Doctor Who_ The Bodysnatchers - Mark Morris [95]
He cracked his knuckles loud enough to make Sam wince, then set to work. He manipulated controls until the image on the main screen altered to what Sam assumed was the ship's-eye view of what lay ahead of it, which at this moment was nothing but hundreds of thousands of gallons of murky water.
'Don't be alarmed if you feel a little turbulence,' the Doctor called. 'I've never piloted one of these things before, and I may be a little'- the ship gave a sudden lurch, causing them all to stagger - 'heavy-handed.'
He sprang forward to tweak and adjust, and almost immediately the ship steadied. 'That's it, old thing,' he said in the same coaxing voice he used when speaking to the TARDIS. 'You can do it.'
Debris-clogged water rushed in a frothing stream from the top to the bottom of the screen.'Are we surfacing?' Sam asked.
'No,' said the Doctor,'we're standing up.'
'You mean this thing has legs?'
'Ambulatory appendages, yes.'
Next moment Sam felt the floor of the ship rocking gently from side to side beneath her feet. She looked at the screen. Scraps of debris were now rushing towards it and then sliding away to the left or right.
'It's walking,' she said with an incredulous half-laugh. 'The bloody thing's walking.'
One or two of the Victorian gentlemen manning the consoles gaped at her, apparently more startled by her use of the vulgarism than by what had prompted her to utter it.
For approximately the next fifteen minutes, the ship continued its spider-like progress along the bed of the river. During this time the warbling scream of the self-destructor unit continued to rise steadily until it reached a point where Sam and the others were having to grit their teeth and intermittently jam their fingers in their ears.
'We can't be that far from the bank now,' Sam yelled at the Doctor.
He didn't respond.
'I said -' Sam began, but just then one of the men, whose blocky brown teeth gave him a rather simian appearance, excitedly blurted,'Land ahoy!
Land ahoy!'
The Doctor scurried across to the screen that the man had been doggedly watching.A grin appeared on his face.'I do believe you're right, Mr Beech,'
he said.'Well done.'
The man looked absurdly proud of himself.The Doctor clapped him on the back, then hurried back to his post. 'Hang on, everybody!' he yelled above the ululating SD unit. 'Hard to starboard.' He twisted controls and the snip gave a pronounced, though not violent, tilt.
At that moment there was a sizzling, popping noise and acrid yellow smoke began to belch from a cluster of ganglia on the wall close to the door. The ganglia themselves began to thrash and writhe like an octopus in pain.
Almost instantaneously the screen that Emmeline was concentratedly watching flickered and died.
The Doctor glanced round, then shouted, 'The toxin is getting through, disabling the subsidiary systems. We haven't much time.'
'Will we make it?' Sam yelled. 'We can only try.'
The control room was getting darker. Sam looked around, and saw that the veins in the walls were beginning to lose their glow. The liquid inside them was becoming turgid, lumpy, causing them to swell and in places burst, releasing a steaming ichor that made her think of mushy peas.
Suddenly there was a bang and one of the men jumped back from the console he was operating with a cry of alarm. Smoke was pouring from the console, which was beginning to blister and melt.
Like a chain reaction, there were several more explosions, and more of the consoles began to disintegrate. Screens died, as Emmeline's had, or simply burst like punctured eyeballs, revealing internal workings like a mass of fat worms writhing in colourless jelly.
The main console ruptured, the Doctor snatching his hand back as thick green fluid bubbled out of it.Then an interlacing