Doctor Who_ Trading Futures Part 23

Cosgrove moved out of the way.

Dimly, he registered that Anji had done the same. Interesting. He'd had her down as a civilian, but not even the White House bodyguard had her reactions.

The bodyguard had drawn his pistol.

Cosgrove did the same, but kept it down, out of sight.

The bodyguard fired, at virtually point blank range, but it didn't do any good.

The creature nearest to the bodyguard raised his weapon, fired, and a white line of light bisected the bodyguard.

Penny Lik screamed, and was the next to die. Cosgrove was surprised how angry he felt.

One of the creatures was grabbing for the Asian girl, Kapoor, but she was managing to duck and weave out of its way. They were almost too large for the room, they were having to bend down to avoid sc.r.a.ping against the ceiling, and Kapoor was taking advantage of that.

One s.n.a.t.c.hed her handbag, parted the leather with its claw, as if it was Clingfilm.

It rummaged through the contents, found what looked like an old*fashioned mobile phone, and growled something.

Cosgrove had hunted rhinos.

It wasn't something he could admit anywhere these days, of course, even at his club. It had been sixty years ago, in Africa, and he'd bagged one, gaining a lot of admiration from the hunter who'd been leading the party.

Rhinos were extinct in the wild and in zoos, now, he'd seen that reported on the news a few years ago. They only existed in clonetivity.

He stood, raised his gun, and one of the creatures was at him within seconds. Cosgrove shot its gun, blew a hole in it that exposed a glowing mechanism. The creature tried firing it, but he'd disabled it. That only served to anger its owner, who swung its arm at him. It was too powerful to block. Cosgrove ducked, came up, tried to punch it in the side.

The creature didn't even register the blow. Instead it reached down, picked Cosgrove up. It was like being lifted by a crane. Cosgrove brought his hands together, slammed them down hard on the creature's arm. It was like hitting a statue.

Cosgrove wriggled, tried to grab at the thing's eye with one hand. Everything had a vulnerable spot, and it wouldn't like the ball of his thumb, or his thumbnail, in its eye.

He poked it, but just seem to enrage the beast more.

It threw Cosgrove down to the floor, leaned in.

It snarled something in its alien language.

It opened its mouth, roared in Cosgrove's face, half*deafening him.

Cosgrove shoved his gun in the open maw, angled it up slightly so it was aiming up at the brain pan, and fired.

The skull was thick, so he didn't blow its brain out. Its eyes glazed over, though.

It had also lost control of its legs. Cosgrove barely rolled out of the way in time as it crashed down.

The reaction from the other two creatures was instantaneous and startling: they panicked.

One of them, the one holding the mobile phone, shrieked an order.

A second later, the air had rippled, and the two surviving creatures had gone.

Cosgrove sagged, exhausted.

Dee was trying to catch her breath.

She'd not felt like this since she was a girl. She'd had asthma, the sort you grow out of, she'd only had a couple of attacks, nothing too serious, although it had felt like it at the time.

It felt serious now.

Her lungs ached, her mind just wasn't doing anything at all.

'What the h.e.l.l were they?' a woman's voice was saying. It was probably her own.

Anji and Cosgrove were on their feet again. The President hadn't had time to move.

Professor Lik and the bodyguard were smeared over the ground.

Dee felt sick.

Baskerville stood, tried to compose himself. He and Anji were the first to get to the alien corpse.

'What is it?' Baskerville asked.

'An alien,' Anji said quietly.

The body looked untouched, pristine. Dee tried to piece it all together.

'Cosgrove shot it,' she said feebly.

Cosgrove was getting back on his feet, but he needed to prop himself against the wall to do it.

Baskerville was agitated. 'We get out of here, now.'

Mather was looking down at the remains of his bodyguard. 'I need my security team '

'They wouldn't last long,' Dee said, and it came out sounding far more callous than she'd hoped. She was more worried about Baskerville, who looked scared for almost the first time Dee could remember.

'I can get us to safety,' Baskerville insisted.

'I'll look after you,' Cosgrove pledged.

Mather laughed.

'I know how to kill them, now,' Cosgrove insisted.

'We get moving,' Dee ordered.

'And we bring the body,' Cosgrove said, looking down at the alien.

Baskerville nodded, then turned to Anji. 'Miss Kapoor, do you have any idea why they were so interested in your telephone?'

