Doctor Who_ Cat's Cradle_ Warhead - Andrew Cartmel [0]
Warhead
by Andrew Cartmel
The place is Earth. The time is the near future – all too near.
Industrial development has accelerated out of all control, spawning dangerous new technologies and laying the planet to waste. While the inner cities collapse in guerilla warfare, a dark age of superstition dawns.
As destruction of the environment reaches the point of no return, multinational corporations and super‐rich individuals unite in a last desperate effort – not to save mankind, but to buy themselves immortality in a poisoned world.
If Earth is to survive, somebody has to stop them.
From London to New York to Turkey, Ace follows the Doctor as he prepares, finally, to strike back.
Full‐length science fiction novels; stories too broad and too deep for the small screen. Produced with the approval of BBC Television, the New Adventures takes the TARDIS into previously unexplored regions of space and time.
Andrew Cartmel was script editor of the Doctor Who television series from 1987 to 1989.
Cat’s Cradle: Warhead is the second adventure in the Cat’s Cradle series.
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Prologue
PART ONE: Assembly
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PART TWO: Detonation
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For Ken Kessler
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Prologue
The bulldozers were big blunt yellow machines, their belted tracks and superstructures spattered with mud. Brodie counted five of them. They were being carried up the sloping dirt road on a fourteen‐wheeled flatbedded truck. Brodie watched from the cover of bushes at the roadside. Both the truck and the bulldozers had cartoon designs of a bee in flight and a human eye painted on their side. There were words and numbers painted beside the bee‐and‐eye logo.
Some of the words were in Japanese and of course Brodie couldn’t read those. The other words, the English ones, he would be able to read soon. He had turned five this summer and he would learn to read in grade one, when he started school in September.
The truck made monstrous low noises as its driver struggled through low gears, fighting her way up the steep mountain track. As she approached the high‐standing security camera the road levelled out and the truck began to pick up speed.
Brodie took his hands off his ears when the driver settled back into high gear and the engine noise dropped to a low rumble. Now he could hear the wind in the leaves all around him. The driver was leaning out of the cabin window and waving as she passed the camera, a small video unit mounted on a tall carbon‐fibre pole. Brodie waited, crouching in the bushes. The truck was out of sight now, growling away on distant curves of the mountain road. Then there was silence, broken by the drilling of a woodpecker in a tree on the forest slopes behind him.
Brodie kept his eyes on the camera and took the smooth heavy rock out of his pocket. He’d brought it from the pile he’d collected by the big fallen tree in the woods. He had brought only the one rock because he knew he’d get only the one chance.
Brodie told himself to be brave but his heart was beating hard.
If he didn’t move now he never would.
Brodie broke from cover and ran out into the centre of the dirt road, almost tripping on the deep ruts cut in the mud. He snapped his fist back and then forward, throwing the rock overhand at the camera on the high pole. It hit with a loud ringing noise, connecting with the support pole but missing the camera by a metre and a half. The boy stood frozen for a moment, then ran back into the woods.
Leaves on low branches whipped at his face, wiping at the tears that were streaming down his cheeks. Tears of rage.
A jeep would be coming down from the big cave now, a yellow jeep with a bee and an eye painted on the side. There would be men with guns and helmets in the jeep and they would search the woods near the road. If they found him they would take him back to his parents and his parents would keep him close to the cabin until it was time to close up for the summer and drive home. And then Brodie would never have