Dominione went from car to car, making sure the men were awake and alert, giving the order to remove camouflage netting and stow their poles. Dusk was falling, casting a darker shadow over the sunken watercourse from the far lip, concealing the Sahariana desert cars as they started up engines and began to move north.
Sarah now sported a gag, a knotted rope that went tight around her head and held her jaws slightly open. The loudest sound she could manage was a gurgle, and since that drew a hostile glare from the soldier manning the machine gun, she refrained.
The command car she lay in as a helpless captive was the lead vehicle, enabling her to look behind and see at least a dozen other cars following, darker shapes against the watercourse. The bottom of the wadi gradually shelved upwards, allowing the convoy to drive out onto the level stretch of gravel beyond.
Driving slowly by compass and map, using a heavily-shielded torch to read by, Dominione led the convoy across the desert north of Mersa Martuba, then swung in to approach it from the east. A long detour, yes, but one he felt sure would catch the British unawares, thinking that any vehicles coming from their rear would be friendly.
The radio operator picked up and put on a British steel helmet, getting up to stand on the running board of the car. He turned to cast a look at Sarah, holding a knife up to his lips in a warning gesture.
Don't worry about me, you brute! I can hardly breathe let alone shout a warning! thought Sarah to herself, glaring at the soldier.
'Wothca!' called the Italian soldier, in a greeting to someone Sarah couldn't see, as the car came to a halt. His Cockney accent was perfect.
'This is Mersa Martuba, innit mate?' An indistinct voice came from the front of the car, followed by the crunch of footsteps, a gasp of alarm and the sounds of a scuffle. With an agonised intake of breath, the sounds stopped, and the Italian got back into the car, wiping his knife on the sleeve of his blouse.
Dominione pulled the car over to one side, motioning the rest of the convoy forwards, cocking a big signal pistol. Half the convoy passed by the command car before alarmed shouts began to come from the British garrison as they discovered the intruders. Dominone fired a parachute flare into the air, which threw a scuttering, erratic light over the depot, revealing the garrison running about in alarm.
Sarah winced in alarm as the machine gun mounted behind her began to fire, lighting the car up with each shot. Dominione fired another flare, shouting in Italian to the radio operator.
Please let it stop! prayed Sarah, her stomach clenched in anxiety.
Silently, and stealthily, helpfully concealed by the darkness that came early to the sand basin, the Doctor slid down the great stone steps of The Temple. He aimed for the canvas shelter where Albert and the Professor had sought refuge, dropping to the sand and crawling beneath it undetected.
Having seen the aliens sweeping the trans-mat platform clear, he knew there was little time until they began to use it. One transmission from this station to the receiving one, a debrief of the new arrival and then within hours there would be a two-way traffic in operation.
Using his sonic screwdriver to light up the dank hiding-place, he sought and found what he wanted – the tin of sugar used to make tea. The "kettle" still had a little water in, too.
'Excellent!' he beamed to himself. The sugar went into water and he gently began to agitate it with the screwdriver, on a low-frequency infrasonic setting. In less than a minute the brew resembled glue. Carefully contorting himself, the Doctor took off his long overcoat and draped it at full length on the floor of the shelter, before carefully pouring the adhesive syrup on the outer facing of his coat. He rapidly flipped it over and pressed it into the sands, knowing that he had –
a warning siren howled over the complex three times –
- little time remaining. Donning the overcoat, now encrusted with sand, the Doctor crept cautiously out of the shelter, concealing a scarf-wrapped canister under his coat. He lay flat on the sand and crawled towards the trans-mat platform, freezing whenever he heard the sound of approaching webbed feet.
Luck, darkness and his improvised sand-camouflage were with him. Twice aliens stalked nearby on his short but risky journey, yet neither noticed him. He paused to slither close to the platform and pitched the canister underhand, a good bowl that brought it to rest against the nearer trans-mat pylon. The scarf was essential to muffle any sound the metal canister made on landing.
