Rose walked up to the TARDIS console where the Doctor was busy wiping down what looked like a spark plug of alien manufacture. He glanced up as she arrived, then blew on the plug and screwed it back into the console. "What're you doing?" she asked, as he pulled out a second plug and wiped it down with an oily rag.
"She's been pulling to the left lately. Have you felt it?"
"What, like a wobbly trolley?" she asked with a laugh.
"Exactly. Thought I'd clean out a bit of gunk." Just then the time rotor came to a stop, and the Doctor smiled brightly, replacing the plug. "Another day. We've landed."
"Landed where?"
"Don't know yet," he said, heading around the console for the door. "Had it set to 'Random'. Adds an air of mystery to life. You coming?" Rose smiled widely.
The Doctor stuck his hawk-like nose out of the TARDIS and was greeted by a dozen soldiers readying weapons and pointing them in his direction.
A smile stretched to the very edges of his face, but before he spoke, a voice came from inside the TARDIS. "Hey, is it sunny out there, or more cloudy? I want to know if I need a hat."
The smile didn't falter as he called back, "Skip the hat, Rose. It's more sort of bunker-y with an air of gun-pointy. Come on out and meet the locals." He addressed the soldiers. "She'll be right out. I'm the Doctor. Who's in charge?"
"I'm in charge," said a mustachioed man in a beret as he pushed his way through the camouflaged soldiers. "Stand down men, conserve your ammo."
Rose came bouncing out of the TARDIS, a broad smile on her face that quickly vanished when she saw the guns. "Sorry, I thought you were joking…" she said out of the side of her mouth as she closed the TARDIS door.
"You Onyx Enterprise folk have to be pretty stupid if you thought we wouldn't notice a big blue box snuck in behind enemy lines."
"Oh, we're not with them," the Doctor said.
"Right. And I'm only on this rock for holiday. I assume that's packed with explosives. Alright, men. Put these Onyx spies in the brig and get that box out of here. I want it far from the bunker when it goes off."
Two of the soldiers came forward to take Rose and the Doctor into custody. Rose looked around at the group of soldiers. "You keep saying 'men', but half of them are women," Rose said as a woman in dirty fatigues grabbed her arm.
"They're all soldiers," the general retorted.
"Really?" the Doctor added. "Where's the military haircuts? These uniforms are a mess, and so's this room. Where's the military precision? These look more like conscripts than soldiers to me."
"We're at war, Doctor. Prism Speculations Unlimited is beset by the enemy. A lack of formality is understandable." The general turned to walk away.
"Wait! The enemy being the Onyx Enterprise? And you're the PSU? This is the Conglomerate Wars then—You didn't want to waste the bullets because your supply ship is late. How late is it?"
"Get this man out of here before I—"
"How late, general?"
The general puffed out his chest as if he were going to yell again, but then answered the Doctor instead. "Four months. The war's gotten pretty bad out there. But the other side hasn't gotten any supplies in that time either—"
"Four months and counting! The war hasn't just gotten bad, general. It's over. There won't be any resupply. They've forgotten about you all the way out here."
"Don't listen to him! He's trying to crush your morale. We need only outlast the enemy, and we can do that in our sleep. Now get them out of here!"
"Wait!" the Doctor yelled again. "You don't even know why we're here! This isn't a bomb locker, it's a landing capsule. I was tracking a Maltzak Beast across this sector, and it was headed straight for this rock! When I noticed there were life-signs, I decided to warn you. You need to work together and evacuate!"
"There'll be no evacuation," the general said to the soldiers. He looked the Doctor in the eye for a moment, then said, "I've never heard of a Maltzak Beast."
"That makes two of us," Rose said in a quiet sing-song voice.
"Massive beast, mostly mouth. It's got a taste for unrefined ore, and it's tough enough to survive planetfall. Trust me, you won't miss it."
"Well then, maybe we'll get lucky, and it will land behind Onyx lines. Captain," he said, then turned and stalked off.
"You heard him," said the soldier standing behind the Doctor. "March." She emphasized her words by pushing him forward with her rifle.
The Doctor and Rose were taken to a group of holding cells, each no larger than a cupboard. Rose was locked in one, then the Doctor was placed in the next. The captain locked the iron door and slipped the key into her shirt pocket.
"Shall I guard them, ma'am?" one of the soldiers asked.
