The Taking of Chelsea 426
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'A fire?' said Jenny.
Zack squeezed her hand and smiled.
'Not a fire,' he said. 'Just an alarm. I'm sure there's nothing to worry about, just like the Captain said.'
His words were sadly contradicted by the appearance of the soldiers, although they were unlike any soldiers Jenny or Zack had ever seen before.
They came up onto the deck, marching in file: squat men in metallic blue armour, their faces hidden beneath domed helmets.
The passengers collectively gasped, and Captain Thomas immediately ran across the deck toward the new arrivals.
'What's happening?' he asked. 'What is this?'
One of the soldiers stepped forward and addressed Thomas directly.
'I am Colonel Sarg of the Fourth Sontaran Intelligence Division. Are you the Captain of this vessel?'
The Captain nodded.
Then I hereby commandeer this ship in the name of Sontar. Your passengers must disembark immediately, under our custody, and will remain our prisoners until our investigation is complete.'
'Investigation?' said Thomas. 'Now you look here...'
'Captain, that is not a request; it is an order.'
The Sontaran lifted his rifle and aimed it squarely at the Captain's head. Hearing the weapon power up with a faint hum that rose in pitch, Captain Thomas looked 116
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to his crew, and then back at the armoured creature before him. With great reluctance he closed his eyes and
nodded.
The Sontarans marched out onto the deck and formed a circle around the passengers.
'Oh no,' said Jenny. 'What's going to happen to us?'
'It's going to be OK,' said Zack. 'Everything's going to be OK.'
It had always been a possibility.
Indeed, their original plans had counted on the Sontarans arriving on Saturn to mine for hydrogen, and so this was not so much a hindrance as a slight alteration to the itinerary.
Professor Wilberforce sat in his office, watching events unfold in the colony on the thin glass monitor in the centre of his desk. He laughed as he saw the Sontarans board each of the visiting ships, rounding up the passengers and leading them down into the loading bays and docking areas.
The Sontarans were such a mindless, brutish race.
They lacked the finesse and the sophistication of the collective Rutan mind. They were clones but, in his opinion, clones bred from inferior stock. The Rutans were their superiors in every way imaginable, only ever submitting to their age-old enemy when it was tactically appropriate, or when they were met with the sheer force of numbers that the Sontarans could muster.
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It was this latest plan which allowed the Rutans to match that force of numbers, even if their hosts were human. If they could now reach the Earth, an Earth which had not been conquered by the Sontarans, there would be ten billion potential hosts for them to exploit, with all the spacecraft and weaponry that the humans had at their disposal.
Five hundred years earlier, the humans had been no match for the Sontarans and yet, from what little information Wilberforce had managed to access, it would appear they had somehow defeated them.
Imagine what might be possible now, now that their evolution had progressed so much.
The Sontarans wouldn't stand a chance.
'Professor Wilberforce...'
His idle daydreaming was interrupted by the voice of Alice, standing in the doorway, her expression cool and impassive.
'Yes, Alice?'
They are here.'
'I thought as much. Our thoughts become stronger, do they not?'
'Yes, Professor. Their leader, a General Kade, is demanding he speak to us. By which we mean he wishes to speak with Professor Wilberforce.'
'Well, it was to be expected. Do they suspect anything?'
Alice laughed.
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'No, Professor. That fool of a Mayor has told them to search the visitors' ships.'
Now it was Professor Wilberforce's turn to laugh.
'Yes,' he said. 'We saw them on the monitor. Quite amusing, really. Well, you should probably show him in.'
Alice smiled, nodded, and left the office. Moments later she returned with the Sontaran leader.
He entered the office with the typical Sontaran air of self-importance, his baton tucked under his arm, and stood before the Professor.
'Professor Wilberforce?' he growled.
'Yes,' said Wilberforce, getting to his feet and extending his hand. The Sontaran shook it forcefully.
'I am General Kade, of the Fourth Sontaran Intelligence Division. We have begun rounding up the visitors from their ships. We have reason to believe that the plants you have grown may be instrumental in a plot against our race.'
The Professor feigned surprise.
'Is that so?' he asked. 'Well, that's... that's astounding.'
Kade's attention had now turned to the plant in the corner of the office.
'Is that one of them?' he asked, pointing toward the glass dome with his baton.
The Professor nodded.
Kade walked around the desk and made his way to 119
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the far corner, crouching on his haunches next to the glass dome containing the plant.
'Fascinating,' he said. 'Such an innocuous-looking thing, isn't it?'
'Well, quite,' said Wilberforce.
'We will of course be seizing this as a part of our investigation,' Kade continued.
'But of course.'
Kade turned to the Professor, his lips curling into what might have been a smile.
'You are most helpful,' he said. 'And wise. I must say, we had expected greater resistance from the inhabitants of this outpost, but we have been pleasantly surprised by your compliance.'
Professor Wilberforce smiled in return.
