DISCLAIMER: I do NOT own Doctor Who, unfortunately D: I own Odie's plot, and Odie's little settlement of immigrants. I am trying to make this story as accurate as possible, but when many sources contradict themselves, according to Doctor Who, I will ALMOST always take the TV-info as the correct. Most of the writing in this chapter is from the book 'Ten Little Aliens' by Stephen Cole.
I'm back, guys :D Aah, real life sucks at the moment _u Let's distract me by uploading more updates to Odie's life! It's much easier than mine right now, but this will change soon!
Ben looked at Polly and narrowed his eyes.
"You saying I've got a cold wet nose and floppy ears?" Polly rolled her eyes but she was smiling, her straight white teeth framed by crimson lips.
"You know what I mean," Polly went on in her oh-so-frightfully tones. "People are either dog people or cat people. And you're a dog."
"Yeah, well, reckon I know how you'd take it if I called you one," Ben retorted.
"I'm a cat person," Polly declaimed, running slender fingers through her long blonde hair.
"Thought you reckoned you were just the whiskers on the thing, not the whole moggy."
"I just mean I make my own way, that's all. Independent." Ain't that the truth, Ben thought wryly to himself. They'd shared a few adventures now since leaving London, thanks to the TARDIS's dodgy compass, and throughout it all Polly was always making out she could look after herself all right. No need for Ben to look out for her, oh no. But he knew better.
Well, it stood to reason. With the navy he'd seen so much, been so many places, learned how to handle himself. All she'd known were Beaujolais Nouveau parties, poncy nightclubs and finishing school in South Ken until they'd fallen in with the Doctor on his batty travels through time and space.
"You'd be a bulldog." Polly laughed. "Or a terrier. Tenacious little Ben, always pulling life's trouser leg!"
"All right, all right," Ben said a little touchily. He was very aware he was hardly a giant among men, especially since Polly was taller than him by a good inch. "What' you think about Odie?"
"Oh, she's a dog too. Loyal and fiercely protective. Like a Golden Retriever or Labrador," Polly mused with a smile.
"What about the Doctor, then?"
"Cat person or dog person?" Polly enquired with a wicked smile, "He's more of an old buzzard, don't you think?" Her smile dropped suddenly as a door shut loudly behind her.
"This 'old buzzard' has excellent hearing my girl, quite excellent, yes," the Doctor fussed as he walked back in to the console room, with Odie following close behind him. The old boy was a real mystery, but it seemed his life was just one long adventure that he was willing to share with his mates. For Ben, that was all you needed to know.
This gleaming monochrome complex was his home. And it suited him. Quite a black-and-white character, the Doctor, Ben decided. Not just his appearance - swept-back silver hair, black frock coat, white wing-collared shirt and grey trousers - but in the way he saw things. A sort of suffer-no-fools and take-no-prisoners outlook that put Ben in mind of an old granddad of his, one who'd maybe lost a few marbles in the trenches.
His friend, the young, black girl winked at Polly.
"Nice way to get him into the mood, Polly," she teased, nudging Polly in the side.
"Oh, stop it." The Doctor began flicking switches on the pentagonal console. His hands waved uncertainly over various sections before his bony fingers stabbed and twisted at the controls with sudden precision. The column in the middle of the console's set-up started to slow. The Doctor steepled his fingers and smiled benignly at his three companions, his blue eyes twinkling. "We should soon be landing."
"Where?" asked Ben. The old man's faced clouded in confusion. He turned back to his controls. Ben turned to the girls.
"Never mind the buzzard, Duchess," he whispered. "Reckon he's got the memory of a goldfish."
"What's that mean then?" Odie asked. Polly and Ben looked at each other, smirking. "What?"
On an unnamed planet, at the edge of the bountiful Human Empire, Marshal Nadine Haunt and her squad were preparing for a mission, close to Spook-space. At Haunt's command, they all quickly split into groups of two. Haunt chose her subordinate, Shel, to partner her, and directed each pair to take a different tunnel. The groups sprinted into the pitch-blackness, weighed down with torches and guns.
Haunt checked her scanner. Multiple lights edged through its grids; the peak-level stats of her unit glowing brightly on a secret wavelength as they fanned out through the tunnels.
Somewhere in the dark, things were hiding that wanted them dead. Haunt beckoned Shel to follow her and set off down the last remaining passageway.
"Do you reckon Haunt's OK?" Denni asked her partner, Joiks, as they picked their way through the rubble-strewn tunnel. Joiks came to a sudden halt.
"You're worried about her?" he asked in disbelief, and tapped the metal band round his head. "You telling me this for her benefit, back at base debrief? Getting yourself some love from above...?" Denni pulled off her webset, the metal headband, keeping her in mental contact with her squad. Joiks stared at her in amazement.
"What's with you? Removing your webset -"
"Brain scramble," Denni replied. She studied the workings in the band. "My stats sometimes throw out the frequency, give me migraine." Joiks remembered hearing that had happened to Denni once before on an exercise. A freak occurrence Haunt had said. What were the chances of it happening again, and on a live ammo shoot? The webset was off now. Denni could tell a dozen barefaced lies, and who'd know? She turned to him, cold and beautiful by torchlight.
"Give me yours. I need to fix the frequency."
"Intermission," Joiks announced, and flicked the band over to her. "School's out." He rubbed his hands through his close-cropped hair. He looked at her slyly. "So – what's this really about? You don't want the world to know you've always loved me? Everyone knows that, Den!" Denni grimaced.
"Like I say, it's Haunt. Something's not right. What she did to Shade -" What their Marshal had done to the Earthborn Shadow was not easily forgotten. Because he'd blamed the design of their spacesuits for his failing a training exercise, Haunt had shot him in the assembly hall at the academy, right in front of everyone. The suit had protected him from fatal injuries, of course, but he still had a nasty hole in his arm now.
"Feelin' sorry for your Earthborn ex? Awww."
"It was a little extreme, wouldn't you say? And the way she blew up at you just for mentioning Morphiea."
"It's a real-ammo exercise," Joiks said. "Aren't you a little on edge?"
"Of course I am. But should our CO be?" Denni shook her head, answering her own dumb question. "We're so close to Morphiean space... Too close. I think it's too much for her."
"So she hates Morphieans. Hates their Spook guts. Seems a pretty good qualification for fighting them to me."
"Duh? They stopped her fighting them! After what she did on New Jersey -" Joiks scoffed.
"They had it coming."
"And the human casualties."
"We're at war. There gotta be casualties."
"Most of the ones she fried were repatriated. On our side."
"Still Schirr, still scum. Back in the Incendiaries we -"
"Enlightened, Joiks." She kept her cool as usual. "All I'm saying is, we have to follow her orders here. But what if they turn out to be bad orders, Joiks? After what she's been through -"
"What is this, psychology?' Joiks wasn't sure if he was amused or disgusted. "She's too involved in all this, is that what you're saying?" He spat on the floor. "She's a good soldier, Denni."
"She was a great soldier." Denni bunched her slim fists.
"So where are we, Doctor?" asked Ben as the demented grinding and wailing of the TARDIS landing motors gradually died away.
"I know where we are," the Doctor announced, "but I'm afraid I cannot pinpoint our location within that district." He was still playing with his switches, but vaguely, distractedly now. The way Ben's dad used to try his luck fixing the family motor; when all else failed, fiddling with bits of engine he didn't understand, just in case one of them magically started the car. Polly sighed.
"Doctor, are you saying that you know we might be on Earth, say, but that you don't know if we're in Africa or Timbuktu?"
"Very neatly put, Polly, yes." The Doctor bestowed a warm smile on her. "Except, I'm afraid, we're definitely in a galaxy very distant from the Earth's. Very distant indeed."
"That narrows it down then," Ben remarked. The Doctor didn't find the comment facetious.
"Quite so, my boy, quite so. And we have landed inside a structure of some kind, of that I am sure. The temperature is very cold... and there's no air, either. A vacuum." He looked up, deep in thought, tapping his chin. "An asteroid perhaps, too small to retain an atmosphere?" Odie grinned.
"Sounds like fun."
"Well, it will be a good opportunity to field test the spacesuits. I've had them in storage for some time." Ben frowned.
"Spacesuits?" He couldn't imagine the Doctor in full Yuri Gagarin gear.
"Oh yes, the TARDIS is very well equipped, you know." He chuckled and turned to Polly. "And they come in a range of colours, my dear." Polly clapped her hands.
"Fab!" Odie was as enthusiastic as Polly.
"I've never tried spacesuits before. All the other planets we've went to had plenty of oxygen," Odie said with a smile. The Doctor was about to correct her, before realizing that Odie had gone home before he had reached Vortis with Ian, Barbara and Vicki.
"But we don't know if it's even safe out there," Ben protested.