"No. We need all hands at the front," the captain said, and with that, the soldiers departed.
Less than a minute later, Rose heard the sound of the Doctor's sonic screwdriver, and seconds after that, he was at the bars to her cell.
"You alright?" he asked.
"Yeah. Just as soon as you let me out."
"Not this time, Rose. I've got to get to the Onyx side. Both sides will be wiped out if I don't do something. Hopefully they'll listen to reason. I need you here to convince these people to cease fire. See if you can get into their war room. We need to set up talks and get them working together."
"But what about the Maltzak Beast?"
"Trust me. I'll take care of the Maltzak Beast, you just worry about the peace."
The Doctor put a hand over hers and squeezed briefly, then was gone.
Privates Mizram and Eljah had watched the sun go down twenty minutes earlier, which left another four hours until dawn on Darnak 9. In that time, the Onyx soldiers hadn't poked their heads over the opposite foxhole. Mizram brought his brother a tin cup of thin soup, and Eljah pulled the pencil out of his mouth to take a sip. He'd been chewing on pencils since they ran out of cigarettes two months ago. He wondered whether the other side had any cigarettes. He'd happily defect if they did.
Mizram took the binoculars and looked out across no-man's-land, the quarter mile stretch of barren rock that separated the warring camps. Any night Onyx didn't test the PSU's ammunition stores was a good night in Eljah's mind. The only sign that they were even there was a shadow that moved past their light source as a soldier paced in his foxhole.
As Eljah took his second sip of soup, an explosion shocked him into spilling it down his front. He quickly grabbed his rifle and peaked out over the top of the foxhole, but the sound hadn't come from the enemy.
The earth between them buckled, then exploded outward, chunks of rock flying in all directions as something enormous emerged from the ground. Its skin was dark and scaly with a toxic red showing through the cracks between scales. Its teeth were like metal stalactites surrounding a maw that could have swallowed up HQ. Along its side were a row of bumps the size of car tires. They extended as he watched, to become tentacles which flailed about and wrapped around anything they came into contact with. The Beast let out a bellow that shook the very air around them and filled Eljah with a terror he had never known.
He snapped out of it when he heard rifle fire from close by. His brother had reacted quickly and was firing up at the beast that towered over both camps. Eljah joined him, pouring his clip into the creature's mouth, being the only spot on it that looked remotely soft.
He threw the empty clip aside and reloaded, noting as he did so that the Onyx soldiers across the field of battle were up and attacking the beast as well.
Attacking its mouth seemed to have had no effect, so he searched for another spot. He couldn't see any eyes on it, and decided to go for the tentacles next. He picked up his radio and shouted, "We're under attack! All hands to the front!" then emptied another clip into the base of one of the flailing pseudopods.
The rest of the soldiers joined him as he ejected his second magazine and reloaded again. It was hard to tell for certain, but he felt like he got a reaction from the beast by attacking the tentacles, so he passed around the word to aim for those.
He emptied a third magazine into the creature's side to uncertain effect. He'd already gone through a month's worth of ammunition with nothing to show for it.
While the others continued firing, he ran to a crate laying near the tunnel to HQ and threw it open. Seven grenades. That's all they had, but if a better use for one ever came up, he didn't want to be there to see it.
Private Eljah grabbed one and ran back to the battlefront. He pulled the pin and aimed high, hoping to land it inside the creature's roaring mouth. The grenade flew, passing through the gap between two of the creature's massive teeth, and disappeared inside of it.
There was a muffled explosion, and the creature went wild. It screamed in agony, threatening to burst their eardrums, then the creature bent over double. It vomited a foul green slime across the length of no-man's-land and dove beneath the surface again, tunneling down through the lake of acidic bile.
"What do you know about this Beast?" the general demanded.
Rose Tyler looked up at him with a smug smile. "I know you can't handle it, for one. I also know you should have listened to the Doctor."
"Yes. The Doctor who's no longer in his cell. I suppose he's gone back to report to his superiors?"
She smirked and took hold of the bars of her cell. "Listen, mate. I've been traveling with him for a while now, and so far as I can tell he doesn't have any superiors. And for sure there's no one he reports to. But he can save you—him and me. You ready to let me out now, or what?"
