Doctor How and the Illegal Aliens

by Mark Speed

  Contents

  Doctor How and the Illegal Aliens

  Dedication

  Author's note (important)

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Free stuff!

  About the author

  Other titles

  Acknowledgements

  Legal Stuff

  Preview – Doctor How and the Deadly Anemones

  Doctor How and the Illegal Aliens

  The Doctor Who isn't a Time Lord

  Doctor How book one

  Mark Speed

  To Lynne Arnott

  Thanks for getting me started, and for saving my life

  Buy this book and get an exclusive FREE short story!

  Doctor How and the Rings of Uranus

  See back of book for details

  Author's note (important)

  Doctor How asked me to write this series in British English. Original manuscripts in Gaelfreyan and Squill will be available when your civilisation reaches the necessary level.

  Similarly, Doctor How uses the Imperial system of measurement, rather than the Metric: the French were wrong on a truly cosmic scale. Other characters use the Metric system because they don't know any better.

  Doctor Who and TARDIS are registered trademarks of the BBC. This book series is not affiliated with or endorsed by the BBC. It is not a Doctor Who story.

  Prologue

  I keep six honest serving-men

  (They taught me all I knew);

  Their names are What and Why and When

  And How and Where and Who.

  Rudyard Kipling (extract from The Elephant's Child)

  "The driver insisted he was rammed by another taxi, Sarge," said the constable. "Said he rolled once from the impact, then the other vehicle pushed the cab onto its roof. He swore the other vehicle came to rest on top of his."

  "Tell me, what am I supposed to believe?" asked Sergeant Hughes. "The invisible cab?"

  "The evidence does point to another vehicle."

  "The only thing that could have driven away from an impact like that is a tank, constable."

  "Sarge."

  "No trace of alcohol in his system. What about drugs?"

  "Didn't seem the type, to be honest."

  Hughes grunted. "Maybe it was aliens?" He looked up. The rain had cleared now, but a layer of thick cloud sat at around a thousand feet, glowing orange-brown from the glare of the distant streetlights of Dagenham. Dawn was still two hours away. "Maybe they're up there, laughing at us?"

  The constable knew better than to answer.

  "And no vehicles in those fields, and no trail of detritus?"

  "Not that any of us has been able to find."

  Hughes looked at the wreck of the cab, which lay at a slight angle on its roof. The driver had been lucky – the impact had destroyed the front passenger side completely. The cab was designed to withstand crushing, and it would have taken considerable force to compress the body as much as it had been. Fire and rescue had had to cut the driver's door off to get him out. He walked around to get the best view of the underside. Elements of the underside were crumpled, consistent with something heavy having lain on top of them.

  "The fuel tank, constable."

  "What about it, Sergeant?"

  "That's a very clean cut."

  "I assume it happened as a result of the impact."

  "No, that's a cut. An impact would have twisted it, probably sheered away some retaining bolts; dented it. There's no denting. This was cut."

  "Fire and rescue?"

  "Why would they cut the line to a fuel tank?" The fire and rescue team was packing the last of their gear. Hughes called their 'guvnor' over. "What do you reckon, Steve?"

  "Someone's cut that," said the fire officer. "Pincers. Two blades. One here, and one here. You'd need about five-hundred pounds of pressure to do that, minimum. Here, Roy!"

  Another fire officer came over. "Guv?"

  "You know anything about this?"

  "Nah. Clean job that, though."

  Hughes thought for a moment. "You'd need one of those pneumatic pincers for this, wouldn't you?"

  "Dirty great things," said Steve. "You've seen 'em often enough. Weigh a ton. Judging from the angle, maybe a ten-foot man could've done it. Cab would've had to have been on its side for us mere mortals to do it. And there's no way we're going to hack into a diesel tank with a casualty trapped inside, is there?"

  "Well, thanks for the clarification."

  "That's not one of ours anyway," said Roy. "Our pincers' jaws are smooth. Look at the edges of the cut – the blades were serrated." He grabbed the constable's torch and shone it on the clean edges of the cut to show the pattern left by the serrated edges.

  "Thanks, lads," said Hughes.

  "Until next time, Hughesie," said Steve, and walked back to his truck.

  "Yeah, there's always a next time in this game," said Hughes. The emergency lights on the rescue truck went out. It throttled up and roared off into the gloom. He turned to the constable. "And you were first on the scene?"

  "Yes, Sarge."

  "And the vehicle was on its back the whole time, and there was no ten-foot Jolly Green Giant with a pair of pincers?"

  "No. I was here four minutes after the incident."

  Hughes sighed. "Two bits of metal from the underside of the other vehicle coming together from opposite directions to cause a laceration in this steel alloy. Doesn't sound likely, does it?"

  "No, Sarge."

  "Besides which, we have no other vehicle, constable." He took a deep breath in order to be able to deliver an even bigger, more theatrical sigh, but stopped. He let his breath out and sniffed the air. "I don't smell forty gallons of diesel, constable. Do you?"

  "Sarge?"

