Doctor Who_ Storm Harvest - Mike Tucker [96]
Mottrack gained the relative safety of the cannon. ‘Fire!’ he said.
‘Maximum concentrated burst.’
The cannon sounded. The corridor was filled with a plasma backdraught that burnt Mottrack. He watched his troopers and their Krill attackers burst into flame.
More Krill were advancing, leaping through the flames. The cannon fired. The Krill burnt. More Krill came.
His holy sceptre held before him, Garrett wandered the miles of corridor, watching the carnage he had created. An end to the war between Cythosi and Human. An end to the war in his head. The Krill would destroy one and all. Unity in bloody death.
Most of the humans, it seemed, were already dead. Their cut to-ribbons corpses littered the corridors. Some Krill, too, had been felled; even now some were cocooning themselves in shiny, black carapaces.
The battle was moving to the higher decks. The creatures had ripped great holes in the ceilings as they advanced upwards. Garrett saw four 186
or five service robots tumble from the holes and attack the marauding Krill. Drills and lasers hacked vainly at the monsters. The Krill tore the robots to pieces.
Garrett followed in their wake, up through the decks. The lifts had been crippled by the Krill onslaught. No matter; he followed his children through the tears they had made in the fabric of the ship.
Sounds of battle were all around him now He could hear the blood-oaths and orders of the Cythosi, the vicious mewling of Krill at the slaughter. He came upon a group of six Cythosi cornered at the far end of a blind corridor. A spirited junior officer was barking rapid orders.
Raising their guns, the men charged in a line towards perhaps a dozen advancing Krill, howling, and blasting them with furious plasma fire.
They closed on the monsters. Garrett watched, fascinated. They were engaging in close combat. From the bottom of each Cythosi gun slid a bayonet – a vicious choreography of whirring, spinning blades. The Cythosi stabbed and hacked at the enraged Krill, who slashed viciously with their claws. A Cythosi arm, sliced from the shoulder and sent spinning through the air high over the heads of the Krill, landed at Garrett’s feet and lay twitching and spurting blood.
The other Cythosi were breaking through... Garrett’s eyes widened as the troopers succeeded in scattering their enemy He stepped back into a doorway, and the Cythosi charged past him, bellowing in savage exhilaration, the officer still shouting furious orders.
But for the most part the Cythosi were being routed. Command had broken down. Here and there small pockets of troopers rallied and mounted a few hasty skirmishes, but most of them were wandering, wounded, through the corridors, hoping to avoid their mindless executioners.
Garrett thought of Mottrack’s empire, crumbling around him, and smiled.
Barely thirty of Bavril’s people could be found to follow the Doctor into the service tunnels. The rest were dead, or dying, or scattered beyond reach. The Doctor peered through a service hatch – the tunnels were a metre square and receded into the far metal distance. He could see endless intersections in the side walls, and automatic hatches in the ceilings and floors.
Peck elbowed him rudely out of the way. ‘I’ll go first,’ he said.
‘You know what you’re undertaking,’ said the Doctor. ‘You will be more at risk of attack than any of us.’
‘Can you find your way to the command deck?’ Peck sneered.
‘No,’ admitted the Doctor.
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‘I can.’ Peck’s lips were set. ‘You come next, Doctor. Then the rest of you. Bavril, bring up the rear.’
Peck was clambering through the access hatch when the Doctor tapped his plasma gun. ‘You can’t use that in there,’ he said. ‘The discharge in such a confined space would kill us all. Haven’t you got any small arms?’
Peck shook his head. ‘The Cythosi don’t really go in for small arms,’
he said hoarsely. He paused for a moment,