Doctor Who_ Illegal Alien - Mike Tucker [106]
Colonel Schott smiled to himself and waited for the end.
As he entered the office the Doctor's ears were hit by a deafening squeal, like nails on a blackboard but amplified tenfold, all the time rising in pitch. It was coming from the machine in the corner.
He could see Limb inside. He hammered on the glass.
The old man looked up, and smiled.
The Doctor began hammering the buttons that ringed the outer body of the capsule in a frantic, improvised attempt to power it down.
Hopeless.
The machine was fully powered. Only Limb, from inside, could stop it.
Ace looked with venom at the disabled Cybercommand unit. She was going to be blown to pieces in less than a minute, and all because of that stupidlooking thing. She aimed a kick at its side.
Her foot never connected. The wall to her side suddenly exploded inward. Masonry toppled around her. She lost her footing and fell to the floor.
Her jaw dropped in disbelief.
Bearing down on her was the biggest tank she had ever seen in her life.
She was lying right in the path of its caterpillar tracks.
She felt the first ohsogentle pressure of those crushing wheels on her foot.
She closed her eyes.
'Ace!'
The Doctor was standing on the gantry outside Peddler's office. He had run out when he heard the wall collapse. Now, he could only look on as his young friend met with an end too horrific to contemplate.
In less than thirty seconds she would be granted a death that was at least instant. Total, painless oblivion.
It shouldn't be like this.
Oh, Ace...
0oohh... Aaace...
There was a wailing in his ears. A tempestuous wind.
Everything was still.
Frozen in time.
The time capsule...
It was difficult to think. Moving was like wading through treacle. The
Doctor gripped the handrail and, oh, so slowly, began to haul himself back down the stairs. This was the hardest thing he had ever done. He was moving against time. Below him the world moved by millimetres. But there was hope.
He reached the bottom of the stairs, swimming across the frozen waters of time. If he could just reach Ace. Time was slipping fractionally forward. He grasped the sleeve of his motionless companion's jacket and hauled her from the path of the tank. So hard to think... The TARDIS.
Pick her up... Carry her, somehow... Out through the great gash in the wall... Bodies...
Where was he?
Hard to remember... The TARDIS... He could feel its presence. It was here somewhere. He could feel its call.
It was about all he could feel. Concentrate... Corridors...
All look the same...
Concentrate...
See it... Picture it... Stairs... Stumbling... Falling through syrup... Concentrate...
Through the porthole of the Cybermen's time capsule George Limb watched the world blur and fade. He didn't care.
It had always been a place of unreality to him a tangled forest of meaning and inference, connections and discontinuities.
People were puppets in a dumb show where the strings were hopelessly and endlessly twisted together. Jerk one and the whole world went into a grotesque and mindless dance.
He drew in a breath. He felt new sensations invade his body... his consciousness. He felt new as new as a justcooled world, hanging in space. He felt as old as the old, black cosmos, and as huge, and as thinly spread.
His mind was alight with images. His own life gone in a flash. The lives of others. Countless others, breathlessly fast.
The lives and thoughts and physical sensations of beings whose existence he had never even
imagined. The thoughts of atoms. The thoughts of all creation. He felt himself being stretched. Stretched over all space, all time.
The pain... He screamed a voiceless, soundless scream of primal creation...
The Doctor lurched forward, dropping Ace. 'What...?
Where...?' 'Come on!' he barked, grabbing her by the hand and hauling her to
her feet. The Cybercontrol unit... They had