The Well-Mannered War Part 10

As if anxious to redeem himself, K9 trundled forward to a cleft in the ridge, and stuck his head around a corner to see what lay beyond. 'More humanoids, Mistress.'

Romana scurried to join him, putting her head next to his. The ridge they rested on was in fact part of a cliff that overlooked a gorge about forty feet across. Tramping through it with weary purpose were three soldiers dressed in one-piece fatigues only slightly less grey than their surroundings. They wore small handguns at their belts. At the centre of this small group was a figure dressed differently, a tall, authoritative-looking man in a light-green suit with a bulletproof vest tied around his middle.

Oddly, there was a small device, slender and cigar-shaped, hovering a few feet behind him at eye level. A recorder, perhaps?

'More soldiers,' she said. As they came closer she could hear the tone of their conversation, if not the exact words. It was light, informal. Chatty.

'Suggest we confer and request guidance,' said K9.

Romana readied herself to descend. 'All right. They look friendly, but you get ready to cut them down with a stun sweep. Just in case.

K9 made an extraordinary clicking sound. 'Regret cannot, Mistress.'

'What?'

'Cannot,' K9 whispered. He seemed ashamed. 'Offensive capability impaired. My laser is inoperative. This unit is functioning at sixty-one per cent of full utility. Advise immediate repair.'

Romana's spirits sank even lower. She watched as the soldiers trudged along and pondered the problem. Perhaps she and the Doctor had grown too reliant on K9 as a universal problem-solver.

Suddenly there was an ear-splitting shriek, followed quickly by the droning chug of an engine. Instinctively Romana looked up. The sky seemed to be clear. Then she saw it at first not much bigger than a black dot, like a full stop, but growing larger by fractions of a second. Plummeting down, it seemed, right on top of them.

K9 wheeled about, panicked. Struck by fear as she was, Romana still had time to notice the unaccustomed anxiety in his manner. 'Advise take cover, Mistress! Missile attack!'

Romana looked down at the soldiers. They were still ambling along, oblivious to the attack, the high sides of the valley shielding them from the noise of the descending missile. There was no time to warn them. Grimly she threw herself down.

The drone of the missile's engine cut out abruptly. She heard K9's voice, strained to its maximum amplification. 'Attention, attention!' She lifted her head a fraction and saw that he had trundled forward to address the soldiers. 'Take cover immediately to avoid grave loss of life! Danger!

Missile attack imminent!'

From her hiding place Romana could just glimpse what was going on down below. The man in the civilian suit broke off from the small, astonished group and walked forward. He squinted up the side of the valley, searching for the origin of the announcement, and called, 'I say, can you help us?' His voice carried upward. 'You probably recognize me.' He shrugged. 'We've got lost, and the radios are dead, and we -'

K9 boomed again, 'Take cover! Take cover!'

And then, for what seemed to Romana like the twentieth time that day, there was a very loud bang.

The Doctor was carrying on, guided by his earlier-stated principle that if you stick to one direction something is bound to turn up eventually. He used the time given to him to expound theories on his discovery. The reverberation of his own voice was strangely rea.s.suring. 'But of course the climate's all wrong for a predator of that type. There's nothing for it to live on, well, nothing that occurs naturally. Hah. Where's a good xen.o.biologist when you need one?'

A gentle purring sound came from somewhere among the lowering clouds.

He looked up and saw a saucer, nudging its way down slowly through the thin atmosphere like a lily blown about the surface of a pond. 'Ah, good.' He stopped, took off his hat and waved it over his head at the newcomer.

'Someone to have a chat with. I do so detest people who talk to themselves, don't you, Doctor?'

The saucer came ever closer, and a series of irregular patterned markings on its pitted upper surface became visible. The lettering was angular and jagged, the notation reminding him of trips to the Orient on Earth. 'If I didn't know any better,' the Doctor muttered to himself, 'I'd say that was a Chelonian ship. But of course it can't be. What would they want with a fleapit like this?'

A stentorian voice boomed from the craft. 'Remain in position,' it said.

There was a throaty gurgle behind each syllable. 'Raise your appendages.'

The Doctor lifted a leg cautiously. 'Your upper upper appendages.' He raised his hands. 'You are a prisoner of the Chelonian seventieth column.' A hatch on the craft's rim slid aside to uncover a tri-p.r.o.nged disrupter attachment. appendages.' He raised his hands. 'You are a prisoner of the Chelonian seventieth column.' A hatch on the craft's rim slid aside to uncover a tri-p.r.o.nged disrupter attachment.

The Doctor sighed. 'How am I ever going to live today down?' he said.

There was more confusion in the Strat Room. Cadinot was hunched over his screen, his fingers clattering on the keyboard as he struggled to make sense of the sudden energy burst picked up by the detectors. At last he looked up, the troubled expression on his young face picked out in the green glow of the sensor equipment. 'Three missile traces this time, Captain,' he told Viddeas, who was leaning over him. 'Plasma release of -'

He consulted a readout and shrugged. 'Well, quite a lot of plasma.'

'Area?'

'Could be anywhere between 48 to 55,' Cadinot said.

He made a hopeless gesture at the screen. 'It's that distortion on the east sat. I can't be more specific.'

Dolne, who had been observing this exchange from the side of the map screen, felt a tugging at his stomach as he looked along the grid. 'Area 52?

That's where Rabley's supposed to be. Where's that escort?'

Viddeas, with his usual efficiency, was already on to it. He had s.n.a.t.c.hed up a handheld link and was calling into it, 'Grayn, come in.' There was no reply. 'Captain Viddeas to escort leader Grayn, respond.'

A wash of static was the only reply. Dolne felt the situation slipping ever further from his grasp. 'Answer, come on, answer.'

