by Doctor Who
Take the city block by block.. .Now over to Polly....'
Polly stared at him, caught out. She whispered to the Doctor, 'What do you mean?'
The Doctor explained 'Ah, should have told you, I need them to spread out and check every tall building in New York, go right to the top, and if they see anything that shouldn't be there, they need to run straight back here, to tell us about it.
We won't be able to move far, the Vykoids will be on to us...'
'But there are hundreds of tall buildings in this city. That's impossible.'
Amy interrupted. 'They need to start at the tallest first.'
'But it'll take ages,' Sam agreed.
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The Doctor joined in. 'Then I'm glad I've got the best team in New York. OK, who's for the Empire State Building? Off you go. Who's taking the Bank of America Tower? Right you two. And Batmen, I need you both on top of the Flat Iron. Take one of these each - you know what you need to do!'
They all yelled back 'Yes!' and scuttled off pair by pair, creeping like well-practised superheroes.
'What did you give them?' Amy asked.
'Fireworks! They're going to need to let us know where they are.'
'And where did you get fireworks from?'
"This is New York, Amy, you can get anything here. New Year for someone all the time, remember?'
Polly was looking worried. 'Are you sure they'll be safe?'
The Doctor answered straight away. 'The Vykoids have no interest in them. Just make sure you stay out of sight yourself. Whatever happens, don't leave your flat.' He leapt up. 'Right, off to the Zoo!'
'Come on,' Amy told Sam. 'It's your turn to be helpful.'
'Don't worry.’ the Doctor said to Polly. 'We'll be barely a few minutes. Well I say minutes. We'll actually be a couple of hours, maybe even longer. But whichever way, I'll come back for you, don't forget that.'
Outside, the Doctor asked Amy to pick a car. I’ll put it back. I didn't do anything to the other one.'
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Sam was appalled. 'You can't just take someone's car!'
'Tomorrow I'll be the saviour of the city. That guy can lend me his Dodge for a few minutes.'
Amy had another question on her mind. 'How come it's not safe for Polly to be on the streets, but it's fine for me?'
The Doctor smiled. 'You're with me. Now come on, Sam.
It's time we took a proper look at that mammoth of yours...'
Sam Horwitz had never broken into anywhere before, so he felt particularly naughty getting out of a stolen car and then clambering over the hastily repaired service gates of the Zoo.
He'd spent most of his time studying long-dead animals, so the sounds of the Zoo at night were strange and frightening to him. Unlike the rest of New York, the animals were loving how dark the sky was, and how quiet the Zoo had become.
Passing through the happily squawking enclosures, Sam went straight to the mammoth's cage. Once inside the enclosure, Sam felt incredibly sad. The mammoth he had spent months slowly defrosting and caring for was split into two pieces. While the top half still looked like an animal you'd find in a school textbook, the lower half was a cyberpunk fantasy of metal and technology. Sam squatted down and gazed with the precision of a 179
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scientist at the inner workings of the man-made beast. He was puzzled by how they'd managed to make it look and feel so real, and pulled at the join between the metal.
Urrgggh! He stopped. The muscle was real. Some kind of lab-grown synthetic meat, perhaps. It had oozed as he'd pulled it back. Seen from the inside, the fur was obviously fake. Everything about the hairs seemed real, but just under the skin, was hard, flexible armour. The Vykoids had made the mammoth far tougher than any other creature it might meet.
The Doctor finished examining the tusks, and moved on to the eyes.
"They did beautiful work here. A real cornea, plus technology. It's not surprising you didn't spot it was a fake.
Now, Sam, as much as I love your approach, it's time to get brutal. We need to make a bit of room in this thing. Can you smash all of that out?' He was pointing to the gracefully constructed central section of the mammoth.
Sam started carefully dismantling the Vykoid living quarters that took up most of the beast.
'Er, Sam, tick-tock, tick-tock, time is the one thing we don't have a lot of.'