"Don't fuss, my boy," said the Doctor. "I must take some readings, some measurements for the log... It shouldn't take us very long..." The Doctor led his three young companions to the wardrobe, where he unpacked spacesuits from a large chest. So large, in fact, that the Doctor upper half disappeared into it. Odie wouldn't be surprised if it was bigger on the inside too.
They all singled out spacesuits rather quickly, except for Polly, who seemed to be having a fashion crisis going on from the choice of colours. Once they had all put on their spacesuits, they met up in the console room. Polly was still nowhere to be seen though.
"Odie, if you would?" Odie quickly did as the Doctor asked, and pulled the lever for the door. The TARDIS doors opened with the usual penetrating hum, and with the added beeping of some device that was depressurizing the control room.
Ben felt a bit of a prat in his new astronaut gear. It was more like a wetsuit than a spacesuit, and made from a dull green quilted material which felt a little too snug for comfort in all the wrong areas. The worst of it was the headgear; like looking out from a crystal ball. Odie seemed right and dandy in her scarlet suit, and she was looking around, entranced by everything.
"How do I look?" Polly's voice crackled in his ears over the suit's communicators. Ben turned and whistled at the sight of Polly in her skintight daffodil-yellow suit.
"Let's just say I hope this bleedin' goldfish bowl don't steam up easily."
"Come along you two," came the Doctor's voice, disapprovingly. "We don't know quite what's out there, so stay close to me." So saying, he led the way out of the ship, fussing and pulling at his own spacesuit, which was dark blue. It was hard to believe he had his usual clothes on beneath the thermal material; his body looked thin and wasted and his head disproportionately big through the glass helmet as a result. The old boy really did look like a buzzard now.
Ben and Polly followed him out, and the Doctor closed the doors. The comforting light spilling out from the control room narrowed to a slit then vanished altogether. They heard a loud thump, and Odie groaned.
"Doctor, would ya warn me before turnin' out the lights?" Odie asked, annoyed. Ben and Polly both laughed, as they imagined Odie walk headfirst into a wall.
"Don't lock them doors, Doctor," Ben suggested as casually as he could. "You never know, we might need to get back inside in a hurry." The Doctor nodded vaguely. For a few seconds the blackness was absolute.
"Dark, isn't it," said Polly. He felt her lightly grip his arm, and gave her hand a comforting squeeze he hoped she could feel through her quilted gloves. Then the Doctor flicked on his torch. The beam revealed small snatches of the cavernous room they stood in, and Odie wandered into the light, still glowering towards the Doctor. Ben tried to build a picture of their surroundings from what he could see in the torchlight.
The room, or cave, or whatever it was, was five-sided. The walls were built from layers and layers of dark stone, and scaled by ornate metal trellises that gleamed like gold. Above these, what looked to be ducting reached right around the room at the point where the walls sloped up to the high, arched ceiling. Slabs of glass had been set into this roof, hundreds of them, and they winked and signalled back at the Doctor whenever he shone his torch in their direction.
Closer to ground level, banks of weird-looking machinery squatted beneath the trellises. Symbols carved in the slate above presumably denoted the function of each set of controls in whatever language they spoke here.
"Fascinating," the Doctor said fervently. "The functionality of a control room but with the trappings of a shrine..." Ben was considering the ramifications of this when the Doctor's torchlight fell on a cowled shape hunched over a console right beside them, overlooked until now by the far-stretching beam. He felt Polly's grip on his arm tighten and her distorted scream in his ears nearly deafened him.
"Ow! Polly, do you mind?" Odie asked, turning around. Then she understood Polly's scream perfectly. Ben took a few steps back, instinctively.
A hideous alien face was staring out at them from under the cowl. Its eyes were wide like a fish's, unseeing. It was lying in a mass of dried blood. The Doctor approached the alien corpse; his eyes squinted in concentration.
"What is it, Doctor?" Ben asked, his voice cracking high in alarm. He turned away from the hideous, glistening head of the thing, sickened. But before the Doctor could reply, a low rumbling note sounded in the cavern, not carried by the spacesuits' helmets.
"There's air in here," Polly realised, holding on to Ben now with both arms. "If we can hear something outside the helmets, there must be air, to carry the sound."
"Indeed," muttered the Doctor. A faint display flickered over the glass of his helmet. "Yes, and I believe it's breathable."
"But Doctor," Ben protested, "you said -"
"- that there was a vacuum in here, yes," said the Doctor irritably. "It would seem the situation has changed."
"It's getting lighter, too," breathed Polly. The globe of her helmet knocked against Ben's as she looked around. Ben swallowed hard.
"She's right, Doctor." The broken glass above them was glowing now, magnifying the light the Doctor had thrown at the ceiling a hundred times. Another deep, sonorous tone rang out, and the grating of metal on rock. Polly looked terrified.
"Doctor, what was that sound?" Odie asked curiously, walking closer to the others. The Doctor came over to stand beside them, gesturing to the far wall where a pentagonal shape glowed with a cold sodium brightness.
"It would appear a doorway is opening." Ben ripped the helmet from his suit and gulped down musty air.
"Something's coming?"
"Coming to get us!" Polly breathed as she took off her own space helmet and gripped it tightly in both hands. "To get us like it got that horrible thing there!" Odie rolled her eyes, taking off her helmet as she did so.
"There is no reason that should be the case. That poor thing has been dead for quite a while," she pointed out.
"Indeed," said the Doctor, heavily. "But I wonder, did these unfortunate creatures here share in its fate?" The Doctor was gesturing to a glassy rectangular shape standing on a raised flat dais beside the TARDIS. They'd missed it in the dark. Now, in the rippling sparkle of the growing light, Ben watched transfixed as grotesque nightmare shapes began to form inside the glass. Dark shadows gradually resolved themselves into twisted humanoid figures the same size and shape as the dead thing in the chair.
The space helmet slipped from Ben's fingers and cracked open on the ground. He was staring at monsters, frozen in glass at the moment of violent death. There were nine of the creatures. They were massive, alien. The heavy lumpen faces were contorted in pain. Each one was dressed in once-white robes now caked black with dried blood.
Ben turned to Polly. She stared at the waxwork-like horrors for a few moments, then screamed. The door in the wall had ground almost fully open. Golden light spilled into the chamber through the pentagonal entrance.
"Seriously, cut that out," Odie complained, holding hands above her ears.
"But, they're! They're-" Polly stuttered, and Odie nodded.
"Alien. I know!" She turned to the leader of their party. "Doctor, what do we do?"
"Back to the TARDIS!" Ben tried to manhandle Polly, still clutching her space helmet, into the police box. But something was wrong. She wouldn't shift.
"Come on girl, pick your feet up," he urged her, fighting down the panic rising inside him.
"I can't move, Ben," Polly cried. "I want to, but I can't!" Ben felt his head start to spin, and a noise like rushing water in his ears. He left Polly and turned round to call for the Doctor to help him. The light shining through the doorway lit up the glass that housed the bloody figures. The Doctor was silhouetted against the glow. Slowly, awkwardly, he took a few steps towards Ben. Ben turned back to Polly and found she'd vanished. He gaped.
"Doctor? Polly, she's just... gone."
"Impossible, my boy," the Doctor said weakly, as he removed his own space helmet and placed it on the ground. "She can't just have disappeared. We merely did not see her leave."
"What's the difference? She's gone!" Ben felt stricken. The roaring noise became thicker in his ears. "And a few seconds ago she couldn't move anywhere! And Odie's gone too!"
"What? Odie-" But even as he spoke, the noise in Ben's ears ebbed away, as did the dizziness. The Doctor fell into Ben's arms suddenly like a puppet with cut strings. Ben sagged a little under his weight, but the Doctor soon recovered; Ben imagined the furious look the old man gave him was designed to cover his embarrassment at collapsing. A moment or so later his expression softened, and he looked at Ben with evident concern. Then he turned to face the open doorway, shielding Ben behind him.
A burly figure walked out of the light, dressed in a dark grey military uniform, holding a box in one hand and a dirty great gun in the other. The gory display case was between them for a few moments, then the figure moved into plain view, looking around cautiously.
"Stone me," Ben muttered. "It's a bird!" The woman looked in their direction and froze. Light glinted off a sort of metal band she wore round her forehead.
"She's seen us," murmured the Doctor. He took a step forward, his hands going automatically to where his lapels would've been beneath his suit and floundering as they tried to grip the quilted fabric. "Madam," he began, "forgive me, I do hope our presence here doesn't come at an unpropitious time?"
The woman stared at them in absolute shock for a moment.
Then she raised her gun.
Polly stared about fearfully. It was dark. Cold. One minute she'd been with Ben and the Doctor, and the next... It all seemed a blur. She'd wanted to get away, so desperately, wanted to run headlong from the opening door in the wall. She'd had a feeling of flight, of disorientating movement, and then found herself here, all on her own. The fishbowl-like space helmet rocked gently on the ground at her feet.
