Doctor Who: The Devil Goblins From Neptune (18 page)

'At least it's cheap at this time of night.'

'That's what I was thinking,' said Bruce. He watched the screen over the technician's shoulder, pretending to be interested.

'There,' said the man, turning back to Bruce. 'All hooked up and ready to -'

The hydrochloric acid hit him in the face. His hands flew up, scrabbling blindly. The technician screamed and fell, cracking the back of his head on the ground. The black and white floor tiles bubbled and melted as the acid streamed over it.

Bruce glanced away, returning the flask to the bench. By the time he looked down again the man was motionless.

Bruce tutted. Science labs could be such dangerous places.

 

Night fell over Geneva as the Brigadier crossed the city to UNIT's worldwide headquarters. He walked for some of the way until,

certain that he hadn't been followed from the hotel, he hailed a taxi and asked for the Rue de Montbrillant. He had purposefully Token in an appalling French accent in an attempt to discourage dialogue. Too much to think about.

Lethbridge-Stewart pondered his position in the silent taxi. He wasn't even sure he could justify his actions to his superiors, but he was in too deep now to go back. The only option seemed to I w a frontal attack, just as at Suez when he had led a division to Port Said to head off a counterattack from Colonel Nasser's crack Republican Infantry. Hit them where it hurt and make their eyes water... Metaphorically speaking.

The plaza in front of the UN building was deserted when Lethbridge-Stewart arrived. Then again, he had hardly expected t !leering crowds. Approaching a lone sentry the Brigadier removed his pass and some papers bearing the UNIT emblem.

'Halt,' said the sentry in English. 'Advance and be recognised'

The Brigadier stepped into the strong light of the building frontage and saluted the private. 'Warm night,' he said.

'Yes, it is, sir. Thank you, sir,' said the sentry, returning the salute. 'Pass in peace.'

 

The cool marble of the entrance hall contrasted with the sticky Drat of evening. Lethbridge-Stewart acknowledged two bored-looking staff officers with further dismissive salutes.

A cry of recognition stopped him in his tracks. 'Brigadier, sir?'

He turned to find a beaming face behind him. It was Captain Munro, who had been under Lethbridge-Stewart's command during the Auton invasion. He was now on the Secretary General's staff after a short spell back in the regular army. The Brigadier groaned inwardly but gave a brief, reasonably convincing smile to indicate pleasure at having run into an old friend.

'Good evening, James.' he said, hoping to keep the conversation as brief as possible.

'I didn't know you were in town, sir,' beamed the delighted captain, seeming not to have taken the hint.

Lethbridge-Stewart thought quickly and nodded. 'Yes, precisely. Very hush-hush. Loose lips sink ships and all that'

He finished shaking hands with Munro and half turned. 'Sorry to have to cut this short, Jimmy. Urgent business, you know how it is'

'Of course, sir,' said Munro, looking a little perplexed.

With that Lethbridge-Stewart hurried off down the corridor towards his objective. The Strategic Operations Defence Command Centre lay deep within the complex and it took the Brigadier some time to find the correct floor, despite having been in the large briefing area on many previous occasions.

The unfolding lack of activity worried the Brigadier. He hadn't expected his entry into UNIT's inner sanctum to be quite this easy, no matter what his rank was. Briefly he considered what would happen if an alien attack were announced in mainland Europe right now and three-quarters of the staff officers seemed to be otherwise engaged. Finally he approached the entry hall to the Command Centre and once again found it deserted and in near darkness.

He knew that a precise inventory of all UNIT equipment was held in the UNIT security records, which were stored in this section of the building. Having switched on his torch, the Brigadier passed banks of computer terminals until he found the large telex section and a filing cabinet marked 'Top Secret' in twelve languages.

The holy grail.

 

It was only as the Brigadier pulled at the cabinet and the top drawer opened that he suddenly realised he had been set up. In the split second before the klaxons began he knew that he had been given the subtlest trail of crumbs to follow. The intention seemed to be to incriminate him beyond recovery.

As the alarms blared Lethbridge-Stewart found himself a seat and waited to see what would happen next.

