Dancing the Code Part 26

Best not to think about it, really. He had to do his job. People got killed.

A lot of people.

Definitely best not to think about it.

He could see a little now, well enough to make out the shadows of rocks all around him. 'Help me get up there, Yates,' he said, pointing at the highest of them. 'We'll see if there are any friendly forces around.'

'I'm not sure that's a good idea, sir,' said Yates. 'I'm fairly sure I saw some Kebirian troops west-south-west of here. We ought to keep -' He broke off, as white light flared behind him.

The Brigadier blinked a few times, then, as his eyes adjusted, he saw a young man in the uniform of a Kebirian Army sergeant pointing a machine-pistol at him. Behind him, someone held a powerful torch.

'We're so glad you're still alive,' said the young man.

'So are we,' said Yates. His hand was near the holster of his gun, but it moved away as more Kebirian soldiers appeared around them.

'We're sorry we had to shoot you down,' the Kebirian sergeant went on.

'That's all right,' said the Brigadier quickly. 'Orders are orders, I understand.'

The Sergeant started down the slope towards them. The Brigadier became aware of a strong smell of perfume. Now where had he smelled that before? - Oh, yes. The Doctor. And Jo.

The fakes.

Which meant - The Sergeant was standing in front of them now, his gun levelled at the Brigadier. He smiled boyishly.

'You must come with us to the nest,' he said. 'You will make honey.

You will be dancing the code.'

The Brigadier blinked. 'I beg your pardon?'

The young soldier repeated his statement, in exactly the same words, with the same boyish smile.

A smile of absolute conviction.

'Now look here,' said the Brigadier, trying to stifle a growing sense of unease. 'Under the terms of the Geneva Convention, we - '

'There is no more Geneva Convention,' said the soldier, still smiling. 'There is no more Law of War. There is only dancing the code.'

Dry soil falling on to her face woke Jo. She sat up quickly. Her body felt stiff, uncomfortable: her trousers pinched at the waist, her shoes felt several sizes too small. Before she could think about this, the floor jolted beneath her.

- honey honey good good sweet sweet dancing honey dancing honey honey good good sweet sweet dancing honey dancing - - Had she left the nest? Was she being taken somewhere in a truck?

She couldn't see a thing.

The floor jolted again, and another rain of dry soil fell on her body.

With a shock, she remembered something in her - Dreams? Had they been dreams?

Zalloua and Benari - the room that tried to digest her - the Doctor - The Doctor was blind.

- honey honey sweet sweet to be UNDER ATTACK THE NEST IS honey honey sweet sweet to be UNDER ATTACK THE NEST IS UNDER ATTACK - - The ground began shaking from side to side. There was still no light. Jo rolled against something soft: another prisoner? She prodded at the soft ma.s.s, felt the rough fabric of an Army uniform.

'We've got to get out of here,' she said in a low voice.

There was no response. Or if there had been, she might not have heard it anyway: a huge rumbling sound was slowly gathering force, as if the world were falling apart - - THE NEST IS BROKEN THE QUEEN IS DEAD THE NEST IS THE NEST IS BROKEN THE QUEEN IS DEAD THE NEST IS BROKEN THE QUEEN IS DEAD - - Jo felt something break away from the back of her neck, something she hadn't even been aware was there. She put a hand up, felt a stickiness that might have been blood or honey.

There was a flare of light. Dimly she saw rows of honey globules, a flailing insect-like form, huge blocks of falling rock and chitin.

We've won, she thought. The Xarax are beaten. They're dead. All I have to do is - Something hit her, hard, pinning her to the ground. Loose soil fell, covering her face, making it impossible to breathe. She tried to move her arms, but they were trapped by whatever had fallen on her. She tried desperately to breathe, started to choke on the dry soil.

- I can't die now not now please not now not when we've won I I can't die now not now please not now not when we've won I only have to breathe and I can walk out of here to BREATHE only have to breathe and I can walk out of here to BREATHE PLEASE PLEASE NO - - But the darkness came down anyway.

Twenty-Two.

The men dug in around UNIT HQ looked almost as if they were there on an exercise, thought Sergeant Benton. They were chatting, pa.s.sing f.a.gs and sandwiches and flasks of tea about, not even bothering to take proper cover.

Regular army, he thought. They probably think it's a bit of a joke, this alien lark. Well, they're wrong.

He picked up his binoculars and looked through them at the HQ building beyond the wire fence. It looked peaceful, bricks gleaming red against the clear blue morning sky. Only the broken window in the front office gave the impression of anything amiss.

Benton put the binoculars down, jogged across the muddy field to the army truck where Major Huffington had made his headquarters.

The Major was sitting on a canvas chair on the sunlit side of the cab, holding an unlit pipe in one hand and a plastic mug of tea in the other. He looked up when Benton approached, nodded a greeting by way of returning the Sergeant's salute.

'You're the UNIT fellow, aren't you?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Where're your men?'

'As far as I know, sir, they're on their way over from barracks.'

The Major grunted. 'Well, as soon as they get here they're going in, you understand?'

Benton blinked. 'Yes, sir. But - '

The Major turned a pair of cold grey eyes on Benton. 'But what, Sergeant?'

Benton looked at his boots. 'What are our orders, sir?'

'Well, flush the alien things out, of course!' He paused. 'Don't worry, Benton, you won't be on your own. We'll give you supporting fire. Small arms and mortar, and I've got a couple of artillery pieces if the worst comes to the worst. But you've got the knowledge - what it looks like in there, and so on. And how to fight these aliens. We don't know how to do it.'

