Doctor How and the Deadly Anemones

by Mark Speed

  He jumped with more force, slapped his gloves and boots against the side of the pipe and realised what he’d managed to do. With his suit providing the superhuman effort, he shimmied further up the pipe. A crackle of bullets whizzed past below and ricocheted. A second later there was swearing.

  “One of them got hit by his own ricochet,” said the Doctor. “Serves him right.”

  “But they’re going to shoot up here, right? A blind man couldn’t miss.” Kevin glanced down. He’d already climbed ten feet without breaking a sweat. This was what it felt like to be Spiderman. He knew this was banned technology, but longed to take it back to his neighbourhood for just one day.

  “In all probability, yes.”

  “Great. Thanks for that.”

  “You’ll be fine.”

  “How come?”

  “You’re going to drop the polyp on them.”

  “What?”

  “Just up there. Five feet. See that grey-ish green thing?”

  “Yep.”

  “That’s it. Hunkering down, protecting itself. Being heavier than air, the gas won’t reach up there. Not in any great concentration, anyway.”

  “But… Won’t…?”

  “You’ll be fine. Just touch it with your Con-Bat.”

  “It can’t be that easy.”

  “Sometimes, things are just easy, Kevin.”

  “But shouldn’t I give it a really big whack?”

  “Your Con-Bat won’t let you, in case you bring the entire pipe down on yourself.”

  “You mean…?”

  “Yes, of course your Con-Bat has artificial intelligence. Now just get on with it!”

  “Whatever.” Kevin took a couple more steps up the pipe. He splayed his feet out and let go with his hands. He unholstered his Con-Bat and reached towards the polyp.

  “Wait just a second,” said the Doctor.

  “But you said –”

  “Wait!”

  Kevin glanced below. He saw a flashlight reach the bottom of the pipe.

  “Okay, go!”

  Kevin tapped the polyp. It sprang into a tree shape, its tentacles splayed out, and dropped. A couple of tentacles bounced off him as it fell past.

  The flashlight caught him in its glare and he saw the red laser light beam in the white gas. He waited for the bullets to strike his nether regions.

  There was a blood-curdling scream from below.

  Kevin looked down to see a couple of soldiers in the polyp’s grasp. One of them had had his gas mask dislodged for a second and was spluttering. The polyp was obviously in some discomfort too and seemed to want to get past the men and away. A third, unseen man, took a couple of shots. The polyp’s body wobbled as the bullets passed through. It swung its tentacles wildly and appeared to jump towards the third soldier. There was a strangled scream.

  “Okay,” said the Doctor. “You’re safe to go down now. They’ve got bigger worries.”

  Kevin looked at the chasm beneath him and his head swam.

  “Just let go. Power-assisted suit – remember? Bend your knees.”

  Kevin pulled his feet in off the side of the pipe and fell. A second later he felt his feet hit the bottom. The suit took the strain as his knees bent and restored him to a standing position.

  An injured soldier was being carried back towards the manhole by a comrade, leaving one either side of the polyp. The man on the upstream side, towards the embassy, stepped back – a smart move on the soldier’s part to put an enemy in place of himself. He’d been the one whose gas mask had been dislodged. He had it back on but was coughing and catching his breath.

  A tentacle swished, struck Kevin around the head and pulled him. He took out his Con-Bat to deal with it but the tentacle couldn’t grip his gear, and slipped off. He was aware that to the soldiers his suit must make him look like a mirage because he was so well camouflaged.

  An arm went around his neck in a stranglehold and he was pulled backwards. A strong hand grabbed his wrist and twisted to release the Con-Bat from his grasp. Just as part of him freaked out at being in one-to-one unarmed combat with a special forces soldier, another part of him remembered that his suit was power-assisted. He pulled forwards and threw the hapless soldier head-first at the polyp. The screams were horrific as the creature swathed him in its tentacles and bit into his left arm.

