Doctor Who_ Night Of The Humans Part 9

As the buggy neared the human city, Slipstream heard the sound of drums and a fanfare of horns. He drove on until he had reached the gates, and then he climbed out. A human guard stood in one of the watchtowers, staring down at him.

'Good afternoon!' said Slipstream. 'I don't suppose you could be a gent and open up these gates for me, what?'

The guard grunted something, and then turned 112 away, speaking to somebody on the other side of the outer wall. Seconds later the gates began to open, and a small army of guards spilled out onto the salt flat, all of them brandis.h.i.+ng weapons. A handful of them set about attacking the buggy with their cudgels and blades, slas.h.i.+ng at its tyres and denting its body, and one of them grabbed Slipstream and put a knife to his throat.

'Steady on, chaps,' Slipstream laughed. 'Not much of a welcoming committee, I must say. I suppose the phrase I'm looking for is "Take me to your leader".'

'So... The Beagle XXI. Your s.h.i.+p...'

'Yes?'

'Is that a Sittuun s.h.i.+p?'

Charlie turned to Amy, frowning. 'What do you mean?'

'Well... Was it made by the Sittuun? On your planet? It's just the name "Beagle". It's not Arabic like your names. It's an English word.'

They were still walking across the salt flat. They had been walking for what felt like an age, and the human city didn't seem any nearer.

'It's a human s.h.i.+p,' said Charlie. 'And it's European.'

'Right. OK. So do you guys work with humans a lot, then?

When you're not stuck here, I mean.'

'Yes,' said Charlie. 'Our company, IEA is a 113 multi-world organisation, but right now it's mostly human and Sittuun.'

'Right. And you went to a university near Earth, yeah?'

'Ye-es. And?'

'Well... If you work with humans, and you went to university with lots of humans, what I don't get is why your Dad, and the others... why they have this big problem with humans.'

Charlie sighed. 'I thought we'd been through this.'

'Yeah, but it can't just be because we're superst.i.tious and a bit, well, warmongery. I mean... Is that all it is?'

Charlie laughed softly. 'And "warmongery" isn't enough?' he said. 'No. For what it's worth, I don't think it's just that. But that's just my opinion.'

'So what do you think it is? If it's not just all the ghost stories and warmongering?'

'Earlier on, when I was telling you why we're called Sittuun, why we have Earth names, I told you we were first encountered by that Syrian crew, yes?'

'Yeah. I remember that bit.'

'Well... Think about it. That's when we were first encountered. By an Earth crew who had travelled through a wormhole using Earth technology. Humans were the first aliens we ever encountered.'

114.

Amy thought about this for a moment. They were both still walking, flakes of salt still crunching with every footfall. Then it came to her.

'You mean you guys had never been into s.p.a.ce?'

Charlie nodded.

'So! Amy said, smiling now, 'you mean to say that humans were all, you know, s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps and wormholes, and you guys were really primitive?'

'Er... we prefer the word developing.'

'But... why? Why weren't you travelling into s.p.a.ce? I mean... You guys seem really intelligent. Way more intelligent than most of the humans I know. And you don't have any of the weird superst.i.tions or... or... hang-ups that we have. My friend's grandmother still thinks you can tell somebody's future by looking at tea leaves. And you're telling me we're more advanced than you?'

Charlie shrugged. 'You know what I think?' he said. 'A part of me thinks it was your superst.i.tions and your myths that got you there in the first place. We had nothing like that. We had our science and our history, but we didn't ask too many questions. We had no sense of mystery. On Earth you were making up stories about the stars and the planets hundreds, no thousands of years before you went there. And I think that made you want to go even more. This mad drive to answer all the questions, and then ask yourselves some more. The Sittuun 115.

don't like questions we can't answer right away.'

He stopped walking, and looked out towards the human city, s.h.i.+elding his eyes from the light of the comet, which seemed to grow brighter with every pa.s.sing minute.

'I can see Ella,' he said. 'She's parked at the gates. And they've trashed her. Typical. Right... Do you remember the plan?'

Amy took a deep breath and let it out slowly. 'Yeah. I think so.'

'OK. Show me.'

Amy rolled her eyes, and then adopted a hunchbacked stance, twisting her face into a b.e.s.t.i.a.l frown. 'I have a prisoner!

she grunted.

Charlie laughed and shook his head. 'OK. That was a bit much,' he said. 'Do it again, only this time try and make it a little bit less "impression-of-a-caveman".'

Tutting under her breath, Amy adopted the stance again. 'I have a prisoner,' she said.

This time Charlie nodded. 'Yeah,' he said. 'Much better.'

In the throne room, Tuco stood on the raised platform and held his staff aloft.

'In the beginning was the dark blue night and the silence and the empty and the none. And into this came Gobo. Chosen is he who rules this Earth. Chosen is-'

116.

'Yes yes yes. Get on with it! said Dirk Slipstream. 'I haven't got all day.'

Tuco scowled at him. 'All hail Django!' he snarled, bringing down his staff with a triumphant thump.

Slipstream smiled knowingly, rubbing the palms of his hands together as if he were awaiting a prize.

Seconds later, Django entered the room followed by his guards. He climbed up onto the platform, and sat on his throne, looking down at Slipstream with an air of wild-eyed curiosity, as if caught in the middle of some mind-bending trance.

'Who are you?' he croaked. 'Who sent you?'

'Oh, n.o.body sent me old chap. This is more of a solo venture. You see, I believe I have information you fellas may find interesting.'

