Dr. Who - BBC New Series 28 (16 page)

‘Tell you one thing, sir,’ Alison Pearce said, as she looked upwards to where it had all begun.

‘What’s that, Sergeant?’

‘That scary face in the sky has gone.’

Miss Oladini was seriously thinking of handing in her notice. This was not a good enough job to be worth all this aggro.

Last night she’d been chased, had electricity chucked at her, been nearly blown up in a car and, worst of all, someone had nicked her bike. She hoped it was that redheaded woman who had been with her in the car, because that would mean she too had escaped the blast.

Miss Oladini wasn’t entirely sure how she’d done it herself, but knew it had involved a lot of rolling along the ground, ignoring the heat and running into a bush and holding her breath for what seemed like an hour but could only have been a minute or two before her pursuers assumed both women were dead.

She had no idea what was going on at Copernicus, but her body had given in to the shock and she’d fallen unconscious in the grounds of the old mansion house, eventually waking up again, cold, damp and very hungry.

And minus a bicycle.

She waited a while to see if anyone was watching her, then made her way back inside the house for warmth.

After a couple of minutes, she found a couple of abandoned coats. She knew she was in shock. Her body

needed protection and warming up.

She put on the coats, one on top of the other, then headed for a tiny closet. She could hide there, and its cramped conditions would help retain the heat she needed.She found a half-drunk bottle of water on a table top and took that with her, too.

After a couple of hours, she felt strong enough to venture out of her closet and see if the people were still there, see if Professor Melville was still with them.

She’d been creeping quietly down a corridor when she jumped, because a load of radios and TVs and a couple of desktops burst into life, and she listened to Madam Delphi’s portent of doom, feeling cold again.

Now she had recovered enough from last night’s ordeal, now it was daytime, it was time to get away from Copernicus. Forget Professor Melville and those people, this was too much for her to deal with, and she suspected that radio broadcast was connected. The police, maybe the army, they needed to know that something was going on here. She began to creep slowly towards the big staircase when a hand came out of nowhere and wrapped around her mouth, cutting off any noise she could make.

Miss Oladini thought this was it, she was going to die.

‘Please be quiet, sweetheart,’ said a voice in her ear.

‘My name is Wilfred Mott, and I don’t want to hurt you.’

He moved his hand away from her face, and Miss Oladini pulled away. She looked at the man, old, but not weak, clearly. His eyes burned with intelligence, but there was nothing threatening.

‘Why are you here?’ she asked bravely.

‘My granddaughter was here last night. She told me about things going on here. I’m looking for the Doctor.’

‘Granddaughter? Redhead?’

‘That’s Donna. You must be Miss Oladini? She thought you were dead, she’ll be so pleased you’re OK.’

Miss Oladini wasn’t sure about this. Those people that had attacked her could know all this. But would they know about…?

‘How did Donna get away?’

‘On a bike. Was it yours? She left it near a police station somewhere. South Woodham Ferrers, that was it.’

He smiled at her. ‘She got home so late last night and I’d been waiting up. She told me everything that happened, and after I got her off to sleep I decided to check on this place myself.’

Miss Oladini frowned at him. ‘You didn’t believe her?’

‘Course I did! Donna doesn’t make things up. But I wanted to find the Doctor and keep Donna safe at the same time. She’d been through enough. So I left her sleeping and crept out of the house this morning.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Right now she’ll have worked that out and be creating merry hell, I reckon.’

Miss Oladini still wasn’t convinced, but he didn’t seem to have the zombie-ish approach of the rest of the people here. ‘You’re looking for a doctor? Which one? They’re all doctors and professors here.’

‘He came with Donna. Tall bloke, daft hair. Talks a lot of rubbish.’

‘Sums up most of the Copernicus workers, frankly, Mr Mott.’

‘Wilf. And no, he doesn’t work here. He was asked to come here by a Professor Melville. That’s why he and Donna turned up so late.’

