TWELVE
A gentle shake of the shoulder woke the Doctor from a comfortable doze. Blinking awake, he saw the dark, warm features of Masha, holding a bowl of stew.
'From the communal cooking in the square,' she explained. 'Eat, you need to keep your strength up.' A big slice of black bread accompanied the stew. 'Also, I feel that there is trouble coming.'
'Children of the Night?'
Masha shook her head, then shrugged.
'No, or not simply them. Oh, I wish you never gave me second sight!' she complained, dragging a hand through her hair.
'It was always there,' explained the Doctor, gently. 'Circumstances only brought it out. I take it that you have six sisters, and six aunts?' He bit back an undiplomatic laugh at her startled response. Obvious, really, that she'd be the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter.
Masha eyed him warily.
'A God-fearing person would make the sign of the cross before talking to you. You know things about people that they themselves have yet to discover!'
The Doctor gestured in embarassment. True, true; Jan Hus had told him pretty much the same thing five hundred years ago.
'There! Helicopters. What did I tell you? Trouble, come to visit,' declared Masha.
Indeed, the sound of rotors could be heard in the darkness, coming in from the south. The Doctor stopped breathing in order to hear better, pitching his head first to one side, then to the other.
'Three of them,' he muttered, barely aware of Masha listening at his elbow. With a few lanky strides he reached a window looking over the town square, threw it open and stopped dead in astonishment.
The formal array of trees, lamp-posts, cobbles and benches had given way to a serried array of erect telephone poles, chainsawed tree-stumps and an overlying large-scale network of cables, suspended from the telephone poles. Bright exposed metal glinted in the light of surviving lamps, metal exposed at the crux of cables in the giant grid over Trevilho's town square.
Impossible! Yet – it has been achieved. I was asleep for longer than I realised! he belaboured himself.
Outside, the rotor wash came and went with unpredictable rapidity.
'Stand ready!' called a voice in the square outside.
The Doctor, despite his disregard of military matters, realised that the helicopters could no longer land in the town square thanks to the telephone poles and cable network. As good a deterrent as anyone could have wished for. In fact, better than the anti-invasion hop-poles he'd helped with before the failure of Operation Sealion.
'If I'm here, then you must be at risk, wouldn't you say?' asked a nervous Masha. Outside, the noise of helicopter rotors sank to a lower level as their pilots looked for and found level landing ground.
The Doctor looked out of the window apprehensively. Yes, he was at risk. So were several tens of millions of human beings at the moment.
'So are the people in those helicopters, whoever they are. What can they be doing?'
Suiting action to words, he dashed downstairs to the town hall steps, just before a surprisingly sober-looking Colonel Stefan also put in an appearance.
'Nobody called me to inform or approve this,' frowned the officer. 'Devil take them, what are they playing at!'
Masha came panting up behind them, pointing breathlessly over at the far side of the square. A dozen paratroopers came pounding over the cobbles, led by a pistol-wielding Captain, heading directly for the town hall.
'Quick. Must have rappelled down,' grunted Stefan, discreetly hiding his pistol. Three helicopters?
Captain Bezobrazhov had indeed rapelled down from the hovering Mil-8 helicopter with his men, sticking to the instructions delivered from Chairman Grechko personally – the helicopters not to land except to take on the prisoners, minimal contact with the townsfolk, who could be considered hostile, shoot to kill on sight if any "unidentified hostiles" appeared. The Chairman told him that the unidentified hostiles would be immediately obvious if they turned up.
The Captain was as ruthless and brutal as Colonel Stefan, but with a lot less imagination and ability – two reasons he was still a Captain. He displayed one talent above all others – blind obedience to orders, which dictated that the deserter Stefan and the spy codenamed "The Doctor" be detained and brought back to secure cells at Chkalevsky.
The first problem encountered in his mission were the obstructions in Trevilho's town square, which prevented the helicopters from landing there. Ideally he wanted two infantry sections protecting a third, which would capture the targets, all over and done in less than a minute.
Instead of which the twelve man team were rappelled to the debris zone outlying Trevilho, the two other helicopters remaining on patrol, making giant figure-of-eights, machine-guns pointing from open doorways. Instructions were that they remained as cover at one hundred and five hundred metres. The overflight and patrolling activity inevitably warned everyone that soldiers were due, making the Captain insist on speed if they had forfeited surprise.
His first thought on arriving in the town square was how crowded it was; people clustered everywhere, cooking, drinking, playing a mournful balalaika; a ragged khaki tent over to one side, a very battered BTR in the middle, and everywhere wooden poles erected to hold up a giant net of cabling.
'Town hall at the double,' he called over his shoulder, having to skirt civilians.
That led to the second problem. Normally Russian civilians would keep out of the way of the military, most especially a section of paratroopers on a special mission. Not these civilians. No, these insolent civilians remained stolidly in place, forcing the Captain to weave about them, losing more time. Hostile glances were directed at him and nearly everyone seemed to be armed, with shotguns and hunting rifles, or AK47's and old sub-machine guns. Another reason for avoiding conflict if possible.
Luck shone briefly upon him when the section went loping up the town hall steps. Colonel Stefan stood there, alongside a tall white-haired stranger who fitted the description of The Doctor.
'These men are under arrest!' shouted Captain Bezobrazhov, levelling his pistol at the two men, who seemed to be surprised by the speed of his actions. A woman loitering in the background was warned off with the waggle of gun-barrels.
'Aha. Bezobrazhov. They couldn't find anyone smarter? I'm almost offended,' snorted Colonel Stefan, before Bezobrazhov struck him smartly over the temple with his gun-butt.
'Stop that!' snapped The Doctor, receiving only a cold glare from the captain. Grechko had been insistent that The Doctor must not be harmed, at all, which kept his insolent skin intact for the moment.
'What on earth are you playing at, man!' asked The Doctor, failing to get any reply. He glanced over the square and realised that the lone spy left in Trevilho must have despatched news of the shield under construction.
'Of course! They want the shield!' he exclaimed, making Stefan look anew at the construction in front of them.
The woman skulking behind the prisoners darted off to the far end of the steps, then went down them at a rate of knots, heading straight for the clusters of people in the square, who were looking at the section with a great deal of dislike, bordering on hate. Bezobrazhov reckoned on two hundred people at least, many carrying firearms. They had to get out of there quick. Damn that obstructing net and it's preventing the helicopters from landing here!
A corporal quickly cuffed both prisoner's hands behind their backs, and they were marched back to the square, Bezobrazhov deciding to skirt the clusters of people there rather than risk going through them. Already, thanks to that bitch getting amongst them, they were starting to move. The soldiers moved to the left of the square, angling for the exit there.
'You haven't left helicopters on the ground, have you!' barked Stefan, appalled at the prospect of the Children of the Night getting their talons onto aircraft.
'Of course not, you traitorous buffoon,' replied Bezobrazhov, raising his pistol for another blow. Before the blow could fall a cobblestone, thrown with accuracy and considerable emotion, hit him on the elbow. He dropped the Tokarev in pain and surprise.
There might well have been a gun battle then, where none of the intruding soldiers survived against the aggreived citizenry of Trevilho.
'Stop!' shouted the Doctor. 'Please! No more killing!'
