by Doctor Who
The Doctor stopped wriggling forward. ‘There are globs blocking the way too.’
‘It’s Ermenshrew!’ said Flowers desperately. ‘She’s waiting the other end for us. She’s going to get us!’
The Doctor took a long noisy sniff. ‘There’s someone up ahead of us all right. . . Who’s there?’ he called.
Flowers held her breath, straining to catch the faintest noise.
A quiet fart noise penetrated from the blackness ahead of them.
‘Screwdriver,’ hissed the Doctor.
She activated it with trembling fingers. In the eerie blue light, beyond the Doctor’s silhouette, she saw two globs were blocking the way ahead of them.
But no ordinary globs.
These two had zippers stretching from end to end.
‘So you didn’t escape,’ Flowers whispered. ‘Ecktosca Fel Fotch?
Dram?’
‘Senator Flowers, I never dreamed you’d go to such lengths to find us,’ rumbled the nearest glob – in the voice of Ecktosca.
‘We weren’t looking for you,’ the Doctor told him. ‘We’re on the run from one of your kind, and this is the only place she can’t get us.’
135
Ecktosca’s glob tried to nod thoughtfully. ‘So you’ve learned the truth about Consul Issabel – or rather, that harpy Ermenshrew.’
‘You knew?’ breathed Flowers.
‘Oh yes, all along.’
‘And you didn’t try to warn me?’
‘Slitheen do not share family business with aliens,’ the glob informed her tartly. ‘The Blathereen are our problem, and one we shall deal with. One day.’
‘Blathereen! Ha!’ The Doctor seemed delighted. ‘I knew Ermenshrew had to be from a different family! That explains why “Consul Issabel” dismissed Rose’s claim that there was a Slitheen on Justice Beta.’
‘Your friend said that?’ hissed Dram quickly.
‘Yeah – but what she’d really seen was a Blathereen.’
‘One of a whole pack of them,’ said Ecktosca distastefully.
‘The Blathereen have been infesting Justicia for years.’
‘They’re working on some big master plan,’ the Doctor agreed.
‘But what?’
136
Riz had never imagined she would one day find herself sitting with Kazta in the social hall. But here they were, together in the smoky fug at the back of the room, just the two of them.
Members of a secret club that believed in monsters.
Kaz had abandoned her cronies for now. Like everyone else, they were fixating on the idea of mixed-sex cellmates; this, aside from some speculation as to Rose’s whereabouts, was the sole topic of conversation. The prettier prisoners were working on cool chat-up lines.
The more pragmatic were practising strangleholds and coercion tactics.
Then Maggi came up to Kaz. With her lank orange hair and gormless expression, she had always been rated by Riz as one of the less scary members of Kaz’s gang – and the most stupid.
‘Kaz, I want to talk to you about the monsters,’ said Maggi.
‘You believe me?’
‘I do. Honest.’
She scowled. ‘If that cow Blanc hadn’t twigged I was taping her I’d have all the proof anyone would need.’
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‘I tried to get the others to believe you.’ Maggi pulled up a stool.
‘Told them that the monsters are real. Told them Rose Tyler got sent away for knowing ’bout them. But all they’re talking about now is boys, boys, boys.’
‘And the boys can only talk girls, girls, girls,’ Riz agreed. ‘It’s distraction tactics. That’s what we reckon.’
Kaz nodded. ‘The monsters are taking over.’
‘Rose and Dennel were the only ones who knew about it,’ said Riz.
‘And they’ve both gone.’
Maggi looked at them wide-eyed. ‘Did you really see one for real, Kaz?’
‘You bet it’s real.’ Kaz shuddered. ‘It lives inside Blanc. She came to my cell. Said she’d kill me if I didn’t back up her story that she was with me the night Norris and Rose and Dennel disappeared. Unzipped her head and. . . ’ Kaz wiped her eyes furtively, not wanting anyone to see her tears. ‘This thing just sort of. . . wriggled out. It was horrible.
Big. Slimy. These boggly black eyes. . . ’
Maggi stared, chewing on a ginger strand of hair. ‘Go on.’