Back across the sands, around the southern side of The Temple, and the Doctor slithered madly until he reached the wooden scaffolding there. He leapt up it, not bothering about concealment now, because time mattered more than stealth.
Remaining deep within the gloom of The Temple's interior, he braced the Webley on his left forearm, squinted down the barrel and carefully squeezed the trigger. A shockingly loud report echoed around the building's pillars, and the scarf-wrapped bundle jumped under the impact of a bullet.
Sounds of alarm came from aliens all across the complex. Ignoring them, the Doctor squeezed the trigger again, aiming slightly above the canister of gas from the camping stove. This shot hit the trans-mat pylon as he intended, sending a brief scattering of sparks into the air – which ignited the vapours streaming from the gas canister. A tremendous bang and flash lit up the platform and the pylon, in the light of which the Doctor could see great chunks of crystalline material fly off the structure, revealing and damaging the complex apparatus beneath the protective layer.
Dropping the Webley and shedding sand grains from his gluey overcoat, he raced to the rear of The Temple, leaping down the steps and onto the empty sands below, before dropping flat and crawling southeast-wards, towards the three separate buildings to the south of the trans-mat. Earlier, whilst the sun still shone into the site, he'd noticed that the excavators avoided getting too close to the walls of the trio of buildings, leaving sand several feet deep around them. He needed to get to that deeper sand for concealment.
Despite his speed and concealment, it was a close-run race. Aliens stamped and ran, in a slightly comical style, around the steps of The Temple, while he snaked across the sands and burrowed into the piles around the middle building of the three. A loud cry went up from The Temple's interior, no doubt as the Webley was discovered. The Doctor dug himself in, grinding down into the sand in order to cover his face, leaving only a small space for his mouth. Dragging a biro from an interior pocket, he stripped out the inner tube and used the outer as a primitive snorkel.
Another yell went up from aliens, muffled by his covering. Providentially, they had found the tracks left by Albert and the Professor and were, suspected the Doctor, following them up to the basin wall.
Predictably, the Detachment Leader was enraged at the damage caused to the Trans-Mat Pylon. The transmission process was impossible to carry out until the damage was assessed and repaired. Several Lead Technicians went over the pylon nervously, keeping one eye on Sorbusa, the other on their equipment.
Sorbusa sent a squad of scouts to sweep the HQ building, and another to scour the entire site. He'd foolishly assumed that there were no locals in the Infiltration Complex and now needed to remedy that. His searchers called in that they had discovered non-bio-vore tracks leading away into the further desert, away from the complex.
'Leave them!' he ordered. 'Maintain a sentry post on the edge of the sand wall.'
One of the Lead Technicians came to report.
'Impulsor circuitry failure, Detachment Leader. Perhaps ten to twelve hours to repair, test and re-seal.'
'Nine hours maximum,' ordered Sorbusa, aware that the technicians always gave themselves leeway with deadlines.
He consoled himself with the satisfied thought that their messenger had gotten through to the homeworld.
Uncharacteristically, he stopped to brood about his far distant and long-departed home. After five thousand years, how would civilisation have fared? Were there still any survivors? Perhaps the trans-mat there only continued to operate on geo-thermal power, long-forgotten by a long-dead race, and this Detachment, on Target Seventeen, were the sole survivors of his race.
The Detachment, after all, had volunteered to remain here, where potential sources of biomorphic energy might proliferate, instead of returning home to a planetary wasteland suffering from terminal biomass decline. Endless vistas of grey dust and sand, from what he remembered. With the emergency plantations struggling to survive in the barrens.
Morbid thoughts.
'Nine hours maximum!' snapped Sorbusa.
Safe beneath his dune, the Doctor remained there until all frantic activity died down, being replaced by more measured action.
Searchers being replaced by patrols. Probably. Time to emerge!
A dark desert night greeted him, stars twinkling down from the heavens, their light nearly lost in the gentle glow that surrounded the newly-activated buildings of the complex.