Nobody else could have kept the vengeful townspeople of Trevilho at bay and even so, several well-aimed cobblestones hit the paratroopers, who wisely refrained from retaliation. Gradually the section and prisoners moved out, away from the bright lights of the town square and into the darker, ill-lit, shattered fields of broken houses and destroyed streets.
'Ha. So much for a pursuit,' commented one of the paratroopers. 'Cowards.'
'Hardly so,' murmured the Doctor. That the citizens of Trevilho were reluctant to travel into the parts of town where Cadaverites might lurk made sound sense to him. Not that such information made an impression upon Bezobrazhov. Both the Doctor and Stefan tried to warn him about the Cadaverites, to no avail; he merely threatened them with a beating, applied with bare fists since he had lost his pistol. No, he wasn't about to believe any exotic threat slinking along the streets of Trevilho.
Nor was that all they had to prevail against. Snow began to fall upon them as they trotted toward the rendezvous, thin and ethereal swirls at first. Over the span of a minute the flakes became thicker and more numerous.
Bezobrazhov found the wind and snow playing tricks on his senses. The helicopters overhead wandered in and out of hearing, and perspective in the dark and wind-blown snow wasn't to be trusted.
The section stumbled into a clearing, actually the flagged quadrangle of an old Tsarist building that had been dynamited long days before. This spot had been chosen for their rendezvous by Bezobrazhov after the rope descent into town; it was open, obvious in the darker landscape of blasted buildings and easily reached. He gestured to the radioman.
'Hello Swan Three, this is Cygnet. Return for landing and pickup, return for landing and pickup.' An undecipherable crackle came from the radio in acknowledgement.
Almost immediately things began to go badly wrong. The Captain saw vague bobbing white shapes on the periphery of the ruined buildings nearby. His first thought – soldiers in camouflage snowsuits – was rapidly dismissed by the unsettling movement of the – figures.
The traitor Stefan hissed a message to The Doctor, who continued with his ridiculous warnings about monsters.
Are these the unidentified hostiles? wondered Bezobrazhov. If they were, their attention seemed to be focussed on the skies.
The sound of rotor blades became abruptly louder, far louder than they ought to be. One of the Mi-8's came lurching downwards, it's piloting erratic to the point of dangerous. Overhead the lights of a second came into view as it, too, began to descend rapidly. Swan One and Swan Two, he recognised their numbers on the fuselage.
'What are they doing!' shouted Bezobrazhov. 'Tell them to regain height and stay up. Warn Swan Three away. Quickly, man!'
Frantic calling into his handset by the radioman didn't cause any change in the helicopter's descent. More rotor wash came and went to one side as Swan Three took avoiding action in a long diversionary loop.
The Doctor had felt obliged to call frantically to the armed citizens closing in on the soldiers, preventing any killing that would, he felt certain, have resulted from any attempt to free him. Now, trapped between armed soldiers and amidst a collection of the Cadaverites, he felt despair: to be removed from the town now! Disaster loomed, not least because the Cadaverites would kill him on sight.
Yet the monsters remained reluctant to close on the soldiers, perhaps fearing silver bullets.
No! realised the Doctor, in a flash of intuition. They were straining their combined mental faculties in order to bring the helicopters down to land, where they could be seized and the crews either used for food or converts. Or chauffeurs. A grim picture of the Children spreading to a major town thanks to having air transport flashed through his mind, bringing the realisation that he must act – now!
An athletic locked-ankle hop that nearly brought his knees into contact with his chin allowed him to bring his hands up in front of him. Then he grabbed the sonic screwdriver from a pocket, fumbled it to an ultra-sonic setting and sent a blast of energy sweeping across part of the ruins in a great arc. Cadaverite figures writhed and shrieked in pain as they were hit by the sonic beam, completely breaking their hold on the helicopter pilots.
Swan One's wheels were nearly on the ground when the pilot suddenly regained his senses, shook his head in fear and alarm and realised what he'd been about to do. The big machine began to rise again.
Aware that there were other Children on the other side of the quadrangle, the Doctor turned to inflict sonic torture on them, too, only for Bezobrazhov to grab his hands and attempt to wrestle the sonic screwdriver from him.
'You idiot! I'm trying to help!' shouted the Doctor, unable to apply an akido hold or throw, thanks to both hands being cuffed whilst simultaneously trying to aim the screwdriver.
Bezobrazhov gave a lound grunt of pain and surprise, falling heavily to the ground, the victim of a viciously-applied kick in the kidneys from Colonel Stefan, who dragged the Doctor backwards.
'Run!' he shouted, pointing upwards.
The reason for his fear became apparent within seconds; Swan Two still came down, far too fast, and Swan One slowly rose up with an air of unavoidable fate.
The two helicopters collided heavily, pitching forward, Swan One shedding rotor blades like giant leaves. Locked together, they fell like stones, fifty metres, exploding on impact with the ground.
Stefan knocked the Doctor to the ground as the aircraft crashed, and the Time Lord felt a jarring shock, then a gust of hot air sweep over him. Bits and pieces of machinery clattered down around them, including a metre-long piece of rotor that stuck in the icy ground at an angle, quivering.
Apalled at the destruction, the Doctor stood up and completed his sonic sweep of the quadrangle's other side. Once again a writhing mass of Cadaverites fled in panic at the sonic bludgeoning.
Bezobrazhov, clutching an AK47, strode up to the two men, beside himself with rage.
'What did you do!' he snarled, literally snarled, like a dog, the rifle levelled at both of them in turn. Stefan's life hung in the balance.
'I tried to stop those creatures from controlling your helicopter crews. They'll be back in a few minutes, once the sonic beam wears off. Unless you have silver ammunition you won't stop them,' declared the Doctor in a matter-of-fact tone.
'Creatures? Creatures? Those people in white?' shouted Bezobrazhov, who then realised he must have just been the victim of the "unidentified hostiles". His command had just lost twenty four paratroopers in the destroyed helicopters, plus four crewmen, and two men amongst his own twelve were injured by the explosion and debris, one seriously. From having thirty six effectives, his force was down to eleven. Marshall Grechko would not be happy. And they hadn't even got the prisoners off the ground yet!
He looked silently at the crashed helicopters, smashed together, burning fiercely, ammunition periodically cooking-off from within.
'Call Swan Three in, right now', he informed the radioman, a slight wobble detectable in his voice. ''Form a circle around the prisoners. Shoot at any movement.'
'Captain, you must not take me from here. I have important work to do!' protested the Doctor.
'Shut up!' shouted Bezobrazhov, visibly sweating. Colonel Stefan discreetly tugged the Doctor's sleeve and shook his head slightly. The senior officer recognised a man in the grip of fear.
'Where is Swan Three! Tell them to hurry up!' the captain shouted at his radioman. Fortunately for his state of mind the sound of helicopter rotors and the beam of aviation lights pierced the night seconds later. The pilot brought the machine down quickly, making the wheels bounce on the snowy quadrangle flags. Both prisoners were hustled into the aircraft, and handcuffed into a pair of bucket seats towards the rear, then roped in even more securely.
'Take off! Take off now!' shouted Bezobrazov into the cockpit. He looked ill, pale and sweating in the dim light thrown by the interior lights. Slowly the Mi-8 rose into the air, and it looked as if they might get away unscathed.
It was not to be. The helicopter had risen six or seven metres clear of the ground when a white blur shot across the ruins below, darting up a partially-burnt timber beam that allowed it to jump and catch the port wheel struts. Those aboard the Mi-8 felt it rock with the impact.
