Wetworld

by Mark Michalowski

  Wetworld

  MARK MICHALOWSKI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Also available in the Doctor Who series

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Acknowledgements

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781409073284

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

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  First published in 2007 by BBC Books, an imprint of Ebury Publishing.

  A Random House Group Company.

  This paperback edition published in 2008

  Copyright © Mark Michalowski, 2007

  Mark Michalowski has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

  Doctor Who is a BBC Wales production for BBC One

  Executive Producers: Russell T Davies and Julie Gardner

  Series Producer: Phil Collinson

  Original series broadcast on BBC Television. Format © BBC 1963.

  ‘Doctor Who’, ‘TARDIS’ and the Doctor Who logo are trademarks of the British Broadcasting Corporation and are used under licence.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior

  permission of the copyright owner.

  The Random House Group Ltd Reg. No. 954009.

  Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at www.randomhouse.co.uk.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 1846075957

  The Random House Group Limited supports the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), the leading international forest certification organisation. All our titles that are printed on Greenpeace approved FSC certified paper carry the FSC logo. Our paper procurement policy can be found at www.rbooks.co.uk/environment

  Series Consultant: Justin Richards

  Project Editor: Steve Tribe

  Cover design by Lee Binding © BBC 2007

  Typeset in Albertina and Deviant Strain

  Printed and bound in the UK by CPI Cox and Wyman, Reading, Berkshire

  For my sister, Julie

  Also available in the Doctor Who series:

  STING OF THE ZYGONS

  Stephen Cole

  THE LAST DODO

  Jacqueline Rayner

  WOODEN HEART

  Martin Day

  FOREVER AUTUMN

  Mark Morris

  SICK BUILDING

  Paul Magrs

  High above the still waters of the swamp, the bird carved out spirals in the purple sky, sharp eyes constantly on the lookout for lunch. Warm air rising from the water caught under her steel-blue wings, lifting her higher and higher towards the bloated orange sun.

  Suddenly, down in the swamp below, something caught her eye: a tiny flicker of motion on the mirror-smooth surface. Silently, and with only hunger in her mind, she pulled in her wings and dropped like a stone. At the last moment, honed by years of instinct and experience, she stretched out her wings to slow her fall. Just metres from the water, she opened her beak, ready to gulp down the fish that she could see.

  And then a glossy tentacle flicked out of the water, wrapped itself around her neck, and dragged her under.

  The heavy silence of the swamp was broken momentarily by the thrashing of wings and a frantic splashing as she vanished. All that was left was a little froth of bubbles and a set of slowly decaying ripples, spreading out across the waters of the swamp. It was over in less than a second.

  And then there was just the sun, beating down, and the wetness and the silence.

  ONE

  ‘So,’ said Martha Jones, folding her arms.

  She leaned against the handrail that ran around the central console of the time machine.

  ‘Flying the TARDIS. What’s all that about, then?’

  From beneath her feet, muffled by the grating on which she stood and the weird-looking electronic tool held in his mouth, the Doctor said: ‘Mphhhpphh… mmm… mppppffhfhf.’

  Martha nodded wisely.

  ‘That’s all well and good,’ she said. ‘But it doesn’t really answer my question, does it?’

  She dropped, cat-like, to her knees and pressed her face against the floor, squinting to see exactly what the Doctor was doing, down in the bowels of the TARDIS.

  ‘I said—’

  ‘I heard what you said!’ snapped back the Doctor, yanking the thing out of his mouth with a scowl. ‘But what you don’t understand is—’

  And he shoved it back between his teeth and mphphphed a bit more, this time with added emphasis, until Martha shook her head exasperatedly and stood up. She wandered around the console, covered with what looked like the contents of a particularly poor car boot sale. There were brass switches, a bicycle pump and something that looked like one of those paperweights with bubbles in it. She was wondering exactly what any of these weird objects had to do with flying through time and space when she suddenly found the Doctor standing in front of her, sonic screwdriver in hand, his hair all ruffled and askew.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Um… yeah,’ replied Martha cagily, wondering what he was on about. ‘Probably.’

  ‘Good!’

  And he was off, racing past her, around to the other side of the console, where he grabbed the paperweight and gave it a delicate tweak. All around her, the subtle burblings and electronic grumblings of the TARDIS changed key ever so slightly, settling into something much more comfortable. Martha followed him, watching as he fiddled and faddled with the junk set into the console’s luminous green surface.

  ‘What I was saying before…’ she ventured, watching his narrowed eyes.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, nodding firmly. ‘Croissants. For breakfast. Definitely. We’ll pop over to Cannes and pick a—’

  ‘Not the croissants,’ she interrupted.

  ‘No problem. Porridge is fine by me. Edinburgh – 1807. Fine vintage.’

  ‘I’m not talking about breakfast.’

  He jolted upright, as if he’d received an electric shock, and turned to her, eyes wide and manic.

