Doctor Who_ Peacemaker - James Swallow [63]
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It was a curse on their enemy, a furious shout of anger and despair at their own defeat.
‘ Doc-tor!!! ’
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Martha couldn’t remember the last time she’d been so pleased to see the sunlight. After the deep gloom of the mine, the bright day of the desert beyond was a stark change and her eyes watered as she struggled out of the narrow vent chimney and on to the hillside.
Sprawled on the stone and sparse scrub, she felt the low rumbling pulse of the building overload through her clothes, deep into her bones. With every passing second, the pulses were getting faster, closer together, and the ground trembled.
Nathan, coughing and wheezing, came after her, hands flailing as he reached the top of the channel. Martha’s hands were cut and rough from climbing up the rocky chimney, but she ignored the stinging and grabbed the teenage boy’s wrists, bracing her feet against a rock to help him up the last few metres. He rolled out over the top like a cork popping from a bottle, tearing his jacket in the process.
Martha went to the edge of the vent and shouted down it. ‘Doctor! Quickly!’ She saw movement in the dark, but it was hard to see how near her friend was to the surface. All the way through the tunnels, he’d been pressing them along, directing them this way and that, sniffing at the air for a way out as if he was a hunting dog after a fox.
‘Don’t wait for me,’ he called, ‘just keep going!’
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She pulled a face. She hadn’t come this far just to abandon him at the last second.
‘Whoa!’ Nathan stumbled as the hillside shivered, sending rocks rolling away and down towards the derelict mine works below. ‘Earth-quake!’
Martha gaped as the ground actually rippled, with a sound like a million jackhammers pounding at the rocky surface. Huge cracks fanned out over the hillside, spitting out fat puffs of red dust. Nathan’s hand clamped on her arm.
‘We gotta –’
He had no chance to finish his sentence. Another ripple hit in synch with the loudest pulse yet and it threw Martha and Nathan into the air. Both of them came down hard and tumbled, rolling out of control over rocks and dry brush, skidding and falling toward the base of the hill.
They landed in a dusty, untidy heap, panting and scratched. Martha felt dizzy where her head had smacked a stone outcrop, and she probed the skin there. Ouch. That would be a lovely bruise in a few hours.
Nathan staggered to his feet and offered her his hand, ever the young gentleman.
Martha scrambled up, listening to the pulsing
thrum of sound.
‘Sounds like a wailing banshee!’ said the youth. ‘Can’t barely stand up!’
Martha wasn’t listening. She stared up along the hill, searching for the vent mouth – and she found it, just as the Doctor came spinning from the hole, blown out by a brown cloud of dust and rock chips.
The cloud rumbled down the hill, becoming a landslide that enclosed the running figure as he sprinted toward them. The Doctor was enveloped by the gritty haze and she lost sight of him.
Then there was a sound like the world breaking open, and the whole hill collapsed.
In the cavern, as the cascading overload reached the point of criti-cal resonance, the screaming Clades were crushed beneath hundreds 156
of tons of iron-heavy red stone, shattering the host-bodies they had claimed and the mecha-organic mesh of the weapons modules.
A final pulse of energy, one tuned to very specific telepathic frequency, flashed out from the linked war machines, sending a shock-wave out through the rock strata.
The mine buried itself in a thundering crash of sound.
It happened so fast that Martha thought she had imagined it; an emerald bubble of light, like a dome made of green lightning. It expanded out of the dust-filled crater that had been a hill only moments before and washed out over the land in all directions. Caught in the path of it, Martha and Nathan had no time to react, not even enough time to cry out – but it passed over them and through them without