'Interesting. Geo-thermal, of course. Must be a luminiscent lithic substrate underneath the vitreous overlay,' he chattered quietly to himself. Having definitely established he was alone, the Doctor crept out from his sandy lair, crawling alongside the walls of the building until he reached it's doorway.
Inside lay dark, faintly echoing and empty of aliens.
'Perfect!' grinned the Time Lord, turning to look behind him at the rest of the site. Nobody near. No, they were all mounting patrols or watching the route into the complex, or repairing the trans-mat. How fortunate for him that one-third of the aliens did not emerge from hibernation.
'Door. Door. Door? Door!' he muttered, looking for an internal control that closed the gaping space in the wall. A circular panel high on one side of the inner doorway proved to be the "handle" – one press and the door silently slid from a recess and merged seamlessly with the walls.
Much to the Doctor's delight, the building he chose to investigate turned out to be an information repository and archive combined. Once more a part of the puzzle fell into place for him.
' "Local Time Elapsed Five thousand one hundred and twenty seven years",' he read on the most prominent display, a big flourescent banner nine feet above ground level.
He whistled, impressed. That must be the date when the complex went into operation. No wonder Templeman couldn't determine which terrestrial culture built Makin Al-Jinni! A date like that pre-dated everything but the earliest Nile civilisations, who simply could not have built such a site.
Further inspection showed that the building consisted of a single giant room, around the edges of which were banks of technical equipment, with corresponding display screens set into the walls, nine feet above the ground. Everything seemed to have been constructed from glass, used to seal-in the delicate components within.
'Perhaps this isn't just a case of using local resources. Perhaps their home is rich in silcon dioxide,' the Doctor mused to himself. Having said that, even if only to himself, he needed to look for reference to the alien homeworld.
"Baseline Referential Data" seemed a likely possibility, a banner located on a bank of dusty, angular equipment racks. Pressing the Master Operator switch brought up a three-dimensional display of a world that was not Earth, not at all, instantly recognisable as a different planet. The Doctor squinted at the stellar background, rotated the virtual model, zoomed in and out.
'Say hello Delta Pavonis,' he told the instrument panel. Without access to more sophisticated instruments he couldn't tell with one hundred per cent accuracy that the planet so depicted was in the Pavonis system. The suns looked similar to that here in the Solar System, if redder, and the background star patterns looked right.
The home of these aliens did not look healthy. Vast deserts covered most of the major land-masses, with tiny spots of green dotted about the hinterland. Long, shallow urban areas sprawled along the coastlines, occasionally linked across the desert wastes by roads.
What the Doctor found interesting were the absences – no ports or harbours, nor any signs of marine activity. No airports or aircraft. No satellites or rockets or any orbital activity, either. No launch-pads or landing grounds or spaceports.
Yet this was a sophisticated culture. They had matter transmission technology, and deep-sleep technology, and the ability to create useful – and dangerous – artefacts from plain, humble sand.
'Chicken and egg,' he muttered. 'How did they get here?'
That answer might be delayed. The why was more obvious: these creatures were bio-vores, feeding off the energy of living matter. They had progressively denuded their homeworld of all such sources, reducing it to a lifeless wasteland. Those dots of green on the representative globe must be a kind of plantation project, an attempt to stave off complete ecological collapse.
Why not try moving on to other worlds? Nearer worlds? Earth lay over nineteen light years from the constellation Pavo, and the Doctor knew there were other planets nearer the home of these bio-vores that they could have colonised.
Why not? Because they could not. They had no ability to travel between planets by spaceship. Trans-mat, yes, but not spaceship.
'Back to chicken and egg,' he pondered. 'Without space vessels, they couldn't land a trans-mat station on another world.'
Deciding that his luck had lasted long enough, he hurriedly scanned the panels and racks and banks of instruments, making a quick selection.
