Doctor How and the Illegal Aliens: Book 1: The Doctor Who Is Not a Time Lord

by Mark Speed

  “I’ve not seen it go quite that long. Oh, there we go.” Fluid splashed onto the wall beneath the creature. A few drops hit the armoured steel door to its left, and the metal hissed. “Quick, turn the light off!”

  Peterson turned off the amber light. The creature lay motionless on the wall.

  “I think we can save your man Jackson’s leg,” said the Doctor. “He’ll probably have a hell of a limp.”

  “That’s kidnapping. I’m going to have you for that, Doctor How. I know what you’re up to – you’re going to interrogate him under duress and steal our secrets.”

  “Oh, please, Mr Thicko –”

  “It’s Thickett, and I’m proud of it.”

  “I can’t imagine what you might possibly think you have that’s worth knowing that I don’t know already, or couldn’t find out if I could be bothered to spend a nanosecond hacking your systems, Mr Thicky.”

  “Thickett!”

  “Whatever. Look, we’ll pop Jackson somewhere safe. Probably a bit later today, if that’s alright.”

  “Where?” asked Thickett.

  “Tsh. Can’t have you knowing my movements in advance, Mr Twit.”

  The creature began to stir.

  “For the last time, it’s Thickett. That… that thing could break into the control room. We have to stop it. You have to get rid of it, Doctor. I’ll hold you personally responsible for this.”

  “Really, it’ll get bored in a minute. Needs a post-coital snackette. It’d be great if you had some volatile petroleum products,” said the Doctor. “Look, if it’s okay with you I’ll be off for now. But I’d be grateful if you could go back to defending the Realm from those who would do harm to Her Brittanic Majesty’s citizens, or whatever it is you’re supposed to be doing, rather than hassling harmless helpers.”

  The creature dropped to the floor. The Doctor stepped into the Spectrel and raised his hand to wave.

  “It’s going to get Smith!” said Thickett. “Turn that light back on!”

  “No!” shouted Peterson and the Doctor simultaneously.

  Thickett pushed Peterson out of the way and flicked the switch.

  Click.

  The Spectrel’s door slammed shut and it winked out of existence. Peterson jumped on top of Thickett, slamming him onto the floor of the control room, pinning him to it with her body.

  The departure of the Spectrel took the jamming from the control room’s systems, which began to reboot. An old-fashioned steady alarm-bell rang, and a modern siren warbled into life.

  Nothing happened for a couple of seconds. Peterson raised her head a fraction, and Thickett opened his mouth to reprimand her. If they had been able to see out of the control room, they would have seen that something had happened. If they’d turned their heads to the monitors, they would have seen them wink into life just in time to show the last two seconds of images that they would ever display.

  The creature’s acid ejaculate had melted through the wiring of the traffic light. There had been a spark as the light had been turned on, and a small flame had been ignited. It flashed down the wall and licked around the posterior of the creature, where fluid still dripped from its failed congress. The creature breathed out through the spiracles in its abdomen, and a yellow flame lit off the breath that came out of two on its right side, like a couple of miniature flares from an oil refinery. The twinge of pain made it breathe in sharply with shock. Deep inside the tubes of the creature’s respiratory system the flame found the perfect mix of oxygen and combustible vapour.

  The explosion blew out the bullet-proof windows of the control room from their surrounds and a couple of pieces of burning black body casing and a mandible bounced off the far wall and hit the floor. Oily black smoke poured off the body parts as yellow-orange flames crackled furiously from them.

  “Stay on the ground!” shouted Peterson. She crawled beneath the thickening layer of smoke to where she knew there was a fire extinguisher. She grabbed it and sprayed the fragments with inert powder.

  The door burst open, and four Ministry of Defence firemen in breathing apparatus ran into the room. They pulled Thickett and Peterson out into the corridor, where a pair of medics clapped oxygen masks on their faces.

  “Smith! Get Smith! He’s in the chamber,” shouted Peterson.

  “How and Where!” said Thickett.

  “This one’s not making much sense,” said one of the medics to a doctor, who had just arrived, out of breath.

