Doctor Who_ Last Man Running - Chris Boucher [0]
CHRIS BOUCHER
Published by BBC Worldwide Ltd.
Woodlands, 80 Wood Lane
London W12 0TT
First published 1998
Copyright © Chris Boucher 1998
The moral right of the author has been asserted Original series broadcast on the BBC
Format © BBC 1963
Doctor Who and TARDIS are trademarks of the BBC
ISBN 0 563 405945
Imaging by Black Sheep, copyright © BBC 1998
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham Cover printed by Belmont Press Ltd. Northampton For Lynda
Chapter One
Leela was not impressed. This travelling hut might be cleverly made and strong but no structure was completely impenetrable, and that buzzing noise sounded like a parasitic worm to her. She pulled the long-bladed hunting knife she carried on her tunic belt and poked at the point on the console she judged the buzzing to be coming from.
‘Don’t do that!’ the Doctor snapped, not looking up from the holographic star chart he was projecting over the TARDIS’s sampling image locator. The match was inexact but it was still too close to be random, which meant either the chart or the locator was malfunctioning, or possibly both. Just identifying the fault was going to be a long and boring process of elimination and there was no guarantee even then that he could repair it himself. The prospect was annoying him intensely. And so, of course, was Leela.
‘There is a Bloodswimmer in there.’ She continued working with the knife. ‘You clearly do not know how dangerous they can be. You do not leave one to swarm. Get it now, or it will get you later.’
‘What you can hear,’ the Doctor said with all the exaggerated patience of someone barely controlling their rage, ‘is not biological. It’s a mechanical circuit. Well it’s a biomechanical circuit actually but I don’t imagine the difference will matter to you.’
Leela was not having much success with her efforts to dig a hole in the top of the transdimensional-drive housing so she turned her attention to one of the flimsier-looking side panels.
‘If it is what you say it is then tell me what it does,’ she demanded.
‘It reacts badly to primitive abuse, especially by abusive primitives,’ the Doctor said with a certain unkind relish.
‘If it is what you say it is you do not know what it does, do you?’ she challenged. Soon after she had first entered the travelling hut. Leela had come to the conclusion that the Doctor had very little idea of how it worked and nothing she had seen had done anything to change her mind. ‘And if it is what you say it is, why is it moving? I tell you it is a Bloodswimmer and it knows I am here now and it is trying to get away from me.’
‘It has a point.’ The Doctor stopped trying to guess what was causing the system identification anomaly and set the TARDIS to locating the nearest viable landing site.
‘It has many points,’ Leela said. ‘More than have been counted. It has three needle-sharp points on every one of its heads. Each head has a point to paralyse and a point to dissolve.’ There was a pause.
‘And the third?’ the Doctor asked finally, his curiosity getting the better of him as it always did.
‘It is a spare of course.’
‘Of course,’ he muttered. ‘Stupid of me.’
‘That is what the Elders said anyway. Nobody ever survived an attack long enough to tell us for certain.’
There was a sudden ripple in the floor, a lurch which was not quite movement, an action oddly without reaction. The TARDIS had identified its ground and started the time-looping systems. The approach and retreat of the materialisation-shock diffusers caused the familiar grating howl as the TARDIS crossed and recrossed the timelines.
The Doctor had once told someone that this roar of not quite noise was music to him, that he thought of it as the overture to adventure. He had been showing off a bit at the time and the phrase appealed to him a lot, but it was not strictly accurate then and it was certainly not appropriate any more. In the short time she had been travelling with him.
Leela had already managed to complicate even the most routine matters of existence. He looked at