'That's one of those things!' shouted Bezobrazhov. The Doctor knew that instantly, closed his eyes and tried to project a mental barrier around the soldiers, keeping the Cadaverite's power at bay. He could manage it, just, and for a short time only.
'You need silver bullets, Captain,' shouted Colonel Stefan. 'There's a gun in my pocket – it's loaded with – LOOK OUT!'
In a lithe swing, the Cadaverite came in through the partly-open cargo door, talons reaching out to throw one paratrooper bodily from the helicopter. Several paratroopers managed to bring their weapons to bear, not an easy feat inside the swaying aircraft, and loosed off several bursts at the creature, which fell down. Holes appeared in the cargo door from misses.
'It's not dead!' warned Colonel Stefan. Bezobrazhov, white-faced and trembling, ignored him and motioned to two men.
'Throw it out. Go on – get rid of it!'
Once the paratroopers laid hold of the bone-white creature, it came to life again, moving faster than the eye could see, talons ripping at the unsuspecting soldier's throats, leaving their corpses gushing blood at it's feet.
Bezobrazhov yelled wordless abuse at the creature and emptied his magazine at it, from a distance of less than a metre. The force of the bullets knocked the Cadaverite off it's feet and against the bulkhead, but they didn't kill it. They did, however, penetrate into the cockpit and kill the pilot, ricocheting aroud to injure the co-pilot and damage the flight electronics, too. The machine suddenly lurched forwards, out of control, throwing all the soldiers forward into a giant pile of limbs against the cockpit bulkhead; one man, screaming madly, fell out of the cargo door. Hideous slashing and ripping sounds came from the tangled soldiers as the Cadaverite carried out its relentless slaughter, not in the least bothered by being riddled by gunfire. Only the Doctor and Colonel Stefan remained upright, tied into their seats, unable to move.
Perhaps the alien intended to take control of the aircraft and fly it over the military cordon below, or perhaps it merely intended to kill humans. At any rate, it dragged itself from the paratroopers, getting ready to dive into the cockpit, when fate caught up with it, too.
The Mi-8 hit the ground with a force that shattered its rotors, buckled the landing gear and crushed the cockpit. The shock transmitted through the airframe jarred both prisoners in their seats, Stefan losing consciousness for seconds.
The Doctor remained awake, if bruised back and front due to his bonds. Ironically, the rope pinions meant he and the officer remained safe at the rear of the helicopter. The Cadaverite had been cut in two by the cockpit partition collpasing, even if none of the survivors could see.
They might be down and alive, but not for long. The helicopter's cargo space had collapsed inwards where the open door had been, allowing snow and earth to collect inside. The Doctor smelt fuel and realised they faced the danger of fire.
'Is anyone still alive there?' called Stefan to the paratroopers. A few muffled groans came from the men. 'Not all dead then. No thanks to that imbecile Bezobrazhov,' muttered the officer to the Doctor.
The helicopter gave a further lurch forwards, moving downwards at an angle for a second and producing a tremendous grating noise, then stopping.
'Can any of you help to get us free?' called Stefan. Hearing and seeing motion from the Doctor, he turned to look in puzzlement at the other man's writhing and contorting. 'Are you having a fit?' he asked, after witnessing the peculiar ritual for half a minute.
'No,' replied the Doctor, concentrating elsewhere. 'A trick or two Harry taught me.' The trick was to keep one's muscles under tension whilst being bound about with ropes, then relaxing to allow a degree of play in the bindings, which a prisoner could then use to wriggle free.
Again the helicopter lurched, grated and slid.
'What in the name of seven hells is happening to us!' called Stefan. 'And can anyone amongst you idle parasites help?'
'Oh no – I know what's happened,' exclaimed the Doctor. 'Talk about bad luck. This helicopter has come down right on the edge of an old tin mine working.'
On cue, the smell of fuel got stronger.
'Hey! Can anyone – oh, the devil take you all,' snarled Stefan. 'What unbelievable luck. Or lack of it.'
'Cheer up,' said the Doctor, still wriggling like a snake with dementia. 'We're still alive.'
'Hah!' replied Stefan, bitterly.
The helicopter lurched, slid forwards and then abruptly fell.
Colonel Proskurov read over the orders he'd scribbled down during the telephone call.
"One: select crews for one artillery piece – crew to be rated for maximum political reliability
Two: select two tractors
Three: select two guns
Four: to rendezvous at ref. PK451 with escort vehicle
Five: to proceed to within 15km ref. DN3034
Six: to deploy on orientation of 280 deg. One gun only
Seven: to await courier with special instructions
Eight: to maintain total radio silence at all times"
The ninth item he didn't write down, not wanting any evidence lying about for careless eyes to see.
None of it made a great deal of sense. The unit he commanded was a towed regiment of heavy artillery, the S-23 180mm gun. They were constituted under North-Western Front command, and ought to be operated as a complete unit, twenty four guns. Not two, sent off on their own to the devil only knew where with only enough crew to operate one gun. PK451 was simply a milestone on the highway, a clearing in the middle of virgin forest a hundred kilometres from anywhere, used several times in exercises for a rendezvous. The other place he didn't know and would need to look up, which would mean unlocking the safe containing the highly sensitive and accurate maps. Why only a single crew for the guns? If you had two guns – at which point a slight insight took hold. Two guns in case of damage or malfunction to one of them. Redundancy. "Maximum political reliability" meant using the most loyal Communist Party members, men who could (and the Colonel didn't count himself amongst them) shoot their own mothers if the orders came to do so. "Escort vehicle" – another puzzle. This was the Soviet Union, not Indochina, you didn't need an escort to prevent attacks or ambushes up here. Nor did orders arrive by courier – that was slow and inefficient in twentieth-century warfare. You used radio instead, except not today, apparently.
It smelt, decided Colonel Proskurov. It smelt of something potentially rather nasty, which Higher Authorities didn't want any evidence of, certainly nothing lying around that could incriminate them.
Then, there was the ninth item. "Remove from storage ten AAS1 fuses and keep secure about your person", from memory. Colonel Proskurov twirled a pencil and looked at the noticeboard of his office without really seeing it.
AAS1 fuse mechanisms were arming devices used in the S1 nuclear artillery round that the guns he commanded were able to fire. The actual nuclear rounds were kept in a very tightly guarded compound at Semipalatinsk; they were useless without the arming fuses, which were kept on-site here at Slapetsk. In another safe. Keeping the fuses about his person meant lugging them around in a foam-lined lockable container. A lot of fuss and bother. For what? This couldn't even masquerade as an exercise, not with only two guns and one crew being used.
The Colonel, if slightly cynical, was nevertheless a loyal and dutiful officer. So he sighed heavily and went to work. He rang the Political Officer.
'Hello? Aleksei? Listen, a special duty has come up. I want you to get me a list of your most highly-rated men, enough to make up a complete single gun crew. Plus a driver. No, don't embarrass me asking what it's for – I have no more idea than you, except that it involves serious equipment issues. Quickly as possible, please.'
Having done that, he went to his samovar, put a spoonful of jam in a glass cup and poured the tea onto it, sitting back to sip it slowly and ponder whither and why.
When John returned to the town square, he found a small community awash with rumour and speculation, centring on the abduction of Doctor Kuznetz and the Colonel by paratroopers. This did not go down well with him.
