by Doctor Who
‘Slitheen?’ hissed the pilot, almost choking on the word. ‘How dare you call me Slitheen!’
‘Well, sorry.’ Rose frowned. ‘But I figured since there were Slitheen on Justice Prime. . . ’
‘Slitheen are dunderhead scum.
Worthless, unimaginative, old-
fashioned –’
Rose gritted her teeth. ‘Well, OK, sorry about that, whoever’s out there, but the pilot’s not a Slitheen – he’s some other ugly monster thing that looks the same and comes from the same impossible-to-pronounce planet –’
‘We are Blathereen,’ hissed the creature.
‘Blathereen?’ Rose frowned. ‘Well, excuse me, but what’s with the royal we thing?’
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The Blathereen’s eyelids were drooping but it managed a sinister chuckle. It seemed to be looking behind her.
Rose turned and jumped.
On the monitor screen, a horrible image had resolved from the static. A dozen creatures identical to the pilot were crowding together, grinning widely and jostling to look out at her.
‘This is the Executive Centre on Justice Delta,’ giggled one of the creatures.
‘Currently under Blathereen control,’ chortled another.
Rose covered her hands with her mouth, rounded on the pilot. ‘You tricked me!’
‘Easy. . . peasy. . . ’ it croaked, before passing out.
‘Thank you for your message and for your location fix, tiny human creature,’ the first Blathereen went on, while its buddies burst out into belly laughs. It pushed its hideous head up close to the screen as if trying to smell her. ‘We shall be coming for you very soon.’
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The Doctor was still weak and pale. He indicated the systems hub.
‘Get in there, quick! We want the environment controls. Work out what’s what.’
Flowers pushed past him and into the dark chamber. Soft white lighting clicked on and she stared round, trying to familiarise herself with the systems.
‘Oh, little fat Flowers, my plump fool!’ Ermenshrew was giggling, reaching slowly, steadily towards them.
‘She’s alien! Why don’t the globs get her?’ cried Flowers.
‘No implant,’ the Doctor reminded her, struggling up from his knees.
‘Besides, she must control the globs.’
‘Time to die, my little one!’ the creature called.
‘Hurt her and I’ll do nothing for your precious project, hear me?’
snapped the Doctor. ‘I won’t lift a finger.’
Ermenshrew shrugged her massive, glutinous shoulders. The movement allowed her to creep a little closer. ‘If you won’t lift a finger, I’ll pluck them from your little girlfriend’s hands instead, one by one.
Provided she’s still alive, of course.’
Flowers heard the Doctor’s voice catch. ‘What do you mean?’
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‘I mean the shuttle she was aboard has crashed on Justice Delta.’
‘ What?’
‘Never mind her! A member of my family has been hurt, and frankly I hope he used your friend for a soft landing. He has invested so many years pretending to be human that for him to die now, when our plans are so close to fruition. . . ’
Flowers bit her lip, told herself to stop eavesdropping and start fathoming the controls.
‘Whatever you’re doing here, I’ll stop it,’ said the Doctor calmly.
‘Oh?’ Ermenshrew’s big black eyes widened further in amusement.
‘And what can you do? You are my prisoner.’
‘I’ll expose you,’ he promised. ‘Tell the others who you really are.
They might be less keen to work for you –’
‘– knowing I’m from Raxacoricofallapatorius and not Earth?’ She snuffled with mirth. ‘Even if they believed you, I imagine they might be rather happy to hear that the human trash that sought to incarcerate them has been. . . removed.’
‘Removed?’
‘We have been moving behind the scenes here for so long now,’ she rumbled. ‘But finally the need for secrecy is ended.’ Her black eyes glinted with malice. ‘With only middling minds to exploit, the work towards our ultimate ends has gone slowly and in secret. But your excellent work, Doctor, has allowed us to advance our plans.’
‘It’s true,’ piped Flowers. ‘I heard her talking to another one –they’re replacing people in all kinds of positions, all over the system.’
