Five hundred years earlier, the humans had been no match for the Sontarans and yet, from what little information Wilberforce had managed to access, it would appear they had somehow defeated them. Imagine what might be possible now, now that their evolution had progressed so much.
The Sontarans wouldn’t stand a chance.
‘Professor Wilberforce. . .’
His idle daydreaming was interrupted by the voice of Alice, standing in the doorway, her expression cool and impassive.
‘Yes, Alice?’
‘They are here.’
‘I thought as much. Our thoughts become stronger, do they not?’
‘Yes, Professor. Their leader, a General Kade, is demanding he speak to us. By which we mean he wishes to speak with Professor Wilberforce.’
‘Well, it was to be expected. Do they suspect anything?’
Alice laughed.
‘No, Professor. That fool of a Mayor has told them to search the visitors’ ships.’
Now it was Professor Wilberforce’s turn to laugh.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We saw them on the monitor. Quite amusing, really. Well, you should probably show him in.’
Alice smiled, nodded, and left the office. Moments later she returned with the Sontaran leader.
He entered the office with the typical Sontaran air of self-importance, his baton tucked under his arm, and stood before the Professor.
‘Professor Wilberforce?’ he growled.
‘Yes,’ said Wilberforce, getting to his feet and extending his hand. The Sontaran shook it forcefully.
‘I am General Kade, of the Fourth Sontaran Intelligence Division. We have begun rounding up the visitors from their ships. We have reason to believe that the plants you have grown may be instrumental in a plot against our race.’
The Professor feigned surprise.
‘Is that so?’ he asked. ‘Well, that’s. . . that’s astounding.’
Kade’s attention had now turned to the plant in the corner of the office.
‘Is that one of them?’ he asked, pointing toward the glass dome with his baton.
The Professor nodded.
Kade walked around the desk and made his way to the far corner, crouching on his haunches next to the glass dome containing the plant.
‘Fascinating,’ he said. ‘Such an innocuous-looking thing, isn’t it?’
‘Well, quite,’ said Wilberforce.
‘We will of course be seizing this as a part of our investigation,’ Kade continued.
‘But of course.’
Kade turned to the Professor, his lips curling into what might have been a smile.
‘You are most helpful,’ he said. ‘And wise. I must say, we had expected greater resistance from the inhabitants of this outpost, but we have been pleasantly surprised by your compliance.’
Professor Wilberforce smiled in return.
‘Anything we can do to help,’ he said.
Neither Zack nor Jenny had spoken since they had left the Pride of Deimos and been taken down into the dimly lit confines of the loading bay. Zack had not let go of Jenny’s hand, and she had noticed his grip tighten each time one of the Sontarans barked at them to ‘move along’. The other passengers were chattering nervously and Jenny heard one, an elegant older woman in pearls, repeatedly asking what was going to happen to her luggage. It had only then occurred to Jenny that their luggage was still on the ship, but it was a thought that passed quickly. Who cared what was going to happen to their luggage? There were far more important things for them to worry about right now.
When all of the passengers had left the ship and were gathered in the loading bay, the large doors behind them slammed shut with an echoing clang and the room fell silent. In a corner of the bay a door opened, spilling light out into the gloom, and more of the Sontarans marched in, accompanied by humans.
One of the humans was a tall, older man, wearing half-moon spectacles and dressed in a white lab coat. At his side was a younger woman, slightly built with her mousy brown hair tied back.
‘This way, Professor,’ said one of the Sontarans to the older man. ‘You have your instruments?’
The Professor nodded.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But I really don’t see why I’m needed here. I am a botanist, General Kade, not a physician.’
The Sontaran leader stopped abruptly and looked up at the Professor.
‘You say that machine of yours can be used to detect any trace of the spores?’
The Professor nodded, holding up a small, black spherical device, no larger than an apple, out of which there emerged a short rubber hose capped by a nozzle.
‘Yes,’ said the Professor, quizzically.
