Doctor Who_ Night Of The Humans Part 15

'And what's that supposed to mean? Are you jealous?'

'Jealous? Me? What? No! Jealous? I don't know what you're talking about.'

'So I'm not allowed to make friends with other aliens, is that it?'

'Don't be facetious.'

'Ha ha... You are. You're jealous. You're, like, green with envy.'

'I'm not even going to dignify that with a response.'

'Ha... The jealous Doctor. Oh, that is priceless.'

'I am not jealous.'

'You so are. What's your doctorate in, anyway? Got a PhD in jealousy, have you?'

'Be quiet.'

They had reached the ship's exit. Manco tapped a code into the door's control panel and the hatch 175.

opened up. Holding the others back with a gesture of his hand, he leaned out into the street.

'What do you see?' asked the Doctor. 'Is the coast clear?'

Manco shook his head.

'No. They're near the western gate. Lots of them. We can't go that way. We'll have to use the south gate. Follow me.'

Walking in single file, the five of them stepped out of the ship and into the streets of the human city, with Charlie and Slipstream trailing behind. Charlie alternated his aim between Slipstream and the far end of the street, where a crowd of humans were congregating at the gate, as if in antic.i.p.ation.

'What are they waiting for?' he asked.

The Doctor pointed at the sky, and looking up Charlie saw the blazing orb of the comet. It looked now like a ferocious eye, its centre so bright as to appear almost black. Its edges were lost in a shimmering haze.

'They're waiting for that,' said the Doctor.

176.

Chapter.

17.

The small lump of ice and rock entered the upper atmosphere of the Gyre with a cacophonous bang, its outer crust breaking away like a shower of sparks. As it plummeted towards the surface, it dragged behind it a quivering tail of fire and smoke, and it made a sound like the rumbling of heavy thunder. ice and rock entered the upper atmosphere of the Gyre with a cacophonous bang, its outer crust breaking away like a shower of sparks. As it plummeted towards the surface, it dragged behind it a quivering tail of fire and smoke, and it made a sound like the rumbling of heavy thunder.

Down and down it fell, piercing a hole through the muggy green clouds, travelling at hundreds of metres a second, before slamming into the salt plain with astonishing force.

Though the fragment was no bigger than an egg by the time it struck, it left a crater more than four metres across, and sent a rippling shockwave out across the plain, hissing through the salt crystals.

177.

It had crashed into the humans' path, no more than a hundred metres ahead, and all of them cowered in its wake, diving to the ground and covering their heads as if expecting a second onslaught.

All of them except Django.

Next to his throne, strapped to the eight-legged carriage with lengths of rope, was the Sittuun bomb. He couldn't read the markings on its outer casing; they were written in the language of the Olden Ones, which only the heretic, Manco the Wordslinger, could understand. Nor did he really understand the digital display, and the numbers that changed with every pa.s.sing second. He knew enough, however, to understand that these digits were counting down.

00:34:01...

00:34:00...

00:33:59...

'We move on!' Django yelled at his men, who were slowly beginning to gather themselves. 'We move on!'

The caravan of humans began moving again, their machines hissing and chugging away, the foot soldiers trudging through the salt.

Django didn't take his eyes off the bomb. To him, it wasn't just a bomb. The truth was, he had little understanding of what it actually did. The Sittuun had tried to explain, when they sent their 178.

emissaries to the human city, but he hadn't really listened.

Their words meant little to him, and he had little time for them.

They were liars and servants of the Bad, of this he was sure.

Why else would they wish to destroy this world before Gobo's return?

Django thought about the Bad. He remembered, as a child, being taken to the Chamber of Stories by his father. There, he and the other children were made to sit and watch the silent images of the Olden Ones projected onto a great screen, while one of the city's elders would tell them what the story was about.

The Bad didn't always look the same. His face would often change, but he always wore the same clothes - a black hat with a wide brim - and he often had a moustache.

The Bad had haunted Django's childhood nightmares, and had plagued his waking thoughts. He had known, early on, that the Star with the Green Tail would return in his lifetime. The Elders had predicted it. They had taught him that with each visit the Star drew a little closer to their world, and that one day it would come to them. They had taught him that the star was Gobo, and that one day it would save them from the Bad.

Now that day had come. The Bad had sent his servants, the Sittuun and the one calling himself the Doctor, to ruin everything, but Django had thwarted them. He had their bomb, and he had the 179.

one person capable of disarming it. Manco.

'Warning. Warning. Coordinate delta three nine is corrupted.

Warning. Warning. Coordinate delta three nine is corrupted.'

The voice of the Golden Bough's alarm remained unnervingly calm and impa.s.sive, speaking in a dull, pre-recorded monotone, though the ship itself was struggling to stay in the air. As good a pilot as he knew he was, and as hard as he tried, Captain Jamal simply couldn't make it fly in a straight line.

Each time he set the coordinates to fly east, towards the human city, the ship would bank sharply to the left or right, as if it was being rebounded by a magnetic force.

To make matters worse, lumps of smouldering rock were raining from the sky.

One of the comet's fragments had clipped a tail fin, though not enough to compromise the ship. The Captain had been lucky. This time.

Speed was the thing, he had decided. He simply couldn't get enough velocity on his approach to punch through whatever force was affecting the ship's systems. He needed more of a run-up, but that would mean flying away from the city and even the Gyre itself.

After his fifth attempt had failed, he realised it was his only choice.

180.

Of course, he didn't have to go to the human city at all. He could leave the Gyre, right there and then. He could steer away from the salt plains and the distant city, and set a course for his home world. The journey might take a month or two, but he'd be free of this place once and for all.

Except his son was down there, somewhere.

