Doctor Who_ The Last Dodo - Jacqueline Rayner [54]
With a desperate effort, she maintained her veneer of calm. ‘Eve, if you want to stop one more species becoming extinct, you’d better do something quickly.’
Eve followed Martha’s gaze. The dinosaur was bearing down on the Doctor. She ran over to the desk and, pushing Frank aside, dived at the controls. ‘You idiot!’ she yelled at him. ‘The last of the Time Lords! The sole survivor!’
Frank was spluttering in indignation. ‘But you told me… If anyone got too close… He’d found one of the bombs, he was going to examine it…’
‘And what can he do?!’ Eve shouted, still pushing buttons. ‘He can’t stop us! But if you killed him… He is a Last One! The legacy of an entire planet, destroyed!’
Under other circumstances, Martha would probably have enjoyed seeing Frank squirm. But as it was, she couldn’t take her eyes off the screen.
The dinosaur raised a claw, preparing to slash down at the Doctor. And then it seemed to pop out of existence.
An angry roar from behind one of the far doors suggested that the reptile had returned to base. An involuntary sigh of relief hissed out with Martha’s exhaled breath. She was still a prisoner. The Last Ones were still stranded on twenty‐first‐century Earth. But as long as the Doctor was alive and free, she couldn’t help but believe that it would turn out all right in the end. Somehow.
And then a word sank in. She realised what Frank had said. ‘Bombs?’
The Doctor stared bemusedly at where the dinosaur had been. Its behaviour had not been what one usually expected of a giant prehistoric carnivorous reptile. Still, compared to the previous one, dealing with it had been a breeze, and he wasn’t going to complain about that. He had other things on his mind right now.
He popped the sonic screwdriver back in his pocket and, shrugging, returned his attention to the deadly device in his hand. Holding it gingerly, he walked over to the electricals shop. The news reports still played across a dozen silent screens. China. India. America. Kenya, Iceland, France. Derby, Dundee, Durham. All across the world, there were dodos. All across the world, there were bombs.
The Doctor walked back to the TARDIS. His instinct was to break into a jog, get there quicker, but while one was carrying a bomb… Better safe than sorry. Once into the control room, with the vulnerable world safely on the other side of a pair of impenetrable doors, he whipped out the sonic screwdriver and set to work.
He’d hoped the ticking indicated a timer, something easily disarmed, but the realities of the mechanism made him hiss through his teeth in frustration. There was a timer, yes, but the charge also had a remote‐control sensor; someone somewhere had their finger on the trigger and could set off the device at any time they liked, without having to wait for the timer to count down to zero.
How many of these bombs were there throughout the world? He could try to gather them all up, but the trigger finger could tighten at any time – and may well do so if what he was doing was detected. Theoretically, with a time machine he could collect them all at the exact same time – but quite how he’d go about tracking down an unknown number of bombs from an unknown set of location to start with was another matter altogether. Much, much better to remove the finger from the trigger instead.
And he was fairly certain he knew where the trigger was to be found, and whose hand the finger was part of.
Martha would have sat down in shock if she hadn’t already been tied to a chair. Had the Doctor been saved from a dinosaur only to be threatened with something worse?
Eve was glaring at Frank, who was trying to look like he didn’t care.
‘Bombs?’ Martha asked again.
‘Oh all right, you might as well know,’ Eve said, and began to tell Martha all