It was a cave or something, deep underground. She'd gone to some caves once, nice and safe touristy caves, when she was eight. She'd run about the place in a bright red raincoat pretending she was a lost damsel, that there was no one else down there with her except for dragons. Except then, when she strayed too far from the crowd, when the fantasy became too scary, there was a daddy to rush back to, grown-up hands to hold. Now she was on her own. Not even with any dragons. Definitely no dragons, she told herself.
And kept telling herself.
A loud groan made her shriek in surprise.
"Seriously though, would you stop that? My head hurts whenever you do that." Polly almost laughed with glee when the familiar complaint came from Odie. Usually, she became rather cross with Odie for that, but she could say it as much as she wanted, so long as she stayed with her.
"I'm sorry. I thought I was all on my own, so you surprised me," she said, fumbling through the dark to find Odie.
"Yeah, well, you couldn't really see me in this lighting, could you?" Odie jested with a shaking voice, as she reached out for Polly as well. They grabbed each other's arms and pulled close together. "Do you remember how we got here?" Odie asked, and Polly shook her head, before remembering the other girl wouldn't be able to see it.
"No. No, I don't. I remember feeling like I was flying, but that's it," she admitted, and Odie sighed. Polly guessed that was all Odie could remember too. "Well, what do we do now?"
"There's only one choice, really. We have to find Ben and the Doctor," she said, as she helped Polly to her feet. It was shaky work, in the dark. "But I bet these tunnels go on for miles, and we'll just get even more lost if we wander without a map."
"We could mark the tunnels?"
"How? We don't exactly have anything to draw with, and it's too dark to see marks on the walls," she pointed out. "Too dark to see almost anything, really." The two women stood in deep thought for a while, wondering how to proceed, when Polly gasped.
"I got it! We could build a little cairn of stones at the mouth of the tunnels. Even if we can't see it, we'll be able to feel it," she suggested. Odie laughed gleefully.
"Polly, that's brilliant! All right, let's get started." They built a cairn together to mark their starting point. In the dark, it took them five minutes, and Polly, apparently, chipped two nails while doing so, but they did it. Now, hand in hand, they went further down the tunnel.
"Odie... Do you hear whispering?" Polly asked, and Odie gritted her teeth.
"No, Polly, it's just our imagination." Polly realized she had said 'our'. She gripped Odie's hand tighter in reaction, and Odie returned the squeeze.
As Ben opened his mouth to yell at the army woman to stop - a pretty pathetic gesture, but it was all he could think of to do – another soldier ran through the doorway. This one really was a fella, an oriental sort. He wore a headband like the woman, and like her he raised his gun in their direction, but Ben was gratified to see his real attention seemed taken by the figures on the dais.
"Marshal." The woman didn't react at the sound of his low, calm voice, but she didn't sound happy.
"I told you to remain where you were, Shel, covering the entrance."
"I thought I heard you scream," Shel said, still staring intently at the figures, like they were people he thought he knew. She snorted.
"You think I'm the screaming type?"
"Marshal, look."
"I am looking," snapped the marshal. Her gun was still trained on the Doctor. "These aren't droids. What the hell are these people doing here?"
"We arrived purely by chance," said the Doctor, beaming benignly. Ben didn't fancy any amount of old-world charm would work against this high-tech old bruiser. He wasn't surprised when she didn't smile back.
"Not them, Marshal..." This was Charlie Chan again. "These..." Only now did Shel's marshal take in the corpse in the chair to her left and the gruesome line-up to her right. After a few seconds her face finally took on some wonder at the sight.
"Schirr bodies?" Shel nodded.
"They've been chipped. Criminals. Look at the branding on the chests." Ben saw from the corner of his eye that the Doctor was slowly edging towards the TARDIS doors. Not wanting to draw attention to the old boy with his eyeline, he swallowed hard and forced himself to look more closely at the bodies on the dais.
They all looked pretty similar. Each had a broad, round head, mottled pink. The eyes were milky-white and bulging, with pupils dilated to dirty red specks. The ears drooped down like melted wax from the smooth sides of the head, and the nose was a fat blob, nostrils thick with bristling hair. The lips were the most grotesque thing about each face, though: full and thick and rubbery, they lent the creatures a sort of obscenely sensuous appearance.
And now Ben came to look at the burst chest of the one on the far end that had taken Shel's attention, he could see that there was some kind of weird symbol burnt into the smooth flesh above the wound. Like a long thin rectangle crossed through with a diagonal line.
"My god," the marshal breathed. She lowered the gun and looked at Shel, her face a mix of emotions. "What kind of a trick..."
The two of them stared helplessly at the bodies in utter amazement. The Doctor had reached the TARDIS doors. Ben clenched his fists. What was he doing, they couldn't go without Polly - But the doors wouldn't open. Ben could see the Doctor pushing with all his strength against them. Then he looked round at Ben, furiously, like it was somehow his fault.
"No," said the marshal, dragging her gaze from the monsters back to the Doctor and looking oddly pleased with herself. "No, I don't think so." She raised her gun again, strode closer to them all. "The corpses of the most wanted criminals in all Earth's empire, just waiting around to be discovered by a military unit on manoeuvres? Not very likely, is it?" Shel was frowning.
"But Marshal -"
"Oh, come on, Shel," she sneered. "This is a live ammo exercise, remember? DeCaster, dead? And here? It's a trap. It has to be." The Doctor cleared his throat.
"It may be a trap, yes, it may well be," he said airily. "But it is not one set by us."
"Is that a fact. Just who are you?" the marshal demanded.
"I am the Doctor." Ben stood to attention.
"Able Seaman Ben Jackson, HMS Teazer. I mean... well, that's my ship, see..." He trailed off. The marshal's face was darkening with every syllable.
"As I mentioned earlier," the Doctor said quickly, "our party arrived here purely by chance, and two of our number -" The woman glanced over at Shel, casually.
"This is part of a trap. I'm going to kill them."
"You can't!" Ben protested. "What have we done to you!"
"This is outrageous behaviour." The Doctor was clearly bristling. The woman was unmoved by any of it. Shel spoke gravely:
"Marshal Haunt, that is in direct contravention of the Codes and Ethics of War."
"We're on a training exercise," Haunt pointed out wearily.
"That is an absurd distinction," the Doctor retorted. "Now if you'd only listen to us, Marshal... Haunt was it...?" The name suited her, Ben decided. She was quite a big girl, around Polly's height but stockier, and she could've been the jolly sort. Instead she had a troubled look about her, a pained expression in her eyes, like she'd taken some bad news in the past that had never got any better. Shel spoke again, his voice dead calm, like they were discussing the price of tea or something.
"Procedure is to take any civilians into safekeeping."
"Civilians? On this speck?" Haunt looked unconvinced. Her space-age rifle still pointed their way.
"We are travellers," the Doctor said. "You could call us refugees in an experimental craft." To Ben's surprise he gestured to the TARDIS. "One that bends the dimensions, passing through solid matter."
"I don't believe you," said Haunt simply. But Shel was nodding.
"In the Japanese Belt such technology is being developed. It is a possible explanation. But it's also possible they're part of the team that set this place up." Haunt looked uncertainly at Ben and the Doctor.
"Well?" she asked.
"As you observe, we are helpless civilians trapped in this terrible place," said the Doctor mildly. "We cannot escape here, and we look to you for protection. So too does our friends, Polly and Odie," he added hurriedly. "They can't be far away but I am dreadfully worried about them. Dreadfully." Haunt's face darkened.
"There's more of you wandering about here?"
"Just the two." Ben wondered what the Doctor was up to, telling these maniacs about Polly. He spun round as a new voice rang out:
"What the hell...?" A black bloke strode through the five-sided doorway this time. A huge great geezer, he carried a slim rectangular pack on his back, a space-age kit bag.
"Roba?" Haunt rounded on him. "What's going on, where's Frog?"
"Outside on guard." Roba was massive, but Ben could tell Haunt had the power to make him feel two inches tall. "Our tunnel led to some weird tomb-place. We went through the circles and found them silver doors."
"All right," Haunt snapped. "Shel, brief Roba on..." She broke off. "On whatever the hell is happening."
"Yes, Marshal," said Shel, unfazed. Ben held his breath as Haunt stalked closer. Her eyes narrowed. Her finger was still curled round the trigger of her rifle.
"So. Your ship was attacked? You strayed into the Spook Quadrant?"
"I'm not familiar with your terminology for this area of space, though I'm sure you are right," said the Doctor with a tight smile.
"You have a death wish," she said.
"If it is so dangerous, why are you training close by?"
"It's still Earth space." Haunt smiled tightly. "Our destiny is in the stars, the pioneers used to say." The Doctor raised an eyebrow.
"Well, that's a fine sentiment, yes. Ours too is in the stars, and really, Marshal, look at us." He tittered to himself. "An old man, a boy... and somewhere nearby, I hope, two young girls. Can we be much of a threat to you and your men, hmm? Can we?" Ben found it handy the Doctor neglected to mention how Odie could, quite easily, knock a man Roba's size flat on his face in the blink of an eye.
