Doctor Who: All-Consuming Fire Page 24

  Moments later, another explosion knocked me off my feet.

  Picking myself up, I began to run back towards the point where I had entered the camp. Nobody bothered with me. They had enough to worry about. Two questions at least had been answered: the Ry'lehans on the slopes of the mountain were not allied to Maupertuis; and they weren't peaceful philosophers either.

  A soldier rose up from the collapsed wreckage of his tent. He yelled something at me, but I elbowed him aside and ran on.

  Another blast flung me into a collapsing tent. I became tangled in guy-ropes and thrashed about for some moments before I could extricate myself Standing, I noticed a figure to one side, silhouetted by an azure conflagration. I made to move off, but it raised a hand. A hand holding a gun.

  'I should have had you killed back in England,' Baron Maupertuis screamed above the pandemonium. 'You will pay in coins of agony for the trouble you have caused me!'

  I tensed, ready to dive, but a cold caress of metal at the nape of my neck made me pause.

  'The Baron would prefer to keep you alive for the moment, old boy,' Colonel Warburton's voice drawled in my ear, 'but I think you'd look just as good dead.'

  'Haven't you got other things to worry about?' I asked as another of the Ry'lehans' infernal devices exploded nearby.

  Maupertuis looked wildly around, his ash-blond hair falling in lank strands around his gaunt face.

  'What have you done? My army! You have destroyed my army!'

  'Look elsewhere for your attackers, Baron. Much as I would wish to take credit, I cannot'

  'Then who . . .?'

  'Your intended victims.'

  He sneered.

  'The natives of this God-forsaken planet are lily-livered philosophers. They rejected arms millenniums ago.'

  'Your hooded friend obviously misinformed you,' I continued, anxious to divert the Baron's attention for as long as possible from whatever plans they had for me. A hit, a very palpable hit. Something moved behind his eyes: a flicker of annoyance, and perhaps even distrust.

  'You know nothing.'

  I decided to make a stab in the dark.

  'I know that you have been played for a fool by whoever it is that you work for.'

  A series of explosions punctuated my words.

  'Baron,' Warburton interrupted from behind me, 'perhaps we should...'

  'Insects!' the Baron screamed at his troops as they milled around us. 'You were supposed to be an all-consuming fire, spreading out to conquer this planet in the name of the Empire! Now you run like insects!' His cold gaze turned to Warburton.

  'You assured me that their training had turned them into an efficient fighting machine. You guaranteed that they were ready for anything!'

  The pressure of Warburton's pistol vanished from my neck. Surreptitiously I edged sideways.

  'You gave me a month!' Warburton snapped. 'It takes years to build up an army, and you gave me a month!'

  'It was not my decision,' Maupertuis said coldly. 'I agreed with your strategy. I was overruled.'

  'Whoever our mysterious benefactor is, he knows as much about building a fighting force as I do about ballet dancing.'

  Maupertuis looked around. The camp was almost deserted now. The landscape of burning tents was bereft of movement.

  'As I have no army,' he said calmly, 'and no need of a ballet tutor, it would seem that I no longer require your services.'

  He shot Colonel Warburton between the eyes. I watched with mixed feelings as Warburton stumbled backwards, staring at Maupertuis with a puzzled expression on his face. Blood streamed from the wound.

  'Gloria?' he said in a quiet, almost conversational tone, then fell to his knees. 'Gloria . . .?'

  He pitched forward onto his face. His fingers clutched at the cold, hard ground for a moment, and then a great shudder ran through his body.

  'God forgive your sins,' I murmured to his departing spirit.

  'There is no sin,' Maupertuis said, swinging his pistol so that I was staring down the rifled barrel. 'There is only disobedience in the face of a higher authority.'

  'And who elected you to be a higher authority?' I said scathingly. 'You bring the whole human race into disrepute.'

  As an epitaph, I wish I had been given time to polish it a bit, but it would do.

  As Maupertius's finger tightened on the trigger, and I watched the tiny gleam at the end of the barrel that I knew was the tip of the bullet that would shortly be tearing through my brain, I tried to recall Holmes's face as an example to give me courage. I could not. All I could remember was an afternoon thirty years ago, when the bright Australian sun shone down upon a creek, and my father and brother and I sat and fished together. It was the happiest day of my life, but I had not realized it until now.

  The world seemed to explode around me. My eyes were filled with a red mist. So this was death.

  The mist settled on my face. It was sticky and tasted of salt and hot metal. I licked it from my lips. I had spent enough of my youth tying off spurting arteries that I recognized it as blood. Mine? Reflexively I wiped a hand across my eyes.

  Maupertuis was still standing in front of me, gun raised, but there was a large hole in the middle of his chest. The rim was charred and I could see the edges of his rib-cage projecting into the void where his heart should have been.

