Downtime - Marc Platt [102]
‘Remember what we are taught, Daniel,’ she said. ‘Fight the evil. Remember the sword that cuts through the thorns of deceit. Be the Sword of Truth, Daniel. Cut yourself free.
Remember.’
The Yeti stirred again. Its claws started to rise.
‘Daniel!’ scolded Victoria.
A face slid in from the side. ‘You’re dead, Danny boy!’
sneered Christopher.
A rage erupted in the Yeti. It roared its fury. Victoria ducked clear as the monster went berserk, flailing and thrashing in the air. Fighting an invisible force. Fighting inside itself.
Christopher did not move fast enough. The Yeti snatched at him, catching him in a monstrous bear hug.
‘No, Daniel!’ pleaded Victoria. ‘Not him! Destroy the generators!’
The Yeti tossed Christopher’s broken corpse aside. Still enraged, it was casting wildly about for anything on which to vent its confusion.
‘Here!’ Victoria called, pointing to the control consoles.
The Yeti bore down on her instead.
‘Daniel!’ she shouted. ‘The Truth!’
The creature reeled in despair.
Sarah suddenly charged out of nowhere, cannoning into the Yeti with all her might. Caught off balance, the huge creature toppled sideways onto the console.
There was an eruption of smoke and sparks. In the heart of it Victoria could see the Yeti striking repeatedly at the disintegrating machinery.
The whine of the generators began to pitch down.
No longer. He couldn’t hold the shrieking sphere off any longer.
The Brigadier saw the cadaver that had once been Professor Edward Travers lunge wildly at Kate. Smoke was seeping out of its clothes. The corpse swung at her with its stick, blocking her path to him.
‘Access denied!’ declaimed its tortured voice. ‘Access denied!’
The pyramid on the stone plinth suddenly fell apart in an eruption of sparks. The globes scattered across the square around him like a break on a snooker table.
The beams from the roof pyramid flickered and died.
The UNIT Captain slumped to the ground like a discarded puppet. Two Yeti at the top of the steps swayed and tumbled forward, reeking of smoke.
The attacking sphere lost all of its will. Lethbridge-Stewart tossed it contemptuously aside and struggled to his feet.
The Travers body was casting about in the detritus of its perdition. ‘I am not defeated!’ it croaked.
The Brigadier marched towards it, ready to show it the door. ‘Leave our world alone.’
‘ My world!’ Travers’s arm rose up to strike like a Yeti. The Brigadier caught it by the skinny wrist. It was hot as a fever –
burning up.
Eye to smoking eye.
‘You’re not wanted here. Go back to Hell. Back where you came from!’
The Intelligence in Travers darted its eyes around the arena.
Everywhere the Chillys were standing, pulling off their headphones. The Children of the New World, Children of the Old Earth, eyes ablaze with the power it had unlocked in them.
The power turned back on the Intelligence. Systems failure.
Malfunction at Server. Its computer body shut itself down.
Confined to Travers’s broken shape, it pitched over onto the ground.
Faces of hatred. Chanting of the Earth mantra. It writhed under their onslaught.
‘Nowhere to go! Nowhere!’ It had slammed the door on its escape route.
It sank back. The ghost of a wind blew strands of web against its body.
A figure stood on a balcony above.
Travers’s head lifted towards her. ‘Victoria,’ it whispered.
She returned its cold glare, dismissing it from her life and her world.
The head slumped down on the ground. Its eyes watched a single ant making its way across the concrete. The Intelligence tried to put out its will, to take a new shape, but it had no strength. It was exhausted. It was time to let go.
The Brigadier opened his arms wide to embrace Kate. As she clung to him, they heard a thunderous roar from above.
The sky funnelled in on the body of Travers – an inverted pyramid of energy and web that boiled downwards, emptying into a smoking mummified cocoon where he lay.
Finally the energy blazed down into a single locus and collapsed into nothing.
‘Dad,’ whispered