Doctor Who_ Last Man Running - Chris Boucher [94]
The Doctor said, ‘Where did Kley get the handgun?’ He looked at Kley. ‘You haven’t got one so it wasn’t duplicated as part of you.’
‘Sozerdor had a gun,’ Leela said.
‘Yes but why would he give it to her?’ the Doctor mused.
‘Enough talking,’ Fermindor said. ‘What do we do to stop this happening?’
The Doctor struggled to establish the crossover point himself yet again, and yet again he had to leave the final details to Leela’s unconscious interaction with the machine.
The surface access shaft was formed within the link to the desert location that the system had already set up, but a collapsing temporal anomaly and a sealing shaft meant the only options for the new access seemed to be in the middle of the crowded cave, or well away on the reverse side of the giant column of rock. On balance, the reverse side of the column looked like the better choice.
As he had expected, the Doctor found the darkness of the crossover no less disconcerting because he knew what to expect. Perhaps, he thought, it was the simple crudeness of the process that whispered to him of ancient dangers.
He stepped out of a fissure in the rock wall and found himself staring across the flat wilderness of stone and yellowy-grey dust.
Behind him, the others crowded out of the fissure: Kley first, then Fermindor, Rinandor, Pertanor and Belay. They all seemed to the Doctor to be quite comfortable with the experience, except for Belay, who looked mildly harassed.
When Leela emerged with her knife drawn and an expression of irritated impatience on her face, it was apparent that he had probably attempted to be last in line and the chivalrous gesture had been abruptly rebuffed. The Doctor waited briefly while everyone got over the initial shock of the breathless heat before he set off to find a way round the huge pillar, the base of which – as well as being several thousand yards in circumference – was surrounded by mountainous heaps of large boulders and broken stone.
It didn’t take any of them long to realise that there were disadvantages to the choice they had made. The scramble up and down through the rocks quite exhausted them – and they had covered less than half the distance to the end of the curve in the pillar that would allow them a first glimpse of what was happening on the other side. A short, bad-tempered discussion led them to climb down from the boulders and move out on to the flatter ground where they could walk more quickly. If Sozerdor had scouts posted or had surveillance monitoring looped up from the underground control centre, they risked being spotted more easily, but it was a chance they decided to take. On the featureless plain they were pitilessly exposed in the bright heat, but there was no other way they could get to the rescue site in time to prevent the retrieval of those first shock troops, the training-developed weapons for a war most people were not expecting back on First and Second.
They were tiring again, and slowing up, when they saw the approach of the first search-and-retrieval ship. It came in under full power, low and slow, with the micro-touch reverse thrust and vertical braking switching through the drives in a flickering blur. By the time it had disappeared from view behind the column of rock, and whirling dust clouds were churning and boiling out on to the plain, they had forced themselves to speed up until they were almost running. The group began to string out as the stronger ones drew ahead and the less fit began to flag. Despite their efforts, the second ship came in long before anyone had managed to reach the front edge of the column.
The Doctor and Leela got to a vantage point ahead of anyone else, and peered through the gradually settling fog of gritty particles to see the copied OIG team, the survivors of which were even now struggling to catch up, greeting the pilot and medic from the first ship. Sozerdor was still nowhere in evidence.
‘What are they waiting for?’ whispered Leela.
‘The pilot from the other ship?’ the Doctor hazarded, catching his breath.
Behind them, Kley and