The Place of Execution was used only occasionally, for when one of the aristocrats or a senior Warrior wanted to make an example of a minion. Then, the unfortunate would be pinioned against a ceremonial pillar, a charge or charges laid out against them verbally, and an executioner would Eviscerate them.
Url felt a profound hatred for the alien, a hatred that he'd not felt for anything in the past that he could recall. Things were breaking down here on Homeworld, Farmers daring to lift their hands against their betters, Warriors discussing orders instead of following them blindly. Never mind that a new world beckoned, ripe and fat and perfect for exploitation, for what use would that be if Homeworld lay in ruins?
He intended to Eviscerate the malicious little alien himself, never mind that the big blue box would remain a mystery. Those idle scientific staff back at his keep could earn their bottled algae breaking into it!
Back to the sentence. Url stood at the front of the amphitheatre, facing the prisoner, who cocked his head to one side and gave a grimace of threat. Url began his diatribe.
'Being that you are guilty of sabotage, assault, deceit, insurrection, murder, theft, property damage to the value of - '
'Don't I get a chance to put my side?' interrupted the alien, making that threat gesture again. 'The defence, putting it's case to the judge and jury.'
Url merely scowled in annoyance. Mock, alien, mock. You will be dead within two minutes. Within three there will be nothing to show you ever existed.
'You are being tried. When sentence is passed, I will carry it out.'
The small alien made a noise unpleasantly similar to laughter.
'Judge, jury and executioner all in one? Well, I suppose it cuts the wage bill a little, eh?'
The aristocrat seethed with indignation. Such effrontery! Why, the last victim to suffer formal execution, an Overseer, had stood in stupified silence until Eviscerated.
'Property damage, unauthorised absenting from a cell, wilful damage to the fabric of - '
Gradually, Url became aware of a scraping, grinding screeching racket pitched at appalling volume behind him, rapidly surpassed in volume by the shouts of alarm and fear from the now-scattering audience.
He almost turned, before noticing that the small alien was sliding around the sacrificial pillar, presenting his back to his potential executioner. Was this a bluff, a dare, another tactic of insolence?
The thundering, smashing noise rushed at him. Warned by a shout, Url turned to see what had made such a vast noise and panic.
An Element Sieve! Rocketing down the terraced slope at increasing speed, striking sparks from the granite, smashing the stones once it passed them. A group of bio-vores lurked at the very top of the terraces, surely the ones who had propelled the twenty-ton device over the lip of the amphitheatre.
Horror-struck, and paralysed with fear, Url was smashed under the squealing metal of the massive object as it cannoned along the floor of the punishment basin, ploughing straight at the pole restraining the Doctor.
Keeping watch on the sentry platform, Doretti whistled loudly to the sandbag emplacement, where Davey snored whilst Tam kept a lookout.
'Look lively,' said Tam, elbowing his companion awake. Davey spluttered into wakefulness, muttering blearily.
'What's up?'
Tam nodded in the direction of Doretti, who pointed across the desert.
'He hasn't cranked the siren, so it ain't the nose-goblins.'
Davey brightened temporarily, hoping it might be a relief column sent down from Tobruk or Benghazi, tanks and artillery preferably. He scanned the distant horizon, unable to see far or clearly in the rippling haze that danced over the gravel and rock.
No tell-tale column of dust. Every vehicle travelling raised dust, except during or straight after rain, so where was the relief column?
In fact almost a minute went by before he saw what Doretti had seen. Of course, the Italian had the advantage of height and binoculars.
A bobbing, weaving black blob, that slowly resolved into a running animal. A camel. Riderless, a saddle dangling in dissaray from the hump.
'What the ruddy hell is a camel doing on it's own?' commented Tam.
' "Doing"? It looks like it's doing a flat race,' replied Davey. 'I reckon it's running from summat.'
Another black blob came after the first camel, resolving into another camel, this time with clutter on it's back.
