Doctor Who_ The King of Terror - Keith Topping [110]
It was a mind-numbingly mundane task and it could only be achieved by a constant rotation of duties, taking time away from the terminals to drink coffee, relax and try to rest on the makeshift wooden beds that had been constructed in the late 1950s when it was believed that this shelter would only ever be needed if the Soviets decided to push the button.
‘Who’d have thought it?’ Paynter asked, removing the dog-eared paperback book that covered his eyes and sitting up on one of the beds as his rest period came to an end. Natalie handed him a steaming hot cup of strong tea with three sugars.
‘I’m good at guessing things usually,’ the Doctor noted with a thin varnish of sarcasm.
‘Who would have thought that SDI would have actually achieved anything?’
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Paynter said.
‘What is, I suppose, even more ironic,’ the Doctor noted, sitting on the edge of Paynter’s bed with his own mug of tea, ‘is that many of the satellites the CIA have turned into weapons platforms were those InterCom themselves put up into space to carry their communications around the world.’
At his terminal the Brigadier turned and smiled. ‘The grid is holding,’ he said triumphantly. ‘It’s carnage up there and not much of it is getting through to Earth.’
‘Victims of their own ambition,’ noted the Doctor. ‘Isn’t that usually the way?’
‘So you keep telling me,’ Lethbridge-Stewart said, after a pause for reflection. ‘And still they come . . . ’
In the vast blackness of space, the fleets assembled. In many ways the battle lines were not dissimilar to those on ancient Earth when two enormous ranks of warring men faced each other, one to one, across a stretch of land, their weapons primed for the kill.
Jex and Canavitchi craft weaved in and out of fixed orbital positions, jockey-ing for the ideal spot from which to begin their attacks. Occasionally, a group of ships would break off from the main fleet and engage in running skirmishes with stragglers from the opposition. But in the main the attacks were orderly, and huge. Ranks of one fleet would charge at the other, weapons systems pouring everything they had at the enemy. They would be repelled and a counterattack would begin, with the same outcome.
Individual fighter craft on both sides, piloted by the brave and the fool-hardy, circled the main battle, closing in for a series of spectacular and daring dogfights. Explosions took place, but in the vacuum of space they were mute and extinguished within the blinking of an eye.
It was some hours before reports began to filter through from the various UNIT and civilian tracking stations around the globe. But once a pattern had been established, the news was all good.
The grid was holding.
As more and more alien ships entered the Earth’s atmosphere they were either becoming stuck, like flies, in a spider’s web of electronic pulses and high-frequency sound waves sent out by the satellites that literally shook the spacecraft to pieces. Or, even more impressively, they were flung off into space at an astronomically implausible speed by the grid which, similarly, wasn’t wholly in line with their tolerance thresholds.
It was ridiculous, the Doctor told himself at one point during their lengthy vigil, that the CIA hadn’t volunteered this solution earlier. But that, he sadly 210
concluded, said much about an organisation that seemed to celebrate the art of double bluffs, and revel in the beauty and sophistication of complex games.
And always had done so, for as long as he had known and associated with them.
He looked around the room at the tired, strained faces of his friends and felt a sense of helplessness. He had been asked to help Lethbridge-Stewart discover whether a company posed a threat to the security of Earth and, in that regard he had succeeded. But at what cost? The lives of Mark Barrington and David Milligan, not to mention numerous others in the bomb attacks.