Doctor Who: The Devil Goblins From Neptune (30 page)

'Codeword.' Starlight.' he said as the doors were opened.

Inside was an enormous room the size of an aircraft hangar. A number of glass-fronted isolation chambers were positioned against the walls. In the centre of the room was, quite obviously, a flying saucer.

'It's comforting to know that all of the bozos who claimed to've seen stuff like this were actually telling the truth,' said Control, pointing towards the spacecraft. 'You want to see what's inside this baby? It'll freak you out.'

The Brigadier nodded, and followed Control about thirty feet up a ramp and into the craft.

It was dark inside, though there was some illumination from a flickering panel directly in front of the entrance. There didn't appear to be any windows.

'How do they navigate?' asked the Brigadier.

'Good question. It took us fifteen years to work that out.

Watch this.' Control placed his left palm on the flashing panel.

The light illuminated his face, first green, then red. 'They seem to perceive colour in much the same way that we do.'

explained Control. 'In many ways we're very similar. They even speak pretty good English.' He had his eyes tightly closed. After a moment light filled the interior of the craft, sharpening to blinding brilliance within seconds. The Brigadier covered his eyes with his hands, shutting out the sudden sunburst.

'Sorry about that. Should have warned you - it's a hell of a surprise the first time.'

Not quite as much a surprise as what had happened to the craft. The walls had completely disappeared. The Brigadier and Control were suspended thirty feet off the ground. White-coated technicians continued their work, oblivious to the miracle taking place above them. To the Brigadier it seemed as though they were in a glass bubble suspended above the floor of the hangar. He stood in silence for a moment, his jaw dropping by degrees.

'Bit of a trip, huh?' asked Control. 'They fly through space like this at thirty times the speed of sound. We still haven't quite worked out the mathematics of it, but it's a great party trick!'

'How's it done?' asked the Brigadier.

'Exterior images are fed directly to the brain of the occupants by sensors in the fuselage. The craft doesn't literally disappear.' it just seems to from our perspective.

Pretty clever, huh?'

Ingenious.' agreed the Brigadier.

'Well, it sure beats having a sunroof,' said Control, removing his hand from the panel. The solid walls and floors formed around them again.

'When may I see these creatures?' asked the Brigadier.

'Right away if you want to, but I warn you, they're a big disappointment.'

Rose and Trainor finally arrived in Las Vegas after three changes of aeroplane, several hours late. The professor had taken the misfortunes they had encountered with a stoic acceptance. Rose, on the other hand, was furious, his temper threatening to boil over as he strode through the terminal.

'Incompetent, bungling morons.' muttered the viscount.

'I'm sure they didn't deliberately set out to delay us.' said Trainor, reasonably.

Fortunately, I have no such doubts,' snarled Rose. 'This heap of junk is ours, I take it?' he continued as they came to a halt beside it gleaming black chauffeur-driven Cadillac.

'I've never been in a car with air-conditioning before.' said Trainor, grateful to be out of the early-afternoon sun. Rose snorted in contempt.

They sat in virtual silence as the car took them deep into the Nevada desert north-west of Las Vegas. Mile after mile of nothing but sand and red rock, broken only by an occasional clump of sorry-looking vegetation.

Finally, Trainor could stand the tension no longer. 'Just where are we going?' he asked.

'We have been given a final task to perform,' said Rose enigmatically. 'Your technical expertise is needed to - how can I put this? - complete the job. Then we can go and meet our grateful friends.'

Trainor nodded. see. And the job is...?'

Rose was silent for a moment, sipping a glass of champagne from the car's well-stocked ice box. It's quite straightforward,' he said at length. 'You've heard, I assume, of

"the final solution"?'

In some ways, thought the Brigadier, Control was correct: the Nedenah were disappointing - at least, if you'd been raised on bug-eyed-monster movies and science-fiction television.

Lethbridge-Stewart, however, found them fascinating.

There were five of the creatures, each kept in their own isolation chamber. They were about the size of children, with grey, wrinkled skin and large green eyes. They were slender and hairless, barrel-chested, with slightly protruding mouths.

