Doctor Who: Sontaran Experiment (11 page)

‘It’s perfectly all right,’ Sarah assured him. ‘Now just relax...’ she said, turning to the pale and shivering Vural.

Sarah pressed the trigger button. Her arms began to shake as bursts of extremely low-frequency sound pulsed out in a tightly focused beam. For a while nothing happened. Sarah gritted her teeth and clutched the throbbing device to prevent it from jumping out of her hands.

Suddenly, the rock surrounding the end of the Terullian strand seemed to soften like toffee. ‘Pull now,’ Sarah cried.

Vural strained at the wire as hard as he could. To everyone’s astonishment it sprang free, and Vural’s arm was released.

At once, Sarah set to work to free Vural’s other wrist.

‘You’re... you’re quite a girl...’ Krans muttered, when after a few minutes, Vural pulled his other arm away from the slab.

‘Thank you,’ Sarah said curtly, frowning with concentration. ‘Perhaps you will now believe that we are your friends,’ she added.

A desperate cry from the ridge made her glance up from her task. The Doctor’s foot had caught in a crack and he was lying flat on his back, fighting off the advancing Styr with the gravity bar.

Just as Vural’s last shackle broke free, Styr wrested the Terullian bar from the Doctor, and raised it high above his head like an axe. With a hoarse scream of hatred and revenge, the Galsec Commander forced himself to his feet and began to stumble up the rocks towards the ridge. Styr turned and watched Vural’s screaming, hysterical figure stagger painfully towards him. Behind him, the Doctor struggled to free his foot from the crevice.

Styr waited, motionless, until the raging Vural reached him and began a pathetic attack. He allowed Vural to snatch the gravity bar and to strike him with feeble, harmless blows. Then, with a sudden burst of cruel amusement, the Sontaran lurched forward and knocked the helpless crewman off the ridge with a single sweep of his huge arm. Vural’s screams died abruptly as he crashed lifeless into the ravine.

The Doctor managed to wrench his foot free just as Styr wheeled round on him again, his eyes roaring like blow-torches and the thick, black vapour jetting in hissing spurts from his swelling nostrils.

‘And now... you,’ Styr gasped, reaching down and picking the Doctor up by the lapels of his jacket, as if he were a sack.

‘You need a rest, Styr,’ the Doctor murmured, his face only centimetres from the Sontaran’s hideous, dribbling jaws and razor-sharp teeth. ‘You don’t look at all well to me.’

The Sontaran’s flaring eyes bore into the Doctor’s face.

‘What is your function here on Earth?’ he gasped, shaking the Doctor like a rag doll.

‘Nothing much,’ the Doctor replied in a choking voice.

‘I just popped in to help a few friends from the Terra Nova...’

‘Terra Nova?’ Styr panted. There was a tearing sound as his talons pierced through the Doctor’s coat. Helplessly, the Doctor hung like a carcass from a butcher’s hook, racking his brains for some way of fighting back.

Styr shook him again and drew him even closer to his wobbling mask of a face. ‘You will tell me all you know about the project...’ he hissed.

The Doctor grinned weakly. ‘If I could only consult my diary, I could look it all up and tell you exactly what’s going to happen,’ he gasped.

With an enraged bellow, Styr swung the Doctor into the air above his head. ‘Your absurd riddles are a pathetic attempt to gain time,’ he roared.

The Doctor twisted his head round so that he could whisper directly into Styr’s ear. ‘I find time so useful,’ he breathed, thankful for the relief from being throttled by his own collar. ‘And from what I hear,’ he went on, ‘time is something that you and your Strategic Council are rather short of just now... and it may be that I can help...’

Styr hesitated. He was heaving with the effort of supporting the Doctor’s weight, severely weakened by the unaccustomed effects of Earth’s gravity, and by his attempts to catch the Doctor in the rugged terrain.

Meanwhile, the Doctor had been secretly feeling in his jacket, while whispering intently into Styr’s ear in order to distract the Alien. He sneaked out a small pocket flask, uncorked it, sniffed briefly at the contents, and then reached across and tipped the flask upside down into the vent at the back of the unsuspecting Sontaran’s collar.

When the flask was empty, the Doctor re-corked it and thrust it back into his pocket.

Finally Styr lost patience. He whirled the Doctor round in the air and shook him over the sheer drop into the ravine.

