The Well-Mannered War Part 8

The catering lady's route had taken Romana, the Doctor and K9 through yet more expanses of grey, barren wasteland. The dullness of the landscape was starting to get on Romana's nerves. 'I suppose,' she said to the Doctor, 'that if this really is the end of history we shouldn't have expected anything spectacular.'

The Doctor replied without taking his eye from their quarry, whose bright white suit made her clearly visible a few hundred yards ahead of them.

'Hardly the very end. There are a good few aeons left in the universe even if she is in her dotage.'

Romana pondered. 'What happens at the very end, I wonder?'

The Doctor's eyes flicked to meet hers momentarily, and there was a look almost of worry in them. 'You're getting very curious all of a sudden.'

'It must be the company I keep.'

'Yes, well.' He seemed suddenly sombre, at a loss for words for once, and it was as if he was looking into the future. 'Everything must come to an end at some point, Romana. Nothing's irreplaceable, not even the universe.' He turned his gaze up to the metallic clouds. 'This close to the final dissolution there's bound to be a tangible sense of unravelling.'

Romana snorted. The last thing she needed was for him to slip into one of these moods. 'You're being insufferably -' she searched for the right word '-extispicious.'

'Am I? What does that mean?'

K9 took this as a cue. 'Extispicion: foreboding based on illogical fears.'

'Oh,' said the Doctor. 'That. Well, you can't present a generally cheery face to the cosmos without being extispicious every now and again.' He nodded to the catering lady, who was disappearing between two large outcrops of rock between which ran a narrow, dried-out gulley. 'Come on, or we'll lose her.'

Suddenly K9 beeped loudly and ground to a halt. 'Master, Mistress, danger!' he bleated. 'Take immediate cover!'

The Doctor groaned. 'What is it this time?'

'Imminent attack,' said K9, already darting towards a small hole in the ground not far away. 'Danger! Take cover!'

Romana looked to the skies. But they remained as clear as ever. 'What sort of attack?'

'Plasma missile approaching!' K9 squeaked. 'Danger, danger! '

Romana made to join K9 in his hidey-hole but the Doctor gripped her arm and held her back. 'Ignore him. He's just being extispicious.' A second, later the unmistakable whine of a descending missile, this time directly above them, split the air. 'Of course, I might be wrong about that. Run!'

Romana was already running. K9 whirred and clicked frantically at her to guide her as a shadow fell over the area. It was as if night had fallen in a second. She didn't dare look up. The whine of the missile became a flat, deadly drone. 'Hurry, Mistress!' the dog called. She threw herself forward the last few inches, and crawled in a snakelike motion over the sharp stones to reach her friend's side. Despite the urgency of the situation a section of her trained logical mind warned her that if the explosion struck nearby she and K9 were likely to be trapped if not killed. She a.s.sumed that the dog had chosen this shelter wisely.

As soon as she was over the lip of the hole she stuck her fingers in her ears and crouched down into a crash position, curled up and face down.

The shadow, it seemed, was now almost on top of them. She heard K9 say, 'Prepare for impact!'

The blast was shattering and rattled every bone in her body. The ground shook. She felt a wave of burning air moving over her back, and heard K9 gurgle and croak. A scattering of small stones and pebbles rained down, making a tinny percussion on K9's metallic surfaces.

But the noise was the worst thing, a giant's roar that reverberated fiercely inside her head. She waited for it to subside, counted slowly to a hundred, felt the heat dissipate, and gently raised her head. Gingerly she looked over the lip of the crater.

The missile had been a clean one, and struck about half a mile in front of them. The devastation began a few metres ahead. Of the two outcrops of rock, the gulley and the trolley woman there was no trace but heavy palls of drifting, glittering dust hanging in strange designs.

Romana coughed and turned to K9. 'Status, K9.'

His eyescreen flashed beneath a coating of the grey dust. 'Motor functions and data core preserved, Mistress. However, my offensive laser and several minor back-up systems have been damaged. Sensor capacity is also impeded.'

She bent over and used her gloved hand to wipe away some of the dust clogging his ear sensors. 'You poor thing. We'll have to get you cleaned up.' She turned around. 'Doctor, I -' She broke off. He was nowhere to be seen. 'K9, where is he? Didn't he follow us?' She trailed off and put a hand to her mouth. 'Oh no. He wouldn't have tried to. . .' She looked across at where the catering woman had been merrily pushing her trolley minutes before. 'Rescue her,' she completed dully.