'Didn't any of you try to stop them!' he snapped, until told by Masha that the Doctor himself forbade any such thing, for fear of killing. Valentin, the ex-Army officer, led them very circumspectly to a large open space now frosted with wind-driven snow, where the burning wrecks of two helicopters lay glowing in the night, entwined together like lethal lovers.
The sight of the shattered, burnt and mangled wreckage made John feel weak at the knees; surely the Doctor hadn't been in one of those things!
Masha, one of the small group to accompany him, jogged his elbow.
'He's not dead. He's not here, either.'
'He got taken in the other helicopter,' pronounced a croupy voice from within a pile of rubble. Guns were pointed, just in case, but the person the voice belonged to turned out to be a small pensioner with a large white moustache, cradling a large rusty carving knife and a large shotgun. He emerged from the bricks and charcoal, dragging a small sack behind him, a sack that appeared to contain several football-sized objects.
'What do you mean?' asked John, looking sideways at the bag, which displayed unpleasant blood-like stains.
'The third helicopter. The one that didn't crash,' explained the old man, pointing illustratively at the skies. 'Them swines with machine-guns got him aboard it. That were after he gave the oupirs a good seeing-to with his magic stick.'
Which must mean the sonic screwdriver, interpreted John. The old man must have seen the Doctor.
'What happened after that?' asked Valentin, looking to all sides with a touch of fear.
The old man shrugged, giving a crafty smile.
'Why, I took the opportunity to count heads, I did. Oupir heads. And me being so bad at counting, I needed a keepsake to remind me – here, take a look - ' and he opened the neck of the sack. Masha, curious and not quick enough on the uptake, glimpsed inside and gave a small shriek. John remained aloof, knowing pretty well what was in there and that the knife's rusty stains were not rust after all.
A crestfallen trio returned to the town square, trying to remain upbeat about what had occurred, and failing to convince themselves.
John looked around him, seeing the carefully-prepared grid of cables, the adapted aerials, the improvised parabolic dishes, not knowing the first thing about how it all operated together. Only the Doctor knew that, and he was on his way to a meeting in Moscow with the high and mighty of the Soviet Union. Not of his own volition, but he might as well have been on the Moon for all the good he could do them. The night had worn on, dawn came soon and the town of Trevilho would last for only another twenty four hours. There was no escape.
Perhaps he'll find a way to communicate with us, reflected John. By phone, or radio. Tell us how to use the Tardis and the cable grid to avoid being destroyed by nuclear artillery.
'Things are not good, are they?' enquired Masha. Across the square, an accordion struck up an incongruously happy tune.
'Nope,' replied John. 'No, they are not. Still, I don't see how they can get any worse.'
Taking time to bolt a bowl of stew offered by townspeople gathered around one of the communal fires, he wandered westwards, declining a slice of black bread. Nasty stuff, not like proper British bread!
There the road lay, now concealed with drifting snows brought across by the winds. Fewer ruins disfigured this part of the town, where the monsters from the mine had less cause to attack and the defenders less reason to destroy.
Well, time spent in reconnaisance is seldom wasted, he recalled from the British Army training manual, and set off down the road, snow squeaking under his shoes. The night might be cloudy and moonless, yet the albedo of the snow-covered landscape allowed him to see the contours of the land as he passed from the town's border and into the virgin countryside. Pine trees stood out like sentries, wooden railings and fences marked fields, worn wooden roofs showed barns or hutments.
I can't believe we were trained to believe these people were a sinister threat to world civilization! John told himself. They can't even build a barn out of bricks. And this road is unpaved, he reminded himself, scuffing a heel along the unmetalled surface. His silent musing continued for ten minutes.
Several hundred yards ahead a collection of dark, mis-shapen forms congregated on the road, across the road and onto the snowy fields alongside the road. Occasional lights and flames were visible amongst the strange shapes. John slowed, until he understood that he was looking at an encampment; the townsfolk of Trevilho who had left the town itself and moved closer to the military cordon along the exit road. Denied escape, they were clinging close to the cordon as a means of escaping from the Cadaverites.
John continued forwards, keeping an eye open for any possible Cadaverite incursion. Not very likely here, since the mine lay on the far side of town, yet he needed to keep his senses keen.
Nobody challenged him or stopped him when he drew level with the makeshift tents and refuges of the escapees. Light cast from candles and torches within nearby tents threw the shadows of those within onto the walls in soft relief, making him realise that this impersonal collection of tents actually constituted a small township of people.
Moving on slowly, he saw the dark bulk of the roadblock clearly visible ahead. It lay across the road, a great black mass of indeterminate origin approximately two hundred metres distant. And most telling of all, scattered randomly where they had died, the bodies of – at a rough estimate – fifty people lay in the snow. They had died trying to get to or through the roadblock, singly or in groups.
Trying to get past the roadblock by moving off-road was a non-starter. The forest pines came sweeping down to within ten yards of the road, and even in the dim light of pre-dawn John could see barbed wire strung between the trunks.
Okay, the road or nothing. The cordon troops and their commanders must have realised how impossible it would be for any escape to take place away from the roadblock, and had backed it up. John could see beyond the barrier and the lumpy black silhouettes of tanks against the white snows, at least six of them.
'You aren't thinking of trying to get past them, are you, sonny?' asked a creaky voice behind him. John whirled round to see an elderly male citizen smoking a pipe and looking quizzically at him.
'Uh – no. No, just came to check what they have,' lied John.
'They got plenty, sonny, they got plenty. You want to chat about it? Step into my tent.' The senior citizen moved backwards and indicated a tall, triangular tent with open entrance flaps with the stem of his pipe. He ducked back inside and John followed him.
The old man closed the tent flaps and poked at a small fire in the middle of the tent.
'Keeps me warm,' he explained. The smoke darted and stung at John's eyes, making them weep initially.
'Yes,' he said, coughing lightly in the fume-filled tent. 'You mentioned the equipment those buggers at the roadblock are using. Tanks and such.'
The pensioner looked up in surprise from his dried fish, which he gnawed like a piece of gum.
'Ah no, now, see, that's where you're wrong. No tanks, no.'
John's spirits promptly soared; no tanks, no armoured protection, ergo an easy way out!
'No, they don't have tanks, they have a thing they call a "Shilka", half a dozen of them.'
John's spirits promptly fell. The Shilka was a Soviet anti-aircraft vehicle, carrying four cannon on a tank chassis, capable of firing fifty rounds a second. And each round could cut a person in two. And there were six Shilkas beyond the roadblock.
'Didn't expect that, did you?' commented the old man, shrewdly. 'No more did those who tried to get past. Cut down like wheat, they were.'
Shaking his head and sighing in dismay, John made his way back to Trevilho. Clearly the townsfolk couldn't get past the roadblock. Six armoured vehicles carrying four cannon apiece would simply obliterate any attempt to break out, not to mention any snipers or machine gun nests set up in the pines. And to judge by those fifty bodies out there in the snow, the soldiers manning the cordon and roadblock were quite prepared to kill anyone approaching, man, woman or child.
THIRTEEN
With a start of realisation, the Doctor pulled himself back to consciousness.
Where was he?
An air of the grave lay over everything. Cold, dank, loamy. There was no light, and a pervasive chemical stink tickled his nostrils. His face lay against a furry surface, cold and yielding. In the dark beyond him a prolonged groan came to his ears.
