Chapter 3

With a high-pitched yelp of alarm Alison twisted away and toppled backwards off the crate, booted feet flying skywards. A thunder of footsteps swarmed in at her from all sides, but first at her side was the Doctor, his coat swirling over her like a protective wing. His hand snapped painfully about her wrist and his voice rapped out sharply:

"Alison! What happened? Are you all right?"

She pointed wildly with her free hand and gabbled out:

"The gravestone! The gravestone! It's moving!"

There were half a dozen troopers grouped nervously about them, weapons clutched in tightly-strung fingers, and they all whirled round defensively to look where she was pointing. The Doctor, his grip on her wrist easing a little, pulled her up to her feet.

The graveyard was quiet and still, the crosses shimmering palely in the moonlight. Everybody stood motionless for a few seconds, poised for something to happen. The tension unwound inch by inch.

"All right, lads." Sergeant Wolff's voice cut across them, heavy with condescension. "False alarm."

The soldiers straightened, weapons hanging slack at their hips, and threw accusing little glances at her. Alison scowled back at them.

"It did move! I know what I saw."

Wolff turned to the Doctor.

"Maybe you should take your young friend inside, sir. It's understandable if she's getting jumpy but we can't have false alarms going up while we're still securing the base."

There was menace in Alison's slow inhalation of air through her nostrils.

"Listen, you..."

"Er, yes, excellent suggestion." The Doctor's hand touched her lightly between the shoulder-blades. "Come on Alison, let's go and investigate the coffee-making facilities, shall we? Making these gentlemen a nice hot drink is just the thing to calm you down."

She gaped at him, too stunned to retaliate.

"Doctor?"

"Come on." His voice sharpened. "You're embarrassing yourself, and me. Let's get you indoors."

Wide-eyed with disbelief at the betrayal, cheeks hot with fury and embarassment, she allowed herself to be led past one patronisingly smiling soldier after another and into the partial shelter of the gap between two huts. Glaring, she stood stiff as a statue while the Doctor glanced warily around to see that they were not overheard. Then he leaned over to speak softly into her ear:

"Which cross was it?"

Her head snapped round to stare at him.

"You believe me?"

He looked back at her blankly.

"Why would I not believe you?"

She exhaled, surprising herself with the depth of her relief, and he bobbed his head in a vaguely apologetic acceptance of blame.

"Yes, well. The truth is I want us to keep our observations to ourselves for the moment. Tell me, did you count the crosses?"

Alison drew back incredulously.

"Count the crosses? Why would I want to..."

She eyed his serious expression for a moment and frowned.

"Why, how many are there?"

With a sweep of his arm he indicated the patch of dirt and its grim array of graves, still visible in the gap between the huts.

"See for yourself. Incidentally, did you note how many troops the sergeant said were originally sent out here?"

She answered him with only half her attention, already engaged in scanning the crosses with her eyes. There were six rows of... of...

"Um... sixty," she said. "He said sixty."

"Correct. And there are..."

Six rows of... six rows of... of twelve.

Twelve?

"Seventy-two," she murmured. "Seventy-two graves."

He leaned in behind her with a smile in his voice.

"Intriguing, isn't it?"

She looked round at his sharp, pale features as his meaning shivered through her.

"Then... then what's in the other ones? It could be anything! We have to tell the sergeant!"

The Doctor grimaced up at the sky, pushing his hands down into his pockets.

"That's a sticky point."

"Sticky? What's sticky about it? We have to warn them, people could get killed!"

"People are going to get killed, Alison. It's a war."

She stared at him. She'd got used to the fact that the Doctor didn't exactly wear his compassion on his sleeve, but this...

"What, so a few more doesn't make any difference?"

He shook his head impatiently.

"That's not the point. Listen for a minute. The truth is, the Telaxian War wasn't one of the more salutary periods in your planet's history."

Alison tensed as she always did when the Doctor belittled her planet. Usually, though, she knew he was just teasing her. This time, there was none of the arch manner which he adopted when he thought he was being funny. His eyes dark with unhappy recollection, he spoke as though the words themselves carried a sour taste.

"The Third Dalek War was a catastrophe. Not just for the millions of lives lost but for what it did to your people. I visited Earth at that time, I barely recognised it. Art, nature, justice, freedom... all forgotten when survival was the only thing that counted. Every thought, every fibre of effort, had been thrown into creating machines of war. The planet was a concrete and metal fist of grinding, smoke-belching factories running twenty-four hours a day. The air was a choking toxic fog. The people were barely individuals any more... just grey-faced automata working themselves to exhaustion and shuffling out to collapse in their sleeping pods at the end of their shifts. When the war finally ended and the bodies were counted, the mindset that the strength to fight and win was all that mattered didn't evaporate overnight. It was as if humanity decided that to survive against the Daleks you had to be like them. That's how the great Terran Empire began. It was all about fear, and the obsessive need to be strong enough to win next time."

Alison listened silently, still wary but sensing the inevitability of where this was going.

"The truth is, there was no need for war with the Telaxians. Not that they had any bragging rights in the peace and concord stakes themselves, but Earth was seeding colonies on worthless uninhabited planets the Telaxians had claimed years before. For no reason except to score points in a galactic game of numbers and boast to the people back home about another triumphant expansion of the frontier. The point I'm making is, if we've stumbled onto some Telaxian stratagem in this futile bloodletting, we've no business working against them because they're not the aggressors here."

"And these guys?" said Alison, waving an arm at the camp around them. "The ones who could end up dead if we don't warn them?"

"Are probably quite decent, well-intentioned men," the Doctor replied quietly. "But so are the Telaxian soldiers working against them. That's wars for you. That's why it's a bad idea to start them."

Alison scowled, the primal instinct to warn of impending danger digging in its heels against the possibility that the Doctor might be right. Sergeant Wolff's voice broke in across them:

"Ah, there you are. Feeling better? How's that coffee coming?"

The Doctor whirled round to face him, ocean-blue eyes glaring from his full imperious height.

"What do you think this is, the middle ages? Get your own coffee."

* * * * *

At the same moment, Private Jak Sanderline was alone in a dark, shadowy spot behind the huts, checking the readings on the fort's tiny but powerful antimatter reactor. Heavily shielded and sunk deep into the earth, for safety's sake it was kept away from the sleeping quarters and beamed power invisibly through the air to the perimeter, to the huts, to the gun towers. Like everything else, like the disruptor cannon, like the force barrier, like the huts and the food and the drink and the spare boots, it was untouched and running perfectly. He frowned and shook his head but got on with the task, shutting out the looming question of why. He ran through his list of checks mechanically, pencil-thin torch held in his teeth while he noted the results on a datapad. Engrossed, he had no notion that anything was amiss until a hand quite unhurriedly grasped the back of his neck.

The one thought he had time for, before his vertebrae twisted and snapped like rotten wood and darkness burst before his eyes, was that the hand was cold. Colder than it should be. Colder than death.