Doctor Who_ Father Time Part 15

'Eh?' said Barry, thoroughly confused.

'Barry Castle, Mr Gibson; Mr Gibson, Barry Castle. Your wife ran over a UFO spotter who was running away from this chap.'

'He's a robot.'

The Doctor had a big grin on his face. 'Well, yes.'

Mr Dawkins looked over at his wife, although he wasn't really Mr Dawkins, and they weren't married.

Kim smiled at him, an encouraging smile, one to disguise what they both knew she was really thinking. She had been so brave.

Mr Dawkins laid the time detector down on the table. 'I didn't check. For the first week in ten years, I didn't check.'

'It's not your fault,' Kim told him.

'A time corridor. Four nanoseconds' duration, ten thousand miles directly above our heads. It opened on Sat.u.r.day. A saucer came through it. A small one, but...'

He couldn't see Miranda. She was in the front room, drinking her cocoa.

'I'll get a sleeping draught ready,' Kim said. 'Miranda will sleep through this, whatever.' She squeezed his arm. 'We knew this could happen. We've done what we could for her. This isn't over yet.'

He nodded, and started to head for the garage.

Debbie couldn't move. It felt as if her feet had got stuck in the ice.

The woman girl Barry had had with him didn't have the same problem. She was already halfway to her Mini.

The robot towered over them all. It was enormous. It looked vicious and practical, the way military equipment often did. It looked like a tank or an armoured car.

'Doctor?' it asked. 'You don't recognise me?'

The Doctor shook his head. 'Does everyone in the universe know me?' he asked, sounding more than a little exasperated.

'Don't you remember remember?' Debbie hissed.

The robot made a noise somewhere between a growl and an engine revving. 'You don't, do you? You merely add insult to injury.'

The Doctor stepped forward, holding his hands out in a conciliatory gesture. 'If I've ever done anything to insult you, then I '

'Insult me!' the robot bellowed. 'You destroyed my world.'

The Doctor stopped in his tracks.

'You let my palace fall, killing my queen.' The robot hesitated, and there was a burst of electronic squealing. 'The most exquisite mechanism in the cosmos. Helpless, I watched my cities burn, one after the other. All because of you.'

The Doctor hesitated. 'Me?'

The robot raised its arm, and some sort of weapon popped from a compartment on its wrist.

Debbie grabbed his sleeve. 'Come on!'

The Doctor was jerked from his reverie.

'Run!' Debbie told him.

The Doctor was heading for the Cortina.

'Here!' Barry objected. 'What are you doing?'

The Doctor was in the car, and he'd somehow got the engine going without the key.

Debbie pulled open the pa.s.senger door and got in beside him.

'Debbie, this isn't your fight,' the Doctor insisted.

Barry had got into the back. 'It's my car,' Barry grunted. 'Drive it carefully.'

The Doctor slammed his foot down, and the Cortina pitched forwards with a squeal of tyres.

Mr Dawkins was ready for them as they came.

Hoverdiscs, flying low over the houses, barely high enough to clear the telephone lines. He thought it would be Zevron who would come for him, and he was right. Behind him, as ever, was his Deputy, Sallak.

Dawkins's first shot went clean between them, off into the night. Both discs swerved to avoid it, and shot over his house without getting in an attack.

He heard the car start and opened up the garage door with one hand, keeping a firm grip on the neutron rifle with the other. The door was stiff, but swung up. Kim was in the car, ready to go.

Faster than he'd been expecting, the Deputy appeared above him, swooping low, firing a machine pistol, blowing chips from his driveway. Dawkins stood his ground, as the cold air gusted past him, but his shot went wide, blasting a hole in the roof of his house, Prefect Zevron had always been a little slower. As his disc appeared over the rooftop, Dawkins got a shot in. It hit the disc, not the man, but it was enough. The disc was knocked off course, and Zevron tumbled off, down the roof, and into a pile of snow in the front garden. One more shot disintegrated the disc before it could hit anything else.

There wasn't any more time. Dawkins threw the garage door open. His wife drove the car out. Miranda slept under a blanket on the back seat. He tried to get in, but the pa.s.senger door was locked.

His wife leaned over, fumbled for the lock.

He could hear the Deputy's hoverdisc coming back towards him. 'Go!' he shouted. The Talbot surged down the drive and smacked into the gate, throwing it open. It was already through, turning on to the road.

The Prefect was on his feet, but too dazed to do anything about the car's escape.

Dawkins turned to face the hoverdisc.

It was coming for him at sixty miles an hour.

The Deputy had a sword in his hand, held horizontal at his waist. His eyes were cold, grey, full of malice.

The blade was coming straight for Dawkins, and there was nothing he could do.

Chapter Nine.

