Captain Viner had heard many strange rumours about UNIT during his still brief career in the European Rapid Reaction (Special Defence) Force, and he had heard quite a lot about its Sector Two Commanding Officer, Brigadier Winifred Bambera from his own CO, Brigadier Martin Jones. Rumour had it that 'The Brig'- Sir Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart, the Prime Minister's Special Advisor on Extra-terrestrial Counter Intrusion Measures, had once asked concerning her: "Good man, is he?" Viner was unlikely to make such a faux pas, but none the less his first sight of the current head of UNIT's most active brigade was one which surprised him. For one thing, he'd expected her to be surrounded by crowds of the fly-like journalists- those few that had been allowed on to the ferry, who were now getting thoroughly underfoot in their efforts to make good on their advantage. Still, in the midst of the hubbub of the ship's lounge Bambera sat quietly, one hand turning the pages of the Times, laid out on the table in front of her, the other idly toying with a heavy sword. It was this latter which appeared to be keeping the journalists at a respectful distance Viner approached her, and came to attention with a salute. The Brigadier glanced up, questioningly.
"Captain Peter Viner, EU Special Defence Force Liason, sir." She nodded.
"Sir, Captain." He sank into the chair opposite her own. He looked at the sword. It looked like an ordinary broadsword, but Bambera was moving it through the air one-handedly without any apparent difficulty, and more to the point a thin red laser guidance beam was flashing from the point, tracing an arc through the air- the arc the swordtip would follow to strike its intended target.
"A laser-guided sword... very esoteric." He looked at her. "One of your toys from the Glasshouse?" Bambera's face twitched. Viner had noticed that. The Glasshouse- UNIT's supposedly top secret repository of captured or abandoned alien technology was a secret known only to the upper echelons of the Government, UNIT senior officers, the personnel working there, and everyone else who had read any of the many huge tabloid exposes on the subject over the years. It was said that there were even postcards featuring photographs from the UFO hangar on sale in the nearby village's shop. None the less, mention the word 'glasshouse' in public near a UNIT officer, and they'd invariably jump.
Bambera shook her head.
"It was a wedding present." Viner decided not to follow that line of questioning any further. The ferry had been underway for over two hours now, after a short delay at Poole, caused by the late arrival of some scientist or other, and the Captain was finding the journey rather tiresome.
"So, I gather UNIT didn't do too well at keeping a lid on this business?"
Bambera scowled.
"Apparently one of the men who found the creatures telephoned people across two continents, contacted every newspaper he could think of with the story, and called up just about very UFO-watch society across England and France." She swore. "Not to mention putting big photos of the things out on the internet. We've managed to kill that site for now, but if we have to go containment on this we're in real trouble."
"Well, from what I understand neither of them have ever signed the Official Secrets Act, so there's not much you can do to them."
Bambera grimaced.
"God save us from irresponsible civilians." She was still seething over Mr de Gris-nez' e-mail. He had, apparently upon the wishes of his friend, the reverend Joseph Andwell, alerted as many people outside the military as possible to the existence of the 'dragons', just so that "You people won't be able to hide anything from us if you decide to slaughter them." She wondered if Mr de Gris-nez would have appreciated it if she'd let him hear the Cybermen's side of the story after the '86 incursion. She would be quite willing, at the moment, to load him on to the next space shuttle and send him out to wherever the Cybermen were lurking these days and let them explain the situation to him.
"He does have a point." A man in a blue suit and dark trenchcoat leant over her shoulder, reading the print out with some amusement. "I'm afraid UNIT does have a bit of a reputation for the genocide of anything green." Bambera looked up at him sharply.
"And you are?" The man hesitated a moment, then darted one hand forward. Somehow she found him to be holding her sword in one hand, and shaking hands with him with the hand that had been holding her sword a second ago.
"Charles Mortimer." The name rattled off his tongue, and - without invitation- he threw himself back into the seat between her and the tall, fair haired captain.
"Mortimer..." she thought a moment. "You're the one who turned up late, aren't you? My duty officer at the dock held up the launch. He said you had priority clearance from the Space Defence Department," - she shot an accusing look at Captain Viner- "and Sir Alastair had told him to hold the ship for you." Mortimer nodded.
