Empty the whole automatic into it, that was the only solution. Clutching the pistol double-handed, he fired and kept on firing, shot after shot through the crab, through the insulation of the ceiling, into the whirling iron guts of the helicopter’s motor.
And all of a sudden the helicopter started making a very sick sound indeed.
The Doctor paused on the ladder, halfway out of the immersion tank. For a moment, exhausted and bedraggled, it was all he could do. Nothing had prepared him for the sheer visceral shock when he hit the water. He had gone under, the shock of the impact jolting the air from his lungs, and he had gulped down a throatful of water before he was able to regain some measure of self-control. Even with the benefits of a respiratory bypass system, drowning was a very real possibility.
But he forced himself to the surface, gasping and coughing, and even as the cold began to sap his muscles of their strength and coordination, he paddled his way around the perimeter of the tank to the white metal service ladder which rose from its depths. He heaved himself out of the water, shivering and coughing, and only managed to ascend a couple of rungs before he had to stop.
What a fool he had been, to think that the Master would simply accept his word without question. In his shoes, would he have placed any more faith in his adversary?
Probably not.
The Doctor delved into his deepest resources and resumed his ascent of the ladder. With a final grunt of exhaustion he reached the same level where the connecting bridge had swung into place, and was at last able to stand on his feet. At least two minutes had passed since the Master had forced him from the platform.
His shoes squelching, his muscles still in shock, the Doctor nonetheless forced himself to run out of the central chamber, into the connecting corridor where his progress had originally been obstructed by the security gate. It was open now, of course – no one had been at the console to close it after the Doctor’s passage. Beyond the gate, he found himself back in the main reactor hall, with its high walkways and ranks of snail-like turbines. He was looking down on it, from the top of the spiral staircase. There, on a stretch of flooring between two turbines, was the waiting TARDIS.
And the Master trying to get inside – stooped by the door, attempting to force it open.
The Doctor was grateful that old habits had made him lock the TARDIS upon leaving. ‘Stop!’ he called, trying to make himself heard above the din of sirens and warning announcements. His voice echoed and re-echoed. Something must have reached the Master, for he turned around and acknowledged the Doctor with a nod, before returning to his work.
‘You can’t open it!’ The Doctor shouted. ‘You’re wasting your time!’
The Master did not deign to turn round this time. But something flashed in his hand, brought to his side for a moment as if he wished the Doctor to know what it was he held, the way a stage magician might flash a card for the audience’s benefit. The Doctor stared. He had recognised the silver device in an instant – the handle and angled head, like a clever little dental drill. It was a sonic screwdriver.
There was nothing for it. The range was extreme, but the Doctor would have to try jamming the Master’s sonic screwdriver with his own. He reached into his sodden pocket, his hand expecting to close around the handle of his own sonic screwdriver.
It wasn’t there.
The Doctor had begun to search his other pockets when he realised what should have been obvious all along. In the struggle on the platform, the Master had pickpocketed him. From time-meddling, to the genocides of entire species, from strangling to petty pilfering: the scope of the Master’s criminality was absolute.
The Doctor couldn’t just watch, doing nothing. He started down the spiral staircase, skipping treads two and three at a time, his cold-numbed hands riding the bannister. The Doctor had come close to losing the TARDIS before but that was something he could almost accept. Having it taken from him was an affront beyond imagining.
Yet when he reached the bottom of the spiral staircase, the TARDIS was still there. It emitted no sound and its blue light remained unlit. The Master was still near the door, but no longer attending to the lock. He was on his knees, his hands now reaching behind his neck.
The Doctor quickened his pace, even as every instinct compelled him to move in the opposite direction. A Sild had clamped on to the Master. He was fighting it, as best he could, but the Sild was resisting, its legs and tentacles redoubling their hold. An ordinary person, the Doctor knew, would surely have succumbed by now. But the Master had a Time Lord’s nervous system and extreme mental fortitude. The Sild, in turn, was touching a mind quite unlike any other it was likely to have encountered.