Upon having reached another passageway, Odie was squatting in front of Polly, searching the ground for one of their piles of stones, for some sign they'd been walking round in circles. Polly would've taken the news as a comfort, that this place wasn't big enough to get truly lost in.
"Sorry Polly. No rocks, just cold stone and more of those annoying fleas." The fleas made Polly's flesh crawl, as if they were swarming all over her, just as the glowing weed crowded over the rocky roof above, dimly lighting their way. She felt she could be under the sea.
"Well... At least that means we're not going round in circles," she muttered weakly, and Odie nodded. Polly could barely make out her curls' bouncing in the dim light from the weed. The two of them proceeded down the passageway, and realized a new light was seeping into view. Polly caught her breath. There was a window in the rock.
"What's a window doin' here?" Odie whispered, as though she was afraid too much noise would break the glass. Or, Polly supposed it must have been some kind of glass, but it was smearless, free of all distortion. Through it she could see a night sky beautiful and brilliant with stars.
They looked like diamonds, like she could stick out her hand and take one in her palm. Not under the sea then. In space.
"We're in a galaxy very distant from the Earth's, aren't we?" she asked Odie, and Odie smiled.
"Your first time in space, isn't it? Welcome to the big blue sky," she said, making Polly laugh shakily. She took a deep breath, willed herself to stay calm. The TARDIS had brought them here. The TARDIS would take them away again. All they had to do was find it. "You don-" Odie began a question, when suddenly Polly felt the other girl tense up.
"What is-" Odie quickly shushed her, as she dragged her back a bit, hiding her as far away from the starlight as possible. Polly soon realized what Odie was hiding from: Two people crossing her path stealthily along an adjoining tunnel. One was a black woman with the most amazing blonde dread-locks, and the other a man following on behind her. Both were armed to the teeth. Seeing the man in profile revealed a nose that had surely been broken a half-dozen times. As he shot a glance up their tunnel, Polly thought she could see the faintest of cocky smiles on his face. She shivered, reminded of the type of bruiser that had hassled her so many times in bars and clubs all over London. So many close calls...
Odie pressed her further against the wall, and Polly hoped the pair wouldn't notice them in the shadowy mouth of the tunnel. Were they hunting for them? Polly wished now she hadn't chosen to wear what was probably the only spacesuit in daffodil yellow in the universe. Compared to that, Odie's scarlet one was almost invisible in the dark. Just another shade of black.
The two figures walked past with only a cursory glance down the tunnel that hid Odie and Polly, and Polly breathed a sigh of relief. They were alone again. All alone. Except of course, for however many others there could be waiting for them down here. With a clear gesture that she should wait, Odie moved towards the passage the pair had gone down. Polly bit her lip, as she waited. Once Odie was sure the couple were too far away to hear them, she called Polly towards her and they crossed into the other tunnel and crept down it in the opposite direction. Soon they came to a gaping hole in the rock to the right, a side-tunnel that twisted off into the darkness. They looked at each other for a second, and decided with a nod to take it. The roof was higher than in some of the others, and the abundance of weed made it lighter, less claustrophobic.
But as they moved cautiously through it, a slow, rhythmic sound ebbed into their ears. A hissing, throbbing, pulsating noise, weird and alien.
"Do you hear that?" Polly asked.
"It's our imagination," Odie said stubbornly, and Polly smiled, grabbing onto Odie's hand again.
"I really wish you'd stop saying that." The walls seemed to shift and shimmer around them. A bright blue light seeped in to the tunnel like water into a sewer, and with it a strange kind of noise, almost like a pressure in their ears. Polly felt giddy, nauseous. For a second she was acutely homesick, remembering late-night London spinning her its sights and sounds, reeling in drunkenness as she staggered with friends in search of a cab, nightlife neon reflected in dark street puddles. Moving on to the next party, the logical next step of the night.
This was the sound of something starting. Polly found herself staggering now, wobbling as if in towering heels towards the blue light.
Ben breathed a sigh of relief as Haunt stalked back over to join Roba and Shel by the body in the chair.
"All right," she announced with bad grace. "Seems we're landed with some refugees."
"Refugees..." The black giant, Roba, considered, then nodded. "State of those suits they're wearing, I'll buy that." Ben glanced at the Doctor. Under any other circumstances, the look of outrage on his face would've been hilarious.
"Seems the Spooks opened fire on them, here on the fringes," said Haunt. Roba nodded.
"Figures. 'No human shall feel secure...' Just like they said. Stepping up the terror campaign." Shel looked over at the bodies hunched up on the dais.
"While the ones they're after are right here?"
"They must be part of the simulation," Haunt said dismissively.
"This one is branded too," said Shel quietly, crouching over the grisly alien corpse in the chair. He had raised the blood-stained robe from its shoulder and was indicating something in the flesh beneath. "Pentagon coding. It's Pallemar all right, he's been chipped. No one can forge these data codes."
"So this really is DeCaster's Ten-strong? And all dead?" Roba looked at Shel.
"No way. You're kidding me, right?" Shel shook his head. As he showed Roba and Haunt whatever his handheld gadget was showing, Ben turned to the Doctor.
"We have to find the others and get out of here."
"Quite so, my boy," the Doctor said vaguely. He was looking intently at his surroundings as if taking them in properly for the first time.
"Where do you think they went, Doctor? I mean, how can they just have disappeared?"
"They didn't," the Doctor informed him curtly. "There must be a concealed exit here somewhere. This chamber was sealed, airtight." He sighed. "In any case... As I said to Marshal Haunt, we require the assistance of our soldier friends if we are to find them. I very much doubt they will let us go looking by ourselves." Ben felt sick.
"How come the TARDIS doors won't open?"
"I don't know, my boy," the Doctor confessed. "That humming noise that started up when the doors opened... I believe it was some kind of generator, setting up the force field you see around these bodies." Ben felt foolish.
"I thought that was glass or something."
"No," said the Doctor. "It's a protective enclosure, triggered no doubt by the rush of air into the room. In the vacuum the bodies couldn't decay. This mechanism was designed to react to anyone entering this room through that doorway."
"But why?" The Doctor hushed him. He was listening again to the huddle of commandos. Haunt was looking at the bodies again.
"We'd better contact Principal Cellmek at the Academy, tell him to let everyone go home early," she said dryly. "The Empire's most wanted have saved us the bother of hunting them down. They've killed themselves and kindly put themselves on display for army inspection."
"What about them two?" Roba scowled at the two strangers. Ben saw the Doctor nod politely as if greeting the vicar. Haunt raised her comms bracelet to her mouth.
"Frog." A female voice came to live on the comm.
"Marshal."
"Join us in here. Move." Haunt turned to Shel and Roba.
"Frog can take them back to the ship. Meanwhile, we'll warn the others to watch out for those girls, and anyone else out there."
"Seems this lump of rock is getting awful crowded," Roba rumbled. "Ain't it meant to be just us and a couple of droids?"
"And they're still out there," Shel said quietly. "Programmed to kill. We can't shut them off." Haunt swore.
"Wrong... everything about this is wrong."
It didn't take Polly and Odie long to find the source of the weird blue light. They came to a tottering halt before a lip of rock jutting out into a huge cavern, staring dreamily at an ethereal cyan sea rolling along both the floor and the ceiling far below.
"Light waves," Odie murmured happily. It was an incredible display. The intensity of the light was growing stronger as the 'waves' grew fiercer. Reaching and rebounding against the far walls of the cavern the light seemed to splash out into the air. The spray from the oceans above and below mingled in the middle and crackled with energy. They were forming shapes, numbers, weird mathematical equations. And although the amount of spray seemed to be growing greater, Polly saw that the value of the numbers was getting smaller.
"Like counting down the hit parade," Polly said with a familiar thrill of excitement. Suddenly she frowned. On the far side of the freaky projection, she saw movement. A figure, blurred and hazy, moved stealthily among the rocks. Polly tried to focus on the figure but the radio static in her head was growing louder, a near-deafening pressure that continued to build. She leaned back against the tunnel wall.
"Polly. Don't go to sleep," Odie murmured awkwardly, attempting to get her head right on again. A vital part of her, her survival instincts, told her that it wasn't safe to stay here, that she should take Polly and go back, but while she tried to concentrate on the words, they were lost over the raging of the unnatural sea. Close by, over the noise, she heard a low, powerful whine, like a dozen flashbulbs charging up.
Polly heard it too. She frowned. Was someone going to take her picture? She looked down at herself, saw a smear of dirt on the bright yellow leg of her spacesuit, crouched to brush it clean. She shrieked as a blast of heat singed her hair and an explosion threw Odie and her forward along with half of the wall behind her. Polly gasped with pain, as the stinging wet slap of her palms against the gritty tunnel floor broke the spell she'd been under. Odie looked up to see a huge, hovering shadow wreathed in smoke from the explosion. Red laser eyes shone into her own, blinding her. With a squeak from Polly, Odie scrambled up, grabbed her arm and ran.