  “The Doctors! It was the Doctors!”

  “Who?” asked the doctor.

  “No! Not Who. How and Where!” said Thickett.

  “Shock,” said the doctor to the medics. “Just relax, sir,” he said to Thickett. He took out a syringe and tapped it for bubbles as he squeezed the plunger. “Going to feel nice and sleepy now.”

  “No! Get Who, you nincompoop! Get the Doctors!”

  “That’s it,” said the doctor. “I’m a doctor and I’m here now. Breathing deeply now, and going to sleep. Relaaaax. That’s it.”

  A man arrived in a military Noddy suit. “Smith and Jackson,” he panted. Where are they, Peterson?”

  “Jackson’s being looked after by the Doctor,” said Peterson. “Smith… Oh, God. Smith’s down there, in the chamber.”

  “So this is Jackson?” said the doctor.

  “No, that’s Thickett,” said Peterson. “Jackson had an accident, the Doctor… Oh, never mind.” She turned to the man in the Noddy suit. “Smith was down there when the explosion happened.”

  “He’s not there now,” said the man in the Noddy suit. “No bodies. No human bodies.”

  “The Doctor must have come back for him. Thank God for that.”

  “Shock,” said the doctor to the man in the Noddy suit. “She’ll be fine. The other one was hysterical. Had to sedate him. Come on, Miss. Don’t try to stand yet – we don’t know what sort of damage you might have.”

  “It’s Doctor,” she said. “I’m a doctor. Well, not that kind of doctor. Not your kind of doctor – my kind of doctor.”

  “Oh, dear,” said the doctor. He took out another syringe and tapped it for bubbles.

  “No, that’s really not necessary, doctor. I’m perfectly alright.”

  “Of course you are. How about a drink or dinner sometime?”

  “Thank you, but I think I’m going to be extremely busy for the immediate future.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Give me a hand, will you?” said the Doctor, collapsing back into the Spectrel, with Smith’s head landing on his stomach. The soles of the man’s boots had melted at the edges, and gave off an acrid smell of burnt rubber.

  “I saw the explosion on the projection,” said Kevin, taking Smith’s weight off the Doctor. The two of them dragged the unconscious man to a clear piece of floor. “It was awesome! Wait ’til you see the replay.”

  “Great – I nearly lost my neck and you want to put it on You’ve Been Framed. I do hope that little incident made up for your earlier disappointment about the lack of monsters in your life. How are the other two?”

  A couple of med-bots were tending to Where and Jackson. Kevin hadn’t been that impressed when the two white boxes had each hovered in from under their respective passenger seats and taken up position over a patient. Then he’d watched in wonder as tiny hatches opened up all over the one assigned to Jackson, and intricate sensors and slender robot arms had reached out to tend to his leg. Two ancillary med-bots had arrived seconds later. One cut away the head and neck of the Noddy suit and planted an oxygen mask over the man’s face. The other carried a plastic pouch of fluid, and used three arms to cut open the Noddy suit on Jackson’s left arm. After peeling away the suit and the clothing from underneath, a fourth arm inserted the intravenous drip. Kevin had gone in closer for a look as microscopic stitches were made in veins and arteries, and tiny squirts of various fluids applied to the flesh. He’d had to look away when a drill began cutting into a bone.

  “Like, these med-bots are the c
oolest thing ever. I so want to take one back to show my Mum. The guy with the amputated leg seems alright. I don’t know about Dave, though.”

  The med-bot above Where was hovering in position above his chest.

  “I don’t think I know about David either,” said the Doctor. “He has the family traits of compulsion and bravado – that’s mostly what did for him.”

  “Can you explain, in really simple terms, what happened?”

  “What happened was fifty years of neglect – both of himself and his duty.”

  “Like, I think I’ve heard that bit.”

