Doctor Who_ Wetworld - Mark Michalowski [56]
For within seconds, as Martha’s team reached the others, the slime-thing’s conditioning finally broke. And in a mad, panicky flurry, the zombie otters fled, scattering out across the slope in a storm of fur and squeals.
‘General Martha Jones of the Seventh Cavalry,’ said Martha, saluting smartly, ‘to the rescue – sir!’
‘General Jones!’ beamed the Doctor, returning the salute. ‘I’m going to be recommending you for a commendation. Come here!’
And he swept her up in a huge hug, lifting her feet clear off the ground.
‘Now,’ he said, dropping her back on her feet with a jolt and looking around at the sleepwalking settlers. ‘Let’s see if we can’t wake these sleeping beauties up.’
The sun had vanished behind the clouds and the rain had begun to fall again as the strange little band reached Sunday City.
Waking the hypnotised settlers had been surprisingly easy without the otters there to guard them. The Doctor went to each one in turn, whispered in their ears and then clicked his fingers in front of them.
One by one, they’d come out of their chemically induced trance, eyes wide and apparently stunned to find themselves standing ankle-deep in mud on the edge of the old city.
The Doctor pointed them in the direction of Martha and Ty, standing at the brow of the hill and, like acquiescent children, they’d trooped up there to join them.
The journey back had been a sombre affair: Martha and Ty had wanted to talk to the settlers, find out what had happened, what they’d thought they were supposed to be doing. But the Doctor had cautioned against hassling them too much: they’d been through a lot, and he thought they needed to get back to familiar surroundings before the interrogation started.
So they passed the trip with Ty and the Doctor explaining to Martha exactly what they’d encountered down at the water’s edge; Martha, likewise, explained all about her little trip to the otters’ nest. She’d recovered the basket with the baby slimey-thing in, that she’d left at the brow of the hill. Of the otters – both friendly and unfriendly, there was no sign. Martha hoped that their brave actions hadn’t put any of them in danger, but the Doctor reassured her that the brainwashed otters were unlikely to have been any threat to the others.
‘I think we have you to thank for them,’ the Doctor said to Ty.
‘The one with the smudge on its ear?’ Ty said. ‘Thought I recognised him.’
‘What?’ said Martha, still trying to work out whether she should be indignant that, somehow, Ty was getting the credit for her perfectly organised and executed rescue.
‘Your little A-Team,’ the Doctor explained, turning the spherical basket over in his hands and making silly cooing noises into it. ‘They were Ty’s otters – the ones she’d had in the zoo lab.’
‘How d’you know?’ Martha asked.
‘Ty here recognised the one with the smudge and the rest was just obvious, wasn’t it Ty?’
Martha felt her teeth grit, all of their own accord, but managed an interested ‘Really?’-type smile.
‘Well, old slimey-boy seems to have most of the otters hereabouts under its slippery little thumb: it’s only the ones that had been in the zoo lab, with the control chemicals decaying, that haven’t. Obviously, they had enough intelligence to keep well away from the water and the slime-thing once the intelligence-suppressing chemicals wore off. And when the controlled ones went on their kidnapping rampage here, your friends took the opportunity to let themselves out of their cages and decided that we were their best chance to help get rid of slimey.’
The other settlers rushed out to greet them, but there was a sense of defeat in the air at the fact that they hadn’t managed to rescue all of the kidnapped humans. No one seemed concerned about Pallister, and Martha realised that she had no idea whether he had any family or friends. It left her feeling a bit cold, a bit detached.
‘You OK?’ It was the Doctor, a hand squeezing her shoulder.
‘Yeah,’ she said as brightly as she could. ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’
‘You did good, you know,’ he said, as Ty vanished into the crowd