Doctor Who_ Underworld Part 1

DOCTOR WHO.

AND THE UNDERWORLD.

by TERRANCE d.i.c.kS.

Prologue.

Once there were the Minyans.

A humanoid race on an Earth-like planet in a galaxy on the far side of the Universe.

Like Man, the Minyans learned the use of tools and weapons. Like Man, they changed from hunters to farmers, built villages, banded into tribes, threw up leaders and wise men. They started the long hard climb that leads all intelligent life-forms to civilisation, technology, and at last to the stars.

On a planet called Gallifrey there were the Time Lords, a people far advanced in power and wisdom. They had already conquered Time and s.p.a.ce, and were exploring the galaxies around them.

They landed on Minyos and studied the planet and its people. With the best possible intentions, they decided to play G.o.d.

The results were catastrophic.

Not at first, of course. The Time Lords made themselves known to the Minyans, who promptly began to wors.h.i.+p them. The kindly s.p.a.ce G.o.ds began conferring the benefits of science upon them. They taught them the beginnings of medicine, introduced the wheel, the plough, steam-power, the internal combustion engine. They altered the structure of Minyan society to accelerate their development.

The Minyans were a bright, aggressive race. They learned their new lessons with astonis.h.i.+ng speed. In a few short generations they raced up the ladder of progress until they reached the level of atomic-powered civilisation. Soon they had mastered s.p.a.ce flight and began to explore the planets around them.

Their teachers watched the Minyans' progress with self-satisfied approval. They even pa.s.sed on the precious secret of bodily regeneration, so that selected astronauts could make the long voyages between the stars.

All in all, the Time Lords thought their experiments a great success-until Minyan mobs surrounded their bases and began killing Time Lords.

Benevolent dictators, wors.h.i.+pped as G.o.ds, the Time Lords had ruled Minyos for hundreds of years. What they failed to realise was that for every Minyan who wors.h.i.+pped them, there were a dozen who feared and hated them. A resistance movement had begun, with the slogan, 'Free Minyos!' Over the generations it grew and grew, until one day it erupted in revolution. All over the planet, Minyans appeared at Time Lord bases, with the new s.h.i.+eld guns in their hands.

So sudden and savage was the attack that most of the Time Lords on the planet were killed. Only a handful escaped to Gallifrey where the High Council met for an agonised post-mortem.

It is greatly to the credit of the Time Lords that there was never any question of revenge. Even then, they had powers at their disposal which could have destroyed the planet with ease. But they were a moral race, and they realised that the catastrophe was largely of their own making. They had learned a bitter and painful lesson.

'Besides,' said the President of the Council sadly, 'it is neither fitting nor necessary that we should destroy the Minyans. In the fullness of time, they will surely destroy themselves.'

The prophecy was very soon fulfilled. After the expulsion of the Time Lords, the Minyans began warring amongst themselves. Thanks to the Time Lords, the wars were fought not with swords and spears but with atomic missiles.

They destroyed their planet.

One black day a junior Tirne Lord on scanning duty in the Temporal Control Room made a routine check on Minyos and found it no longer existed. It had been fragmented by a series of colossal atomic explosions. A scattering of radioactive asteroids occupied the s.p.a.ce where once there had been a world.

The effect on the Time Lords was shattering. With the death of a planet on their consciences, they developed a policy of non-intervention. Their curiosity was too great to confine themselves to Gallifrey. They would continue their quest for knowledge, continue to study the inhabited planets of the Universe. But in future they would only observe and record. They would never, never interfere.

(Non-intervention remained official Time Lord policy, though later it was modified under the influence of a renegade Time Lord known as the Doctor.) But Minyos was not dead, not completely. In the years before the holocaust, a few far-sighted Minyans had sought means of escaping the coming disaster. They had developed a mind-pacifier, though too late to end the wars.

