by Doctor Who
‘Our ship has lain here, hidden for thousands of years, insinuating itself into the rock,’ the female added. ‘With the drives at less than full power, we could be torn apart.’
‘I had to make the call,’ said the Doctor sadly. ‘Everyone on this planet, or us.’
‘Us?’ said Rose quietly.
“Fraid so,’ he said, as the vibrations worsened around them and dust and debris began to trickle from the distant ceiling. ‘Even if we survive the take-off, we’ll be trapped here for the rest of our lives.’
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RosestaredattheDoctorasthethoughtofbeingstuckhereforever began to sink in to her shellshocked mind. ‘The rest of our lives,’
she echoed.
‘That will not be long,’ rasped a battle-scarred Wurm behind them.
She heard a whirr of gears as its gun attachment extended – then the buzz of the sonic screwdriver. The Wurm screeched as its gun started to jerk about, as probes extended from its shoulder and a loud squeal of feedback blasted from the speakers in its comms helmet.
‘What are you doing?’ asked the male.
‘Turning his battle implants up to the max,’ said the Doctor coldly.
‘Should put him out for a while.’
But Rose was staring the other way as a faint trail of golden light appeared like stardust.
‘Doctor, the teleport!’
she shouted, half-
delighted, half-terrified she was dreaming. ‘The Wurms used their communicators to open it, boosted the frequencies or something.’
‘And now it’s opening for us!’ The Doctor adjusted the sonic’s settings. ‘Let’s make it wide open.’
The Wurm gave an excited yelp and started to twist itself into knots, its probes smoking, its sensors going fruit loops as the Doctor boosted the implants further and the golden spiral of smoke grew brighter.
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‘Through you go, quick!’ shouted the Doctor, bundling Rose towards it. ‘Before he short-circuits.’
‘Not without you!’ She grabbed his hand and dragged him after her.
They vanished into the golden void –
And emerged again in the silent, deserted cavern.
The Doctor looked almost comically startled and Rose stared round in disbelief. ‘We made it,’ she breathed. ‘We actually made it!’
‘Yes,’ said her golden double, ‘we did.’
She was standing just behind them with the golden Solomon.
‘Rats from a sinking ship?’ the Doctor enquired. ‘Or from one ready to take off and never come back?’ He squared up to them. ‘I blew up your navigation systems. I couldn’t allow the Valnaxi to fly straight back here and butcher all humanity into their image.’
‘We know what you did,’ said the golden Solomon. ‘That is why we two choose to remain on Earth.’
‘After so many empty centuries clutching at schemes and dreams,’
breathed Rose’s golden double, ‘we must taste life again – in any form.’
A vast tremor tore through the cavern. ‘If we hang around here you won’t be tasting it for long,’ the Doctor shouted.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ Rose agreed.
‘Wait!’ The Doctor had seen Korr, lying on the slope, and raced to check on him. ‘He’s injured, but still alive.’ He pointed to an upturned green shell. ‘Get that stretcher.’
Another tremor nearly knocked them off their feet. Rose staggered over to the stretcher. ‘Give me a hand, then!’
‘Leave it to die,’ hissed the Solomon-thing.
‘Point one,’ said the Doctor sternly, ‘the only viable shelter round here is the Wurm ship – and Korr can get us inside. Point two – show this kind of attitude to intelligent life and I’ll never let you stay here on Earth.’
‘We do not need you to grant us permission.’
The coldness in the Doctor’s smile made Rose shiver. ‘Yes. You do.’
The whole cavern shook again. Stalactites started to drop down from the ceiling like deadly darts.
The Valnaxi quickly took the
stretcher from her and carried it easily to Korr’s side. They hesitated 180
for a few moments. Then they loaded the injured Wurm aboard and raised the stretcher.
‘Good.’ The Doctor grinned. ‘Well, don’t just stand about. Haven’t you noticed this whole place is falling down around our ears? Run! ’
‘What’s happening?’ Basel yelled as Solomon, Adiel and Faltato followed him out of the lava tubes and into the dusty daylight. The ground was shaking so hard, he could imagine the hot white sky was about to fall in on them. ‘Is the volcano erupting?’