The first animal came racing into the depot, onto the main track and carried on through, not slowing down. Davey, with a vague idea of stopping the creature, let it pass without trying to catch it.
'That was not a happy camel,' he told Tam in an aside.
Doretti cranked the siren once, bringing everyone to the eastern edge of the depot. Sarah, dozy and with a headache, climbed up the vantage point to see what approached. The soldier passed her his binoculars and indicated the second camel.
Sarah had only heard the footfalls of the first animal a minute before, a frantic rhythm that disturbed her sleep under an awning in one of the cooler mud huts. This second creature only managed a limping gait, one leg either injured or rendered senseless.
Because, crawling like a vile bloated beetle, another of the bio-vore's tanks came on in pursuit. Sarah noticed that this one had two barrels in the turret, one the familiar big-bored stun gun, the other a narrower weapon. Too fast to register properly, a series of missiles came from the narrower barrel, throwing up a line of spurts in the sand next to the racing camel. The creature swerved away, only for another sudden spray of sand to fly up and send it back on the original course.
Playing! They're toying with it! seethed Sarah to herself. Her anger increased when she realised the bundled cloth on the animal concealed at least one person. Doretti realised much the same and muttered imprecations.
Roger had been watching from behind Davey and Tam's emplacement. He felt pity for the suffering Arabs, but all the same hoped they wouldn't draw the bio-vores any nearer.
'Fat chance!' he grumbled.
Tam and Davey both looked at him. Dominione, standing in concealment behind a mud hut, shrugged in resignation. They were going to be discovered whether they opened fire or not.
The camel loped awkwardly straight for the depot, leading on the black tank. Roger crossed the roadway in a crouch, getting under the camo netting that concealed the A13 and climbed in by the turret hatch. The interior felt stifling after being outside, made even worse by the layers of camouflage netting that seemed to make the air staler than ever. Sweat stood out on his skin, not entirely the product of temperature.
Roger slid a two-pounder shell into the breech and closed it. Oil and grease helped to make the loading smoother. He squinted into the aiming telescope, seeing nothing but gravel and sand.
Okay, elevate. The elevating drum turned stiffly, as he brought the gun up to register at a range of three hundred yards. It wasn't possible to turn the turret; he had to wait until a target crossed his line of vision.
With a rapidity that displayed his nervousness, the officer stood up and looked out of the open turret hatch. The injured camel cantered closer, the black tank, squat and baleful, crawled along behind.
Roger dropped back into the gunner's seat, squinting into the rubber eyepiece, sweat and grit rubbing at his eyelid.
There! A fleeting glimpse of an irregular, rounded, bobbing object. Then a dark, glossy shape appeared in the sights. He pulled the trigger, ears suffering from the greatly-amplified bang that rang in the turret. Flicking the breech lever, the hot brass base of the two pounder shell rattled onto the floor at his feet. Roger slid another shell home, closed the breech, checked that there was still a target there – and there was – and fired again.
Tam and Davey witnessed the camel come into the depot, catching one glimpse of a terrified female face cradling a child under the concealing blue cloth, before the creature trotted off.
Their attention returned to the approaching bio-vore vehicle. The A13's gun fired, muzzle blast causing the camouflage netting to bulge outwards like a balloon. A glowing tracer in the shell's base drifted with what seemed astonishing slowness, until it hit the vehicle low down in the middle.
Unlike previous black tanks, this one did not blow apart. The shell hit, and the vehicle jerked to a stop, but it wasn't destroyed. The big flat turret began to turn, until a second shell hit the blind cockpit, smashing it open.
Bio-vores began to jump purposefully from the rear doors of the tank, wielding weapons. Sarah counted at least twenty – they moved and ducked for cover too much for her counting to be accurate. Several carried large pieces of equipment which they began to set up behind their immobilised transport.
'Take that, you barstards!' shouted Davey, beginning to fire his Vickers machine-gun. He fired without stopping, shifting the fall of bullets by watching the tracers or spurts of sand thrown up where the bullets landed. The bio-vores avoided grouping or offering easy targets, having learnt or recalled skirmish skills not needed for centuries. They still began to suffer injury under the relentless fire.
