Doctor Who_ Winner Takes All - Jacqueline Rayner [13]
She was almost comforted. ‘Really?’
He looked sincere. ‘Yeah. Really.’ A pause. ‘Well, probably. Tell you what, shall we go and rescue him?’ He glanced at the LCD clock on the front of Mickey’s video recorder. ‘Still plenty of time before tea.’
She threw an ‘I don’t believe it’ look at the ceiling. ‘Well, yeah. I pretty much assumed we’d be going to rescue him.’
The Doctor plonked himself down on the other chair. ‘All right then. I mean, I’m not saying I’ll miss him now he’s gone or anything. But I’d rather he didn’t get kidnapped by aliens on my watch, you know?’
She nodded, biting back a remark. She still could never tell if he was pretending not to care, some dry humour sort of thing, or if he really didn’t care. And on the whole, she thought it was probably better in the short term if she didn’t find out one way or the other.
The Doctor didn’t seem to be doing anything, though. She waited for a moment, and then said, ‘Well? Thunderbirds are go, or what?’
‘Or what,’ he said. ‘Or did you get a Brownie badge in porcupine tracking?’
She glared at him. ‘It can’t be that hard. Someone’ll have noticed a giant porcupine walking about the place carrying someone in its arms, or whatever.’
The Doctor shook his head. ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Have a sniff.’ She did so, and as she breathed in a sneeze took her by surprise.
‘Ooh,’ she said. ‘Better make a wish.’
‘How about, “I wish I knew where Mickey had been teleported to”?’ the Doctor suggested.
‘Teleport?’ she said. ‘How can you tell?’
‘Leaves a distinctive tingle in the air, teleportation,’ the Doctor said. ‘And means our porcupines are fairly technologically advanced an’ all.’
She shivered, thinking of Mickey’s atoms being broken down and zapped through the air. ‘You’ve managed to reverse teleportation before,’ she said, thinking back to one of their previous adventures.
‘Yeah, if I was at the other end where the controls are,’ he said. ‘Sorry, no can do here. No, there’s only one thing for it.’ He grinned, and picked up the games console. ‘Time to go fishing.’
It took her a moment, but she got it in the end. ‘You’re going to act as bait. You’re going to play the game and hope they come and get you too.’
‘Yup.’ He pressed a button on the console. The legend ‘Introduction’ appeared on the screen, and the Doctor grimaced. ‘Right back to the beginning.’
‘At least you don’t have to do the training level,’ Rose said. ‘Anyway, we might learn something.’
Dancing cartoon porcupines shimmied across the TV screen, eventually drawing back to reveal a grainy image of what Rose now knew to be the real aliens.
‘Yeah, s’pose you’re right,’ said the Doctor, selecting an on‐screen option.
A graphic flashed, and the introduction began.
There were a group of porcupine‐aliens sitting round a table. It looked like a council of war.
‘Fellow Quevvils,’ said a porcupine who had salt‐and‐pepper facial hair and long quills curving back off his head like a deadly teddy boy, ‘we meet to discuss the threat of the evil Mantodeans.’ The picture cut to footage of the giant praying mantises, then back to the Quevvils at their table.
‘But what can we do, Frinel?’ said another of the aliens. ‘We are at a stalemate! We cannot hurt the Mantodeans, and they cannot hurt us!’
Now it cut to a cartoon showing a Mantodean trying to fix its jaws round a Quevvil’s thick, spiny neck, and finally giving up with a shrug of its feelers. Another cartoon showed a Quevvil shooting a barrage of quills at a Mantodean, only for them to bounce off the insectoid’s tough exoskeleton.
‘Looks as if nature had the right idea,’ said the Doctor in an aside to Rose. ‘Two species that could live together in harmony.’ He snorted. ‘Like that’s ever going to happen anywhere in the universe.’
Back at the table, another Quevvil continued, ‘We have tried to infiltrate the Mantodean stronghold.’
Cut to a structure rather like one of the great pyramids, only without the point. Mantodeans, dwarfed