  Behind the polyp Kevin could see the other soldier raise his carbine. Without thinking, he swung his Con-Bat at the foot of the polyp, knocking it clean off the bottom of the pipe. Soldier and polyp collapsed. The one with the carbine followed the polyp down and pumped two sets of two rounds into it. The creature let go of its victim and lashed out, knocking the weapon from the soldier’s hands. Kevin stepped forward and deliver the coup de grâce to the polyp’s head and then elbow-jabbed the soldier in the solar plexus. The massive force of Kevin’s blow sent the man sprawling backwards, gasping for breath.

  “Good work!” said the Doctor. “Now grab the polyp and get the hell out of there.”

  “You don’t have to tell me twice, Doc.” He peeled the dead polyp’s tentacles off the unconscious casualty, gathered the grey-green blubbery mess up in his arms and turned around.

  In the instant he turned around he realised that the polyp would be visible. He looked up to see that the soldier who’d taken the casualty to the manhole had dropped to one knee and was taking aim. The laser beam flashed into his eyes and he winced as he heard the double-tap of the bullets and a scream.

  The bullets hit the side of the pipe and ricocheted.

  He opened his eyes to see the soldier struggling in the water.

  “Thanks, Tim!” he muttered.

  As he stepped over the man he’d elbowed, he felt his ankle being clasped, but shook off the hand and trod on the fingers. He jogged down past the soldier who’d shot at him. The man was just getting to his feet, and Kevin gave him a knee to the head as he passed. He followed the curve of the pipe and heard the rattle of a couple of stun grenades being tossed in his direction. He was well ahead when they detonated and was able to stay on his feet through the double blast wave. A few bullets ricocheted their way past him.

  “Keep going, lad – you’re nearly there.”

  “Thanks, Doc. You must be exhausted.”

  “I’m doing pretty well, thank you.”

  “Glad to hear it. It’s been one hell of an afternoon.”

  “So far, yes.”

  “What the hell do you mean so far, Doc?”

  “You’re not out of the woods yet. Or sewers.”

  “Tell me you’re going to pick me up in the Spectrel. You gotta!” Kevin kept jogging, splashing through the foul water.

  “Well… you know I don’t like germs.”

  “Jeez, Doc! You can’t just dump me in a sewer, cover me in poo and leave me here!”

  “I’m not ‘just leaving you’ there.”

  “Sure as hell sounds like it to me.”

  “I’m going to get Tim to decontaminate you.”

  “How long’s that going to take?”

  “I think that’s the least of your worries at the moment.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The mouth of the pipe was just ten yards ahead and Kevin could see moving lights. He heard what was by now the familiar rattle of a couple of stun grenades bouncing his way. They landed a few feet ahead of him and it was too late to stop.

  “Stuff this!” he yelled and swung his bat at a turd, which exploded forwards in a supersonic shockwave of expanding steam, carrying the stun grenades back out of the tunnel. The grenades detonated in the chamber in mid-air, combining with the blast from the disintegrated turd and the vaporised water, shattering most of the lights in the chamber. He was hit only by a small echo of the blast coming back down the pipe, but felt its massive power thundering through the surrounding earth and shaking his insides.

  “Well played,” said the Doctor. “Very enterprising. You missed a career in county cricket. The only trouble is that you’ve upped the ant
e.”

  “Not much I can do about that now, is there?”

  Kevin reached the end of the pipe and surveyed the damage. He counted four special ops soldiers in various degrees of concussion. The worst was sitting in fifteen inches of sewage with his back against his wall. The best was staggering, dazed and blinded by the flash. He could see blood on their necks, and guessed that they’d suffered punctured eardrums and bleeding noses.

  “Shouldn’t blow things up in confined spaces, any idiot knows that,” he muttered. “And I didn’t take no hypocritical oath.”

  “Hippocratic, you mean.”

  “Whatever. Look, they’re going to be alright. Where to now?”

  “Same exit as Trini. Tim’s right behind you. What’s left of them.”

  “You mean…?”

  “They paid a heavy price. Get going.”