‘The family gathers, my dears,’ she slobbered. ‘Soon Justicia will fall entirely under our control.’
‘And then what?’ The Doctor watched her wriggle that bit nearer.
‘What do you want it for? Why have you been trying to turn the Justicia system into an enormous fast-gravity centrifuge?’
‘You geniuses arc all the same. You can never see the possibilities in your own work. . . ’ Ermenshrew breathed in, sucking in her sagging stomach so she could squeeze more quickly down the passage. ‘Justicia has long profited from the exploitation of alien minds. Under our control it will profit from whole planets!’ She lunged forwards, claws 128
outstretched – but her sinewy body snagged once more in the small corridor, her talons inches away from the Doctor’s chest. ‘No one and nothing can protect you, Flowers.’
Flowers was forcing back tears. ‘What are we going to do, Doctor?’
‘The gravity regulator!’
‘What about it?’
‘You said you could make it zero gravity all through the SCAT-house.’
‘Well, in theory,’ she flapped. ‘But the power required would be –’
‘ Do it!’ he thundered.
Flowers started to alter the settings, hoping it would work.
Then she shrieked as her body lurched up into the air.
The Doctor was rising with her. Ermenshrew stared impotently up at them, wedged stickily in the narrow shaft of the corridor as her prey floated up and away. With a bellow of anger, she swiped for Flowers’s feet with her long, raking claws. But she was a fraction too slow; Flowers had nudged herself just out of reach.
‘You asked for this,’ she screamed. ‘I’ll put the others to work in your place, Doctor. Oh, how I’ll work them. Kindness gets you nowhere, Flowers!’
‘Ignore her. Kick out with your legs!’ the Doctor ordered, swimming through the air. ‘We’ve got to move fast. How long can the systems keep this up?’
‘It’s a big drain on the power cells.’ Flowers turned a slow somersault and looked at him anxiously. ‘They’ll default to Earth gravity in a few minutes, maximum.’
A frisson of fear ran through her as she realised they were about to breach the thick shadows that cloaked the high ceiling. She realised that although she’d lived in the SCAT-house for years she had no idea what actually lay up here, out of view. The globs were part and parcel of the place. She’d always taken them for granted.
And yet this was their lair, the dark place where Justicia’s guardians hovered, vigilant and vengeful, on the lookout for trouble down below.
‘Where are we going?’ she hissed urgently.
‘To test a theory,’ he said, as the blackness swallowed them.
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‘And if you’re wrong?’
‘We die.’
‘You don’t sound very bothered.’ She shut her eyes. ‘Oh dear, you’re not suicidal after your friend –?’
‘Shut up,’ he growled. ‘She’s fine. Shuttle crash? Nothing.’
She couldn’t even see him now in the thick gloom, and her hands flew to her glasses to check they weren’t floating away. Below her she saw Ermenshrew trying to free herself from the confines of the corridor. If she fell now, she’d impale herself on those long, clacking claws. . .
‘Switch on the screwdriver,’ the Doctor told her. ‘We need the light.’
Flowers did so, and had to stifle a gasp. In the ghostly blue light she saw that they had drifted right up into a nest of globs. There had to be twenty of the creatures up here, per
ched on a shelf cut into the dry, rocky roof.
‘Why don’t they react to us?’ she whispered.
‘They can’t have programming for intruders up here,’ the Doctor suggested, peering into the soupy blackness ahead of him. ‘They’re designed to watch over the world below – ah!’
‘What is it?’
‘At first I thought the globs were grouped in strategic places all around the SCAT-house. But what if you’ve got a riot going on – a small flock of globs may not be enough. So! They have to be able to move about, right?’ He started swimming through the squid-ink air with smooth strokes. ‘Like that one I recognised out in the corridor –he’d moved from his little patch in the projects room. So what does that suggest to you?’
‘That if there’s trouble they have to get there fast, and in numbers.’
Flowers couldn’t stop looking down. ‘Look, Doctor, the zero-G will cut out at any moment –’
‘And did you ever see a glob dip down through a doorway?’
