The Slitheen Excursion

by Simon Guerrier

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Recent Titles in the Doctor Who Series

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  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

  Chapter Ninteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  1500BC – King Actaeus and his subjects live in mortal fear of the awesome gods who have come to visit their kingdom in ancient Greece. Except the Doctor, visiting with university student June, knows they’re not gods at all. They’re aliens.

  For the aliens, it’s the perfect holiday – they get to tour the sights of a primitive planet and even take part in local customs. Like gladiatorial games, or hunting down and killing humans who won’t be missed.

  With June’s enthusiastic help, the Doctor soon meets the travel agents behind this deadly package holiday company – his old enemies the Slitheen. But can he bring the Slitheen excursion to an end without endangering more lives? And how are events in ancient Greece linked to a modern-day alien plot to destroy what’s left of the Parthenon?

  About the Author

  Simon Guerrier is the author of the Doctor Who novels The Time Travellers, featuring the First Doctor, and The Pirate Loop, featuring the Tenth Doctor. He’s written numerous short stories and 10 audio plays for Big Finish Productions (including the seventh Doctor’s meeting with Oliver Cromwell) as well as an episode of the new Blake’s 7. He’s also the editor of How The Doctor Changed My Life, a collection of 25 short stories all by first-time authors, published in September 2008. He lives in London with a bright wife and a dim cat.

  Recent titles in the Doctor Who series:

  GHOSTS OF INDIA

  Mark Morris

  THE DOCTOR TRAP

  Simon Messingham

  SHINING DARKNESS

  Mark Michalowski

  THE STORY OF MARTHA

  Dan Abnett

  BEAUTIFUL CHAOS

  Gary Russell

  THE EYELESS

  Lance Parkin

  JUDGEMENT OF THE JUDOON

  Colin Brake

  PRISONER OF THE DALEKS

  Trevor Baxendale

  Doctor Who: The Slitheen Excursion

  Simon Guerrier

  For my mother-in-law

  Wild dogs roamed the streets outside the Acropolis, the huge, high rock overlooking Athens. Their claws skittered on the smooth marble flagstones, and their tongues lolled from between snaggled, yellow teeth. They looked hungry and bedraggled, and they kept most people away from the ancient monument in the hours before it opened.

  June pretended not to notice the scraggy, smelly things as they trotted back and forth around her. She remembered what her ex-boyfriend had taught her about big dogs; she didn’t make eye contact with them, she kept her arms folded, her fingers out of sight, and she kept on walking, despite the weight of her rucksack. It seemed to work. The dogs tagged along expectantly but didn’t try to eat her.

  The sun sat low in the early-morning sky, honey-coloured sunlight burnishing the trees. The air smelt fresh and of pine needles. Away down the hill behind her, Athens came slowly to life, the distant burble of cars and chatter echoing up the hill. Up here, all was silent but for the dogs’ eager breathing. But one by one even they left her alone, padding dolefully away to scrounge easier pickings.

  June made her way to the ticket kiosk. A large man sat up behind the glass partition, eyes fixed on his newspaper. Just as she had ignored the dogs, so the man ignored June. She stuck her tongue out at him and crossed her eyes until a split second before he looked up. Then she smiled her most winning smile. He sighed, looked at his watch and returned to his paper. June dumped her rucksack down on the floor, her shoulders aching, and waited.

  At one minute past eight in the morning, he tucked his newspaper away and slid the glass partition open to peer down at her.

  ‘Boro na eho esitirio parakalo?’ said June, her accent not half bad after two weeks’ practice.

  The man scrutinised her student ID, then unhurriedly tore off a ticket from the book in front of him. He muttered the price so quietly no sound actually escaped his lips, but June already had the correct change in euros. The man seemed to find this exhausting.

  ‘Efharisto,’ said June sweetly. Heaving her bag back onto her shoulders, she made her way up the pathway behind the kiosk.

  At the gate, a guard with a twinkle in his eye tore her ticket. He made a joke she didn’t quite understand as he handed it back to her. June could ask for food and drink and hotel rooms fluently, but she wasn’t up to flirting. She just smiled at him, tolerant but not encouraging, and continued on her way. In just over two hours she’d be on a train heading back to St Pancras. Why did men only ever show an interest when it was too late?

  The path led her up to some steep, marble steps, the ancient remains of an impressive entrance gateway. June climbed the steps, her heart pounding not with the effort but with anticipation. High above her loomed the Propylea. The marble blazed white in the early-morning sun.

  She reached the top of the steps and halted. Before her, up the gentle rise of bare rock, stood the Parthenon, the ruined, sun-bleached temple that had overlooked Athens for two and a half thousand years. June gazed at it in awe, despite having seen it three times in as many days. Again, she let her eyes pick over the details, her brain alive with all the history and myth she’d gleaned from her reading.