And yet the Sild would triumph. The Doctor was sure of that. It was simply a question of how long it took to overcome the Master’s defences. Minutes, perhaps, rather than the usual seconds. But of the outcome there could be no doubt. The Master, after all, was why the Sild were here.
The Doctor reached the other Time Lord. By now the Master was on his side, legs drawn to his chest in agony. His face was a mask carved of equal parts pain and concentration.
‘Doctor,’ he managed to say, the word half-choked. But if the Master was on the verge of begging for help, he could not yet bring himself to that humiliating state.
The Doctor stooped down, collecting the sonic screwdriver which the Master must have dropped when the Sild reached him. A scuttling sound came from further down the walkway. Two more Sild were advancing along the elevated walkway, while a third was working its way over the back of one of the turbines. If they were here in ones and twos, then they would soon be here in dozens, then hundreds. The Doctor fished out his key and opened the TARDIS, stepping neatly around the writhing Master. He paused on the threshold, part of him ready to close the door, engage the dematerialisation circuit, prepared to abandon the Master and this planet to their mutual fates. There was a whole universe out there, with miracles and wonders enough to fill a thousand lifetimes. Nothing bound to him to this miserable corner of space and time except a handful of friendships.
But there was no force in creation stronger than those friendships. Jo, the Brigadier, the rest of his colleagues in UNIT … and by extension every human being alive on this planet. He couldn’t abandon them to the Sild.
Even the Master deserved better than that.
The Doctor directed the sonic screwdriver at the Sild. It jerked in his hand, as if it had been left in an odd setting. Whatever it was, the Sild did not care for it. The alien creature sprang off the Master, twitching on its back in a kind of electrocuted palsy. The Doctor glanced at the sonic screwdriver, as impressed and disturbed as if it had changed into a snake.
The Doctor dragged the now slumped Master by the shoulders. He pulled him over the threshold, into the TARDIS. The other Sild were very close now. The Doctor squirted the sonic screwdriver at them. At close range, the effect was one of instant debilitation. At longer range, it only slowed or deflected the advance. The Doctor ducked back inside and started closing the doors. A Sild crawled around the top of the doorway, tentacles whipping. The Doctor slammed the door, but not quickly enough. The Sild was inside, dropping to the floor, righting itself. He aimed the sonic screwdriver at it, delivering a close-range energy pulse even as the Sild seemed about to pounce for his own neck.
The Sild twitched like a nerve-gassed spider.
The Doctor propped the Master against the control room’s wall, then tried to straighten his head so that it didn’t loll onto his chest. There was something hard under the Master’s collar, like a second collar of metal. For an instant the Doctor was inclined to investigate, but for once his sense of urgency prevailed over natural curiosity. Leaving the Master alone, he strode to the console and initiated dematerialisation. He danced around the instruments, flicking switches and turning knobs, until he had locked the TARDIS on to UNIT headquarters. The console’s central element began its reassuring rise and fall. The Doctor allowed himself a moment’s relief – there had
been no real danger of the Sild penetrating the TARDIS, but it was still good to be out of there.
Something slammed the TARDIS. It was less a lurch, more a hard jarring collision: the temporal equivalent of ramming a multidimensional iceberg. The Doctor slid from one side of the control room to the other, cartwheeling his arms – it was as if the level floor had become the deck of a capsizing ship. Then he was sliding back the other way, almost falling this time, until he was able to find an anchor in the central console. The Master, too, was being thrown around like a rag doll. The controls had gone haywire, the central element jerking up, down, up, up, down, up, down, down. The Doctor made frantic adjustments to the controls. The TARDIS’s environmental readings were either scrambled or nonsensical. Sifting through centuries of experience, the Doctor could only conclude that the TARDIS had been exposed to some violent energy field in the instants after dematerialisation had commenced. Had the Sild, against all his judgement, managed to bring a powerful weapon to bear? Something with the energy density of a stellar envelope?
No. There was, now that the Doctor put his mind to it, a vastly simpler explanation.
