Doctor Who_ Return Of The Living Dad Part 44

And was gone.

Jason slowed and stopped, standing in the spot where his son had disappeared.

He turned back, helpless. Joel stood in the doorway of the van, watching him.

'See you later, kid,' said Jason, and marched back to the van. 'What was that you said about backup?'

Benny and the Doctor tumbled to the ground. The gra.s.s around them was scorched, the air s.h.i.+mmering with heat.

Isaac grabbed his daughter, lifted her head into his lap.

Tony and Bridget knelt down beside the Doctor.

Bridget thought they would both be dead. But Benny was coming around. Her clothes were singed and scorched, but her flesh wasn't, as though the flames had come out of her.

Isaac stroked her hair.

'I let her go,' gasped Benny. 'I let her go, Doctor. Oh G.o.d, are you all right?'

The Doctor sprang to his feet, looking around wildly. The bearded man, Tony, almost fell over with shock.

Bridget began, 'You all right, mate?' But he waved his hand at her, looking down at Benny. 'Did you see it?'

Benny sat up. 'He's already in the silo.'

'How do you know?' said Isaac.

Tony said, 'I thought she was Death. I thought she'd got a head start.' He shook his head. 'It's true what the Book of Names says. Death doesn't have a name.'

'Her name was Caroline Grey,' said the Doctor.

'She's not Death,' said Benny. 'She's dead.'

'She spread herself so thin that there was finally nothing left.' His voice rang out, louder than the ringing in their ears.

'She was a first-year archaeology student. She found an ancient Youkalian time-travel device which discharged the remnants of its power through her.'

The Doctor spun round, as though lecturing some unseen crowd. 'She grew up on Mars,' he shouted, 'where her family bred orchids, but she couldn't remember any of their names, and she was very good at origami, and she couldn't remember her own name, and her favourite flavour of ice cream was b.u.t.terscotch!'

The others were staring at him. He put his hands over his face and ran them suddenly, sharply back through his hair.

'Come on,' he said. 'There's no time to spare.'

The sky yacht was parked above the forest, disguised as a low cloud. After tugging on their armour, Roz and Chris ran their handscans over the area, raising them up to the base of the s.h.i.+p, above the tips of the trees. You could just make out the metal if you squinted the right way.

'No obvious traps,' said Roz. 'In any case, I can't imagine anything that'll bother, er...'

Ms R opened the boot. The fifth member of the party came s.h.i.+mmering around the car.

It was a smear of red, hovering in the air, like an error made by a careless landscape artist. You could see through it, barely, the outlines of the trees diluted by its rich colour.

Roz didn't know what it was, and she didn't want to know. She just stood the h.e.l.l out of its way as it blurred suddenly, leaping into the air.

Its tip slapped against the airlock of the yacht and stuck fast. It pulsed for a moment, and became more solid, wiggling itself invitingly.

Roz gritted her teeth and took hold of its sinuous body.

She expected her hand to go right through it, to discover that it had no substance at all, that it was just a wisp of colour in the afternoon sun. Instead her fingers met a textured, ropy surface that gripped her as hard as she gripped it.

She resisted the urge to pull her hand away, and started to climb up the living rope. Chris followed after a moment, and then Ms R. The Ra'ashet waited, picking its teeth. Roz glanced down at it. Yeah, the red thing probably couldn't have borne its weight as well as all of theirs, she guessed.

At the top, the red thing extruded some of its rough surface to loop around her hips as she picked the lock. The Doctor had pinched all of Albinex's security codes while he'd been aboard.

They had to wait while the airlock cycled, clinging awkwardly to the red thing. Roz hoped the fuzzy colour was as strong as it seemed.

'Look out!' shouted Ms R.

A hairy, warm hand reached down and grabbed her wrist and pulled her into the airlock.

'Chris!' Roz yelled. Oh great, give him even more ideas, she thought, as the Ogron tried to break her neck.

They'd slipped past patrols, avoided a jeep, and now they were standing at the base of one of the squat, cylindrical buildings. There were two dead guards at the entrance to the silo.

Bridget covered her mouth with her hand. Isaac and the Doctor knelt by the bodies. 'They were stabbed to death,'

said the Time Lord shortly. 'With a long blade, by the look of it.'