When he'd first sat at this ship's controls he'd felt what he thought might be fear for the first time in his life; but it wasn't a fear of the humans, or what they were capable of. It wasn't a fear for his personal safety. It was fear for his son. He had fought long and hard to get him a job in the IEA. He had fought for his son's place on the Beagle XXI's mission to the Gyre. His son was only here, on this terrible, barren world, because of him.

He wasn't going home alone.

The Captain steered the ship away from the city one last time, so that now all he could see ahead was the dark blue sky and the twinkling of distant stars. He hit the boosters, and was pinned back in his seat by the sudden thrust of acceleration, and he watched the sky grow darker still as the Golden Bough left the Gyre's thin and almost imperceptible atmosphere.

When he was a hundred miles out, he turned the ship around in a long and graceful arc, and now the Gyre lay before him; a vast and jagged disc of gnarled grey metal, fused together over aeons. He 181.

saw it in its entirety, from edge to edge. He saw the light from the nearest stars glittering on its crooked metal mountains, and he saw the vast white void of the salt plains near the human city. Looking up, he saw the blazing inferno of Schuler-Khan, now perilously close to the Gyre; pieces of it falling away like drops of burning rain.

This was it. This was his chance.

Captain Jamal pushed the control column forward, and began his descent.

'Manco, old chap... I thought you were showing us the way out of here?' said Slipstream, his voice laced with disdain.

Charlie nudged him with the rifle. 'Hey... Do us all a favour and shut up,' he snapped.

'This is the way out,' said Manco, mindless of the bitter exchange between Charlie and Slipstream. 'It's the only way out.'

They were back inside one of the buildings in the human city, creeping along a low pa.s.sage, the walls of which were fashioned from beaten panels bearing the logos of long-forgotten companies. Some of them were logos Amy recognised, brands that had existed in her time, back home.

Seeing them like this - tarnished and faded - made her feel sad, though she couldn't quite fathom why.

Maybe it was the thought that all the effort that people put into their lives, all that time working 182.

hard to buy things, could be reduced to nothing more than junk. Or the fact that everything looked so old. No, not just old.

Everything looked ancient. The adverts for sportswear and soft drinks that lined the pa.s.sage looked as weathered, as ancient and otherworldly, as Egyptian hieroglyphs and Roman mosaics.

Eventually they left the pa.s.sage and found themselves at the entrance to a large, almost church-like s.p.a.ce, where dozens of humans sat before a large canvas sheet. At the back of the chamber an ancient projector clicked and whirred. Its single lens cast a prism of multicoloured light onto the sheet, on which two Wild West gunslingers stood at opposite ends of a dusty street lined with clapboard shop fronts and saloons. One wore a white cowboy hat, the other black. Their hands were poised above six shooters in leather holsters, and the man in black scrutinised his foe with narrow, vulpine eyes. Amy was sure she had seen the film somewhere before, maybe on TV on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Why were these humans, in the year 250,339 watching it?

Standing beside the sheet, holding a rusted length of pipe like a staff, was the Elder - a human in dark black robes, his long, matted grey beard reaching all the way down his chest.

His voice echoed out over the otherwise silent chamber, and Amy, the Doctor and the others stopped in the 183 narrow entrance and listened to him.

'And the Bad travelled to El Paso, where he met with Zasquez, son of Gobo. And he said to him, "Where have you taken mankind? I wish to destroy them, for I hate them all." And Zasquez said, "My father, Gobo, has taken mankind far away from this world, to a place called Earth, so that they may be safe..."'

Amy turned to the Doctor.

'What is this?' she whispered. 'Why are they watching Westerns?'

'My guess?' the Doctor replied. 'Somebody on the ship had a big collection of Westerns. They've developed an entire culture based around the sc.r.a.ps of what survived the crash. Old Westerns... a cartoon clown...'

'But surely this film's got nothing to do with Gobo?'

'No. It hasn't,' said the Doctor.

His face suddenly lit up with a smile.

'You... are a genius.'

Without another word, he walked out into the room, making no effort to conceal his presence. The bearded man in black robes stopped talking and looked at the Doctor, his mouth opening and closing but failing to form words. One by one the humans sitting before the screen turned around, and they looked at the Doctor with the same expressions of shock and confusion.

184.

'Who... who are you?' asked the Elder.

'I'm the Doctor. And you, my friend, are talking rubbish.

Eighteen-carat, unadulterated rubbish.'

The Doctor produced his sonic screwdriver from his pocket, and pointed it back across the room at the projector. Its tip burned with a glowing emerald light, and the image on the screen flickered and shuddered, freezing for a few seconds before starting again. Now they heard the character of the man in black, the Bad as they called him, speaking with his own husky voice.

'You know you can't win this, Shane. Whyn't ya just get on your horse and ride out of here while you still have the chance?'

Then the man in the white hat spoke.

'Not today, Ramirez. You killed my brother.'

The room erupted into excited chattering, and from the narrow entrance Amy watched on, confused. What was the Doctor playing at? They had to get out of this place, and quickly, and there he was fixing their projector. Was he mad?

'They speak!' cried one of the humans. 'I can hear them!

The Olden Ones! They speak!'

As the Chamber of Stories descended into chaos, Dirk Slipstream began backing away from the small party who were still hiding in the pa.s.sage, moving as silently as he could. He had made it no more than five paces when Charlie wheeled around and aimed his gun at him.

185.

'Yeah... Nice try, Slipstream,' he growled. 'Now get back here.'

Slipstream cursed under his breath and joined them once more, and this time Charlie didn't take his eyes off him.

'OK!' shouted the Doctor, rushing to the front of the room.