Wetworld

by Mark Michalowski

  The Doctor pulled a grumpy face and smacked the sonic screwdriver against the palm of his hand, examining the flecks of mud that came out.

  ‘Listen,’ Martha said, trying to change the subject. ‘I’ve been thinking. Why don’t we take a few people out into the swamp, find the TARDIS, and just give them all a lift back home? Problem solved! Then that thing can set off its bomb, and it won’t matter. It can blow itself to kingdom come for all we’ll care.’ She gave him a bright, optimistic smile.

  ‘And what if they don’t want to go, eh? Have you asked them?’

  ‘You think they’re going to want to stay with slimey out there about to blow up half the planet? And even if it doesn’t, they’d have to be mad to carry on living here, especially if we can’t get rid of it.’

  ‘These people have invested their whole lives in this place, Martha – the dead ones literally. They’re not going to give up without a fight. And besides, if we let slimey blow its seeds into space, who knows what the next planet it infects is going to be.’ He paused, pointedly. ‘It could even be Earth. No, the fat lady’s not even out of her dressing room yet, never mind started singing. And we,’ he tapped her on the chin, ‘are going to make sure that she can’t find her costume.’

  With perfect dramatic timing, Orlo came rushing into the room.

  ‘They’ve started up the drill!’ he gasped, steadying himself on the back of a chair as the settlers crowded round. ‘I’ve just heard it! I wasn’t sure at first, but…’

  ‘Oh whoopty-doo,’ said the Doctor tiredly. ‘You know, I think the fat lady’s just had her five-minute call.’ He looked around the room, eyes suddenly narrow and thoughtful.

  That’s his ‘Right! Time for a plan’ face! thought Martha. ‘

  Is there a geologist in the house?’ asked the Doctor. ‘Or a Sundayologist, I suppose. And not someone who studies ice creams, thank you Martha.’

  Ha ha.

  A stocky black guy with a weird, asymmetric beard stood up.

  ‘Excellent!’ said the Doctor. ‘What’s the ground like out there? Will the shaft need some clearing out?’

  The man nodded. ‘It’s been untouched since before the flood,’ he said. ‘I reckon that it’ll take ’em two or three hours to establish a proper shaft.’

  ‘Buys us a bit of time,’ the Doctor said thoughtfully, chewing on his lip.

  The room fell quiet again, and it was Ty who broke the silence. ‘So you really think that dropping a bomb down the hole will protect the creature from the radiation and the blast?’

  The Doctor shrugged, wide-eyed. ‘Depends on the size of the bomb. Depends on the density of the ground. Depends on how strong that thing is. But it’ll certainly give it more protection from the blast and the radiation than detonating it above ground.’ He paused for a moment. ‘But yes, I think it will. When that thing blows, there’ll be a lot of damage. An awful lot of damage. But judging by the junior slimey that Martha brought back, there’ll be more than enough bits of it left to colonise a thousand planets.’

  ‘How easy is it, anyway, to build an atomic bomb?’ asked Martha. ‘Aren’t they, like, quite technical?’

  ‘Oh in principle they’re very simple,’ the Doctor replied, making two fists and holding them out at arm’s length. ‘You get a metal casing and two small lumps of uranium-235 along with a couple of explosive charges to slam them into each other.’ He brought his fists together. ‘When combined they create a critical mass. All you need is a bit of gubbins to hold it all in place, a bit more gubbins to act as a detonator – and voilà! Instant Armageddon!’

  ‘That easy?’ Martha was aghast.

  ‘Well, OK, maybe not quite that easy – but well within the capabilities of people who are running their own nuclear reactor. Well within the capabilities of Pallister, I should imagine, and that’s where slimey’s getting his information from. It fits perfectly with the parts the settlers remembered fetching for it. And it’s not like it’s got to worry about protecting you lot from radiation.’

  The Doctor turned to Orlo. ‘I hate to ask,’ he said, ‘but we need someone out there to keep an eye on the otters even more than ever. If that creature is planning to drop an atomic bomb down the bore hole, we need as much warning as we can get.’ He gripped Orlo by the shoulder. ‘You up for it?’