‘Lethbridge-Stewart,’ he said, for nobody’s benefit but his own. ‘You actually went and did it …’
CHAPTER NINETEEN
There was, of course, no sense in which the events of the Doctor and those of Captain Mike Yates could be said to be cotemporaneous, not now that the Doctor was hurtling through the Vortex, neither part of time nor entirely detached from it.
But in the moments before the TARDIS vanished from the reactor hall, Yates, from a distance of two miles, trained his glare-proof binoculars on a single red-finned and shark-grey Phantom. He watched the jet curl away to the north east, twin afterburners bright as miniature suns, its bunker buster package having been deployed successfully. Invisibly to Yates, for it was far too small to be seen at that distance, the jet was already in the process of being guided home via a laser-designator, shone onto the reactor building from a second Phantom loitering far beyond the Durlston Heath perimeter.
Yates lowered his binoculars. He reached for a pair of flash goggles and slipped them on. It was almost unnecessary. The bunker buster did not detonate until it had already penetrated both the outer and inner layers of Durlston A, so there were already two layers of well-protected building interposed between him and the initial flash. Through the goggles it registered as an instant of muted brightness, as if the reactor building were a giant opaque cube in the heart of which some illuminating light source had just been switched on and off. Yates felt the kiss of the heat pulse. And then an eruption of billowing bright light punched apart the hall in a kind of cone formation, dragging fire and gas and dirt in its wake, and an instant later there it was, the incipient mushroom cloud, hauling itself into the sky like a vast swollen cerebellum, propelled upwards on the piston of its own monstrous knotted spinal column. The brain seemed to churn and writhe, like a thing in transports of mental anguish. Under Yates’s boots, the road quivered.
Yates was not impressed. He had seen bigger bangs.
Then it came: the sound and the fury. A hot wind, a muffled but still appallingly loud thunder crack, echoing and echoing, until a second sound, a crunching endless roar, swallowed it. It sounded like the world being torn in two, over and over again.
Yates extracted the earplugs from his ears and lowered the flash goggles.
There was a squawk from his radio. He lifted it to his ears. ‘Greyhound Two.’
‘Status?’ the Brigadier queried.
‘Bang on target, sir. Couldn’t have asked for a cleaner strike.’
‘No,’ the Brigadier said, with a distinct absence of enthusiasm. ‘I don’t suppose we could have.’
‘And the Doctor, sir? Do you suppose …?’
‘We gave him as long as we could,’ the Brigadier said.
Tom Irwin had watched the helicopter go down with a sick feeling in his stomach. It had been bad enough observing Lovelace’s departure, knowing that the helicopter was almost empty, but at least it had taken the man out of his hair. Yet the helicopter had barely been two minutes away from the rig when something had begun to go badly wrong. The normal sound of the rotors had gained an ominous grinding undertone, like a Glasgow Corporation bus crunching its gears on its way up Sauciehall Street. Smoke had begun to billow out of the rotor assembly in unfeasible black quantities, like ink from an octopus.
It had gone down fast. Irwin had been trained in helicopter crash scenarios, how to survive a ditching in water, how to escape from a capsized helicopter – but at the back of those simulations – cold, wet and terrifying as they were – was the unstated and frankly optimistic assumption that the initial descent was inherently survivable. That had not been the case here. The phrase ‘dropped like a stone’ had never been more appropriate. Shorn of lift, some mechanical fault preventing the normal auto-rotation of its blades, the helicopter had fallen out of the sky like the cumbersome metal thing it had always been. It had tipped over and aimed itself nose down, arrowing into the water like a gannet. Irwin couldn’t have given a stuff about Lovelace, but there was no way those pilots were surviving an impact like that. After only a few seconds bits of the helicopter were seen floating on the surface.
Under other circumstances a helicopter crash would been the most significant development in weeks. Right now it was just another troubling incident on a day that was going from bad to worse. With the crew left on the platform, Irwin did not even have enough spare manpower to organise a rescue attempt. Not that there would have been much point.
Fortunately that was not the only helicopter shuttling between shore and sea. Brushing aside questions – dismissing the fact that he had just been held at gunpoint – Irwin returned to Eddie’s office and tried to get a line to mainland operations. But the telephone was still dead, the way Lovelace had left it.
