Doctor Who_ Battlefield - Marc Platt [9]
‘Why don’t you decode the message or something? Then you’ll know who it’s from.’
He looked at her, startled by the simplicity of her solution. ‘That’s brilliant, Ace!’ He wondered why he had never thought of it.
Ace made a mental note to state the obvious more often.
The Doctor began to adjust the settings on the console.
‘We’ll just change the modulation, like so,’ he said, suddenly grateful that the TARDIS was filtering out so much of the superfluous transmission.
The signal began to transmute, compressing and then enhancing, echoing around the darkened console room as it fed through the TARDIS computer systems.
‘Just twist the envelope a little and play.’ He gave the console a final theatrical flourish and the sound vanished altogether.
On the monitor, the wire-frame image went berserk, swerving and spiralling as the tunnel sped faster and faster.
The harsh light from the screen grew fiercer, catching the Doctor in its glare and throwing his giant shadow up the wall. Finally the rushing image broke up completely. The message’s harsh trill vanished and the screen went dead.
‘Merlin!’ hissed a sibilant spider-voice from the speakers.
Instinctively, Ace looked across at the Doctor and found him returning her confused stare.
Thunder rumbled in the clear air outside.
Dark thought from another time and place pierced the skies and looked into Avallion’s morning. Its eyes sought those who heard the message of the sword.
‘At last, he is revealed to us!’
High in the suddenly storm-rich air, the TARDIS
sensed the danger. Its systems shuddered.
The first drops of rain began to fall.
Chapter 2
The weathermen were embarrassed.
The violent storm that was wreaking havoc over the south of England had come from nowhere. Worse than the great storms of 1987 and 1995, this time there was not even an inadequate explanation.
At 06.33 hours, exactly the time that the diabolic eruption of deafening sound and static had woken most of Northern Europe, the barometer had dropped like a stone.
Several groups of morbidly eager evangelists took the blasts to be the Last Trump and revelled as all meteorological hell broke loose immediately afterwards.
As the British Met Office computers went down and the lights failed, one hapless systems operator swore that while he fiddled to light a candle, he saw his precious pine cone (which he kept as a reliable fail-safe) opening and closing its segments like an overenthusiastic sea anemone.
The rush hour was at a standstill before it could even start. Warnings spread across the media — for the precious few who could still hear them.
‘Stay at home. Don’t even attempt to travel. There will be structural damage and flooding.’
The force-twelve hurricane clawed and howled across the countryside like an unleashed demon. Most of the God-fearing British battened down their hatches and sat tight until the storm inevitably tore off their roofs or flooded their from rooms.
The stationary UNIT command car shook under the relentless onslaught of the storm.
Bambera, dressed in DPM combat fatigues, stared at the pounding rain on the windscreen until her eyes ached. It should have been daylight, but it was black as hell outside and visibility was down to zero. The torrential downpour was hitting the roof like a massed corps of drums.
After the Zambezi, England was like the Arctic. It felt like half the night since they had been forced to pull up.
They were stuck on an open Cornish road, only three klicks from the nearest village, but at the mercy of these elements, it might as well have been three hundred.
She looked at her watch. 09.21 hours. They had been there two hours and forty-eight minutes and Sergeant Zbrigniev, her driver, was no conversationalist. He had been with UNIT since the old days and had seen a few skirmishes. She knew that from his file. But experience hadn’t made him a philosopher. He never talked about how they coped on Bug-Hunts, using firearms that looked like pea-shooters against today’s smart strategic weaponry.
Bambera picked up the radio handset