"And what is your field of expertise, exactly?" He smiled, leaning back and rubbing his index finger on what looked like a bullet scar on one temple. The stocky man pushed back his untidy mop of brown hair and peered at her for a moment from under impossibly bushy eyebrows which seemed to meet in the middle.
"I'm interested in things." Mortimer turned to Viner. "You, for instance," he thought a moment. "Captain Peter Viner. I've seen several of your troops about the place amongst the usual UNIT clutter. ESDF, is that right?" He shook his head. "It doesn't scan as well."
Viner nodded. "We're the Space Defence division of the EU Rapid Reaction Force. When we're fully operational we'll be taking over some of UNIT's duties in the EU states." Mortimer sighed, interrupting.
"Two of them... I didn't know when I was well off." Brigadier Bambera gave him a strange look then, a sort of horrified almost recognition. Mortimer went on.
"So you'll have seen UNIT's files..." he mused. "Tell me what you think?" Viner glanced at Bambera. He didn't know anything about the man, and he seemed to be making spying into an art form. Bambera had folded her arms, and was staring at Dr Mortimer rather nervously. She caught Viner's eye and nodded, almost in resignation. He shrugged.
"Well, I suppose equal parts horror, delight and disbelief. You feel like your life's suddenly became a game of Space Invaders." He thought a moment. "There's still some things in there I find it hard to swallow, even now. This business with the 'Doctor', for one. Apparently back in the seventies the Brig used to have an alien working on his science staff." He laughed. "Like that 'Slimer' character in "The Real Ghostbusters", I suppose." Mortimer spluttered, his thick eyebrows raising and his eyeballs bulging forwards.
"That's interesting," the man remarked, interlacing his fingers. "By the way, is it true what I've always heard about your ancestors picking fleas off each other as a greeting, human?" Bambera's groan was audible. Mortimer turned to her, taking a much creased grey trilby hat that appeared to have been used for origami experiments at some time in the past from his pocket and setting it on his head for the sole purpose of doffing it respectfully to her.
"Winifred, how wonderful to see you again."
Mike watched the approaching ferry through a pair of binoculars he'd borrowed from the UNIT sentry. He supposed they were under house arrest- well, in face more under island arrest, the entire island community cut off from the outside world and urged to stay indoors as much as possible. As one of two human/dragon liason officers, he and Andwell had been granted a bit more freedom, mainly because he'd suggested that their currently placid discovery might well consider roasting every soldier on the island if they were locked up. About forty-five minutes away. It was time to go and talk to the dragons.
He handed the binoculars back to the sentry and headed up the harbour road. The whole idea of talking with the beasts at all was something he could only accept by promising his brain that he'd make time for culture shock later. When he'd faced the creature on the cliff edge the night before last terror and disbelief had paralysed him, he'd stared the creature in the eye and waited for death. All that had happened was that the dragon had said 'hello'.
He hadn't understood it at first, hadn't recognised the word spoken in the dragon's great rumbling voice, so after a moment, her voice piqued with a slight confusion, the massive beast had spoken again.
"Hello." Her long neck had wavered and her head turned towards Andwell. "I am saying it proper?"
"Properly," the vicar had noted.
"Properly," she had repeated. He had nodded. Finally, Mike had spoken.
"You can... you can speak our language?"
"I taught it to them. They can learn incredibly quickly." The vicar had sounded proud.
"Where do they come from?" Mike had addressed Andwell, but it was the dragon who had answered.
"We do not know."
"No information about their origins at all?" The Doctor was poring over the reports from Herm.
"None that they're willing to tell us, anyway," Bambera confirmed. "When we arrive I may just have to be a bit more persuasive." The Doctor looked up, and suddenly all hint of foolishness was gone from his eyes. She'd seen a few photographs of the Master, the Doctor's old nemesis, taken during their feud during the seventies. She'd often wondered at the difference between them, the cold magnetic power of one and the warm, self deprecating humour in the eyes of the other. Now though, in the Doctor's face there was no warmth, only an impersonal, almost uncontestable force of will.
"You will do nothing of the kind." A slight bitterness crept into his voice, and his eyes became shadowed. "I will not have it fall apart again." He flung himself back in the chair and shot her a wide grin. "But you were only speaking hypothetically, weren't you." The Doctor, what she thought of the Doctor, was back, even if he had changed so much. "Now then..." he examined a photograph of the dragon. "You say these creatures can speak?" Bambera nodded. The Doctor peered more closely at the photograph and frowned, shaking his head.