‘For the last time,’ he roared. ‘You will tell me the truth... or you will perish..

Styr’s words dissolved abruptly into a harsh torrent of black smoke and steam which gushed out of the vent behind his shoulders and from his mouth and nostrils. He stamped about on the narrow ridge, gasping and roaring.

With a sudden shrug, he sent the helpless Doctor flying into the ravine.

Sarah crouched by the slab, staring up at the ridge in horror as Styr began to lurch down the slope towards his spacecraft, his bulky limbs twitching spasmodically and dense smoke pouring out from all over his huge body. She shook her head slowly in disbelief, and gradually her eyes filled with tears.

‘Doctor...’ Sarah murmured, ‘Oh, Doctor...’

Harry shrank back behind the ring-shaped bulkhead which surrounded the communication port joining the two modules, and made himself as small as he could. He watched with bated breath as the little spherical robot glided past him, its tiny scanner sweeping from side to side. It buzzed into the centre of the chamber where he was crouching and paused, its circuits working busily as it scanned the mass of instruments covering the walls. Harry jumped when a thin probe shot out from the capsule and operated a row of contact buttons. But then the probe was retracted, and the miniature Scavenger hummed on its way into the next module.

Amazed at his narrow escape, Harry waited until the robot had gone and then clambered cautiously into the module ahead of him. Following the Doctor’s instructions as best he could, he selected a sequence of coloured keys set into the panelling and turned them slowly in what he hoped was the correct order. Nothing seemed to happen.

‘So far so good,’ he muttered, wiping the sweat from his eyes and licking his dry lips nervously.

He worked his way through a series of modules which grew progressively larger, stopping occasionally to make adjustments to the instruments in accordance with the Doctor’s directions, and listening constantly for the robot.

Eventually Harry reached the very heart of the Sontaran spacecraft: a dark spherical chamber about nine metres in diameter, almost completely filled by a broad cylindrical structure in the centre, that crackled and flashed with some prodigious source of energy.

‘This must be it...’ Harry breathed, ‘the Catalytic Energiser...’

Slowly he advanced round the structure, searching the quivering, flickering array of instruments for the section he wanted.

Suddenly something loomed in the shadow of a deep, semi-circular alcove which ran the height of the structure.

Harry all but jumped out of his boots as he distinguished the bulky figure of a Sontaran standing motionless with its back against the Energiser. Unable to move, Harry gaped at the massive, dark shape. Its eyes were two dull points glowing faintly and staring straight ahead. Its slow, deep breaths sounded like some vast and distant machine.

‘I’m too late,’ thought Harry, his heart sinking. ‘Styr’s beaten us to it... there’s nothing we can do now.’

Eventually he took a brave and careful step forward.

Nothing happened. He took two more steps. Still nothing happened. Gradually he made his way round the chamber towards the tunnel leading to the hatch. All at once his heart leaped into his mouth. A second Sontaran stood exactly like the first, pressed into the shadows, with faintly glowing eyes and slow, mechanical breathing, connected to the Energiser by a thick tube inserted into the back of its collar. It too made no movement when Harry recovered himself and tip-toed past.

He heaved a sigh of relief when, a little further on, he came across a third niche in the Energiser Structure which was unoccupied. ‘This must be Styr’s...’ he murmured.

‘Perhaps we’re going to make it after all...’ At once Harry set to work, feeling about in the darkness among the maze of unfamiliar gadgetry which cluttered the vacant recess.

Every now and then, he listened to check the slow, regular breathing of the two dormant Sontarans nearby.

At last he found what he was looking for: a grid of small pyramid-shaped keys arranged in a complex chequer-board pattern. The grid was coded with different colours, but in the gloom Harry could hardly make them out. Sweat began to trickle down inside his collar as he chose a key and slowly turned it. He repeated the operation with a second colour, desperately trying to remember the correct sequence which the Doctor had repeated to him over and over again. The keys were close together and very stiff. It seemed to Harry that it would take him hours to complete the task, and the Doctor’s warning, that the slightest mistake would be fatal, nagged away at the back of his mind as he struggled in the darkness.

As he knelt there, straining to turn the keys with numb fingers, he felt the floor of the chamber suddenly start to vibrate beneath his knees. He froze, listening intently. A heavy, erratic tramping was coming nearer and nearer.