‘What could I do? When Robsen came in, I said I’d been with her.’
She looked down on the floor. ‘What else could I do?’
‘I reckon maybe we should go and tell Robsen what really happened that night,’ said Maggi.
‘Yeah, like he’d believe us!’ snorted Riz.
‘He’s one of the better ones,’ Kaz admitted.
‘A screw’s a screw,’ Riz insisted. ‘If it got out that we talked, we’d all disappear.’
‘Well, I’m not waiting around till some monster sneaks into my cell in the middle of the night,’ said Maggi with unexpected determination. ‘You do what you like. I’m gonna see Robsen.’
Riz watched her go, gallumphing off across the social hall.
‘What’s got into her?’ wondered Kaz.
Rose led Dennel out of the ruined, smoking ship and into the mint-smelling jungle. The light from the three suns dazzled her, made everything seem overexposed. But it was wide open and springtime out 138
here, a total contrast from the cramped, sweaty grey of the borstal. Fi-brous leaves and stalks burst up from the ground in a frenzy of green.
Rose and Dennel hadn’t gone far before the vegetation masked all trace of the wrecked shuttle.
‘What can we do?’ said Dennel helplessly. ‘Those things are gonna catch us and eat us.’
‘The Blathereen won’t eat us,’ she assured him.
‘They won’t?’
‘Nope. They’ll just kill us.’ She pulled aside a tangle of branches so that he could clamber through. ‘Which is why we’re looking for that monitoring station we crashed into. If it’s not a total write-off, we might be able to find out how many there are and which way they’re coming from.’
‘Then we can run in the opposite direction.’
‘Or try to sneak past them.’
‘Well, how’re we going to find it?’ He produced his lighter. ‘Maybe I could burn down some jungle.’
‘And lead them straight to us?’
Rose began scrambling up a
chocolate-brown tree trunk. ‘Let’s try an aerial view.’
Halfway up, she could see it, some distance off in a clearing – like a large turret of blackened metal, rocking on its side. A flattened path stretched away behind it – not so much a turret then, as a big silver slug, nudging forwards through the foliage. Beyond it, looming over the trees, she could see a big white high-rise. It was uglier than anything you’d see back on her council estate, which was saying something. One of the admin centres, she supposed – it figured that the Blathereen pilot would try to put them down somewhere close to its buddies.
‘We’ve been going more or less the right way,’ she reported, shinning back down. ‘Come on, let’s check it out.’
Dennel took the lead. She decided there were worse bums than his to be stuck behind while trekking for her life through an alien jungle, pursued by monsters.
But suddenly he stopped dead in his tracks.
‘Come on,’ she said, ‘you can’t be tired yet. We’ve got miles to. . . ’
139
Her mouth went horribly dry as she saw what he was staring at.
They had come to a large, natural clearing.
It was strewn with bodies and skeletons, all clad in borstal uniform.
‘Ronika,’ breathed Dennel, staring down at the corpse of a dark-haired girl who might have been pretty once, her rotting lips bared in a horrified grimace, tiny green bugs pouring in and out of her open mouth. He stumbled forwards, towards two more bodies lying in twisted, unnatural poses. �
�Malc. . . Dix. . . ’ He swung back round to Rose. ‘All these kids who went missing inside. Transferred, they said.’
‘But it was Blanc,’ said Rose, covering her mouth. ‘Look.’
Propped up against the tree was the staring cadaver of Warder Norris.
Dennel took some deep breaths, looking pale and sick. ‘No wonder they never found no trace of these people. She’s been dumping them out here.’
‘But how did she get them here?’ Rose wondered. ‘She couldn’t have taken a shuttle or whatever each time, could she? How’d she get Norris here so fast?’
‘Does it matter?’ he snapped. ‘These people are dead, and all you care about is how they wound up here!’
‘I don’t!’ she protested, took a step towards him – and trod in something sticky. She looked down and blanched. ‘For instance, I also care about how come this person here. . . seems to have been turned inside out.’
Her foot had snapped through a ribcage into the lining of a uniform caked in powdery red detritus. Gingerly, she lifted her leg clear.
