Doctor Who_ Last Man Running - Chris Boucher [45]
‘Swallowed up, the Doctor supplied. ‘What about you?’ he said to Kley. ‘Were you in a clearing made by a vanishing ship?’
‘Monly was. Dead centre. Dead being the operative word in the event.’
‘When I examined the place where ours disappeared,’ the Doctor said, ‘a pack of aggressive carnivores began to gather.’ He looked to Leela for confirmation and was irritated to see that she had wandered off on her own again. Had he not made it clear to her that she was a key element? That whatever was doing this might now be focusing on her?
‘I was attacked soon after I first landed,’ he continued. ‘But that was routine, I think. I was alone so I was treated as a test subject.’
‘Alone?’ Rinandor said. ‘What about Leela?’ She looked round. ‘Where is Leela?’
‘What do you mean “a test subject”?’ Fermindor asked.
‘What is it you’re saying?’
‘Did your runner come here deliberately, do you know?’
the Doctor asked. ‘Was he trying to throw you off? Did you chase him here, or were you just following him?’
‘You didn’t answer Fe’s question,’ Kley said. ‘What are you saying?’
The Doctor got to his feet. He must look for Leela. ‘I’m saying that if your runner is a weapons technologist, he’s picked an interesting place to run to ground. I think that we’re all stranded in a weapons development facility of some sort.’
The two tall, heavy-set warriors were making no attempt to be quiet. The deep-chested grunts and guttural noises must be speech, Leela assumed, except that they did not seem to be paying enough attention to each other to be saying much.
The men, if that was what they were, had green skin, hairless and smooth, the same dark shade of green as the large fleshy-leaved plants that dominated the jungle thicket in which she was crouching. Their heads were bald apart from a crest of bright yellow spines, which they raised and lowered as they gurgled and snorted. Their arms were long and seemed to have double elbows, their upper bodies were wide and powerful and their legs were long and muscular with narrow three-toed feet, which were bare. They wore what looked, from where Leela was, to be woven metal body armour. They carried short-shafted spears and had small round shields clipped to their forearms. It was this combination of weapons and their uncaring loudness that left no possible doubt in her mind that these were raider-warriors rather than hunter-warriors.
The two of them were standing by what might be a shaft which emerged among a small outcrop of rocks in a jungle clearing of the sort Leela had quickly learned to mistrust. As she watched, a third warrior climbed out of the entrance and then closed a cover over it. His crest of spines was white, but in every other respect he was identical to his two companions.
The three warriors swaggered down from the rocks and stood forming a half-circle at the centre of a natural arena of flat grassy ground. They continued making the strange noises and raising and lowering their head crests but to this they now added the occasional clash of spear on shield.
Leela quickly recognised that what they were doing was offering to fight. But they were ignoring each other and there was no one else around, so who could they be challenging?
The ritual display of aggression went on, but still they ignored each other and still no one came. Then the warrior with the white spine crest turned and looked at where Leela was concealed. She could see his eyes clearly, vivid yellow slits with narrow black irises, staring directly into her eyes. He knew she was there. He struck his shield with the flat of his spear blade. There was no mistaking it. He was challenging her to fight. She stared back without moving. She could see no reason to accept the challenge. He had nothing she wanted. There was nothing she needed to prove to anyone, least of all herself. If he knew she was there and was determined to fight her, let him attack across the open ground so she could see him move. The warrior stared for a moment longer, then turned slightly and repeated the performance, staring at a new spot in the dense