Listening hard, Albert and the Professor both waited for the shooting to die down and stop. Initially it had helped them, seeing the parachute flares casting a weird light over the desert, and the flashes of gunfire.
They had been lost, gone astray from the track back from Makin Al-Jinni. Albert couldn't quite understand how he'd managed to lose the way so badly. He didn't dare to put the headlights on, not with those monsters stamping around The Temple and their killing machines.
Then the gun battle suddenly erupted in the night, making them both jump with fright.
'Is that another battle with the alien's or their weapons?' asked Albert.
'How on earth should I know!' growled the Professor angrily. 'We'll just have to sit and wait it out until daylight and see what's going on at the depot.'
Without a weapon, he felt like adding, before realising that a Webley revolver had little chance of stopping one of the big glass tank vehicles that had killed Bourgebus. Of all the things to happen to him! Physical proof that intelligent life existed elsewhere in the universe, one of the biggest discoveries ever in the history of the human race, let alone science, and he couldn't communicate the facts anywhere, couldn't research further or –
'Professor!' interrupted Albert, tugging on the other man's arm. 'I asked, what do we do?'
'Eh? Oh, sorry, Albert. My thoughts were a million miles away.' He sighed. 'As I said before, we need to wait and see, and we can't see anything until daylight.'
Albert nodded, then started in alarm as the Professor burst out laughing.
' "A million miles away"! I think I accidentally made a joke!'
The laughter stopped as abruptly as it started.
'Sorry, Albert. I – I think seeing Pierre killed was more of a wrench than I realised.'
The Professor slumped back in his seat, pinching the bridge of his nose.
Albert sighed. The night, he felt, was going to be a long one.
Major Brendrecke swilled down another cup of coffee, laced with cognac. His eyes were tired, his back was tired, his calves were tired, and his mind felt very tired, too. He had worn down a pencil making notations, marking the small-scale maps, drawing in lines for the prospective advance of the Afrika Korps, consulting and drawing up march tables, orders of battle, petrol and diesel consumption rates, ammunition scales, spare part inventories, way points, prospective dumps, on and on and on.
'Enough,' he said to his equally tired assistant, the lanky Swabian captain, Hertz. Their NCO's had long gone to bed.
'Agreed, sir,' said Hertz. He spoke fluent Italian, which was why he was here in Tripoli, instead of manning that border post at the Brenner Pass. 'The General can make big sweeps with his hand over a map, but it's up to us to make them work.'
Brendrecke sighed. True enough! They had to work out how to get the Fifth Light Division and the Fifteenth Panzer Division to El Aghelia, alongside their "gallant Italian allies". Together with ammunition, fuel, spare parts, water, radio interception units, Luftwaffe liaison, artillery, more water, breakdown and recovery teams, a bakery unit – the list was endless. Their Chief of Staff, General Von Dem Borne, wanted results, quickly, and wouldn't accept any excuses if the plans weren't ready on time. Besides which, General Rommel would be breathing down the Chief of Staff's own neck.
The glamour of Africa, eh? Burning the midnight oil in a pokey little flat requisitioned from the Italians. Tripoli's harbour brought the smell of brine and oil to them, dusky and hot. That, at least, was different from home.
'The British aren't moving forward. We can cut around them, outflank them and move south across the desert, the way they cut off the Italians,' commented Brendrecke.
'Please don't mention that in front of the Regio Esercito liaison officer, sir,' asked Hertz, pleadingly. 'It's a huge embarassment to them.'
Brendrecke gave his subordinate an arch look.
'We're not here to support our Fascist allies because they need us to look splendid in a triumphal march, Kapitan. If their toes are tender enough to dislike being stepped upon, it's probably because they spent so long retreating.'
He remembered how the Italians behaved when the Afrika Korps arrived in Tripoli and paraded with the local Italian forces. Respectful silence for the Germans, riotous applause for the Italians. Humbug!
Picking up a pair of dividers, he measure distances across the map.