And behind them, they both heard the building charge of the flashbulbs again.
Ben joined the Doctor as he walked stiffly over to join the two troopers, raising his hands to show he meant them no harm. Addressing Roba, he nodded back at the monsters on the dais.
"I take it, young man, that you recognize these poor, unfortunate creatures here?"
"Unfortunate?" Roba looked like the Doctor had just spat at his mother. "What're you talking about, unfortunate?"
"Well, of course, unfortunate only in that... Well, they are dead, after all," the Doctor blustered.
"Wouldn't have them any other way," Roba hissed. "Schirr scum." The Doctor looked at him sharply.
"Ah, but the manner of their death. Held in stasis for all to see. What of that, hmm?"
"Keep quiet," Haunt said warningly. The Doctor turned to Shel, whose eyes met his own.
"It's bothering you, sir, is it not? These creatures are not fake, they are real flesh..." He turned up his nose distastefully at the crimson mess at their feet. "And real blood, of course." Roba clenched his fists.
"Look, man -" The Doctor raised his voice, losing patience, acting as if the hulk of a man was just some upstart kid speaking out of turn in the old boy's classroom. "Surely you don't think all nine of these Schirr creatures stood here on their dais waiting patiently to be shot until the last man retaliated, hmm?" A thought occurred to Ben.
"And what about that stasis field thing you mentioned, Doctor," he said, pleased to have found something to contribute. He shrugged at Haunt. "Triggered by you lot coming in here, ain't that right, Doctor!" Haunt frowned.
"What?"
"Yes, it's quite a mystery, quite a mystery," said the Doctor. He looked almost amused. "Not forgetting the concealed exit in this room that Polly must somehow have fallen through -" Shel finally lost his cool.
"That's enough out of you," he barked.
The Doctor looked furious at the interruption, but then everyone's attention was taken by something else. The echo of approaching footsteps began tripping over themselves as, this time, a small, wiry figure burst into the cavernous hall, dressed again in grey and with backpack and metal headband. Ben was pleasantly surprised to find he was taller than at least one of these space soldiers. But as the bald, scarred person approached...
"Stone me," Ben muttered. "It's another blinkin' bird." Just about, anyway, he qualified to himself. She had a face like the smell of gas. The woman glanced over at the bodies on the dais, but she seemed far more interested in Ben. He swallowed.
"Frog," Haunt snapped. "You're taking these two back to the ship."
"Yes, Marshal." Ben couldn't help himself from smirking at the weird, warbling croak that came from her mouth. As a frog, she was pretty well-named. Frog continued to stare at Ben.
"Then shall I keep them under observation for a bit?" Ben stopped smiling and cast an anxious look at the Doctor. He was staring into space, apparently oblivious to all.
"Then you'll join the rest of us at the bullring for an emergency debriefing. Now go. Hurry." Haunt turned to Shel darkly. "We need to regroup. Get everyone to retrace their steps, back to the bullring." Frog shrugged and indicated with her gun that the Doctor and Ben get moving. They trudged off towards the pentagonal doorway. Ben saw the Doctor cast a wistful look at the TARDIS, their ship and sanctuary, just out of reach.
"Marshal." Ben heard Shel call over to Haunt, and there was an edge to his usually assured tones. "I can't raise Joiks and Denni. No contact. Just static."
"This is how it begins," murmured the Doctor, just loud enough for Ben to hear him, as Frog nudged them through the exit.
Tovel found the wet crunch of his boots on the gritty floor almost comforting in the semi-darkness. Shade marched along beside him. He looked just as concerned as Tovel that Haunt had ordered a recall. They walked on in silence. Tovel tried not to dwell on his concern. It was lucky the websets weren't so good at picking up underlying feelings, the murky background noise during playback; at least this generation of them. For the moment, soldiers controlled their websets and not vice versa; with practice anyone could keep their real thoughts and feelings suppressed. But the technology was getting better all the time. One day the Army examiners would be able to pick up every dissenting thought you ever had - and deal with you accordingly. Tovel imagined that websets of the future would turn their wearers into unthinking, unquestioning machines, designed solely to act and react. Perfect soldiers.
Suddenly he froze.
"Shade."
Shade stopped dead too. Shadow seemed a good nickname.
"What?"
"You hear that?" A weird whispering sound had started up. Shade frowned and listened. But suddenly the only sound was that of slapping footsteps on the rock. Something was coming for them, fast. In the time it took Shade to swear, Tovel had drawn his gun. He aimed it down the gloomy tunnel. The footsteps were getting louder, closer.
"That's no droid," Shade said quietly. He drew his own gun.
"You heard Haunt, no one's seen these droids before," Tovel snapped, keeping eyes and gun trained down the passageway. The murky green light seemed a little brighter, a little bluer. A blur of hot red, followed by a willowy yellow shape burst into view. Two women, a black and a blonde. Tovel liked the blonde one. She was pretty. Her long blonde hair streamed out behind her like a comet tail.
"Don't shoot me," she yelled, having seen them a second before her black friend. "Please!" Tovel turned now to Shade, who was staring at her - up and down and slowly - in amazement. The black girl noticed, and stepped in front of her blonde friend, glowering at Shade.
"There's a blue light," the girl said breathlessly. "And a noise, sort of hypnotic. I followed it, to this incredible place, and..." She trailed off, stayed staring at Shade's face. They all did that.
"And what?" Tovel prompted her. The girl looked at him now with wide, fearful eyes.
"I'm sorry. Please, there's something -"
"Wait." Tovel could hear the low, flat whine of weapon generators building. In a second Shadow had fallen to one knee and was blasting round after round down the tunnel to where the droid must be coming from. Clouds of white fleas exploded under each impact. The blonde girl shrieked as she was dragged towards them by the black girl in a speedy flight. They then both crouched a bit behind Shade, the black girl keeping the blonde's ears covered with her hands. Tovel crouched beside them.
"You guys hurt?" The black girl looked at up at him, her dark eyes scrutinizing him, sizing him up.
"We're fine," she answered. "But your guns are too noisy."
"You should block your own ears too," Tovel advised. Shade kept on blasting, criss-crossing the tunnel entrance, until abruptly the yellow fire faded.
"Power pack's out!" For a moment Tovel relived Shade's helpless sense of panic back at the freighter simulation, as the Kill-Droid had targeted him head-on. Then he raised his own gun and took up the barrage. Through the bolts of yellow light Tovel glimpsed burning red, caught coruscations of reflected fire in the body of something big coming out of the darkness. Shade had thrown down his rifle and released his grenade launcher from the clamp on his back. Now he aimed it down the tunnel and fired. The kickback nearly knocked him over.
The noise of the grenade impacting left Tovel half-deafened.
The tunnel mouth was incandescent for a second. Tovel blinked furiously to clear his sight. He had a blurred view of Shade gripping the launcher so tightly it seemed the skin would split over his knuckles. He fired again. Tovel heard the rumbling of rock.
"That's enough!" Tovel yelled. "You'll bring the roof down on us! We've got to get out of here!" That would be a count against Shade when they got back to base. Poor little Earthborn. He turned around to grab the girls, but the black girl had already pulled the blonde up, and was more than ready to follow.
The ground felt like it would shake itself apart.
A few metres down the tunnel he, Shade and the girls all collapsed together as the impact of several tons of rock hitting the ground behind them knocked them off their feet. Tovel choked as he breathed in dust.
"Nice work, Shade. Were you tired of walking? Wanted to block off that tunnel on purpose?" The blonde girl glowered at him.
"I'm glad this outfit's quilted."
"Who the hell are you anyway?" Shade suddenly aimed his gun at her head. The reaction was immediate. The black girl pulled off some sort of absurd twist of her body, which Tovel would imagine had broken his own spine in half had he attempted to do it. The gun was out of Shade's hands, while she sat on his back, using the barrel of the gun to choke him.
"Point that gun at Polly again, and I'll snap your neck," she growled. Shade was caught by surprise, obviously, and the blonde girl was frozen in shock. Though whether it was by Shade's pointing of the gun, or her friend's reaction to it couldn't be said.
"Wow, cool down, both of you! No reason to be like that," Tovel attempted to intermediate, and with a final pull on the gun, which made Shade gurgle, she pushed his face down into the rock and jumped off him.
"Why you-"
"Easy Shadow, they're clearly not soldiers. Just look at 'em," Tovel said. Shade studied the girl, Polly, properly: dark make-up around her eyes, a straight pointed nose that had never seen close combat, the ludicrous yellow spacesuit... She was clearly no soldier. Where the hell had she come from, and what the hell was she doing here? Even the black girl was obviously civilian. Just like Polly, her face was in its original state, no broken bones or scares. She had no make-up on, had a more natural look to her, and her spacesuit was a flattering shade of scarlet.