The Brigadier couldn't help but think of the Second World War concentration camps, and Control seemed to pick up on his unease. 'We have to keep them like this.' he explained.

'They're stubborn little critters, and they don't easily volunteer information.'

'Why don't their own kind come and rescue them?' asked the Brigadier, feeling a wave of sympathy for the creatures.

'Oh, they've tried that. The first contact was in forty-seven. Another craft turned up a year later. The little one in the middle is a survivor from that fiasco. By the third attack, we were ready for them. Shot the sucker right out of the sky.

They haven't been back since. Perhaps they're wary of letting any more technology fall into our hands. Which is a pity, because they die so easily. We had nine of them at one point.'

The Brigadier turned his face away from the creatures, angry at Control's callous disregard for life.

'But if they do come back, we'll be ready for them,'

continued Control. 'We're building up an arsenal of anti-BEM

technology and we're quite capable of using it against them.

And others.'

'Others?'

'Oh yeah. Cybermen, Nestenes - we know all about your minor-league run-ins. The Daleks - you know about those guys?' am aware of them,' said the Brigadier stiffly.

'Course you are, thanks to that shape-changer boy of yours. Well, lemme tell you, Ally, the Waro are something else again. They're mean little mothers, and we're going to wipe them from the skies.' Control chuckled. 'This ain't no game of cricket, and it won't be won on points. This is war. Don't ever forget that.' Control steered the Brigadier away from the impassive aliens, and towards a series of laboratories that adjoined the main hangar. 'We've got Nedenah technology, masses of it. We're talking serious merchandise here. You know, for a peaceful race, they sure make a boatload of lethal weapons!' He pointed towards one room, where an almost invisible green beam was being fired at a series of sensors.

'Much of it is based on the emission of high-powered laser beams. We're bolting these weapons to the experimental aircraft we're testing here and at Groom Lake AFB.'

'To what end?' asked the Brigadier.

Isn't it obvious? We're going to deal with the Waro ourselves. We knew all about the false bridgehead, and we also know about the Waro's need for cobalt-60.'

The Brigadier shook his head, scarcely able to believe what he was hearing. 'You've been two steps ahead of us all along.'

Two steps ahead of the Waro, Ally. About fifteen ahead of you boys!'

'I'll try not to be too upset about that.'

'That's good, Ally. I knew you and I would get along. You see, the Waro will come to us, and they'll be obliterated.

Completely.' 'Then our aims are the same,' said the Brigadier.

'Never!' replied Control angrily. His face was flushed at the very suggestion. 'You play at saving the world, but with that alien freak in your ranks, do you even know what your real agenda is? Do you?' He paused, trying to calm himself.

'We've been subverting UNIT ever since it was formed. And victory here will be another successful operation in our ongoing strategy to discredit you. UNIT will be destroyed, revealed as the false prophets you are. Mark my words.'

The Brigadier reacted passively. 'I'd like to speak with the Nedenah, if I may,' he said.

'Not on your life, boy,' replied Control. He turned, and led the Brigadier deeper into the complex. Lethbridge-Stewart became aware of the dark-suited men following close behind.

Control came to a halt in a corridor of cells. 'Sorry, buddy,' he said sarcastically, 'but you know how it is. We're going to have to lock you away for a while now.'

The Brigadier nodded grimly. 'You're going to kill me, aren't you?'

'Eventually,' said Control, leaving Lethbridge-Stewart in the sealed room.

* * *

'I'm told a man dies of heat exhaustion out here every four weeks,' said Trainor, shielding his eyes from the blazing sun.

'Then he should start selling tickets,' said Rose. 'That's quite a trick.'

Trainor hurried to keep up. The rucksack seemed inordinately heavy, but he knew that Rose would never agree to carry it. 'You don't seem to be taking this very seriously,' he observed.

'Oh, I am,' said the viscount with a brief smile. 'And we'll be there soon enough. Now, do shut up, there's a good fellow.'