  ‘You mean it’s lunchtime?’ He glanced at his watch, frowned, shook it and then placed it to his ear. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ He rolled his eyes and slipped the sonic screwdriver into the breast pocket of his dark-brown suit. ‘I’ve been down there for hours.’

  ‘You’ve been down there for fifteen minutes.’

  He opened his mouth to say something, but quick as lightning Martha clamped her hand over it.

  ‘What I’m trying to tell you,’ she said with slow and forced patience,
taking her hand away. ‘What I’ve been trying to tell you for three days now, is that you ought to let me know how the TARDIS works – and if not how it actually works, how it operates. How you operate it.’

  She ignored the muffled protestations and the wiggled eyebrows. ‘I mean – all I want is some basic lessons, yeah? Just “Press this button to get us out of danger; press this button to sound an alarm; press that button to get BBC Three.” That kind of thing.’

  Martha folded her arms again and leaned back against the console, putting on her most reasonable voice. ‘Now that’s not too much to ask, is it? And it would help you too – you wouldn’t have to be hovering over this thing twenty-four seven.’ She patted the console behind her.

  The Doctor puckered up his lips thoughtfully, reached into his pocket, pulled out the sonic screwdriver and shoved it back in his mouth.

  ‘Mpfhphfhhff,’ he said.

  She reached out and pulled the device from him, extracting an indignant Ooof! along with it.

  ‘You think I’m too thick, don’t you!’

  He just stared at her – actually, he just stared at the sonic screwdriver. Martha looked down at it, hanging between her fingertips, and pulled a face at the dribble on it before handing it gingerly back to him. She pointed at her own chest with her free hand.

  ‘Medical student, remember?’ she said. ‘A levels.’

  The Doctor raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Driving licence,’ she added.

  The other eyebrow joined the first one.

  ‘Martha, Martha, Martha,’ he said patronisingly, making her instantly want to slap him. ‘Operating the TARDIS isn’t about intelligence. It’s not about pressing this button, then pulling that lever. It’s much more difficult than that.’ He reached out and stroked the curved, ceramic edge of the console. ‘It’s about intuition and imagination; it’s about feeling your way through the Time Vortex.’

  ‘It’s about kicking it when it doesn’t work, is what it’s about.’

  He pulled a hurt little boy face.

  ‘Don’t start that,’ she warned, a smile twitching the corner of her mouth upwards. ‘I’ve heard you, when you think I’m not around, stomping and banging the console.’

  ‘Well there you go then!’ he said triumphantly, as if that settled the matter. ‘It’s about stomping and banging your way through the Time Vortex!’

  He turned away, stowing the sonic screwdriver back in his pocket (after, Martha noted with a grimace, wiping it clean on the sleeve of his jacket again).

  ‘Intelligence is overrated, Martha – believe you me. I’d take an ounce of heart over a bucketful of brains any day.’

  ‘Oooh!’ mocked Martha. ‘Bet you’re a whizz in the kitchen!’

  The Doctor’s eyes lit up again. ‘And talking about food… who’s up for breakfast? All that talk of croissants is makin’ me mighty hungry.’ He stretched out his right hand. ‘And this here hand is a butterin’ hand! How d’you fancy breakfast at Tiffany’s?’

  Martha’s mouth dropped open: ‘Tiffany’s? You mean the real Tiffany’s? As in Breakfast at?’

  ‘Where else?’ the Doctor beamed back, looking extremely pleased with himself.

  ‘Nice one!’ said Martha, a huge grin on her face. ‘This is the kind of time and space travelling I signed up for! Although,’ she added, ‘I’m beginning to suspect you’ve got a bit of a thing about New York, you know.’

  And with that, she was gone.

  ‘New York?’

  The Doctor stood in the console room, watching Martha vanish in the direction of the TARDIS’s wardrobe. A puzzled frown wrinkled his brow. New York? Why had Martha mentioned New York when he was taking her to Tiffany’s near the Robot Regent’s palace on Arkon?

  ‘Must have misheard her,’ he decided, tapping at the controls on the console and flicking a finger at what Martha would undoubtedly have thought was just a small, brass, one-eyed owl. Blue-green light pulsed up and down the column at the centre of the console and a deep groaning filled the air, settling down as the TARDIS shouldered its way out of the Time Vortex into the real world.

  ‘Perfect,’ the Doctor said to himself. ‘Textbook landing. Like to see Martha manage a landing as textbook perfect as that!’

  ‘Ahhh…,’ said the Doctor out loud, somewhat surprised at quite how warm, wet and, well, swampy Arkon had become since his last visit.

  And slippery.

  Because as he stepped from the TARDIS, the sole of his foot skidded on a moss-covered root beneath him, and it was only by grabbing onto the TARDIS’s doorframe that he managed to stop himself from ending up on the muddy ground.

  The air hit him like a huge, damp blanket. He stood there, one foot still inside the TARDIS, the other hovering a cautious six inches from the ground, and wondered what had gone wrong. Arkon should have been a prosperous, advanced, Earth-like world. Right about now, a hot, F-type star should have been beating down on him, and his senses should have been assailed by the smells, sounds and scents of technology run riot.

