Doctor Who - Downtime Part 31

There was a crack of electricity that threw her back in her chair. The screen flared white and went dead.

Kate sat in the dark alone, squeezing her scorched fingers.

A sudden fresh breeze from the door stirred the cobwebs. The apparition of Danny had blown away.

The lift doors on Floor Five cranked themselves open.

The Chillys fell back.

With a roar of rage, the released Yeti emerged and strode forward in search of its prey.

29.

Call in the Cavalry he Brigadier was drowning on dry land. Waves of hands T smothered him, dragged and pinioned him against a stack of dusty chairs in the corner of the stairwell.

A face swam into view. A clean-cut youth with empty eyes like blue ice. Lethbridge-Stewart was sure the Chilly had been one of his pupils. It was revenge at last for all the boring lessons and preps and detentions he had inflicted. The young man impa.s.sively raised a pair of headphones. They emitted the relentless bleep of the silver sphere.

'Acolytes!'

A voice echoed down the concrete stairwell. The Chillys faltered. An old man, leaning heavily on a stick, stood on the steps above them.

'You know me. Now stand away!'

Travers, thought the Brigadier.

Surely not. Professor Edward Travers had died years ago.

The old man waved his stick angrily. 'Release him! Let him go free!' He began to edge painfully down the stairs. The woman went to his a.s.sistance, taking his arm proudly in hers.

It was Travers, the Brigadier was sure of it. And the old fellow was no zombie either. Today everything that he'd reckoned dead and buried was up and walking as if it was some sort of medieval judgement day.

The Chillys were starting to back slowly off. Harrods pulled free of his captors and was immediately at the Brigadier's side.

The woman, now he could see her properly, wasn't the apparition he'd dreamed about at all. Her modern executive clothes were at odds with the Victorian ghost that haunted him. Yet at a distance, in the gloom, the likeness had been uncanny.

The fire door all but crashed off its hinges. The Yeti stormed into the area with a ma.s.sive roar. The stack of chairs collapsed across the floor. The Chillys fell back as the Yeti launched straight at the Brigadier.

'Sir!' Harrods grabbed up the discarded fire-extinguisher and swung it at the monster.

The weapon was torn out of his hands and tossed away.

The Yeti seized Harrods' head between its claws. As his body was dragged to the floor, they heard his skull splinter.

The Yeti let the little man's body drop onto the concrete with a smack. It rounded on the others and faced the woman who was nearest. She held its gaze for a moment that almost seemed like a recognition. The Yeti growled softly as it swayed in front of her.

Travers stumbled past, determinedly heading for the door.

'Must shut down the mainframe,' he muttered. 'Professor!'

shouted the woman.

The Yeti flung an arm wide and knocked the old man to the floor. It began to advance on the Brigadier.

He grabbed up a chair and, holding it by its back, tried to fend the brute off lion-tamer style.

The Yeti seized the legs and tore the chair apart like matchwood.

'Leave him alone!' the woman yelled.

The Chillys suddenly pincered in from the sides and held the Brigadier, offering him to the monster.

The Yeti loomed over its victim. One claw lunged out and clamped around the back of the Brigadier's neck.

'All right. All right, I was coming anyway,' he choked.

Like a march to the scaffold, he thought, as the monster drove him forward. He saw that the woman was also being held tightly, but there was no sign at all of the ancient Professor Travers.

The Yeti led its prisoner back towards the lift, followed by its entourage of Chillys.

In the distance, the Brigadier could hear the sound of claxons.

Through the surveillance systems, the Intelligence saw the convoy approaching the campus. This was the threat it had antic.i.p.ated.

Sixteen silver sphere control units activated and plunged into the chests of the Chillys a.s.signed as hosts. A frenzied chorus of staccato bleeping. Chairs clattered to the floor of the computer room. Figures reeled and tore at the web that blanketed them. Nano-instructions from the control spheres induced immediate atomic restructuring and multiplication.

Shapes rose ma.s.sively in the gloom. Sixteen pairs of burning red eyes. A clamour of roaring as the new Yeti quit the room.

The remaining Chillys sat in pa.s.sive contemplation of the patterns of web on their terminal screens.

The convoy drew up on the outer perimeter road of the university. Brigadier Crichton, not a happy man, surveyed his meagre squad of twenty as they piled out of the UNIT jeeps.

He'd taken every available soldier he could find, leaving UNIT HQ on skeleton staff. They were highly skilled soldiers, trained to deploy cutting edge weaponry gadgets that the regular forces would pay their eye teeth to be able to afford.

Except that computer technology had outsmarted them. It was suddenly too dangerous. UNIT was back to basics, issued with entirely manually operated guns. When they'd broken them out of store, the men had joked about The Antiques Roadshow The Antiques Roadshow and about not knowing which way round to hold the weapons. and about not knowing which way round to hold the weapons.

Crichton was taking no chances. He was out on a limb. One time or another they'd all trained with these guns, but it was just training, not put into practice. He positioned his men to cover the front of the main block and tried to call his adjutant on an ancient walkie-talkie.

There was no response from her.

'Captain Bambera? Do you read me? Please respond.'

The radio buzzed with a random electronic jamming pattern. It pulsed in time with the beams of light shooting up from the New World buildings.

The sky overhead was cut off. The web canopy was extending in all directions out towards the horizon, throwing out fingers like frost flowers through the atmosphere. Web strands were drizzling down, catching in the trees like spanish moss. Increasingly frustrated, Crichton decided to take the bull by the horns.

