Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [112]
The Doctor looked grim. ‘Krotons have some fairly rigid ideas about how to deal with aliens. Ideal material for the Shift to work with.’
‘Not important,’ said Trask. ‘Shift’s gone. Let it go.’
The Doctor’s face became a shade grimmer. ‘The Shift won’t leave until it’s secured the Relic. It’ll take the City apart brick by brick, if it has to.’
Qixotl scraped himself off the ground. ‘Not a problem. It can’t damage the ziggurat, right? The defences can take out any weapons system it can chuck at us, no trouble. We’re safe.’
The Doctor looked still grimmer.
‘The defences,’ he said. ‘I knew there was something I had to tell you. Qixotl... if, theoretically, somebody had shut down all the City’s defences, how long would it take to reset them?’
‘Couple of hours, probably. It’s a delicate kind of system I’m running here. Er, why?’
‘Oh dear,’ the Doctor said. The next thing Qixotl knew, the Time Lord was hurling himself towards the exit.
Kathleen didn’t move.
Kathleen didn’t move, again.
Kathleen persisted in not moving.
Sam was, quite frankly, getting sick of this. Tending to the sick was one thing, but she wasn’t actually doing anything except sitting at the end of the Lieutenant’s bunk, waiting for the woman to wake up screaming or have an interesting muscular spasm or something. Once, a minute or two ago, Kathleen had murmured the word “dead” in her sleep, but that had been the high point so far.
An alien sauntered past the doorway of the guest room. Its head was gyrating, its arms were wobbling from side to side, and it was making an odd warbling noise as it moved.
Well, it was novel, at least.
That was the problem with this kind of job, thought Sam. Time-travelling was great, yeah, but there was a hell of a lot of waiting around involved. The Genetic Politics book had vanished again, so she didn’t even have anything to read. Next time I leave the TARDIS, she told herself, I’m packing a copy of Mizz. For definite.
The Doctor’s head popped through the doorway, and peered around the guest room. Involuntarily, Sam stood to attention.
‘Have you seen a Kroton come this way?’ the Doctor asked, somewhat urgently.
‘Don’t know. Is a Kroton a big silvery-white thing that looks like it came out of a fondue set?’
The Doctor looked surprised. ‘Yes, I suppose it is.’
Sam jerked her thumb. ‘It went that way.’
He’d vanished before she’d even finished the sentence. Sam looked back at Kathleen. The Doctor was in one of his “quick, let’s save the world” moods, so there was probably going to be trouble.
Kathleen would be all right on her own, wouldn’t she? Just for a few minutes?
Sam caught up with the Doctor at the bottom of the stairway, the one where Kathleen had offered her the funny cigarette. Catching him wasn’t hard; he had legs like a cranefly, but Sam was a born runner, three miles a day, no excuses. She put her hand on the Doctor’s shoulder, and the Doctor jumped.
‘I’m coming with you,’ Sam told him.
‘You don’t know where I’m going.’
‘Stop picking holes.’
The Doctor looked mildly exasperated. ‘We have to stop the Kroton reaching its ship. Luckily for us, they don’t move very fast. Not in their high-gravity bodies, anyway.’
‘Doctor?’
Sam and the Doctor both turned. The Colonel stood at the far end of the corridor, his face as rigid-looking as ever. He saluted, stiffly, then started marching in their direction.
The Doctor went from “mildly exasperated” to “increasingly exasperated”. ‘Colonel, now isn’t the time –’
‘Doctor. I know you now. You understand.’
‘Understand? Understand what?’
‘The natural order. The laws of balance all flesh must obey. All things are ordained, even this.’ The Colonel slid the backpack off his shoulders as he moved, and by the time he reached the bottom of the stairway his hand was already rummaging through the contents. ‘I have something. Something to aid the cause in the struggle to come. A token of our destiny.’
The Doctor looked between the stairway and the Colonel, as if trying to work out whether this conversation could possibly be more important