  But, instead, all around him was a languid silence, punctuated by the occasional sound of splashing water. And the only smells were the fusty smells of swamp gas and damp. A green smell. He liked green smells – full of vim and vigour and vegetables.

  ‘Ummm…’ he added, looking out over the oily water that stretched away from the steeply sloping bank where the TARDIS had plonked itself. At the other side, a couple of hundred metres away, shaggy trees lowered their branches almost to the water, like a floppy fringe. And through the canopy of leaves above him, an orange-red sun blistered the purplish sky.

  ‘This is just a teensy bit wrong,’ he said to himself.

  Ferreting around in the TARDIS’s wardrobe for something ultra-glam and ultra-chic to wear to Tiffany’s (think Audrey Hepburn, she reminded herself, think Hollywood glamour), she just knew that the Doctor would be standing in the console room, tapping his foot impatiently. Well he could just wait. It wasn’t often that a girl got to do sophistication when travelling with the Doctor. Jeans, her red leather jacket and stout boots had been the order of the day recently, and she wasn’t passing up this chance to shine.

  She rooted around for a slinky frock and let out a triumphant ‘Yes!’ when she found a lilac silk dress and some matching elbow-length gloves with pearl cuffs. In seconds, she’d slipped into them and was twirling and preening in front of the mirror. The frock, it had to be said, was a wee bit tight on her. But if she breathed in – and didn’t breathe out too much – it’d do. Shoes were a bit trickier, but she found a pair of silver strappy sandals that just about fitted.

  ‘Knock ’em dead, girl!’ she told herself as, with a final tweak of her hair, she bounded out of the wardrobe, ready for her disgustingly decadent breakfast. At Tiffany’s.

  The Doctor was tempted to assume that something had gone very wrong with Arkon’s sun, and that it had caused a massive change in the planet’s ecosystem, turning it from high-tech paradise to swamp world. He was tempted to think that maybe the Arkonides had been messing with solar modifiers and had mutated their star into the orange ball that hung over him. Or that some attacking alien race had done the fiddling for them in an attempt to wipe the Arkonides out.

  In fact he was very tempted to think anything except the one thing that really seemed most likely.

  He leaned back into the cool interior of the TARDIS.

  ‘Have you been messing with those controls again?’ he shouted to Martha. But not quite loudly enough for her to hear. Because of course Martha hadn’t been messing with the controls. And the Doctor knew it.

  He shook his head ruefully and ventured his foot out onto the mossy tree root, snaggled and sprawled out of the bank like a deformed Twiglet.

  ‘Must get those gyroceptors fixed,’ he muttered.

  Cautiously, he tested the root with his weight, and it held. The slipperiness was more of a problem: he had to hang on to the TARDIS’s doorframe as he shifted his weight onto his outstretched foot. Carefull
y, he brought the other foot out and found a safe-ish place for it. Finally, he leaned onto it.

  ‘There!’ he beamed at his own cleverness. ‘Wasn’t so difficult, was—’

  With all the comedic grace of one of the Chuckle Brothers, the Doctor began to flail his hands around as his left foot started to slip and slide on the root. And as his other foot decided to join in the fun, he began windmilling his arms frantically, jacket flapping around him. Seconds later, as he felt himself begin to fall, he instinctively grabbed for the open doorway to the TARDIS.

  Which was a big mistake.

  The TARDIS might have been a pretty solid, pretty hefty thing, despite its external dimensions. But it was as subject to the same forces of physics – and friction – as he was. And despite the fact that it had squashed the roots underneath it when it had landed, they were still very slippery roots.

  It was, thought the Doctor ruefully as his time and space ship began to move, a bit like launching a battleship. Only without a bottle of champagne smashed against the side of it.

  With a creak and groan of roots and a deep squelch of mud, the TARDIS began to slide down the bank towards the water, and the Doctor again began to lose his balance. In fact, in accidentally pushing against the TARDIS, not only had he sent it down the natural runway that the roots provided, but he’d pushed himself in the opposite direction.

  ‘Wellingtons!’ was the only thing he managed to cry out to Martha as he landed flat on his back in a spray of muddy water. He lifted himself up on his elbows just in time to see his beloved TARDIS pause at the edge of the swamp before it tipped, almost as if it were waving him goodbye. And in majestic slow motion, the blue box keeled over.

  There was an almighty splash, drenching the Doctor with warm, silty water, a brief gush of bubbles and a massive wave that spread out across the swamp. And then the TARDIS was gone.

  ‘Wellingtons,’ he repeated in a disbelieving whisper. ‘Don’t forget your Wellingtons, Martha.’

  Martha was sure she heard the Doctor shout something. Just seconds after there was a very slight lurch beneath her feet. But it might just have been the TARDIS settling down. Sometimes it did that after it landed, like her granddad, shifting himself in his armchair, getting comfy for Strictly Come Dancing.