Running out of ammunition as the belt finished, Davey began to open another box. Tam began to fire his gun, short bursts aimed at a particular target, and he kept firing until he hit the target. Bio-vores made bigger targets than humans, but they were stronger, too. Each needed several bullets to kill them, nor was that all.
'They've got armour on,' realised Tam, seeing another bio-vore get up, only injured from what ought to have been a killing series of hits.
'Good! Because this belt is armour-piercing!' snarled Davey, in the grip of a furious temper.
A single loud popping sound erupted from behind the bio-vore tank, like a giant hiccough. Davey recognised it as a mortar and ducked flat, or as flat as he could. Another loud popping sound struck his ears, and he felt a stinging pain in his left bicep, and another behind his left ear. What sounded like bees went whizzing into the ground, and the sandbags, accompanied by pinging and rattling.
'We're being shelled,' he called to Tam, who didn't reply. The pain in his bicep made him look to see the damage: a long, slender splinter of glass fully four inches long projected from the muscle, blood staining the worn khaki around the wound. Almost afraid to look, Davey realised the big shrapnel spike penetrated to the other side, poking out for an inch.
'Tam!' he hissed, feeling a wave of nausea. 'Tam – I'm hit!'
The A13 fired again, then again, and again. The shells all hit the rear of the black tank, knocking off great chunks and physically shifting the vehicle. The movement was sufficient to expose part of the weapon concealed behind the tank.
Before the bio-vores could launch any more glass shrapnel bombs, the Sahariana driven by Torrevechio came bounding over the gravel from the south, shrugging off glass darts and stun rays from the dispersed bio-vore skirmishers, the A13's dismounted engine covers making excellent protection.
At a hundred yards distant from the aliens, Torrevechio fired up the flamethrower and drove straight at them, drenching the unfortunate victims in blazing fuel and killing them almost instantly. Next he swerved to the left and poured liquid flame over a few of the pinned-down bio-vores.
Faced with a weapon so terrifying, the surviving bio-vores broke and ran, only half a dozen of them getting away: Doretti saw to that, picking off runners with a Bren gun. He felt a savage delight in bowling the stampeding monsters over with a brace of bullets, until Sarah stopped him with a restraining hand.
'Enough,' she said. 'No killing for the sake of it. We need to defend ourselves, not to slaughter.'
Doretti's face, when they found the injured Davey, looked coolly and appraisingly at Sarah.
Tam was dying, hit in the back and the head by the big glass splinters. He hadn't been able to duck as fast as the private, who looked utterly distraught.
'I'm sorry, sir,' mumbled Tam, blind. 'And miss – I'll not get to know how this ends.'
'You daft plonker!' croaked Sarah, her throat constricting to the diameter of a drinking straw. 'You win!'
She didn't know if Tam ever heard her, but she hoped so, she hoped so. When she could speak again, Roger was tending to Davey. The officer broke off the longer end of the glass splinter and pulled the remnant out from the other side, in a gout of blood. Sarah stood by and helped with a bandage, then cleaned out a ragged gash in the back of Davey's head, laid open by more shrapnel. The private slurred his words and alternated between grogginess and aggression, symptoms of concussion. Once he was bandaged Roger escorted him over to the mud hut Sarah had been sleeping in, forcing him to drink water and sit in the sultry heat of the primitive structure.
'Needs proper medical care,' commented the officer, rooting in a tin medical box. 'Here we go, sulfa powder. Morphine, morphine, morphine – got it.' He straightened up. 'Your chappie the Doctor couldn't help, could he?'
Sarah shrugged, her emotive response dulled by sorrow.
'I don't think he's that skilled at medicine. Science is more his thing.'
Dominione asked where Albert and the Professor were? He hadn't seen them for a long time. Were they casualties?