The war room was like a bunker inside the bunker, with slits for windows that looked out into the concrete hallway surrounding it. The room was dominated by a large plasticrete table covered in little movable representations of troop locations and holdings, with the PSU in blue, and Onyx in red. Between the two sides was a small stretch of land currently occupied by a green plastic ovoid. A pair of soldiers were speaking into headsets and using long sticks to reposition troops along both sides of the no-man's-land.
Around the edges of the room were desks where other soldiers listened as radios output an overlapping stream of reports. These soldiers would then bark out troop positions to the two manning the table.
"That's where the Beast came up? Right between the two sides?" Rose asked as she surveyed the room. There were only four soldiers present that she hadn't seen when the TARDIS landed. Between that and the troops represented on the table, she was starting to get an idea how small a group each side had remaining.
"That represents an acidic and radioactive bile the Beast vomited onto the field before burrowing underground. There is no way of crossing it at this point—even the air above it is corrosive to the point of preventing an air assault."
"And how did you make the Beast dive for cover?"
"Sod the Beast, girl! The enemy is across the way. We'll deal with the creature once we have secured victory! I need you to tell me how to neutralize the acid so that we can attack and end this bloody conflict!"
Rose's mouth hung open at the general's words, but any response she had been formulating was interrupted by all radios simultaneously. "Doctor to Rose, Doctor to Rose, have they put you in charge yet? Over."
The soldiers around the room looked to the general in stunned silence. The general puffed up like an angry cat and turned a deep shade of red. Rose smiled, walked to the nearest sitting soldier, snatched up his handset and pressed the send button. "You're a little ahead of us, Doctor. The general was about to, but I don't think he knows it yet. Over."
"How dare you?" the general finally demanded. Rose clicked the send button again and held the handset over her head. "I'll have you thrown back in your cell for that! I'll have you executed!" the general yelled.
Rose let go of the button.
"General," the Doctor's voice came back over the radio, "shut up. The Maltzak Beast can't be harmed by a single grenade, and it won't be gone for long. You're going to need all the firepower both sides can muster to drive it away for good. The Onyx side is on board with the plan, but if just one side holds a single pistol in reserve, that thing will consume you all and have this asteroid for afters."
The general rushed over to another radio and barked into it angrily. "You may speak for the Onyx Enterprise, Doctor, but you do not speak for me. I will decide what's best for my men, and I think you'll find the PSU to be a tougher lot than that."
"I told you to shut it, general. I'm not talking to you, I'm talking to your people. You saw what the Beast did to no-man's-land. What do you think'll happen if the next time it surfaces is right under your bunker?"
"Now, you listen, Doctor. We have your little friend—"
The general was cut off by one of his soldiers. "It's Rose, right? What should we do?"
The general reached for his pistol, but several of the soldiers were faster and had their weapons trained on him. He let go of the butt of his gun, but his face was no less red.
Rose spoke into the radio again. "We're all caught up now, Doctor. What's your plan?"
"That's more like it. General Tyler, collect all the guns. Bullets won't do any good against the creature, but if you collect all of the gunpowder, and I do mean all of it, you can use some timer cord and make satchel charges. Gather all the explosives you have, grenades, mining equipment, whatever you've got. I'll get back to the TARDIS. From there I can send a sonic pulse deep underground and drive it to the surface—a bit like grunting earthworms. Then you hit it with everything you've got. Use the explosives to keep it from diving under, and with a bit of luck, we'll send it packing off this asteroid."
"Six grenades, two satchel bombs and fourteen sticks of dynamite? Is that really it?" Rose said after all the ammunition had been salvaged for gunpowder. "One of you got the general's gun, yeah?"
"Affirmative, ma'am. Just before we locked him in his cell," said the corporal.
"You what?" Rose said.
"Yes, ma'am. I'll probably be court marshaled and hanged when Prism finally makes contact again, but it beats being eaten, and if the general is free, I believe he will try to sabotage our truce with Onyx. I left him a radio so he could at least listen in. I've also sent men into the mines, ma'am. We have two pounds of C4 and some detonators down there. They should be back soon."
"Add those to the pile then. We can't keep anything back. And it's just Rose, alright, corporal? You make me feel old calling me ma'am."
"Yes, Rose. Sorry, Rose."
That was no better. He somehow managed to make her name sound like ma'am. "As you were then. Be ready for the Doctor's signal."
"Where are you going?" he asked as Rose turned to leave.