'I think the Thirty-Third Recon Battalion ought to make the running to this place. Mersa Martuba, way out in the middle of nowhere. From there they can move north or north east against the British lines of communication.'
Kapitan Hertz yawned. Right. Plot and plan to get a thousand men and all their equipment across the desert to a fly-blown speck of nothingness. Nothing would probably come of it, anyway.
Twelve: Moving From A to B to AThe Doctor skulked across the beaten path between what he now deemed to be scientific buildings. He had just been noseying in an archive, of sorts. Perhaps it was designed to update new arrivals to Earth? Aliens who came via trans-mat from their wasted world, unfamiliar with circumstances here. A refresher course in the wherefore and why. Yet why would they remain uncertain of what they were leaving and where they were going?
Staying any longer in the archive would be unwise; given the bio-vores now patrolling or simply accessing buildings, to remain there would have meant risking discovery.
Fortunately for him, their patrolling was no longer aimed at tracking down the person responsible for damaging the trans-mat. In fact more and more of the bio-vores were working on the damaged pylon, fetching various unfamiliar pieces of equipment from the cuboidal building that had stored their personal weapons and armour.
He headed back to the collapsed canvas hide, glad to see that no webbed footprints led to it, remaining prone in the dark and with his gluey, gritty coat providing protection.
A jerky movement away to his left caught his attention and he paused, trying to discern shape or outline in the dark, almost dismissing it as imagination before seeing an irregular patch of desert move forward in a flapping motion. The peculiar motion happened twice again, and by simple extrapolation the Doctor realised the strange, ungainly object had the same destination as he did – the canvas hide.
By the time he got to the collapsed lip of the screen, the other object became less puzzling – a man hiding beneath a tent cover, scurrying forward a few yards at a time.
Both reached and entered the hide simultaneously.
'Albert!' hissed the Doctor, not happy to see the young man back at the dig and in danger again.
'Doctor!' exclaimed Albert, frightened at the Time Lord's sudden appearance.
'I do hope you have an eminently good reason for returning here, Albert,' scolded the Doctor quietly but intently a few seconds later.
'I do, I do,' insisted Albert. 'The Italians have captured Mersa Martuba. The Professor and I saw the battle. It didn't last long, there were loads of Italians with armoured cars and machine guns and flares.'
'Where is the Professor?' asked the Doctor, suddenly worried. He didn't mention the other person whose fate sent a ripple of worry up his spine: Sarah Jane. She'd been back at the depot, too.
'Oh, he's alright, he's back away in the desert beyond the campsite tents. I asked him to drop me off. We realised if you got out of here then you'd head back to the depot and be captured, maybe even killed, so we needed to warn you.'
The Doctor felt absurdly grateful. Faced with mortal peril, this young man had chosen to return to the dig, to warn a stranger about what he might have walked into. He briefly explained about damaging the alien's trans-mat device.
'So they can't come through from the other end?' asked Albert, seemingly grasping the concept of matter-transmission with impressive speed.
'Not yet. The damage is minor, and repairable. You were able to get in here undetected because so many staff are working on repairs. We have gained a breathing space, nothing more.'
They didn't dare use light in the stuffy little den, so Albert's dejection only came across in his tone.
'Oh. That's not much help, is it?'
'Chin up, old chap!' murmured the Doctor, encouragingly. 'Time is on our side, not theirs. I've viewed their homeworld, you see.'
The concept of motile holographic displays, the location of Delta Pavonis and the bio-vore lifestyle took creative explanation to make sense to Albert. His grasp of the trans-mat enabled him to ask another intelligent question.
'So you can send anything at all via a trans-mat?'
'Well, broadly speaking, Albert. Inorganic matter is easier, and smaller objects obviously require less energy expenditure and computer processing - '
'No, no, that's not – what I meant was, how can they put a trans-mat here in the first place? With a rocket-ship?'
The Doctor pondered over that problem himself.