K9's head dropped. 'Likely, Mistress. Doctor Master's personality contains high level of altruism.'

Romana stared grimly at the hanging clouds of plasma. Perhaps the Doctor's illogical fears had been borne out after all.

Chapter Three - A Very Long Story.

The command post's alarms, untested and unneeded for over a hundred years, responded admirably to the shockwave of the explosion. Less than a second after the plasma core of the missile impacted with the surface at grid-cell 51 Y, the remote satellite sensors registered the energy release and triggered an automatic sequence wired into the post's defence network by hands long dead. As soon as the lighting flashed red, the air was invaded by a high-pitched howl of an alert, and the blast doors on the post's southern perimeter (the only ones that were still working) slid into position with a screech of unoiled machinery.

What let this effort down was the human part of the equation. Untested and unneeded, the majority of the staff, ambling about the corridors on their various businesses, stopped, turned their heads to each other, scratched their brows, tutted, and waited for somebody else to sort it all out. Just another component failure, no doubt.

Dolne, however, could tell something was wrong. Really wrong. The timing was too exact for this to be anything but a genuine alert.

He dabbed his tears dry, threw on his tabard with a groan of effort and hurried from his quarters, heading up to the Strat Room. The alarm blared in his ears, a constant escalating spiral of electronic noise. He loathed these loud noises and sudden frights. Was everything - the Phibbs Report, the election, the mechanical failures, the loss of Kelton's patrol - conspiring against him? Thirty years in the top job and he'd never before been called upon to act decisively. He tasted for the first time the responsibility of command, and it was bitter.

In the Strat Room hands were flying over consoles, screens were displaying unfamiliar patterns, voices were raised in near panic. Dolne's entry was greeted by several audible sighs of relief which he tried to put to the back of his mind. 'Don't the idiots realize?' he thought. 'I'm more scared than any of them. Just because I wear an outfit with more gold bits on doesn't mean I have the slightest idea how to handle this.'

'Captain.' He nodded as gruffly as his mood allowed to young Viddeas, who was hunched over the war map, his fingers curled over the edges, the knuckles whitened. 'What the h.e.l.l's -' He broke off, aware that his voice was a full octave higher than usual. 'Ahem; Status report, Captain.'

Viddeas lifted his head at an odd angle. 'Admiral?' he said slowly.

Dolne felt like hopping up and down. 'Status report!' He sided closer and hissed, 'For heaven's sake, Viddeas, you've been praying for this for years.

You've finally got the chance to astound us all with your tactical ability.'

Viddeas seemed to snap out of his trance. He pointed to a particular cell on the map, beneath which an unfamiliar bright red light was flashing continuously in time with the alarm. 'Plasma strike, sir, in 51Y.'

Dolne's blood ran cold. He wanted more than anything else to sit down and catch his breath. 'Strike? As in, er, missile strike? With proper missiles, big ones?'

'Yes, sir,' said Viddeas. He consulted a printout handed to him by a junior officer. 'The missile was launched from the enemy position along the 94 ridge.' He indicated the area, which was on the far side of the map, close to the mountainous area that ringed the Chelonians' base.

'Any patrols out there?'

'None registered, sir. But we've been having trouble getting through to at least half of our active units.'

'What sort of trouble?'

'Jamming, sir. I believe it to be enemy interference of a new, untraceable kind.' Viddeas snapped to particularly rigid attention. 'I suggest...' He faltered, and swayed suddenly.

Dolne was rather too lost in his own thoughts to notice. 'Suggest what?'

'Countermeasures, sir. A return strike.'

'Against the enemy? Don't be silly. They were probably just cleaning one of their launchers and it went off. Their missiles are as old as ours, you know.'

The alarm made another swoop through the musical scale. 'Can't you switch that thing off?'

'We're trying to find the right switch, sir,' called Cadinot.

'Sir,' said Viddeas. Dolne looked at him properly for the first time since coming in and saw that his eyes were bright as b.u.t.tons and his skin was pale. 'The Chelonians' launchers have computer-controlled failsafes.

Accidental firing is impossible.' He swayed slightly again.

Dolne leant forward. The thought of Viddeas, who at least knew how most things in the post worked, falling ill at this moment filled him with horror.

'Are you feeling all right, boy?'

