Doctor Who: Space War (14 page)

‘We not home yet,’ said the Ogron. ‘Home good, inside hill.’

‘It sounds cosy.’

Inside the cliff was a labyrinth of crudely fashioned passageways and open areas, lit by flickering torches from the rough rock walls. At one point they passed an Ogron suspended from the rocky ceiling by heavy chains.

‘Him bad Ogron,’ Jo’s guard explained. ‘Stole food from holy place.’

‘How long’s he going to hang like that?’

‘Till too weak to run. Then we give him to big lizard.’

Jo shuddered.

At last they were in a fairly large cave. the Master’s quarters. Against the rough walls were various items of advanced communications equipment. The Master was seated in a comfortable swivel chair. ‘Welcome to my humble abode, Miss Grant.’

She looked round the place. ‘You must have been more comfortable the time on Earth you were in prison.’

‘These are temporary quarters. I shall soon change them for something better.’

‘You’ll soon be back in prison again,’ she replied. ‘Once the Doctor convinces everyone of the truth, Earth and Draconia will combine their space fleets to attack you.’

He shook his head. ‘I doubt it. There is too much mutual distrust.’

‘The Doctor will find you somehow.’

He smiled. ‘I hope he does. In fact, he must come here, not only to find you but also to try and get back his beloved TARDIS. Look in that corner.’

Jo stared into a gloomy far corner of the cave. Her eyes now accustomed to the flickering torch light, she saw the TARDIS standing there. ‘Well, you’ll be sorry when he gets here.’ It was all she could think of to say.

‘On the contrary, Miss Grant. I
want
him here. To achieve that. I’m going to set a trap for him, and you are going to help me.’

Jo said nothing.

‘What’s this, Miss Grant? No noble speech to say that you’d rather die than do anything to harm your precious Doctor?’

‘You know that I’m never going to help you. If you’re going to set a trap you can do it with your stupid Ogron friends.’

‘And if I should force you?’

Jo nerved herself. ‘If you want to hurt me there’s nothing I can do to stop you.’

‘Exactly, Miss Grant. I’ve tried hypnotising you before now but you fail to respond.’ He glanced round at the electronic equipment in the cave and his eyes settled on a small, dull grey box with various knobs and controls. ‘My hypno-sound device, perhaps? I could terrify you with illusions that you were seeing Drashigs and other monsters.’ He picked up the box lovingly. ‘Ingenious, don’t you think?’

‘Is that how you made Draconians see Earthmen?’

‘And Earthmen see Draconians! Yes, entirely my own creation.’ He put the box down. ‘But I doubt that would work on you a second time. So we may have to use cruder methods to persuade you to help me trap the Doctor—’

A tall Ogron entered the cave. ‘Master, I bring news.’

The Master looked up. ‘What is it?’

‘Two of our raiding ships come back. They find two Earth cargo ships. One fought back. They smashed it.’

The Master smiled. ‘Excellent! There
must
be war now!’

Waiting for General Williams to prepare his spaceship, the President, the Doctor and the Draconian Prince watched a flash newscast on her television wall. ‘Two more Earth cargo ships have been intercepted in Earth Space by the Draconians,’ said the newscaster. ‘Mass rallies are demanding war with Draconia.’ The picture cut to a shot of Congressman Brook addressing a crowd of thousands. ‘I warn the President that we shall no longer tolerate these murderous attacks! I hear cries from, all sides—Attack Draconia! Attack now! ‘There is only one final solution and that is war, war, war!’ The crowd went mad in a frenzy of cheering. then in unison chanted the word, ‘War!’

The President switched off the television wall and turned to the Doctor and the Prince. ‘I don’t know how much longer I can hold them. The thought of war always excites people.’

‘When they have so much to lose?’ said the Draconian Prince. ‘Even their own lives?’

‘When in history have people thought about that, Your Highness? People enter war always thinking that they will win, and that they personally will survive.’

The Prince threw back his head. ‘On Draconia meetings such as these’—he indicated the blank television wall—’would not be permitted. Only noblemen may express opinions.’

‘Our nations are very different,’ said the President. ‘Earth prefers democracy, but that in itself creates problems. Give me proof about the Ogrons, and I shall speak to the people of Earth and convince them that Draconia has had nothing to do with these attacks on our cargo ships

General Williams entered the President’s office. ‘Madam President, everything is ready. We shall take my personal scout ship.’