Of course! The helicopter – they had fallen forward, and downwards, until stopped by a terrific jolt.
Which, to judge by the freedom enjoyed by his arms, meant that his handcuffs had broken free.
The groaning was joined by a pattering sound, interspersed by the occasional dull rumble and banging.
'Colonel? Colonel Stefan, can you hear me?'
No answer came.
Testing the bounds of his freedom, the Doctor discovered that the grave-like smell came from being in close proximity to damp earth. He had managed to wriggle and contort free from the ropes that kept him in the bucket seat before Swan Three fell into the old mine workings, a drop of, oh, say fifty metres approximately. The drop must have broken his bucket seat's rivets and deposited him atop the heap of paratroopers lying against the cockpit bulkhead. Then, logically enough, since he had been handcuffed to the bucket seats restraints, his hands ought to be free.
And they were! He laid hold of the sonic screwdriver in his coat pocket and set it to "Illuminate" by touch alone.
The greenish glow laid an air of surrealism over the interior of the helicopter. The roof had fallen by a good metre, and the port side had given way to an intruding mass of earth and stone, explaining the smell. The cockpit bulkhead had been forced inwards partially, further reducing the area of the cargo compartment.
Colonel Stefan, still secured to his chair, blearily came back to normality as the Doctor pinched an earlobe and tweaked his little finger. Acupuncture points. The Doctor undid the rope and severed the cuffs.
'Eh? Lizaveta, leave me alone – oh. Oh. It's you, Doctor Kuznetz.'
'Yes, it's me, and we need to co-operate to get out of here, Colonel.'
The Spetznatz officer paused to sniff the air.
'We certainly do, Doctor. That's aviation fuel I can smell. One spark and our corpses won't leave enough behind to fill a matchbox.'
The Doctor reacted with considerable aplomb, in the circumstances.
'Colonel, we happen to be buried under a fall of earth in an abandoned mine working, in the middle of no-mans-land. Our escape plan needs to be implemented now. Now!'
Under the circumstances Colonel Stefan might be forgiven a natural impulse toward pessimism. Getting out of the crushed and mangled airframe of the Mi-8 would normally mean using equipment and tools guaranteed to create sparks due to metal-on-metal contact. With the Doctor's sonic screwdriver they were able to unseat, unscrew and unrivet panels to the outside environment entirely spark free. The process was accompanied by a constant chorus of rumbles and clattering; the sound of earth and rock continuiing to fall on the helicopter, interspersed with more worrying screeches as the helicopter's abused frame collapsed further inwards. With seconds to spare, the now filthy Doctor and Stefan wriggled out of the machine, into a small void along the starboard side. Stefan produced a compact steel torch and it's defiantly bright life illuminated a narrow space behind the helicopter, which now stood on it's nose, crushed inwards like an egg-box. Tons of earth lay beyond the smashed aircraft, blocking any exit.
'This way,' called the Colonel, wriggling as deftly as a snake along the rubble-strewn ground. The Doctor followed suit, anxious to clear the machine before the fuel ignited.
They crawled diligently until the narrow space widened and vaulted upwards, sufficiently high to allow them to stand upright. The passage led onwards for another ten metres, then stopped in a rockfall, where the unsupported mineshaft roof had collapsed.
'Dead end. Do we go back?' asked the Doctor.
'Certainly not!' snapped Stefan. 'We stay far away from the crash or risk being blown to bits.'
And, a hundred metres distant, the roof finally caved in completely upon the Mi-8, crushing hot engine parts together and into spilt fuel. A sudden bright burst of light lit up the tunnel like a flashbulb.
Both men were thrown to the ground as the blast and shockwave sped through the tunnel, it's force magnified by the confined space. A low rumble, followed by yet more quivering of the ground, heralded the roof's collapse onto the narrow crawlspace leading to the helicopter.
Colonel Stefan sat up, shaking dirt from his hair. His torch lay on the ground next to him, broken and useless. He sighed after trying to turn it on.
'My wife got me that torch.'
The Doctor exhibited considerably less fatalism.
'Don't sit down and start giving in. We're not dead yet. Not only that, I need to get back above ground to finish work on the shield, and I refuse to accept that we are stuck here.'
Stefan was struck by the intensity of the other man's voice. In the darkness neither man could see each other, yet the Doctor's determination almost allowed the officer to see the set of his jaw and clenched teeth.
'Your little magic wand doesn't dig its way through rock, does it, Kuznetz? Because our bare hands won't make a great impression.'
The Doctor pondered the idea for a minute. The sonic screwdriver would crack rock if he got the correct frequency, but not enough and not quickly, given the drain on it's power cell such use would entail.
'No, Colonel, it won't. For the present we are stuck here. I suggest we stay still to conserve what air there is.'
The still, dank air sat in the underground chamber like a third person, leading Colonel Stefan to think over his situation. He was doomed, condemned to expire like an unfortunate miner, gasping his last seconds away.
No! he decided. With the gun in his pocket he would at least depart this life like a soldier; a single bullet to the temple would suffice. Having made that decision, he began to wonder about the stranger sharing this earthen tomb with him. To have been present at Stalingrad, over twenty-five years ago, that was an achievement. The other reports delivered to him, giving an account of a Doctor Kuznetz at the storming of the Winter Palace – no, a mistake there, that had been over fifty years ago. This conjecture led on to others; what, exactly, was the magic-wand Kuznetz used? The principle seemed to be that of sound waves, focussed very narrowly. It must be a prototype device, the Colonel told himself, not very convincingly.
And the giant shield construction in Trevilho town square? he asked himself. Did that come under the title of "experimental prototype"? How did this man know so much about the oupirs, the Children of the Night, before he even encountered them? For that matter, how did he know that Moscow decided to use nuclear weapons to destroy the town?
The colonel wrestled with his imagination and curiosity until his patience gave out.
'Doctor. Doctor, can you hear me? I begin to think neither of us will get out of here alive. No, no, don't start to lecture me on hope and hopelessness, I know we are surely doomed. Now, given that, you can answer honestly questions I put to you.'
'Why should I?' replied the Doctor, intrigued at the flinty officer's sudden desire to know.
'Because whatever you tell me won't go any further.' A short laugh disturbed the chamber. 'It isn't as if I carry a radio with me, is it?'
'True enough,' admitted the other man. 'I am reluctant to tell you any truths for fear you won't believe them.'
Again the short, ironic laugh went up.
'Doctor, Doctor – yesterday – or was it the day before? – I had my mind taken over by a monster straight out of Russian folklore. I took it's body to be dissected and analysed at Chkaletsky. My idea of what "truth" now constitutes can be described as elastic.'
A mutual silence ran for seconds until the colonel spoke again.
'So, Doctor, you can answer me these questions: who are you and where do you come from?'
With a sigh, the Doctor explained: he, too, was an alien. Like the Cadaverites, he had been exiled here on Earth by his own people. Unlike the Cadaverites, he was benign.
'An alien? How can that be – you look so human! You are pulling my leg!' exclaimed the Colonel.
'Not at all, Colonel. For a start, my cardio-vascular system is profoundly different from yours, as is my cerebrum and cerebellum. Any detailed medical analysis would reveal differences. As for looking human, my fellow Time Lords didn't want me to stand out from the crowd. That would have been counter-productive; my exile was a punishment and a probation at the same time.'
