by Doctor Who
The Doctor peered at the grotesque creature. ‘Can’t see much in this fog, can you?’
‘I can see you have two Slitheen with you.’ He chuckled, a noise like rubble shifting. ‘Bad luck, boys. You were full of big words at the start. But you couldn’t stop us.’
‘We’re not through yet,’ sneered Ecktosca. The guard behind him kicked the back of his leg, forced him down on one knee.
‘Hey, I may be recruiting. You want a job, Slitheen?’ He laughed again, phlegm rattling in his labouring lungs. ‘Only I got this big butt, see? And it needs kissing nice and regular. Think you can pucker up for me, Slitheen? Huh?’
‘May your mother boil in the cauldron of atonement, Arco,’ Ecktosca hissed. His guard struck him. The blow sounded like the first bite into a toffee apple.
‘You’re little people,’ said Don Arco, peering down at the Slitheen.
‘Look at you. Your family used to be respected. Used to prosper. You held the outer archipelagos in your dirty claws. But it all went wrong for you, didn’t it. . . ?’ He leaned forwards in his chair, causing the candle flames around him to gust alarmingly. ‘When did you go so soft, Slitheen?’
165
Dram struggled in the hold of his guard, but he too was forced down to his knees.
‘So these schmucks have got you on side, huh, Doc?’ Arco stretched out his wobbling neck to scrutinise the Doctor more closely. ‘Got you as their scientific advisor?’
‘What are you on about?’
‘For their big comeback.’ Again, the Blathereen laughed nastily.
‘You’re gonna help them get back on top of their planet-frying game, right?’
The Doctor looked at Ecktosca and Dram, the disappointment on his face clear. ‘So much for antiques and dressing up.’
The Slitheen said nothing, but Don Arco was happy to fill their silence. ‘They came here snooping for their old relics. And in the process they found out we were here. They really thought they could take over our operation. Thought they were big enough to cope.’
He laughed again, big dribbling gasps of laughter as he turned his attentions on the Slitheen. ‘Know what? I don’t even get pleasure from seeing you beg. You’re nothing to me. I think maybe I should just kill you now.’
‘Never mind them. Why don’t you tell me what you’re doing here?
What I’ve helped you to achieve?’ The Doctor smiled. ‘What I could go on to help you achieve.’ Flowers stared at him, appalled, but he just shrugged. ‘Time to think about other plans.’
A furious bellowing carried from beyond the blacked-out windows.
Don Arco gestured, and the guard holding Flowers went over to see, dragging her with him. He wiped his claw against the mucky glass and she caught a glimpse of overgrown lawns, of straggly topiaries: a magnificent garden gone to pot.
And in the middle of a bush, the legs of a Blathereen pedalling the air. There was another shriek of rage.
‘It’s Ermenshrew,’ the guard reported. ‘Upside down in a bush.
Should I go help her?’
‘She’s blown up worlds. She’s massacred millions. She’s run a talent agency on Hastus Minor.’ Don Arco glared at the guard. ‘You think she can’t get herself out of a bush?’
166
Flowers looked away as Ermenshrew dragged herself out of the bush and started stomping towards the building. The Doctor’s sabotage had worked after all – not that it made much difference.
Don Arco stared at the Doctor. ‘How come there’s a problem with the portal? You got through OK.’
‘These little warp-holes in space can play up a bit,’ said the Doctor.
‘What are you using them for, anyway – saving on taxi fares?’
‘They’ve made a useful little travel system for getting around Justicia. But once your gravity amplifier is up and running –’
‘You can enlarge them. That’s what you’ve been planning all along.’
Don Arco sniggered, a sound like elephants dancing in a skip full of gravel. ‘We knew you alien schmucks would make the breakthrough some day. So we’ve been busy preparing. . . ’
‘So, now you can join all the holes together to create a whacking great portal in the fabric of space.’
‘Precisely.’
‘But why?’
The Patriarch smiled round at them all, even at the Slitheen still kneeling before him. ‘The super-portal we’re going to create is for the entire Justicia system to pass through. The planets, the suns – all of it!’