The two soldiers exchanged looks, before they retreated down the tunnel, out of the girls' earshot.
"Nice work," Tovel said.
"Wasted the droid, didn't I?"
"Did you?" Tovel waved back at the blocked passageway. "And what about them? Now we can't go check out their story."
"What story?" Shade scoffed. "Blue lights? Incredible places?"
"You're just pissed the black girl made a fool out of you," Tovel jeered, making Shade glare at him. "Besides, we'll get more out of them," said Tovel, "if they think we trust them." Shade nodded slowly.
"I guess so." They both looked back at the girls. Polly was sitting on the ground, with her friend talking to her. From the looks of it, she was trying to calm the frightened Polly down. She soon looked up, though, having sensed their looks.
"You' leavin' us behind now?"
"No chance of that," Tovel called back as they marched back to rejoin them. "I think our Marshal's going to be very interested to find you here. So, if she's Polly, what're you called?"
"Odie." Polly looked up.
"Please, you don't understand..." She got to her feet with the help of Odie, looking at them indignantly. "I was trying to tell you. There's some sort of countdown going on, I'm sure of it." She regarded the blocked tunnel with a gloomy expression. "And now I can't show you where it was!" Tovel nodded ruefully, though he noticed Shade showed no signs of remorse.
"What do you mean by a countdown?" Polly gesticulated worriedly with her hands.
"I... I got the feeling we haven't very long." Shade looked like he was losing patience.
"Long before what?" Odie's reaction to his tone was prompt.
"How the hell are we supposed to know? We just got here!" Tovel quickly raised his hands, in an attempt to calm them both down again. Polly did a better job of calming Odie down, obviously, as she put a hand on Odie's arm. "But it's something big." She was right; Haunt's voice, low and concerned, broke in on their conversation.
"Tovel, respond."
"Tovel here," he rapped into his wrist-comm. "Marshal, I was about to -"
"Shade with you?"
"Right here."
"Have either of you had contact with Joiks or Denni?" Tovel swapped a quizzical glance with Shade.
"No, Marshal. But we've -" Haunt cut him off.
"Get yourselves back to the bullring. We'll meet you there. Out."
"Marshal, wait," Tovel said quickly. "We've had some action here. Clash with a droid."
"Hit status?"
"Not confirmed. Rockfall came down on us. And something else. Seems we've got ourselves some civilians here." There was a pause before the voice came back as heavy as the long seconds that had passed.
"Female civilians?" Tovel looked at Polly and Odie.
"Very."
"Watch it," Odie warned, stepping in front of Polly, as though to protect her from bad looks.
"All right, watch them," Haunt instructed. "I'm coming to you, you can guide me through from the bullring. I'll be in touch."
She turned to Roba and Shel.
"Come on," she said, with a lingering look round the cavernous control room, at the bodies on the dais and the corpse slumped in its chair. "We're moving out." She led them out of the chamber, through the tunnel and into the echoing vaults beyond. In a few minutes they had reached the massive gold doors. Then Shel suddenly raised his hand, motioning them all to stop.
"Vibration," he whispered. "In the ground, do you feel it?"
"Don't feel nothing," Roba reported, unimpressed.
"He's right;" said Haunt. "And Tovel mentioned a rockfall. This whole place could be unstable." The tremor increased. With it came a deep rumbling noise from somewhere far beneath them, before both died slowly away.
"Makes sense," grunted Roba. "They've thrown everything else at us." Haunt looked daggers at the mass of tiny white dots on her scanner, and cursed.
"If we could only pinpoint our location." Roba pointed to a set of doors in the rock.
"Me and Frog came through there. Our tunnel led straight to it."
"Many of the passages must intersect," Shel remarked as they moved on. "If you knew where you were going I imagine you could navigate the tunnels quite swiftly." Haunt nodded.
"The droids could have the whole place mapped out by now." They walked on in uneasy silence until they reached the bullring.
"You two wait here as arranged," Haunt said, "let the others know what's going on."
"Marshal," Shel acknowledged curtly.
"I won't be long." She activated her wrist-comm. "All right, Tovel. Tell me how I get to you."
"The ground gets steeper here," Denni warned Joiks. The rock sloped down and away into shadows. "Darker too."
"Want me to go first?" Joiks mocked her.
"No."
"Good. Don't want you scoping my ass. Flake."
"Flake?" Denni said softly.
"Just thinking about what you said earlier." He chuckled.
"Worried?" He heard Denni scramble easily down the slope. The shadows got thicker, the darkness pressed in on him as he followed. He couldn't keep his mind focused. What good would it do him to try it on with Denni now? If he'd reported her straight away, then fair enough, but... Who cared? He slipped his hand round her waist.
"Don't think about it," he whispered.
"Shouldn't that be my line?" Denni was holding herself very still, acting casual. She didn't pull away. She still needed his support. He heard his voice, loud in the quiet tunnel.
"It's just bodies." In the blackness he sounded like a different person.
"The sets don't pick up bodies. Know how they work?" Denni took a step forward, and he took it with her. "They're powered by visual stimulus."
"So focus on the dark. Think of nothing." His breathing was getting shakier. "I done it loads of times. Sets don't pick up a thing when you've nothing visual to focus on." Denni took a deep breath and released it in a single, stone-cold second.
"Joiks," her voice slithered into his ears. "Let go of me."
"It's a rush," Joiks urged her. "I'll help you, you help me out, huh? We're safe here in the dark. Nothing can creep up on us here."
"You reckon," said Denni. He felt her tense up.
"Don't go so fast," Ben pleaded with the funny-looking frog-bird as she pushed them along the echoing tunnels that made up this place. "Can't you see, the Doctor can't keep up the pace!"
"Nonsense, nonsense," the Doctor muttered, but he clearly had too little puff left to get really indignant.
"All right," Frog said in her weird grating voice. "We rest for a minute, no more." Ben nodded.
"Thanks." It wasn't the nicest spot for a rest. Ben shivered, and only partly from the cold. This whole place was straight out of your worst nightmares. Dark, shadowy room followed dark, shadowy room, and God knew what could be lurking there. Luckily for the moment it seemed to be just fleshy insects hopping about the walls, and swarming all over the slimy, glowing ceilings.
"Fascinating," the Doctor observed, fingering some hanging strands of the slimy weed. "I wonder... has this been grown here by the architects of this place so that you can light your way... or so that something else can see you approaching?" He looked expectantly at Frog. She belched. "Tell me," the Doctor tried again more faintly, "Miss, er... Frog...?"
"Mel Narda. Sergeant." The boggle-eyes turned on Ben. "But yeah, call me Frog, honey," her voice buzzed and crackled. "Everyone else does." Asking why seemed as unnecessary as it was probably unwise. So Ben kept quiet while the Doctor got on with the big questions.
"We've been travelling for some time," the Doctor said, ignoring her. "We've become a little out of touch. What can you tell us of the, ah, rebel Schirr, hmm?"
"DeCaster and..." the name eluded Ben.
"The Ten-strong?" Frog finished for him automatically, then smiled, apparently amused. "You never heard of the Empire's most wanted?"
"Indeed I'm afraid not. Remind me, from which planet do these ten terrorists hail?"
"Idaho," Frog informed them, eyes trained on her watch. "Outer Empire."
"A planet called Idaho?" Ben spluttered. The Doctor ignored him, looked at Frog sharply.
"The Earth annexed the Schirr planet?"
"Repatriated," she qualified with a chuckle that sounded like a rusty alarm clock going off. "Fifteen years ago. Standard procedure."
"Yes, of course it is, of course it is," the Doctor muttered. "And I suppose the Schirr didn't wish to be so aggressively... repatriated, hmm?" Frog shrugged.
"What we want and what we get, honey, we none of us got a say in."
"But DeCaster and his mates want a say, right?" Ben chipped in. "Even so, ten blokes against an empire...?" Frog shook her head.
"Schirr got links with the Spooks." The Doctor raised an eyebrow.
"What links might these be?" Frog shrugged.
"Old, old links. Before the Spooks crept back to their cloud. Old, old magic. And ten's all you need to make the big rituals work."
"Rituals, not warfare?" the Doctor asked, eyes gleaming now with interest.
"People die just the same." She raised her gun, suddenly cold and threatening. "Frog don't talk too much to prisoners, honey. Break time's over. Get moving." They did; through a mighty set of doors set into the rock, along a winding, narrow tunnel, on to a large cave riddled with passages.
Then they felt the first tremor.
"Seismic activity on a planetoid as small as this?" the Doctor wondered aloud. His expression suggested he didn't find this likely. The second tremor sent them staggering into the wall.
"Getting worse!" Ben shouted.
"Soon have you tucked up tight," Frog told him. "Here's the drop zone." And she herded the two of them roughly into a circular chamber, lit with a wide blue spotlight shining down from high above. While the beam was bright and concentrated, it cast the rest of the chamber into pitch blackness. Two flexible metal ladders snaked down the ray of light.