‘I spent most of last night hiding and being blown up, I didn’t see Donna till we escaped. No idea if there was anyone with her at all. Sorry.’

Wilf seemed to deflate. ‘Oh. I was so sure he’d be here.

I think he’s the only one who can save us from all that Madam Delphi stuff we just had to listen to.’

‘Why’d you think that?’

‘It’s the sort of thing he does. Save us.’

‘Some sort of vicar is he?’

Wilf laughed. ‘No, no, not at all. So, where is everybody, then?’

Miss Oladini shrugged and explained she was thinking of getting away.

‘Give me fifteen minutes,’ Wilf said. ‘If we don’t find my friend, I’ll drive you back home, how’s that?’

Miss Oladini weighed up her options, and then agreed.

There was, after all, no other way home as easy as this.

And Wilf Mott didn’t seem to be very threatening.

She led him down the stairs, through the shattered French windows and out into the back garden, pointing over at the radio telescope, explaining that was what the whole place was about.

Wilf nodded. ‘That face in the sky, that was made up of stars, right? I reckon that observatory thing is where the Doctor would be.’

Miss Oladini shivered and pulled her coats tighter around her. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said quietly. ‘I don’t want

to go back there.’

‘Why not?’

But Miss Oladini couldn’t explain. There was just something about it, something about the way the telescope had always seemed a safe place to work but now…

Wilf gripped her shoulder. ‘All right, you wait here and I’ll pop over and see if the Doctor’s there. Won’t be long.’

Miss Oladini watched as he wandered off. She shivered again. For one brief moment she had felt safe with this strange old man, and now she was alone again, she…

She caught up with him in seconds. ‘Entrance, this way,’ she said.

He smiled at her. ‘Good for you, girl,’ he said. ‘Didn’t fancy going in alone. To be honest.’

They smiled at each other.

‘So, Donna’s your granddaughter, then?’ Miss Oladini said. ‘Glad she got away.’

‘Me too. Be lost without her. Family’s an important thing to keep a hold of.’

Miss Oladini considered this. ‘I don’t know where my family are,’ she said. ‘Probably back in Nigeria.’

‘How come you lost touch?’

She smiled. ‘Oh, you know how it is, came to the UK

for university, lost my status, stayed hidden here, signed on to the agency to find me work under a false name, usual stuff.’

‘That’s very brave of you,’ Wilf said. ‘Risky, too, working here.’

‘Right under the government’s nose,’ she replied.

‘Easiest way to disappear off the radar is to hide in plain

sight. That’s what my dad said last time I spoke to him.’

Wilf agreed. ‘Used to say that about spies, during the war,’ he said. ‘Best way to infiltrate was to be seen, so no one got suspicious. Just become a member of society.’

‘That’s what I did. Look where it’s got me. Frightened for my life.’

Wilf winked at her. ‘You’ll be all right.’

They were at the door of the radio telescope. It was slightly ajar and they crept in.

Professor Melville was dead. There was no doubting that, his neck was at such a strange angle, and although Miss Oladini had never seen anyone dead before, she just knew it. Her hand was over her mouth, stifling the cry in her throat. Wilf checked the poor man for a pulse, but gently lifted his hand away.

It looked like he had been working at the guidance systems for the array when he’d died. When he’d been killed
, Miss Oladini thought. After all, people didn’t break their own necks.

Wilf was climbing up the small ladder that led to the upper deck, where the telescope itself was housed. It wasn’t an old-fashioned tubular telescope, but a series of computers arrayed across the room, linked to the radio dish on top of the building.

That had always disappointed Miss Oladini when she first came to work for the poor Professor. Somehow a giant telescope seemed more romantic than a computer bank.

She glanced back at his body, eyes staring open at the ceiling, and thought about his old mother. And his cat.

And how scared she’d been of him the last time she had seen him. And now all she could think about was his cat.

And she began to cry for the first time since everything had gone wrong.

