Doctor Who_ Combat Rock - Mick Lewis [39]
The guerrilla raised his machete to the guide’s throat. ‘So you are not always coward, huh? There are some things you will fight for?’
‘You have no quarrel with innocent girls, my friend’ It was Kepennis who spoke, lifting a hand to gently push the blade away from his companion. And surely enough of our people have died already?’
The guerrilla sized him up as if wondering whether to plunge his machete into this new target for his aggression.
Then he was lowering the weapon, and the moment of imminent violence was gone. Weariness replaced the fury in his face.
‘It is the army we hate. They beasts, led by the biggest beast of all. But if we cannot win against them, we must strike against whatever we can to save our people’
‘Hardly a fair way of dealing with the problem, now is it”
interceded the Doctor gently. He decided to shut up again when an arrow clenched in a guerrilla’s fist prodded him meaningfully in the belly.
Jamie gave him an exasperated look. ‘We’re no gonna find Victoria with you antagonising them, are we?’
The Doctor was indignantly about to argue his case when a shout came from ahead. A guerrilla who had ventured forward to check the trail came loping back to join the group. He spoke excitedly to the leader in Papul and then the guerrilla was ushering the whole group onward again.
They soon found the reason for the guerrilla’s excitement.
A large metallic craft was embedded in the jungle undergrowth just around a bend in the trail. It was the size of a London bus, windowless apart from a forward screen in the crumpled nose, and roughly the shape of a truncated cigar. The buckled casing, once silver, was now streaked by fuel burn and jungle juice. Trees, bent and smashed by its impromptu descent, clutched at the craft like wrestlers struggling for a throw.
The guerrillas thronged eagerly around this alien intrusion into their natural habitat, although when Jamie gave the Doctor a meaningful glance, silently suggesting this might be a good opportunity to make a break for it, it was apparent from the speed with which a machete appeared under his nose that the guerrillas were never too distracted to lower their guard.
Kepennis drew the leader’s attention to some slimy trails along the bulkhead of the craft. Long green smears, thick and viscous. He spoke with the leader in Papul, but the Doctor, his curiosity aroused by the craft and by the smears that had so interested Kepennis, ignored the machete and pushed forward to find out for himself.
He touched the green ooze and lifted a trace to his nose. It stank of stale ponds.
‘Jungle Snatcher,’ Kepennis told him. ‘This Indoni military craft; maybe fly too low over tree tops, pulled down by Snatcher.’
‘Snatcher?’ The Doctor was intrigued. But Kepermis’s attention was already focusing on the guerrillas who were forcing open the dented forward port. The Doctor, ever conscious of the machete hovering next to his throat, stooped slowly to peer inside.
He could see someone sitting in the pilot’s chair. Blood slicked the interior of the cabin around him, drying tidal marks rising up the metal bulwarks. One of the rebels was prodding at the slumped pilot, an Indoni in military garb, whose left sleeve was saturated in blood. The Doctor could see by the rough way the guerrilla shook the man that the Papul didn’t really care whether the pilot was alive or dead.
The leader pushed past the Doctor and hauled himself into the cabin. The Doctor could still see the pilot’s face, however, and that now the man’s eyes were fluttering glazedly open, as though he was awakening from a long and particularly bloody wet dream.
He looked as if he really wished he could return to it when the leader started shaking him brutally. The pilot groaned in pain; it was obvious he would not last much longer. Yet the leader was adamant he would make him speak and began cuffing the side of the Indoni’s head.
‘That man will die if you don’t give him some aid soon!’
the Doctor called angrily. The leader ignored him,