Nowhere near casualties, it transpired. Albert had been practicing taxiing in the Lysander beyond the supply depot's western perimeter, with the Professor looking on to indicate and rate his performance in terms of thumbs up, thumbs down or thumbs horizontal.
'I think I've got the hang of it,' exclaimed an excited and dusty Albert, climbing down from the cockpit and pushing a pair of goggles atop his head. Sarah and Dominione looked on with less enthusiasm that the Professor, who scowled hugely at their lack of support.
'We're now down to eight people,' said Sarah. 'Corporal Mickleborough died five minutes ago.'
'Died! What happened?' asked Albert. The noise and dust created by the unevenly running aircraft engine meant he missed the whole battle on the eastern edge of the depot. 'I see. I see. Sorry I missed helping,' he said in a very muted voice after hearing the explanation.
'We need to all be together,' declared Dominione. 'For a briefing.'
Sarah translated and the two archaeologists swapped glances, only to agree.
Roger looked at his fellow survivors and soldiers. Dusty, pale-faced, salt-encrusted and unutterably weary. Not counting Davey, in even worse condition than the rest of them. Torrevechio had picked up soot and smoke from the flamthrower, leaving only his goggle-covered eyes clean in a filthy face.
How unfair was all this! The lieutenant silently snarled. Corporal Mickleborough, Captain Dobie, all the other dead garrison soldiers. They were members of the RASC, not men who did the fighting. They supplied the men who did the fighting. Fighting was down to other people, other folk who put their lives on the line, not the pen-pushing, crate-carrying men of the RASC.
'As I see it,' he began, 'We are not in a good position. There are only eight of us left alive, and only seven effectives. Whilst we repelled the last enemy attack, I don't think we can survive another.'
'You don't know another attack will come,' stated Professor Templeman with considerable emphasis. 'You aren't gifted with a crystal ball.'
'No. I don't know. But I do have a very well-informed speculative sense.'
Roger pointed at the wreck of the knocked-out bio-vore vehicle.
'I've been over to look at that monstrous chariot. The other ones that got hit by armour-piercing shot flew apart in a cloud of fragments. That one remained intact, as you can see.'
Silence settled whilst the audience waited for an explanation.
'That particular vehicle, however, has been constructed with layers of metal mesh underneath the surface, interleaved in the glass. Our opponents learn quickly. At a guess, I would say that the recycled Sahariana's are now being used to armour these things.' Seeing a lack of comprehension, Roger carried on. 'They use metal to strengthen the glass that makes up their main construction material.'
'What are you implying?' asked the Professor.
'That they'll be back, and ready to attack us. That mortar weapon firing glass shrapnel – I think that's how they killed the Lysander pilot. I bet there are other weapons come through from their arsenals, too.'
Sarah remained silent. Her worry focussed on the Doctor, who had been gone far too long for comfort. He might very well have to creep around secretly, avoiding bio-vores, but he'd been gone far too long. Despite the heat, she shivered.
'Somebody walk over your grave?' asked Albert, with all the tact of a tank. Professor Templeman scowled at the graduate, who blushed after realising what he'd said.
'I want us to get ready to leave the depot, and move back to the wadi. Use the Bedford – oh, the clutch has gone. Stow food and water in the Bedford, then tow it with a Sahariana. We take one of the Vickers guns in the emplacement, for protection.'
'Abandon the depot?' said Dominione, not entirely in agreement once he understood what the other officer wanted.
'We barely held off that last attack. The bio-vores know where we are, now, and how many of us there are. We have only seven people, three of whom are civlians unfamiliar with firearms. The A13 can't be moved around.'
Sarah caught Albert looking sideways at Roger. The young graduate seemed about to speak, then changed his mind.
Albert had intended to point out that the defenders still had the giant-flamethrower, and over a hundred Amaretto spirit bombs, and – most tellingly – an aircraft.
