Doctor Who_ Island of Death - Barry Letts [104]
Pete Andrews was thoroughly fed up, but whether it was with the Royal Navy, himself, his officers or the Brigadier he didn’t know. Or Sarah Jane Smith, for having had the idea in the first place.
He’d given the order to Bob, whose responsibilities would cover equipment like respirators, only to be greeted by a dismayed face.
Why did they have only five of them? It was okay if you were dealing with a smoke-filled engine room or something of the sort, but not much cop if the ship was facing a full-scale attack of nerve gas (or whatever). The whole point of their presence in Hong Kong had been to police the surrounding sea area, yes, but also to be prepared for any provocation the Commies might throw at them.
‘Were you supposed to have them?’ the Brigadier had asked, irritably and irritatingly, with a sub-text of Army glee.
That was the trouble. He had no idea what the regulation was; but it certainly had been his responsibility as First Lieutenant to make sure that it was followed.
‘That’s irrelevant, sir, if you’ll forgive me,’ he’d said. ‘The fact is that only five of the landing party will be protected in the case of another gas attack. The question is, who?’
‘Bags I have one!’ said Sarah.
Oh God! That was all he needed. He’d read The Famous Five as well, but this was hardly the moment, now was it?
* * *
The Great Skang didn’t come down from the skies like Peter Pan on a Kirby wire. Nor did it appear with a flash and a puff of smoke like the Demon King in a pantomime.
The first intimation that anything was happening at all, as the sound faded away, was a twinkling of sparks, which then multiplied and grew, tracing a three-dimensional outline of the now-familiar Skang figure in the space behind Alex.
This Skang was not a Gulliver, a living mountain seventy feet tall. It was little more than twice the size of its facsimiles on Earth. But it was no solid, bronze-skinned creature of muscle and sinew. As the hot-white scintillations increased in number, filling in the gaps, they expanded to such a splendour that at first the Doctor couldn’t bear to look.
As his eyes became accustomed to the intensity of the light, he saw that the shape of the awesome figure wasn’t fixed. It was perpetually melting at the edges, and forming its shape anew; a continuing reminder that this was a visitor from another realm of being.
When it spoke - and was he hearing it in his ear or in the depths of his brain? - the sound mirrored the form. It was a multiplicity of voices, as if blown by a gusty wind, at once coming and going, growing and fading; each separate, yet overlapping the next to speak as one, a great voice seeming to echo round the arena.
‘Who are you?’ said the Great Skang. ‘You are not the Mother.’
The Doctor would have expected the voice to be detached, dispassionate. But here was an undertone of real emotion. It felt like the anger of a monarch faced with treachery.
How could this be? One might as well have expected a beehive to be jealous, to be proud. Ah, but a swarm of bees could certainly be angry - and for that matter, the Great Skang could communicate with the curious hybrid creatures standing before him only by sharing their human sensibility.
‘By what right do you stand there?’
This was a question that could not remain unanswered.
‘It was decided by the whole group that I should become their leader,’ said Alex.
The Doctor found it difficult to believe what he was hearing.
Was it bravery, desperation - or just foolishness?
The cold anger grew in the alien voice. ‘You lie. There are many here that disagreed.’
‘Then why should they have supported me?’
The arrogance of the man! Couldn’t he see that he was digging his own grave?
‘From fear. We can smell it, rising like smoke. Is this the unity of the Skang? Those we send are not mere messengers.
They are torn from our very heart to become our children.
Where is the Mother that we sent?’
For once, the royal ‘we’ seemed entirely appropriate.
Alex didn