Doctor Who_ Wetworld - Mark Michalowski [67]
‘Plan D, I think.’ He flashed a grin at Ty. ‘Or was it E?’
Ty glared at him and now Martha was certain something was up.
There was an atmosphere in the room – half conspiracy, half just-had-a-blazing-row. Martha used to think that she didn’t do jealousy, but there was something about the way he seemed to be confiding in Ty that got her hackles up. Again.
The Doctor was filling another of the little cartridges. ‘Right,’ he said, tossing the capsules into the air with one hand and catching them neatly in the other. He took off his glasses, swiped up his jacket from the back of a chair and slipped it on. ‘No time like the present.
And if we don’t hurry, there really won’t be.’
And, with that, he slipped past the two of them and through the doors.
− .... . −.−−| .− .−. .| ..− ... .. −. −−.| − .... .| −.. .−. .. .−..
.−..| ..−−..|| −.. −−− −. −| −.− −. −−− .−−| .−− .... −.−−|
..−−..|| .. −−| −−. −−− .. −. −−.| − −−−| ... .− −... −−− −
.− .−. −−. .| .. −
‘You’re mad,’ Orlo whispered to himself. ‘You’re completely raving mad.’
The flashes from Candy’s torch ceased, and he saw her wave at him and slip it into her backpack. He hoped he’d understood her Morse code message. If he’d remembered to bring his own torch with him, he’d have told her what he thought of her plan – and what the Doctor had said about the creature’s plan. As he watched her through the monocular, she crouched down in the shadow of the building and began to inch her way around to the window.
If someone had told Martha Jones, just a few weeks ago, that she’d find herself heading deliberately towards a nuclear bomb, she’d have laughed them out of the room. And yet here she was, on a swampy alien planet, light years from Earth, doing just that.
It put the rest of her life in perspective.
And it might just end it. ‘What if we can’t stop it?’ she whispered to the Doctor, hoping that Ty couldn’t hear her.
‘Oh, we’ll stop it.’
He sounded quietly confident.
He always
sounded quietly confident. Well, sometimes noisily confident. But always confident.
‘Why are you doing this?’ It was Ty.
‘Because if we don’t,’ answered the Doctor breezily, ‘then slimey-boy wins, and we lose. And if I have one fault, it’s that I’m not a good loser.’
‘You sound like you do this kind of thing often.’
‘More often than is healthy, believe me,’ said Martha, pushing a branch aside as they started up the slope that would bring them out above the drill site. A rustle of bushes further along the slope caught their eyes.
‘It’s Orlo!’ whispered Ty.
Martha looked where she was pointing, and could just make out his stocky frame, his back to them, squatting in the undergrowth.
‘Go and get him,’ urged the Doctor gently. ‘If this doesn’t work out, I want him as far away from here as possible.’
Ty squeezed the Doctor’s hand and went to get Orlo.
Look before you leap.
That’s what people had always told Candy. They’d never given her the He who hesitates is lost one. Candy had never been given warnings about hesitating.
She wished, just now, that someone had.
The idea that had suddenly struck her as she’d waved goodbye to Orlo was just so obvious.
So obvious, in fact, that she kept thinking that there must be an equally obvious reason why it wouldn’t work. A really obvious reason that would jump up and bite her, like a ’gator out of the swamp, when it was too late. Making sure that no one could see her, hiding in the shadow at the corner of the building, she slowly stood upright – and stepped out into the light. And then, keeping her face fixed and flabby like the other settlers, she began to walk.
In Candy’s panicky head, it was perfect. The other Sundayans were acting on instructions that the slime-thing had given them earlier. So were the otters. The slime-thing wasn’t actually remote-controlling them, not in real-time. So there was no reason why, if she didn’t act threatening, any of them should react to her. They’d see her – if they saw her at all – as just another zombie. Her legs