The Prince took the President’s hand and kissed it. ‘May you live a long life and may energy shine on you from a million suns.’

The President replied formally, ‘And may water, oxygen and plutonium be found in abundance where-ever you land.’

The Prince continued to hold the President’s hand in his green scaly claw. ‘My life at your command.’ he said with meaning, something he would normally have said only to his father the Emperor.’

‘And mine at yours,’ she said, moved by the Prince’s words. ‘Now go, the three of you, and may your mission be successful. The future of two great empires depends on you.’

The Doctor bowed to the President and hurried away with the Prince and General Williams.

Jo sat on the hard earth floor of her cell in the Ogron stronghold and tried not to cry. It was bad enough being in the great soulless Security Prison on Earth: at least then there had been a chance that someone might have listened to her. But now she was a prisoner of the real enemy—the Master who was wholly evil, and the stupidly savage Ogrons. What’s more, she was convinced the Master would use torture to make her help him defeat the Doctor in some way. Being placed in this cell was part of some demoralising preparation, to give her time to think about what was to come.

She could see no means of escape. Two walls of the cell were solid rock; the other two ‘walls’ consisted of heavy iron bars from floor to the cave roof. A cage door was set in the bars, its huge primitive lock secure. Next door was another cell, empty and its door standing open. Jo looked longingly at the open cage door. Then as a thought struck her, she inspected the floor at the foot of the dividing iron bars. The bars between the two cells came down to a heavy iron girder that simply ‘sat’ on the hard earth floor. It would be possible to burrow under the girder and get into the next cell, like a rabbit burrowing under a wire-mesh fence. She started scratching at the earth but quickly realised it was too hard packed for her to make any impression. She looked at her torn bleeding fingers in despair.

Someone was coming. She heard the heavy pounding of an Ogron’s feet approaching down the rock-walled corridor. Instinctively she cowered to the back of the cell, fearing the torture was now to begin.

A single Ogron came into the flickering light. He carried a wooden bowl and earthenware jug. He stopped at the gate to her cell, produced a massive iron key and let himself in. ‘You eat.’

Jo came forward and took the bowl. It contained a substance like gruel, so stodgy that the spoon stood upright in it. ‘Thanks.’

The Ogron rubbed his stomach. ‘Food is good.’

‘Fabulous,’ she said.

‘You eat good, get big, become Ogron wife.’

‘There’s a thought,’ she answered. ‘Well, I’d better fatten myself up.’

‘Eat, get big.’ He put the jug of water down beside her, relocked the door and went away.

The food in the bowl had no taste at all. Then she suddenly realised that the spoon was made of strong metal. She put down the bowl, went back to the bars dividing the two cells and tried to scrape away the earth using the spoon. The hardness of the earth again defeated her efforts and she sank back on her haunches in despair. Then another thought came to her. She poured a little of the water on to the hard-packed earth. When she tried again to use the spoon she found she could move away some of the softened earth.

The General’s personal scout spaceship was one of the most advanced the Doctor had ever travelled in. A dozen Earth soldiers sat in a special compartment aft set aside for the General’s personal bodyguard. On the flight deck were the Draconian Prince. the Doctor, General Williams and the ship’s pilot. The Doctor was busy making calculations on a memo pad.

‘In thirty-four seconds,’ he told the pilot, ‘make a course correction to galactic co-ordinate 2349 to 6784.’

The pilot looked to General Williams for confirmation.

Williams nodded. ‘Do whatever the Doctor says.’ He turned to the Doctor. ‘You realise this course will take us into a completely uninhabited sector of the galaxy?’

‘It’ll take us to where we’ll find the Ogrons’ planet.’ The General looked less than convinced. ‘May I ask where you obtained this information?’

‘From the Master,’ replied the Doctor. ‘He fed the co-ordinates into his ship’s computer when I was his prisoner.’ He turned to the Draconian Prince. ‘When you captured the ship I extracted the information from the ship’s memory banks.’

The Prince spoke. ‘The female with whom you travel, the one who talks, you expect to find her on this Ogron planet?’

‘That is my hope,’ said the Doctor.