'From what I've seen, Albert, I doubt that very much. I don't think these aliens have the technology or resources to build rocket-ships.'
The sound of sand being trodden not far away led to their sudden, tense silence. With a regular pattern, the footsteps moved away into the night.
Albert released his breath, feeling a cold sweat all over him. That question about the trans-mat wouldn't go away, like toothache. If they had to deal with over fifty aliens just at this precise moment, how many countless thousands might come through the working trans-mat? From what he understood – which seemed to be far less than this Doctor, who really was most mysterious himself – from what he understood, a trans-mat acted like a doorway. A doorway here on Earth, with another door nineteen light years away, and a person could walk between the two with no lapse of time.
Why, there might be millions of these bio-vores waiting to flood into this world! And these were creatures who had wilfully destroyed their own world and all life on it, even down to the vegetation. What unbridled mayhem might they wreak here on Earth?
'Sorry to keep going on about it, Doctor, but can you send a trans-mat along by trans-mat?'
The Time Lord laughed quietly. The boy was certainly struck by matter-transmission technology!
'No, Albert. One of their restrictions. You have to have a station established before you can send to it, or receive from it.'
Any speculative projection of a trans-mat beam into space would merely end up as dispersed Bhatacharjee radiation, an unfocussed pulse of energy –
'Of course!' he whispered, triumphantly smacking a fist against the sandy floor. 'A mid-point focus! It would all make sense!'
Albert wondered what his companion felt so enthusiastic about. In his mind's eye he could see millions and millions of rapacious alien monsters, devouring whole continents, leeching all energy from the lifeforms on Earth.
Although, he wondered, why hadn't they already arrived? The Doctor's description of the bio-vores homeworld made it sound like a desert wilderness, a hellish environment they'd try to leave behind quickly. For some reason they had instead waited five thousand years before deciding to continue with their attack on Earth.
Alongside him, the Doctor's thoughts ran on similar patterns. He reached a conclusion.
'How convincing can you be, Albert?'
Albert felt nonplussed. Convincing?
'I hope you can be very convincing, Albert, because I want you to return to the Professor and for both of you return to Mersa Martuba.'
'What!' squeaked Albert.
'Albert!' said the Doctor, low-pitched yet affectingly. 'You and the Professor need to return there, and inform whoever holds sway that they will need to contend with the bio-vores in the near future. And ensure that Sarah Jane Smith is hale and hearty.'
At least, he reassured himself, she only faced human foes at present.
Albert drew in a stale, sweaty, clammy lungful of air and asked another
question.
'What – what will you do, Doctor?'
The answer, initially, sounded impossible.
'Do, Albert? Do? Why, I shall travel to the homeworld of these bio-vores! After all, we need to obtain primary data!'
After all, he did need to confirm his theory, if possible. More than that, he must try to negotiate a truce of sorts, if possible. Conflict being hateful to him, he needed to prevent it. If possible!
'You might want to take this as proof,' added the Time Lord, passing over a piece of the alien databank he'd removed, just in case. Albert fumbled in the darkness for a second before grabbing the smooth, rugby-ball shaped object.
'How will you get there! And back?' asked Albert. The Doctor tapped the side of his nose, before realising the gesture was invisible.
'By flying! Now, no more chatter. The next patrol might find this hide. You make your way out first.'
Thirty terrifying minutes later, Albert cowered behind the flapping canvas of a tent at the camp-site. How grateful he was that the moon wasn't full! His transit across the desert had been cautious and frightening.
Now all he had to do was locate the Professor – easily done by following the truck's path over the sands – persuade him to drive into Mersa Martuba, meet with the Italians and convince everyone to join forces against a collection of monsters – no, not monsters, aliens.
Easy! At least, easy compared to what the Doctor was attempting.
The patrolling bio-vores did indeed discover the collapsed canvas hide. By then, however, the Doctor was on the upper level of the Temple with a length of rope taken from the scaffolding.