‘Styr...’ he shivered, the sweat turning to ice on his forehead. Frantically he wrenched and twisted the last few keys, expecting at any moment to be engulfed in a gigantic explosion. The stumbling and gasping of the approaching Styr thundered , and echoed through the honeycomb of chambers as Harry gripped the final key with all his strength and tried to turn it.

Very, very slowly the key began to give. Harry knew that he only had a few more seconds. There was a rapid series of clicks and the panel came away in his trembling hands. At the same instant, Styr burst into the chamber panting horribly in his struggle for survival. Harry scrambled to his feet clutching the panel to his chest, not knowing which way to run. He stared round in confusion at the series of identical modules surrounding the chamber. Styr was almost upon him. In desperation he pressed himself against the Energiser Structure and waited.

Styr thrashed blindly past him into the vacant niche.

Harry forced himself to remain still until he heard the Sontaran activate the Energiser Unit, and connect himself to the Structure. Then he hurled himself across the chamber and into the access tunnel. As he ran round the curve towards the open hatch he was stopped short. An enormous, metallic ‘spider’ was silhouetted against the daylight, its gleaming legs fanned around the hatchway and its phosphorescent body quivering at the centre.

Harry’s escape was completely blocked.

Instinctively he raised the panel like a shield in front of him. The ‘spider’ turned its eye towards the panel, and then flicked it back to Harry’s face, expanding its iris with a shrill whirr. Buzzing like an angry hornet, the thing drew in its tentacles. Harry dived sideways into the complex of modules. Weaving right and left he scrambled through the echoing maze, trying to shake off the swiftly pursuing robot...

He seemed to have failed after all, just when success was within reach.

8

Krans and Erak had recovered a little from their ordeal at the hands of the Sontaran, and while Sarah strove to release their shackled ankles with the sonic-screwdriver, they did their best to try and comfort her.

‘That ravine’s hundreds of metres deep,’ murmured Krans gently, ‘no one could survive that kind of fall.’

Erak patted Sarah’s shoulder clumsily. ‘He wouldn’t have felt anything...’ he added.

Sarah shook her head, fighting back her tears as she concentrated on freeing Erak’s leg.

‘If only I knew how to use this thing properly... perhaps I could have saved him,’ she said, focusing the sonic beam.

‘You’re doing just fine, Sarah Jane,’ Erak replied as his ankle was released from the loop of Terullian embedded in the slab.

‘The Doctor was so kind and so gentle...’ Sarah whispered, ‘and he never wanted to harm anyone or anything...’ She switched off the sonic beam and stared silently up at the ridge from which the Doctor had been hurled by the maddened Sontaran.

‘Unfortunately, Sarah Jane,’ began Erak, ‘we live in a universe where that is not possible...’

‘The Doctor lived in a universe all of his own,’ Sarah interrupted quietly.

‘He certainly did, Sarah,’ Krans grunted, nodding towards the strange device lying inert in her hand.

Sarah stood up decisively and faced the two Galsec crewmen who were still rather dazed and unsteady on their feet.

‘Well, we’ve got to manage by ourselves now, haven’t we?’ she said firmly, with an air of authority, although in reality she had little idea what they could possibly do against Styr without the Doctor’s help. ‘I suggest that we all stick together and...’ She broke off in mid-sentence as an excited and urgent shouting came from the direction of the Sontaran spacecraft. ‘That’s Harry...’ she cried, with a smile of relief.

‘Who?’ chorused the puzzled crewman.

‘Never mind now,’ Sarah cried, scrambling over the slab. ‘Come on you two...’ and she set off at a furious pace over the boulders towards the centre of the hollow, the bewildered crewmen limping after her.

Harry tore headlong down the ramp from the spacecraft still clutching the precious panel from the Energiser Structure tightly in his arms. Before he could stop himself, he tripped over the de-activated Scavenger’s tentacles lying scattered at the foot of the ramp, and sprawled among them in a hopeless tangle. Seconds later the miniature robot buzzed out of the hatchway in pursuit and hovered, its scanner sweeping the area in front of the space craft.

‘Doctor... Doctor... Where are you... Doctor?’ screamed the helpless Harry, completely at the mercy of the tiny robot. He struggled to disengage himself from the tangle of wires as the mechanical hornet buzzed ferociously towards him.