'And Izvestilnyuk – he is an alien, too? That is why there is no trace of him?'
The Doctor coughed in slight embarassment.
'Er – no. No, he is human, just from – well, from the future. 1975, to be exact. And from Britain. Where he is an army officer,' he hurried on. The colonel drew in a hissing breath.
'A spy!' before he caught himself again. 'Who is helping the townspeople and who helped you and them get out of the mine. That doesn't make sense. And he is from the future!'
'He is the reason we both came here. You see, in the future he knew that Trevilho had been destroyed in 1969 by a nuclear attack, but not why. Being part of UNIT, he needed to find out.'
That led to a tangential discussion about UNIT. The Colonel eagerly drank in the Doctor's description of Lethbridge-Stewart's brainchild, formed after the Yeti incursion in London the year before, currently being stalled at the UN by Soviet suspicion and intransigence.
'Ha!' snorted the Colonel, punching one fist into the other. 'Those laggardly pen-pushers in the Kremlin will be queuing up to join after this little business, eh?'
'Indeed they will,' replied the Doctor, seeing that the Trevilho affair had indeed been the catalyst for Soviet agreement to the formation of UNIT.
'You say that you travelled backwards in time to get here. You can move around in time?'
'Yes,' replied the Doctor, not really wanting to give away more information than he had to. The colonel kept on.
'You have seen the future?'
'Colonel,' replied the Doctor with infinite patience, 'I have lived in the future.'
'And the past, too?'
'Yes. Which explains how I came to be present at the battle of Stalingrad.'
'Ah, yes, our world-famous victory. What it must have been to see it with ones own eyes!' and there came a note of triumph in the officer's voice.
'It was a ghastly attritional bloodbath, Colonel, I assure you, and your life is no poorer for not being there,' replied the Doctor in a tone of some annoyance.
'You're not a Russian or a Bolshevik, Doctor,' snapped the Colonel. 'You simply cannot understand.' He paused a moment before adding 'And if you dislike war so much, what were you doing there?'
Embarassed at being caught out, the Doctor harrumphed before responding.
'Yes, well – I have the besetting sin of curiosity. And a knack of getting into trouble.'
A silence lasted for whole minutes whilst the Colonel took stock of what he'd been told. The whole story was too ridiculous to believe, of course. Yet it explained everything, and what person in their right mind would concoct a tale so utterly fantastic when they had no reason to?
'Oh – surely, Doctor, surely you trying to preserve the town with a shield affects the future? Or doesn't it matter?'
'Oh, it matters alright,' said the Doctor, in a tone full of anguish. 'My rescuing the prisoners from the mine and collapsing the roof is a major disturbance in the normal fabric of time. The shield is part of a scheme to balance that.'
Actually part of the scheme remained a mere outline in his head, a plan he needed to fill in later on.
'Back in the square you said "they" wanted the shield. That would be a bad thing, would it? The Soviet Union able to protect itself from enemies?'
The officer's tone was ambiguous.
'Getting that shield would be a disaster!' retorted the Doctor with considerable heat. 'A technological leap of several centuries overnight is inevitably destablising. Not to mention the resultant disturbance in time would alert the Time Lords, who take a very dim view of such matters.'
There came that mention again, realised the colonel. "Time Lords", whoever they were. Aristocrats from the future?
'And what would they do, these Lords of Time? Destroy us all?'
'No,' replied the Doctor moodily. 'No, destruction is always a last resort for them. No, they would reassert the normal flow of events from a point before I arrived here, a retrotemporal sweep. None of this will happen, nobody gets to be saved, the Cadaverites all die in the nuclear attack just as the townspeople would.' He didn't add that he would also suffer severely for a serious infringement of the Laws of Time, possibly being re-exiled with a new body and parts of his memory missing. As a punishment it mattered rather less than the prospect of the lives he had saved being snuffed out like so many inconsequential candles.
The Colonel shook his head.
'This is all quite fantastic, you know.' A short pause later he added: 'But having battled monsters with mind powers, I am less skeptical than I was a week ago.'
The Doctor grinned, remembering similar a line from the Brigadier.
'Excellent, Colonel! We'll get you an open mind yet!'
Masha stood on the town hall steps and looked at the new dawn. No-one here might see another if The Doctor didn't return. She turned and went back to the meeting room outside the mayor's office, dodging a line of labourers carrying sandbags down into the basement.
Vassili brooded over a collection of sketched diagrams The Dockor had left lying on a table, tracing circuitry with a pencil. Avtandil, not interested in shifting rubble in the presence of hostile Russians, sat on a chair, watching Vassili.
'I can't make any sense of this,' he complained to the world at large. 'Half the symbols are invented. Plus this feed here – "temporal vector hysteresis inductor" – what the devil's that?' He looked up at Masha. 'Oh, our resident witch.' She gave him an exceedingly cross look. Evgeniy came over to clap a consoling hand on the other man's shoulders.
'Don't take it out on others. I know we're under a deadline here, so let's co-operate, not quarrel. Okay? Now, show me this mystery diagram.'
Minutes later Evgeniy, too, had to admit defeat over the drawings.
'I have a feeling we're not intended to know the details of how this works,' he told Vassili. 'In the sense that The Doctor is not – ahem – local.'
'I'm an electrical engineering graduate,' complained Vassili. 'And I'm not local, either. Why shouldn't -'
Evgeniy pointed a forefinger at the skies.
'Not that kind of local.' Vassili's eyebrows rose in surprise. Any comment remained unsaid as Kopensky and John came into the room, dirty and tired.
'Well, that's the big blue box uncovered,' announced Kopensky, exhausted after performing heroically in shifting rubble since before sun-up. 'And now I am going to lie down before falling down.' He left for the camp beds.
John slumped into a chair, less out of tiredness than despair at having lost the Doctor.
True, the TARDIS now stood proudly in a small clearing amidst a vast pile of rubble. Incredibly, the damn thing didn't suffer so much as a scratch after having a builing drop on it. How freaky was that! The Russians who uncovered the vehicle treated it with a certain awed respect, as befitting a flimsy wooden box able to survive being dynamited and buried in rubble.
All of which was for nought, if they didn't have the Doctor to open the doors and – and do whatever he planned to do.
Masha, standing and looking distractedly at the drawings, yawned hugely. She sat down in one of the padded chairs and her eyes slowly closed.
She deserves it, thought John. All last night she had remained awake, trying to determine what happened to the Doctor, where he was.
With a suddenness that made everyone jump, Masha sat bolt upright, her eyes flying open and a terrific gasp escaping from her suddenly open mouth.
'Holy Mother! Don't startle me like that!' exclaimed Vassili. 'My nerves are bad enough.'
Doctor Abakumov hurried over to Masha.
'Are you alright, dear?'
'Yes, yes! I saw him! The Doctor!' a statement that ensured all eyes turned to her.
'A dream,' scolded Abakumov, folding her arms sternly.
'No, not a dream. I – how can I put it? I saw what he saw, felt what he felt. Really, I did.'
She seemed both upset and excited, desperate to convince them that she experienced a real insight. Across the room Avtandil came to life, ambling over.
'What did you see?' he asked.
'Darkness. Darkness all around. It wasn't like the darkness of night, because that's over. Dark and cold. That's all I had time to notice.'
Paying more interest, John leant forward.