Amy stepped in to help. 'I think what he means is do it more like this...'
Kicking with her boots, Amy smashed a delicate level of the Vykoid ship, sending the hand-crafted 180
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construction skittering to the floor in tiny pieces.
Taking care to leave the controls in the head of the mammoth untouched, Sam set about his work with a vengeance. This was the mammoth that had ruined his career, and he'd suddenly realised he was going to enjoy taking it to pieces.
'Does he do this a lot?' he asked Amy.
'Well, I've never seen him with a mammoth before,' Amy answered.
Sam loved that Amy had such spirit. Before he'd met th e Doctor, Sam had been ready to hide from the world for ever, content never to show his face in public again. But now he was gleefully breaking into the City Zoo and dismantling an alien spaceship. 'I meant, does he just not tell you what he's planning to do,' he clarified.
'I know,' said Amy with a quiet smile.
'I guess he's doing this so the Vykoids can't leave,' Sam suggested.
'Maybe. But it's more likely he doesn't know what he's doing yet. Just has a kind of feeling for something...'
Sam wasn't entirely reassured by this.
His doubts grew even stronger when the Doctor stood back from the mammoth, and asked, 'Enough room for a man inside there yet?'
Sam told him there was, and the Doctor nodded. 'Go on then.'
'Excuse me?'
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'In you get, Sam Horwitz.’
Amy watched Sam carefully. She could see him struggling with his instincts. There was something so compelling about the Doctor, she was fascinated to see the effect he had on people.
'You want to shut me in there, don't you?' Sam guessed.
'No, that would be silly. I just want to see what happens when you get inside.' The Doctor smiled at Sam. 'Of course, now you say it, shutting you in for a bit could help us learn a lot.'
Amy nudged Sam towards the door. 'Come on, in you go, no time like the present.'
'You'll be out soon,' the Doctor assured him. 'In fact, th e sooner you're in, the sooner you'll be out again.'
Unable to resist the lunatic logic, Sam found himself doing something he'd never imagined. Putting his head up into the chest of the mammoth, he hauled his body up on the metal innards, nicking his legs up inside the space he'd smashed out.
Below him, the Doctor and Amy took one side of the mammoth's belly and lifted it high into position. Sam heard a quiet click as it shucked into position. From the outside, he guessed, the Polar Woolly Mammoth once again looked very, very real.
But inside the dark of the mammoth, Sam was growing increasingly angry. The Doctor had promised he'd be out soon, but minutes were
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crawling past. He was hot, he was suffocating, and he was furious that they had tricked him like this. Sam banged on the metal belly, determined to smash his way out.
But nothing would budge. He shouted for them to release him from his curious prison, but he heard no sounds outside.
For all Sam knew, they had left him there at the mercy of the Vykoids. His mind raced at a hundred miles an hour, and his anxiety spun out of control - what if the Vykoids came back and found him in their ship? What would they do when they saw what he'd done to it?
Finally after ten nervous minutes, Sam heard another click, and the belly of the mammoth was disconnected. Sam was so eager to get out, he stamped down on the metal, and fell o
ut in a sprawling mess, landing heavily on the floor of the Zoo enclosure.
The Doctor and Amy were astonished.
'What's got into you?' Amy asked, upset that Sam was so cross at them.
'You left me in there for ages!' Sam screamed, desperate to get his frustration off his chest.
'That's interesting.' The Doctor was talking more to Amy than to Sam. 'It's made of Vykoid technology. So it's immune to the Time Freeze.'
'You were only in there for a minute.’ Amy explained,
'but we're all being slowed down by
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the Vykoids. In there you must have been going at normal speed.'
'So this means we can fight them at their own speed!' Sam exclaimed, realising that his ordeal had not been in vain.
'Yes,' the Doctor agreed. 'But only if we all get inside the mammoth.'
'You cannot be serious?' Amy stared at the Doctor. 'You are, aren't you? I should have known!'
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Chapter
17
Commander Strebbins was having a very bad night.