167
Rose led Dennel and Robsen in the charge away from the relentless crashing sound. They were moving towards the big buildings she’d seen; the thick forest was impenetrable in all other directions.
‘There must be about fifty of them coming after us!’ panted Dennel.
Robsen nodded. ‘We don’t stand a chance.’
‘Shhh!’ Rose stopped running, held out her arms to slow down the others. ‘I think I heard something up ahead. Give me a bunk-up.’
With a worried look behind him, Robsen offered his hand as a stir-rup and helped Rose shin up the nearest tree. Then he clambered up after her.
‘Hurry up!’
Dennel urged her, as the crashing and cracking of branches got still louder. ‘They’re almost on us!’
But the news was no better this way. Crowded in a small clearing about 100 metres away were six Blathereen, alert and listening – and an injured one on the end who could barely stand. He had to be the pilot.
‘There are your monsters,’ Rose whispered.
Robsen just nodded. His face had turned so white it made his ginger freckles seem to glow.
169
Rose dropped back down. ‘We’re trapped.’
‘Can we circle around them?’ asked Robsen.
‘If we had a dozen machetes maybe.’
‘Or a flame-thrower,’ said Dennel mournfully.
Robsen winced at a particularly loud thud and crack from behind them. ‘They sound like they’re trying to run through the trees.’
‘Making as much noise as they can, herding us on in a panic so we run slap into their mates this way,’ Rose reasoned.
Then, with a tearing, cracking sound, a massive tree toppled towards them.
Robsen cowered back. ‘What the –’
‘They’ve caught us up!’ cried Dennel.
‘No,’ said Rose, gaping as something huge and steel and shiny pushed gracelessly through the gap in the treeline. ‘No, look!’
Like some bizarre missile, the entire monitoring platform was slithering towards them. It rocked on its side, ploughing a steady, inex-orable path through the forest.
‘Must be the grav motors,’ said Dennel, staring in bewilderment,
‘malfunctioning or something. Pushing it along.’
‘It’s our only chance,’ said Rose. ‘Door’s open. We can get inside.’
‘And get past those monsters,’ Robsen agreed. He ran along-side the monitoring platform and then swung himself through the doorway.
‘Come on!’
‘Quick, Dennel!’ Rose grabbed him by the hand and dragged him after her.
They threw themselves inside just as the capsule struck another tree and rattled them around like beans in a tin can. Rose fell head first into the bank of TV screens. She clung on, praying the glass wouldn’t break beneath her.
‘Warder Robsen,’ said Dennel as the platform ground its way onwards, ‘when we get back to the detention centre, will you lock me up and never let me out again, please?’
‘We’ve got to get the door closed,’ shouted Robsen. ‘Before the Blathereen –’
170
Rose heard a clanging sound and a hoarse alien cry, caught a twisted glimpse of two of the creatures staggering past the gaping doorway, horribly injured.
‘OK, never mind,’ he concluded. ‘You think they saw us?
‘If not, they’ll have smelled us,’ said Rose.
Dennel clutched his head in his hands.
‘They’ll be coming after us madder than ever now!’
Suddenly the monitoring platform started to rotate clockwise as it pressed onwards. Rose felt like a hamster in a wheel, trying to keep the right way up. She didn’t manage it and fell on to the screens again.
When the platform stopped shifting, the doorway was now more of a skylight.
‘Well, that’ll make it harder for them to get in,’ said Robsen.
Dennel nodded, wiping a cut to his head with his snotty sleeve. ‘But how do we get out!’
‘Shut it, both of you,’ hissed Rose. The screens were still working, and one in particular had caught her attention. The dark and sinister scene she’d seen earlier. . . Up close she could see that the blurry yellow light was coming from candles, they were making the smoke.
And the Doctor was there.
‘It’s him!’ Rose pressed her hand against the screen. ‘I need volume.
Now.’
Robsen found the controls for her. The three of them clung on desperately, staring and straining to listen as their transport bludgeoned its way through the dense forest.
