Doctor Who_ The Forgotten Army - Brian Minchin [38]
The psychic paper glowed again.
Are you still there, Amy?
Wondering if he genuinely expected an answer, Amy looked up along the tunnel and saw a glow of light around the next bend. She raced forward,
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running out into a vast Subway station. Brand new and shiny, this was part of the Mayor's regeneration scheme, and it looked posher than most buildings in Leadworth. The space was dimly lit with hundreds of tiny lamps, no bigger than pencil sharpeners.
Amy approached slowly and carefully. Straining her eyes, she could see that the floor of the huge platform looked bumpy and uneven. As she moved closer, the torchlight revealed the true nature of the bumps. All along the platform, people had been tied up and covered with blankets.
Hauling herself up off the tracks, Amy crouched down beside the nearest person. His legs had been bound, and there was a gag in his mouth. Panic rose in Amy. Everywhere she looked people were lying, trussed up. The Vykoids were using this as a storage for captured humans.
A set of doors swung open, and Amy hit the ground, fast.
Just in time. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see a blur of colours and high-pitched grunts of exertion as the Vykoids dropped off another load of people.
Their methods were extraordinary. A team of Vykoids would carry in a body, and lay it down for trussing by a separate group. They worked like mechanics at a Formula One pit stop. The team specialising in tying the gags around the prisoners' mouths would take a piece of cloth five times longer than they were, and spread it out like they were 144
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shaking a sheet. Then they gently lowered it over the mouth, and a separate Vykoid tied a knot behind the head.
Meanwhile, a second team tied a cord around each hand and, attaching it to a miniature Vykoid crane, hauled each hand until they were floating together, zombie-like above their captive's chest.
On a signal, both hands were dropped and a waiting team of Vykoids snapped a long chain cord tightly around it. This looked like the most dangerous part of the operation, and Amy imagined that every Vykoid dreaded being responsible for cuffing the giants. The feet were taken care of by two teams of Vykoids on mini-bulldozers. They had attached special jaws to the bulldozers and, facing each other, the two bulldozers gradually pushed the ankles together. Occasionally they paused and shouted out for someone to throw more ball bearings under the ankles so they would move more easily.
Once the prisoner's feet had been pushed tight together, a mesh of nettings was dropped over the ankles, and sealed together with some sort of heat gun.
After they'd been trussed up, the bodies were shunted along to a freshly scrubbed section of platform where white-coated Vykoids opened the eyelids of the prisoners, and dropped something into their eyes, with tiny pipettes. It took two Vykoids to hold each pipette, which looked like cannons in their little hands.
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Amy wasn't sure, but she thought she saw them take a lunch break during all this. And had she seen a visit from what looked like an inspector with a clipboard, or was she just cracking up under the pressure? Maybe he was a Union Rep, checking up on the minutes they'd been working, and that Health and Safety regulations were being followed.
'Wow!' Amy thought. They've been waiting thousands of years, and they've been planning all that time.'
She watched in awe, as twenty-five people were processed in this way in under a minute, then neatly tucked under blankets. It was as if they wanted to keep the prisoners as safe and warm as possible. Amy remembered what the Doctor had said the captured people would be used for, and shuddered in horror.
Everyone around her was about to be taken to a faraway planet.
They would never again see their families or eat a doughnut or drink an expensive takeaway coffee.
As soon as the Vykoids left, Amy started to untie the man next to her. He was a big bloke, still wearing his dirty