Doctor Who_ Underworld Part 10

That's the whole point of official punishment, eh? Anyway, you can talk, Leela. What about the Test of the Horda?'

Leela nodded. There had been an equally complicated and gruesome ritual on her own planet-though there, at least, the victim did have a chance. The Doctor himself had survived the Test, cutting a thin rope with his cross-bow bolt in time to save himself from dropping into the pit of savage Horda.

She was just about to point this out. when she hit the bottom of the shaft with a gentle b.u.mp.

They had arrived.

Jackson, Orfe, Herrick and Tala were running along the corridor that led to the top of the shaft.

They paused when they saw the yawning chasm, but K9 sailed straight on, shooting over the edge of the shaft to hang suspended in s.p.a.ce. 'Follow, please,' he piped.

'Faster. Imperative move faster!'

The Doctor, Leela and Idas came out of another short tunnel, and found themselves facing a wide chasm, stretching right across their path.

It was spanned by a narrow metal bridge-and on the other side of the bridge was the P7E.

They could see only one side of the s.p.a.ce s.h.i.+p, which appeared to be embedded in solid rock. The bridge led straight to its airlock, which stood invitingly open.

The Doctor strode confidently on to the bridge. More hesitantly, Leela and Idas followed.

They were half-way across when black-hooded Guards appeared in the airlock, covering them with blasters.

They turned. More Guards had taken up positions at the other end of the bridge.

One stood a little apart from the Guards in the airlock, obviously their leader. 'Do not move!' he called. 'You with the weapon, throw it down.'

'Throw it down, Leela,' said the Doctor resignedly.

Leela tossed the weapon over the bridge and it spun down and down till it disappeared from sight.

'Move forward,' ordered the commander. 'Bring them inside.' They shuffled forward until they reached the airlock, where hooded Guards surrounded them.

The commander pulled off his hood. Idas shrank back.

'Rask!'

Rask nodded, peering into his face. 'Idas, is it not?

You're just in time to follow your father. But first you shall see him die. Bring them to the temple!'

The cord was beginning to burn through. Strand after strand had separated, and now only a few thin threads supported the weight of the sword.

There was a stir as the three prisoners were thrust into the room. Ankh said angrily, 'What is the meaning of this interruption, Rask?'

'I have captured the aliens, Master, and the traitor, Idas!'

Puzzled, Ankh looked to his senior for guidance. Lakh waved his hand, and a Guard with a long pole moved the lamp away from beneath the cord, holding it to one side.

'Bring them forward,' ordered Ankh.

The captives were thrust forward. Lakh studied them.

'Aliens and traitors! They too will answer the Question of the Sword. Let the ceremony continue!

The Guard released the lamp, allowing it to fall back into place. The cord was very thin now-any moment the last few strands would be snapped by the weight of the sword. They began to unravel...

'No!' screamed Idas. With one frantic leap, he sprang from the group of prisoners and shoved at Idmon's trolley-just as the sword flashed down. It missed Idmon's body by inches, glanced off the edge of the trolley and clattered to the floor.

There was a gasp of horror at this sacrilege. For a moment no one moved-except the Doctor. He whirled round, knocked down the nearest Guard, s.n.a.t.c.hed the man's blaster and tossed it to Leela. 'Out!' he roared.

'Everybody outside! If any of you want to be free-come with us!'

'Kill them!' screamed Ankh. 'Kill them all!'

A Guard raised his blaster; Leela promptly shot him down.

There was instant pandemonium, terrified slaves milling about the temple in their rush to get clear of the blaster fire. A few of the bolder ones ran forward to follow the Doctor. He s.n.a.t.c.hed up the sword, cut Idmon free of the trolley and pulled him to his feet.

He thrust him towards Leela, who began bustling everyone towards the door. 'Move! Come on, move!' she shouted. 'Come with us, and fight for your freedom!'

'Get them all into the tunnels, Idas,' shouted the Doctor. 'We'll never beat them here!'

The air was full of shouts, screams and the whine of blasters. There was so much noise and confusion now, with slaves running in all directions, that the Guards had to aim their fire carefully for fear of hitting each other or, worse still, of damaging some part of the Oracle.

The Doctor and Leela had no such problem. Leela fired her blaster, the Doctor waved his sword menacingly.

Guards and slaves alike gave way before them. In a tightly-packed group, the Doctor and Leela and Idas and Idmon thrust their way towards the door, followed by a few rebel slaves.

'Kill them!' screamed Ankh again. 'Kill them-kill them all!'

Rask, more practically, was speaking into his communicator. 'Gate patrol! There's a breakout. Rebel slaves. Stop them!'

Jackson and his crew followed K9 out of the anti-gray shaft, along the corridor-and found themselves facing the P7E for which they had been searching so long.

For a moment they gazed in awed silence. Then they heard the sounds of screaming and the sizzle of blaster fire coming from the s.h.i.+p.

'There's a battle!' yelled Herrick joyfully, and ran for the bridge.

The Doctor's little group ran down the corridor to the airlock-straight into the advancing gate patrol. Leela drove them back with a barrage of blaster-fire, then swung round and aimed more blasts at the pursuing Guards.

'They've got us on both sides, Doctor,' she shouted.