  "The driver said he was coming back from the depot, having filled up for tomorrow. Where did the diesel go?"

  "There was no spillage. You can see from the ground that –"

  "Nothing. No diesel. I get it."

  The wreck was cleared away just as dawn was breaking. A few minutes later the remaining patrol car removed the last of the cones and drove off just as the Essex rush-hour was beginning. The greatest volume of traffic was heading in the opposite direction from the cab, into London.

  As he walked back to his own car, Sergeant Hughes glanced into the field adjacent to the dual carriageway and saw a thing of wonder – a mound of fresh earth sitting in the middle of a field of four-inch spring barley, some fifty yards from the site of the impact. The lines of the seed-drill went straight through it, from left to right from his point of view, so it had been made after the crop had been sown. There were no tractor marks anywhere near it, so it could not have been made by a machine. He'd grown up in rural Essex, and he knew a molehill when he saw one. This was some mole.

  He clambered down the embankment, noticing a crushed sapling and cuts into the grass at approximate right-angles to the direction of travel of whatever had left the site. The top bar of the wooden fence at the bottom of the embankment was freshly broken, and splayed out into the field. The break revealed fresh wood, with no points of weakness; something much heavier than a man had snapped it. He examined the top of the bar, and found abrasions indicating that whatever had come over the fence was not only heavy, but hard.
<
br />   The cuts he'd seen in the grass continued into the soft earth of the field and stopped at the base of the molehill. Unfortunately, they'd been made before the rain had stopped, and were parallel to the seeding-lines, so they weren't as distinct as they could have been. The furrows had been flattened in some places, and had the tops cuffed off in others. Nevertheless, he took out his tape measure. The mound itself was about ten feet in diameter and five feet high. There was a whiff of diesel.

  He couldn't blame his team for having missed this. Not in the dark and the rain. Even if they had seen it, would they have wanted to believe it?

  He turned and looked back. Only from this angle was it clear that something around six feet wide had made its way down the embankment into the field, across it and then... and then literally gone to ground. He took a photo which encapsulated the path down the bank and through the barley.

  He laid out his measuring tape against a couple of the cuts in the earth and took photos showing their length, and the distance between them. As he did so it began to dawn on him that these were footprints, and he wished that he were not alone. The cuts, or what he assumed were the actual feet of the footprints, were some fifteen inches long and three wide. In aggregate they looked somewhat like the tread marks a tracked vehicle might make, except for the fact that the distance between them was not of an exactly regular pattern.

  He looked at his muddy shoes and realised that somewhere beneath them might be something with serrated jaws that could cut through steel alloy. It had multiple feet that were capable of digging into earth.

  He trod as lightly and carefully as a soldier in a minefield until he reached the embankment, then scrabbled up, grasping at tufts of grass, up onto the reassuring solidity of the tarmacked road. Once he had his breath back he looked across into the field. From this angle all he could see was the molehill and his own footprints, such were the angles of bent vegetation and the furrows in the field. He scanned the surrounding fields and saw nothing else out of the ordinary. He ran across to the other side of the dual carriageway and had a look there. Nothing.

  What troubled him wasn't just that whatever it was didn't seem to have come out from the molehill, but that there seemed to be no clue as to where it had come from.

  He got back into his car, and his professional training kicked in. He was conflating evidence: a road traffic accident with a couple of difficult-to-explain features had occurred. In a nearby field he'd seen the tracks of a diesel-powered earth-moving vehicle. Of course, there was the matter of a sober taxi-driver reporting a non-existent second vehicle, and the cutting of the fuel tank.

  Twenty years of service or not, he'd be a laughing stock if he reported this. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and wondered whether he should call a colleague to verify it. Wasn't there a retired copper who had a website about UFOs? He'd look for something similar, or maybe log it there.

  He wasn't patient by nature, but when dealing with other species protocols had to be observed. He forced a smile, gritted his teeth, and knocked for a third time. "Mrs Plensca?" he said. "It's Doctor How." He fingered the wooden coat hanger, wishing he didn't need it.

  The apartment door opened on a chain and two beady black eyes set on a pale face looked at him through the three-inch gap. The eyes blinked; the door closed. There were low, muttered voices in an alien language. The chain rattled and the door opened just enough for him to enter the apartment.

  Mr and Mrs Plensca were as naked as the day they were hatched. Their mouths were flattened beaks, with a single nostril hole placed directly in the face behind. In everyday life these features would be disguised by a biomask; a living tissue which would give the wearer a human face. Their appearance would be accepted as well within the normal, and rather wide, range of faces in London. Its variety was one of the many features which made the city so attractive.

  Beneath the translucent skin of their bodies he could make out their respiratory systems – blue-green pulsing veins squeezed between skin and organs. He didn't look any lower than chest-height. Whilst nudity in private was the norm for this particular culture, one just never knew about other taboos. The face – or at least the primary sensing area – was always a safe bet.

  "You are how?" said Mr Plensca, bowing.

