CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Still Falls the Rain
The battle of New Eucla didn't occur as either party expected First blood went to the Lithoi; no trace of Brogan ever came to light and the bleak assumption was that he'd been completely disintegrated during the messy skirmish.
The Doctor also found himself embarassed; there were two Lithoi aircraft, not one, which multiplied the risks immensely.
The Lithoi found themselves almost visible. The rain that sleeted down revealed the outline of their normally-invisible craft, which is how the defenders realised they faced two alien craft, not a single one.
Another of the Timelord's guesses proved wrong. The two ghostly outlines in the driving rain never worried about the amount or direction of the squalls that hit them – he'd assumed that the Lithoi pilots would perform poorly in conditions that involved free water in very large amounts.
New Eucla's principal construction material, glass, also proved far harder to destroy than the all-wooden structures of Forrest. The tinted overlay helped to reflect a lot of energy directed at them. The Doctor stood behind a safely distant shearing shed and watched one of the ghostly craft spend thirty seconds destroying a single house from high up. A second flaw in the rain slowly descended to thirty metres above the town and fired at an abandoned house where Mike had been hiding.
A storm of glass shards flew in all directions amidst the rain, both materials twinkling, and a geyser of super-heated steam flew upwards with such force that the invisible flying eye flipped end-over-end with rain flying off it's exterior.
'Howzat,' muttered the Doctor. 'Own goal.' He slithered across the roadway and under the fire-engine's tarpaulin cover, taking a knife with him. Once underneath he cut a long, narrow horizontal slit in the smelly material and stuck the hose nozzle there. When the second flying eye came into view and range he loosed the release valve and flayed the hiding craft with a torrent that reached over a hundred metres in height and flipped the craft upside-down.
After that both stayed high, but they came after him and the fire-engine. The engine's water tank exploded with enormous force and sent metal shrapnel thudding into nearby houses.
'Good job you got out,' said a relieved Billy. 'I got your cooking pan like you asked.'
Feeling damp and worried, the Doctor brushed rain from his brow where his holed boater allowed rain in. He peered around the misted glass walls of a house with crazed windows and missing panels. More glass shrapnel fell around them with high-pitched pings and tinkles and another geyser of steam erupted towards the town hall as another house succumbed.
'The fire-engine didn't scare them off, eh?' gasped Mike, running past them with a bad case of sunburn and his clothes steaming madly.
'No. Keep moving!' shouted the Timelord. Privately, he worried that the Lithoi would find destroying the town far too hard thanks to the glass houses and even more so with the ever-present rain. If that happened, they'd then decide to go after the human refugees -
'Desperate measures,' he said to the air. Billy spied rain puddling on the horizontal surfaces of an invisible object fifty metres up and closing on them.
'Doctor Smith! We move or we fry!' he hissed, dragging at the smaller man's elbow and not shifting him at all.
Lightning flashed. A rolling peal of thunder followed, making the house shudder. The Doctor reckoned on beam trajectory, sublimation, vapour collimation and tossed his umbrella to Billy.
'Run for it!' he barked. Billy almost flew into cover amongst the buildings opposite, the strange half-seen craft in the sky turned to track his movement and the Doctor jumped from cover himself with the wok held out as a shield.
Inspired guesswork, a touch of luck, good reflexes and an outclassed opponent – he later claimed all these played a part in his not being roasted in his brogues. The guesswork was that the Lithoi would fire at him, not Billy, who merely served to attract their attention.
The wok glowed white hot and bitter, scalding metallic fumes burst from it as the gold lining boiled off and reflected the thermal beam backwards. The Doctor dropped it a fraction of a second after pointing it and still burnt his hands. His clothing, boater and hair gave off a thick cloud of steam and his nose felt as if he'd been sniffing nitric acid. His primitive reflector only reached an efficiency of five per cent. Still, this was enough to melt fascias, burst seams and crack linings on the flying eye, and it fell heavily to earth, suffering more damage as it hit.
