Doctor Who: Dragonfire (14 page)

Kane looked at the hundreds of spacecraft, and thought of them full of innocent people and his force of frozen mercenaries. There must be no witnesses to the terror which was just starting. No cries of warning. No one must escape.

He pressed another button. The night sky was suddenly filled with the simultaneous burst of explosions.

Glitz didn't understand what had happened. He saw the huge blast that tore through the Nosferatu and blew it into fragments. He saw the explosions from the other spacecraft that burst in the sky like hundreds of fireworks. He knew that five hundred spacecraft had just blown up.

But he didn't really understand what had happened. He didn't comprehend that two thousand lives had just ceased to exist. Two thousand lives had just been extinguished, like a beam of light being switched off. Two thousand tiny, insignificant lives, each one as precious as a diamond, had been scratched out like errors.

Glitz never really understood. But he felt the huge, black pain of it, all the same. He crumpled, and fell to his knees in grief.

Kane stood for several minutes, watching the fragments of wreckage sparkling against the black. Then he closed the observation window.

Glitz looked up. His face was hard. He knew who had done this. 'Kane!'

Like everywhere else in Iceworld, the Freezer Centre was deserted.

Items of melting foodstuff were trampled into the floor, and small puddles of water collected round the bases of the freezer chests.

The Doctor hurried in, with Mel and Ace in tow. He didn't like the empty silence. 'Where is everyone?' he muttered darkly. 'Half-day closing? Some kind of fire drill? I don't think we have much time.'

He marched over to the TARDIS and fished the key out of his pocket.

Ace was getting restless. She'd expected them to go straight to the Docking Bays.

'What are we doing here? I thought we was going to see your spacecraft?'

Mel smiled. 'This is our spacecraft.'

Ace looked at the tall blue cabinet which the Doctor was trying to unlock. Then she looked at Mel, laughing at Ace. She almost thumped Mel. 'I'm not stupid!' she said, trying to contain her anger.

The Doctor opened a narrow door, and disappeared inside. Ace couldn't work out what was going on. Mel smiled sympathetically at Ace and said, 'Believe me...' and then disappeared through the door too. Ace was amazed. She stood watching for a few moments, waiting for Mel and the Doctor to step back out of the cabinet. But instead she heard Mel's voice from inside: 'Come on. Come and see for yourself.'

'This is stupid,' said Ace. But she was curious to know what was so important inside this box. 'Squeeze up, then.'

She pushed her way into the box, expecting to be squashed up against Doughnut and the Professor inside. She looked around, startled. At first, she thought she'd made a mistake, and pushed through one of the Freezer

Centre exit doors accidentally. She was inside some kind of brightly lit control room, and the Doctor was flicking through star charts on a large viewing screen. But how had she got into the Doctor's spacecraft from the Freezer Centre? She turned back to look at the door she'd just come through. It was a large pair of double doors, not the small, narrow door she remembered walking through. Was her mind playing tricks? Had she fallen unconscious, or something? She stepped back to the doors, and looked out through them.

Outside the TARDIS, Ace's head popped out through the open door for a moment, looked around in amazement, and then disappeared again.

'Hang about..."

What was going on here? Were they playing some kind of a joke on her? Someone had some explaining to do, and Ace turned on Mel in annoyance. 'Here - how d'you do that?'

Mel had never really understood the technicalities of it herself, so she just shrugged her shoulders and smiled. 'It's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.'

'Don't come all clever dick with me. What's going on?'

'It's difficult to explain.'

'Try me.'

'Well - it's dimensionally transcendental, you see.'

The Doctor, meanwhile, was studying a particular star chart, but with all this chatter in the background he could hardly think. 'Quiet!' he bellowed.

Mel and Ace turned to look at the Doctor with slight surprise.

'That's better,' said the Doctor. 'Now, since the planet Proamon doesn't appear to exist, at least according to the TARDIS star charts, I think it's time we had a word with Mr Kane. Come on, there are things to do.'

And he brushed past the two women and out into the Freezer Centre.

'Come on,' said Mel, leading Ace out.

While the Doctor was locking the TARDIS door, Ace peered round the back of the TARDIS, just to make sure it wasn't all some magician's illusion...