  There was still a lot of gas around, and the only light was from the manhole above. With his goggles Kevin realised he was the only person who could see anything – these professional soldiers weren’t going to shoot blindly in the darkness at a sound in the water. He could hear shouting, and a rope ladder started jiggling, its end splashing in the water, as someone climbed down it. He waded across the chamber and entered the oval-shaped brickwork tunnel that led to the mouth of the Effra, still holding the dead polyp.

  “Thanks, Tim,” said Kevin, as the last of the slime fell away from his suit and into the water. “You’d better be going, eh?” He motioned to the huge iron flap that led out onto the Thames. The tide was in and water occasionally splashed through as the wake of a tourist cruiser washed ashore.

  “Tim are coming with us,” said the Doctor.

  “But you said they’re toxic, and they just decontaminated me.”

  “They’ve decontaminated you, yes – so they’re clean too. As for travelling with us, the Spectrel will make available another space for them.”

  “You’re the boss.”

  There was the sound of something heavy hitting the metal of the flap. There was a scraping noise as a piece of steel was pushed between the bottom of the flap and the masonry.

  “Come on, Doc – they’re here!”

  The Spectrel appeared, hovering just above the surface of the water. The door of the red telephone box swung open. Trinity jumped the six feet from the opposite wall and went straight in without touching the sides. Kevin stepped up onto the floor of the telephone box.

  There was the sound of some machinery outside. The huge metal flap creaked and groaned as it began to inch open. More water splashed in and there was the sound of men’s voices.

  “Get in!”

  Kevin stepped through the back of the box to find himself not in the control room of the Spectrel but the en suite bathroom of his quarters. “I didn’t know you could do that,” he said.

  “As I’ve said before – the advantage of something that doesn’t exist is that design is fluid. And I’m not having you stinking out the rest of the Spectrel.”

  “Glad to know I’m appreciated, Doc. So you made a separate entrance for Tim?”

  “Yes, what’s left of them.”

  Kevin felt the weight of the Doctor’s statement. “Like, how serious was it?”

  “You know that contingent who went up to the US embassy?”

  “Yeah. They tripped up one of the soldiers.”

  “They split up again, with half of them going back to help you. That was them.”

  “And you’re saying they suffered some casualties, yeah?”

  “One hundred percent. All gone. Dead.”

  “I… I dunno what to say.”

  “Just try being grateful to the rest of Tim when you see them next. It was brave, but foolish and unnecessary. Let that be a lesson to you.”

  “Don’t you think you’re being a bit harsh and unsympathetic, Doctor?”

  “They were in the clear, Kevin. They’d suffered some casualties, but it was a foolish thing to have done. You were safe. Well, fairly safe. Bulletproof, at least. They got caught up in the heat of battle. It happens. Particularly with super-predators. They get blinded: tunnel vision. As I say, let it be a lesson to you.”

  “Man, that’s heavy.”

  “It’s a lesson best observed, because the first time you make it is your last. Now, get cleaned up and join me in the lab.”

  “The lab?”

  “I’d have thought you’d have had a good wander-round at some point and stuck your nose in. A house-bot will show you the way.”

  “But why the lab?”

  “Autopsy.”

  “On who?”

  “The polyp.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, but cause of death was being hit by my Con-Bat.”

  “Don’t be a smartarse, laddie. We need to study this, and check that we’ve eliminated the threat.”

  “We got all three. Tim got one, then Trin, then me. Game over. Three-nil.”

  “If only it were three-nil, Kevin. I seem to recall two dead Rindans, a dead Circarian who was working illegally in the sewers, two dead urban adventurers, a couple of dead MI6 officers and someone in the US embassy. I think that makes it eight-three to them. And if we’re going to use a football analogy, I don’t want us going into extra time.”

  “Like, I was meaning us. Team How. The dream-team.”

  “Just get cleaned up. And leave your ego in your bedroom.”