'We could try rus.h.i.+ng them,' suggested Idas. 'We must do something!'

'Hmm,' said the Doctor thoughtfully. He was sure there must be a solution, but for the moment he couldn't seem to think of it.

Suddenly they heard the distinctive roar of a s.h.i.+eld gun.

Herrick shot down the corridor, and opened fire on the gate patrol. The Guards swung round to deal with the new attacker-and Leela blasted them again.

Now it was the gate patrol who were caught in a crossfire, and they broke and scattered.

Led by Leela and Herrick, the Doctor's party dashed down the corridor and into the airlock. Leela and Herrick stood back to let them through, and then defended their rear with covering fire. Step by step, they fell back until they were on the bridge-all except Herrick, who stayed in position, covering the entrance to the airlock, protecting their retreat.

When everyone was across the bridge, Jackson shouted, 'Herrick! They're all across-come on!'

Herrick was filled with the joy of battle, the kind of berserk bloodl.u.s.t that made the old Vikings fight till they died beneath a heap of their foes. A Guard edged too far forward in the airlock, and Herrick picked him off.

Without looking round he yelled, 'I've waited a long time for this, and I'm not missing it now. Go back, Captain.

Goodbye and good luck!'

'Herrick, I order you-' shouted Jackson.

Herrick wasn't listening. Crouched down on one knee so as to get maximum cover from his s.h.i.+eld gun, he was methodically raking the airlock with blaster fire. Jackson hesitated. Then with a yell of, 'Goodbye, Herrick!' he ran after the others.

Herrick went on fighting till he was over-run. A dozen Guards rushed him from the airlock doorway, urged on from behind by a furious Rask. The first half-dozen died beneath his fire but the rest leaped over the bodies of their fellows and bore him to the ground. The b.u.t.t of a blaster thudded against his head.

When the survivors sorted themselves out, Herrick lay like a Viking warrior, surrounded by a ring of dead enemies.

Rask came out of the airlock, and stood looking down at Herrick's body. He jabbed it in the ribs with his boot, and Herrick moaned and stirred.

Rask smiled. 'Good. Not dead-yet! Bring him inside for questioning!'

Chapter Eleven.

The Crusher In a disused side tunnel, an old hiding place where slaves met for hopeless talk of rebellion, the Doctor and his party were pausing to rest and plan. They had already exchanged stories with Jackson and his crew.

A small group of rebellious slaves had followed them from the P7E. The Doctor was dressing the wounds of their new allies with supplies from the medikits the Minyans carried in their belts. Leela was helping him. The slaves had suffered most in the battle. They had no means of defending themselves, and the Guards had not hesitated to fire whenever they got a clear shot at the crowd.

Leela sprayed a layer of plasti-skin on to the arm of a slave girl called Naia. 'And life has always been like this for your people?'

We are born, live and die in the tunnels,' said Naia simply. 'There was nothing else-until now. Nothing but the Quota.'

'The Quota?'

Naia picked up a fragment of rock, then threw it to the ground. ' This! This! Every day we must carve out so much rock for the Crusher to feed into the Citadel.' Every day we must carve out so much rock for the Crusher to feed into the Citadel.'

'Why do they need rock?'

'For energy, for fuel, for reprocessing into food. So we can go on working, to get more rock-unless our lives are ended by a Skyfall.' She laughed bitterly. 'Oh, they say they're accidents, but they're not, not all of them. They use them to keep our numbers down. Just enough of us survive to do the work.'

At the end of the tunnel, Idas was staring longingly at Jackson's s.h.i.+eld gun. 'If only we had more of these...'

Jackson shrugged. 'Even if we had, we can't use the shaft again. They'd be ready for us. They'd wipe us out before we got over the bridge. Is there any other route into the s.h.i.+p?'

Idas shook his head despairingly. 'None that I know of...'

Leela moved over to the Doctor. 'Doctor, Naia here says they eat rock!'

The Doctor nodded. 'On a new planet like this, who knows what's possible? There could well be nutrients in the rock, and if they were processed properly...' He grinned. 'Did I ever tell you about the time I went to Blackpool? Everyone eats rock there!'

'Doctor, be serious.'

The Doctor was thinking aloud. 'If they process rock, they must take it into the s.h.i.+p somewhere, mustn't they?'

'Through the Crusher,' said Leela. 'That's what Naia said, anyway.'

'Through the Crusher and into the s.h.i.+p.' The Doctor looked up. 'There is another way in, there has to be!'

Suddenly he changed the subject, following a random thought. 'Why do you think Idas calls the tunnel system the Tree of Life, Leela?'

'Why shouldn't he? No, wait a minute... Idas has never seen a tree, has he? So why would he call it one?'

'The Tree of Life,' said the Doctor. 'The Race Bank!

The gift of immortality, on the Tree of Life... guarded by the dragon!'

'Surely, Doctor, all this is just a myth, an old story?'

'Ah, but old myths have a grain of truth in them-if you know where to look. Do you know, Leela, everyone here except us comes from the same racial stock as Jackson and his crew?'

'The same stock?'

'How do you think they got here, in the middle of a planet? Seers, Guards; Trogs-they're all descendants of the people who came here on the P7E. Jackson is probably Idas's great-great-great-great-great-grandfather a few thousand times over! '