‘I’m glad I put my foot in my mouth before I stepped in that,’ she told him.
It was a fairly feeble line, and it only raised a feeble smile. But when she held out her hand for Dennel to take, he took it, and she led the way on through the spearmint jungle.
Flowers lay uncomfortably, flat on her face on her gloomy, smelly perch, wishing the Doctor might take his conversation with Ecktosca 140
and Dram on the move. If Ermenshrew was working on a way to get them back into her clawing clutches. . .
‘So come on then,’ he demanded of the bogus globs. ‘We may not know what the Blathereen are up to, but what about you lot? Why are you here?’
‘We explained –’
‘All that guff about being family historians. . . ’ The Doctor shook his head. ‘I saw your picture on the cell wall – the Slitheen family business is still going strong, isn’t it?’
‘You merely saw a historical re-enactment. I always dress up for an auction, the punters love it.’ He leaned forward and jiggled his zipper.
‘The fuel-sale business had to be wound up – because the Blathereen undercut us and stole all our customers. They were better organised, more streamlined and had lower overheads. . . ’
‘So you’re yesterday’s men,’ the Doctor surmised. ‘And with your noses put out of joint. So you came along here –’
‘To get our ancestors’ belongings,’ he insisted. ‘I mean, yes, we knew the Blathereen were sneaking about Justicia – but who cares?
Humans deserve all they get, if you ask me.’ The shrunken Slitheen gave a loud belch. ‘Then that ratbag Ermenshrew had us banged up because she needed our brainpower!’
‘And she got it, too, didn’t she?’
‘We didn’t want her getting suspicious while we worked on our escape,’ said Dram.
‘I’m amazed she didn’t cotton on,’ Ecktosca admitted. ‘I mean, if our genius allows us to compress the powers of a solar eruption, it follows that we can compress ourselves quite spectacularly too – for a limited time, anyway. And you were right, Doctor, it sorts out that silly implant good and proper.’
Dram giggled and let loose an enormous fart. ‘Although it does push the gas exchange to the limit.’
‘I hadn’t noticed,’ said Flowers politely, trying not to gag.
‘But how’d you get up here. . . ?’ The Doctor clicked his fingers.
‘Easy! You start a fight while you’re full size, wait for the globs to 141
come down and get you, set off your compression fields and hang on when they float back up to the rafters.’
‘Very good, Doctor,’ said Ecktosca drily. ‘If this thing had hands I’d be clapping.’
‘But why? I mean, now you’re prisoners up here instead of down there. Not much to choose between, is there?’
‘Your discovery of our compression fields forced us to move sooner than we would have liked,’ he said. ‘We’ve not yet located the only way out.’
‘But no one can get in or out of Justicia,’ said Flowers. ‘Unless. . . ’
The Doctor craned his neck to look round at her. ‘Go on.’
‘I overheard Issabel – Ermenshrew, I mean – talking about. . . pathways. Passages that must exist between here and one of the other worlds.’
‘Not just one of the other worlds,’ said Ecktosca. ‘There are pathways joining all the worlds in Justicia.’
Flowers reacted. ‘ All of them?’
‘Not pathways – warp-holes.’ The Doctor rolled over, perilously near the edge of the ledge, to look back at Flowers properly in the dim blue light. ‘The very thing you’ve been hoping to use for space travel. Only the Blathereen have already got them. They’ve used them to travel between the worlds of Justicia without arousing suspicion.’
‘And we’re going to use them to get out of here,’ hissed Dram determinedly.
‘But if the Blathereen already have these warp-holes, why would they want us to keep working on the gravity amplifier?’ Flowers wondered.
‘To make little warp-holes into big warp-holes, perhaps. Increase the power of the centrifuge.’ The Doctor nodded. ‘That’s why the Blathereen have been trying to move the planets into different orbits with exact measurements, to improve the system. Imperfections lead to instabilities.’
‘And Justice Prime, with its irregular orbit, gets shoved right outside the system.’ A shiver ran through her. ‘But the power you’d need to shift planets. . . ’
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‘Wake up and smell the Arkellis sap, Flowers!’ the Doctor roared.
