Doctor Who: Dragonfire (13 page)

Bazin felt no pain at first. That came later. He simply felt his shoulder wrenched violently backwards, as the streak of fire from the Creature's eyes impacted. It spun him sideways and he fell to his knees.

McLuhan didn't even think. She threw her arm round Bazin's body and dragged him to his feet. Without breaking the movement, she hauled him down a side passage. By the time she realised what was happening, they were two passages away, and beyond the Creature's range.

The Creature didn't follow the two who escaped. It stared at the small human who didn't run away.

Stellar was terrified. She hugged Ted close to her, in fear. The Creature was like something out of one of the small girl's nightmares - the terrible, disfigured monsters that made her scream out in the night.

The Creature heard the small child's whimpers. It didn't understand language, but it could recognise the meaning of sounds. This was the sound of fear. It reached out slowly towards the child.

Stellar recoiled in terror.

The Creature paused, and waited. Then it reached out again, very slowly, so that it didn't frighten the child. Its bony arm reached forward, and it extended a long finger to touch the toy which the child was clutching.

Stellar flinched slightly, but then she saw that the Creature only wanted to touch Ted. Perhaps the Creature wasn't going to hurt her at all.

Slowly, she held

Ted out for the Creature to see. The Creature ran its finger lightly over Ted's ears. A smile broke through Stellar's anxiety, and spread across her face.

The Creature recognised that the small child was no longer frightened.

It reached out its bony finger again, and ran it over the child's hair.

Stellar felt the Creature's light touch, and she knew that it wouldn't hurt her. It looked frightening at first, but it was friendly underneath.

She reached out towards it and touched its membranous skin. It felt softer than anything she'd ever felt before. It felt like a fluffy, white cloud must feel - if you could stroke a cloud. Or a rainbow. Or a dream.

The Creature reached forward with both arms and lifted the child up.

She didn't mind. She wasn't scared now. She nestled in the soft folds of its skin as it carried her away down the passage.

Mel and Ace scrambled over the ice to keep up with the Doctor.

'Slow down, Doctor!'

'No time, Mel.'

'But where are we going?' moaned Ace from a few metres behind the others.

'Back to the TARDIS.'

Ace's eyes lit up. 'Your spacecraft!'

'But what about the Creature?' insisted Mel. 'We've got to save it.'

'The Creature's always going to be in danger from Kane. The only way we can save it is by convincing Kane that his star charts are hopelessly wrong. If we can do that, we might be able to stop all this.'

The Doctor strode on ahead. Ace hurried to catch up with Mel. 'Here -

this isn't another wind-up is it? I mean, I really am going to see your spacecraft this time, aren't I?'

"Who knows?' sighed Mel.

For three thousand years, the Creature had lived almost entirely in the Lower Levels, beyond Kane's reach. It avoided the humans in the Upper Levels, but it still remembered every twist and turn in the Ice Passages that led up to Iceworld.

Stellar was asleep in the Creature's soft embrace as it strode silently through the deserted corridors. Her nose twitched occasionally in her dreams.

The Creature reached the Refreshment Bar, and gently laid Stellar down in a chair. It recognised her soft, contented breathing. Then it turned to go.

It looked back once before leaving her.

It wouldn't see her alive again.

'Most ingenious,' remarked the Doctor when he saw the climbing ropes that Mel and Ace had used to get down the Ice Face. 'These should save us some time.'

He insisted that Mel went first, with him and Ace pulling on the free end. Then Ace followed, with the Doctor pulling from beneath, and Mel helping from above. And finally, the Doctor himself went, with the two women heaving from above.

'Not too heavy for you, was I?' asked the Doctor when he reached the top. Mel decided not to bother telling him about the problems they had had with the nitro on the way down, and how she had had to struggle one-handed to rescue Ace. She didn't want to worry the Doctor...

Stellar woke up and looked round a bit sleepily. She had had the strangest dream - about a snow world and a terrible creature that turned out to be soft and friendly.

Where was everyone? And where was her mother? Then she remembered - about hiding under the table while all the grown-ups ran past shouting. She remembered that she and Ted were on their way back to the spacecraft.