‘I hope so too,’ said the Prince. ‘You must educate her to be silent, then she will be a very nice person.’

The Doctor suppressed a smile.

Jo reckoned she had scraped away enough earth to make her escape. Lying on her back, gripping the heavy girder, she pulled herself head first into the clip. To her delight her head went easily under the girder, and with a further heave she brought through her shoulders. Now half of her was on the ‘free’ side of the dividing iron bars. She raised herself on her elbows and wriggled until she was in a sitting position—sitting in the dip. Her legs protruded up into the locked cell. Since knees only bend backwards, she had to turn over on to her stomach to draw her legs through. She struggled to her feet, aware that both the back and front of her clothes were plastered with mud. She stepped out of the unlocked cell and tried to remember how she had been brought here from the Master’s private quarters.

A minute later she realised that she was lost in the maze of tunnels and passages. Standing at an intersection of four corridors, she saw that the end of one led out into a more brightly-lit area. She ran in that direction.

Here there was a profusion of flickering flares on the walls. It was a big cave, the rock walls more smoothly cut than anywhere she had seen since her arrival. At one end a mound of rubbish lay under what appeared to be a wall drawing. Curious, Jo went closer to the great picture on the wall. In crude shapes, which she presumed was the best one might expect from an Ogron artist. the wall drawing showed a huge animal like a lizard, or one of Earth’s prehistoric dinosaurs, holding something in its claws. She went closer and saw that what it held was in fact an Ogron, a tiny figure dwarfed by the size of the monster.

The sound of footsteps made her race to a place of hiding in the shadows. As she watched an Ogron entered the brightly-lit area carrying an armful of strange fruit or vegetables. He walked up to the picture and spoke to it.

‘O Great Mighty One, I bring you food. Eat well of what we give. Allow us to share your planet. Do not eat Ogrons.’

With the final words of the incantation the Ogron threw the food on to the pile that Jo had thought was rubbish. He fell to his knees, crossed arms over his chest, rocked forward three times, then got up and backed away.

Jo waited until the Ogron had gone, then emerged from the shadows and continued her search for the Master’s quarters.

General Williams’s pilot pointed to a disc on the ship’s monitor screen. ‘That’s it, sir. I’ll bring it into better view.’ He adjusted a control and the disc grew in size until it filled the screen. ‘The planet you wished to reach, sir.’

The General looked up from the records he had been studying during the journey. ‘According to the Galactic Survey, Doctor, this planet is uninhabited. It has no valuable minerals and very little vegetation. There is one dominant life-form—a large and savage lizard. Since it is such a miserable and unpleasant place, neither Earth nor Draconia has ever colonised it.’

‘There you are, then.’ said the Doctor. ‘Just the place the Ogrons would choose as a base.’

The Prince asked, ‘If they are on this planet, how do we find them?’

‘When we get in closer,’ said the Doctor. ‘we’ll have to keep looking until we see some signs of life.’

‘Go into close orbit,’ the General ordered his pilot.

‘We must search for these lizards,’ said the Prince.

‘Why?’ queried the General. ‘We’re supposed to be hunting Ogrons.’

‘Ogrons would know enough to hide,’ said the Prince. ‘Lizards will not. If the lizards arc savage perhaps they eat Ogrons. So where we see lizards, we can be sure the Ogrons are not far away. It is logical.’

Jo crept into the cave-room where she had previously talked with the Master. She had found it more by accident than through remembering the way. It was deserted. Everything was just as she last saw it. She picked up the little dull grey box that produced the hypno-sound and pocketed it: it could be useful evidence. Then she turned her attention to the papers on the Master’s table and found a star chart; the Master had ringed the Ogrons’ planet. Now she looked at the ultra-advanced communications equipment. The controls were helpfully easy to understand. She found the transmitter control, turned it on to full, and spoke into the microphone. ‘May Day, May Day. This is an urgent message to Draconians or Earth forces. The Ogrons are using a planet on gallactic co-ordinates 2349 to 6784. Please, anyone who hears this urgent message, inform the authorities of either Earth or Draconia. May Day, May Day—’

The Master stepped out from the shadows of a corner of the cave room. ‘Thank you, Miss Grant.’ He came up to the communications equipment and switched it off. ‘You see, that was the trap.’