Doctor Who_ Wetworld - Mark Michalowski [63]
She was still puzzling over that as she hid in the bushes.
Still puzzling over it, as the sound of her own breathing began to subside, and she heard a faint and distant noise. A low, mechanical droning, it drifted across the treetops from well beyond the far bank.
And for a few moments she sat there wondering where she’d heard the noise before. Only when it finally came to her did she heave herself to her feet. She looked back towards Sunday City, wondering if the Doctor and Ty had heard the sound. But it was so faint that she wasn’t even sure she was hearing it herself.
Quietly, she stepped into the open and began to make her way upstream, looking for a shallow crossing point, pausing every few metres to listen. And the more she listened, the more certain she became –
and the more puzzled.
Why had someone decided to start up the drill?
On the other side of the forest, nearly two kilometres away from the original settlement, stood the spindly tower of the deep drill – a skeletal column of metal scaffolding over a hundred metres tall. Thirty metres away stood the drill’s squat control room. And wandering between the two, silently, were the remaining kidnapped settlers.
And watching over them all in the darkness was the man that had once been Pallister. Suspended a metre above the ground, he hung like a broken doll above the water’s edge, slick pipes of flesh still pumping chemicals in and out of his brain, feeding back to the thing that waited beneath the waters. There was no longer any real Pallister there. There hadn’t been for a while – not since the Doctor had attacked it. Now he was just an encyclopaedia for the swamp creature to flick through at will, a database, a source of knowledge and information. Raw brainpower, tied directly in to the creature. Brainpower that the alien was putting to good use.
The thing controlling him held no bitterness, no anger. The Doctor’s action had been understandable – he had sought to survive. The body that housed Pallister’s brain had been damaged by what the Doctor had done, but the brain still functioned. After a fashion.
Even filtered through Pallister’s senses and memories, the creature could make little sense of the Doctor’s earlier questions. It simply could not comprehend how any creature could not understand life’s prime directive: to reproduce, to make more, to colonise and spread.
There was nothing else.
‘You know,’ said the Doctor, his eyes sweeping grimly around the room, ‘I’m half afraid that if I tell you that the worst thing, just at the moment, would be an army of killer robots with flashing red laser-beam eyes, someone would open a cupboard door and point out that you’ve already got one. . . ’
He was seething, Martha could tell.
‘Anyway. . . ’ He seemed to calm down a little. ‘This drill: tell me more about it.’
A youngish man – early twenties, Martha guessed – with long, straggly blond hair raised a hand at the back of the crowd. ‘It’s for extracting low-grade uranium ore,’ he said. ‘The drill tower’s a hundred metres tall, but the extensible bit can go as deep as five hundred. There’s a reasonable seam of ore down there. The drill makes a hole and then we drop low-grade explosives down to fracture it.’
‘And then leach it out with a chemical solution?’ asked the Doctor.
‘And pump it back up to the surface for processing?’
The man nodded, his mouth tight, worried.
‘So much for your intentions to switch to fusion power,’ he said darkly, glancing at Ty. ‘Looks like you’ve already got yourself a long-term energy policy.’
‘But what’s this got to do with that creature wanting to set off a nuclear bomb under our backsides?’ Henig put in.
‘Never heard of the Orion Project?’ asked the Doctor. His eye caught Martha’s. She gave a shrug. ‘Today’s been a real history lesson for you lot, hasn’t it,’ said the Doctor wearily. ‘It was an idea,’ he said eventually, ‘back on Earth in the 1940s, for a nuclear pulse rocket. The idea was to build a big spaceship – a really big spaceship. Whopping, in fact. The size of a city. And