‘Thanks to your little chain gangs slaving away on the problem, they’ve got that power! All your research, your findings, your inventions. . . ’
‘All along, they’ve been using us for their own ends,’ Flowers realised. ‘Leading us by the nose, steering our studies.’
The Doctor nodded. ‘While I was working on the amplifier today, the computer picked up some interference. So I checked it out, and what did I find? Three enormous gravity warp generators – not only drawing the planets off their natural course but powering their warp-holes, keeping them open. There’s one hidden here somewhere on Justice Prime. Another on Justice Alpha – must be what drew my ship there in the first place. And there’s a third out in deep space. But there’s also a whole load of tiny little disturbances scattered all over Justicia.’
‘Each one of them must be a point where you can enter or leave the warp-holes,’ Flower realised. ‘A sort of portal.’
‘It’s through one of those we’re hoping help will come,’ said Ecktosca quietly. ‘They’ll be hidden in all key locations. Quiet places, so no one sees you coming or going.’
‘Yeah, that figures. But what about the third major warp, outside the Justicia system altogether? Where’s that based?’ The Doctor looked between Flowers and the globs. ‘Come on, anyone got any ideas?’
‘It’ll be on-board their mothership!’ Ecktosca suppressed a burp.
‘That’s how the Blathereen have swelled their numbers here. They’ve used the warp-holes to smuggle whole armies into Justicia, one at a time!’
‘One of the girls wants to talk with you. And only you.’
Robsen looked up at Jamini, who was smirking in the common-room doorway, and raised an eyebrow. ‘Who says?’
‘Tiller, coming off shift. It’s that Maggi Jalovitch. Friend of Kazta’s.’
Jamini pulled a face. ‘None too bright, of course. But then why else would she want to see you?’
‘Ha, ha.’ Robsen frowned. He’d never had any personal requests 143
for audiences before. If it had been anyone other than a friend of Kazta’s. . .
Jamini turned suddenly serious. ‘Kazta’s not been the same since you said Blanc called in on her. Think it’s linked?’
‘Could be. I’ll go and see Maggi later.’
‘Want me to come with you?’
Robsen considered. ‘Nah, it’s OK. S
he might open up more if she thinks it’s one on one.’
‘Could be a set-up, or a trick.’
He smiled to see the concern on her long, chiselled face. ‘I’ll let you know.’
‘Is it just me,’ said Flowers, ‘or is the light getting fainter?’ She shook the sonic screwdriver, clamped tight in her clammy hand.
The Doctor rolled back on to his stomach. ‘Battery’s running down.
Better switch off, save the power.’ She did so, and his grim voice floated out of the darkness. ‘We have to find the portal. I need to get to Justice Delta and rescue Rose.’
‘I know where the portal must be,’ said Flowers with sudden certainty. ‘I saw one of the Executive senators walking about this morning. I thought he was here for a meeting but it had been cancelled –and no shuttle had arrived. Issabel tried to convince me I’d made a mistake, but I saw him. He went into the aquaculture compound.’
‘Did you see him come out?’ hissed the Doctor.
‘No – I mean, I didn’t stay around to look, but what would he have been doing in there by himself?’
‘It’s quiet, deserted?’
‘The experiments were scaled down some months ago,’ said Ecktosca.
‘Then postponed, by Issabel herself,’ Flowers added, ‘and she never did explain why.’
‘How fast can we get there?’ hissed the Doctor.
Dram and Ecktosca rolled away nimbly through the tunnel.
They pressed on. Somehow, the Doctor seemed to know when she was flagging in the pitch-blackness. ‘Come on, Flowers,’ he’d whisper.
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‘This is the last push. All downhill from here. . . ’
And then things really did go downhill.
‘Doctor,’ hissed Flowers. ‘There’s something on my leg.’
‘What?’
‘There’s something –’
‘I know what you said, what is it?’
Something else squidged on to the side of her arm, like a big bit of chewing gum being pressed against her.
‘Globs!’ she hissed. ‘They’re – they’re all over me!’