* * *

Liz and the Doctor watched the creature intently. It was no bigger than a child, but it spat and lashed out with surprising torte whenever anyone approached. It stared with utter contempt through bruised eyelids, as if daring one of the humans to try putting it out of its misery.

'Do you recognise it?' asked Shuskin, thankful that her angry attack on the creature had gone unobserved.

The Doctor shook his head. 'No. But then it's a very big universe.' He pointed towards the wings, and the large belt that I held them in place. 'The fact that these work at all indicates how light the creatures are. Which just goes to confirm their reliance on agility and sheer numbers'

'As we saw from the air battle,' observed Liz.

The Doctor nodded. 'Earth's military forces aren't equipped to deal with them.'

'It doesn't seem to want to talk,' said Shuskin.

'Perhaps it can't,' said Liz. 'Maybe it left its English/Alien phrasebook behind.'

'How many soldiers would talk when captured by the enemy?'

'The Doctor took a step closer to the creature, which lunged at him, hissing.

'Then there's nothing more we can gain from it,' said Shuskin, drawing her pistol.

'Put that thing away!' snapped the Doctor. 'You might not have signed a treaty with these creatures, but please don't descend to their level!'

Liz glanced back at Shuskin, and wondered for a moment if she'd start firing at the Doctor again. But instead she replaced her gun in its holster, a look of disappointed incomprehension crossing her face.

'What can you do?' Liz asked the Doctor.

'My people have a rite, a psychic ability that allows the memories of a dying Gallifreyan to be transferred to another's mind prior to assimilation.'

 

'Assimilation?'

'Too complex to explain. But the process – somewhat melodramatically - is known as "soul-catching". I've never tried it with an alien before.'

'Oh.'

'Actually, I'm not sure anyone has.'

'Oh.'

'And I was never very good at it anyway.'

'Oh' Liz paused. 'Doctor, you do know what you're doing, don't you?'

 

Bruce had been hard at work at the terminal for some minutes, all the while hoping that the soldier wouldn't return.

Finally he took the spool of magnetic tape from its spindle, and walked over to the technician's corpse. He pulled off the man's white lab coat, and then unbuttoned the shirt. The man was taller than Bruce, with a very cheap taste in fabric, but there wasn't much he could do about it now.

Bruce quickly dressed the almost faceless corpse with his own clothing - a sad waste of
haute couture
, if not of human life - and then dropped the body back on to the floor.

He removed the corpse's spectacles and poured some more acid over the body, then carefully smashed the flask on the floor and overturned chairs and test-tube racks.

Bruce stood back to admire his handiwork. It wouldn't fool an expert, but there were few of those in this pox-hole, and it should be enough to get him clear.

He rummaged in the pocket of the lab coat, and found the dead man's pass and his car keys. 'Well, Mr Donald,' he said. 'I think we'd better be going, don't you?'

* * *

Major-General Hayes burst into the Command Centre, red-faced And seemingly flustered, no more than thirty seconds after the sirens had first sounded. Behind him came some twenty troops, all Armed to the teeth. Even the Brigadier thought this smacked of overkill.

Lethbridge-Stewart sat calmly, arms folded, a thin smirk on his la«. which he knew was guaranteed to irritate Hayes.

'What kept you?' he asked casually.

'I beg your pardon, Lethbridge-Stewart? Stand to attention!'

'Yes, sir,' said the Brigadier, snapping out of the chair and saluting. His eyes were fixed on Hayes, trying to determine if someone he considered a close friend was the very person who had manoeuvred him into this predicament.

'Well?' said Hayes angrily. 'I presume you have some sort of explanation for this, Brigadier?'

Some of the troops behind Hayes shifted anxiously at the mention of Lethbridge-Stewart's rank. Shooting a man who had command of thousands of men is not usually advisable, even if he is a spy.

'Security is lax,' said the Brigadier simply. 'I noticed it the last time I was here, reporting on the Stahlman fiasco.'

'What?' screamed Hayes.

The Brigadier merely blinked impassively back at him. 'A little exercise, sir. I assumed you would approve'

Hayes was almost purple now. A large vein throbbed at his temple. 'Lethbridge-Stewart,' he said through gritted teeth,

'you have not heard the last of this. You will return to your hotel, pack, and be on the next plane to London this evening.

