Doctor Who_ The King of Terror - Keith Topping [102]
There was an almost eerie silence now. The battle had moved up the stairwells and on to another floor and only two UNIT gunners lay at the foot of the stairs with their machine guns occasionally spitting bullets up into the open spaces above. The Doctor, Lethbridge-Stewart and Paynter stood up in the virtually deserted foyer. Around them there were Intercom bodies everywhere, dead and dying, a few twitching spasmodically and still clinging grimy to life.
Paynter walked over to Chebb, turned the corpse over and closed the dead man’s eyes. Then he went to check on the one injured UNIT man lying on his side by the elevators. ‘Man down. Get the medics in here now,’ he shouted to one of the remaining soldiers.
‘Are you telling me this has all been for nothing?’ asked the Brigadier.
The Doctor didn’t reply.
‘I don’t suppose now’s the time to tell you what you missed whilst you were away, either?’ Paynter asked.
‘No it damn well isn’t,’ Lethbridge-Stewart snarled. ‘Let’s get back to HQ, and we can figure out how to stop yet another invasion.’
UNIT headquarters a day later. And in that twenty-four hours enough had happened to see the building awash with activity.
The Doctor stood in the strategic command room on the top floor, staring at a map of the city, poring over every last detail of roads, junctions and intersections. Paynter appeared at his shoulder.
194
‘Big place, this. Bigger than Sunderland.’
The Doctor seemed to appreciate the irony. ‘It certainly is.’ He walked around to the other side of the room for another perspective. ‘I’ve noticed a change in Tegan,’ he continued without taking his eyes from the huge map.
Paynter tried to act nonchalantly. ‘Really?’ he asked in the kind of slightly quivering voice normally used by men shortly before their girlfriend’s older brother snaps their arm in two. ‘Can’t say that I had.’
‘Yes,’ noted the Doctor, still seemingly fully engrossed in the evacuation routes through the east of the city and into the surrounding desert. ‘It’s little things, you know? She’s started singing all the time. Love songs, mainly. And she’s taken to looking at catalogues with wedding dresses in them.’
‘Oh Jesus,’ said Paynter. Then he saw the Doctor’s innocent ‘who me?’ look instead of the expected cruel smirk. ‘Very funny,’ he snapped. ‘I didn’t know Time Lords were big on sarcasm. Listen, nothing happened . . . ’
The Doctor moved to a smaller version of the map on a cork drawing board on the far wall. ‘This shall be the site of Armageddon,’ he said dramatically.
‘Or the closest equivalent this world will ever see, I fancy.’
‘You’re expecting a rough one then?’ asked Paynter.
‘I’m expecting total war, Captain,’ the Doctor answered, sadly. ‘Annihilation on a scale that this part of the galaxy has never known before. And all we can do is watch it happen.’
Paynter tried to be philosophical about the coming of two mighty forces that would use Earth as a minor inconvenience; a mere rock in the middle of their battleground. ‘A case of cannons to the left of ’em, volleyed and thundered?’
he asked.
‘Ah,’ noted the Doctor, looking up from the map and smiling. ‘A man who knows his Tennyson? I approve.’
‘I had a limited education,’ replied the soldier. ‘But I learned one or two things!’
‘I saw the charge of the Light Brigade,’ the Doctor said wistfully, remembering the valley in the Crimea and the brave horsemen blown to pieces by roaring Russian cannons. ’Magnificent folly. If you’ll excuse such an unreconstructed oxymoron.’
Paynter didn’t look as though he was entirely sure what an oxymoron was.
‘I saw the film with David Hemmings,’ he replied, hoping this wouldn’t make him sound like a Philistine. ‘That was good. I liked it. It was antiwar, but it was antiwar from the soldiers‘ perspective.’
‘I don’t follow?’
Paynter sat down as he tried to formulate exactly what he wanted to say, with much use of hand gestures. ‘Normally if something’s