Doctor Who_ Psi-Ence Fiction - Chris Boucher [111]
The on-screen image changed. The TARDIS was back in the cavern. It was right at the beginning of the pulse tunnel. It was difficult to tell from the screen, but it looked to be hard up against the front of the rogue projector.
Leela found the ride down into the depths of the stronghold oddly exhilarating. As she leapt off the slowing floor she knew she had made the right choice. Here there was none of the death darkness that had been flooding up the stair shaft.
She trotted along the brightly lit corridor. As she went she kicked open all the doors to all the rooms, but none of them gave her any clue about where the shaman and his Tesh were hiding. Nor was there any sign of where they were holding the Doctor.
Finally, in a room near the end of the corridor, she found a huge screen on which were many different moving images. Among them she saw a set of pictures showing a control room where the shaman and the Tesh were scuffling and creeping about. She peered at the pictures, looking for some way to identify where the control room was.
She turned away and searched the work desk, pushing and prodding at buttons and switches. Finding nothing, she went back and peered at the screen again. It was then that she noticed a sort of flickering reflected into the control room, a pulsing of power. Faintly, in the background of her senses, she could hear and feel that pulsing which was in the picture.
She must follow the pulsing she decided, if she wanted to find them.
At the end of the corridor there were cruder tunnels. Leela could feel the pulse getting stronger as she loped on through them.
The Doctor was very careful to avoid any contact with the power beam as he left the TARDIS and stepped down on to the cavern floor. Finer's projector had narrowed the break-through zone to a point which was still narrowing and closing, and there was already a scatter effect reflecting from the back of the TARDIS. Some of the excess was dissipating into the cavern but a number of intensifying streams were forming feedback links with the projector. Sooner or later, or perhaps in this instance sooner and later, the projector was going to destroy itself and collapse all these tunnels and caverns, leaving nothing to mark their passing other than a big depression in the surface of the university's grounds.
He hurried to the crane lift and climbed into the cradle. He had to make sure there were no innocent bystanders involved and give Finer and Josh a chance to escape the destruction. At least now, thanks to the TARDIS, it was destruction from which there was a chance to escape. Providing he hurried, of course. He fiddled with the lift controls and after a couple of abortive bounces got the cradle soaring upwards.
Stopping the upward momentum was not as easy as he had expected, however, and he had passed the gallery viewing platform before he found the correct control. Crouching just below the roof of the cavern, he set the lift going downwards again and was almost back on the cavern floor before he could stop it.
He glanced at the TARDIS still holding position and feeding the projector with annihilating streams of energy. 'Don't leave without me,' he called as he set the lift going up again.
Leela was very calm as she rose on the platform towards the place where she knew the enemy was skulking. She flexed her arms and practised routine killing strokes with her knife. She could see how this travelling device would work and she knew her most vulnerable moment would be when it arrived in its place. Above her the hatch opened and she stretched up and tried to get a look at the positions of the shaman and the Tesh.
She did not wait for the platform to lock into place, but leapt into the control room and did a half-somersault away from the hatch. She was in a fighting crouch with her back protected by a wall before she saw that