We don't, either, mate, thought Benton. We just make it up as we go along.

He looked up at Huffington, who was lighting his pipe. 'Uh - sir, don't you reckon we should wait until the Brig gets back - uh, that is, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, sir?'

The cold grey eyes looked at him again.

'Lethbridge-Stewart's helicopter went down over Kebiria about half an hour ago, Sergeant. Went up in smoke. We haven't heard anything further, so we have to a.s.sume he's bought it.' Unexpectedly, the Major's expression softened and he gave Benton a sympathetic smile.

'Sorry, old chap, but there it is.'

Benton suddenly felt sick. The Brig - and Mike Yates too, probably, if the chopper had gone down. He didn't dare ask. He knew he ought to feel grief, but what he mainly felt was confusion. So many men had been killed; but Captain Yates and the Brig had seemed to be immortal, invulnerable.

Like the Doctor.

And now they were all dead. Gone. Not able to help any more.

Benton swallowed, looked down at UNIT HQ.

'We'll just have to do the best we can, sir,' he said aloud, for something to say.

The Major's voice was still sympathetic. 'That's right, sergeant. Do the best you can.'

Someone was kissing Jo on the lips. If she didn't feel so ill it would have been nice. As it was, she just wanted them to go away.

Then they did go away, and Jo became aware of something unexpected. She was breathing. Her lungs hurt, her throat hurt, and there was a line of pain across her midriff and more running around her shoulders. But she was breathing, and she was fairly sure that last time she'd thought about it she hadn't expected to do that ever again.

'Come on, Jo.' The Doctor's voice. 'All you have to do is keep breathing through your mouth, and you'll be fine.'

Jo opened her eyes, saw the kind, round face of the Doctor smiling down at her.

'Wha-' Jo croaked. She tried to clear her throat, nearly choked.

Her lungs heaved.

She closed her eyes for a moment, then tried again. 'What happened, Doctor?'

'Well, you were dead - or, at least, your heart had stopped.

Fortunately you hadn't been dead long enough to suffer permanent brain damage, so I was able to resuscitate you.' He paused. 'Do you feel strong enough to stand up yet?'

Jo tried to sit up, felt a wave of dizziness and pain. She clenched her fists, pushed them against the hard, stony floor.

'I'm okay,' she managed to say. Then she frowned, stared into his eyes.

His eyes.

'But Doctor, you were blind!'

The Doctor smiled. 'Fortunately Xarax macroproteins are fairly similar to my own, so I was able to use them to do some repair work.

In fact I very nearly had the entire situation completely under my control - as opposed to Monsieur Zalloua's - before some idiot decided to blow the nest to pieces. You see the Xarax themselves are fundamentally -' He broke off as there was a clatter of falling soil from somewhere nearby.

Jo looked around, noticed her surroundings for the first time. She was on a sloping ramp of loose mud and pieces of rock. At the top of the slope were the remains of a mud wall, topped by a ragged patch of open sky. The sky was a deep dawn blue with wisps of rosy cloud.

'Have the Xarax been destroyed?' Jo remembered the message from the nest, the tendrils or whatever they had been disconnecting from her neck. She felt a surge of hope. Perhaps it was all over.

'Possibly,' said the Doctor, then looked down at her and beamed. 'If you've got your breath back now, I think we should go and take a look.'

Jo managed a smile and got up. The dizziness returned; for a few seconds she had to lean on the Doctor for support. She kept hold of his hand as they scrambled across the treacherous slope towards the mud wall. Jo could see an entrance in it now, half-blocked by fallen earth.

As she followed the Doctor towards the entrance, she realized that there was a figure sitting there, half-obscured by fragments.

She hesitated, but the Doctor pulled her forward. 'Don't worry,' he said. 'It's only Monsieur Benari.'

They drew up to the figure and Jo realized that the Doctor was right. But the Prime Minister was barely recognizable. His clothes were torn and stained with dirt. Jo almost felt sorry for him: almost, then she remembered the bombs, the little girl dying.

He lifted his face. To Jo's surprise it was streaked with tears. 'What have I done to my country?' he said. 'What have I done to the Revolution?'

Jo did feel sorry for him then. She looked at his grey and dishevelled hair, the deep lines in his face, and suddenly realized how much older he was than he seemed to be in the posters in Kebir City and the newspaper photographs. And after all, she reasoned, he might not have been the one who gave the order for the raid on Vincent's camp. He might have been down here, in the nest. She couldn't hold a grudge against him forever because the system he had created had gone mad.

She crouched down, took his hands in hers. 'Come on, Monsieur Benari, get up,' she said. 'We've got to help the Doctor.'

The Doctor was already on the far side of the entrance, standing at the top of a steep slope leading to a gully. When he saw Jo and Benari coming he nodded and started down; Jo followed, keeping a hand in Benari's.

Although it was steep, it wasn't as hard going as it looked: crude steps had been cut into the rock. They looked old - older than the nest, thought Jo, until she remembered how old Zalloua had said the nest might be. She wondered who had built the steps, and why.

She was about half way down when she saw the Doctor, already in the gully at the bottom. He looked both ways, his hands on his hips, then up at Jo. Then he started down the gully at a run. Jo hurried after him, followed by Benari. She almost collided with the Doctor at the end: he was standing, one hand raised, facing an open expanse of rock streaked with rust-coloured sunlight and dotted with the bizarre carca.s.ses of the Xarax 'helicopters'. Jo took another step forward, saw several figures standing a few yards away in the shadow of a rock.

They were wearing combat fatigues and carrying machine pistols.