  The Doctor sighed and sat at the Spectrel’s controls. “There’s a kind of symbiosis between a Time Keeper and his Spectrel. A bit like a married couple in many respects. As the relationship grows, you grow into each other. For whatever reason, David chose to opt out. It was the Sixties, I suppose. We were all tired and jaded after the War. But in my view we were entering a new and much more dangerous age. Humans had finally learnt to unleash the power of the nucleus and the atom – though you’ve still a long way to go in controlling them. So far as David was concerned, the genie was out of the bottle and it was up to others to perform different duties. You know, sometimes a routine life can seem like an adventure. He was obviously abusing the relationship with his Spectrel. Using her to ferry passengers around London is just the pits, frankly. You saw his lifestyle – drinking, smoking… not to mention a terrible diet.”

  “Yeah, but what about what happened back there?”

  “Hmm? Oh, heart attack. You see, just as his Spectrel was weakened by his lack of care for it, so he was weakened. That little incident we had with the beast at his place reawakened something in him. As I’d hoped, the old David was still in there. You saw how much better he was. He got a decent night’s sleep and then overdid it. Simple as, as your generation would say. Luckily, he does have a second heart. But it’s not like the second one is in any fit state either.”

  “And his Spectrel?”

  “She clearly decided she was better off elsewhere.”

  “But, like, where?”

  The Doctor swept his open hand in a broad arc.

  “So… when will she be coming back?”

  The Doctor shrugged.

  “Well, at least David’s alive and the monster’s dead, innit? And that Thicko guy didn’t get anything. So, like, round one to us. Right?”

  The Doctor snorted. “Let us compare ourselves to where we were just a short while ago. We had two Time Keepers and two Spectrels. We now have one of each. We now also have a couple of unwanted passengers and have further piqued the interest of Sixteen. Oh, and so far as they’re concerned, it looks like we were party to an attack which resulted in a massive explosion at one of their most secret locations. With the destruction of the monster, we’ve lost another piece of evidence that might have told me who the hell is doing this to us. Another day like this and they will have won.” The Doctor glanced at his watch. “In fact, given that it’s not even noon, we could be utterly defeated by tea-time.”

  “Do we still have that map of the underground thing in Essex?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can’t we, like, do something with that?”

  “There it is. The unrelenting optimist – the reason I hired you. Thank you, Kevin, for your can-do attitude. Yes, we could take a visit. But a number of different treaties to which I am a signatory – and in a couple of instances an enforcer of last resort – as well as common decency and sense, dictate that we have to look after Tweedledum and Tweedledee over there first. Furthermore, what you would call in your lexicon the baddies are just a tad cheesed off at the moment.”

  “Alright, alright – don’t go wholesale with it. Like, we do have the advantage of surprise, innit?”

  “Ah, you’re looking at a Battle of Midway option, eh?”

  “Um…”

  “He with the best reconnaissance, and who refuels and reloads first, wins.”

  “Right you are. That was it: the Battle of Midway option. You got me.”

  The Doctor got up and wandered over to Smith’s unconscious body. The med-bot tending to him had cut away the Noddy suit’s head to let him breathe more easily. It had the end of a clear plastic tube clipped to his nostrils. It turned a sensor to the Doctor, who nodded in response. “Well, he’s fine. Just needs to stay sedated. Won’t remember much.”

  He turned to Jackson’s med-bot, which popped out a similar sensor to communicate with the Doctor. “Remarkable, even by our standards. Helped that it was such a clean cut. And, of course, that we acted so quickly. Surgery will be finished in the next few seconds – all veins and major nerves reattached. Ah, here we go.”

  The med-bot withdrew its instruments and another two bots appeared. They unrolled a thin metallic tray and manoeuvred Jackson’s limp body onto it. With a bot at each end, the tray was lifted a foot into the air and Jackson and the med-bot seemed to Kevin to disappear through a wall.

  “Where have they taken him?” asked Kevin.

  “Let’s call it accelerated healing therapy, shall we? The prognosis is that we should be able to dump him into a reasonably competent hospital within the hour. We’d have to leave a note, of course. Something a bit more detailed than ‘Please look after this bear’.”

  “You could show a bit more sympathy, Doctor.”

  “You’re right; I could. However, things weren’t going too badly for him until he threw a hammer.”