"I imagine those lead through the asteroid's mantle and back up to the docked ship," the Doctor told Ben.
"But we can't just go and leave the girls and the TARDIS behind!" Ben hissed back, panic rising. The ground trembled beneath him once again as if in sympathy.
"Get climbing," Frog told them. The Doctor looked outraged.
"Climb up there? At my age? Preposterous, madam!"
"Yeah," Ben added, "you can't expect an old geezer to -" But Frog wasn't mucking about. She leapt nimbly into the light and caught hold of the ladder. The strength of the light obliterated most of her form, turned her into a pin-man as she scaled a few rungs. She swung out on the ladder, winked at Ben, caught hold of the quilted neckline of the Doctor's spacesuit with one hand, and hauled him off the ground. The Doctor squawked with indignation as he dangled precariously from Frog's grip. Ben stared in disbelief. Incredibly, the woman was scaling the ladder and carrying the Doctor with her.
"Ere, wait a minute!" yelled Ben.
"Climb the other ladder or I drop him," Frog called teasingly. A fresh tremor nearly knocked Ben to his knees, but he recovered and ran into the light without a second thought. A moment later he was clambering up after them.
"Hang on, Doctor," he yelled, squinting into the blue radiance at the hazy figures above. He could hear grunts of exertion from Frog, the furious fussings of the old boy as he demanded to be released:
"Madam, unhand me at once!" Then Ben cried out as something small and sharp smacked into his forehead. It was followed a few seconds later by some smaller stinging missiles and a shower of dust.
"Wait!" he shouted, blinking grit from his eyes, disorientated by the blinding light. "Frog, them tremors... they must be bringing down a rockfall or something!"
"I think I preferred us being on our own," Polly muttered from Odie's side. Odie smiled humourlessly.
"How's that?"
"We might've found Ben and the Doctor like that. Now we're going nowhere: prisoners of space soldiers, stuck inside a big rock..." Odie looked up at their captors. Tovel, the bigger and dishier of the two men, mumbled directions into his sleeve to their marshal. The one called Shade pointed his gun towards them, and had warned Odie against trying anything this time. There was something wrong with his face. It was peppered with dark markings, like black seeds were trying to sprout from under his skin. The region around his eyes seemed the worst affected, though the eyes themselves glinted a brilliant green. Polly was staring at him.
"You want to know what's wrong with my face," Shade remarked. His voice was hoarse.
"No!" Polly felt herself blushing. "I'm just trying to keep my eyes off your gun, that's all." Shade shrugged and smiled.
"It's OK. I don't mind." His voice kept the same gravelly tone, and she realized he must always sound that way. Under different circumstances, it might be quite sexy. "I was clearing some kids out of a war zone. There was this mine..." He shrugged. "I had to shield the children. My face caught a load of the shrapnel." Odie winced at the thought.
"Were you all right?" she asked. Shade looked at her, obviously not having expected her to ask that question.
"They had to stick me in a cryo-tank. Saved my life. But they froze the damage in with me." He raised his free hand, felt the little bumps and ridges. "The shrapnel's a part of me now. They offered me a new face entirely but I decided to stick with the old one. Every day... I never forget the scum that did this to me."
"You were in a war, then?" she asked.
"This was the big Schirr raid, two years ago," Shade said casually. "DeCaster and his wannabe Morphieans, they tried to take out the Pentagon sub-router on New Jersey."
"New Jersey?" Polly seized upon about the only words she'd understood. "New Jersey in the United States?" Shade stared at her now like she was mad.
"No." Polly jumped as a burly, hard-faced woman strode round the corner. Armed to the teeth, dressed in the same futuristic combat fatigues as Tovel and Shade, this could only be their Marshal Haunt. The woman fixed Polly in her sights and zeroed in without hesitation.
"So." Haunt swung up her gun and nudged it against Polly's temple. Before Polly could stop her, Odie had swivelled her behind her, and faced down Haunt in her stead. Polly was starting to get dizzy whenever Odie did that. Haunt seemed unimpressed. "Here you are, just like your friends said. I suppose it's been you leaving little markers at the tunnel mouths?"
"You've met the Doctor and Ben?" Polly asked, attempting to look at Haunt from behind Odie, but Odie always moved with her, shielding her as best she could. "Are they all right?" Haunt snorted.
"I don't know what they are." The gun barrel was digging into Odie's head so hard, she winced and shut her eyes tight. Polly was getting sick to the stomach at the sight. "Perhaps you can tell me?" Polly wished the ground would swallow her up. She scrunched up her eyes tightly as she tried to think up an answer that might satisfy this maniac, before she pulled the trigger on Odie.
"We've... We've been travelling," she said.
"Through the Morphiean Quadrant?" Tovel looked at her suspiciously.
"She and her friends here claim they're refugees," Haunt told her soldiers.
"That's what I meant!" said Polly. "Please, could you take me to them?" Suddenly the ground beneath her started to shudder. Polly cancelled her earlier wish.
"We should move," Tovel warned. He shot a look at Shade. "We must've weakened this whole area with all that firepower."
"It doesn't feel like a tremor." Haunt looked around her, suspicious, as if the answer to the puzzle was somehow staring her in the face, mocking her. The force on the gun eased, and Polly heard Odie breathe a sigh of relief. The tremors, meanwhile, seemed to be getting worse. Cracks and fissures were opening in the walls and the roof. Streams of black choking dust seeped from them. Polly wondered how far she and Odie'd get if they tried to make a run for it past Haunt, and decided she'd rather take her chances with falling boulders. Haunt's gaze settled on Tovel.
"What do you make of it?"
"Vibration." His head was cocked slightly to one side, as if listening to something none of them could hear. "Like something powering-up."
"The countdown," Odie hissed. "Something is going to happen, and you're too busy pointing guns the wrong way." Haunt ignored her.
"All right, let's join the others." She looked the two girls up and down. "I can see I'm not going to learn anything from you." How about the importance of moisturiser and dieting for starters, you bullying bitch, thought Polly. If only she could be safe with Ben back in the TARDIS, listening to the engines grind and grate, leaving this horrible place far behind them... A thought struck her as they were shoved along the passage in the direction Haunt had come from.
"These tremors," she said, turning to face them. "I know what they remind me of." Odie looked at her, confused.
"What?" asked Haunt, looking as if she already regretted asking.
"Our spaceship," Polly said, "when it's getting ready for take-off. Only a thousand times stronger."
"A spaceship?" Shade echoed in disbelief. "Inside an asteroid?"
"It's not so strange, is it?" Tovel muttered, a surprise ally. "That's where ours is." Haunt, for her part, said nothing. But before Polly was pushed onwards unsteadily through the rumbling tunnel, she at least had the satisfaction of seeing the marshal's face darken into sudden concern.
The tremor's had activated a minor earthquake by the drop zone, where the Doctor, Ben and Frog had gotten clear as quickly as possible. The Doctor had left first, with Ben helping the injured Frog to safety. When they reached the Doctor at the edge of the drop zone, far away from any potential rockfall, the two of them fell to their knees, breathing heavily.
Frog wiped the back of her hand across her bloody face and looked up at Ben.
"Why'd you help me?" Ben looked away, embarrassed.
"Why wouldn't I?"
"You could've escaped," Frog said. Then she showed her teeth in a gory smile. "Could've tried to, anyway."
"We couldn't leave you to die," the Doctor muttered.
"Well, you're still my prisoners," Frog warned them, still dabbing at her nose with her palm. "When this quake dies down we go straight back up them ladders."
"You're joking!" Ben angrily gestured to the rumbling drop zone. "You want that little lot on top of you?" Frog shrugged.
"The ship'll be safe. It has to be."
"Even if that proves true, we have no way of getting to it," the Doctor said tetchily. "I fear the control room will be the only place of safety. This is no natural earthquake, of that I am sure. It's... That is to say..." His face clouded, and Ben watched him struggle for words that were lost to him like an actor drying up on stage. "It's something else," he concluded lamely.
"We'll join the others," Frog decided. "And I don't think the marshal's gonna to be too glad to see you..." As she walked off, Ben noticed she was limping slightly. There was a vivid gash in her calf where a rock or something had ripped through her suit, but it looked like the fabric was digging in hard around the wound.
"You all right?" he asked. "You've hurt your leg."
"Ain't you a bleeding heart," Frog muttered. "The suit's taking care of it." The Doctor perked up automatically.
"Intelligent armour," he told Ben. "If the soldier is wounded, the fabric compresses to staunch any bleeding." Frog only grunted as she herded them both along the tunnels.
"Gotta get back to Haunt," she warbled. "Gotta get back."
"All right, all right," Ben complained over his shoulder as Frog's rifle butt dug into his spine for the tenth time, forcing him along the tunnel. "We're moving as fast as we can." She didn't meet his gaze, instead staring suspiciously all around them. The tremors had clearly shaken her in more ways than one.