  His face was noble in death. Noble and unreal, like a marble statue. He fell like a statue too: without bending.

  A young woman stood behind him. She was holding a device the size of a Maxim gun, but a lot sleeker.

  'Hi,' she said. 'My name's Ace. And you're grateful.'

  Chapter 14

  In which Ace and Watson pit themselves against nature, and come out on top.

  She was wearing a smooth armoured bodice like the carapace of some glossy black beetle. Her shirt and leggings seemed to be composed of some fine-mesh metal weave. She was wearing spectacles, but of such a deep hue that I could not make out her eyes. I could not help but wonder how she could see out of them in the dark. She was so shorn of the identifying badges of her gender that the only clues were her long hair, her voice and the curve of her bodice.

  Her weapon was trained firmly upon my midriff.

  'My name is Watson,' I said, and swallowed. All I could see in her spectacles was my own distorted reflection. I hoped that the panic evident in my expression was caused by the distortion rather than the circumstances. 'Doctor John Watson, at your service. I presume that you are another of the Doctor's companions, Miss . . . ah?'

  'Ace, like I said. And what makes you think I'm with the Doc?'

  'A wild guess. He seems to have a fondness for leaving young ladies in situations fraught with danger.'

  She looked around.

  'Young ladies? Oh, I get it. You must mean Bernice.'

  She stared strangely at me.

  'Are you for real?' she asked.

  'Indubitably. Shall we go?'

  She lowered the gun and, with a couple of quick twists, disassembled it into components which she hung off her belt.

  'Show me the way.'

  I pointed, and without another word she moved off. I took a last glance back at Baron Maupertuis's ruined body. I could not find it in my heart to regret what Ace - I supposed that I should call her by that appellation - had done to him, but something in me had responded to his fervent, if misguided, patriotism.

  But what now? Would his invasion fall apart with his army scattered and its general dead, or would the mysterious hooded man that Holmes and I had seen in Euston weld it back together again? Only time would tell.

  We moved across the ravaged landscape, trying as far as we could to avoid the bodies. The explosions seemed to have ceased, but I could see a large number of survivors forming up into lines closer to the slopes of the mountain. It looked to me as if they were preparing to take the fight to the Ry'lehans.

  Ace quickly impressed me with her skills. She moved quickly but carefully, maintaining a constant watch upon our surroundings.
She threw questions back over her shoulder and, under their prompting, I told her the story of how we came to be there.

  'He shouldn't meddle,' she said at one point. 'He doesn't know the half of what's going on here.'

  'What do you mean?' I asked, but she gestured impatiently for me to continue.

  I finished talking as we passed the last row of tents, and persuaded her to wait for a few moments whilst I found the beast which had been roasting as I entered the camp. The spit had been knocked over during the attack, but the carcass was still in one piece, and I managed to pull two of the legs off.

  They did not look appetizing, but I was ravenous. I rejoined Ace, who refused the food I offered with a secret little smile. As we walked off I asked her how she came to be there. Whilst I ate the tender, spicy flesh, she explained in a few terse sentences that the Doctor had left her on Ry'leh in the same way that he had left Bernice in India, and for the same reasons.

  She was meant to scout out the area, prepare the way for the Doctor and report on anything interesting that happened. Having seen my confrontation with Maupertuis, she had decided to act.

  'Does he always do this sort of thing?' I asked.

  'What sort of thing?'

  'Move you and Bernice round like pieces in a game of chess?'

  'You don't know the half of it. Trouble is, I've seen him play chess, and he's crap.'

  By now I had finished both legs and discarded the bones. My stomach was beginning to rebel against its unfamiliar contents, but I ruthlessly suppressed the incipient insurrection. I would not give Ace the satisfaction of seeing me ill.

  The camp was a few miles behind us now, and we were approaching the area where I remembered leaving my friends. Looking round, I could see no sign of Bernice, Holmes or the Doctor. I caught hold of Ace's arm to stop her whilst I got my bearings. At the touch of my hand she whirled and knocked me to the ground. My head slammed against rock: I blacked out for a moment, and awoke to find her fingers pressed into my windpipe.

  'A word of warning,' she hissed. 'Don't touch me. Too many people have done that already, starting with a scumbag named Glitz. I don't like it, and these days, what I don't like, I stop. Violently.'

  'Glawp!' I said. It was all I could manage to get out of my compressed larynx.

  'I'm glad that's understood.'

  She stood up and looked around.

  'So where's the party, then?'

  I rolled over to enable my arms to take the strain of lifting my body, bruised and battered by recent events, to its feet. A dark stain on the ground caught my attention. I touched it tentatively, and my fingers came away sticky.

  It was blood.

  I ran a hand across the back of my head to determine whether I had hit the ground harder than I had thought, but my scalp was clear of any wounds.

  'Ace,' I said.

  'I know.'