They had sent out hastily constructed scout s.h.i.+ps, and had actually found a habitable world in a solar system close to their own. They established a tiny colony on this world, which they had christened Minyos II. They had gathered the genetic heritage of Minyos into a Race Bank, and despatched it to Minyos II in a s.p.a.ce s.h.i.+p called the P7E.

The P7E was never to reach Minyos II. A failure in its guidance systems sent it far off course. It vanished, somewhere in the colossal turbulence at the edge of creation. Faint signals were picked up from its automatic distress beacon. They faded and died.

The scientists of Minyos staked everything on one last gamble. Straining the resources of their dying planet, they built an Interstellar Patrol Vessel, a ma.s.sively powerful craft designed for an eternal voyage. They equipped it with perpetual energy-generators, with re-cycling and regeneration equipment, chose the finest and most dedicated astronauts on Minyos for its crew.

During the final days of Minyos. the Interstellar Patrol Vessel blasted off on its vital mission to find the lost P7E and bring the Race Bank safely to Minyos II.

Soon after the s.h.i.+p blasted off, the planet blasted itself from existence.

In the endless years that followed the little colony on Minyos II waited for a s.h.i.+p that never came. With the Race Bank, it could create a new Minyan race, people the planet and re-create the world that had been destroyed. Without it, it could do little more than survive.

The Interstellar Patrol Vessel roamed the turbulent frontiers of creation, endlessly searching for the s.h.i.+p that held the survival of the Minyan race.

A hundred thousand years went by.

Then one day, the Minyans crossed the path of the Time Lords once again. Or rather, that of one particular Time Lord.

A renegade known as the Doctor...

Chapter One.

The Nebula It was the edge of creation.

Even the expanding Universe must have a frontier, and this was it, An area of incredible turbulence, where stars, planets, whole galaxies flamed into existence in the twinkling of a cosmic eye.

Through this howling chaos there moved a mystery. It was small and square and blue with a flas.h.i.+ng light on top.

Strange symbols were written above the door. Two words in one of the languages of an immeasurably distant planet called Earth-'Police Box'.

The police box was not a police box at all, but a s.p.a.ce/time craft called the TARDIS. Inside its incredibly large control room was a girl. She was tall and strong: she wore a brief animal-skin costume and a heavy fighting knife.

The girl's name was Leela, and she was the companion of a traveller in Time and s.p.a.ce known as the Doctor.

Leela had grown up in a tribe that lived by perpetual warfare. She joined the Doctor in search of excitement, and found herself involved in a series of adventures more terrifying than she could ever have imagined.

Leela was quick-witted and resourceful, and she had soon adapted herself to her new life. But some things still baffled her. One of them was the TARDIS itself.

To begin with, there was its shape. The Doctor had explained that it looked like something called a 'police box'. As far as Leela could understand, this was a device for summoning the city guards in a town called London, on the planet Earth.

(She had once visited London with the Doctor, but there had been no other police boxes about. The Doctor explained they hadn't been invented yet.) The TARDIS was shaped like a police box because something called the 'chameleon mechanism' had got stuck. It was supposed to enable the TARDIS to blend with its surroundings. But now it was jammed, so the TARDIS remained in the shape of a police box on planets where police boxes, policemen, or even human beings were completely unknown.

Then there was its size. From the outside it was only big enough to hold one, or at most two people. Yet inside it held not only the control room in which she was now standing, but an apparently infinite number of rooms, pa.s.sages, chambers, corridors of every shape and size.

The heart of the TARDIS was the many-sided central control console which Leela was now regarding nervously.

The Doctor habitually spoke to the TARDIS as if it were alive, chatting to it, reproving it, giving it the occasional pat on the back. Leela had become convinced that the TARDIS was was alive. She treated it like a minor G.o.d, to be flattered and cajoled. She would have garlanded the console with flowers and offered the occasional sacrifice if the Doctor had let her. What worried Leela at the moment was the fact that the centre column of the console had stopped moving up and down, which meant that the TARDIS had stopped. alive. She treated it like a minor G.o.d, to be flattered and cajoled. She would have garlanded the console with flowers and offered the occasional sacrifice if the Doctor had let her. What worried Leela at the moment was the fact that the centre column of the console had stopped moving up and down, which meant that the TARDIS had stopped.