‘Then you must test each of these visitors,’ said General Kade. ‘If they have inhaled the spore, there will still be traces, will there not?’
The Professor nodded.
‘Then test them, man. Test them!’ barked Kade.
Dutifully, the Professor approached the crowd of passengers and, walking past them one by one, he held up the nozzle of the device and began taking samples from the air around them, occasionally looking back at the Sontaran leader.
Kade turned to the Professor’s assistant.
‘You, girl,’ he said.
‘My name’s Alice,’ the young woman replied.
‘That is of no importance to me!’ said Kade. ‘Are there more of these instruments?’ He gestured toward the Professor with his baton.
‘Yes, back at the gardens,’ said Alice.
‘Then bring them to me,’ said Kade. ‘We shall be here for eons, otherwise. Time is of the essence.’
‘Of course,’ said Alice, smiling politely. ‘That would be agreeable.’
She had turned and was halfway towards the loading bay exit when Kade turned back.
‘What did you say?’ he asked.
Alice stopped in her tracks, and turned very slowly so that she now faced Kade once more.
‘I’m sorry. . .?’
‘What did you just say?’
Alice smiled nervously.
‘Nothing. . . I just said, “Of course”.’
‘After that. What did you say?’
Alice looked beyond the Sontaran now, at the Professor, who had turned away from the passengers and was slowly drawing a glass thermometer from the pocket of his lab coat.
They held each other’s gaze for a moment and then, in one sudden, violent move, the Professor thrust the thermometer into the neck of one of the Sontaran soldiers.
Peering over the shoulders of those standing around her, Jenny saw the thermometer jutting out from a narrow hole in the back of the soldier’s armour. The soldier staggered forward, clutching at the back of its neck with both hands, and making a terrible gurgling sound in its throat.
The Professor lunged forward again and tugged at the thermometer, snapping it in half. The Sontaran howled in pain as globules of mercury fell from the broken glass, before collapsing to the ground, its last breath leaving it with a sickening rattle.
Now the young woman, Alice, ran towards General Kade, a scalpel in her hand, howling monstrously, as if she were possessed. The General reached out with his baton, which emitted a sudden flashing bolt of orange energy, and Alice fell to the ground, doubled over in pain.
The Sontarans now had both her and the Professor separately surrounded.
The Professor looked down at Alice, and then across the loading bay at General Kade, breathing heavily, but with a malevolent smile. Cackling maniacally, Wilberforce held up his hands, white sparks of electricity jumping from his fingertips but, before he could make his move, the Sontarans opened fire, the red flare of a dozen laser beams cutting him down until he lay in a smoking heap at their feet.
Alice let out a mournful wail, reaching up towards Kade pathetically, the blade of the scalpel pointing up at him, before a second ear-splitting barrage of lasers silenced her.
It was a silence that would last just seconds before the passengers and the crew of t
he Pride of Deimos began to scream.
Sneering callously, General Kade made his way toward the loading bay exit.
He turned to one of his subordinates and snarled, ‘Interrogate them using all means necessary, and then inform Colonel Sarg that all humans on the colony are to be arrested immediately. It’s worse than we thought.’ Kade marched out of the loading bay, the double doors closing behind him with a thunderous clang.
The remaining Sontarans turned on their heels and, lifting up their weapons, began marching toward the unarmed passengers.
Zack turned to Jenny and put his arms around her, holding her close.
‘I love you,’ he said.
‘I love you too,’ said Jenny.
He smiled down at her and gently wiped a tear from her cheek as the Sontarans drew closer and closer.
GAZING INTO HIS dressing-room mirror, Riley Smalls straightened his tie and ran one hand through his thinning hair. Somewhere outside the studio he could hear the howls of the sirens, rendered faint and barely audible by the thick walls.
This, he had decided, was his moment. Back on Earth, before his cryogenic suspension and a long time before he awoke in a different century, he had dreamed of the day when he would report an event of great importance. His television show had given him the opportunity to discuss news events, politics and wars, but never anything like this.