Viddeas attempted a smile and pa.s.sed the back of his hand over his brow.

'Quite all right, sir. It must be the... the heat.'

It was at this point Dolne noticed two things. In normal circ.u.mstances they would have stood out as extraordinary, but in the present crisis the observations were relegated to the back of his mind. Firstly, Viddeas smelt, but the odour around him was not the stuffy sweatiness of all the others in the post. It was sort of cheesy cheesy. Secondly, despite what he had said there was not a single trickle of sweat visible on him. In fact he looked somehow cold cold. Ignoring these observations Dolne said, 'Get me Jafrid right away.'

Viddeas nodded and walked swiftly away from the map towards his desk.

Dolne rested his weight against the side of the map table and sighed heavily. The alarm clamoured on.

The Darkness watched through Viddeas's dead eyes. It saw the panic in the command post, the worry lines on Dolne's kind old face, the insistent flashing lights of the alarm.

Only the beginning.

In the split second before impact, with the unholy whistle of the missile ringing in his ears, the Doctor, realizing that he was not going to reach the catering lady in time, had thrown himself sideways, using a scissor-like movement of his long legs to propel him high and far. He had come down with an enormous thud that had knocked the wind out of him, but he had remained conscious throughout the blast. It was the aftermath that had caused his problems. The force had wedged him between two slabs of rock, with only his head and shoulders remaining above ground. He felt he must look like a partly hammered nail. He heard Romana and K9 calling his name and made to holler back, and encountered his next problem. His mouth was packed solid with grey dust and the only sound he could make was a sort of croak.

By the time he had levered himself out of his trap, taking care to move slowly to avoid agitating possible fractures, and spat the dust out, his two companions had stopped calling.

He dabbed at a small cut in one hand with his dusty tongue and called, 'Romana! Romana!' He made his hands into a funnel and bellowed her name. There was no reply.

The Doctor shrugged, and unconsciously reached into a pocket for the cup of tea stored there. After draining it he threw away the cup and set off for where he had last seen them. That was the intention, at least; he had not taken two steps before he realized that the blast had not only dislodged at least a couple of tons of rock dust but also caused the topography of the region to be altered dramatically. He looked around slowly and gave a grim whistle. There were no recognizable landmarks at all. The sun was still covered by clouds, giving no hint of help.

'Ah, well,' he said, taking out his tin whistle. 'If I just give this a blow and stay put...' He put it to his lips and sent out a repeated sequence of dots and dashes. He stood like this for some minutes, staring into the thick clouds of dust. Then he put the whistle away. 'Should have heard that, shouldn't they?' he muttered. 'If I stay within the general area, I should be - aha, what's this...'

An object had caught his eye on the ground a few feet ahead. He bent down and brushed off the dust that covered it, and found it to be a plastic bag. There was something soft and squelchy inside. Carefully he upended the bag and tipped out its contents into his palm. He sniffed it, still cautious, and then a grim expression sewed over his face. 'Scone mix. That poor woman. She didn't stand a chance.' He let the crumbs fall through his fingers and as he scattered the last few to the wind took off his hat and held it respectfully to his breast.

He put his hat back on and stood up. 'Where is that dog? K9?' He chose a direction at random and strode off.

The Strat Room's big screen whistled and clicked. For a few moments it buzzed and hissed as thick grey bars of interference rolled across it. Then, after a final surge of distortion, the image of General Jafrid steadied. It troubled Dolne that after all these years he still had no way to interpret the facial arrangements of his friend. Right now he looked hunched and aggressive, his head pulled right back up to his sh.e.l.l, concealing the neck.

There was an unhealthy silence (Cadinot had dealt with the alarm at last) as both leaders contemplated each other. Dolne was absolutely determined not to speak first. So, obviously, was Jafrid. The staring went on.

Dolne broke. Those green reptilian eyes sent an atavistic chill running through him, a fear that seemed to strike his very core. 'Er, now look,' he said feebly. He was aware of sounding unwarlike. To compensate he raised a finger and wagged it sternly. 'This isn't on, really, is it?'

Jafrid's reply was equally muted in tone. 'We are checking and rechecking all components.' He issued a deep groaning breath. 'The incident is most regrettable.'

Dolne felt a surge of relief. 'Ah. It was a mistake, then?'

'Of course it was,' thundered Jafrid. 'Did you really think we'd open fire on you?'