'Since you got hypnotised in the mine you seem to have developed a mental link with the Doctor. Could it be that you experience what he does?'
Avtandil tugged his moustache.
'Like a radio. You can receive his mental broadcasts. Can he get yours?'
Masha tried hard, eventually collapsing in defeat.
'No. I can't even get his thoughts now.'
Again Avtandil tugged at his moustache.
'Perhaps there's too much interference, if this thing is like radio.'
Masha brightened straight away.
'Yes! When I fell asleep it happened straight away. I need to fall asleep again, that gets rid of all the things around me that distract.' Her face fell a little. 'I'm too excited to sleep.'
'Doctor?' asked John of Abakumov, who looked scandalised.
'What! Give this woman a sedative! I will not!'
If matters had been left to John his temper would have inevitably scotched any hope of co-operation. Instead Avtandil swept in, sandwiching the doctor's hand between both of his, bowing and kissing her index finger.
'Most abjectly, I plead our case, Doctor.' An astonished (and secretly flattered) Abakumov mumbled an "okay" and gave Masha a small injection of pentothal.
'Enough to instil a hypnagogic state,' the doctor declared. 'But what you expect to get I surely don't know.'
In less than a minute Masha relaxed contentedly in the chair, her eyes fluttering under their lids.
'Masha? Masha, can you hear me?' asked John to a mumbled "yes". 'Okay, tell me what you can see, what you can hear and feel.'
Privately John dreaded being told that the Doctor was being held in a lightless cell underneath the Lubyanka.
'Dark. Darkness. No light at all. Damp. Earthy. Smells of earth.'
That puzzled the audience.
'Sounds like the mine,' commented Evgeniy. 'Except that's the last place on earth he'd be.'
'No sounds. Nothing moving. Wait. Wait. There is another person there. Another man. Stefan.'
This again was puzzling. Were they being held together? That made no sense – prisoners like them ought to be held seperately.
'The air is not good. Stale. Not enough of it.'
Torture by asphyxiation? wondered John. Evgeniy and Avtandil were even more baffled.
'What d'you think, Boss?' asked the Georgian. 'I think it sounds like a cave-in.'
'Yes,' agreed Evgeniy. 'Which makes no sense at all.'
Doctor Abakumov looked smugly satisfied, that is until one of the remaining MVD soldiers came in to report.
'Captain Kopensky is off-duty. You can report to me,' said Vassili.
'Yes, sir. We've spotted a crater out in the middle of no-man's land.' Vassili rolled his eyes. Did that really need to be brought to his attention?
'Whereabouts? Whereabouts is this mysterious hole in the ground?'
The MVD guard shrugged.
'Near one of the old mineshafts. Is - er - is that important?' he continued, wondering why all eyes suddenly turned to him, in a repeat of what Masha had experienced.
'There's no reason why the Doctor and Colonel Stefan should be stuck at the bottom of a crater out in the middle of a snowy wilderness. Who else finds this peculiar?' commented John.
Avtandil tugged each side of his moustache in turn.
'Two helicopters crashed last night. Why not a third?'
Within twenty minutes he and Evgeniy were poring over a set of old maps, which displayed the sites of old mine workings in red and black. The MVD soldier pointed out the crater, the best he could.
Evgeniy used a pencil to indicate.
'It looks as if the crater is at the site of a worked-out tin mine. For reasons I can only speculate, the helicopter crashed there. Presumably our comrades are trapped in the helicopter, unable to get free or escape.' His pencil followed a red line. 'This dotted line shows access from another shaft, parallel to this one with galleries branching off. Their over ground entrance is still accessible.'
He looked up to see John getting ready to leave.
'And where do you think you're going, Izvestilnyuk? You're not a miner. You don't have mining experience. This tine mine has been derelict a long, long time, meaning all sorts of difficulties. Plus, the smaller the better in this case. You can stay here and looking dashingly martial.'
Avtandil grinned a flashing grin, stroked his moustache in triumph and stalked off to get helmets, torches, picks and shovels.
John watched them depart with mixed feelings. After humping and dumping rubble for three hours, since well before the sun rose, he could do with a rest. Still, leaving others to rescue the Doctor didn't seem right.
To his left, a fearsomely loud noise rattled around the room. In less than ladylike fashion, Masha had fallen asleep, snoring heavily. John found a coat and covered her, then left to see what needed doing.
He paused at the sandbagged checkpoint in the foyer, looking out at a picturesque sky of pinks and golds and blues, matched by reflected light from the snowy lands beyond the town. Not much of a poet, it still touched him in a distant part of his heart.
'Got a smoke?' asked Zhadov, breaking the moment with typical bluntness. The surviving KGB officer looked haggard and bleary.
'Sorry - '
'Right, right, I forgot: you don't smoke. What were you staring at?'
'Eh? Was I? The landscape, I suppose. In about twenty four hours all this will cease to exist. What a shame. Where I come from - ' and John stopped before waxing darkly about Wigan. 'Shall I just say it's nothing like as unspoilt and natural.'
'Kiev, hey?' nodded Zhadov. 'Typical big city.' He scrounged a cigarette from a passing civilian and inhaled with relish.
'Ahhh. That's better. Oh, I saw those two dirt-diggers leave for one of the old tin mines, said they were trying to locate The Doctor.'
'Yeah. Right. They won't take me because I'm too large. Mines only accommodate midgets, it seems.'
Zhadov puffed away in silence for a while, then rubbed the ingrained dirt under his eyes.
'Those flying slime in the helicopters came to abduct him, from what I've heard.'
A silent nod was the only comment.
'Be careful and quiet if you do rescue him, then, because he'll be abducted again if that roving spy Stefan imported gets to see him.'
For several seconds John swore mightily, much to the Russian's amusement.
John paused to take in the other man's dirty clothes, the scratches and soot on his shaven pate, the well-used AK47 clutched in one hand.
'I've been sweeping,' explained Zhadov. 'Got three of the monsters. None of us killed. Not a bad morning.'
'Any sign of Zelinski?'
Zhadov spat on the floor.
'No. No, worse luck. If ever I get that whoreson in my sights I promise to slowly shoot him apart from the knees upward.'
'You'll have to join the queue,' said John moodily, provoking a harsh laugh. 'Be on the lookout for him, all joking aside. He can move around in daylight when the Night Children can't.'
Zhadov pursed his lips in momentary concentration.
'You're right. I'll pass the word on to the patrols. Not that we have that many out at present, thanks to daylight and silver bullets.' The departing agent gave John a slap on the back.
'I never thought much of Ukranians, friend, but you put them in a good light.'
His "Ukranian" friend had the grace to blush at the compliment.
'These Darlicks, then, they are the product of science without any – without any morality?' asked a bemused Colonel Stefan. The word "morals" did not often enter any conversations he had outside his home.
They had tried to move part of the previously collapsed roof, working at the top of the pile, to see if it were possible to get past it. Since more rock and earth fell to replace that which they removed, the answer remained "no". Now they were sat, backs to the recently collapsed tunnel leading to the Mi-8.
' "Daleks" ' , corrected the Doctor. 'And yes,' he agreed. 'Ruthless, remorseless, intelligent, amoral. In about a hundred years Earth will encounter them directly, much to the misery of the few who live to see them.'