She slid down from the chair and rubbed the sleep out of her eyes. She noticed a glass of starfruit milkshake standing on the bar. None of it had been drunk. It must have been left behind when everyone ran away.

She pulled a tall bar-stool over, and clambered up onto it. The ice cream in the milkshake had melted - and Stellar giggled when she remembered what the waitress had done to her mother with a milkshake.

Once she had finished the milkshake, Stellar slithered down off the bar-stool, and trotted off out of the Refreshment Bar in search of the spacecraft. She'd already forgotten her dream.

McLuhan hauled Bazin down passage after passage until her legs ached.

Then she lowered him to the ground, and sank down beside him.

'Morphine...' gasped Bazin, his face contorted with pain. 'I need morphine...'

'No you don't,' reassured McLuhan. 'You can do it without morphine.'

She knew what would happen if she gave him a shot of morphine. It would kill the pain, but it would also leave him floating through a haze of drug-induced psychedelia. And she wanted him awake and alert, or else they would both be dead.

The Creature was following them, she was certain of that. It all depended on how soon it caught up with them. If she had time to fix Bazin up somehow, they might still have a chance.

She turned to look at Bazin's injury. It was bad. His left shoulder was burnt away. No wonder the boy was asking for morphine.

Obviously it would need extensive surgery to do the job properly, and even that might not save Bazin's left arm, but McLuhan just wanted to patch it up enough to make him some use to her.

'I think I'm going to throw up,' warned Bazin.

'It's shock,' she advised him. 'It'll pass.' She could see the sweat pouring down his pale face, and she felt at his brow. It was ice-cold. She had to do something to stop

him going into major post-injury trauma - the PITs, as it was called by those who survived.

He turned to one side and tried to throw up, but all he could do was retch violently.

'That's good,' she said. 'Get it out of your system.' When he had recovered, she wiped his face with her sleeve. Then, she unclamped both of their Cosmolites, and took off both their shoulder harnesses.

She took her own belt off, looping it round Bazin's neck, to form a make-shift sling. Then she took her combat jacket off. It was chilly in the Ice Passages, but she had to keep Bazin warm if he was to keep going. She hooked his injured arm in the belt looped round his neck.

Then she pushed his good arm into the sleeve of her jacket, and wrapped the rest of it round his shoulders and over his injured arm, fastening it at the front.

She slipped her shoulder harness back on, and clamped her Cosmolite back into position. She took the signal tracker from Bazin's Cosmolite, but left his gun lying on the ground.

'Can you walk?'

'I'll try.'

He'd lost a lot of strength, owing to the shock, but McLuhan knew that it would return once they got going. She helped him to his feet. 'Come on, we're not safe here. We've got to keep moving.'

With his good arm round her shoulder for support, Bazin started to stumble down the passageway. McLuhan admired the boy's courage, the way he was fighting the pain. He was badly crippled by the injury, but even a cripple would be better than no one when the time finally came to face the Creature.

A cold breeze blew among the hundreds of empty tubes in the Cryogenics Chamber. The atmosphere was even more chill and eerie than before. A ghost town from which even the ghosts had gone missing - leaving just an

emptiness.

In the shadows, something moved.

The outline of a child was briefly visible, then it disappeared into the gloom again. It emerged from the shadows once more - a small girl, clutching a teddy bear, picking her way through the refrigeration pipes and valves. Then she was gone.

The ghost of a child.

The panicking customers found themselves in the Docking Bays, and they needed no further encouragement. They ran blindly for the nearest spacecraft they could find, pushing and fighting to get on board. Many mercenaries followed unthinkingly after them, then found themselves trapped when the airlock hatches sealed shut. The Docking Bays were full of the sound of automatic voices intoning the undocking sequences. 'Pier 27 - switching to primary power...' 'Pier 9 - locking arms disengaged...' 'Pier 83 - switching to primary power...' 'Pier 106 -

undocking sequence in progress...' 'Pier 27 - undocking sequence in progress...' 'Pier 52 - spacecraft ready to clear Iceworld...' 'Pier 8 -

locking arms disengaged...' 'Pier 73 - switching to primary power...' One by one, the tiny spacecraft began to drift clear of Iceworld's crystalline docking arms, free of the evil colony's icy clutch, and slowly out into the fresh darkness of space.