  I rose, to find her holding the torn remains of the Doctor's paisley-pattern scarf.

  'Why is nothing ever easy where he's concerned?'

  To that I had no answer.

  Casting around, we found little else to indicate that they had ever been there. The most significant discovery was a patch of charred ground where a fire had obviously been lit. The ashes were still warm.

  As a pearly, directionless sheen spread across the sky, heralding the approach of a new day, I sat down upon the hard, cold ground. A patch of moss squirmed beneath me, so I shuffled sideways. It tried to follow, so I stood up again and watched it cast itself unsuccessfully upon my boots.

  Sounds of gunfire suddenly drifted across the plain. Maupertuis's shattered army had regrouped enough to go on the offensive. I wondered who was leading them now.

  Hearing a sound, I glanced round to where Ace was talking softly into a small box. I wondered if it was some marvellous form of communication, but I soon realized that she was leaving no space for a reply. A dictation machine, perhaps, akin to the phonograph but much smaller.

  I glanced around at the harsh landscape now emerging from the shadow of night. The murmur of Ace's voice ceased.

  'Who do you think took them?' I asked.

  'How do I know?' She sounded bad-tempered. 'It could have been this Baron's men, or it could have been the spindly sack-things with five legs, or it could have been those winged creatures with the spiky tails. We won't know till we find them.'

  'I doubt that it's the rakshassi,' I said patronizingly. 'They're only animals.'

  'Rakshassi?'

  'The winged creatures. The red ones.'

  'Who told you they're only animals?'

  I frowned.

  'Well . . . it seemed obvious.'

  'Nothing obvious about it, mate. They're as intelligent as you or me. Well, you at any rate.'

  I didn't know what to say for a moment.

  'But...' I stammered finally, 'they've never shown any sign of intellect . . .'

  She looked pityingly at me.

  'Well they're not going to do crosswords on the train, are they, dick-brain?

  Remember that seance you told me about? The one in Euston with this hooded geezer?'

  I nodded.

  'Well, I was listening to the other end of it. There's a large township a couple of hundred clicks away...'

  'Clicks?'

  'Kilometres. A bit over a hundred miles. Anyway, I was scouting around a big temple-type building, and heard something big inside opening hailing frequencies. The town itself was occupied by the rakshassi.'

  'Occupied? You mean, they were living there?'

  'Yeah. Worshipping at the temple, too.'

  'Worshipping what?'

  'I don't know, but it wasn't Sonic the Hedgehog.'

  She took pleasure in watching the stunned expression blossom on my face.

  Foolishly, perhaps, I had made certain assumptions about the nature of the new reality in which I had found myself. Now, one by one, those assumptions were being overturned. If only Holmes were there to make things clear for me.

  'They could have taken him anywhere,' I whispered to myself, disheartened.

  'Not quite,' Ace said. 'The plants here kip during the night, and they get a bit ratty if something disturbs them. If we're lucky, we can tell which way the kidnappers went by checking how quickly the plants react to us.'

  'How do we do that?' I asked stupidly.

  'Stick your finger out and see how long it takes them to bite it.'

  Ace watched on, a sardonic smile upon her face, as I hesitantly knelt and tempted the mosses with my outstretched digit. It quickly became apparent that those lying towards the distant mountains responded significantly faster than those in any other direction. So quick were they that they almost ripped my nail out with their thorny little mouths.

  'Well,' she said, 'that settles it.'

  'Do you think they're poisonous?'

  'I wouldn't have thought so. They're probably more at risk biting you than you are being bitten.'

  'Somehow that fails to reassure me.'

  'It wasn't meant to.'

  We set out shortly after that.

  The walk to the lower slopes of the nearest mountain took us some hours.

  Every few minutes I would check the plants in the vicinity to ensure that we were heading in the right direction, but our course was as straight as a die.

  It was hard to tell when we actually began to climb the mountain slopes: it was only after I complained to Ace that I was tiring, and she agreed that the going suddenly seemed to have become hard, that we realized we had been walking uphill for some little time. We rested for a few moments, and I took the opportunity to appreciate the view in the manner of a tourist, rather than a tired doctor.

  The slope fell away from us, blending gradually into the purple plain below.

  I could see Maupertuis's quondam encampment and, through the haze of distance, men in blue and silver uniforms in close combat with fivelegged Ry'lehans. Further than that, the ground rose up to form more mountain ranges whose tops were lost to the i
ce. Ry'leh seemed to be a planet composed of peakless mountains. From where we stood I could see along three major valleys. It was like standing in Cheddar Gorge back on Earth, and looking between the stalactites and stalagmites, but on a far vaster scale. What was God thinking of when he created this place?

  We seemed to have risen above what, on Earth, I would have termed the tree-line. The vegetation had died away, but we had been moving in a straight line for so long that we saw little point in altering our course.