Doctor Who_ Deep Blue - Mark Morris [103]
‘Safe,’ the Doctor said, lowering Benton’s dripping, unconscious form to the floor of the console room, beside the Brigadier.
As they carried the third soldier into the TARDIS, Turlough exclaimed, ‘Doctor!’
‘What is it?’
‘The Xaranti infection. It’s vanished.’
It was true. With everything that had happened in the last few minutes it was only now that Turlough had noticed the spines on the men’s skin and the growing humps on each of their backs had disappeared.
‘Yes,’ said the Doctor, grinning. ‘Miraculous, isn’t it?’ He laid the man next to his colleagues and ran out for the next one, leaving any further explanations still-born.
Less than a minute later, the Doctor and Turlough were hurrying towards the TARDIS with the last soldier. A few steps from the open door, Turlough heard a dry, scuttling sound and looked up. ‘Doctor!’ he called.
The incoming tide had perhaps another hundred yards of sand to cover before it came up against the sea wall.
Swarming over that wall now, and dropping down on to the beach thirty feet below, were dozens, perhaps hundreds of mature Xaranti. They were moving strangely, lop-sidedly, like injured crabs, scuttling and scrambling over one another in their cluttering, high-pitched panic. They were moving in one direction only, towards their mother-ship, which meant that in another ten or fifteen seconds they would be swarming over and around the TARDIS.
‘Inside, quickly!’ the Doctor said. He and Turlough covered the gap to the TARDIS at a run, carrying the soldier between them. They laid the man down, then the Doctor leaped across to the console and yanked back the lever that closed the TARDIS doors. Turlough, meanwhile, switched on the scanner and watched as the bristling mass of Xaranti rushed past them. Their purloined ship had extended ramps like lolling tongues, which lapped up the Xaranti and gulped them into the craft’s interior.
‘Time to go,’ the Doctor said from the console where he had been setting coordinates. Turlough was unsure whether he was referring to themselves or the Xaranti. The Doctor pulled the lever that would propel the TARDIS into the Space/Time vortex and then frowned.
‘Turlough,’ he said sternly, ‘you’re dripping on my floor.’
* * *
For two minutes after the TARDIS had de-materialised, the Xaranti continued to pour into the Morok ship. At last they were all aboard and the ramps that had extended to admit them were retracted before the doors slid closed. Immediately six portals, evenly-spaced around the body of the ship, opened like eyes, and a cannon-like tube extended smoothly from each one. These tubes extended so far, then bent downwards in the middle at a forty-five degree angle, quickly becoming jointed, telescopic supporting struts. As soon as their tips had embedded themselves in the sand, there was a deep rumbling sound and two large cavities opened at the base of the Morok craft, one on each side. The gigantic caterpillar tracks that had been used to trundle across the sea-bed and up on to the beach lifted up from the sand, tipped slowly sideways with a growling of powerful machinery and folded themselves neatly into the belly of the ship.
Once the cavities had rumbled closed, sealing the caterpillar tracks inside, the Morok ship looked less like the kind of tank that could flatten houses and more like a conventional space craft. There was a pause, then the ship began to growl and shake as if building itself into a rage.
Slowly the growling increased in volume and pitch and the shaking grew more intense until suddenly four columns of fire - pink and orange threads twisting like agonised spirits in the blinding whiteness - gouted from the massive thrusters at the base of the ship, accompanied by black, boiling plumes of smoke which sullied the pristine blue of the sky.
The supporting struts