‘Feels more like a spaceship’s getting ready to take off out from the volcano – dredging up who knows what as it goes.’ Faltato went clip-clopping off on his dainty legs. ‘You do what you like, but I’m heading for the Wurm ship. It’s got a force-field.’
Solomon frowned. ‘A what?’
‘It’ll keep us safe if we get inside,’ Adiel panted. ‘You want to be out here when the top blows off that volcano? Come on. I don’t trust Faltato not to shut us out if he gets there first.’
The monster snickered. ‘Perhaps you’re not such a stupid biped after all.’
Together they raced up to the huge, slimy ship, sat upon its mountain of stinking mud. And then Basel stopped and stared. ‘Solomon. . .
look.’
Vivid green shoots were protruding everywhere from the soil, strong and fat and fleshy.
‘It’s the corn-vera crop,’ Solomon breathed. ‘Growing like wildfire.’
‘But this muck only came down last night,’ said Basel. ‘It must be, like, super-fertile!’
‘Come on,’ Adiel urged them, struggling up the trembling mud pile while Faltato raced ahead. ‘Hang around out here and it won’t be corn-vera we’re pushing up, it’ll be daisies!’
Rose raced on through the shaking tunnels, clutching the Doctor’s hand. It was like the rock itself was grinding and screaming around them, and the air was crimson and thick with choking, blinding dust.
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‘The launch sequence is almost completed,’ the male said grimly, staggering into the wall and almost dropping his end of Korr’s stretcher.
‘What’s gonna happen if the ship takes off?’ Rose asked.
‘The ship’s a champagne cork and the volcano’s the bottle,’ said the Doctor, still dragging her along. ‘The bottle’s shaking, surrounding lava’s fizzing up and the cork’s gonna pop, go shooting out, right into space. Whoooosh!’ He laughed out loud. ‘That’s if there’s enough power getting through to the drive systems.’
Rose was too busy choking on dust to join in the laughter. ‘And if there isn’t?’
‘The whole bottle explodes. Very, very messily.’ He tugged her along more urgently. ‘Now, save your breath and keep running. Reaching the Wurm ship’s our only chance!’
The four of them pushed on with the unconscious Wurm. Rose half-wished she was out of it too. With every step she imagined the ground breaking up beneath her, or the roof falling in. It was stiflingly hot and, with diabolic red lights glaring from the walls, it felt as if they were charging through hell.
At last they reached the exit doors and came out into open air. The rotten-egg stench of sulphur made Rose want to retch. She could see a poisonous yellow cloud belching from the spout of the volcano.
‘It’s going to erupt!’ she shouted, fear rooting her to the spot.
‘The Wurm ship,’ the Doctor bellowed. ‘Come on.’
Rose forced herself into action, running alongside the golden couple, Korr on his stretcher, the Doctor leading the way up the sticky, muddy slope towards the waiting spaceship. But in her heart she already knew it was too late.
There was an ear-splitting boom as the air itself seemed to split apart. Rose fell flat on her face in the thick, muddy slime, scrabbled at green shoots to pull herself up, twisted round to see the top of the volcano explode. A long, twisting shard of burn
ished metal burst out: the Valnaxi spaceship, like an arrow shot into the stars. But the thick blanket of burning, white-hot debris that had burst out with it was already falling back to Earth.
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Rose realised that it would rain down right on top of them.
She scrabbled up the muddy slope, into the Doctor’s arms. He bent over her, shielding her body with his own.
But the debris never hit.
It showered down, but then bounced and scattered and burned up a good ten metres from the ground, as if an invisible umbrella had opened over them to absorb the deadly rain.
‘Ha-haaaa!’ whooped the Doctor. ‘Neutronic partition!’
‘I’m glad you got to the mud slopes in time,’ Adiel called from a hatch in the rubbery belly of the ship. ‘We saw you coming, but it seems that’s as far as the forcefield extends.’
The Doctor looked impressed. ‘You worked out the controls?’
‘We were able to twist Faltato’s arms on your behalf. All four of them.’