  Orlo grinned. ‘Try and stop me!’ he said.

  ‘He’s a good lad, that one,’ the Doctor said as Orlo vanished. ‘Common sense and enthusiasm – the best qualifications I can think of. Maybe you should make him the head of the Council when this is all over.’

  ‘If,’ said Ty.

  ‘Oh, Professor Benson!’ exclaimed the Doctor. ‘Look on the bright side!’

  ‘Anyway – how’s that sonic doo-dah of yours? Cleaned it out yet? It’s the only thing we’ve got that’ll work against all those otters, remember.’

  He fished the sonic screwdriver out of his pocket and gave it another go. The light was brighter this time, but it began to fade after a few moments. Desolately, he tossed it into the air and Martha caught it.

  ‘Technology!’ he snorted. ‘It’s all rubbish in the end, isn’t it! Still, Professor Benson, we have something even better at our disposal, haven’t we?’

  ‘You’re talking about your brain again, aren’t you?’ said Ty wryly.

  His face fell. ‘Am I that transparent?’

  ‘As glass,’ Ty grinned.

  ‘What’s the point of this?’ asked Ty as she watched the Doctor power up the centrifuge. With a whine, it rattled up to speed whilst the Doctor rolled his sleeve back down and set the hypodermic back on the table.

  ‘Plan B,’ the Doctor said. ‘Or Plan A, I suppose. Depending on whether I can come up with a Plan C.’

  ‘What?’ Ty was now totally confused.

  The Doctor had dragged her over to the bio lab and, in a frenetic whirl of activity, had activated the tabletop display. He punched up dozens of different images of the proteins that he’d extracted from himself, Martha and the otters. She’d followed him around the room as he’d started up all sorts of pieces of equipment, transferring vials of fluids from one to another, running the results through the chromatograph and the sequencer, testing them again and then going through the whole process all over again. Martha had been sent off to see if she could find any plans or schematics of the drill site and information about the ship’s power cores.

  The Doctor’s final step had been the most frightening: with a cry of ‘Yes!’ he’d taken the last test tube of straw-coloured fluid, filled a hypodermic with it – and jabbed it into his own arm.

  ‘What the future are you doing?’ she cried, reaching out to snatch the syringe from him. But she was too late. He closed his eyes, leaned back against the table and gave a deep sigh.

  ‘Shush,’ he said softly, raising a finger. ‘The Doctor-otronic needs shush. Biiiig shush.’

  Ty glared at him. How could he be so stupid? Hadn’t he learned anything from what had happened last night? From what he’d said back in the Council chamber, they were only a couple of hours away from a nuclear holocaust, and here he was injecting alien proteins into himself. Again.

  ‘Doctor?’ she ventured after a few minutes. It seemed that he’d stopped breathing altogether. His body was motionless, still seated on the video table, leaning back at an angle. ‘Doctor?’

  His eyes flicked open and Ty flinched. He was staring straight ahead, and although the whites of his eyes were still visible, his irises were completely black. Flecks of dark green and brown swirled in them like grains of dust in a sunbeam. A chill crept down Ty’s spine.

  Not again, she thought. Please… not again…

  Orlo raised the monocular to his eye and scanned the drill site.

  Its location had meant that it had avoided the flooding that wiped out the first Sunday City. And it hadn’t been used since then: there was enough power left in the ship’s spare core to keep the new settlement going for another year. The settlers had enough on their plates witho
ut worrying about mining more uranium just yet. And they’d built a smaller, wood-fired station to cope with the nuclear plant’s occasional downtimes.

  But there was no doubt – the kidnapped settlers were operating the deep drill. And, all around them, the creepy figures of the otters stood guard.

  Orlo wished he’d thought to ask the Doctor what a bomb might look like. But he didn’t imagine it would be so small that he might miss it.

  Suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, Orlo caught a flash of movement. Bringing the monocular back up to his eye, he searched for it again. There – in the shadow behind the drill control room. It couldn’t be… He twisted the zoom ring on the monocular and the image jumped about before steadying.