First, a mammoth had come alive, destroying the Grand Hall of the most famous museum in New York. Then the city had blacked out. Now she was losing units of men, all over the city. Her decision to go onto the streets herself had been popular with her officers. They had been scared by reports of an unseen enemy, and were worried for their colleagues.
But now she was at the helm they felt protected. Patrolling the streets like an American Boadicea, Strebbins had her head poking out of the top of an armoured vehicle, surveying all the damage to the streets as she went.
'Take me to City Hall.’ she hollered down to her 185
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driver. 'I want to see this for myself.'
The convoy rolled along the empty streets like an army conquering a ghost town. Strebbins had never seen the city like this, and she was determined to restore it to its roaring, all-night-long self.
On the lawns of City Hall, Lieutenant Red of the Vykoid army lowered a tiny telescope and smiled with triumph. He'd seen their main prize - the human identified as running the city, Commander Jackie Strebbins.
She was the woman who had put the city under Martial Law. If they took her, they could do what they wanted. Red signalled for his men to spread out across the road. Working at top speed, they unrolled nets across every stretch of sidewalk, and a specialised climber Vykoid ran a cord up to a pivot point on the fifth floor of City Hall. Meanwhile, a team of twenty Vykoids leapt into a human jeep and, with different teams on each pedal, manoeuvred it into position. The trap was set...
Strebbins pulled up in front of City Hall, the car jolting to a stop to avoid a water main bursting a fountain over the sidewalk. On her signal, the officers piled out of the back of the van.
Yaara seemed immediately unnerved. 'Ma'am, there's something on the road.'
Commander Strebbins was already climbing 186
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down from her vantage point. 'I'm sure I've stepped on worse in my time.’ she said drily.
But as her feet hit the ground, they stuck to it firmly. It was as if her shoes were made of Velcro. She tugged and yanked with all her might, but she couldn't move.
'Eyes all round!' Strebbins commanded, determined that she would not be ambushed like this.
Somewhere close by, an engine fired up. A jeep zoomed away from City Hall, pulling with it the cord that gathered up the huge nets that Strebbins and her officers were standing on.
The nets had been designed to subdue a Tyrannosaurus Rex, so Commander Strebbins didn't stand a chance. As either side of the nets pulled up, the entire unit of armed police officers was bundled together. Like rabbits caught in a trap, they were dragged into the air, legs and arms poking through the holes in the net. They were helpless.
Deep underground in a Subway station, General Erik inspected the work of his Vykoid scientists. He'd been forced to adapt his battle plan to the unfortunate mistiming of their arrival, and he was more than happy with what he'd come up with. His original mission had called for very few slave workers to be captured. But if his new plan worked, he'd be bringing home all of New York.
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When they'd discovered that their cryogenic sleep units had malfunctioned and they'd woken up thousands of years too late, he could have abandoned the mission and gone home.
He wouldn't have been blamed. Instead, he'd sent out a team of Vykoids with a mission: find a human and force it to take the mammoth to the greatest city on Earth. He'd faced a threat of mutiny from the disgruntled soldiers eager to go home and a vote of no confidence from the Vykoid Fleet Commanders, but he'd persisted with his plan, and it had worked. However powerful and well defended New Yorkers thought they were, Manhattan was defenceless to a hidden enemy.
He signalled to the Chief Scientist with a brief wave of his hand. 'Please begin.'
In a corner of the Subway station, the Vykoids had assembled something that looked like a shower in a hippie commune. They had constructed a man-sized chamber out of bent copper pipes and elaborate woodwork built into the wall.
Hauling on levers and pulleys, the Vykoids were lifting something large into a standing position in the chamber. On either side of the object, platforms of Vykoids waited to be called into service. Waiting like paratroopers before a drop, they had a hint of bullishness and anxiety, overridden by the sense that this was their moment. After years of waiting inside the mammoth, they were finally getting to put their technology into action. It wasn't how they 188
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had expected to use it but, deep down, they knew it was going to be a lot more fun.