In seconds Mike had pounced, sticking the barrel of his police-shotgun into a narrow breach uppermost on the eye and letting off a solid metal shot. Sparks flew out of the device and it spat and sizzled in the rain, crippled and useless.
A small victory, since the other Lithoi craft remained out of reach and therefore mostly out of sight. Several giant blooms of steam and discordant shattered glass fell over the deserted township as remote operators sought to avenge the destruction of their first airborne craft with the surviving second. At some point in this thermic barrage Denny went missing, never to be seen again. As with Brogan, no trace of him was ever found, and the memorial in the cemetery used an ancient pre-Big Crash photograph that flattered him by fifty years.
'What can we do?' asked a terrified Billy Barakan. Dodging killer beams from alien spaceships that remained almost invisible was new to him, and he felt the urge to ask Doctor Smith what to do. "Urge" written in letters fifty yards tall.
The pair were sheltering behind the framework of a house that had suffered total failure of all it's window frames, allowing gusts of sodden air to smack them in the faces.
'Improvise!' grinned the Doctor, not feeling anywhere near as cheerful as he sounded. More thunder rolled around the township, rattling window panes (or those that remained seated) and jarring the ground. Despite being early afternoon, the light levels were those of early evening.
Billy looked south, to where sinister grey storm clouds were sweeping in over a fractious and disturbed ocean, all shot through with lightning bolts and made vague by sheets of rain, sheets in the literal sense of the word, giant laminates of precipitated water hanging from the sky.
He looked back at the strange doctor, who looked puzzled and who stuck one forefinger into the ground and another into the air.
'How do we improvise a gun or something that destroys hidden things in the air?' asked Billy. The light was bad, yellowish and pale thanks to the amount of water in the atmosphere, but Doctor Smith seemed worried in a way that he hadn't been up till now. He leaned back against the lower brick wall of the house and looked upwards, glancing over at Billy.
'Thunder without lightning?' he muttered. The air fizzled with energy and acrid scents as the hidden flying eye scorched another house, with the inevitable bang and tinkle of glass splinters.
Mike came limping along the backstreet to them, his sunburn now giant blisters all down the exposed skin of his left side. He lurched up to the pair and dropped next to the sheltering walls, casting careful glances all round.
'I can't find the others! I think we're the last!' he gasped, stinking of wet wool and parboiled pork.
Billy stared at him, seeing thick vapours drifting upwards from the deputy's clothes, and inhaling – briefly, before his lungs seized and spasmed – the horrid scent of boiled human being.
'When did the lightning last strike?' asked Doctor Smith. Billy stared at him, wiping the driven rain out of his eyes at such a bizarre question. Given their battleground, the deaths that had taken place so far, the likelihood that they'd be roasted into vapour in seconds – "when did lightning last strike" rapidly occupied the hinterland of stupid questions. What could –
'Look at that puddle,' instructed Doctor Smith, pointing at a dirty, muddy smear across the roadway. Mike instead looked at the stranger, clearly wondering what on earth was going on as thought processes behind that bland exterior. Billy looked at the Doctor, then at the puddle. He looked at Mike, then looked back at the puddle, which showed dancing, intersecting rings pulsing back and forwards.
'Why is that? There's vibrations there that shouldn't be,' he muttered, thinking aloud and not worried about any eavesdropping. Grains of sand shifted in the puddle. Physics, practical day-to-day stuff that he dealt with thanks to his dad's insistence, told him that there had to be an input of energy from such symptoms.
'Doctor - ' he began, before realising that Doctor Smith had produced a strange metal cylinder and was talking into it. Billy jumped in surprise and wonder when the strange cylinder began to talk back, and belatedly recognised a radio transmission device – but one a fraction the size of the ones he'd seen as a child in the Heritage laminates.
This conversation suffered interruption when the Lithoi's flying eye came hunting them, possibly drawn by the electronic signalling. Doctor Smith harried them from their insecure hiding place to another formed by the collapse of two residences into the street, creating a fractal pyramid of debris that they both burrowed into. He then relayed a description of the unearthly creature that had masqueraded inside a fake human being, hiding beneath a plastic exterior.