  Kneeling at the base of the building was an unmistakeable figure. Candy.

  Candy’s heart was pounding as she pressed herself into the corner behind the control room. All the otters and the settlers, as far as she could tell, were busy around the front – on the drill tower itself and in and out of the squat grey building behind her.

  She’d shuffled her way closer and closer to the drill site, convinced that this was something the settlers and the Doctor needed to know about. Why would they want to be drilling? What use could they have for uranium? The One Small Step was surely beyond repair, so they couldn’t be trying to get fuel for it.

  From where she was hiding, all she could see was the top of the tower, a skinny metal finger pointing at the orange sky. And then suddenly something glinted: a brief flash of light from the undergrowth at the edge of the clearing. Fishing in her backpack, she pulled out her monocular and raised it to her eye.

  Grinning at her and waving, buried in the shadows of the bushes, was Orlo – watching her watching him.

  ‘What’s going on?’ asked Martha suspiciously as she burst into the main bio lab. It was the only place she could think of that the Doctor might have gone – and she was right. He was fiddling around with tubes of liquids and pipettes in his shirt sleeves whilst Ty watched him, her arms folded sullenly. There was definitely an atmosphere in the room.

  ‘What?’ said the Doctor with a forced brightness as he took a test tube out of a clunky-looking old centrifuge and held it up to the light. He was wearing his glasses again, and the harsh fluorescent light glanced off them, making his eyes unreadable.

  ‘You rushed off,’ Martha said. ‘I didn’t know where you’d gone. We found some plans and what-not. They’re looking them over back in the Council chamber. For all the good it’ll do. What’s all this then?’ Martha indicated the video table, lit up like a Christmas tree, images of molecules and proteins all over its glossy surface. One or two of them were coloured in shades of red – a warning if ever there was one.

  ‘Belt and braces,’ the Doctor said with another false smile.

  ‘You’re up to something, aren’t you?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘What’s that?’ Martha indicated the yellowish liquid that the Doctor was now pouring into a little glass and metal cartridge.

  He frowned and looked up at the ceiling, as if the answer to her question was written there.

  ‘Plan D, I think.’ He flashed a grin at Ty. ‘Or was it E?’

  Ty glared at him and now Martha was certain something was up. There was an atmosphere in the room – half conspiracy, half just-had-a-blazing-row. Martha used to think that she didn’t do jealousy, but there was something about the way he seemed to be confiding in Ty that got her hackles up. Again.

  The Doctor was filling another of the little cartridges. ‘Right,’ he said, tossing the capsules into the air with one hand and catching them neatly in the other. He took off his glasses, swiped up his jacket from the back of a chair and slipped it on. ‘No time like the present. And if we don’t hurry, there really won’t be.’

  And, with that, he slipped past the two of them and through the doors.

  SIXTEEN

  ‘You’re mad,’ Orlo whispered to himself. ‘You’re completely raving mad.’

  The flashes from Candy’s torch ceased, and he saw her wave at him and slip it into her backpack. He hoped he’d understood her Morse code message. If he’d remembered to bring his own torch with him, he’d have told her what he thought of her plan – and what the Doctor had said about the creature’s plan. As he watched her through the monocular, she crouched down in the shadow of the building and began to inch her way around to the window.

  If someone had told Martha Jones, just a few weeks ago, that she’d find herself heading deliberately towards a nuclear bomb, she’d have laughed them out of the room. And yet here she was, on a swampy alien planet, light years from Earth, doing just that.

  It put the rest of her life in perspective.

  And it might just end it.

  ‘What if we can’t stop it?’ she whispered to the Doctor, hoping that Ty couldn’t hear her.

  ‘Oh, we’ll stop it.’ He sounded quietly confident. He always sounded quietly confident. Well, sometimes noisily confident. But always confident.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ It was Ty.

  ‘Because if we don’t,’ answered the Doctor breezily, ‘then slimey-boy wins, and we lose. And if I have one fault, it’s that I’m not a good loser.’

  ‘You sound like you do this kind of thing often.’

