Cold Fusion - Lance Parkin [79]
That was all the time Chris needed. Now he was looming up behind the pilot. He grabbed his shoulders, spun him around and punched him on the jaw. Pulling the pilot up by the collar, Cwej slammed him into the bulkhead, knocking the air out of his lungs. Another couple of punches and the pilot had stopped moving. Cwej loosened his grip, guiding him to the floor.
‘Unconscious,’ Chris assured Nyssa. His forehead was running with sweat and he was out of breath. ‘Haven’t you forgotten something?’ Hurriedly, Nyssa twisted the cap, disarming the bomb.
‘That was a nice trick. Let’s get the bombs out of here.’
‘How?’
Chris patted the bulkhead. ‘We’ll take this shuttle. It’ll buy some time. They’ll have two of the fusion charges, but we’ll have the other twenty-two.’
‘They could kill hundreds of millions of people.’
Chris shook his head. ‘They need every single one of these for some reason. They want to kill tens of trillions of people.’ He stopped, realizing what he was saying.
‘Someone said once that the human mind finds it difficult to comprehend numbers above one hundred. It’s too much to take in. We see them as a crowd or an audience, somehow as some entity in its own right, rather than something made up of individuals. It’s difficult to imagine six million people watching a holovid or dying in a war. It becomes less personal, harder to relate to? Ten trillion people... there aren’t that many people to kill.’
‘I come from Traken,’ Nyssa reminded Chris sharply.
‘Which means both that I don’t have a “human mind”, and that I can comprehend what it means for a trillion people to die. These weapons are evil and we must destroy them.’
Chris gestured helplessly. ‘I agree. I don’t know how and I don’t want to risk a guess. The Doctor will know what to do, we must get them to him.’
Nyssa frowned. ‘You know the Doctor?’
The Doctor was climbing quickly hand over hand. Adric’s progress was slower. The plateau was steep-sided, but the rock face was rough and uneven and there were plenty of hand-and footholds. Unlike the Doctor, though, Adric had no experience in rock-climbing: there was little call for it on Alzarius.
The Doctor reached a ledge, and waited for his companion to catch him up. Leaving the observation dome had been easy: the brightly lit building had been all but deserted. He had told Roz to head into the Machine and instructed her what to do once she got there. He’d pointed out the plateau, a stump of rock rising about two hundred feet above the cavern floor. It was tiny compared to the Machine, of course, but it was the largest natural feature here. It would serve as the landmark he needed. Roz went off on her mission, while Adric came with him.
Now Adric had caught up with him, reaching the plateau. He looked exhausted, but he would do. He was still wearing his armour. Smiling sympathetically, the Doctor produced a Paisley handkerchief from thin air and passed it over. Adric finished mopping his brow with it, but it had vanished before he could hand it back.
‘You don’t need the armour,’ he told Adric. The boy nodded, and together they removed it, unclipping and unclasping. Finally Adric stood surrounded by a pile of blue and gold metal