Django looked at Tuco, raising one eyebrow, and Tuco shrugged in return. Django's lunatic gaze returned to Slipstream.

'Yes? And what is this information?'

Slipstream smiled, his snow-white teeth twinkling in the dim glow of the torches.

'The Sittuun hideout. I know where they are. I know where their bomb is kept. You know about their bomb, don't you?'

'The bomb is the work of the Bad!' Django roared. 'They wish to destroy the Earth.'

Slipstream cleared his throat, trying not to 117 laugh. 'Yes. Well, quite. And I know where it is.'

Tell me!'

'Easy, old boy. You see... There's something you can do for me in return.'

A deathly silence fell over the room and Django sat back on his throne, scratching at his straggly beard with long, bony fingers. His breathing grew heavy, a wheezing death rattle, and his lips curled back from his crooked, ashen teeth.

'What is it you want?' he asked.

'I want to go into your tower,' said Slipstream. 'This tower with... whatsisname... Gobo on the side of it.'

'Why?'

'Well, old chap... Just so happens there's something I want in there. It's nothing of interest to you, but it's very valuable to me.'

Django's expression darkened. 'n.o.body goes into the tower,' he said. 'n.o.body.'

'Ah, but then of course I do know where the Sittuun are hiding. Don't I? I thought maybe, on this occasion, you could make an exception.'

Tuco glanced anxiously from Slipstream to Django. He hunched himself over at the side of the throne and whispered into Django's ear: 'Master... He may be right. We need to find the Sittuun.

Gobo grows greater by the day; his light gets ever brighter. If they explode the bomb... boom! What then?'

118.

NIGHT OF THE HUNANS.

Slowly, Django began to nod. 'Yes! he said. 'Yes... Maybe he is right.' He turned to Slipstream. 'Very well. You may go into the tower.'

Slipstream beamed. 'Ah, marvellous. I knew you'd see sense. Now... I'll need two things. First, a guide. Is there anyone who knows their way around the s.h.i.+p... I mean, the tower?'

Django and Tuco looked to one another. Tuco nodded, as if he understood some unspoken sentiment.

'There is one,' he said. 'The Wordslinger, Manco... the heretic. He has been into the tower.'

'Jolly good. I'll take him.'

'But he is our pris-'

'I won't hear a word of it. That tower of yours is a quarter of a mile tall. I'll need a guide, so I'm taking Manco...'

Tuco looked at Django, who gave his consent with a dismissive gesture of the hand.

'And this other thing?' Tuco asked. 'What is this other thing you need?'

They had left the city on its far side, behind the great towering hulk of the Gobocorp s.h.i.+p. Looking out into the distance, the Doctor saw another seemingly endless landscape of jagged and misshapen metal; mountains of debris, and valleys and canyons etched out of refuse.

'Tell me something, Sancho,' he said to his 119 guard. 'Your city... and your tower... is it by any chance the centre of the world?'

Sancho looked at him with a quizzical frown. 'Hmm?'

'Your tower. Is it slap bang, right in the middle of the world? Dead centre? Like a bulls-eye?'

Sancho shrugged. 'S'ppose so.'

'Right. I... see. Interesting.'

They took him out across a vast plain of copper that had turned green with rust; a single concave sheet of metal perhaps half a mile across that may have looked, from some distance, like a pasture, until they came at last to the lake's edge. The lake itself was immense, a bubbling cauldron of dark and toxic waste that hissed and fizzed at the sh.o.r.eline.

Jutting out over the lake's surface was a long, st.u.r.dy panel that was riveted into the ground at its base.

'You're making me walk the plank?' said the Doctor. 'You know, not even pirates made people walk the plank. Well...

Earth pirates didn't, anyway. Common misconception.'

'You walk up there,' said Sancho, gesturing towards the iron jetty with his spear.

The Doctor sighed. His hands were still bound with rope, and, despite several surrept.i.tious attempts to free himself using every trick in the book, he'd had no success. However devolved these humans were, they certainly knew how to tie 120 a good knot, he had to give them that. Of course, he could always try and make a run for it. None of them had firearms.

He'd just have to hope their aim with arrows and spears wasn't particularly good; but then he doubted that very much.

'Sancho! he said softly. 'You don't have to do this. I can help you. If you'd just-'

Sancho jabbed him in the back. 'You walk up there!' he barked, more insistently than before. The other guards were growing restless, rattling their spears threateningly.

The Doctor nodded, and began walking up the ramp, out over the lake, with Sancho following him every step of the way.

When he had reached its end, the Doctor looked down into the acid of Lake Mono and took a deep breath. He had faced so many dangers before, found himself in so many situations from which there had seemed no obvious way out, and yet now he found himself stuck in a tight spot by some rope handcuffs and a handful of angry humans armed with spears. In his many lives he had fallen great heights and been shot. He'd lost a hand and grown it back. He had seen the end of the universe, and lived to tell the tale. But acid... Acid was something else. Acid would rule out a regeneration. Acid would be final.

'You will die now! said Sancho, nudging him with the spear once more.

121.

The Doctor closed his eyes. He thought of Amy, and he wondered where she was. Maybe there was some way out of this for her at least. Maybe the Sittuun would take her away, somewhere safe. Perhaps he could draw some comfort from that. He opened his eyes again, his toes now inching over the jetty's end. He could feel the chemical warmth rising up from the lake's surface, the noxious fumes stinging his nostrils.

Looking back across the curved field of verdigris, he saw a single dark figure making its way towards the edges of the lake.