  ‘More often than is healthy, believe me,’ said Martha, pushing a branch aside as they started up the slope that would bring them out above the drill site. A rustle of bushes further along the slope caught their eyes.

  ‘It’s Orlo!’ whispered Ty.

  Martha looked where she was pointing, and could just make out his stocky frame, his back to them, squatting in the undergrowth.

  ‘Go and get him,’ urged the Doctor gently. ‘If this doesn’t work out, I want him as far away from here as possible.’

  Ty squeezed the Doctor’s hand and went to get Orlo.

  Look before you leap.

  That’s what people had always told Candy. They’d never given her the He who hesitates is lost one. Candy had never been given warnings about hesitating.

  She wished, just now, that someone had.

  The idea that had suddenly struck her as she’d waved goodbye to Orlo was just so obvious.

  So obvious, in fact, that she kept thinking that there must be an equally obvious reason why it wouldn’t work. A really obvious reason that would jump up and bite her, like a ’gator out of the swamp, when it was too late. Making sure that no one could see her, hiding in the shadow at the corner of the building, she slowly stood upright – and stepped out into the light.

  And then, keeping her face fixed and flabby like the other settlers, she began to walk.

  In Candy’s panicky head, it was perfect. The other Sundayans were acting on instructions that the slime-thing had given them earlier. So were the otters. The slime-thing wasn’t actually remote-controlling them, not in real-time. So there was no reason why, if she didn’t act threatening, any of them should react to her. They’d see her – if they saw her at all – as just another zombie. Her legs were shaking like jelly as she slowly threaded her way through the others and around the building to the doorway. Not even risking a tiny look back, she walked inside.

  The room was cool and dim – no one had bothered to turn on the lights. But there was enough illumination from the windows to see what was happening. Dory Chan was motionless by a big desk on which, unrolled, was a schematic of the drill mechanism and shaft. Dory was staring into space as if she’d done what she was programmed for and was waiting for further instructions. That didn’t make sense, surely, thought Candy as she moved alongside her. Hadn’t the Doctor said that when the slime creature’s instructions had been completed the settlers and the otters had to go back to it for more? That could only mean one thing: that the slime creature had no more instructions for Dory. And if it had no more instructions, then it had no more use for her.

  Candy snuck a glance out of the window. All around, the settlers were coming to a halt. She saw Eto
n, Pallister’s aide, walking in stuttery circles. The otters were all stationary.

  And then she saw movement.

  One of the quad bikes was being pushed along by three of the settlers. The engine wasn’t running and on the cart at the back was big, grey cylinder almost as big as the engine of the quad bike itself. The cylinder was strapped up with metaltape and looked, thought Candy, a right dog’s dinner. Following on behind were two more settlers, pushing a huge reel of grey electrical cable, unrolling it along the ground as they went. What were they doing? She followed the line of the cable – and realised that it snaked in through the window of the control centre in which she stood. Just like that tentacle had snaked in through the window of the ship. The tentacle that had attached itself to Col. The tentacle that had killed him.

  Candy ran to the cable and followed its route. It ended in a large, locking plug on a control panel. Quickly, she grabbed it and tried to turn it. But it was fixed tight. A keyed collar held it in place. Frantically, she wrenched at it with her bare hands, but it was no use. It wasn’t budging.

  Think! She told herself, trying to make sense of it all. She remembered what the Doctor had told her: common sense. Think things through a step at a time… The slime-thing had control of the settlers, and the settlers were about to drop something down the drill shaft. Therefore, whatever it was had to be bad. She had to find a way to—

  Her train of thought was derailed as something moved in the shadows of the control room. Several somethings. Her mouth went dry and she froze as, out of the darkness, an otter appeared, its beady eyes fixed on her. Silently, another one appeared, and then another.

  Within seconds, she was surrounded.

  The Doctor clenched his fists and stared out over the drill site. So close…

  Down on the mud around the old settlement stood the kidnapped settlers. One or two of them had fallen over and were lying motionless on the ground. Scattered between them were the otters – and some of them looked like they were sleeping too.