  Kevin found himself in a spacious clinically-white room – so white and bright that the borders between walls, ceiling and floor were invisible, and the Doctor appeared to float in the middle next to what looked like a stainless-steel mortuary table. The only way Kevin knew there was a ceiling at all was because Trinity was upside down on it in her black furry spider form. She winked one of her pairs of large green eyes at him, whilst the other three pairs seemed to remain fixed on the table ten feet below her. He guessed she was there for security reasons, not just out of scientific curiosity.

  The Doctor looked up. “Ah, glad you could make it. We’re just about to start.”

  “Sure. This autopsy’s the only entertainment in town right now. Apparently.”

  “Look, I appreciate the effort you put in getting this thing out. I really do.”

  “You quite literally landed me in the shit, Doc.”

  “But your government will be grateful to you for tackling this problem.”

  “Not really. They ain’t allowed to know. Ever. Am I right?”

  “There is such a thing as karma. And your reputation in the out-of-town community as a man of action is growing. You’ve got what all young men of your ilk seem to crave above all else: respect.”

  “Like, a fat lot of use that does me in Tulse Hill.”

  Trinity hissed at him.

  “Quite right, Trin. She says she’d rather have status amongst the out-of-towners than a bunch of two-bit petty crooks.”

  “Um…”

  “Now, let’s get on with the autopsy. I know you can handle a dead Rindan so a polyp shouldn’t be much of a problem. Thankfully, you got it back whole. Nice work.”

  “Uh, thanks. What happened to the other one, by the way?”

  “Tim ate it, as per the plan. Now, what do you notice?”

  “Erm. Apart from the fact that it’s brown bread?”

  “Brown bread?”

  “Dead.”

  “Cockney rhyming slang. How twee. Now, be serious.”

  “Like, four of them tentacles is long and the other ones is short.”

  “Grammatically incorrect, but the right observation. Well done. Now, tell me why that is?”

  “Injured in the fight and got cut off?”

  “Nope. These were not traumatic amputations. And they’re all the same size.” The Doctor looked at him expectantly.

  “I give in.”

  “These are new. Completely new. Notice as well that there’s a line of scar tissue running down the body of the polyp, and that it carries on both to the mouth and the foot.”

  “Scar tissu
e. Right.”

  “It means that this polyp has reproduced asexually.”

  “Dirty little polyp.”

  “Asexually means without sex. Basically, it split into two. All terrestrial plants can do it, and many less complex animals too.”

  “Yeah, and?”

  “It did it pretty recently, which is why these tentacles are so small.”

  “So you’re telling me… what?”

  “That there’s at least one other.”

  “I thought Trini reckoned there were three.”

  “Were three. Past tense. The two you and Trini killed today were both actually only one of the three originals.”

  “Aw, that sucks.”

  “Well, quite. And now we don’t know where the other one is. There’s little chance that this one – or the one that was this one – could have travelled from Vauxhall to Brixton and back in the time that it did. So the other one was the one Trini nearly got before the emergency services prevented her from eliminating it.”

  “So it’s still somewhere in the south of South London?”

  “Yes, it is. Or they are, if it’s split. And that would seem likely, since this one did so after eating just one human.”

  “Like, are you expecting me to go on another mad hunt around the sewers?”

  “No, Tim’s already set off again. Like Trinity, they have a keen sense of smell, so they should be able to track it down. But of course the fastest and most aggressive of them bought the farm today.”

  “Yeah, but the others should be well angry. Plus they ate one of these things, so they should get their strength back.”

  “True. Anyway, they wanted to get right back on the case. Whilst you were cleaning up I reinserted them around the Brixton Market area. As you can imagine, police activity there has died down somewhat in the wake of today’s events.”

  “So what’s our next move?”

  “Unfortunately, the next move is down to Tim or the polyp – or maybe polyps plural. We can but wait.”

  “Like, how’s Tim feeling about their loss?”

  “Not the happiest creatures in the universe. The Americans have the remains in a specimen jar. Every culture has its rituals for the dead, and I feel truly awful about that. At least the Rindans had the chance to dispose of their irresponsible consul and her husband with the appropriate dignity. I’m still out of pocket for it. There’s no justice in the universe.”