For the first time in a very long while, Riley Smalls was excited. He liked life on the colony, there was no doubt about that, but it was hardly exciting. He had made the decision to abandon Earth and move there for good only a few months after coming out of cryogenic suspension. The planet that had greeted him on his waking had been quite different to the one he had left behind. It was so crowded and the people there so different. The everyday things that he had taken for granted no longer existed. The things that he thought of as timeless traditions were now little more than footnotes in history.
The counsellors provided by the cryogenics lab had tried to tell him that this was simply the way of the world – that times changed and that things came to pass – but he was having none of it. As far as he was concerned, the world had forcibly been changed by the very people he had railed against in his television show. They, it would seem, had won, and left the world an overcrowded and chaotic mess. When the opportunity arose to pack his bags and leave for Saturn, he had seized it in an instant.
But then a strange thing happened. Days smudged into weeks and months and eventually years, and he came to realise that he was bored. For years now his show, The Smalls Agenda, had largely involved him pouring scorn upon a planet more than a billion miles away, based upon the titbits of information they received on the weekly news broadcasts. He began to see his role as little more than a comforting reminder to the inhabitants of Chelsea 426 that they had made the right choice, leaving Earth, and that it was so terrible there they would never want to go back.
All that had changed with the discovery of the spores and the arrival of the Newcomers. Now there were people on Chelsea 426 for him to rail against. Now his words would make a difference.
Truth was, the Newcomers terrified him. Chelsea 426, as boring as it might have been, was a comfortable oasis of calm. Its environment was so carefully constructed to remind the inhabitants of a time and a place that was, so they imagined, less troubling and changeable, that the arrival of any reminder that the rest of the universe was not that way troubled him. It hung over him like a dark storm cloud, overshadowing his thoughts and emotions.
However sudden and uninvited the appearance of these Sontarans was, they spoke of ridding the colony of invaders, and that was good enough for him.
‘Mr Smalls, they’re ready for you.’
It was one of his show’s runners standing in the doorway of his dressing room. He faced her with a disarming smile and nodded, rising from his chair and following her out into the corridor.
In the studio he sat behind a wide grey desk, before a blue and red backdrop. One of the sound technicians clipped a tiny microphone to the lapel of his jacket, and the make-up artist gave him a last-minute dab of powder on the nose. Behind the camera, the director counted down, ‘Five, four,’ and then mimed the rest of the countdown with his fingers.
Three. Two. One.
‘Greetings,’ said Smalls, smiling into the camera. ‘As some of you may be aware, our honourable guests, the Sontarans, are investigating a serious incident here on our colony. At first they arrested our so-called visitors, the Newcomers, from their ships and hotels. Now, it transpires, they are arresting the residents of Chelsea 426.
‘Now there are some out there who will say that they are overstepping the mark, that they are trampling over our liberties, but to this I say: Nonsense! The Sontarans are a proud and noble people who just so happen to be at war with a venomous and parasitic race called the Rutans. Right now we happen to be caught up in that war. Granted, it is through no fault of our own, but that isn’t to say that we can simply stick our heads in the sand and pretend it isn’t happening. The good citizens of Chelsea 426 have nothing to worry about. It is the Newcomers who have brought the war to us; not our people, and certainly not the Sontarans, and so it is the Newcomers who will suffer. Arrest and questioning by the Sontarans is but a minor inconvenience if we are to have stability return to our once happy colony.
‘What you must ask yourselves is, do you want stability? Do you want peace? Are you so arrogant that you believe these things will simply be handed to you on a plate, or do you believe, as I do, that sacrifices must be made?
‘Could you hold your head high with any sense of pride if you knew that, cometh the day, you had taken the coward’s way out? That you had kowtowed to such a vile and poisonous species as the Rutans? Furthermore. . .’
