Doctor Who_ Last Man Running - Chris Boucher [97]
When she could see as much as she could see, she ghosted over the smooth rock floor and into the narrow opening. It was only a few paces long and then it turned to the right and opened out suddenly into a much bigger cave which glowed very faintly with strange light, the same strange light – only much weaker – as there was in the underground passageways and caverns. There in the cave, in the half-darkness, just as the communing had shown, Leela found them. They were all her. There were at least fifty of her, maybe more. Everywhere she looked she stood with her knife drawn, waiting to fight, waiting to kill. Even though she had been ready for something like this, the number of them and the reality of them was too wrong. She could not keep ahead of this madness, she could not keep fighting it. She heard a low moan of horrified fear and she realised it was coming from her. She felt the muscles of her legs and arms starting to tighten and twitch. Part of her knew she was about to lose control of everything.
‘My word,’ the voice whispered behind her. ‘He has been busy, hasn’t he?’ She turned to find the Doctor peering past her at the crowded cave. ‘It’s entirely possible,’ he went on softly, ‘that producing all those meant there wasn’t enough capacity left to keep track of us and counter what we were doing. There must be a limit to what the machine can cope with at any one time.’
Leela felt the panic drain out of her, and her muscles stopped twitching.
Rinandor’s damaged leg hadn’t been giving her trouble and she had more or less forgotten about it until she tried to sprint across the open ground to the closer of the two ships. Then, suddenly, it hurt like hell, and she grunted with the pain as she hopped and staggered on. A shot burned past her face and another kicked a chunk of dusty rock out under her heel.
The compression wave jagged at her foot almost tripping her over. For the moment she forgot about the pain and sprinted on.
Who’d have thought that terror’s an analgesic? she found herself thinking, and saw with bizarre clarity that it was she herself who was firing at her. Self-destruction made easy, she thought, and shouted, ‘You’re me, you craphead! Stop shooting at us!’ But it made no difference. The firing went on.
If anything it got worse, and she ran on desperately.
It would have been a sort of relief if they had attacked.
They looked to Leela like standing corpses. It was only the small movements, the tiny shufflings, the odd twitch of a head that told her that they were not dead. Or at least that they were not dead and gone.
There are no ghosts, she thought, and looked at the Doctor. ‘What are they waiting for now?’ she whispered, ‘Why are they not out there with the others?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe he’s saving them for a rainy day.’
Leela frowned. What did that mean? More silliness. This was a desert cave. ‘I do not understand,’ she said quietly. ‘It will not rain here.’
That was better, the Doctor decided. He could see that she was getting back in control of herself. He could understand her panic – he wasn’t at all sure how he might have reacted if suddenly confronted with massed ranks of himself standing to attention in some gloomy tomb waiting for a signal to go into action. The immediate question was: what was that signal going to be?
‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘Bad joke. Is that light getting brighter?’ Of course it was getting brighter. That would be the activation signal. A radiation pulse was coming.
Leela stared round. ‘Yes. It is getting brighter.’
The Doctor tugged at her arm. ‘They’re not going to be waiting for much longer,’ he said, and they retreated back through the narrow opening.
The firing stopped abruptly as she approached the ship, and with a yell of