They were already up to their necks in dog-doo. Now, as the truth squawked out through the few speakers still functioning, Rose could feel it rising over their heads.
Pandemonium kicked off in the borstal canteen as the monsters finally broke out of their human hiding places. Riz watched, frozen in fear, as a gang of hard lads, real bruisers, advanced warily on the monster Blanc had become. The thing rounded on one boy who was wielding a chair, swiped it away with her claws and took most of his arm with it.
171
But his cries, and the blood, seemed to turn a tide in the panicking crowd. Scary monsters killing a screw was one thing – but now it had maimed one of their own. People stopped yelling in panic. Instead they started picking up chairs, heaving at table legs, trying to break them off. The group of boys, at least twenty-strong, started laying into the creature, and more were joining in – Kaz included. She helped to pin down one of its claws, while two boys smashed down chairs on its gruesome skull. Soon the creature was lost from Riz’s sight through sheer weight of numbers.
The other monster almost reached the doors. But it was still half caught in its human disguise, it couldn’t move or fight back freely.
The mob wrestled it to the ground, smothered it, meted out the same crazed punishment.
Maggi worked her way between the two scrums, grinning like a maniac. ‘Yeah, hit it! Kill the alien freak!’
‘We’re in control now!’ Kaz shrieked, triumphant, alien blood dripping down her cheek.
‘And we can all bust out of here!’ cried Maggi, waving her key card in the air. ‘See this? Follow me, and I’ll get you out of here. All of you!’
The mob roared its agreement. Riz watched Kaz and Maggi lead the march from the hall. She saw a couple of screws, Jamini and Tiller, cowering behind tables, powerless, as the inmates crowded out and left them behind with the twitching, broken bodies of the monsters.
Maggi had created a new monster, an unstoppable force that was busting out of this dump after all these years. And as she joined the mass exodus, Riz felt a real rush at the thought that now she was a part of it too.
Flowers stared slack-jawed at Don Arco in the wake of his words. ‘It’s impossible. Can’t be done. The force you’d need to shift suns out of their orbit, together with their family of planets –’
‘We can do it,’ Don Arco assured her.
‘But you can’t fly an entire solar system through space!’
‘Can so too.’ Don Arco nodded happily, setting his chins wobbling.
172
‘It’s taken me thirty years of research, and eight more in the field here while we’ve slowly taken over this whole place. We’ve turned your Executive’s headquarters into one big calculating machine, working out the quantum mechanics involved. And thanks to some inspired work from your team on the hardware side, Senator Flowers, we’re almost good to go. We’ll control the whole thing remotely from Justice Prime, well away from the powers of the centrifuge.’
‘The whole thing’s impossible.’ Flowers just couldn’t take it in. She took off her glasses and started polishing them furiously. ‘It’s a ludicrous notion.’
‘Ludicrous!’ the Doctor agreed. ‘Unlikely. Preposterous. Couldn’t happen.’ He took a step closer to Don Arco, somehow dragging his towering guard along with him. ‘Suppose that’s what you want the judge to think, isn’t it, when the law comes looking for you? You know, after you’ve committed whatever perfect crime you’re planning.’
‘Oh, come on,’ said Ecktosca suddenly. ‘Dirty great solar system whizzing through space? Hardly the least conspicuous getaway vehi-cle.’
‘No one’s gonna see a thing, Slitheen,’ said Don Arco. ‘The space-warps provide instant travel, right? So, we open us a hole in space
– and Justicia jumps through it. We pop out close to another solar system.’
The Doctor stared at him. ‘But you’ll destroy it. You’ll start a gravity-quake, knock that system’s planets out of orbit.’
‘Nah,’ said Don Arco. ‘The three suns will incinerate them before then.’ He patted Dram on the head. ‘These guys built us a solar flare compressor. Reverse the circuits and you’ve got the biggest flame-thrower in the universe. We can use it to burn up any number of worlds anywhere. . . Then pop back through the hole and into Justicia’s native space like nothing’s happened.’
‘So you bombard other worlds with nuclear radiation from Justicia’s suns,’ said Flowers, ‘leave them burnt-out cinders – but why?’