'Sergeant Beagles. Six-man escort now. I'm going up to knock on the front door.'

His entourage set off across the lawns, heading towards the gla.s.s-fronted reception area. As he reached the concourse, a door in one of the side buildings opened. A figure in frill uniform lurched out.

'Not that way, Brigadier,' rasped Captain Cavendish. His voice was a tortured parody of itself. His face had become a mask behind which his cold-blooded eyes darted like a reptile's.

Not that way, Brigadier... Brigadier... Brigadier... echoed the campus PA system. echoed the campus PA system.

Crichton ignored the mockery from all around him. He already had the young man in his sights. 'You are under arrest, Cavendish. Where's that file you stole?'

The PA system roared with cold laughter, throwing its voice from one speaker to another across the campus. Finally the laugh settled in Cavendish's throat. He moved like a puppet, his uncoordinated limbs jerking to the reflexes of an outside force.

The voice said, 'Your Captain is no longer answerable to you.'

'Who are you?' called Brigadier Crichton.

'I am many!'

Many! Many! Many!

Cavendish's arm rose and indicated the door leading into the building. 'Come inside and see for yourself.'

Crichton glanced briefly round at his men. 'No thanks. I prefer to talk out here.'

'Sir,' whispered the corporal next to Crichton. He nodded with his eyes to the parkland beyond the administration block.

Several objects were moving through the trees large shapes striding out of the shrubbery about to cut off Crichton's group from the rest of the squad.

'Yeti!' shouted Crichton.

Three more of the bearlike creatures ducked out through the doorway behind Cavendish.

Crichton's practised eye took in their situation. Cavendish, or whatever was controlling Cavendish, had hoped to get them surrounded where they stood. Lawns by their nature afforded little cover. 'Pull back and re-form!' he yelled and brought up the rear as the group withdrew to the 'safe' position of a nearby herbaceous border.

Captain Cavendish stood back as the Yeti started to advance.

Brigadier Crichton crouched in the flowerbed, his boots sinking into the muddy topsoil. The men round him were tense, fingering the triggers of their automatic rifles.

'Call this a rapid-reaction force?' he muttered. 'Where the h.e.l.l's Bambera with that back-up?'

Sarah had left her Spitfire further along the road, out of sight of the convoy. Its windscreen wipers were clogged with web.

She had watched Crichton's confrontation with the young officer from a safe distance behind a laurel bush.

Twigs cracked. She ducked into the foliage. Two furry shapes as big as grizzly bears lumbered past no more than twelve feet from her. They walked upright with a rolling gait, their forepaws clawing the air.

Yeti, she thought, and tried not to think too much of Charlie Bryce. Somehow these hulking creatures didn't look like the shy, endangered species that the doc.u.mentaries always made them out to be. Or like fluffy bundles that bit prime ministers.

They also emitted a persistent high-pitched bleeping signal.

She saw Crichton's group start to retreat. More of the huge brutes were emerging from the trees on the far side of the lawns. And still more from the building.

Blue UN berets were visible ranged across the parkland.

Battle lines were being drawn up. Sarah ran through the layout of the campus in her mind. She heard the first rapid gunshots as she skirted the bushes and headed for the administration block.

There was web on the inside of the reception windows. She cautiously pushed open the door and went inside. The squeaky-clean place she had visited only yesterday had changed beyond belief. The air was stale and clogged.

Something unearthly was in residence here. She had sensed it on her first visit, but it was no longer just an uncomfortable gut feeling. It had erupted into visible form, filling the place with an evil nebulous gossamer. She immediately thought of spiders and parlours and giant versions of things that kept eating her roses in the garden at home.

In the gloom, Sarah was suddenly aware of a figure seated behind the curve of the desk, a young woman with long blonde hair and her head buried in her hands. She slowly looked up, plainly exhausted. Sarah knew her ident.i.ty immediately.

'It's Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, isn't it?' she said enthusiastically. 'Your father said it might be a family affair.'

She reached across the desk and heartily shook the perplexed woman's hand. 'Sarah Jane Smith. h.e.l.lo. This place is like a beacon.'

In truth, she also recognized Kate from a photo of a little girl that the Brigadier had always carried in his wallet. The family resemblance was striking.

Sarah flapped her hands in a busy sort of way. 'So show me where to find your dad. I used to work with him sometimes.'

There was a pause. Kate hardly reacted.

'Are you all right?' asked Sarah.

Kate was rubbing her fingers. They looked raw. 'I don't know,' she said. 'I feel used, dirty. A computergeist computergeist.'

A clanking sound came from further inside the gloomy building. They heard a high-pitched bleeping signal approaching. Sarah darted through the open side of the reception desk beside Kate. They ducked below the counter as a Yeti emerged through the veils of hanging web.

It pa.s.sed the desk and stopped in the centre of the foyer, facing the main doors. It seemed to be waiting. The signal died. The ma.s.sive shape did not move. Sarah and Kate crouched close to the floor, too terrified to breathe.

Above them, there was a slight burr as the computer terminal on the desk activated. The screen started to glow with an empty pallor. It began to turn slowly back and forth like a cyclopean eye searching for them.

Sarah pulled Kate down tight under the desktop until they were practically chewing carpet. The screen continued to cast to and fro, searching in frustration.