Glitz had returned to the chamber of the Singing Trees, and not finding the two women there, realised that they must have returned to Iceworld with the Doctor. At least, that's what he hoped had happened.

He was making his way back along the metal gantries in the upper Ice Passages, when he suddenly heard the heavy, ringing footsteps of several mercenaries from another passage. He looked back down the passage just in time to see them lurch out of a side passage, and turn towards him.

Nearly all of Kane's frozen mercenaries had been destroyed in the spacecraft, but evidently these half-dozen-or-so had escaped being trapped with the customers. Glitz took one look at them, and started to run. The Sprog had mentioned something about having a store of nitro back in her quarters. Glitz needed to borrow some ...

McLuhan was taking most of Bazin's weight as they staggered down endless Ice Passages. Even if they managed to kill the alien creature now, there was no certainty that they would ever be able to find their way out of the Ice Passages again. But that was a problem that could wait. She kept glancing at the signal tracker, and had noticed that the Creature was pursuing them once more and was gaining on them. They would soon have to stand and fight. She didn't know whether the fight would come before or after their one hour fifty-three minutes were up.

Bazin was in considerable pain, and could hardly stand. 'Leave me.

Leave me here...' he gasped. 'I'm not leaving you anywhere.' 'Don't be stupid. I'm slowing you down...'

'We're not in any hurry.'

'One hour fifty-three minutes ...'

At first, McLuhan wasn't sure that she'd heard Bazin properly. 'What?'

'Average survival on an ANT-hunt: one hour fifty-three. We're way past that.'

'Who told you rubbish like that?' demanded McLuhan.

'Everyone knows it.'

'You stick to your rule book.'

'Like you, you mean?'

McLuhan looked at him. She was getting to like the boy. 'Yes, well, we can't all be perfect soldiers. Look -we'll take cover over there.' McLuhan had seen a small alcove in the Ice Passage, with a number of low boulders at the front. It was the best they'd find down here.

She hauled Bazin over the boulders, and lowered him to the ground.

Then she kneeled down, and unclamped her Cosmolite. She set the gun up pointing between two boulders, and took cover in the alcove with Bazin. 'Here,' she said, handing him the signal tracker. 'I can't line the gun up and read the tracker at the same time. You'll have to read the signal.' She lay down flat on her stomach, and adjusted herself to the Cosmolite. 'This ANT won't be able to tell its toes from its tentacles when I've finished with it.' She flicked up the gunsight, and then settled her finger on the trigger. 'Right - where is it?'

Bazin was watching the signal tracker. It was following the radio signal from the map, still tucked into the Creature's folds of skin where the Doctor had left it. 'About two hundred metres away. Approaching from the left.'

McLuhan lined her sights up on the passage to the far left. All she had to do now was wait for the ANT to walk into the centre of the sights...

Glitz clambered up a service shaft leading from the Ice Passages to the basement areas of Iceworld. He had just reached the top, when a strident voice pierced the air. 'Ah - you there!'

Glitz froze in surprise and terror.

'Yes - you. Where is everyone? What kind of a way is this to run a business?'

Glitz turned round to see a white sparkly thing festooned in fluffy pink feathers bearing down on him.

'Have you seen a small child anywhere? She answers to the name of Stellar. I appear to have mislaid her.'

Glitz was lost for words.

The woman peered at him, but quickly decided from the man's vacuous expression that he was a complete buffoon. 'Evidently not. Well, if you find her, would you be so good as to take her to the Refreshment Bar to wait for me?'

The woman turned to leave, but then turned back again and looked at Glitz. 'Don't just stand there gawking, man. Start looking for her.'

'Certainly, missus.'

Glitz turned a little confusedly, and started looking, while the woman flounced off in a quiver of pink ostrich. Glitz had already peered uncertainly behind two fire extinguishers and an ash tray before he realised what he was doing...

The Doctor was hurrying through the empty corridors.

'Ask him what he's up to,' Ace kept insisting, as the two women hurried along in the Doctor's tracks. But Mel knew better than to pester the Doctor with trivial questions when he was in this kind of a mood.

Suddenly, Ace halted, and pointed at an access ladder on the wall that led down to the floors below. 'Here - this is a short cut to my quarters.