‘No. Which implies some kind of. . . ’ Now she got what he was driving at, and nodded furiously. ‘Some kind of tunnel network up above in the roofing. It must link all the rooms and walkways together!’
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‘Right. So there should be one at the end of this ledge they’re sat on!’ cried the Doctor, bobbing in the darkness up ahead of her. ‘Quick, grab my coat-tails.’
Flowers held on and allowed herself to be pulled after him. She was gently drifting in to perch when Earth gravity reasserted itself, and she fell the last few inches. Waving round the screwdriver she saw a pitch-black hole ahead of them, bored out smoothly through the rock – and the Doctor grinning like a maniac.
‘That was close, wasn’t it?’ he said gleefully.
‘Do you suppose they have ledges like this along every wall in the place?’ she said shakily.
‘Be a waste of energy to have the globs hovering around the whole time, wouldn’t it? So they sit up here out the way to keep themselves fully charged.’ He started shuffling along the ledge. ‘Come on. Should just be wide enough for us if we lay on our fronts and wriggle.’
‘I’ve got more front than you,’ Flowers complained as she shunted herself along after him. ‘Anyway, where are we going? We can’t stay hiding up here for ever. Issabel – I mean, Ermenshrew – will soon figure out where we’ve gone!’
‘There’s somewhere we have to get to,’ the Doctor told her.
‘Where?’
‘Justice Delta. I have to know that Rose is really OK.’
‘Doctor, I’m sorry about your friend, but I hardly think it’s likely that one of these tunnels leads to another planet hundreds of millions of miles away!’
‘Not one of these tunnels, no,’ he answered.
‘Dennel!’ hissed Rose. ‘Come on, snap out of it!’
At his first semi-conscious groan she grabbed hold of him and pulled him to his feet. Dennel stared round, terrified at what he must have lived through.
‘We’ve got to get out of here and fast.’ She glared at the Blathereen.
‘Things like that are on their way to hunt us down.’
‘Oh,’ said Dennel, who still seemed kind of shell-shocked. ‘We don’t stand a chance, do we?’
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‘We have to try.’
He nodded. Rose took him by the hand and led him past the fallen, smouldering body of the Blathereen, towards the exit.
The Governor stared at the blank screen on his wall. He’d been trying to contact his superiors. None of them were responding.
The relaxing blue lamp started to flicker again. He switched it off in annoyance, let the darkness soothe his eyes. He’d heard the grumblings from his staff at the new directives, even when he’d tried so hard to pronounce the new decrees with conviction, to assure them that everything was for the best.
Truth was, even the Governor was beginning to wonder.
He’d done so much to appease the Executive these last years, taken all policy decisions on-board without protest no matter how strange they seemed, hoping that if he did so, the rumoured wrongdoings taking place here would remain overlooked. That’s just what they were, after all. Only rumours. Not a shred of real evidence.
But no one had come looking at all. And now, after wasting a day trying to track down any of the Area Governors, he was beginning to think the Executive had ceased to exist altogether.
Suddenly his door slid open. He couldn’t see who was there, so he switched on the blue light again.
Warder Blanc.
‘I didn’t hear you knock.’ He frowned as she stepped inside. ‘And I never said you could enter!’
‘Sorry, sir,’ said Blanc, with a small smile. ‘But I needed to see you.’
‘Yes, well. As it happened, I wanted to see you too.’ He smiled stiffly. ‘That troublemaker – the girl, Rose Tyler – made some very odd complaints about you.’
Blanc raised an eyebrow. Her smile grew broader. ‘Oh?’
The Governor snorted. ‘Some nonsense about you being a monster!
Even so –’
‘That is nonsense.’ Blanc giggled. Then she whistled to someone standing just outside the door. ‘ This is the monster.’
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A huge, glistening, grey-green creature lumbered into the Governor’s office, its eyes black and gleaming, terrifying claws flexing and quivering at the end of its oversized arms.
‘That Tyler human had the nerve to think that you were one of us, Governor,’ said Blanc. ‘Crazy.’