*

She didn’t want music, she wanted news. It wasn’t hard to find. All over the globe, massive beams of light had struck down, and been surrounded by people. Some observers were saying they were terrorists guarding a bomb site, some thought they were religious fanatics guarding something holy and special. Others reckoned it was aliens, coming to get those who had claimed to have been abducted and then returned with microchips in their heads over the last fifty years. The strange message from ‘Madam Delphi’, which everyone assumed was just an internet hacker trying to be funny, had started that one off…

‘Irony is,’ she said to the radio, ‘that’s the one that might be right!’

There didn’t seem to be too many casualties but no one could get near the people actually guarding the craters.

Britain, America, Russia, the Middle East, Asia, New Zealand, Africa, Greenland, nowhere was untouched.

There seemed to be no connection between the people gathering to guard those craters: different ages, sexes, politics, backgrounds.

‘Wonder if the Poles got attacked,’ she mumbled after

listening to the reports for a bit longer as they drove past the Tower of London.

‘There was a mention of one in Germany,’ Lukas said.

Donna smiled. ‘I didn’t mean Poles in Poland, I meant the North or South Poles.’

‘Does it matter?’

‘Yeah, it probably does. They seem to be heavily populated areas, rather than desolate. So there’s something significant about that.’

‘What?’

‘No idea. But I’m thinking.’ She looked at a sign saying A13 Tilbury. ‘Essex thataway.’ Then she shrugged.

‘Not that I know exactly where I’m going. It was dark last night and I was thinking about the Doctor too much to note landmarks.’

‘You want to take the A127,’ Joe piped up. ‘Three miles along that after the M25 junction, then left into Meadow Lane, half a mile further on and right into Gorsten Road. Stay on that for six and a half miles, then left towards South Woodham Ferrers.’

‘Oh yes, I remember that name,’ Donna said. ‘How do you know?’

‘After passing under the railway bridge, you need to go eight miles on Tributary Road and as you get to the B8932, turn right into Allcomb Lane. Copernicus is two miles along there.’

Donna looked at Lukas, who just shrugged. ‘He knew where to find you,’ he told her. ‘And what van you’d be driving.’

‘That’s creepy,’ Donna said quietly, glancing at Joe in

the rear-view mirror.

‘That’s Joe,’ Lukas said. ‘Thank God we’re only half-brothers.’

‘Don’t say that,’ Donna chided him. ‘He’s still your brother.’

‘Yeah,’ Lukas agreed. ‘But if we were full brothers, maybe we’d both be weird. This way, I can translate if he starts speaking Italian.’

‘Why would he do that?’

‘Cos that’s where his dad was from, according to Mum.’

And something flashed through Donna’s mind.

Something the Doctor had said at the dinner the night before, when she was helping Netty out and old man Crossland had thought he was barking. When he was talking about that Mandragora thing.

I first encountered it in the fifteenth century in Italy.

Something in Donna’s head sparked. Mad dolphins!

Course! It couldn’t be that simple, surely… but then, he said it was five hundred years ago. Plenty of time for people from Italy to travel the world, have generations of kids… That man, last night at the telescope who zapped the Doctor, his accent could have been Italian. And he had gone on about genealogy…

‘Any idea where in Italy?’

‘Nah,’ said Lukas.

‘San Martino,’ Joe piped up.

‘Thought you might know that,’ Donna said.

‘Why?’ asked Lukas.

‘Cos I don’t think him being all Super SatNav in the

back there is a coincidence. I think something is using him to get us to that telescope thing for a reason.’

‘You mean my little brother is an alien?’

‘Don’t sound too excited by that idea.’

‘Nah, it’s dead cool.’ Lukas leaned closer. ‘I always told Mum he was weird.’

‘He’s not an alien. But there might be something in his background that’ll help the Doctor sort this out.’

Lukas glanced back at his brother, who was now listening to his M-TEK again. ‘I don’t want anything to happen to him though.’

Donna smiled at him. ‘It won’t, the Doctor’ll make sure he’s safe.’ But inside, she wasn’t quite so sure she could guarantee that.