It's right underneath us. Look.'

Mel looked at the ladder. There was some graffiti felt-tipped onto the wall beside it:

'Ace for Wayne?' said Mel with a slight smile.

'Yeah, he's my stuffed dog.' Then Ace realised what Mel had been thinking, and turned on Mel accusingly. 'Here, who d'you think he was?'

'Come on, you two!' called the Doctor from down the corridor. 'Why are you always squabbling?'

'Come on,' said Mel.

'No - wait. I just want to pop back to my quarters. I feel a bit naked without a couple of cans of nitro.'

'There isn't time.'

'Will you two hurry up!'

'I'll only be a sec' Ace was already halfway down the ladder. 'I'll catch you up before you reach Kane's Cryogenics Chamber.' And she was gone.

Mel ran and caught up with the Doctor. 'What's happened to Ace?' he asked in concern.

'She's gone back to her quarters. But she said not to wait for her.'

The Doctor was annoyed by this time-wasting. 'I'll have something to say to her when I see her again. Come on. The Creature's still in danger.'

'I hope it's found somewhere to hide. Somewhere safe...'

McLuhan was calm as she lay with her finger pulling gently on the Cosmolite's trigger. She heard the quiet ticking of the signal tracker that Bazin was holding.

'One hundred metres,' he said, as the ticking grew slightly faster.

For some reason, an incident from her childhood suddenly came into McLuhan's mind. She and her gang of friends had been playing in a disused quarry, and the boys had dared the girls to climb up a rock face.

There were plenty of hand-and footholds, but it was almost vertical.

The smallest girl had got halfway up, then got frightened. McLuhan was nearest to her and had started to edge towards the small girl. She kept looking at her and could see the sheer terror in the small girl's eyes. But before McLuhan could reach her, the expression in the girl's eyes changed. It was almost as if the small girl had realised that the choice between life and death was hers, and had decided to fall. Even as a child, McLuhan knew at that moment that the other girl would fall before she could reach her.

'Fifty metres. It's there!' Bazin's voice brought her back to the Ice Passages.

She saw the ANT appear at the edge of her gunsight, moving towards the cross-wires in the centre, and she pulled her finger another millimetre further back, until she felt the resistance of the trigger point.

She knew what she had to do. She saw it all clearly now - a simple choice between black and white. All the inessential greys of everyday life had melted away: all the half-truths and half-lies that everyone tells; all the confused emotions and confused relationships that everyone lives through; all the delayed decisions and delayed affection that no one ever finds time for. All were now reduced to a simple black and white for McLuhan -either live or die; win or lose; kill or be killed. A simple choice. A simple morality. A simple outcome. She saw it all clearly now, and she liked it better this way.

The gunsight's cross-wires bisected the Creature horizontally and vertically. McLuhan pulled back another millimetre on the trigger. She felt the Cosmolite kick slightly against her shoulder, and she saw through the gunsight as the .65 gigawatt bolt-beam blew the CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Ace keyed in the security number of her door, and disappeared inside.

She looked round the room and identified a small hold-all underneath the mess. She fished it out, and then retrieved a rather shapeless stuffed dog from one end of the bed. She smiled at Wayne, pushing him into the hold-all. She turned to the racks of chemistry equipment, inspecting the contents of one or two flasks, but shook her head.

Suddenly she froze. There was a noise behind her -the slight creaking of a door. She hardly dared turn to look.

She inched slowly round.

She gave a huge sigh of relief when she saw what had given her such a fright. She hadn't closed the door of the fridge properly, and it was swinging slightly ajar. It was a tall fridge-freezer, and the door creaked on its hinges. She pushed the door closed.

A gloved hand suddenly appeared from inside the fridge and jammed the door open.

Ace's heart missed a beat.

Kane pushed the door wide open, and stepped out. 'You're so predictable...'

Ace backed away from him. 'I'm not frightened of you.' But Kane's eyes saw right through her lie.

'You can kill me - I still won't come and work for you.'

'Possibly not - although I think you overestimate your capacity to withstand pain. I can cause pain in ways that you can't even imagine.' He began to advance on Ace. 'But all this would take time.