The Last Battle The Doctor wasn't stopping at the junctions. The car sped along the hillside path, pa.s.sed s...o...b..und fields and dark woodland.

'We have to get to the Dawkinses' house.'

Helpless, Barry looked out of the back window. The robot was chasing them, catching them up with each step. It had one arm raised, and there was a rocket launcher on its wrist. It flashed, and he actually saw the missile heading straight for them. But the Doctor put on another burst of speed, and accelerated away. The blast lifted up the back of the car for a moment. When they'd slammed back down, Barry turned back to check the speedo. One hundred and twenty miles an hour. He could hear the engine straining.

'What have the Dawkinses got to do with anything?' Barry asked. He'd met John Dawkins once he'd come round to fix their wiring.

His wife looked over her shoulder at him. 'They're here to kill Miranda Dawkins.'

'What? A kid? A little girl?'

'A ten-yearold girl,' Deborah confirmed. 'There are two men those two that you saw flying past.'

'They won't stop until they've killed her,' the Doctor said, almost matter-offactly.

'Then we go there and we stop them,' Barry told them. 'That's what we do.'

'We have to keep that robot away from populated areas,' the Doctor said.

'No,' said Barry 'We save the girl.'

His wife gave a laugh, her looking-downat-him laugh. 'Aren't you even going to ask who they are?'

Barry smiled back. 'No. I don't care who they are. I just want to stop them killing a little girl. If you've chickened out, you take me there, and I'll stop them.'

He could see the Doctor looking at him in the rear-view mirror.

'You're right,' the Doctor said, turning the car around.

The road ahead of them exploded in a cloud of black rubble. The Doctor yanked the steering wheel to the right, swerving to avoid it, then pulled the car left.

'Excuse me,' the Doctor called, as the Cortina swerved past the robot.

Deborah glanced back. 'You'll damage the engine,' she squealed.

'So will Herbie there,' Barry reminded her, jabbing a thumb over his shoulder.

The Doctor threw the car around a corner, making the tyres smoke. Out of the corner of his eye, Barry saw the robot carry on the way they'd been going, unable to fight its own momentum. It used its hand to brake, ploughing a swathe from the tarmac. The Doctor had bought them a few seconds.

'You're a good driver.'

'Thanks.' There was a straight stretch of road. They were heading out of town. 'I'm still going the right way?'

Deborah nodded. 'Keep on this road,' she told him.

'Good. Yes.'

The road here wound around the hill. There were a lot of blind bends, a lot of corners where there was nothing but a crash barrier between you and a one-hundredfoot drop. People who lived in Greyfrith could always tell if they were behind someone who wasn't from the village everyone else took them nice and slowly.

But not even Barry would drive as fast around these corners as the Doctor did.

The back window was suddenly full of bright white light.

He looked back. The robot had become a Volkswagen again, and was haring towards them, travelling even faster than the Doctor could get the Cortina to go. It was half a dozen car lengths away now.

The Doctor was biting his lip, one hand slapping against the steering wheel.

'It's going to catch us,' Deborah warned.

He nodded, then slammed the brakes on, just as they reached a bend.

The robot didn't have time to stop it carried on, finding itself tearing through the crash barriers. Somehow, it managed to transform to its original form in midair, but was still unable to stop itself falling.

The Doctor drove forward, parking right at the lip of the drop. Together the three of them watched the robot as it crashed down the hillside, tumbling over itself, limbs flailing as they tried to find some purchase. But its weight was just too much, and it crushed everything in its path. Barry saw it grab at a tree, only to pull it out at the roots. It rolled through a stone wall. The noise was like a train crash.

Their car started reversing, and the burning robot disappeared from sight. Barry looked ahead at the Doctor, who was looking over his shoulder, steering the car back as far as it would go.

'We've damaged it,' the Doctor said. 'But we haven't destroyed it.'

He closed his eyes, seemed to be counting under his breath. 'Get out of the car,' the Doctor told them.

'Eh?'

'Out! Both of you.'

Barry and his wife found themselves getting out. 'Aren't you coming?' Deborah asked as she was about to close the pa.s.senger door.

The Doctor shook his head.

Barry stepped forward. 'Hang on, what are you planning?

The robot began rising over the edge of the hill. First its head, then its torso. One of its eyes was smashed, and it was badly dented and scratched. It looked angry.

Barry stood his ground, waited for the robot to come to him.

The Cortina's tyres started squealing, then it leapt forwards, heading straight towards the gap in the crash barriers and the robot. Barry was frozen to the spot, and saw it all happen.

The robot raised an arm, but the missile launcher wasn't there, it must have been broken off in the fall. It hesitated, momentarily surprised by the exposed wires and cables on its wrist.