Had the Doctor, mysteriously absent in some other part of the s.h.i.+p, ordered the TARDIS to stop? Had it decided to stop of its own accord? Or had it broken down in some way?

At Leela's feet there was a kind of robot dog, with squared-off body and head, antennae for ears and tail, It was called K9.

K9 looked like a dog, and sometimes even acted like one, but in reality he was a complex and sophisticated computer, built by a s.p.a.ce-travelling scientist who missed the dog he'd left behind on Earth. K9 was self-powered, independently mobile, and had built-in offensive capabilities-in other words, a blaster in his nose.

Leela said, 'K9, we've stopped!'

K9 c.o.c.ked his metal head in a curiously dog-like fas.h.i.+on. 'Affirmative!'

'We've stopped dead!'

'Negative dead.' Like all computers, K9 had a very literal mind.

The Doctor marched into the control room. He was wearing a painter's smock, a floppy beret, and carrying an enormous brush.

'What on Earth have you been doing, Doctor?'

'Decorating,' said the Doctor with dignity.

'I thought the TARDIS could maintain itself?'

'Well, so she can, after a fas.h.i.+on. Can't always trust her taste though. You remember I didn't like the way she did the spare control room, all that white?'

Leela nodded.

'Well, when I told her, she said I was welcome to try and do better myself. So I am!' The Doctor flourished his paintbrush, sending drips of blue paint everywhere.

'Rather a pleasing shade of aquamarine, don't you think?'

'Doctor, we've stopped. Nothing's gone wrong, has it?'

The Doctor wandered over to the console. 'Not so far, no.'

'Then why are we not going anywhere?'

The Doctor touched a control and a wall-panel slid back to reveal a monitor screen. It was blank. The Doctor frowned and checked the controls again. 'That's intensely interesting! Do you realise, Leela, we've stopped because there's nowhere to go? As far as I can make out, we're on the edge of the cosmos, the very frontiers of creation, the boundary between is is and and isn't isn't. Or isn't yet, anyway. Don't you think that's interesting?'

'Well, I suppose so...'

'What?' The Doctor peered into the blackness on the screen. 'I feel just like a goldfish, looking out into a new world!'

'But it's just black nothing out there. We're stuck here on our own, and there's just-nothing!'

From somewhere near ground level there came an electronic voice. 'We are not alone!'

The Doctor stared at Leela in indignation. 'Nothing?

What do you mean, nothing?'

'Nothing!' said Leela defiantly.

'But it's a magnificent nothingness! Do you realise, at any minute, any second, a whole new world could be born out there, and we'd be the first-'

K9 piped up again. 'We are not the first!'

The Doctor ignored him. '-the first intelligent-' he glanced at Leela, 'well, semi-intelligent beings to witness the spectacle.'

'We are not alone!'

'What does he mean, not alone?' demanded the Doctor irritably.

'I don't know!'

K9 was happy to explain. 'We are not the first. We are not alone! ' He glided closer. 'Receptors indicate pulsing.

Pulsing characteristic of ion drive system. The inference would be: s.p.a.cecraft in vicinity.'

'Where?'

K9 reeled off a string of spatial co-ordinates. 'Thirty-four, seven, zero, one, seventeen, fifty, zero, five...'

The Doctor hurried to the console. 'Beyond visual range. Might get it on audio.' He reached for the audio-scanner controls and began tracking them delicately to and fro. Suddenly a faint but regular electronic pulsing came from the speaker. 'Listen, Leela, listen... Ion drive or I'm a budgie's cousin!'

'Affirmative, ion drive,' said K9 importantly. 'Doctor's family grouping, negative.'

'Oh, shut up, K9!'

'Doctor! ' said Leela reproachfully.

'I can tell him to shut up if I want to...'