'Anything we can do to help,' he said.
Neither Zack nor Jenny had spoken since they had left the Pride of Deimos and been taken down into the dimly lit confines of the loading bay. Zack had not let go of Jenny's hand, and she had noticed his grip tighten each time one of the Sontarans barked at them to
'move along'. The other passengers were chattering nervously and Jenny heard one, an elegant older woman in pearls, repeatedly asking what was going to happen to her luggage. It had only then occurred to Jenny that their luggage was still on the ship, but it was a thought that passed quickly. Who cared what was going to happen
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to their luggage? There were far more important things for them to worry about right now.
When all of the passengers had left the ship and were gathered in the loading bay, the large doors behind them slammed shut with an echoing clang and the room fell silent. In a corner of the bay a door opened, spilling light out into the gloom, and more of the Sontarans marched in, accompanied by humans.
One of the humans was a tall, older man, wearing half-moon spectacles and dressed in a white lab coat.
At his side was a younger woman, slightly built with her mousy brown hair tied back.
This way, Professor,' said one of the Sontarans to the older man. 'You have your instruments?'
The Professor nodded.
'Yes,' he said. 'But I really don't see why I'm needed here. I am a botanist, General Kade, not a physician.'
The Sontaran leader stopped abruptly and looked up at the Professor.
'You say that machine of yours can be used to detect any trace of the spores?'
The Professor nodded, holding up a small, black spherical device, no larger than an apple, out of which there emerged a short rubber hose capped by a nozzle.
'Yes,' said the Professor, quizzically.
Then you must test each of these visitors,' said General Kade. 'If they have inhaled the spore, there will still be traces, will there not?'
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The Professor nodded.
Then test them, man. Test them!' barked Kade.
Dutifully, the Professor approached the crowd of passengers and, walking past them one by one, he held up the nozzle of the device and began taking samples from the air around them, occasionally looking back at the Sontaran leader.
Kade turned to the Professor's assistant.
'You, girl,' he said.
'My name's Alice,' the young woman replied.
That is of no importance to me!' said Kade. 'Are there more of these instruments?' He gestured toward the Professor with his baton.
'Yes, back at the gardens,' said Alice.
Then bring them to me,' said Kade. 'We shall be here for eons, otherwise. Time is of the essence.'
'Of course,' said Alice, smiling politely. That would be agreeable.'
She had turned and was halfway towards the loading bay exit when Kade turned back.
'What did you say?' he asked.
Alice stopped in her tracks, and turned very slowly so that she now faced Kade once more.
'I'm sorry...?'
'What did you just say?'
Alice smiled nervously.
'Nothing... I just said, "Of course".'
'After that. What did you say?'
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Alice looked beyond the Sontaran now, at the Professor, who had turned away from the passengers and was slowly drawing a glass thermometer from the pocket of his lab coat.
They held each other's gaze for a moment and then, in one sudden, violent move, the Professor thrust the thermometer into the neck of one of the Sontaran soldiers.
Peering over the shoulders of those standing around her, Jenny saw the thermometer jutting out from a narrow hole in the back of the soldier's armour. The soldier staggered forward, clutching at the back of its neck with both hands, and making a terrible gurgling sound in its throat.
The Professor lunged forward again and tugged at the thermometer, snapping it in half. The Sontaran howled in pain as globules of mercury fell from the broken glass, before collapsing to the ground, its last breath leaving it with a sickening rattle.
Now the young woman, Alice, ran towards General Kade, a scalpel in her hand, howling monstrously, as if she were possessed. The General reached out with his baton, which emitted a sudden flashing bolt of orange energy, and Alice fell to the ground, doubled over in pain.
The Sontarans now had both her and the Professor separately surrounded.
The Professor looked down at Alice, and then across 123
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the loading bay at General Kade, breathing heavily, but with a malevolent smile. Cackling maniacally, Wilberforce held up his hands, white sparks of electricity jumping from his fingertips but, before he could make his move, the Sontarans opened fire, the red flare of a dozen laser beams cutting him down until he lay in a smoking heap at their feet.
Alice let out a mournful wail, reaching up towards Kade pathetically, the blade of the scalpel pointing up at him, before a second ear-splitting barrage of lasers silenced her.
It was a silence that would last just seconds before the passengers and the crew of the Pride of Deimos began to scream.
Sneering callously, General Kade made his way toward the loading bay exit.
He turned to one of his subordinates and snarled,
'Interrogate them using all means necessary, and then inform Colonel Sarg that all humans on the colony are to be arrested immediately. It's worse than we thought.'
Kade marched out of the loading bay, the double doors closing behind him with a thunderous clang.
The remaining Sontarans turned on their heels and, lifting up their weapons, began marching toward the unarmed passengers.
Zack turned to Jenny and put his arms around her, holding her close.
'I love you,' he said.
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'I love you too,' said Jenny.
He smiled down at her and gently wiped a tear from her cheek as the Sontarans drew closer and closer.
