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The Zen Military – A History of UNIT

by Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart (2006)

Maybury Hall was a sprawling red brick building near the Hendon base. It was usually used for recreation, but Group Captain Gilmore had requisitioned it as his headquarters.

Now in the billiard room the portrait of the Queen looked down on teleprinters, radios and field telephones; in the officer’s club the lower ranks sat with feet up on oak tables and stubbed out Woodbines in crystal ashtrays.

Gilmore decided that he needed a field base closer to the area of operations. Sergeant Smith might be able to help on that: Smith had connections in the Shoreditch area, like that man Ratcliffe. Smith had brought him in, a short, broad-shouldered man with the unmistakeable bearing of a soldier. Smith said that Ratcliffe ran the Shoreditch Association and that the manpower it could mobilize would be useful to them for ancillary tasks. Gilmore had agreed to notify him if they were needed. Something, however, nagged at Gilmore’s memory: Ratcliffe – I’ve heard that name before. But he had far more important things to occupy him.

George Ratcliffe walked out of Maybury Hall into the weak sunshine. Mike escorted him past the guards on the gate.

‘Where are you parked?’

‘Just round the corner.’

Once they were out of the gates Ratcliffe turned to him.

‘Your group captain,’ he said to Mike, ‘is he a patriot?’

‘Yes,’ said Mike, ‘a good one.’

Allison was sketching the machine’s innards from memory. Rachel looked over her shoulder and made the occasional suggestion.

‘The weapon stick,’ said Rachel as Allison’s pencil started marking out the curve of the complicated gimble joint, ‘what do you think?’

‘If it’s not a light-maser I don’t have any viable ideas.

One thing, though,’ she flipped pages to show another sketch, ‘this seemed to be the control line, but...’

‘It wasn’t electrical wiring,’ finished Rachel. ‘No, it was something like extruded glass, a very pure glass fibre.’

Concepts formed in Rachel’s mind: she envisaged bursts of coherent light modulated to carry digital signals down a net of pure glass fibre... The image broke up. ‘I must be getting tired,’ she said. ‘I had an idea and then it just went out of my mind.’ She shrugged and looked at the sketch again. ‘We need to get it to a decent biology lab.’

‘And a half decent biologist,’ said Allison. ‘You think it’s extra-terrestrial, don’t you?’

Rachel nodded. ‘The question is how much do we tell the group captain?’

‘Ah,’ said Allison archly, ‘you’re the chief scientific adviser; it’s your decision.’

‘Before I tell him anything I want to catch up with the Doctor.’

‘You think he knows something?’

‘Yes,’ said Rachel, and she suddenly remembered the Doctor’s eyes, ‘and considerably more than he’s telling us.’

‘I thought you’d been here before,’ said Ace as she recognized a pub they had passed before. The Doctor ignored her, peering intently over the steering wheel.

‘There!’ he cried, and swung the van down a side street into Coal Hill Road. A minute later they pulled up alongside Coal Hill School. Ace grabbed her tape deck and jumped out, following the Doctor towards the gate.

‘Why are we here?’ she asked.

‘This is where Rachel detected the primary source of the transmissions. Come on.’

Transmission of what? thought Ace as she hurried after the Doctor.

The inside of the school was all cream-coloured brick and bright, crude pictures. Ace felt a shock of recognition: it wasn’t so different from the concrete palace in Perivale where she had spent five years serving out her adolescence

– the same notice-board and the same deserted feeling once the kids had gone home. But there were differences.

Murals decorated walls in Ace’s school of the 1980s: there were scenes from Africa and India, notices for Ramadan, Passover, Caribbean nights, and concerts by the school reggae ensemble.

I bet they don’t teach sociology here, she thought, and suddenly she was nostalgic for the future. I hated school, didn