• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

A machine gun fired from somewhere behind her. She'd managed to blot out all the noise and confusion since retrieving the Doctor's gadget, but this was deafeningly close.

She turned, half expecting to have to shout at a Soviet soldier

'Be a bit careful or you'll hit me '

And the Waro that had crept up behind her toppled into her lap, spewing blood and bone. Shuskin stood a few feet back, now firing at the Waro that circled overhead. She was shouting loudly Liz couldn't tell if she was telling Liz something, or ordering her troops into action, or simply swearing in colloquial Russian - but occasionally she stopped firing and seemed to be shaking her fist in the air in some madly theatrical gesture.

Liz looked down at the Doctor's jamming device. It was covered in the dead Waro's bile-coloured blood. So were her hands, her blouse, her lips, her face.

She felt nauseous, but swallowed hard, wiping her hands on her trousers. Then she set about fixing the wires together, bending and twisting them into shape, but hoping that the connections would hold. And that the machine wouldn't blow up when she came to switch it on.

'Here goes nothing,' she said lightly, flicking on the device and aiming it at the clustering Waro.

'Can things get any worse?' asked Mike Yates, throwing up his arms in anguish as yet another crisis dropped comfortably into his lap.

'Is it really our problem?' asked Corporal Bell, expecting some sort of outburst in response. She'd started to worry about Yates recently, his flashes of anger having become more frequent. He'd even developed a facial tic that she was sure hadn't been there before.

'It'll be everybody's problem if the aliens decide to invade any time during the next couple of weeks!' said Yates. He stared at the telex again. Addressed to all UNIT field officers, it described a disaster at the 'secret listening post' in America.

A sudden and unexplained spike in the power supply had caused the emergency nuclear safeguards to malfunction, leading to a 'zero-99 situation'. Or, in other words, the airtight doors had come down, the oxygen supply had switched off, and two highly trained and capable computer experts had suffocated.

The file they were working on had vanished, taking with it half of the data on the mainframe. East-coast thunderstorms, now this. According to Bill Filer, the Intelligence Chief at UNIT'S New York HQ, it was the 'biggest series of balls-ups since Pearl Harbour'.

Yates had spoken to Filer just minutes before on an apparently unrelated matter - only now it seemed that it might not be quite so unrelated after all. Yates had finally got through to New York using one of the Home Office's IE-pirated videophones, to tell them that Bruce Davis was either dead or, probably worse, a murderous traitor.

Filer had only one question, and it wasn't the one Yates expected. 'Bruce who?'

'Davis. Your crash retrieval officer. Just arrived here.

'Never heard of him,' came the reply.

At that moment a few things started to make sense. Then came the confirmation from Dr French that the body in the lab was, in fact William Donald. 'I couldn't find dental records for Davis,' French had told a less-than-surprised Yates, 'but I could for poor Billy, and they're a perfect match'

If was almost inevitable, therefore, that Corporal Bell was hearing the brunt of Yates's increasing frustration.

'What's the latest from the police?'

'No sign of the fugitive. I suppose we ought to assume that he's slipped through the cordon by now After all, the officers were looking for Billy Donald, not Mr Davis'

'Or whatever his real name is, said Yates. 'I don't suppose there's been any word from the Brigadier?'

Bell shook her head.

'Do you know, they used to kill the bearers of bad news?'

said Yates.

The Doctor's jamming device worked almost immediately.

Artificial wings that had been motionless or gently flapping as the creatures bit and slashed at his comatose form suddenly began moving vigorously. The goblin creatures clutched at the Doctor, looking