Doctor Who_ Storm Harvest - Mike Tucker [85]
‘Your attention please.’ His voice drowned the blaring alarms. All eyes turned towards him. ‘This establishment has been sabotaged. The reactor is going critical. We are ordered to abandon the site and return to the mother ship. Dive crews will be recalled and all troops will return to their assault shuttles.’
There was a moment of shocked silence when no one moved, then the control room erupted into a frenzy of activity.
Bisoncawl had turned towards the doorway when the Doctor stepped in front of him, his grey eyes blazing. ‘Commander, you understand what will happen if this reactor explodes?’
‘Yes, Doctor. We will die unless we get out of here.’ He tried to step past the Doctor but the little Time Lord stepped into his way again.
‘The Krill will be released into the water in vast numbers. The colony will be completely wiped out.’
Something akin to guilt flashed across the Cythosi’s face. ‘I’m sorry, Doctor, but I have a responsibility for my troopers.’
‘But I can stop this!’ The Doctor caught him by the arm.
Bisoncawl’s face darkened and he bared vicious teeth.
‘Get out of my way, Doctor.’
‘Listen to me!’ the Doctor bellowed. ‘I can use the transmat to get all the Krill eggs out of here before the reactor goes critical. This disaster doesn’t need to happen!’
Bisoncawl shook himself free of the Doctor’s grasp. ‘The parameters of the device don’t allow that kind of bulk beaming, and we don’t have time to do it in batches’
‘The parameters can be changed. Do you think that this equipment is complex? It’s primitive junk, Bisoncawl. I can make it do whatever I like!’
Time Lord and Cythosi glared at each other. The room went silent, the troops staring in shock at the little humanoid. No one talked to the commander in that way.
Bisoncawl turned to the technicians at the bulky transmat controls.
‘Leave that. Get to your ship.’
163
The troopers lumbered from the control room.
‘I will leave you the transmat controls, Doctor,’ said Bisoncawl, ‘but I will not risk even one of my troopers.’
He crossed the control room and squeezed himself through the narrow hatch. He didn’t turn around. Goodbye, Doctor.’
The Doctor stood in the centre of the red-tinged reactor control room, the sounds of the alarms ringing about him. He pulled over a chair so that he could sit between the reactor controls and the transmat unit and waggled his fingers like a concert pianist.
‘Now then...’
The Doctor’s hands moved in a blur. One hand swiped back and forth over the Cythosi transmat controls and the other danced a complicated jig over the keyboards controlling the reactor, his fingers tapping a complicated tattoo on the keys.
He had turned off the alarms but the background hum of the reactor had now risen to a piercing shriek. The Doctor shut the sound out of his head, concentrating on the tasks in hand. He performed a number of lightning-quick calculations and keyed more commands into the reactor central computer, giving himself a few more seconds’ grace.
He couldn’t stop the explosion, that had become clear to him, but he was managing to slow things down. A second here, a second there, anything to give him more time with the Cythosi transmat unit.
He decided that his boast to Bisoncawl, that he could make the equipment do whatever he liked, might have been a trifle wild. Cythosi operating systems were complicated with dozens of conflicting programmes forced to work in unison; and he was trying to make this system do something different again.
The reactor’s shriek stepped up a pitch and another bank of warning lights blinked into life. The Doctor sighed. There was nothing he could do now, he had extended things as long as he could. Abandoning the reactor controls he turned all his attention to the transmat.
Ace struggled to drag Rajiid to his feet. The wind battered her like a living thing, tearing at her clothes and at her hair, flinging the rain against her so hard that it hurt. Leaves and debris swirled around her, a whirlwind of stinging