Timing was everything. The noise of work coming from the damaged pylon had lessened perceptibly, meaning more bio-vores able to inspect their complex for unwelcome local intruders. He had planned, originally, to create handholds in the support columns of the Temple, allowing him to climb upwards easily, if a little slowly.
'Too late for that,' he muttered. Using the sonic screwdriver might give him away, now that the covering noise of work in progress had diminished. Those bio-vores certainly wanted that trans-mat back in action!
To climb the column, he used a technique he'd witnessed in the South Seas, where locals climbed the branchless trunks of coconut palms. The rope went around the full circumference of the pillar, he grasped an end in each hand and pulled it taut, then moved each foot vertically against the column and braced himself. Quickly relaxing the rope and throwing it upwards, he gained six inches, then just as quickly moved his feet upwards. Moving six inches at a time, he slowly moved vertically.
It was far harder than he'd anticipated. Coconut palms, after all, were much thinner than massive basaltic columns. Sweat beaded on his forehead, his arms began to ache and his palms were getting badly chafed. After ten feet, when he began to wonder if this idea would work before he became exhausted, progress became slightly easier – eventually his bounds upwards became eight inches, then twelve.
Ah! he realised, gratefully. The column was starting to taper. His strength was still flagging when he reached the roof, and then he had no choice but to use his sonic screwdriver, clutching the rope single-handedly to make a handhold in the black stone, then another. That was even harder, dangling from a single cavity fifty yards above the ground.
With a desperate heave, he swung himself up and over the edge of the temple roof, onto the flat upper surface, utterly spent. For several minutes he was too tired to move from the edge, even though he lay next to a very long drop. After recuperating, he slowly crawled to a safer position, massaging his arms and breathing in a yoga pattern.
Timing, once again, was critical. So, too, were accurate measurements. Using a telescopic pointer, the Doctor carefully measured the length of the Temple roof, peering slowly over the far end when he came to it, which overlooked the trans-mat platform.A few bio-vores were using thermal tools to seal the pylon shut, plating the delicate interior with fused silicon appliques. With a shock, the Doctor realised they had finished repairs already. He had only just made it to the roof in time!
The bio-vores first order of business would be a test-despatch, back to their homeworld. To judge by those aliens vanishing into the nearest scientific station, that despatch would be soon.
Three blasts on the siren, recalled the Time Lord. If he misjudged this, the best he could hope for was serious injury; the worst, instant death at the hands of the aliens. He paced out the correct length on the roof.
Detachment Leader Sorbusa led a dozen technicians onto the trans-mat platform. This time they would go back to Homeworld in force, him with a bodyguard to prevent any "misunderstandings" by superior technical staff.
Privately, he was pleased that the repairs were done in record time; less than seven hours. He was less pleased at the repairs being necessary in any case, from an alien saboteur. The patrols discovered where the alien had hidden, in a specially-camouflaged shelter next to the currently quiescent HQ building. Perhaps he ought to Eviscerate another minor technician, blame them for the lapse in security?
The warning siren blasted out three times. Sorbusa braced himself for the transfer, only to see an instant before transmission took place, and with utter astonishment, an object come flying off the roof of the HQ building and over the platform.
'Stop - '
' - the transfer!' he shouted, the first word uttered on Target World Seventeen, the last two on the reception platform of Homeworld. The object – an alien creature – having been caught in the trans-mat field had come along too, and fell at speed amongst the party of technicians.
The Doctor picked himself up, partially winded. A dozen aliens, bowled over by his airborne arrival, regarded him with undoubted dislike.
'How do you do!' he beamed, reaching for his absent hat to doff it. 'I'm the Doctor!'
His first guess, that the angular momentum of his kinetic displacement wouldn't be transmitted had been proved correct; effectively he'd only fallen twenty feet.
His second guess, that these aliens were completely unfamiliar with the third dimension and airborne travel, also bore fruit: none of them expected him to get to the trans-mat by leaping from the Temple roof.