‘Because one person’s burnt-out cinder is a space merchant’s stockpile of fissile material,’ said the Doctor. ‘The Blathereen can sell off the chunks to any dodgy dealer with a nuclear space fleet to power.’
173
‘But you’re missing the true genius of our plan,’ huffed Don Arco.
‘It’s not just the unique positioning of Justicia’s planets that makes it perfect for our needs. And it’s not just having access to brilliant alien minds.’
‘The rest of Justicia’s worlds?’ the Doctor breathed. ‘What are you gonna do with them?’
Don Arco clapped his slimy claws together with joy. ‘Nothing shall be wasted! On justice Epsilon, the colonies will be put to work processing the fissile material we collect from the burnt-up planets.’
‘They won’t live long exposed to that much radiation.’
‘Which is why, on Justice Beta, we have instructed that young male prisoners will mingle freely with young female prisoners in the borstals.’ He sniggered. ‘They will breed a new labour force for me.
And of course, the good planets of Earth’s empire will continue to send their unwanted louts, crooks and murderers to Justicia.’ His bulk throbbed with mirth. ‘ We want them very much. We shall put them to excellent use.’
‘And you don’t think anyone in EarthGov will notice?’ Flowers challenged.
‘Oh, I’m sure those humans on the secret monitoring committees would soon notice something.’ He chuckled. ‘If I hadn’t already replaced them all with my godchildren!’ He quivered with giggles, thick saliva dribbling down his fat neck. ‘So, no worries there.’
Flowers felt her stomach twist and tighten another notch. ‘But Justicia is in the business of selling punishment solutions to colonies all over the Empire – and you’ve messed up all the experiments!’
Don Arco waved a dismissive hand. ‘So, some of us stay in human character and report back to Earth now and then to sell them some faked results. Why not? Another little cash flow coming in.’
‘These are people you’re talking about,’ the Doctor said furiously.
‘Human lives you’re playing with!’
‘If they can’t do the time, they shouldn’t do the crime.’ Don Arco clicked his claws together. ‘And, as I say, they’ll serve a useful purpose.
Those historical punishments dished out on Justice Alpha, for instance
– building pyramids and the like? Not any more. Now those lucky 174
people will be building storehouses for our processed fissile material, where it can be kept until it’s ready for collection.’
‘Poisoning the planet, poisoning the people –’
‘So what? When one part of Justicia gets too polluted I can use the portals to relocate the entire labour force to another of its worlds.’
Don Arco giggled. ‘That’s the wonderful thing about taking over a whole solar system: room for expansion. Important for any business, don’t you think?’
‘The scale of it!’ Dram actually sounded impressed. ‘The nerve of it!’
Ecktosca agreed. ‘We thought you were maybe planning to nuke the suns or something for increased fuel yield, but this –’
‘Oh, yeah,’ said the Doctor. ‘It’s incredible, audacious. . . all of that.
If you pull it off.’ He stared up fearlessly at the hideous creature. ‘But you won’t. No way. Because I’m gonna stop you.’
At that moment, the doors to the Blathereen’s lair slid open and Ermenshrew thundered in. The candles flickered, alarming Don Arco.
‘Gently, half-sister, gently!’
He retched up a spluttering cough.
‘You’ll give me a turn!’
‘Kill the Doctor, Don Arco!’ she howled. ‘Kill him! The trouble he’s put me to today!’
The Doctor turned and grinned. ‘Oh, it was no trouble, honest!’
‘You’re too hasty,’ rumbled Don Arco. ‘We can still use his brain.’
‘Yes – as a chamois leather!’ rasped Ermenshrew. ‘I’ll have Flowers polish the gravity accelerator with it – before I break her back!’
Flowers shuddered, and the Doctor must have noticed. ‘It’s OK,’
he said soothingly. ‘She won’t really make you polish with my brain.
Think of the mess.’
‘Calm yourself in my presence, half-sister!’ Don Arco commanded.
‘Forgive me,’ she said. ‘But. . . it’s my daughter. On Justice Beta.