  "Very well, thank you," said Dr How, returning the bow. "And I trust you and your lady wife are well? Do excuse me a moment." He placed the coat hanger on the door handle, unlaced his shoes, and put his socks in them. Next came his suit trousers, which he placed on the bar of the hanger, being careful to line up the creases. His jacket went on top, followed by his shirt. He slipped his underpants off and, after a slight hesitation, put them on top of his socks.

  "We can help you how? Or this is a social visit during the holy month?"

  "Oh. Happy Rindan holy month to you both. It slipped my mind, but then it's once every – what – three-and-a-half Earth years, isn't it?"

  "Very good, Doctor. We have been here only two, so it's our first away from home," said Mrs Plensca, looking at her husband with what looked like fondness. "You observe our protocols well, for which we thank you. You would like to eat with us? My husband is an excellent... cook."

  "Thank you so much, but I'm quite full." He'd made the mistake a few years ago of eating with the previous consul and her husband. Little wonder she had hesitated over the word 'cook', since the cuisine was entirely raw, and usually slimy in nature. There was an awkward silence. He beamed a smile at the couple and looked at them expectantly. They looked at each other, then back at him.

  "We can help you how, Dr How?" said the consul.

  "I thought I could help you."

  "I assumed this was a social call."

  "Ah. I received a message that your invertor was malfunctioning."

  "Our invertor is functioning well, Dr How. Voltage and power are both satisfactory. We thank you for your concern."

  "How odd." He turned and reached back into his jacket pocket for his smartphone. He tapped in his passcode and showed them the screen. "See? Got the message half an hour ago. I wasn't busy, so I thought I'd drop by."

  "It really is most attentive of you, but we have noticed nothing."

  "May I take a look?"

  "By all means, Doctor." The consul waved her hand in the direction of the kitchen.

  As his feet dug into the carpet he wished he'd brought disposable blue wrappers with him. Who knew what microbes or dirt he was picking up? The kitchen floor was tiled, but the sudden coolness against his feet felt awkward in a different way. He opened the fuse box and looked at the invertor. It was just as he'd installed it a decade earlier when the first Rindan consul had arrived. This was basic technology even a human could understand: it just took the domestic electricity supply and converted it to the frequency and voltage required by the occupants of the apartment. He checked the telemetry device attached to it by sending himself a test message to his phone. He pinged it back and it sent him a history. The device had not sent an alert to him. Not today, not ever. Perhaps the problem lay elsewhere?

  "There is a problem, Doctor?" asked the consul.

  "I wouldn't mind checking your utility cupboard, if I may." The consul nodded her assent, so he put on his underpants and opened the apartment door. The meter box was in the corridor, just outside. His feet felt even more exposed on the hardwearing blue communal carpet. This was a public space – he could only imagine what filth found its way in from outside. He squatted down and opened the door.

  He heard the door of the apartment opposite open and a female voice say, "Oh!"

  He twisted round and saw a middle-aged woman staring at him, open-mouthed.

  "Landlord services," said Dr How. "Heating malfunction, do excuse me." The door slammed shut. He muttered to himself about social protocols and looked inside the cabinet.

  The electricity meter spun steadily, and the wiring was fine. He'd just closed the door when something struck him as odd. He opened it again and checked. The water meter was turn
ing. He stuck his head back into the apartment, where the consul and her husband stood waiting politely. Just off down the hall he heard footsteps, so he nipped back into the living room and closed the door behind him. He took off his underpants and bowed again. The Plenscas bowed.

  "Do you mind if I...?"

  The consul once again swept her arm.

  He checked the kitchen. As he'd thought, none of the appliances were on.

  "All is well, Doctor?"

  "May I just use your facilities?"

  "Facilities?"

  "The bathroom."

  "Doctor, I –"

  Before the consul could reply, he raced through the bedroom. Although the door to the en-suite was closed, he could hear that the shower was on. The consul was right behind him.

  "Doctor How, this is most –"

  He whipped open the bathroom door. There was no one in the shower cubicle, but it was far from empty. One wall was covered in what looked like polyps – greyish-green tubes about two inches in diameter and five inches long. They drooped contentedly under the warm shower. He estimated there to be two dozen.

  "Doctor How, I must protest in the strongest –"

  "Mrs Plensca, what do you think you're doing?"

  "I'm sorry, Doctor," said Mr Plensca. "These are my responsibility. I planted them."

  "My husband was growing them for the feast at the end of the holy month," said the consul. "They're a traditional food for the final meal."

  Doctor How took a couple of deep breaths to calm himself, and wished he hadn't – the smell from the polyps was not a sweet one. "Mrs Plensca, you do not have a breeding licence for these."

  "We're not breeding them, Doctor," she said. "We're just growing them."

  "These are an unlicensed alien species. What happens if their eggs spread into the sewer system?"

  "Really, they are quite harmless, Doctor," said the consul.

  "Excuse me," said her husband. He opened the door of the shower cubicle and threw some powdered food at the wall of polyps. "Feeding time," he explained.