Once again thunder minus lightning interrupted them, rattling their entire hideout. The sound of the Lithoi's flying eye destroying another house came clearly to them as evidence of how close the alien device was to them.
'We're fighting a rather one-sided battle. I'm afraid I possibly miscalculated,' stated Doctor Smith. 'Also, a third party seems to have intervened. If I didn't know better I'd say the dingoes were here driving bulldozers – Ace? Can you hear me? Hello?'
Billy would have shaken his head if the constricted space and miscellaneous sharp edges hadn't made any such gesture risky. Doctor Smith might be right about alien invaders, but there was no denying he was mad as a box of frogs!
To the Doctor, mystery thunder without any accompanying lightning meant one thing: explosive force administered to Planet Earth. Initially he'd been inclined to dismiss it as another Lithoi plot, but after the flying eye kept right on destroying property he'd become less sure. Why carry out two types of attack when only one was needed?
For one thing, the thunder had a suspiciously regular rhythm. BOOM boom boom BOOM, repeated with pauses. His flippant remark about dingoes with bulldozers had only been partly a joke, since anything able to impact the ground and create such a resonance would be immense, easily several tons at the very least.
'Doctor Smith,' whispered Billy. 'Doctor – Doctor! Come and see!'
From his hiding place inside the giant pile of rubbish, Billy saw a massive grey-green pillar of flesh descend onto the marshy roadway of New Eucla, stamp it's stubby taloned toes into the ground and move onward. He had a strange suspicion about what was making the noise and the movement.
When the Doctor slid out from cover, dislodging glass and wood chips from his back with a deft wriggle, he stood as witness to a sight few others had seen and lived. Not fifty yards from him loomed a monster, a creature clad in dark green scales that loomed as big as the buildings around it, and as long as the street before and behind it.
'A Dilly!' breathed Billy. 'Giant crocodile!' he added, un-necessarily.
This additional description was gilding the lilly. The Doctor stared at a mutation created over generations thanks to the input of radiation from the Great Northern War, not too much to kill off the original strain, not too little to fail to affect the genotype. No, this porridge was just right. A thirty metre monster weighing in at twenty tonnes, able to destroy a house with a sweep of it's tail, teeth as long as sabres, and a disposition akin to that of a bear with a migraine. A week-long migraine at that. He realised that the monster must have been lurking in the ocean depths off the littoral of the Gulf of Carpentaria when his "flyswatter" hit, and been driven ashore by the turbulent seas. New Eucla constituted the nearest land with the easiest access beyond the shoreline.
The giant antediluvian creature moved slowly into the heart of New Eucla, dragging it's limbs and a wrack of seaweed along for the ride, sounding a muted bellow.
The Lithoi, not used to free water in any significant amounts and hence not very aware of marine fauna and certainly not aware of megafauna, panicked when the Dilly showed up on their flying eye's scanner. A blast of superheated steam and a sonic boom came as they abruptly fired at the huge crocodile, which leaped backwards as it's scales crisped and burnt.
The Doctor dragged Billy backwards, knowing what would probably come next and wanting to get away from the havoc.
They were only just in time; with a screeching hiss the blinded Dilly launched itself at the source of it's torment and clamped it's mighty jaws around the flying eye, being roasted from the inside as it did, collapsing in a torrent of sparks and shattered plastic. The tail lashed once, twice, shattering buildings on either side of the road and then all that could be heard was the pattering of rain.
Mike, Billy and the Doctor were the survivors, and Mike looked seriously scalded. He stared in amazement and disbelief at the corpse of the Dilly and the smashed Lithoi craft.
'Did – you didn't plan that, did you?' he asked.
'No. Happy coincidence.'
Billy looked at the smashed, waterlogged, burnt or windowless buildings all around and shook his head.
'Now what,' he muttered.
'Hopefully our uninvited guests will get the message, pack up and go home,' beamed the Doctor.