‘Thanks,’ said Rose, closing her eyes. ‘Doctor, we made it!’
‘And so did they,’ he murmured, staring up at the Valnaxi ship, now little more than a speck disappearing into the ashen sky.
Rose looked at him. ‘They’ll go on fighting, won’t they?’
He shrugged. ‘Who knows? If the situation’s tight enough, maybe they’ll call a truce. But fingers crossed, they won’t ever return. I’ll wipe the memory of the flight systems on Korr’s ship too, save any reprisals against humanity. . . ’
Adiel had moved a little way down the slope. ‘You going to introduce us to your friends?’
The male and the female looked at the Doctor.
‘Don’t know who you mean,’ he said lightly. ‘There’s no one here.
No one I need to worry about.’ He looked at them both, stared deep into their golden eyes. ‘Is there?’
Slowly they smiled and shook their heads.
The Doctor took one end of Korr’s stretcher and gestured that Rose should take the other. They carried him up the sticky slope.
Rose glanced back when they’d reached the ship. But the golden couple had already gone.
183
They couldn’t leave till the Wurms’ landing-site muck was cleared, since the TARDIS lay buried beneath it. It had taken two days already for the returning workers to get the mountain down as far as they had.
With a twinge of guilt – a small one, mind, after what she’d been through lately – Rose watched the staff beavering away from the comfort of the air-conditioned common room, shifting the muck and storing it out of sight in the surviving lava tubes. She half-smiled. The Doctor didn’t like to hang around and deal with the fallout of their adventures, but when the fallout was this big and this smelly there wasn’t a lot he could do.
Luckily there had been plenty of loose ends to tie up. When the Valnaxi ship had crashed out of Mount Tarsus, with all the smoke and tremors the world and his wife assumed the volcano had erupted.
‘We’ll have aid workers turning up in droves,’ the Doctor had moaned. ‘Can’t have them finding a Wurrn warship. It’s got to go.’
‘I am more than ready to leave,’ Faltato had replied prissily.
Turned out he’d only saved their lives with the forcefield because he couldn’t fly the ship on his own. It was Korr the half-a-Wurm he’d been protecting.
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‘What of the Valnaxi filth?’ the Wurm had snarled, twitching beside Faltato in the pilot’s seat.
‘Dead,’ the Doctor had told him. ‘Nothing left of them.’
‘Then my comrades did not die in vain.’
The Doctor had stared down at him then, suddenly looking so tired.
‘Oh. . . push off.’
‘Hello, Rose.’ Adiel breezed into the room, grabbed a drink from the fridge.
‘Hello, Acting Director,’ Rose replied.
Adiel looked tired as hell but as happy as someone who’d been there and come back. The Doctor was right. That muck is a gift. It’s like a dream. Too much to hope for.’
Rose grinned. ‘You’ve run your tests and simulations and that?’
‘Anything grows in it, under pretty much any conditions. Anything.
With yields six to eight times greater than you’d get with even the most fertile soil on Earth.’ She swigged down her drink, threw the carton into the bin in the corner like she was shooting a hoop. ‘And there are no side effects, nothing dangerous in the food, nothing that could harm the environment – nothing obvious anyway –’
Rose raised her eyebrows. ‘But you’re gonna check it out properly, yeah?’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ bubbled Adiel. ‘But used in the right way, rationed out and strictly controlled, this stuff could revolutionise farming. Turn around the world’s food shortage. It could –’
‘Radical thinking,’ she said pointedly. ‘Fynn would approve.’
Adiel’s face clouded just a little, but she nodded. ‘The proof of what Fynn did. . . It’s buried. Buried along with his fungus.’ she paused, as if wrestling with some problem – or maybe her conscience. ‘I’m going to do my best to make sure it stays buried. I have to.’
Rose remembered Adiel’s words back in the common room, when the girl had thought she wasn’t being overheard. ‘For the greater good?’
