Doctor Who_ The Infinity Doctors - Lance Parkin [120]
The Magistrate pulled a lever, and the door swung open.
‘We arrived while you were changing.’
He strode through the door, and the first of the Needle People was on his back, unconscious, before she’d followed him out. She wondered what the strange crumpling noise was, only to see the Magistrate bending over the slumped body of an old man in loose black clothes. There was a Z-Cap on the man’s forehead.
The floor was littered with rubble. There was broken ground beneath her feet, a cracked dome above her head.
She glanced back and saw that the TARDIS had disguised itself as a block of fallen masonry.
The Magistrate was already advancing towards the fire in the centre of the room. Larna – her training finally asserting itself – helped him by pulling in close behind him, advancing with him, watching his back. In the image of this room that they had seen from the Station, the Doctor had been lying unconscious by the fire. Three Needle People had been asleep there. The fourth had been on guard, nearer the edge of the room. He was the one that the Magistrate had just immobilised.
The light quality here was poor, but her eyes quickly adjusted to it. She hadn’t been ready for the cold, and the Suit was no help. She had to rub her hands together and speed up her metabolic rate.
The Doctor was there, prone on the floor, seemingly in a deep coma. The three Needle People were around him, asleep.
She stepped over to the Doctor, and she could hear the medical unit following close behind her.
The three Needle People were stirring. She could imagine the Magistrate edging round them, invisible now in his Suit and the darkness. The best she could do was stay in plain sight, distract them while he got into position. This way she could also tend to the Doctor.
‘Halt!’ a voice commanded behind her, to her left.
‘Good evening,’ she said, not looking up. Instead, she knelt at the Doctor’s side. As she had thought, he was in some sort of healing trance. There were no signs of external injuries.
‘Stand up.’
She didn’t. They were moving to surround her. The oldest one held a stave, a six-foot wooden pole. The others had guns of some kind.
‘Where’s Pallant?’ one of them asked. A hand knocked at the lid of the medical unit. ‘This is some sort of mobile intensive care unit?’
Larna rose to her feet, folded one hand in front of the other. ‘It’s only a medical unit,’ she said.
‘Hands apart!’ one of them shouted.
Another, the eldest one, the one with the stave, was pulling back, disappearing into the shadows. An odd time to leave the room.
Two of them remaining. Larna smiled, and began walking towards the nearest. She had just seen the Magistrate in the shadows. The eldest man was making his escape, the Magistrate was following him.
‘Halt or I fire!’ the man she was approaching called.
Larna continued to walk towards him. She was between them both now.
‘I don’t know what to do…’ he shouted across to his comrade helplessly.
‘Helios, what do we do?’ the other one cried pitifully, obviously appealing to the old man who had deserted them.
Larna hesitated.
They both opened fire. The guns were energy pulse weapons of some kind, firing off sparse bursts of light and a chirping sound. At this range, they couldn’t possibly miss.
The Suit kicked in, and suddenly Larna was standing a little to the left of where they were aiming, and so they missed her. A simple application of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, linked with really rather primitive time travel technology. The Suit monitored the future, and arranged for it and its wearer to be elsewhere when anything hostile was due to hit it.
But the energy had to go somewhere. Two energy bolts.
The first came from in front of her, streaked past her head, she heard a crack and a muffled explosion as in slammed into the back wall. The other bolt came from behind her. It spat past her at about chest height, travelling in a perfectly straight line. A fraction of a second before it happened, she realised it was going to hit the man in front of