Stefan's head spun. His conversation with The Doctor had led to discussion of alien races so monstrous they could only come from the imagination of a Strugatsky or Lem! Nor were the Daleks the worst. No, that had to be reserved for the Cybermen, metallic creatures adapted from living organisms. Humanoids, or in the case of planet Earth, humans.
The Doctors description of that bizarre episode in the Colonel's life where whole hours went missing last year began to fit together like pieces in a ghastly jigsaw: it had been a deliberate orchestration by the Cybermen to infiltrate human society.
'The Cybermen you described. They were once human, or like humans. Yet now they are "ruthless inhuman killers", to quote you.'
The silence in the increasingly stale air lent itself to the imagination, so much so that the Colonel felt The Doctor sigh in near-pain.
'Colonel, I am not an aggressive man, by no stretch of the imagination. I seek to resolve situations by peaceful means if at all possible. Violence is a last resort. Yet I will unhesitatingly seek to frustrate the Cybermen wherever I meet them. Some things, Colonel, some things must be fought unto the last breath in our bodies.'
Nobody who listened to that speech could have denied the emotional sincerity underlying it. Colonel Stefan felt his world suffer another blow. "The ends justifies the means" didn't ring quite as true now as it did yesterday.
'And does the Soviet Union survive into the future?' he asked, pensively.
'For another two decades, after which it starts to fall apart from the edges inwards,' said the Doctor, to the Colonel's wonder.
'Twenty years, hey. Time enough for me to salt some savings away for the coming of capitalism,' he half-joked. The silence took on a dissaproving tone. 'A Polish Pope. War in Afghanistan. Americans on the Moon. Americans, on the Moon – how can that be, when we were first into space?'
'The Earth has no political boundaries when seen from space, Colonel. Look on it as an achievement for all humanity.'
'Humanity! How can you talk about humanity – you, who aren't even human!'
'Certain qualities are entirely separate from physical form, Colonel. And consider the beam in your own eye before picking on the mote in anothers,' a Biblical reference lost on the avowedly atheistic officer.
Both lapsed into silence to help conserve air. The Doctor had calculated the duration of their survival, then understood that air was reaching them – either from behind them, where the helicopter lay, or ahead of them past the roof-fall. His estimate of their time left possessed too large a plus or minus factor to be reliable.
'I can hear sounds,' stated the Doctor. Stefan sat stock still, concerned that the roof might yet fall on top of them. Not that he intended to go out like that, not with bullets in his gun.
A sickly green glow lit up their miniature cavern as the Doctor used his sonic screwdriver to illuminate the surroundings. Pattering noises were accompanied by the trickle of mud and stones from the top of the collapsed roof in front of them. Metallic clinks and scrapes came to their ears, followed by a cheerful call.
'Had enough holiday?'
'Is that Evgeniy?' answered the Doctor. 'Not before time, young man. What kept you!'
'Being a practical miner after being a paper-shuffler for too long,' answered the other man, pushing wooden planks under the newly-revealed roof. 'We had to go look for wood to prop this up. Another plank, Avtandil.'
Light from torches bobbed and swung on the far side of the narrow gap created, where crudely braced wooden planks prevented the roof from falling in again, planks held in place by props of dubious age and strength.
'Wide enough. Come on, Doctor – oh! Didn't see you there, Colonel. Want to come, too?'
'Less of the cheek,' grumbled the officer. Both he and the Doctor went clambering up the steep pile of rock and earth, squeezing under the boards with difficulty.
Once on the other side, Stefan stopped to take long, deep breaths of air, grateful at being released.
'Out we go,' ordered Evgeniy. 'Step lively, this whole excavation is unsafe.'
Despite having left Trevilho alone, the miners and those they had just rescued were met at the sagging boarded barrier of the mine entrance by what looked, to the Doctor, like a caravan on skis with an aeroplane propellor at the rear.
The driver, a man with a skin apparantly made of leather and walnut, opened the side door and peered out.
'Your man – the Ukranian – said you'd be needing a lift back. Got this out of storage specially for you.'
The aerosan made a speedy departure from the decrepit mine, engine roaring like a caged beast. It ran up to the edge of the town and slid onto the road, the noise increasing enormously.
Before stopping, the driver shouted back to his passengers. Nobody heard what he said, and he was only audible after the engine stopped.
'I said, the bald bloke with a gun, he put that stretcher in, and a blanket. He said to lie on it and cover your face. Damned if I know what he's been drinking.'
'Oho!' exclaimed Stefan. 'He wants us to pretend that you, Doctor, are dead. We can get you into the town hall under the blanket on the stretcher. Doing this will prevent that GRU agent from reporting back to HQ on your survival.'
Grumbling, and with only a modicum of good grace, the Doctor lay down on the canvas stretcher. The other three men and the driver took up the wooden carrying poles and hefted their "corpse" by several back streets to the town hall, avoiding the town square – too many witnesses by far, a lot of whom would feel impelled to look under the blanket.
The stretcher got carried, with much puffing and grunting, into the town hall. The impressive marbled staircase gave them some anxious moments, Stefan fearing that the angle they climbed at might dislodge The Doctor. Finally they reached the mayor's office and gratefully dropped the stretcher, a little too eagerly for their passenger's comfort.
'Ow!' exclaimed the Doctor, throwing the covering blanket off. 'No witnesses? Good.'
In both senses of the word: if people thought him dead, then they'd be liable to panic and desert the shield – which still wasn't ready for operation, not nearly. The margin for error had nearly vanished with his time wasted in the mine.
Vassili, when called in, nearly fell over in astonishment at seeing the supposedly-abducted and if not then probably-dead Doctor standing at the mayor's desk.
'Yes?' asked the Doctor, busy looking at a diagram. 'We still need enough cable to run from the shield to my large blue box, and from the town's power lines.'
Vassili waggled a metre-long piece of cable.
'That's what I came up here for. This is our total stock of cable. No more left, even though I was certain we had sufficient.' He narrowed both eyes and continued. 'And why would we need to connect that wooden lavatory to the shield?'
Predictably, the Doctor bristled.
'The TARDIS, sir, is not a toilet! It is - it is – let us just say that it is essential for the protection of people under the shield,' he finished, weakly.
'No more cable anywhere?' said Colonel Stefan, deciding that intelligent activity made more sense than drinking himself into oblivion. 'This is a mining town – surely there's stores of equipment around here.'
Avtandil tugged his moustache, looking sideways at Evgeniy.
'There's a whole lot of cable in storage up at the mine.'
'Then we need to get it,' stated the Doctor emphatically. 'There is no time to waste – being kidnapped and then buried has wasted far too long. I shall be hard-pressed to complete the work in time.'
'How are you going to get there?' asked Vassili, skin crawling at the thought of going near the mine and the monsters hiding there. 'That BTR won't get far on five wheels.'
'The aerosan again. It's fast if you don't mind being slightly deaf afterwards,' replied Stefan. He pointed at the Doctor. 'You are not to come. Stay here and work on your work, but you can't come to the mine. For one thing, you're supposed to be dead, and if you did get killed up there we'd be lost.'
'Very well,' grumbled the Doctor. 'But for heaven's sake be quick! Make sure you take John along with you – he's immune to the creature's influence.' Sadly, he displayed the hypnotic gadget so useful a couple of days ago, now broken in half and with it's mirror cracked and crazed.
'This is the Soviet Union, Doctor Kuznetz. You should know we don't appeal to the supernatural,' replied Stefan, stoney-faced.