He paused, taking in a deep breath. Then he was interrupted very suddenly by a crashing sound somewhere on the other side of the studio. Peering past the studio lights, shielding his eyes from the glare with his hand, he saw dark figures entering the room: dark, broad-shouldered figures brandishing guns. One by one, the technicians and assistants from his programme were being dragged out of the studio, marched at gunpoint through the exits. Finally one of the shadowy figures stepped into the light. It was a Sontaran.
‘We have orders to take you into custody,’ said the soldier.
‘What?’ said Smalls, getting to his feet and unclipping his microphone as quickly as he could.
‘You are a Rutan suspect and as such will be taken into custody.’
‘No,’ said Smalls, backing away from the creature, waving his hands desperately as if this might ward off the Sontaran. ‘No, there must be some mistake. I have supported your investigation from the beginning. What is this? You can’t arrest me. I’m Riley Smalls, for crying out loud. Don’t you know who I am? Where is your commanding officer? I demand to speak to your superi—’
His words were cut off suddenly and violently as a second Sontaran grabbed him from behind, covering his mouth with a gloved hand, and jabbing him in the back with the barrel of a gun.
Smalls felt his wrists locked together suddenly with handcuffs. Seconds later, he was blinded as one of the Sontarans tied a length of cloth around his face and over his eyes before wrapping another around his mouth, gagging him completely.
The cameras were still rolling, filming nothing but his empty chair, as they led him out of the studio.
‘BUT WHY WOULD they do that?’ said Mr Carstairs, gazing up at the video screen in the lobby of the Grand Hotel. For a moment, there was little he could do but stand there, his mouth wide open, blinking up at the image of the desk and the empty chair in the seconds before it cut to static.
The Doctor appeared at his side.
‘They were never going to stop with the Newcomers,’ he said. ‘It’s not the Newcomers’ fault. Like I said, this is their war – the Sontarans’ and the Rutans’ – not yours. But they’ve brought it here.’
‘The Newcomers. . .’ said Mr Carstairs, insistently.
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The Doctor shook his head.
‘But they came here. . .’
‘They didn’t make this happen. It was the plants, at the Flower Show. And the Sontarans will come here soon enough.’
‘But. . . but. . . What can we do?’
It was a good question. What could they do? The Doctor could think of one very good way out. They could go to his room, get in the TARDIS, and leave – the Doctor, Mr and Mrs Carstairs, and their children, not forgetting the Major. But that would still leave every other visitor and resident on Chelsea 426 at the mercy of both the Sontarans and the Rutans. It wasn’t an option.
‘I could always get my gun,’ said the Major, from his post behind the reception desk. ‘A few blasts from my Maiman 4000 ought to show ’em a thing or two.’
Mr Carstairs turned to the Major and scowled.
‘Oh, would you please shut up?’ he snapped. ‘I think we’ve all heard enough of your nonsense for one day, thank you very much. Your interminable war stories and your non-stop blathering on. You don’t have a gun beneath your pillow, you old fool. You didn’t have one when you checked in, and you don’t have one now.’
The Major hung his head, his moustache twitching from side to side, but said nothing, choosing instead to pretend to read his newspaper.
Mr Carstairs sighed.
‘The children,’ he whispered to the Doctor. ‘We need to. . . I mean. . . I don’t want them to end up in the clutches of those. . . those things.’
‘I won’t let that happen,’ said the Doctor.
‘That thing,’ Mr Carstairs continued. ‘In your room. Your ship? Could that escape the colony?’
The Doctor nodded.
‘Then I want you to get them out of here.’
‘What?’ said the Doctor. ‘Just them? I could get you out of here, too, but. . . I don’t know whether I can just leave while. . .’
Mr Carstairs closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose between forefinger and thumb in deep concentration.
‘I know. . . I know,’ he said. ‘I just. . . We can’t leave the hotel. There’s no saying what those things might do to the place. Somebody needs to stay here. I can’t say I trust you wholeheartedly, Doctor. You’re still a stranger to us. But I think I trust you enough, and I suppose that’s the best we can hope for. Take the children as far away from here as you can. Somewhere safe.’
The Taking of Chelsea 426 Page 8