  The Parthenon had been built before the invention of the load-bearing arch, so the huge, tall columns had to jostle close together to hold up the roof. Not that there was a roof any more; it had been destroyed in an explosion of gunpowder in 1687. The temple’s vivid sculptures had then found their way into various museums and private collections. These scant fragments, scattered around the world, gave a tantalising glimpse of the ancient people who’d once lived and worshipped here. But, like a jigsaw with half the pieces missing, only a small part of the picture remained. Students like June used the hotchpotch of remaining fragments to guess at the distant past.

  The temple and its sculptures would have been painted in bright colours, the air alive with scented smoke and music. To the left of the temple would have stood an enormous statue of Athene, goddess of wisdom, who had given her name to the city. According to myth, she and the god Poseidon had competed for the honour, offering gifts to the people to win their favour. Poseidon had offered their sailors calm waters; Athene had planted an olive tree.

  Whatever the truth of the story, ancient Athens had made its money trading olive oil. It had grown so rich the citizens had lived comfortably, with enough leisure time to invent the structures of drama and democracy still recognised in the world today. In fact, June knew, everything from modern maths to medicine owed a debt to the ancient Greeks.

  So the spot on which she stood was in some ways the birthplace of the world she knew. She boggled at the thought, resisting the need to check her watch to count down the minutes she had left here. Another hour and she’d have to lug her
rucksack down to the train station for the long journey home to England. June had wanted one last quiet moment with this extraordinary place before her holiday was over. But she didn’t have it to herself for long.

  A coach party of fat, noisy tourists made their way up the steps behind her. June quickly got out of their way, following the gravel pathway round the side of the Parthenon. In the two weeks she had been in Athens, she had learnt to despair of other tourists. They stopped to take or pose in photographs, but not to simply look at the monuments. She wanted to tell them to slow down, to shut up, to think about where they were. But these people were bustling around the site like cattle, grabbing pictures and tacky souvenirs as they passed, muttering about the lack of a coffee shop.

  June hid from them. She made her way behind the Parthenon, to the back of the rock. A low wall ran round the perimeter of the Acropolis, and she looked down over it to the ruin of the great Athenian theatre below. A sudden sadness threatened to engulf her. She was upset that her holiday was over, but also at the desolate state of what had once been so great a place, how it had been ravaged by time. She felt so small and insignificant beside the great weight of history around her. Gazing down at the broken, weed-ridden, dusty bowl of the theatre, she felt stupid for almost wanting to cry.

  And then, as she watched, with a rasping, grating sound, a blue hut faded into being on the floor of the theatre. At first she thought it must be a magic trick, but that didn’t make any sense when there was only her to see it. Even a rehearsal would need technicians and stage managers, checking that the trick worked. June stared, eyes open wide in amazement. A skinny man in a brown suit and trainers emerged from the box. He waved what might have been a mobile phone around, as if trying to get a signal. And then he made his way up the steps of the theatre.

  June’s brain did cartwheels, trying to make sense of the impossible thing she’d just seen.

  Suddenly there were fat, noisy tourists bustling all round her. She waved off their entreaties to take pictures of their group and hurried away back to the entrance gateway. At first she might just been have escaping them, but then she knew exactly where she was headed. Despite the weight of her bag, she took the high steps two at a time, running past the guard, who really was quite cute. He called out something, might have asked her for a drink, but June could hardly hear him. She ran across the slippery flagstones and then onto the gravel track that ran round the base of the Acropolis, the same path she had climbed that morning.

  Soon enough the pathway split off to the right, a sign indicating the teatro. By now June was sprinting, grinning, full of excitement for whatever it was she’d just seen. Something strange. Something impossible. Something she had to make sense of.

  The path dipped down then rose steeply up. The straps of her rucksack cut into her shoulders, but she ran all the way. She staggered breathless over the summit, looking down on the theatre that had once been able to seat as many as 17,000 Athenian citizens. The blue hut still stood in the horseshoe-shaped space at the bottom, in front of what once would have been the stage.

  June made her way quickly down the eroded, uneven steps. And then she stopped, an arm’s length from the solid, impossible object, gazing on it in awe. She walked slowly all round the wooden hut, looking for power cables or anything else that might have produced the illusion. Yet she already knew this had been no trick. A sign said, in English, that it was a ‘police public call box’. A panel in the door explained that officers and cars responded to all calls. ‘Pull to open,’ it said. She reached a hand out to do just that, then quickly snatched it away. The panel – the whole hut – trembled with energy. She tentatively reached out her hand again, pressed it flat against the blue painted wood. The vibration felt warm against her skin.

  June turned slowly round to gaze back up at the theatre and the high rock of the Acropolis looming above it. There was no sign of the skinny man in the brown suit, but she’d not passed him on the pathway and there was only one other way he could have gone. Quickly but carefully she made her way back up the uneven steps of the theatre, following it further round to her left. Footprints in the dry dust led up to the long, gaping wound in the side of the rock, the sacred caves. June followed the tracks, which had definitely been left by trainers.

  The cave felt chilly after the warm air outside. June’s forearms prickled with gooseflesh. She made her way into the grotto carefully, not daring to call out, perhaps even a little afraid. Water dripped from long, glistening stalactites. Small, fizzing electric lights cast eerie shadows. And then June could hear voices.