Rose paused and looked across no-man's-land. The soldiers on the other side were making similar preparations, stacking satchels and distributing what few grenades they had. "I'm going to get the general," Rose said. "If he isn't going to help, he's at least going to witness this."
The corporal's eyebrows went up, but Rose smiled. "Don't worry. You took all the gunpowder out of the bullets, yeah? If he starts waving a gun around, you know it's empty."
With that, Rose re-entered the bunker, and the corporal rejoined the captain. He saluted, and she nodded back. "Report. What's the latest on the Doctor's plan?"
"We've sent the signal that all is ready on our side. Soon after, we heard the Onyx team announce that they were ready as well. The Doctor said he had to get to his box, then he'd start the sonic… thing. He said we'd know it when it happened."
The captain sighed and lifted one side of the crate of grenades. The six remaining grenades rolled around at the bottom. "Then all we can do is wait," she said.
They didn't have long to wait though, as a sound like an ancient army blowing on rams' horns seemed to come at them from all horizons, growing in volume until the earth shook.
"This is it!" the captain shouted, her voice lost in the sound of the vibrating asteroid. "Ready arms, but await my command!"
The soldiers silently gripped grenades, satchels and dynamite, with knuckles gone white. There were barely enough munitions to spread among them.
The shaking stopped, and the world was eerily still once more. The corporal shared the feeling he saw on the other soldiers' faces. Assuming the Doctor knew what he was doing, the Beast could come up anywhere. They had no way of knowing that where they stood was safe.
Moments later, the ground began shaking again, though differently. The sounds they heard were of cracking stone and falling rock.
"There!" someone on the far side of no-man's-land cried.
The captain saw a soldier pointing toward the east. She climbed atop the rampart and surveyed the landscape in that direction. Then she saw it too. Small stones were rolling toward a slowly expanding depression. It was too far away to hit from where they stood. "Open the gate!" she yelled.
She jumped down from the rampart and grabbed one of her soldiers by the shoulder. The soldier spun, eyes wide, looking like she nearly threw her grenade at the captain's touch.
"Belkin, I want you to carry the C4. Give your grenade to Milliken." She turned toward the front and shouted, "Assemble, now! And get that gate open!"
"This is a mistake, captain," said a voice behind her as the gate slowly rose.
The corporal turned to see Rose had returned with the general, who was leveling a career-ending gaze at the captain. She seemed momentarily indecisive until she looked to the side. The corporal followed her gaze and there was Rose. She had a quiet confidence about her, and the barest hint of an encouraging smile. The captain look back at the general, then she turned to her soldiers and gave the command. "Charge!"
The corporal suppressed a smile and led his squad's charge. They poured out through the gate and turned left while the soldiers on the other side mirrored their actions. The ground ahead buckled and exploded outward.
The Beast emerged from the hole, fully this time, looking like an enormous caterpillar composed of a shell of cooling rock over a molten core.
The soldiers came to a halt as the Beast bellowed into the sky and fell flat with a ground-shaking woomf! Four-meter-long tentacles extended from its sides along the front half of its body, and it reared back, flailing them around.
"Forward!" the captain shouted. "Form a perimeter! Don't let it back in that hole!"
Her soldiers reluctantly followed her orders, spreading out around the Beast, mixing with their recent enemies toward the center of their semi-circle. The corporal pulled the pin on his grenade and lofted it at the Beast.
"Still think it's a mistake, general?" Rose asked, as she and the general surveyed the battle from the safety of the ramparts.
"My god, I didn't think it would be so huge!" he replied without looking away from it. Grenades went off all around it, and the Beast roared in response.
"Look down there. Really look. What do you see?"
"It's hideous…" he managed.
"Not the Beast, the people fighting it. The way they're working together, coordinating, taking orders. Hard to tell which side is which."
"I know what you're trying to do, and it won't work," the general said.
Rose didn't try any harder. She and the general stood watching the battle rage. The Beast was buffeted on all sides by explosions, occasionally taking a swipe at any soldier who ventured too near, but never managing to connect. It bellowed in rage and pain as each new explosion threw it off balance.
But there was no sign of damage to speak of.
"It's not going to be enough," Rose said quietly. She grabbed the radio clipped to the general's belt. "Doctor! It's not going to be enough! They're almost out of explosives, and the Beast is still there! It's going to slaughter them when they run out."