  “True. What about David?”

  The med-bot looking after the Doctor’s cousin pointed its communicator at him. “Days? A week? More? It’s not just his heart.” He seemed to nod to the med-bot.

  Two bots came into the cabin and unrolled a silver foil tray next to Where. He wasn’t sure whether they were the same two bots that had moved Jackson, because they all looked alike to him. He watched the two bots, the med-bot and Where disappear through the same section of wall as Jackson.

  “Man, I really miss him. No offence to you, Doc, but I think I shared quite a bit of wavelength with David. You get me?”

  “I get you, Kevin.”

  The youth’s face brightened again. “Like, is this his regeneration? Is he going to come out of this totally changed? And as good as new?”

  “That, my friend, is part of the problem. You can only regenerate in conjunction with your Spectrel. It’s that whole relationship and growth thing I was telling you about. Come on, let’s look at the map of this place under Essex.”

  “Um…”

  “What?”

  “I need to know where the facilities are. And, like, do you have any food?”

  “I’m sorry. Not much of a host. Not used to it. Not recently, at least. Sorry. Through there.” The Doctor pointed to part of the wall between two rows of passenger seats, where the bots and the bodies had disappeared.

  Kevin saw that there was the slight hint of a black line in the shape of a door.

  “Do I…?”

  “Just walk through, yes.”

  The Doctor flipped on a projection of the underground facility in Essex.

  Kevin returned a few minutes later. “This is a well-cool place, man. I hope you don’t mind, but I took a bit of a tour. It’s huge.”

  “The two great things about real estate which doesn’t actually exist are that it’s terribly cheap and you don’t need planning permission. And, since it doesn’t even exist, remodelling is a breeze.”

  “You mean this is all just complex force projections? There’s no matter there at all?”

  “Yes. Well put.”

  “Like, that makes me feel really uncomfortable. Knowing that there’s nothing out there beyond these walls that don’t exist is kinda spooky.”

  “Kevin, nothing in your world exists either. It’s all just forces.”

  “Yeah, but I’m totally comfortable with the way the world doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist in a totally natural and not in-your-face kindaway. The way this place doesn’t exist really freaks me out? You get
me?”

  “Not really. You should be more scared in an aeroplane flying at 35,000 feet. Same sort of thing in terms of forces keeping you alive there, but you’ve just got some human at the controls and you could slam into a mountain.”

  “Maybe, but it’s matter.”

  “No, it isn’t. It’s unimaginably small bits of matter that aren’t really matter at all, with forces around them. Pay attention. All we’ve done is remove the unnecessary bits.”

  “Yeah, like the matter.”

  “Well, I’m sure you’ve eaten a fish fillet.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “You enjoyed eating the fish, but you just ate the flesh – you didn’t have to waste your time on all the bits that made the fish a fish, did you? Like the bones, head, tail and fins. And when you’ve eaten it, you’ve got a clean plate – no waste. See?”

  “No, that’s a totally mental comparison. And it kinda makes my point about my fear about there being nothing left and it all going horribly wrong.”

  “As you wish. Now, speaking of food, did you get anything to eat?”

  “Yeah, I ordered something from some machine that asked me what I wanted. It’ll be delivered shortly, I expect.”

  “Good. We couldn’t have you going more than three hours without food.”

  Kevin rolled his eyes. He nodded towards the projection of the Essex installation. “So you got it figured out, Doc? And why’s it not so detailed?”

  “This is just the upload of what was intercepted during the hack. We’re being jammed from getting a decent read, which at least proves it’s not human. At one level it’s blindingly obvious, really. These beetles are GM and –”

  “Sorry, GM?”

  “Genetically modified. You know, like the crops that people protest about. Not naturally bred.

  “You mean not organic bread?” Kevin grinned.

  “Very droll. Where they come from there’s not much oxygen. And you can see why that would be an advantage, given their diet and their physiology. They’ve evolved to live off crude oil, so distillates like diesel are like refined sugar or starch are to your physiology. With me so far?”