There was a beep in response, and a voice crackled through. 'Grayn here, sir. It's bad news, I'm afraid. Pretty awful news in fact, sir.'

Dolne felt like throwing his hands over his ears. 'Oh no.' He waved at Cadinot. 'Raise Jafrid again. I must talk with him.'

After brushing the rock dust from her clothing (she was beginning to look rather less elegant after all of these explosions), and having ascertained K9's good health, Romana crept forward to examine the aftermath of the attack. The valley had taken a direct hit and folded in on itself. The edge she had rested on had partly crumbled away and she was lucky to be alive.

Now, only minutes after the strike, another three soldiers were picking their way through the chunks of rubble - coughing furiously as the chalky vapour infiltrated their lungs - and beginning the unwelcome task of dragging the bodies of their colleagues out from beneath the debris towards a small open-topped vehicle, not much bigger than a loading platform. Their leader, who looked far too old to be on field duty, was talking into a communicator.

Carefully, Romana crept down towards the site, beckoning K9 to follow.

She kept herself under cover.

The leader was saying, in a broken voice, 'Yes, Mr Rabley and the rest of them. It's terrible. There are bodies and bits of missile all over the place.'

He paused, looked around at his men, and said, 'Er. What shall I do?'

The voice of his superior, clipped and curt, filtered back. 'Orders. You're supposed to request orders, not say "What shall I do?"

'Sorry, Captain. I request orders.'

There was a brief silence. Then the Captain's voice said, 'Load the bodies and the debris on your truck and get out of there right now. The Chelonians could open fire again any moment and you're sitting targets.'

Romana exchanged a knowing glance with K9, who was also listening attentively. So he had been right about the other side in this war.

The squad leader shuffled as if embarra.s.sed. 'You mean, they really are shooting at us, sir?' he asked his communicator. 'But why? We get along usually, don't we?'

'Just get back here, Grayn,' said his superior. 'Viddeas out.'

Grayn squared his shoulders, holstered his communicator, and turned to those in his charge. 'Right. You heard the Captain. We've got to take all of this back to the post.'

One of the milling soldiers raised his hand. 'Do we have to touch the bodies, sir?'

'Yes, you do,' said Grayn awkwardly. 'Come on, get to work.' He made a chivvying gesture and the soldiers returned to their duty.

K9 made a clicking noise to get Romana's attention and whispered, 'Mistress. Suggest we offer a.s.sistance.'

'What if they turn nasty?'

'Speech mode and weaponry suggests non-aggressive character.'

She patted him on the side. 'All right, then. But go carefully.' She settled back to watch as he started to climb, with some difficulty, down the shattered slope.

Ahead of him one of the soldiers had come up to his leader with a piece of metal in his hand. 'Is this a bit of missile, sir?'

Grayn looked closely at it. 'No, it's Rabley's autocam.'

He took it and looked it over. 'Still working. There could be vital evidence on this. I'll convey it personally to -' At that moment he glanced up and caught sight of K9. His reaction was almost comical. He jumped and backed away, his right hand scrabbling desperately to unholster his pistol.

'Stop right there!'

K9 continued to advance. 'I am not hostile.'

The soldier gulped. 'Could be an enemy weapon, sir.'

'I am not a weapon,' said K9. 'Please do not shoot. My record of the events leading up to the missile attack may be of value to you.'

The soldier pointed. 'It's got agun, Sir, in its snout.'

This decided Grayn, who raised his pistol to fire, at point-blank range.

Romana leapt from her hiding place and bounded down over the rocks, scissoring her raised arms frantically. 'Wait! Don't fire!'

To her relief Grayn lowered his pistol. He stared at her for a few moments and then his shoulders slumped. 'I don't believe this,' he said.

The central compartment of the saucer was dark and cramped, each surface bristling with the a.s.sorted machinery of a high-tech war. The Chelonians came up to only just above waist height on the average humanoid, and the Doctor was forced to bend his knees as he stepped from the entry ramp. His eyes swept alertly about, taking note of the craft's systems and capabilities and comparing them to what he recalled of Chelonian technology from previous encounters. To cover his interest he said brightly, 'Good afternoon, gentlemen. Lovely saucer you have here. It's been, ooh, epochs since I last saw the inside of one of these.' He pointed to a control panel. 'I say, isn't that a remote missile activator?'

One of the three Chelonians aboard the saucer, plainly their leader from his position in a centrally positioned hammock, growled and fixed him with a baleful stare. 'Be silent.'

The Doctor ignored him and walked casually around the circular s.p.a.ce.

'But then it's been epochs since I ran into any members of your charming species. Pardon me for saying so, but I'm quite surprised to find that you're still around.' He stooped to examine a set of environment displays. The small screens showed an aerial view of the battlefield, its contours picked out in yellow lines. He made an effort to memorize it. 'Although I'm sure you've outgrown any unpleasant aggressive tendencies you once had, and any second now you're going to offer me a seat and a plate of biscuits.'

'Silence!' the leader roared. 'Or I will have your eyes torn from their sockets!'

The Doctor gulped and stood up. 'Of course there's nothing that bad about aggressive tendencies.' He found one of the younger Chelonians lurking at his side, an oddly shaped yellow weapon clutched in one of his front feet.

'You will give your name and patrol number,' said the leader.

'I haven't got one. Of either.' He paused. On several occasions in his travels he had crossed paths with Chelonians, and put a stop to their schemes to wipe out human populations and push out the borders of their empire. Consequently he had an unfavourable reputation with them.

Deciding it was best to be honest he said grandly, 'You can call me the Doctor.'

There was no noticeable reaction to this p.r.o.nouncement.