Am I understood?'

The Brigadier nodded mutely. He had lost.

'Furthermore, I shall be making a full report of this incident to the Security Council' And it was then, as Hayes moved close to the Brigadier to issue his threat, that he slipped a piece of paper into Lethbridge-Stewart's hand. 'I don't know what game you're playing,' continued Hayes, 'but it stops here' He turned and marched out of the room, most of the troops following him. 'Make sure the Brigadier is returned whence he came,' he called over his shoulder to the remaining trio of soldiers.

Lethbridge-Stewart was led to the front of the building, placed in a staff car and driven, without any conversation, to his hotel. He was then escorted to the lift and taken to the door of his room. At this point the soldiers turned away.

'Aren't you going to make sure I leave?' asked the Brigadier.

It was the sergeant of the three who answered in a strong Texan accent. 'No, sir.'

'Why ever not?'

'Orders, sir,' replied the sergeant. 'You've got your orders, I've got mine. Sir.' He saluted and turned to leave.

Inside his room the Brigadier sat heavily on the bed and opened the piece of paper that he had been given. It was a page torn from a memo pad. There was no signature, but Lethbridge-Stewart recognised Hayes's handwriting instantly.

 

'You are right,' it said simply. 'We have a cuckoo in the nest who is particularly ruthless. You must be equally so. Deal with him' Beneath this there was a name, and an address, and two small doodles of a gun and a tombstone.

The meaning was clear. The Brigadier looked out across the lake at the glittering fountain, lit up like a space rocket.

Then he glanced into the corner of the room at the rifle he had assembled. Ever since his arrival he'd been hoping to avoid this, but the moment had come. For the sake of UNIT, he must take a life.

 

 

 

CHAPTER 12

 

 

As dawn approached Liz watched soldiers pin the alien's limbs to the forest floor. It thrashed wildly, spitting and screeching.

The Doctor approached, a look of great concentration on his face. He seemed to be muttering something under his breath. He knelt down at the creature's side, stretched out a hand, rested his fingertips on its forehead. Shuskin had the unsavoury job of holding the head in position.

The moment the Doctor touched the creature it became still, its eyes glazing over. Despite the cold, the Doctor's furrowed brow was damp with perspiration.

A moment later his whole body jerked, as if he had been electrocuted. Despite this, the Doctor's hand stayed on the creature's forehead.

The Doctor twitched again, his free arm flailing. His closed eyes flicked open. They stared through Liz and the forest, focusing on something unimaginably distant.

Something terrifying.

 

No images, no words, no memories. Just an emotion.

Rage.

It boiled and seethed, a blood-red sea of terrifying aggression, swamping everything else. Only gradually did the Doctor feel other sensations, shrouding the anger like a gently forming dew.' a resolute sadness at having to leave behind the home world, the entrapped planet of savage beauty.

Moments later the Doctor glimpsed the goblin creatures clinging to a projectile, hurtling through the empty vacuum of space. It was as if their hatred was propelling them across the vast distances between the planetary arcs. The imagined roar of the propulsion unit was a shout of defiance to the rest of the universe.

Even this memory, surging through the Doctor's mind, was more emotional than visual. He felt barely restrained anger, a thirst for destruction. He knew that nothing else mattered.

 

There was a final backward glance at the alien world that had once been an intruder in the solar system. Countless generations ago it had been captured by the gravitational pull of the cold blue planet. It had become a moon, a mere satellite, with a thin, cloudless atmosphere.

Their world's ignominious fate was a never-ending source of disgust.

Another memory flickered.' the frozen pink poles, the volcanoes of ice, the solid lakes. An incredible world, almost sculpted by hand.

The creatures rested weary limbs against the metal hull of the

spacecraft, knowing that soon the killing could begin.

The cloud-covered planet approached.

Kill. Destroy. Feed.

The Doctor was swept up in the creature's lust for blood.

For a moment he too wanted to stretch out his artificial wings and sever limbs and arteries and muscle. Devour all life.

Devour everything. But -

Obey the plan. Wait. For the best.

What is the plan?

Obey the plan. Wait.

Tell me more about the plan
.