The Onihr ship was in uproar.

Fitz had watched the three*Onihr landing party depart. All they needed was one of those little control boxes. So that meant all he needed to get out of here was one of those little boxes.

Well, he also needed to know where they stored them. And how to work it. But it was something to aim for.

The Onihr leader gloated to 'the Doctor' about how they were going to teleport down and take the time traveller and their time machine (which they a.s.sumed was the device they'd detected).

They'd also said their attack would be fast a s.n.a.t.c.h and grab raid, one where any resistance would be met with maximum retaliation.

But even the Onihrs who stayed behind on the ship seemed surprised how quickly the landing party returned.

When only two of the Onihrs returned, surprise turned to shock.

Shortly afterwards, when it became clear that the leader hadn't returned, that the humans had managed to kill him, that turned into an uncomprehending silence.

The deputy leader shuffled forwards to hear the report.

One of the human weapons had killed the leader with one shot. They had ma.s.sively underestimated human ingenuity, for the second time. They had recovered the time machine, though.

It looked remarkably like Anji's mobile phone.

'This device is the human time machine,' the deputy leader told him. 'You will make it operate.'

Fitz took it from the Onihr, turned it on and selected something from the menu.

It started to bleep out the X-Files X-Files theme tune. theme tune.

'This is a telephone,' he told him. 'A communications device. It's nothing like a time machine.'

'Our instruments prove that it has travelled through time.

Fitz brandished it. 'It has, I'm sure. But that doesn't make it a time machine. Did you kill the owner of this?' he asked, beginning to feel a little numb himself.

'A man and a woman died,' one of the landing party confirmed.

'The woman holding this device?' Fitz asked, not wanting to hear the answer.

'No.'

Fitz took a deep breath, felt a bit more calm. What he was going to do next was horrible, insensitive and exploitative, but it was the break he'd needed and he wasn't going to let it slip away.

He whirled to face the Deputy Leader.

'I warned you,' he snarled. 'I warned you the humans were not to be underestimated. Your leader's arrogance killed him, not the humans.'

The Deputy Leader looked taken aback at least that's what Fitz a.s.sumed. He'd no idea what an offended rhinoceros looked like.

'You sully the honour of our leader.'

'No. I'm merely telling you the truth. You're playing with fire. If you can't deal with the humans, then how do you ever hope to deal with the implications of time travel?' He fished for a suitably portentous phrase. 'You're meddling in the fundamental elemental forces of the universe. They'll destroy you. My concern is that you will accidentally destroy this whole tangent of the galaxy!'

He wasn't sure he meant 'tangent', but it had the desired effect. The Deputy Leader looked cowed.

'Hand me that!' Fitz demanded, and was pa.s.sed Anji's phone. He slipped it into his jeans pocket.

'And hand me one of those control boxes.'

The Deputy Leader, used to taking orders, not yet giving them, handed it over.

Fitz, not quite believing his luck, tucked that into a jacket pocket.

'Now, you must prepare to leave this solar system. You have done enough harm here.'

The other Onihrs murmured what sounded like consent, all eyes (or noses, Fitz supposed) on their new leader.

The Deputy stood his ground for the moment, then straightened up.

'No!' it roared. 'No! We will destroy the humans. We will purge them from the universe for this action! Prepare the invasion!'

Fitz sighed. It had all been going so well.

Chapter Fifteen.

Time*Flight Anji sat in the helicopter as it swept over Istanbul, but she hardly registered the historic city beneath her.

The helicopter was full up Dee was flying, Cosgrove in the copilot's seat. Baskerville was sitting next to the President... and she, being the smallest, was squeezed in the back with the dead alien.

It stared at her, through one gla.s.sy, dead eye. Its skin was smooth up close, it looked more like a seal's or a dolphin's than the hide of a rhinoceros. But the head was almost an exact replica of the Earth animal. The boxlike snout, the fearsome horn, those funny little round ears right at the back of their heads.

The armour was a substance that looked and felt like some hitherto unsuspected alloy of wrought iron and rubber.

There was a n.o.bility in the creature's face. It was an undignified way to treat the corpse, she thought.

They were heading for the airport. That's all Baskerville would tell them.

The President twisted round to talk to Anji it was pretty difficult to hear him over the noise of the rotors.