Twenty Six: Pushed Over the EdgeFrom his viewpoint, his hands strung together behind the pillar by cuttingly thin strands of glass wire, the Doctor saw an enormous metal oval appear at the edge of the execution basin, moving jerkily. In fact he was the only witness, since the audience of bio-vores were clustered along the lower tiers of the amphitheatre, all intently looking at him.
'Oh, get on with it, you pompous windbag!' he shouted at Url, who ignored the interruption and carried on with the sentence.
Fascinated, the Doctor recognised the metal oval as an Element Sieve, big as a house, being pushed over the rim of the artificial basin. The bio-vores who would normally be towing it were now pushing it. And it would come racing down right at him.
For a split-second the massive object teetered on the very lip of the semi-circular arena, before tipping forward and smashing downwards, accelerating.
Carefully, wanting to avoid getting his hands cut off, the Doctor shuffled around the pillar to face away from the oncoming metal juggernaut. He heard the shuffles and shrieks of bio-vores moving out of the way, and the last gasp of Url, too late and too slow to avoid being crushed to death, all under the muted thunder and grating of the Element Sieve, which struck his pillar like an earthquake.
The pillar broke at the base, falling backwards into the gaping scoop of the Element Sieve, where it stuck like a matchstick in a mouth. The Doctor desperately and frantically struggled to retain his balance, bracing his thighs and feet against the pillar, as the massive metal scoop skidded across the floor, sending out sparks in all directions. The pillar rolled left and right, the binding wire cruelly cutting into the Doctors wrists
With a tremendous hollow clang, the Element Sieve hit the far side of the amphitheatre, pitching the pillar forward again. The Doctor fell to the side of the stone column, hearing a series of brittle cracks, surmounted by a rapid series of high-pitched twanging sounds, reminiscent of a sped-up banjo.
Experimentally , he flexed his fingers. Still working! Tugging very gently, he found no resistance from the hitherto restricting glass bonds.
Gingerly, he stood up, seeing that his restraints of glass had impacted against the rim of the worn metal scoop, and shattered under the weight of the column hitting them at speed.
The heavily worn and pitted interior of the scoop smelt of hot metal, odd mineral tangs and dust. As the Doctor moved inside it, the scoop rocked slightly, making grating noises that echoed a little.
Stepping outside, keeping to the cover of the giant Sieve, the Doctor peered carefully round a curving shoulder of metal at the amphitheatre. Ranks of empty tiered seating, with a path of shattered stones and slabs leading down from the edge of the basin to his very feet. That crumpled purple smear on the granite flooring must be Lord Excellency Url …
Escaping from the amphitheatre was an anticlimax; there were no bio-vores present, and when the Time Lord reached level ground, no living thing in sight. Presumably his erstwhile captors considered him to be definitely dead, not worth bothering about in a search.
He never could be sure whether the bio-vores had propelled their indiscriminate missile at Url, to kill the aristocrat, or at The Doctor, to free him.
Whatever their intent, he faced a long hike back to the grey granite complex at the shoreline, where the TARDIS still stood.
'In such a case, one practices discretion, that part which bests valour,' he mused to the uncaring desert around him. He made a direct path to the distant sea, intending to hit the shore and then work south to the trans-mat complex.
Bio-vore society, undergoing convulsions, interrupted his progress. The Doctor managed to get to the dunes that overlooked the tired, shallow sea before meeting any more inhabitants of Wastelandworld, as he now dubbed it.
Suddenly, a group of bio-vores appeared in front of him, looming with silent menace, an ambush out of the sands. When he turned to retreat, another group stood behind him, looking equally threatening.
'Stay your hand!' called one of the aliens. 'This is the alien prophet. He is called "Thedoctor". Do not harm him.'
Feeling absurdly flattered, the Doctor found it hard to avoid preening a little. He bowed to the aliens, a gesture that impressed them enormously.
'Thank you! Thank you, and to whom am I indebted?'
'You can call me Imgelissa. You, Thedoctor, bear a charmed life. Not less than an hour ago, you were being led to the Place of Execution.'