The radio was silent for a while, then the Doctor's voice came through faintly. "Then we've failed. All that's left to do is retreat. Get them to the TARDIS, and we'll get them back home."
"Like hell we'll surrender this rock," the general said. He snatched the radio out of Rose's hand. "We've got a bazooka. It's only two shots, but it's a lot of firepower. The men didn't know. I was saving it in case the enemy's supply ship came first."
Rose accepted the radio back. "Get it. Get it now, before your soldiers are decimated."
As he ran off, she lifted the radio and said, "He's getting his bazooka. Let's hope it's enough."
The radio crackled, and another voice came through. "This is Marshall Reed of the Onyx Enterprise. We have a reserve missile as well. I'm getting it now. Over."
Rose smiled faintly and turned back to watch the battle. The soldiers had run out of grenades, dynamite and satchel charges, and were working together to distract the Beast while someone planted the C4 on the other side. One final explosion and they'd be out.
The captain gave a command barely audible at this distance, and all the soldiers threw themselves to the ground. There was a huge explosion, sending rock and dirt flying in all directions, obscuring the creature and raining down on the soldiers.
When the dust cleared, the Beast remained, apparently unharmed, in the midst of a large crater.
With a hiss, a trail of smoke shot from Rose's left in a gentle arc, straight at the heart of the Beast. A second rocket came from the right before the first one struck, and two enormous explosions obscured the Beast again. Its roar of pain was louder still than the explosions, but the two commanders didn't let up. They fired a second volley into the smoke cloud, the new explosions cutting off the Beast's scream.
The Beast shot up out of the cloud like a rocket, climbing high into the sky until it became a pinprick indiscernible from the blanket of stars surrounding the asteroid.
Both sides returned to the PSU bunker to celebrate their victory. One of the Onyx soldiers produced their last packet of cigarettes, and the captain retrieved a bottle of bourbon she'd been saving. There was only enough for each soldier to have one cigarette and one short shot each, but it was the biggest celebration either side could remember in years.
When the Doctor walked in to join them, grinning from ear to ear, a cheer went up all over the war room. The corporal handed him the last cup of bourbon. "I think you should say something," he said.
"Alright," the Doctor said, and the room quieted down. He raised his cup. "I want to thank everybody for your help. We couldn't have done it without each and every one of you. I also think you should know, there's no such thing as a Malzak Beast." Then he threw back the cup and swallowed loudly. He grinned at the stunned audience.
"But, then what was that thing we just fought out there?" one of the soldiers asked.
"Nothing at all. I rigged the TARDIS's holographic projectors to point outward and manufactured the creature. It was a sound and light show."
"I don't get it. What about all the shaking, and that green muck it spit out?" the captain asked.
"The sonic pulse emitter is real enough. And that muck was just spent coolant from my ship. It'll be harmless in a couple days, as a matter of fact, it should enrich the ore of this asteroid. Remember when you lot were miners?"
"Why?" The room turned to find the speaker. It was the Onyx Marshall. "Why go through this charade? Why make us fight an imaginary monster?"
The general slammed his fist down on the table. "I knew it! They got us to waste all our ammunition, while the Onyx side made a good show of it. Now we're defenseless against them and they're in our base!"
"Just as stupid as ever, general," the Doctor said. He turned to the rest of them, the Onyx and PSU miners gathered around the room. "I'm on nobody's side, or alternatively, I'm on everybody's. I've run a scan, and there are no more firearms or explosives on this rock. So, now that you've beaten all your swords into plowshares, you've got a choice. Either you start whacking each other with sticks and stones, or you sit down at this table and work out how to live in peace.
"The war is over out there. They've slaughtered each other across this whole sector until winning didn't mean anything anymore, and they finally gave up. But they forgot about you way out here, assuming everyone was dead like so many of the other mining colonies. You need to pool your rations and work together until the supply ship arrives. Rose and I will make sure it does."
Rose put a hand on the general's shoulder. "Your soldiers are ready to be miners again. Marshall, general, this is how you keep your people alive." She walked over to join the Doctor, then turned back. "Captain, it's up to you and your counterpart to keep them on task, yeah?"
The Doctor and Rose looked at each other, then turned and left.
"You're just going to leave us here?" the general called to their backs.
The captain stepped in front of him. "It's up to us now."
Marshall Reed of the Onyx Enterprise sat down at the table, spreading his hands across the surface. "Okay. What do we do now?"