‘The last thing we need is any whiff of scandal, any excuse for the corporations and multinationals to jump in and take control.’ Adiel’s 186
expression had grown fierce, but now her face softened. ‘And with Fynn dead too, all that belongs to the past. Better it stays there than comes out and jeopardises the future.’ She smiled. That mud could save millions of lives. It honestly could. So I’m going to say it was spewed up in that mysterious volcanic eruption and file a claim in the name of the African people.’
‘Seriously?’ Rose smiled properly. ‘You can do that?’ Adiel smiled and lowered her voice. ‘With all the admin generated by our little
“natural” disaster here, it’ll take our sponsors months to notice.’
‘And by the time she’s finished doing her tests and telling the world what’s what,’ said Basel, breezing into the room, ‘the paperwork will all be sorted, nice and legal.’
‘Hello, here’s trouble,’ said Rose, grinning up at him.
He took off his straw hat and chucked it on a chair. ‘People been either taking from us or giving us handouts way too long,’ he said.
‘Now we’re gonna coin it, big time.’
Rose nodded. ‘So this sort of bio-piracy’s OK, then?’
‘When the stuff you’re pirating’s from, like, Jupiter, it don’t count,’
Basel reasoned. ‘Whole world’s gonna want a piece of this miracle mud, and they can pay for it.’ He tapped his nose. Through this.’
‘Pricing will be fair, Basel,’ said Adiel patiently. This stuff can help starving people the world over.’
‘Uh-huh,’ said Basel. ‘Starting here.’
Rose smiled. ‘You’ll be sticking around, then?’
‘Course. And I’m gonna keep schooling myself up. Gonna need credibility. It’s us against the fat cats, the big businesses.’
‘We’ll need to buy ourselves out of the agri-unit system and set up independently,’ agreed Adiel. ‘It’s going to be a hell of a lot of hard work. . . but we’ll get there.’
There were different ways to save the planet, Rose reflected. Short-term fixes and long-haul solutions. Looked like Adiel and Basel and the others were in this for the duration, maybe for their whole lives.
That was cool.
But what did the future hold for her? she wondered.
∗ ∗ ∗
187
Solomon wondered how long it would take Adiel to find his letter of resignation on the shambles of her desk.
He’d waited a couple of days before making it official, but his mind had been made up from the start. It was time to go home. Not to the city. To the old village. Gouronkah, his
home.
It had been almost levelled by the tremors from the volcano. Its people needed help; Solomon had been giving aid in secret for too long. Now he was going to do things properly. His kids had urban citizenship. They could make up their minds whether they would follow him back to Gouronkah or forge their own lives in the city. He would support them as best he could in whatever they decided.
But right now he needed to do this.
How many people had died because he’d touched a golden panel?
And yet how many people might now live in the future because of the chain of events he had set in motion?
The Doctor said that if he hadn’t touched the plaque ahead of the Wurms, the whole world might have ended up a smoking cinder. But the only smoking cinders he had seen were those of Kanjuchi, and the men on the gate, the animals and birds. . . They had all died in consequence of what he had done.
Solomon knew you couldn’t change what you’d done in the past.
But if you wanted to, you could make amends.
No more compromises, no more standing awkwardly between two worlds, no more wasting time. Solomon walked out through the main gates and very nearly smiled to himself. It was time to do things right.
The Earth’s solar system was dwindling on the monitors, and Faltato was sipping tea and yawning in equal measure. He had spent a dark day and night wondering just how he would cope with the lengthy journey back to his ship.
The tactic he’d hit on was to lord it over the battered Worm as much as possible.
He waggled his teacup. ‘I think I’d like another, Korr. When you’re ready.’
‘I am not your servant, leggy scum!’ the Wurm raged.
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‘But you are very, very grateful, I hope,’ said Faltato smoothly. ‘I saved you. Carried you out of that volcano myself. Under your warrior code, you owe me your life and your loyalty.’ He settled back in his seat. ‘So just ambulate along and make the tea, hmm?’
Already he was losing himself in future plans. He would leave with the finest of those art treasures on board, enough to pay off his debts, impress his peers and wow the ladies. He might even fund an ex-pedition to locate that last, lost Valnaxi ship and its hidden vault of masterpieces. Or maybe simply set himself up in a little antiques place on Hastus Minor. . .