Tapping the side of his nose, the Doctor grinned back.
'A few of your friends helped to set me free. Allow me to guess – you are the peasant population of this world, and you have finally begun to resist your lords and masters? Armed insurrection? Revolt?' This was far better than using a crude bomb to destroy their Earth-terminus trans-mat! No "mere blind bashing" indeed!
The bio-vore's appearance confirmed what he suspected: their assorted harvesting tools and equipment had been adapted to become lethal weapons, knives, pikes, scythes, hammers and other offensive hardware. A development straight out of Chinese peasant resistance. A few stunners or shard-throwers were also in evidence, probably booty from slain Warriors.
'Word has reached us that you accuse the aristocrats of being responsible for reducing Homeworld to this - ' and Imgelissa gestured at the wasted lands around about ' – whilst pretending that it is not their fault, that they are fated to rule Homeworld regardless of what they do.'
With a touch of steel in his tone, the Doctor informed the audience of what he extrapolated about the littoral aristocracy. How they had despoiled their own world, then sought to export that misery to other worlds, all to avoid having to face the consequences of their own actions.
'What is your moral stance?' asked the Doctor of his audience, turning and looking at them, and realising with a well-concealed start that his audience had unobtrusively grown to number several hundreds. 'What is your attitude? How do you feel?'
With a strange, backward bow, Imgelissa addressed the Doctor.
'We the Farmers feel what we have long felt, that it is folly to extort life from life, criminal to destroy others that others may live. We can subsist on the energies of algae, without resort to the life-energies of our fellows, without sapping other worlds of their life. The Farmers can exist as a self-sufficient culture, if we ever get free of the cursed Warriors!'
The Doctor folded his arms and stared intently at Imgelissa.
'You may be getting just that, Farmer Imgelissa. You called me a prophet before.' Theatrically, the Doctor stopped to sweep his arms wide, indicating everyone now listening. 'No! Not a prophet. I merely predicted what would happen when you, the Farmers, finally stood up to your masters. All that has happened since is the result of your actions, not mine.'
Long murmurs of discussion went around the listening aliens, who looked impressed with this intellectual distinction.
The Doctor looked on with approval. Self-determination, very good!
The discussion died when a stranger came into view, a Warrior to judge by the amount of equipment dangling from it's utility belt.
The massed Farmers noticed the Warrior and didn't seem disposed to treat him leniently. Several dozen brandished their improvised weapons, and began to close on the solo bio-vore. The Warrior did not stop or slow down, but did make that strange backwards bow that the Doctor had seen elsewhere.
Oh! I see! he realised. A gesture of submission. That's why the listeners were so impressed when I bowed to them.
'Stay your hands! Let him speak!' boomed the Doctor in the best music hall baritone he could muster. This created sufficient confusion to allow the lone Warrior to speak. Firstly he crossed both hands over his proboscis, another gesture the Doctor realised was meant to be conciliatory.
'I will not fight for the Overseers, or the Seniors, nor the Detachment Leaders any longer,' intoned the Warrior. 'And most of all I will not fight for the aristocrats, the Lords and Excellencies.'
Most impressive! Breaking free from the class and culture classification of ages, analysed the Doctor.
'Why is that?' he asked, curious as ever.
The Warrior threw off his armour and web harness.
'I look around and see a dying world. We should be trying to revive it, not trying to destroy other worlds. Besides, Thedoctor prophet said the aristocrats helped despoil this world, an age ago.' This last sentence was said with a sly glance at the Doctor.
'Really, I'm not a prophet!' protested the latter, now feeling a little concerned at his reputation's rapid spread. He tried to fade into the background rather more, trying to listen to what the Farmers were planning.
Imgelissa, nominally the leader of the Farmers, gestured to his followers to gather round for a quick discussion.
