Doctor Who_ The Last Dodo - Jacqueline Rayner [56]
He threw up his hands in the air. ‘Pay attention! It was that or spend the next however‐many‐years in prison!’
Martha sighed in disbelief. ‘You’re strictly a short‐term‐gain sort of person, aren’t you, Frank.’ She tried again with a defiance she no longer felt. ‘The Doctor will stop you.’
‘Yeah, right,’ said Frank.
There was a noise like a thousand trumpeting elephants, and the TARDIS appeared.
‘Yeah, right!’ said Martha, overjoyed.
‘Hello,’ said the Doctor, bursting through the TARDIS door, his momentum carrying him across the room, plucking Frank’s gun out of his hand on the way. A few buzzes from the sonic screwdriver later, the gun was tossed back to Frank, who’d barely had time to realise it had been taken in the first place. In some confusion, Frank gingerly raised the weapon and pointed it at the Doctor, who tutted. ‘Franky, Franky, I’m hardly likely to give you back the gun if it still works, am I? Six to one it won’t do a thing if you try to shoot, half a dozen of the other it’ll explode in your hand. I appear to have mixed up a few expressions in that sentence, but you get the general idea. Shooting equals bad idea.’ Scowling, Frank put down the gun.
‘I don’t like to say “I told you so”, Frank…’ Martha was laughing with relief as she turned to the Doctor. ‘How did you find us?’
The Time Lord whipped a feather out of his pocket. ‘Automatic dodo detector!’ he said. ‘Only I specifically tuned it in to Dorothea this time.’ He gave the bird a quick pat on the head. ‘What a fantastic invention that is. A million uses.’
‘What are the other 999,999?’ asked Martha. ‘You know, apart from the detecting dodos thing?’
‘All right, one use,’ the Doctor admitted, leaning over her to untie her bonds. He smelled faintly of peaches and patchouli, and she smiled. ‘But you could detect a million different dodos.’
‘Like the ones which are burying bombs ready to destroy life on Earth?’ Martha said.
‘Could do, could do,’ said the Doctor, and there was a touch of seriousness underneath his apparent levity. ‘But I thought it would be far simpler to deactivate them all at once from the source.’
As he undid the final knot, they heard a door slam. Frank had taken advantage of the Doctor’s back being turned to make a getaway.
‘He’ll have gone to fetch Eve,’ Martha said urgently. ‘She’s the one behind it all!’
‘Quelle surprise,’ said the Doctor. ‘Well, we’d better find the detonator controls soon, then.’
‘Yes please,’ said Martha. ‘Please, please don’t let the Earth be destroyed. I don’t want to be a Last One.’ She smiled weakly. ‘Eve’s planning to put me in a cage, you know.’
The Doctor froze for a moment, like he was being put in suspended animation again. Was it horror? Or had he had an idea? Martha wasn’t sure. She turned her attention back to the immediate problem. ‘Frank recalled the dinosaur from over there somewhere,’ she said, indicating the desk. ‘Perhaps the detonator’s in the same place.’
He nodded. ‘Good, that means I can bring back the clones while I look.’
‘Can’t you bring back the bombs too?’ Martha asked. The nod switched to a shake. They’ll have been buried by now, they’re no longer in contact with the dodo carriers.’ The Doctor began to search frantically, sorting through piles of equipment with one hand while tapping on the computer keypad with the other. Martha hurried round the rest of the room, looking for anything that looked at all technological and remote‐detonator‐like.
After a few minutes, the Doctor took a step back and ran his fingers through his hair. ‘Nothing!’ he said, a touch of panic shading his voice. ‘I’ve sorted the dinosaurs – dromaeosaurs, I think, it means “fast‐running lizard”, I suppose she couldn’t get away with breeding anything much bigger, and – sorry, getting distracted, matter in hand,