  She ventured forward, trying to keep herself concealed behind the rock formations and stalagmites. Up ahead something stank of ozone. The voices were loud and angry but in a language she didn’t recognise, made up of clicks and whistles. She crept forward, to find the skinny man struggling in the grip of two blobby grey aliens.

  June blinked. Yes, they were definitely aliens. No more than a metre and a half tall, blobby and grey, their flesh glistening with rainbow patterns like on a puddle of oil. Two of them held the tall, skinny man while a third berated him in the clicking, whistling language.

  The skinny man struggled but could not get free. He argued back in clicks and whistles but the grey aliens would not be swayed.

  The skinny man sighed and shook his head. And glimpsed June lurking in the shadows.

  ‘Bartholomew,’ he told the grey alien, now in blokey English. ‘You’ve enough explosives here to take out most of Athens. I just can’t let you do that.’

  The grey alien seemed to have understood him, and the powerful gravity with which he said it. As it replied in a defensive sequence of clicks, June looked past it to the heap of hefty packages like sandbags. They were stacked around three tall, wide stalagmites, more than the height of a man. Yes, there did seem to be an awful lot of explosives.

  ‘I’m sure you’ve got the best of reasons,’ the skinny man insisted, again with a quick glance in her direction. June realised he was speaking English for her benefit, so she would understand. ‘But I’m sorry. I really am. You have to leave right now. Earth’s authorities will be here any moment. And you know what humans are like. What a curious bunch they are. Before you can say that you come in peace they’ll have cut you open to see how you work.’

  And June realised that he didn’t just need her to understand. She had to rescue him, too, or Athens would be destroyed. All that wealth of history, the bedrock of the world she knew . . .

  Terrified but determined, June stepped out from her hiding place. The fizzing electric lights behind her cast a huge shadow up ahead. And she suddenly knew what she could do to stop them.

  ONE

  ‘RAHRRR!’ SHOUTED JUNE as she ran forward. Her voice echoed in the cave and her shadow up ahead might have been twenty metres tall.

  The blobby aliens threw their arms into the air and ran off wailing. June moved her hands, her shadow reaching out to grab them.

  ‘Oh no!’ called the Doctor after the blobby aliens. ‘A human being! Don’t leave me!’ But he was also laughing.

  The aliens hurried behind the explosives they’d stacked up round the three tall stalagmites, and into a silver sphere. June watched them squeeze themselves through the small entrance, which closed like an iris behind them with a high-pitched whirr.

  Only the sound didn’t come from the silver sphere but from the wand in the skinny man’s hand. He lifted his thumb from the control and the blue light on the wand clicked off. The skinny man twirled the wand around his fingers then dropped it back into the inside pocket of his suit.

  He wandered over to the silver sphere and knocked on it with his knuckles, as if wanting to be let in. Nothing happened. The skinny man looked up at June and grinned.

  ‘Hello,’ he said brightly. ‘Don’t worry. This is all a dream. You’ll wake up any moment.’

  ‘Those were aliens,’ said June.

  ‘Uh,’ said the skinny man. ‘OK. Yeah.’

  ‘Aliens trying to
blow up the Acropolis,’ said June.

  ‘Yeah,’ said the skinny man. ‘Good point.’ He hurried over to the stack of explosives and began to scrutinise them.

  June joined him, determined not to be scared. The man was very tall and gave off waves of confidence, like being up close to a huge stack of explosives was something he did every day. He put on a pair of thick-rimmed glasses and pressed his face up close to them for a good look.

  ‘Need to do this quickly,’ he said, ‘before it all explodes.’

  ‘Yeah,’ June told him. ‘That would probably help.’

  Each individual fat packet of explosive was connected to the next with a single red wire. The skinny man traced the connections with his index finger, following them round the three stalagmites. Then he stuck his hand in between two packets and began to rummage around.

  ‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ she asked him, nervous at how roughly he treated the great stack of explosives.

  ‘Sort of,’ he said. ‘There should be a—’ He stopped, his eyes wide, and for a moment June thought they’d both be blown to kingdom come. Then he slowly withdrew his hand from the explosives. In his fingers glinted a tiny silver sphere on the end of a red piece of wire.

  ‘Control box,’ he told June. ‘Well, not a box. Technically it’s a want conduit. But you won’t know what one of those is, so let’s just call it a control box.’ He closed his fingers around the sphere, gripping it in his hand. Then he closed his eyes tight.

  When he opened his eyes and his fingers, the small sphere had turned pale blue. The skinny man grinned at June and tucked it back in amongst the explosives.

  ‘Well,’ he said, running his fingers through his thick and messy hair. ‘That’s that taken care of. You just saved the Acropolis. Maybe even all of southern Greece. Well done.’

  ‘But why would aliens want to blow up the Acropolis?’ asked June.

  ‘Um,’ said the skinny man. He glanced back at the silver sphere in which he’d locked the blobby creatures. ‘They said they had a good reason but didn’t get round to saying what. I suppose we could ask them but that would mean letting them out of their ship. Oh well. It’ll just be one of those things.’