Isaac shook his head. 'A sword?'

'Maybe he doesn't fancy using projectile weapons around a nuclear warhead,' said the Doctor. 'Bridget, thanks - get yourself away from here as quickly as you can.'

The young woman opened her mouth to say something, then closed it again. She nodded, and briskly walked off across the gra.s.s.

The door was open. The Doctor caught Isaac's arm as the Admiral was about to go inside. 'This is it,' he said. 'This is really the moment where you decide what you want.'

'I've made this possible,' said Isaac firmly. 'I have to stop it if it kills me.'

Benny looked at him in horror, but they were inside the building before she could say anything.

Chris vaulted into the airlock and kicked the Ogron's knee with all his strength. It roared and dropped Roz' reaching for the boy. He stuck his armoured elbow in its throat.

Ms R said something very rude in Malagasy, scrambling out of the way as the Ogron and Chris started walloping each other. Roz tried to s.n.a.t.c.h the ape-faced monster's weapon, but neither of them could get past Chris to pull the blaster from its holster.

The next thing she knew, the Ra'ashet's fish-reptile head was poking over the rim of the airlock. The alien hauled itself up, tossed Chris easily to one side, and took a big bite out of the Ogron's head.

The rest of the Ogron went very suddenly slack as the Ra'ashet chewed thoughtfully on its skull.

The telepath managed not to actually throw up. 'How many more?' said Roz.

Chris, who was getting his breath back after slamming into the wall, tugged out his handscan. 'Three,' he said.

'One's behind the inner airlock door.'

'And very pleased with his clever strategy,' added Ms R.

She was breathing deeply, keeping her eyes shut, trying not to listen to the munching sounds. 'He can't see in here.'

'One in engineering,' said Chris.

'Asleep on the job,' said Ms R.

'And one up in the control room, I guess.'

Roz said, 'Er, could you pa.s.s me the Ogron's blaster, please?'

The Ra'ashet obligingly opened the holster and plucked out the weapon with a slick, scaled hand. He pa.s.sed it back to her without stopping his meal.

'Thanks,' said Roz, trying to hold the gun without actually touching it.

'No problem,' said the Ra'ashet.

Good to have a weapon again. Nice chunky gun. Pity about the s...o...b..r and blood. Roz took up a firing stance, the blaster pointing at the inner door. Chris stood by the controls, ready to open it.

'Needs salt,' commented the Ra'ashet.

The missile protruded from the ground, just the tip - avionics and payload - visible, ringed by a metal railing. There were more uniformed corpses scattered on the floor. Sword wounds, and worse, chunks of flesh gouged from faces and hands.

Albinex was in his own body, wearing an archaic Navarino uniform, fierce white and green cloth stretched over his stumpy frame. There were twin ceremonial swords strapped to his back. He had dragged a desk across to the railing, and was working hard on a computer from his s.h.i.+p.

He glanced at them, once, double-took when he saw the Doctor, and went back to programming the weapon.

'I say,' called the Time Lord' moving towards the missile.

Cables trailed from it where Albinex had slaved its...o...b..ard computers to the console. 'I've come all the way back from the dead to thwart your evil scheme. You could at least say h.e.l.lo!'

The Navarino didn't look up.

'Look out!' shouted M' Kabel.

Two Ogrons came at them at a run, blood and shreds of flesh trailing from their mouths.

'Check this out,' Chris said. He stepped to one side so that Roz could get to the yacht's console. 'Look at that telemetry.'

'He's tracking a satellite,' said Roz. She ran a fingernail under a blip moving across the screen. 'It looks like geostationary orbit. Wish I could read Navarino.'

'I'll tell you one thing,' said Chris. 'I'll bet it's not a TV satellite.'

'Daleks,' said Roz.

'Yeah.'

'We need to get our a.s.ses out of here,' said Roz.

The Ra'ashet was already standing in the corridor outside, an Ogron arm hanging from its scaly mouth. It rolled its fish-eyes at them. Ms Randrianasolo ran up behind it, holding the blaster. 'I fused the door to engineering,' she said. 'The, er, arm... the third Ogron's stuck in there.'

'We're done,' said Roz. 'We're outta here.'

The Doctor tripped up one of the Ogrons with his umbrella'