"What is it?" Viner took a similar photograph of the creature and studied it. The Doctor pointed at the dragon's mouth.
"Your average household pet can understand some of the more basic concepts and phonemes of English, even aside from tonal recognition" the Doctor claimed, "and would probably do more if you lavished the same level of training on it as you do your own race, but you'd be waiting a million years for your cat to answer you in English. Concepts don't equate across species' languages, and even given that it's not difficult for an advanced race to learn to translate them- your people do it all the time, these creatures have the same physical problem..." He flexed his jaw and lips, rolling them back and twisting them back and forth. "They can't do this. A cat is simply physically incapable of vocalising a properly formed labial consonant, and so are these 'dragons'."
Viner shook his head.
"You're assuming they formulate sounds the same way we do." he replied. The Doctor gave him a surprised look.
"That's good thinking." He scratched his nose. "But there's still the problem of origin. There's no creature even remotely resembling them anywhere in your galaxy or, to the best of my knowledge in the surrounding Local Group... if these things are extra-terrestrial they'd have had to have broken Durantho's Limit to get here in this time-frame."
"Durantho's Limit?" Viner asked. Bambera looked at him warningly. She'd learned from bitter experience that asking for explanations from the Doctor normally left you more confused than you were to start with. The Doctor grunted, tapping a pen against his lips.
"Speed of light for the ambitious. Hyperspace reduces distance by a vast degree, but you're still anchored in space- time. Equally there's a limit upon how tightly you can curve space in wormhole or space warp travel. Travel still takes time. Durantho's limit is the distance which, if you'd exceeded it would mean that, in the time-frame you currently occupy, if you've reached the destination, you would have had to have started your journey before the universe began." He sighed. "Only someone with a space-time craft could have breached it, and the boundary limitations on ours, and the Daleks' too, as far as I'm aware, are rather less than Durantho's limit in space anyway... no, I don't believe those creatures are extra- terrestrial.."
Bambera looked at the photographs.
"I'd thought they might be Skarasen." The Doctor laughed.
"Skarasen? Flying Skarasen?" He shook his head. "You helped deal with that nest in the Australian Outback, didn't you? To get a Skarasen calf into the air you'd need a very, very large catapult." He paused. "Trust me, I know."
"So you're suggesting that they've always been here?" Bambera looked sceptical. "Creatures in deep hibernation, like the Silurians?" She checked her manifest. "If there's a Silurian nest here I might have to call for reinforcements." The Doctor's eyes blazed. He murmured something. "What was that, Doctor?"
"If that did happen to be the explanation, Brigadier, which, incidentally, I rather doubt, then you should probably know that I will not help you, and indeed will do everything in my power to thwart any offensive military action you take." He looked at her challengingly. "I hope I make myself clear. In that particular squabble, I'm neutral."
Bambera stared at him coolly for a moment. "In the end," she said calmly, "you might find you have as much a stake in the human race and our world as any of the rest of us."
Viner coughed, to break the silence. "It's possible they could be unconnected with the Silurians, isn't it? I mean, some other race or other that just went to sleep...?" The Doctor beamed at him, all darkness washed from his face in an instant. Viner found it hard to keep pace with the man. He seemed to fly from the borders of rage to a childish glee in seconds. It did not indicate a stable mind.
"They went to sleep many years ago..." The Doctor smiled at some private joke. "It's certainly one hypothesis. My main problem with it is that..." He stopped, as a klaxon sounded two short blasts and the PA came on. A voice, muffled and distorted, crackled over the tannoy.
"Would Brigadier Bambera and Captain Viner report to the Bridge immediately, please. Brigadier Bambera and Captain Viner to the Bridge." The voice sounded nervous, almost in shock. The two soldiers exchanged glances and stood up, eliciting great interest amongst the scientists and pressmen. The Doctor carefully returned his pen to his breast pocket and rose to his feet, quietly following the pack of journalists that had formed around the Brigadier as she walked towards the exit.
"And then woke up with a brand new... what?" he asked himself, quietly.
"Oh bloody hell!" Gwen tore the note from Dr Smith's door and screwed it up. "Thanks for letting me know."