The rebellion had spread up and down the coast with surprising speed, moving from scattered attacks on isolated Overseers and Warriors to large-scale assaults on the various building complexes. Lord Sur's castle had been attacked, occupied and plundered, the underground cells discovered and checked (all empty). The Warrior garrison fought briefly and fled, pursued by angry insults and thrown stones.
Part of the reason for the rapid spread of actual revolt, as opposed to covert discontent and mutterings, was the excessive demand for algae requirement, and the attempted Evisceration of dozens of Farmers to "encourage" their fellows.
Imgelissa also realised that the aristocrats and their aides had made a major blunder in sending so many Warriors to Target World Seventeen. The total came to nearly a thousand, a thousand Warriors who might have been able to prevent this rebellion and crush it, but who were off on the Target World.
In the near future he anticipated that the littoral aristocracy would arrive with detachments of Warriors, ready to kill and destroy to re-establish their regime. In the north, parties of Farmers were posted as lookouts, waiting to give a warning on seeing any approaching forces. The north wasn't a problem.
South was where they had a difficulty. South lay the trans-mat complex, guarded by surviving Warriors, Overseers and one or two misinformed Farmers. The Warriors were too numerous, well-armed and protected to be overwhelmed by a direct attack. That had been proven, bloodily, twice.
Not only that, recalled Imgelissa, with a nasty feeling of having missed a trick, the other lords along the littoral might send reinforcements to the loyalists holding the trans-mat by trans-mat. As a mere Farmer he didn't know how many trans-mat stations still operated, those ones capable of sending matter across the continents, but it would be folly to assume none still functioned.
He stopped thinking and began speaking.
'We must overcome the defenders at the trans-mat station. Only if we capture that do we become safe from loyalist reinforcements being sent in by other aristocrats to our north and south, or from other continents.'
'You'll be lucky!' replied a Farmer. 'We've already tried twice.'
'A hundred dead,' complained another.
Before Imgelissa could speak, Thedoctor interrupted, a strange wrinkling appearing on the skin above his eyes.
'How many injured?' asked the small alien. Although it came in the form of a question, Imgelissa felt Thedoctor knew the answer already. After all, he was a prophet.
The bio-vores looked amongst each other. Injured?
'Oh! I understand!' exclaimed a Farmer. 'Those temporarily alive. Maybe fifty were temporarily alive, until Eviscerated.'
Thedoctor didn't stop his questioning there.
'Very well, ignoring those who suffered injury in the recent attacks, what if one of you were to suffer an accident whilst harvesting algae? What if you contracted a disease?'
Once again, Imgelissa and the other bio-vores exchanged looks of surprise at the prophet's ignorance. It fell to Nurbonissa, young and daring, to reply.
'Evisceration, of course. What else is there!'
Thedoctor seemed to turn purple with suppressed rage, which burst forth in a long diatribe. Imgelissa listened, spellbound, as did the entire audience. They underwent a conversion, then, convinced that Thedoctor was not merely a prophet but a visionary.
'Medicine!' he roared, with a volume and vigour not utilised since appearing at the Trocadero in 1896. 'Surgery! I am living proof that the "temporarily living" can be brought back to full health. On many occasions in the past I have been injured, or rendered sick with an illness. Did my fellow s kill me? No! No, they used medicine, or surgery, or both to help me find my way back to full health.'
The Farmers looked at each other, wondering at this new concept of society. Medicine? Surgery?
'Keeping your fellow alive is all very well,' commented a Farmer. 'We don't have sufficient algae or other bio-morphic resources to sustain our tempor – the "injured".'
Normally a quiet round of whispered assent would have greeted this statement. Today, dead silence held sway until Thedoctor spoke again.
'Not yet. Not yet, you don't. I can help to provide you with plants adapted for desert terrain, and embryonic fauna to populate your environment. Well, I can if I can get my TARDIS back.'
Once again a whisper of discussion went around the listeners.
