Doctor Who_ The King of Terror - Keith Topping [97]
‘That’s right,’ echoed the Brigadier, with the perfect timing of a comedy straight man. ‘None of those things,’ he deadpanned.
There was amusement in the throaty splutter that emerged from the thing that had been Paolo Sanger. Words tumbled over themselves in a bid for freedom. ‘Doctor,’ it rasped, ‘you are a fool if you believe that the Jex can be stopped that easily.’ As it said this, its claw-like pincers scratched at a flapping sliver of skin over its eyes. It drew the strip from its forehead with a slow and deliberate sucking sound. When the skin was free, it was casually flicked on to the floor at the Doctor’s feet. ‘Mere words cannot hold us back, any more than the puny weapons of your world can,’ the creature said arrogantly.
‘No indeed,’ agreed the Doctor. ‘I rather think that it is actions that will stop your invasion. The Canavitchi, for instance. Now they’re a very action-orientated race.’
There was disquiet in the group. The Brigadier sensed immediately that the Doctor had unnerved most of the aliens by casually slipping a mention of their mortal enemies into the conversation. The thing that had once been Joyce counterattacked with a vicious bluster that the situation almost certainly didn’t require.
‘We shall kill every last one of those insolent scum. We shall spit on the bones of the final Canavitchi when we have wiped their verminous stench from the universe. We will defeat them, as we always have defeated them.’
The conversation stopped and the thing that had been Sanger sat down again. Ryman continued to shuffle nervously in his human form. ‘Do you want me to change?’ he asked at last.
‘Up to you,’ hissed the thing that had been Sanger.
186
The Doctor returned to the subject of the Canavitchi. ‘That’s an interesting tactical assessment,’ he told the aliens. ‘Because, from what I know of my ancient history, the Canavitchi were always more powerful and deadly than the Jex.’
‘If that is so,’ said Ryman, who had remained unchanged, ‘then how were they defeated?’
Lethbridge-Stewart raised a quizzical eyebrow in the Doctor’s direction, indicating that he, too, was interested in the answer to this. From a purely professional point of view.
‘The Canavitchi had controlled an empire for a dozen millennia,’ the Doctor began, using the curve of the conference table to signify the spiral of their galaxy, like a master storyteller. ‘They had conquered worlds and spread like a plague They were feared, Brigadier. The modern equivalent would be the Daleks. It’s that level of power and conquest.’
‘So what happened to them?’ asked Lethbridge-Stewart.
‘Yes Doctor, tell us what happened,’ the thing that had been Joyce asked.
‘Like all powerful dictatorships based on military strength and megaloma-nia, they got decadent and lazy,’ the Doctor replied simply. ‘They stopped scaring people as much as they once had. The Jex came along at just the right time, picking off a few outlying worlds in the empire. When the Canavitchi didn’t respond to their incursions, frankly because they couldn’t be bothered, the Jex went right to the Canavitchi homeworld. Within thirty years they had conquered it from within. A velvet revolution with hardly a shot fired. By the time the Canavitchi tried to organise themselves into a resistance movement, it was too late.’
The thing that had been Sanger clearly approved. ‘An excellent summation of a truly epic period in the history of my race,’ it told the Doctor. ‘When we were kings of the galaxy.’
But that didn’t tie in with the present situation, and Lethbridge-Stewart still needed more answers. ‘So, how do we go from that to where we are now?’
he asked.
The Doctor smiled indulgently and turned to the Jex with his arms spread out across the vast expanse of the table/galaxy. ‘The Canavitchi empire was too big for the Jex, Brigadier,’ he said. ‘They were brilliant organisers. Still are for that matter. But it was all they could do to hold down the Canavitchi on their own world and a