Stellar was beginning to feel frightened. She and Ted were lost in a huge ice chamber full of shadows. She picked her way carefully through the ice towards the light that was coming from behind one of the ice walls. Round another corner she found herself in a brightly lit clearing.

Open vats steamed with a cold mist that fell to the ground and lay in a chill fog round Stellar's ankles. A

large cabinet with a clear lid stood in the centre of the light, and Stellar could see a man lying inside. She was glad to meet someone else and she wondered if he was asleep, or if he was just resting.

A sudden hiss from the cabinet made her jump.

The clear lid began to swing open and a cold mist washed over the sides. Stellar watched apprehensively as the man inside slowly sat up.

He turned to look at her. As soon as she saw his piercing black eyes, she knew that he wasn't going to help her. But for some reason she wasn't able to run away back into the shadows and hide. She couldn't take her eyes off his. She watched as he lowered his legs to the ground and stood up. She knew she wanted to run away, but she couldn't. She watched as he approached her. His eyes made her skin shiver. He looked at her.

Uncertainly, she held her teddy out. The man looked at it.

'Ted says he's sorry if he woke you up.'

The man looked up, into the dark shadows of the chamber. He was thinking of somewhere else, remembering something that had happened a long time ago. He looked back at Stellar, then turned away, and strode out of the chamber.

Stellar hugged Ted close to her.

Glitz had grown more and more worried as he ran through the deserted Iceworld. The corridors were littered with things that people had dropped in their panic to escape, and Glitz knew that something terrible had happened. He raced to the Lower Docking Bays.

He couldn't believe what he saw. The piers should all have been full with berthed spacecraft, but instead the status boards all indicated empty. He raced to Pier 63.

As he ran, he noticed that just one or two piers still had spacecraft berthed, but the automatic voices softly marked the progress of their undocking sequences. If he

had arrived at Pier 63 just a few moments earlier he would have been in time. But he didn't. He saw three huge mercenaries forcing the last remaining customers into the airlock that led to the Nosferatu.

'Here, what's going on?' he shouted from across the Docking Bays. But the three mercenaries took no notice, and the airlock door began to slide shut behind them.

'Stand clear of the door, please,' intoned the emotionless automatic voice.

Glitz threw himself towards the airlock door, but it was already shut.

'What's the big idea? Open up!' He banged his fist uselessly against the steel door.

'Pier 63 - switching to primary power..."

'What's going on?' he cried with increasing desperation.

'Pier 63 - undocking sequence in progress ...'

'You can't go without me!' Glitz turned to look out of the observation window.

Outside, the long arm of the airlock, which reached from the Docking Bays to the spacecraft entrance hatch, was sliding back into the bay.

Beyond, against the black sky, Glitz saw hundreds of spacecraft fleeing from Iceworld. He looked helplessly back to the Nosferatu and saw the locking arms, which held the spacecraft clamped securely in position, swinging clear of its hull.

'Pier 63 - locking arms disengaged...'

Glitz was desperate. 'No, there must be some mistake!' But he knew that there was nothing he could do to stop it.

'Pier 63 - spacecraft ready to clear Iceworld...'

Small manoeuvering rockets pushed the Nosferatu clear of the docking arm, and then began to thrust the spacecraft out into the dark night of space.

'Safe journey and good fortune, Nosferatu...' intoned the automatic voice, without feeling.

Glitz was heartbroken. Through the observation window, he watched his spacecraft slowly drifting away.

'No - you can't leave! Not after all these years. Come back! I should be coming with you.'

In his Control Room, Kane jabbed at a button. The shutter on his observation window slid back, and Kane looked at all the tiny spacecraft fleeing into the night. Terrified people trying to escape from him. A slight smile creased his face for a moment. This is what it would be like when he returned to Proamon. This is what it would be like throughout the Twelve Galaxies!

Glitz banged in grief on the Docking Bay observation window. 'Oy! Take me with you! Please...'