Doctor Who_ Relative Dementias - Mark Michalowski [101]
Sooal brought his gun up sharply – and suddenly found it inexplicably tangled up in the handle of the Doctor’s umbrella. It was jerked from his grasp and flung over the Doctor’s shoulder into the laboratory where it clattered loudly across the floor.
Sooal watched the plodding shape of the Annarene’s dog – their Landine, he realised, with a sick feeling in his stomach – retrieve the weapon as if it were a stick thrown for its amusement and hand it over to its master.
‘Doctor. .’ said Ace, ‘something’s going on here.’ She gestured at the female Annarene.
She was smiling as she looked round the room, shaking her head slowly and deliberately. ‘From where did you get that idea, Doctor?’ she said with infinite patience. ‘What is it that makes you think that we intend to take Sooal back to Annares?’
The male Annarene raised Sooal’s gun. ‘Now that Sooal has the access codes for the stasis chamber, we intend to take them for ourselves. And with the weapons contained in it, we will make this planet the centre of an empire mightier than the Tulks ever dreamed. The legacy of the Tulks is ours.’
Chapter Eighteen
This was one of those moments, thought Ace. One of those special Doctor Moments when, with a triumphant ‘Aha!’ he’d produce something out of thin air – a bit of gubbins from his pocket, a clever plan he’d been hatching for the last few hours, secretly knowing what was going on but keeping it from everyone for dramatic effect.
But he did nothing.
‘Don’t tell me,’ she said, a cold, sinking sensation gripping her. ‘It’s as much a surprise to you as it is to me.’
‘Not at all,’ he huffed, drawing himself up. ‘Why else would our friends here have been content to watch and wait for all these years?’ He turned to the Annarene who, still pointing the gun at them, had backed into the laboratory ‘If you’d genuinely wanted to bring him to justice you would have done it long ago.’
He tipped his head back and glared at them.
Go gettem, Professor! thought Ace, hoping that he had something a little more concrete up his sleeve than a stern look.
‘I assume you don’t speak for the Annarene Protectorate,’
the Doctor said. ‘They’d never countenance this. They’re peaceful, humane –’
‘And weak,’ cut in the male Annarene with a sneer. ‘Annares was once one of the greatest powers in this sector – until some of our leaders decided that the way forward for the Protectorate lay in pacifism and “forging bonds”. Some of us decided that there was another way –’
‘And when the Tulks were caught and sentenced,’ the Doctor interrupted, clearly determined not to be outdone in the cutting-in stakes, ‘I presume you found out about this cache of weapons – what are they? The usual? Mind-controllers, solar disruptors? Meme bombs? – and decided to give Sooal here a little helping hand in rescuing them.’
Ace couldn’t remember ever seeing someone’s mouth drop open quite as widely as Sooal’s did then. He was genuinely shocked, she realised, by the fact that he hadn’t accomplished all of this on his own. She wanted to laugh; but somehow, on the eve of world domination, it didn’t seem entirely appropriate.
‘So I went through all of that – all of these years stuck on this pitiful planet – for nothing?’ Sooal said bleakly, looking as if he were unable to believe that his marvellous duplicity had been outdone by a couple of aliens wearing shellsuits made of skin.
He took a step towards the Annarene, but the male shook the gun, a gentle reminder.
‘We knew Sooal’s intelligence would be insufficient to facilitate the rescue of the Tulks, recover the stasis chamber, escape and revive the Tulks’ memories without assistance,’ the male said casually ‘So our faction helped them – covertly, of course – and then we followed.’ Its voice held no smugness –
just a creepy sense of superiority, inevitability in the