Centuries of being frustrated by their size had led the Vykoid race to become experts in building larger vehicles. But even with the might of technology on their side, the universe still refused to take them seriously and so, with the logic of the conqueror, they had decided to use their machines to subdue anyone that stood taller than them.
Their perfect machines of war had run amok through solar systems and caused chaos across galaxies. All the time, the best brains of the Vykoid race had been working long and hard on a new and better solution to the problem of being tiny in a world of oafs and gangly gargantuans. They had learnt how to control the minds of larger animals, to take charge of their every action.
A bright spotlight blazed onto the object in the Vykoid conversion cubicle. It was Commander Strebbins, fast asleep and tied upright to a wooden scaffold by hundreds of tiny ropes.
Buzzing with adrenalin, Lars, a Vykoid private on his tour of duty, hopped into a minute seat and saluted his commander. The chair was packed with hundreds of controls.
At his left hand were dozens of buttons, and on his right a carved Vykoid joystick.
The scientists around him backed away, and Lars shouted out, 'Ready!'
With a dazzling manoeuvre, Lars was shot into 189
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the air to land squarely on the head of the NYP D
commander.
General Erik watched with satisfaction as Strebbins's left eye opened halfway. Then her right eye jammed wide open in a thousand-yard stare.
Lars radioed down to the command centre. 'I'm having slight ocular control difficulties, sir.'
A Vykoid scientist spoke into a communicator. 'You're doing great, just blink it out, and relax the muscles.'
Two sleepy-eyed blinks later, and Lars was back in business. He attempted a smile, and the Commander grinned dumbly around the room. Her lips trembled, and then opened in ludicrously fast speech. 'Hey, it ain't easy being this big! Talk about dumb animal...'
Down below, the Vykoid scientists were drenched in drops of spittle.
The lead scientist, spoke into the communicator again.
'Hat back on... now.'
With a skilful whirring of pulleys, the NYPD cop baseball cap was delicately lowered into position. A dangling Vy
koid tided up the hair around the cap and gave a thumbs-up signal to down below. Lars was now out of sight, and totally in command of Commander Strebbins.
'I'm good to go.'
Lars marched Strebbins out awkwardly, as the Vykoid scientist called out, 'Next!'
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General Erik and his Vykoids had felt hours pass, stopping for two meal breaks and nine cups of coffee in the process. But in only thirty minutes of New York human time, the Vykoids had upgraded themselves to become controllers of hundreds of fully armed NYPD cops. They had taken the defenders of the city, and made them the attackers.
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Chapter
18
Leaving the Doctor and Sam to rip more parts out of the mammoth, Amy wa ndered out to Fifth Ave nue to watch out for fireworks from Polly Vernon's class. The sun was beginning to rise above Brooklyn, sending fingers of light through the still clear sky.
Then, as the sun rose over the park, something unexpected happened. Another huge pulse of green light spread over the city. Just like before, Amy felt as if every part of her had become weightless, like she'd reached the top of a rollercoaster ride. It passed just as quickly and, all around New York, the power returned.
On the street around her, cables ripped from street lamps sparked on the tarmac, and the windows of the city flashed into light again, the blackness
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banished. It was astounding to Amy how quickly the air filled with chatter as all the televisions and radios that had been left on around the city blared noisily back to life.
Hearing the commotion, the Doctor ran out of the Zoo to where Amy was staring joyfully at the rejuvenated city, hopeful that the threat was over.
'Hey, the lights have come back on!' she cried. 'Is it over?
Maybe we've got the better of them?'
A department store window showed TV screens with news channels scrambling to get their reporters on air. The rolling headlines were calling it the Big Blackout. The sun was rising above Brooklyn, and the dark night was over. All the noises and business of an ordinary New York day began to fill the air, as if the long dark night had been an aberration or a bad dream. New York had survived a night of terror and confusion and it felt like a time to celebrate.