The Governor stared at them in the flickering blue light, struck dumb with terror.
‘This is the person you’re going to be,’ Blanc told the monster. ‘A pathetic, ineffectual animal, I know – that’s why we didn’t replace him sooner. But there you go. The rabble here quite like him. They think he’s. . . fair.’ She pronounced the word like it tasted of sick.
‘Don Arco reckons they’ll do a lot for him, if he asks them right. We’ll get better results than if we drug the prisoners into compliance.’
‘What. . . ’ The Governor finally teased a word on to his tongue.
‘What is the meaning of this, Blanc? What joke are you trying to play on me?’
‘It’s a knock-knock joke,’ Blanc giggled.
The Governor stared at her blankly.
‘Knock, knock,’ said the monster. It lashed out with its fist and thumped twice on the governor’s head.
The second blow crushed his skull against the mahogany desk, and splintered both. The blue light toppled over and fizzled out in a pool of his blood.
‘Do you think he got it?’ chuckled the monster, and Blanc fell about laughing.
At the same time, all over Justicia, the final substitutions took place.
The colonial government on Justice Epsilon met to discuss the radi-cal new laws regarding the death penalty proposed by their president.
She planned to conscript all fit men and women on the planet over the age of twenty-one to a heavy labour programme. Those who refused would be executed. The politicians were in uproar. They didn’t even understand why this heavy labour should be necessary.
But the Blathereen did. And once they’d barged in, slaughtered the ministers and taken their places, a unanimous vote saw the new 133
policies agreed and ratified without delay, to be implemented in time for the first great burn-up.
On Justice Alpha, members of the Executive informed the last of the galley masters that his branch of historical punishment was being shut down. All slave workers would be diverted to the pyramid-building programme. At the same time, the general overseer for pyramids was hunted down and brutally murdered. A Blathereen wriggled into his skin and announced that, from now on, slaves would work to erect a more useful form of storage facility. . .
In the penal settlements of Justice Gamma, the last remaining human governors were executed by their Blathereen replacements. Liberal regimes would soon be a thing of the past, but so too would the bloody extremes
of the harsher prison camps. Their human prisoners would no longer be subjected to a diverse range of experiments.
Instead they would be worked like beasts of burden, drugged only should it be necessary to quell any resistance.
Soon, these humans’ work would begin. Hard, dangerous work that would kill hundreds if not thousands of people.
But the Blathereen knew they had enough livestock to turn a very tidy profit in the first three years of the new operation. And by carefully keeping up appearances, new prisoners would continue to arrive to replenish their labour stock. They wouldn’t need to raise a single, sticky claw themselves.
Flowers had been trailing the Doctor’s feet along the ledges and through the tunnels for some time. Her limbs were aching, her elbows and knees scraped sore, and it was dark and claustrophobic. To conserve the sonic screwdriver’s power they were pressing on in the dark. Sometimes they would chance upon a glob, wet and springy like a ball of turf, but it would meekly roll out of the way and hover in the air until they had passed.
‘What do you suppose Ermenshrew is doing right now?’ asked Flowers.
‘If I were her I’d be busy trying to get the globs to attack us up here,’
came his cheerless reply.
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‘What about Ecktosca and Dram Fel Fotch?’ she asked.
‘If I were them I’d be swigging a ginger beer and toasting freedom.’
‘No, I mean, why did they even want to escape? If the Slitheen have taken control of the prison, they must have known.’ She gasped.
‘Maybe the whole thing was staged! Maybe Ermenshrew needed to press them into service somewhere else, and smuggled them out!’
‘No, that doesn’t fit,’ he told her. ‘Ecktosca and Dram had put together home-made compression fields. I found them in the cell.’
‘They can’t have!’
‘Well, they did. They’re incredibly crafty. But why would they go to all that trouble if a quick word with Issabel could get them out in a moment? She put them here in the first place –’
Flowers shushed him. Her nose started twitching, and in a moment, her body flushed with adrenalin. ‘Doctor, I can smell Slitheen!’