His third guess, about the test nature of the first transmission, was woefully wrong, and he realised that the instant he cleared the edge of the Temple roof and saw at least a dozen aliens standing on the platform.
'Game of skittles?' he asked, getting to his feet. Keep the bio-vores off-balance, questioning, unsure.
'Seize him!' trumpeted a familiar-looking alien. Clad in helmet and numerous artefacts, this bio-vore seemed to be the leader.
'Detachment Leader?' called one of the now-standing aliens. A note of fear and uncertainty in the voice caused the other aliens to ignore their leader and look about.
Between the treelike bodies of his companions, the Doctor could see more aliens, assembled in force around the receiving trans-mat platform.
'Smaller stature,' he noticed. 'Proboscis kept in a pouch. Well, I suppose fashions have changed over the past five thousand years.'
What surprised him more was that these contemporary aliens didn't seem happy to be visited by their recent ancestors. The reception guards were armed, with what looked like dart-guns, and all were levelled at the new arrivals.
'I think I'm not the only spectre at the feast,' he blithely told the Detachment Leader, who glared back at him. The Detachment Leader might well be an alien, with different modes of expression, but the Doctor recognised a glare when he saw one.
A small group of the smaller aliens stamped onto the platform, issuing pouches for the new arrivals. These were punishment versions, locking at the rear of each torso and preventing the proboscis from being used. One bio-vore tried to protest at this treatment and was instantly shot dead by the guards, dying in a silent storm of black glass darts.
When they came to the Doctor, the guards muttered back and forwards between each other, referring to a superior. They looked him over from head to toes, gestured to each other and shooe'd him away with the dozen arrivals.
They were moved to a giant sled, drawn by several dozen aliens, also wearing the punishment pouch. Once the whole party were aboard, the sled moved off, travelling on a well-worn path over barren sands.
Typically, the Doctor spent his journey looking around. A complex of buildings lay around the trans-mat platform, gradually thinning out into long, low buildings of a plain and utilitarian design. The path lay near a shoreline, which became clearly visible when they left the buildings behind. Acres of slimy weed covered the foreshore, continuing out into the shallows – in fact as far as the Doctor could see. And there were aliens out in the waters just off the beach, busily working. In the hinterland, concealed by haze, great artificial bunkers of immense proportions lay, obscured by blown sands.
Sitting back down, the Doctor chewed at his thumb and worked at what he had witnessed. Looking to either side of the sled, he confirmed a first impression: none of the plantations shown on that virtual globe existed here any longer. No greenery at all, apart from the vast slicks of – algae? – out on the shores.
'Environmental collapse,' he told himself. 'A world on the brink of collapse. A world of wastelands.' Of course! All that mileage of greenery out to sea – oxygen-yielding marine weeds. If not for that, this would be a dead world indeed.
A few of the prisoners in the sled turned to look at him as he spoke. The guards looked at him in complete bafflement.
'Not quite what you expected?' he asked of the apparent leader amongst the prisoners. The bio-vore, who could have easily dismembered the Doctor in a moment, turned to look at the inquisitor.
'No. Homeworld survives, with a strangely changed populace. We of the Detachment are now deemed heretics, throwbacks. Once we were the future of our race. Now – prisoners.'
Taking off his cylindrical helmet, the alien looked out to sea, at the weeds and waves and the workers amongst all of them.
'Prisoners, and heretics beside. We will not be allowed to live long, small alien being.'
The alien looked at the Doctor in alarmingly human fashion.
'You have not been kept alive out of merciful consideration, small alien. Just as we will not be allowed to live, neither will you. Except in your case, interrogation will be the first order of events.'
The Doctor looked over the lifeless deserts that lay away to the west in endless acres.
'Ah, well, qui sera, hmm?' He reached into a pocket of his waistcoat. The guards darted anxious glances at him, until he produced a paper bag and offered it to the alien leader now a prisoner.
'Jelly baby?'