125
ELEVEN
Gazing into his dressing-room mirror, Riley Smalls straightened his tie and ran one hand through his thinning hair. Somewhere outside the studio he could hear the howls of the sirens, rendered faint and barely audible by the thick walls.
This, he had decided, was his moment. Back on Earth, before his cryogenic suspension and a long time before he awoke in a different century, he had dreamed of the day when he would report an event of great importance. His television show had given him the opportunity to discuss news events, politics and wars, but never anything like this.
For the first time in a very long while, Riley Smalls was excited. He liked life on the colony, there was no 127
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doubt about that, but it was hardly exciting. He had made the decision to abandon Earth and move there for good only a few months after coming out of cryogenic suspension. The planet that had greeted him on his waking had been quite different to the one he had left behind. It was so crowded and the people there so different. The everyday things that he had taken for granted no longer existed. The things that he thought of as timeless traditions were now little more than footnotes in history.
The counsellors provided by the cryogenics lab had tried to tell him that this was simply the way of the world - that times changed and that things came to pass - but he was having none of it. As far as he was concerned, the world had forcibly been changed by the very people he had railed against in his television show.
They, it would seem, had won, and left the world an overcrowded and chaotic mess. When the opportunity arose to pack his bags and leave for Saturn, he had seized it in an instant.
But then a strange thing happened. Days smudged into weeks and months and eventually years, and he came to realise that he was bored. For years now his show, The Smalls Agenda, had largely involved him pouring scorn upon a planet more than a billion miles away, based upon the titbits of information they received on the weekly news broadcasts. He began to see his role as little more than a comforting reminder to the inhabitants of Chelsea 426 that they had made the 128
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right choice, leaving Earth, and that it was so terrible there they would never want to go back.
All that had changed with the discovery of the spores and the arrival of the Newcomers. Now there were people on Chelsea 426 for him to rail against. Now his words would make a difference.
Truth was, the Newcomers terrified him. Chelsea 426, as boring as it might have been, was a comfortable oasis of calm. Its environment was so carefully constructed to remind the inhabitants of a time and a place that was, so they imagined, less troubling and changeable, that the arrival of any reminder that the rest of the universe was not that way troubled him. It hung over him like a dark storm cloud, overshadowing his thoughts and emotions.
However sudden and uninvited the appearance of these Sontarans was, they spoke of ridding the colony of invaders, and that was good enough for him.
'Mr Smalls, they're ready for you.'
It was one of his show's runners standing in the doorway of his dressing room. He faced her with a disarming smile and nodded, rising from his chair and following her out into the corridor.
In the studio he sat behind a wide grey desk, before a blue and red backdrop. One of the sound technicians clipped a tiny microphone to the lapel of his jacket, and the make-up artist gave him a last-minute dab of powder on the nose. Behind the camera, the director 129
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counted down, 'Five, four,' and then mimed the rest of the countdown with his fingers.
Three. Two. One.
'Greetings,' said Smalls, smiling into the camera. 'As some of you may be aware, our honourable guests, the Sontarans, are investigating a serious incident here on our colony. At first they arrested our so-called
visitors, the Newcomers, from their ships and hotels. Now, it transpires, they are arresting the residents of Chelsea 426.
'Now there are some out there who will say that they are overstepping the mark, that they are trampling over our liberties, but to this I say: Nonsense! The Sontarans are a proud and noble people who just so happen to be at war with a venomous and parasitic race called the Rutans. Right now we happen to be caught up in that war. Granted, it is through no fault of our own, but that isn't to say that we can simply stick our heads in the sand and pretend it isn't happening.
The good citizens of Chelsea 426 have nothing to worry about. It is the Newcomers who have brought the war to us; not our people, and certainly not the Sontarans, and so it is the Newcomers who will suffer. Arrest and questioning by the Sontarans is but a minor inconvenience if we are to have stability return to our once happy colony.
'What you must ask yourselves is, do you want stability? Do you want peace? Are you so arrogant that you believe these things will simply be handed to you 130
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on a plate, or do you believe, as I do, that sacrifices must be made?
'Could you hold your head high with any sense of pride if you knew that, cometh the day, you had taken the coward's way out? That you had kowtowed to such a vile and poisonous species as the Rutans?
Furthermore...'
He paused, taking in a deep breath. Then he was interrupted very suddenly by a crashing sound somewhere on the other side of the studio. Peering past the studio lights, shielding his eyes from the glare with his hand, he saw dark figures entering the room: dark, broad-shouldered figures brandishing guns. One by one, the technicians and assistants from his programme were being dragged out of the studio, marched at gunpoint through the exits. Finally one of the shadowy figures stepped into the light. It was a Sontaran.
'We have orders to take you into custody,' said the soldier.
'What?' said Smalls, getting to his feet and unclipping his microphone as quickly as he could.
'You are a Rutan suspect and as such will be taken into custody.'