"Is there a problem?" She turned quickly- guiltily at being caught in such a childish temper tantrum. Philip lounged on the stairs behind her.
"I thought I left you up in my room to get changed for the banquet tonight?" He nodded, indicating his somewhat crushed suit.
"And so I have."
"That was quick... and how'd you find me, anyway?" He laughed.
"You pointed out the staircase on our way in." She relaxed. Philip had always found it easy to unsettle people, never being quite where you expected him to be in a room, moving quietly from one place to another when you turned your back for a second, picking up on things you'd forgotten you'd told him and then surprising you with his own knowledge. He took the note from her, smoothed it out and read it, a smile pulling up one side of his mouth.
"Slay or save... that's our hero all right." He relaxed, and grinned at Gwen, suddenly seeming her junior. "So that's the great doctor's study is it?" he asked, jabbing a thumb at the door. Gwen nodded.
"I wish you could see some of the things he's got in there, actually. All sorts of junk he's collected over the years."
"Oh yes?" He looked curiously at his sister. "Anything in particular?"
"Well, there's some bits he says are part of a broken Cray- you know, the supercomputers?" Philip nodded, and she continued. "And this collection of odd keys... and especially that telephone box- the Police Box I told you about."
"Ah yes." Philip's eyes were not like hers. Even when they'd been young, those pale grey eyes had set him apart. A small part of her mind questioned the eagerness she felt to show him the room, but the larger part dismissed it. Dr Smith was an eccentric, and her brother was always interested in the unusual. Idly, she scratched at something itching on the back of her hand.
The itching spread to her face. Small, hard, chitinous silverfish crawled out on to her face from inside her tear ducts and she let out a choked sob of disgust, flinging her hands to her eyes and then drawing them down again to look on her work. Her brother leant over her shoulder. He shook his head. "No, that's wrong." He pointed at the error. "Things would flow much better if the door was unlocked." She looked at the offending passage and nodded, taking a rubber to what she had already written and adjusting it. As she wrote, tiny hands reached round from the pages of the future and doodled little pen- and-ink dragons in the margins of the present day.
Gwen rubbed at her eyes. Philip was watching her curiously.
"Are you all right?"
She shook her head. "Another one of those flashes... I'll be fine. I'm probably just coming down with a cold or something. She felt a moment's dizziness and leant on the door to keep her balance. The latch slipped and she fell into the room.
Philip dashed in after her. She'd fallen to her knees, but beyond a worrying lightheadedness, felt fine. He helped her to her feet. She felt her face flame with embarrassment. All right, it was mostly Dr Smith's fault for not locking his door properly, but even so, breaking into a tutor's room like that...
"Come on, we've got to get out of here." Philip looked around, then grinned at her.
"Well, you said you'd like to show me the Police Box." He pointed. The box stood in one corner of Dr Smith's study, like an ersatz cupboard. The first time Gwen had seen it, she'd had to ask what it was. The lettering above the doorway and round the other three sides had been almost erased by the same fire that had blackened the rest of the shell, the roof was splintered, and the light on top that would have guided one to it in the darkness was smashed. One door was missing, the interior a dull cavern that seemed almost to repel light, the other unmarked and clean, and obviously far newer than the rest of the box. Gwen nodded.
"I think he's restoring it or something. He's put that door on since I started having tutorials with him. Never see any sort of DIY stuff lying around though. Philip ran his hand down the blistered paintwork at one corner.
"I don't think you repair one of these in quite that way..." he murmured. "It's more a question of feeding it power and teaching it to repair itself."
Gwen shook her head. They couldn't just stand around here poking through Dr Smith's things. If one of the porters came up... Philip was peering into the gloom. "What does he keep in here?"
"I... I don't know. He's never let me have a look inside. Nothing, I shouldn't think, if he is restoring it." The man shook his head, a smug smile on his features.
"Oh no, there's something behind the door." He beckoned, and despite herself Gwen found herself walking over to join him. "And what?" he continued. "A key. The key to turn all the world."
Well, that's got the basics of the characters established, I hope, after the set-up of chapter one. I'd be especially intrigued to hear comments on the new 'Ninth' Doctor. Yes, I'm deliberately making him as smug and arrogant as the character envelope allows...