'Allow me to explain,' continued Thedoctor. 'I managed to escape from the cells underneath Lord Sur's castle, by smashing the cell walls with a prosthesis. An artificial bone, created and utilised by your ancestors five thousand years ago. Your long-dead relatives knew how to mend and maintain the bio-vore body, and so can you. Medicine! The usage of pharmeceuticals to balance the body's internal chemistry. Surgery! Physical manipulation of the body proper, the better to repair it.'
Imgelissa and his compatriots looked at each other in slow, treacly understanding: a bio-vore injured was not mere Evisceration fodder. To fall ill was not – ought not – to be an automatic sentence of death. A Farmer who was not well might very well get better and perform mighty deeds.
Still wearing a shadow of the frown created by what he heard from the Farmers, the Doctor looked over his now enormous audience. From hundreds, the listeners had grown to thousands, trickling in during his presentation.
A revolution in progress! he enthused, before taking stock more empirically. In progress here, perhaps, at this part of the littoral. At this part of the littoral, in progress until swamped by the response of other, less-threatened aristocrats.
He looked out over the bio-vores, who looked back with a hungry intensity that bespoke a desire to hear The Answer.
'I'm afraid that my colleague here spoke the truth. To be safe from an attack by outside agencies, we need to prosecute a vigorous attack against those very same agencies.'
In behaviour completely different from that displayed during Imgelissa's tenure, the waiting bio-vore audience accorded the Doctor a serried wave of applause.
For a moment that seemed to last whole minutes, the Doctor paused to think. Finally, having ensured that the maximum number of people would pay attention now (and in the future), he continued.
'We do indeed need to capture the trans-mat platform. If we have that platform then the old order is ham-strung. Already the aristocrats of the coast are panicking about the Farmers taking matters into their own hands, trying to reverse history, undercutting progress.'
That was a guess, but a well-informed guess nevertheless. With any advanced communication system the leaders would be finding out what was happening across their world, before the man at the bottom level found out himself.
What the Doctor couldn't ignore or bypass was the fact that the revolt amongst Warriors and Farmers was taking place in a single city-state. There were dozens of other such polities across this world, which might or might not choose to join in the revolt.
With startling clarity a phrase from Sorbusa came back to the Doctor. Target World Fourteen – and that gave him an idea.
'What we need is a Torjan Horse. None of you are familiar with that concept?'
Imgelissa crossed both hands over his proboscis.
'We are Farmers, Thedoctor, not Warriors. Conflict is novel to us.'
'Good! Let's hope it stays that way.'
From the sentry post of Lord Url's keep, the warning went out that an Element Sieve was approaching, being dragged by two dozen Farmers, escorted by Warriors.
The garrison at Lord Url's keep had been reduced due to the escort sent to obvserve matters at the large-scale transmat. They had been warned by the survivors of the escort that Lord Url was missing, had not been seen for hours, and that Farmers – yes, Farmers! – were attacking at the trans-mat platform.
The huge metal artefact was dragged into the inner keep, scraping over the granite flooring – which is when the escorting Warriors turned on the keep's garrison, as did the towing Farmers.
Not only that, the service and retrieval hatches on the Element Sieve fell open, and more Farmers stormed out. Within half an hour the keep had fallen to the fifty attackers.
The Doctor was allowed out of the Element Sieve when the fighting finished, to be led deeper within the castle and to Lord Url's own private trans-mat.
'Can you operate this equipment?' asked one of the escorting Farmers.
Taking in the big panels, with their coding, lettering, symbols and schematics, the Doctor nodded confidently.
'Oh yes! The trick lies not in knowing how to operate this equipment, it's in finding out how to remotely operate other trans-mats.'
He had told several of the elected leaders amongst the rebels what he intended to do, which had impressed and alarmed them. Enough to insist he took an escort with him.
As luck would have it, one of the castle's unarmed staff survived: an Administrator. He was brought before the Doctor, who looked keenly at the frightened alien.
'I want to know which large-scale trans-mat was used to send an Infiltration Complex to Target World Fourteen. I want to know if it can be re-activated. Can it?'