Doctor Who_ Wetworld - Mark Michalowski [66]
‘Doctor?’ she ventured after a few minutes. It seemed that he’d stopped breathing altogether. His body was motionless, still seated on the video table, leaning back at an angle. ‘Doctor?’
His eyes flicked open and Ty flinched. He was staring straight ahead, and although the whites of his eyes were still visible, his irises were completely black. Flecks of dark green and brown swirled in them like grains of dust in a sunbeam. A chill crept down Ty’s spine.
Not again, she thought. Please. . . not again. . .
Orlo raised the monocular to his eye and scanned the drill site.
Its location had meant that it had avoided the flooding that wiped out the first Sunday City. And it hadn’t been used since then: there was enough power left in the ship’s spare core to keep the new settlement going for another year. The settlers had enough on their plates without worrying about mining more uranium just yet. And they’d built a smaller, wood-fired station to cope with the nuclear plant’s occasional downtimes.
But there was no doubt – the kidnapped settlers were operating the deep drill. And, all around them, the creepy figures of the otters stood guard.
Orlo wished he’d thought to ask the Doctor what a bomb might look like. But he didn’t imagine it would be so small that he might miss it.
Suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, Orlo caught a flash of movement. Bringing the monocular back up to his eye, he searched for it again. There – in the shadow behind the drill control room. It couldn’t be. . . He twisted the zoom ring on the monocular and the image jumped about before steadying.
Kneeling at the base of the building was an unmistakeable figure.
Candy.
Candy’s heart was pounding as she pressed herself into the corner behind the control room. All the otters and the settlers, as far as she could tell, were busy around the front – on the drill tower itself and in and out of the squat grey building behind her.
She’d shuffled her way closer and closer to the drill site, convinced that this was something the settlers and the Doctor needed to know about. Why would they want to be drilling? What use could they have for uranium? The One Small Step was surely beyond repair, so they couldn’t be trying to get fuel for it.
From where she was hiding, all she could see was the top of the tower, a skinny metal finger pointing at the orange sky. And then suddenly something glinted: a brief flash of light from the undergrowth at the edge of the clearing. Fishing in her backpack, she pulled out her monocular and raised it to her eye.
Grinning at her and waving, buried in the shadows of the bushes, was Orlo – watching her watching him.
‘What’s going on?’ asked Martha suspiciously as she burst into the main bio lab. It was the only place she could think of that the Doctor might have gone – and she was right. He was fiddling around with tubes of liquids and pipettes in his shirt sleeves whilst Ty watched him, her arms folded sullenly. There was definitely an atmosphere in the room.
‘What?’ said the Doctor with a forced brightness as he took a test tube out of a clunky-looking old centrifuge and held it up to the light.
He was wearing his glasses again, and the harsh fluorescent light glanced off them, making his eyes unreadable.
‘You rushed off,’ Martha said. ‘I didn’t know where you’d gone. We found some plans and what-not. They’re looking them over back in the Council chamber. For all the good it’ll do. What’s all this then?’
Martha indicated the video table, lit up like a Christmas tree, images of molecules and proteins all over its glossy surface. One or two of them were coloured in shades of red – a warning if ever there was one.
‘Belt and braces,’ the Doctor said with another false smile.
‘You’re up to something, aren’t you?’
‘Me?’
‘What’s that?’ Martha indicated the yellowish liquid that the Doctor was now pouring into a little glass and metal cartridge.
He