He went down the corridor, to the wireless room. The door was shut but unlocked. The wireless room had hardly been used since the sub-sea cables went in, but it was still kept in operating order. Irwin knew his way around the equipment well enough. He pulled a seat up to the desk, settled on the headphones and called up mainland operations. The signal was poor – whatever was going on was causing radio interference – but he was able to communicate news of the helicopter crash and request continued assistance in the evacuation. Another helicopter was already on its way.
‘Eddie’s somewhere in the rig,’ he told the wireless operator on the other end. ‘I’m going to see if I can find her – she might be in the secure area. Any word on that UNIT party, let me know.’
Irwin delegated one of his men to keep watch on the wireless equipment, while he gathered two more workers and told them to follow him down into the platform’s lower levels, hoping and trusting that this hunt was going to come to a happier conclusion than the one for Pete Lomax. It was no time to mount a search, with the alarm still blaring, the men spooked by what they had seen out on the deck and reports beginning to filter in of more crab sightings. Irwin pushed all that from his mind, for the moment. Find Eddie, establish some order. That was priority number one.
But finding Eddie turned out to be the easy part. Irwin heard the banging long before he reached the security door at the start of the restricted area. Through the little window in the upper half of the door he could see Eddie herself, swinging a fire extinguisher against the door from the other side. What should have been a clang came through as a muffled thud.
Irwin tapped the glass and held up his hand. ‘Easy! We’re here!’ he called, as if raising his voice was going to make much difference.
Eddie came to her senses. She looked flustered but otherwise in one piece. She dropped the extinguisher and ran off down the corridor. He waited until she returned, perhaps thirty seconds later, with a notepad and pen. She scrawled something on the pad, then jammed the pad against the window.
LOVELACE
Irwin looked around to his men. ‘Get me a pen and paper, someone.
’ Then he turned back to the window and dragged a finger across his own throat, tapping the other hand against the name Eddie had written. ‘Dead,’ he mouthed.
Eddie mouthed back: ‘Dead?’
Irwin nodded. She would just have to accept that; there was no way he was going to be able to mime a helicopter accident.
Eddie wrote something else in the book.
LOCKED IN STORES. SMASHED WAY OUT. CANT GET THRU THIS DOOR. CODE ON OTHER SIDE?
Irwin nodded. There was a keyed-entry device, but he had tried the obvious combinations – all zeroes, all ones, one, two, three, four, with no success. He gave a hopeless shrug.
Eddie wrote again.
IF U CANT FIND OUT CODE, CUT THRU DOOR.
‘Cut through?’ Irwin asked.
OXY-ACET, DRILL, WHATEVER. ON A BLOODY OIL RIG.
USE YR IMAGINATION.
He grinned. The day was not shaping up to be the best of his life, but there was still life in his boss, and that was enough to lift his spirits.
Someone slipped Irwin a notebook and chunky black felt tip. He bit the cap off and jotted down his own note.
BIG PROBS. ATTACK OF THE KILLER CRABS. LOVELACE
HELI CRASH. EVAC IN PROG – HELIS AND LIFEBOATS.
GOT TO GET YOU OUT FAST. THEN WORK OUT HOW SMASH GEAR.
She nodded, composed her own reply. CRABS?
Irwin said: ROBOT CRABS. INFESTING RIG. NASTY.
She asked: CONNECTED MERMAN, LOMAX ETC?
Irwin replied: THINK SO.
Eddie wrote: UNIT ARRIVED?
Irwin replied: NOT YET. BUT LOVELACE PLANNED SMASH GEAR. CHICKENED OUT. NOW WE HAVE TO DO IT.
Eddie wrote: IN ROOM HERE. BUT BEHIND ANOTHER DOOR. CANT GET IN. NEED TOOLS.
‘We’re on it,’ he said, trusting she’d get the message.
She wrote: WATCH OUT FOR CRABS.
Doctor Who: Harvest of Time Page 17