"Gotta get back," she said again.
"As I've told you already, Miss Frog," said the Doctor, marching along beside Ben. "You will be showing your Marshal considerable initiative if you'll just take us back to the control centre. I must examine the instruments there." Frog didn't answer, so Ben did.
"Thought everything was dead in there."
"Dormant, perhaps," the Doctor muttered. He looked sweaty and pale-faced. "A sleeping giant."
"What," said Ben puzzled, "and we've gone and woken 'im up-?" Even as he spoke something pushed out from an opening in the tunnel wall beside him, grabbing for his throat. Ben yelped in surprise. His attacker spun him round. It was a big bloke, with a broken nose and wild dark eyes, wearing a headband like Frog's and yelling in his face.
Over the din and the pressure in his ears he heard the Doctor ordering Frog to do something, and the harsh rattle of Frog shouting. But she wasn't warning Ben's attacker off. She sounded like she was trying to calm the bloke down, as best as she could with her cartoon accent. When that didn't work, she kicked the man in the knackers. He collapsed backwards, falling on his kit bag.
"Strewth," Ben gasped, whooping down lungfuls of the dank air. "Wish you'd kept your mouth shut about them giants, Doctor." The Doctor didn't respond, crouching arthritically over the groaning man on the floor. "Who is this fellow?"
"Just Joiks," Frog replied. Ben got the impression that belting the man in the jewels hadn't been much of a chore. Frog gestured the Doctor out of the way with her rifle. "What's up, Joiks? This place made you crazy?"
"Denni," Joiks muttered. "She was attacked, in the dark. Taken away." Ben thought the bloke sounded a bit South African. He recalled now that Joiks and Denni were the two Haunt hadn't been able to contact. "I reckon she's dead."
"Dead?" Frog's bulging eyes narrowed.
"Something came at us in the dark. I tried to hold on to her, but whoever it was just snatched her away." Joiks glowered up at Ben. "Must've been this one. What did you do with her?"
"I ain't done nothing to no one since I got here!" Ben protested. Frog pulled Joiks back to his feet.
"You sure she's dead?"
"Maybe," Joiks said, apparently without irony.
"Try 'maybe not'," Frog said flatly. "Whatever happened to Denni, it wasn't either of these two. They were with me." Joiks looked at her like she was mad. Then he scowled at Ben and the Doctor and clenched his big fists.
"Who the hell are 'these two', anyway?"
"These four, you mean." Ben shut his eyes and groaned.
"Terrific," he muttered. "Marshal Misery's come back to haunt us." Her words sank in. Four?
"Ben!"
"Doctor!"
Now Ben spun round in disbelief. Stood bright and beaming next to Haunt was Polly. She was flanked by a right array of bruisers, and her daffodil-bright spacesuit was covered in dirt, but that aside she looked perfect as ever. He rushed to bundle her up into his arms, and Polly ran forward to meet him, managing to snag the Doctor and Odie into the clumsy embrace as well. Ben gently pulled away from Polly.
"Good to see you."
"You're not hurt, either of you?" the Doctor asked. Odie smiled, her face more innocent than Polly had seen it all day. She shook her head, wordlessly. "What happened to you two?" But before Polly could answer, Haunt put a gun to her head, with a look that warned her to keep quiet.
"Frog, why aren't these two locked up in the ship?" Ben wasn't sure it was possible for anyone to look more peed off than she was. While Frog started to explain, Ben took in the figures lined up behind her. He was definitely feeling like the odd man out around here. Maybe he should start standing on tiptoes. The two soldiers who'd marched her along with Haunt looked the type you wouldn't want to tangle with. One of them seemed to have weird tribal markings all over his face, which made his otherwise undistinguished features far more formidable.
Behind them stood Roba and Shel and two more soldiers, a stocky, sly-looking man and a thin girl who would've been dead tasty if someone hadn't tried to cut her red hair with a lawnmower. All of them carried backpacks and wore the weird headbands. It was strange, Ben decided. The soldiers could only be around his age, but they seemed somehow so much older. He thought about making a run for it back to the TARDIS, but not for long. Outnumbered two to one, with no weapons and the Doctor's stamina to contend with, how far could they get? Suddenly it seemed that everyone started talking at once.
The soldiers burst out into angry, frightened discussions, with several dark looks in Ben's direction. Haunt began questioning Joiks, whose answers brought fresh mutterings in the ranks. The bloke with the tattooed face looked especially gutted. And then Frog was pulling Ben roughly away from Polly's arms. He yelled at her to let him go, a complete waste of breath. The Doctor was gripping the girls firmly, barely managing to keep Odie in place, as Roba and the nimble redhead closed in on them, guns raised. He was keeping her close to him but hushing her questions and protests, taking in each exchange around him with swift movements of his head, like some big worried owl.
Then the biggest tremor yet practically took them all off their feet.
When the rumbling and the vibration finally began to die down, Ben could hear a new noise beneath it. A weird, haunting two-tone melody, a ghost's idea of an emergency siren. As one by one they heard the sound, so each person in the passage fell silent.
"It's coming from the control centre," the Doctor declared imperiously. "Marshal Haunt, might I suggest we go there at once?" She pushed past the Doctor, breaking into a run, Shel at her side and most of the squad falling in behind her.
"Looks like you're getting what you want, old man," said Roba. He started hustling the Doctor along after them, while the silent redhead steered Polly, protesting noisily, by the arm. The man with the tribal markings was steering Odie by holding a gun to her head. Frog motioned that Ben should follow them. They trooped back through the vaulted cavernous chambers and the flea-ridden ceilings, past the statues and the slates, the ghostly alarm growing louder, more penetrating. And with it, something else.
A resonant hum growing in power.
"Let go of me, would you?" Polly snapped to the skinny woman who was clearly a lot stronger than she looked. "You're breaking my arm."
"And you're breaking my heart." The skinny woman's cultured voice was like cut glass. She propelled Polly into the control centre.
"Easy on her, Lindey," said Shade.
"The delicate flower's making you wilt is she, Shade?" the dark-haired, neat-looking man inquired.
"She's a civilian, Creben, and there's no need to mistreat her," Shade said coolly. But he couldn't hide the faint blush beneath his blackened cheeks.
"Says the man who's giving me marks with that barrel," Odie said annoyed, and she and Shade exchanged dirty looks. Looking away, Polly's heart leapt as she saw the TARDIS, just where they had left it. But she caught sight of the crowd of corpses on the platform, and quickly averted her eyes.
Unlike everyone else. Shade and Tovel, and the man with the broken nose she'd glimpsed earlier, had all noticed the horrible display themselves, and were staring in disbelief. The alarms grew ever louder. Finally Lindey let go of Polly's arm, but only so she could cover her own ears. The noise was almost overpowering now. Creben turned, pale-faced, dragged his gaze over to Tovel.
"All this is Schirr design, isn't it?" he yelled. Tovel simply nodded. Then he jogged over to one of the consoles built into the wall. Shade and Creben looked at each other uneasily. Frog and the man with the broken nose stood close together, apparently unmoved by the commotion. Her whole head ringing with the sound, Polly looked round in panic for the Doctor. Only when the black man stepped aside could she see him standing, head cocked to one side, absolutely still.
"I tried to tell them, Doctor," Polly shouted. "Before, there was a noise, a light, a vibration..."
"Quiet," Haunt snapped. She shouted over to Tovel: "Can you make sense of the controls?"
"The girl was right," Tovel yelled back. "I think some sort of take-off's been initiated, that the engines are starting up." Polly noticed the Doctor steeple his fingers and smile almost smugly at the news. His eyes were like dark buttons, gleaming in the oily light.
"Take-off?" echoed the man with the broken nose. "That's garbage. We're in the middle of a rock, how can we be taking off?"
"A section of this complex has been designed to break free of the main planetoid," explained the Doctor impatiently. The oriental man nodded like he understood.
"Those earlier tremors signalled the primary phase of the separation." The Doctor nodded vaguely and bustled over to Tovel.
"Can you compute where we are going?" Polly couldn't hear the rest of his words over the scary whistling of the alarm. But she caught Lindey's breathy voice close in her ear.
"What is this place? Where the hell did nine dead Schirr spring up from?" Polly frowned, and forced herself to look again at the corpse in the chair and the bodies on the dais, to count them properly.
She screamed. Though the piercing notes of the alien klaxon had reached their climax, everyone in the chamber whirled round to face her.
"Look!" she shouted. "The bodies. The alien bodies. There were ten of them when we arrived, now there's only nine. One of them's gone!"
Dum-dum-dum-duuuuum! I won't lie, I really liked this book. It was filled with adventure, tension, mystery and nothing was ever as it seemed. And somehow, we end up seeing more of the Doctor's mind in it too :D I highly recommend it. (Remember, even if the chapters are ridiculously long, I always cut out quite a bit from my book-based-chapters)
Then, until next time!
