Doctor Who_ Storm Harvest - Mike Tucker [67]
Brenda opened her mouth to argue but Ace’s expression was stony.
She stared down at the determined girl, suddenly seeing herself reflected in the rebellious eyes of this teenager. Loyalty and bravery were all too rare these days. She wondered what she would do in Ace’s place. If they were her friends out there.
She stepped aside.
‘Then take care.’
129
Ace nodded her thanks and hurried through the control room and out into the corridor. All through the building she could hear screams and gunfire. With a sudden cold chill, she realised that she might not come out of this one. Gripping the harpoon gun tightly she crossed to the stairwell. Below her she could hear the sound of running feet, could almost smell the fear. She edged tentatively down the stairs, her finger twitching on the trigger of the gun.
The Krill appeared when she was only halfway down, its hooked claws tearing a lump from the wall. Ace threw herself into a roll and fired the harpoon gun. The spike tore up through the monster pinning it to the wall.
Ace was back on her feet in moments, bounding back up towards the command level. She could hear claws scrabbling on the stairs behind her.
She launched herself at the top step and rolled into the corridor.
She heard a soft chime as the lift doors slid open ahead of her.
And a Krill stepped out.
The Doctor watched from the access panel in the wall where he and Holly had tucked themselves, as three Krill padded around the mess of the medical bay. The glass door lay shattered in a million pieces, and spilt liquids ran in rivers around piles of broken equipment.
The Krill lashed out at anything that wasn’t fixed down. He watched them with interest, trying to see any glimmer of intelligence that he could work with, anything that might help him try and communicate with them.
One of them picked up a child’s teddy bear from one of the beds.
The monster brought the toy up to its face, cradling it in its huge claws.
It scrutinised it for a moment, as if confused as to what it was, then, with a savage twist of those razor claws, the bear was torn in half and cast to the floor. The Doctor shook his head. These creatures were no product of nature, no result of an evolutionary process. They were engineered. Constructed. Designed to do nothing but kill until there was nothing left to be killed.
He closed his eyes, creating a space in his subconscious, a place into which he would push all the guilt when the time and opportunity came to destroy these monsters. In the quiet and blackness behind his eyes he realised that his mind was already too full of those pockets of guilt.
He opened his eyes again and found himself looking at the disembodied head of the teddy bear, its cheerful face staring up at him.
Something innocent destroyed by something evil. So simple. So easy.
But to turn the tables...
A snarl from the room brought his attention back to the creatures.
130
With no prey visible in the room they seemed to be losing interest.
They began to lumber to the door, lured by the sounds of firing from the upper floor.
The Doctor and Holly waited until they were sure they had left and then pushed at the heavy medical bed. The structure swung away from the wall with a quiet hum and the Doctor unfolded himself from the access panel. He crept across the shattered room, wincing at each crunch underfoot. He peered out into the corridor. There was no sign of the Krill.
He waved back at Holly who crawled from the access panel and continued her work on the exposed optical cables that ran from wall to medi-bed. She had already dismantled the auto-doc by the time the Krill had started to break their way in.
The Doctor had been trying to concoct some form of repellent from chemicals on the nurses’ desk when Holly had pulled the bed back from the wall revealing the access conduit. They had barely made it inside and swung the bed back into place before the Krill smashed through the door.
Now Holly was working like a woman possessed; patching cables across each other, running bypasses, linking everything through