind.
‘The Benefactors, it appears, are the salvation of mankind,’ Morris said, rather pompously. ‘It sounded too good to be true, at first, and there was no shortage of sceptics. But, judging by the initial results, the sceptics were wrong.’
Martha shook her head, still baffled. ‘Why don’t you start at the beginning? I’ve been… away, don’t forget.’
‘I’d like to know who these Benefactors are,’ the Doctor said. ‘I mean, don’t you think it’s a bit of a coincidence, being the good guys and having a name like the Benefactors? It’d be like having bad guys called the Villains.’
Morris shrugged. ‘It was probably just a literal translation.’
‘So, those big floating things,’ Martha said. ‘They’re the Benefactors, right?’
‘Hardly. The Benefactors remain many thousands of light years away. They are a solitary race. What you see is the gift they sent us.’
‘I still don’t get it.’
‘Wait until we reach central analysis,’ the professor told her. ‘I’ll replay the broadcast for you both. Then everything will become clear.’
‘Broadcast, eh?’ The Doctor grinned. ‘Good! I haven’t seen any TV in ages.’
Morris led them along an aisle that ran between the banks of monitors until they reached the central hub, a large oval desk laden with equipment. Standing around it, gazing up at screens suspended overhead, were a dozen or so people, all dressed in white coats. Martha guessed they must be the more important scientists on board.
The screens streamed lines of data that meant nothing to her but obviously spoke volumes to the scientists, scribbling away with styli on hand-held pads as they studied them. One broke off to confer quietly with a keyboard operator. Otherwise no one said a word. There were no friendly conversations, no laughter and no coffee breaks. There was a definite tension in the air.
‘Not much office banter is there?’ she said lightly.
Morris frowned. ‘Not when the future of the world is at stake, Doctor Jones. Everyone here has family and friends on Earth. People they care about.’
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean…’
‘No, no, I’m sure you didn’t,’ the professor said, smiling to show he was not offended. ‘But you must understand, we are in the front line. We’ll be the first to know if the Benefactors were right or, God forbid, if they were wrong and the Earth is doomed. That’s a heavy burden.’
‘Funny thing,’ the Doctor said. ‘I have no idea who these Benefactors are or what they’re doing, but I’ve already taken a dislike to them. Save the planet or don’t save it, but don’t keep people dangling. I hate dangling.’
A serious-looking man who had been standing at the side of the hub now approached them. He wore a dark suit and fiddled with his flashy wristwatch.
‘Hello!’ the Doctor said brightly. ‘Who’re you, then?’
‘Daniel Grant,’ the man answered, face a granite mask. ‘Head of security.’
The Doctor flashed his psychic paper again and introduced them both.
‘I should have guessed your people would send someone here,’ Grant sneered. His eyes swept over the Doctor, taking in his shock of hair and the pinstripe suit that clashed with his trainers. ‘You don’t look like a scientist.’
‘Doctor Smith’s a bit eccentric but a genius,’ Martha said.
‘Right on both counts,’ the Doctor beamed. ‘Now, then, I believe Professor Morris was going to replay the Benefactors’ broadcast for us.’
‘Why?’ Grant was openly suspicious. ‘Is there anyone on Earth who hasn’t seen it a hundred times already?’
‘Let’s make it a hundred and one,’ the Doctor said, putting on his glasses and peering expectantly at the screens. ‘Never know, could have missed something.’
Grant stared at him. ‘Fine, whatever, but I think you’re just wasting time.’
Professor Morris stepped across to the nearest workstation and spoke quietly to the operator. ‘Won’t be a moment,’ he said as he rejoined them. ‘You know, I’ll never forget the first time I saw it. I was filled with such hope.’
‘Why?’ Martha asked.
‘Because the world was dying, that’s why! Atmospheric pollution, global warming, it was all reaching critical point. The world’s governments played it down. They didn’t want mass panic on their hands. But the evidence was there for everyone to see – the icecaps melting, the floods, the air so choked with noxious gases that some days it hurt to breathe.’
Martha could scarcely believe it. Everyone had been talking about global warming for as long as she could remember, but she hadn’t thought too much about it. It was something to worry about in the future. Now, it seemed, was that time.
‘So when the Benefactors made contact,’ the professor continued, eyes far away, ‘it was like our prayers had been answered. But of course you know all that.’
‘Course we do,’ the Doctor said. ‘But I can never resist a good story. Go on – what happened next?’
A burst of static interrupted the data stream on the screen immediately overhead. As soon as Martha saw the creature that appeared on it she was shocked into numbness. ‘People of Earth,’ it said. Its voice sounded composed of liquid, like someone gargling while they talked. ‘We feel your planet’s suffering. We feel your pain and your terror. But do not be afraid. We can help you.’
Mar
tha barely took in the words; she was too transfixed by the alien speaking them. Its impossibly long head was like a living balloon, with tiny eyes near the top and a slit of a mouth at the other end. It was the colour of dough and did not appear to have ears or a nose. The head quivered as it spoke, as though under-filled with gas. If that was its head, Martha thought with a shudder, she was glad she couldn’t see its body.
‘No,’ she heard, a breathy gasp that for a moment she thought was coming from the speakers. Then she realised it was the Doctor, not the alien, that had spoken. The smile had vanished from his face and he was staring at the bizarre creature with an expression somewhere between anger and loathing.
‘We have the technology to scour your atmosphere, to remove the poisonous gases and give your planet the chance to breathe again.’
‘No!’ the Doctor repeated, so loudly that everyone turned to stare at him. ‘You have to stop them. If you don’t, everyone will die.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Morris demanded.
‘For this we seek nothing in return.’
‘Don’t believe a word that thing’s saying.’ The Doctor waved a finger at the screen. ‘I’ve seen those creatures before. Believe me, they are not beneficial.’
Grant sneered. ‘They make contact for the first time and you’ve seen them before. Very good, Doctor – I suppose you speak their language, too.’
‘Their language is destruction,’ the Doctor said, fixing Grant with an intense look which reminded Martha that beneath the slightly geeky human façade was an alien who had seen far more than a mere human could imagine. ‘They’re the Cineraria. They take planets by stealth, wipe out all life and then strip out every resource until there’s nothing left but ashes and the stink of death.’
Grant smiled coldly. ‘You call it stealth when they contact us, offer help and send life forms far beyond our understanding? Life forms which can filter the atmosphere, collecting greenhouse gases that will be discharged into space? If they wanted to take Earth, Doctor, why not just attack it? They’re so advanced we wouldn’t stand a chance.’