Breaking out of his cell was possibly the easiest thing that the Brigadier had ever done. The moulded plastic door had clearly never been intended to house anyone with the strength of Lethbridge-Stewart and, after five or six hefty kicks with his army-regulation boots, the entire window unit collapsed outward. The Brigadier dived through the hole, and straight into the midriff of the guard standing outside the door.

His rifle clattered down the corridor.

They rolled around for a moment on the concrete floor, grappling for a stranglehold on each other. Eventually the Brigadier got a grip of the man's shoulders, and powered his forehead downwards on to the bridge of the guard's nose.

The man fell away, moaning.

The entire scrap was more Stretford End than Sandhurst, but the pragmatism of the Lethbridge-Stewarts was well known. The Brigadier scanned the empty corridor, briefly considering what he would have done as commanding officer if an important prisoner had escaped from a room with only a single guard stationed outside. Shouted a lot, probably.

For the first time in many hours, the Brigadier found himself in a position where no one was holding a gun on him, or pushing him around, or making veiled threats. It felt marvellous. He sprinted to the end of the corridor and then back along the route he had taken with Control.

Remarkably most of the corridors seemed deserted. The legacy of having kept intruders out for so long was that no one thought About a threat that appeared from within.

The Brigadier approached the section of the central complex in which he had been shown the Nedenah. The cavernous room was now in semi-darkness, and deserted but for a single bored-looking USAF cadet who sat on a low bench in front of the observation cells, completely engrossed in the dog-eared Harold Robbins novel in his hands. The Brigadier crept up behind the man, then delivered a heavy chop on the back of his neck. He fell to the floor noiselessly.

The Brigadier made a mental note that, should be ever get home again, he would have to oversee UNIT's internal security procedures personally.

He looked up, and saw the Nedenah watching him closely from their glass-fronted cubicles. It was impossible to read anything into the bland expressions, but the green eyes seemed a fraction wider than usual.

'Good day,' said the Brigadier, briefly aware of how ridiculous he probably sounded. 'My name is Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart, I am a brigadier with the United Nations Intelligence Task Force, a multinational, quasi-autonomous military collective whose aim is to protect Earth...' He paused.

He was uncertain whether his words were being understood by the aliens, although Control had indicated that the Nedenah could communicate with humans. 'The people of Earth are in grave danger,' he continued, but again his voice trailed away. The childlike aliens appeared to be ignoring him completely.

The secret base had finally come into view through the heat haze after a two-hour trek through the desert. Rose and Trainor had navigated completely by compass, there being no features to speak of in the broiling desert. Trainor remembered a joke he knew involving a map of the desert and a sheet of sandpaper, but decided against sharing it with the viscount.

They had used some equipment from the rucksack to plot a path through the only camera and sensor blind spot, and then followed the perimeter fence until they now stood at an unmanned secondary entrance, an electronic sentry box guarding a heavy metal gate.

'The proverbial tradesmen's entrance,' announced Rose.

Trainor rummaged in the rucksack, having studied the electronic schematics on the flight over. It works by looking for certain retinal prints.' he announced. 'Probably based on alien technology - it's way ahead of anything I've seen before.'

'But can you break in?'

Trainor looked hurt. 'Of course. It's just a lock.' He attached a small computerised device to the retina-scanner.

All you need to do is come up with enough combinations - in this case, eye patterns, not numbers.' He smiled. 'The real trick is not setting off the security protocols before we come up with a valid "key".' Trainor's device hummed and buzzed for a few moments, and finally the gate swung upward.

Rose smiled. 'A tribute to the enterprise of your best researchers.'

‘A tribute to what your money can buy you,' said Trainor sadly.

'But I've never used a parachute in my life,' said Liz nervously. 'I'm afraid it's the only way,' replied Mike Yates.

'We haven't got a ladder long enough!'

Oh great, thought Liz. Now everyone's a comedian.

'You will be fine,' said Shuskin impatiently. will show you.'

And she gave Liz a crash course in landing techniques as the Lockheed C-130 Hercules circled in the Nevada sky. It was all about bending your knees, apparently. Shuskin made it all sound straightforward enough, but Liz still couldn't help but wish she'd had longer to prepare for this mission. Like a year or two, at least.