Doctor Who: The Invasion (19 page)

'But I suppose the archives in Geneva will be glad of...' He paused and grinned. 'Just keep out of my way, that's all.'

Vaughn clasped the Cerebration Mentor to his chest as he and the Doctor ran through the maze of buildings forming the factory complex, making their way towards the distant blockhouse under the three spherical antennae shrouds. They had successfully dodged patrolling Cybermen, but suddenly one of them appeared abruptly round a corner, striding inexorably towards them. Vaughn stopped and carefully aimed the apparatus at it. At once the Doctor grabbed his arm and dragged him into a doorway out of sight.

'What do you think you're doing?' Vaughn muttered distrustfully. 'We must destroy them...'

The Doctor peered warily round the corner. 'They don't know we're here yet. Let's keep the element of surprise.' He looked again.

'All clear now.'

Reluctantly Vaughn agreed and they crept along the side of the enormous building and started to run down a narrow alleyway. Just ahead of them a door opened and they were confronted by two silver giants completely blocking their escape. Vaughn aimed and triggered the machine. A shrill whistling bored into their heads and the two Cybermen performed a hideously comic semaphore of jerking limbs, with smoke and black fluid-like pus oozing from their joints and grilles.

'Now they'll know we're here,' lamented the Doctor as they clambered over the hot, smoking carcasses and rushed on down the alley.

Reaching the end, Vaughn indicated the roofs of a group of derelict buildings opposite. 'We can go up that way...' he panted, racing across a yard to a rusted fire escape.

The corroded structure creaked and wobbled as they stumbled round and round the spiral staircase and onto the roof twenty metres above the concrete. Dodging between the shattered skylights, rusted ventilator cowls and sagging beams, they made for the other end of the vast ruin. Vaughn paused to look over the edge and then opened a steel door in the head of a shaft.

The Doctor peered into the unwelcoming darkness. 'Is this the only way?' he asked unenthusiastically.

'It is now,' Vaughn told him. 'The Cybermen are all around us already.'

Before following Vaughn down into the gloom, the Doctor scanned the sky hopefully. But there was no sign of the Brigadier's forces. He glanced over the parapet. Cybermen were striding across the small yard and along the alleyways far below. With a brave shrug he started down the echoing concrete steps.

The UNIT taskforce screeched to a halt in the compound and leaped from their jeeps.

'There are the golf ball things,' shouted the Brigadier, 'over that way through the old buildings..

Zoe and Isobel ran along behind him. Isobel was laden with camera, lenses and rolls of film.

They made their way through a deserted old factory building and were about to cross the yard beyond it when the Brigadier ordered the force to take cover behind the inert and decaying machinery.

Silhouetted against the sunlit open doorway stood four Cybermen, their huge shadows stretching across the floor. The UNIT

platoon concentrated its machine-gun fire on the advancing enemy, but it had no effect whatsoever. Then the Cybermen's laser units flashed with intense blue light and two troopers were flung against the corrugated steel wall of the factory amid splinters of wooden crate.

'Bazookas! Where the hell are you?' yelled the Brigadier, glancing over his shoulder at two groups of soldiers frantically setting up a pair of anti-tank launchers behind a massive lathe.

'Fire at will!' he ordered, grabbing Isobel as she tried to take a telephoto shot of their assailants and dragging her back beside Zoe behind a huge steel pipe.

All at once there was a roar and a searing whoosh as the bazookas fired. The Cybermen were hurled cartwheeling and disintegrating out of the building by two devastating explosions.

'Advance!' ordered Lethbridge-Stewart, leading the way.

Isobel could not resist stopping for a moment to photograph the tangled remnants of the Cybermen. 'Great!' she murmured, her motorised shutter zipping madly away.

'Come on!' Zoe urged her. 'That's only four of the monsters.'

They followed the troopers across the yard and into the alleyway opposite.

Vaughn and the Doctor froze momentarily as the sound of muffled explosions rumbled through the semi-darkness inside the old powerhouse.

'That'll be the Brig,' the Doctor murmured with satisfaction as he followed Vaughn among the eerie ghosts of the heavy machinery.

Eventually Vaughn forced open a small door and they emerged into a narrow road running alongside the windowless blockhouse containing the ion beam generator. Vaughn pointed up at the flat roof under the three shrouded antennae.

'That's the best way into the building,' he advised. 'Take them by surprise.'

The Doctor glanced cautiously round the edge of the door. 'It's very odd, Vaughn. There don't seem to be any Cybermen here at all.'

Vaughn indicated the corpses of several security guards lying near the entrance to the blockhouse. 'No doubt they are all inside, Doctor,' he murmured. 'I'll go up there first and cover you.'

The Doctor waited while Vaughn clambered up the fire escape at the corner of the transmitter building. When he reached the top, the Doctor edged out into the road and scuttled across to the foot of the stairs. As he reached the corner, three Cybermen suddenly emerged from the open door of the powerhouse where he had been crouching seconds earlier.

'Behind you, Vaughn!' he yelled, dodging round the corner out of sight under the metal stairs.

Above him, Vaughn spun round aiming the Professor's machine awkwardly over the handrail. As the intense whistling ripped the air, one of the Cybermen collapsed in a heap of wobbling limbs and tubes. Before Vaughn could adjust the direction of the horn, the other two Cybermen discharged their laser units simultaneously. Vaughn was instantly transformed into a pillar of fire, flickering rapidly from positive to negative. He flung the Cerebration Machine high into the air and it smashed asunder at the Doctor's feet in a cascade of delicate components. Vaughn's terrible death took several-seconds as he flailed about in a vortex of strobing white flames.

Crouching beneath the fire escape, the Doctor's blood ran cold as he listened to Vaughn's final agonised screams... They were the sounds not of a human but of a Cyberman. When he looked up eventually, the Doctor felt a rain of fine black ash on his face.

Rubbing his watering eyes, the Doctor peered round the corner. The second Cyberman had now collapsed on top of the first, but the third monster was advancing across the road towards him.

Glancing behind him, the Doctor saw that the alley formed a dead end. The hissing rubbery breaths were only metres away. Swallowing hard, the Doctor waited at the corner. As soon as the creature appeared, he dived forward between its legs and raced towards the powerhouse door.

At the far end of the road, the Brigadier and his troops saw the disorientated Cyberman trying to disentangle itself from the railing of the fire escape. Behind it, a tiny figure scurried into the powerhouse.

'There's the Doctor!' cried Zoe.

'Bazookas!' snapped Lethbridge-Stewart.

Seconds later a roar burst from the launcher and the Cyberman was blown to pieces in the middle of the roadway.

After a pause the Doctor crept out from the doorway. 'Where on earth have you been?' he yelled. Then he pointed to the blockhouse. '"I'he ion beam transmitter's in there... Do get a move on...'

Led by the Brigadier, the platoon and the girls tore down the road to the blockhouse. After a brief consultation with the Doctor, the Brigadier ran up the fire escape, clambered over Vaughn's welded corpse and onto the roof. Armed with her camera, Isobel tried to follow him, but the Doctor caught her and dragged her under the fire escape. Several troopers clattered after the Brigadier and the others surrounded the blockhouse with levelled machine-guns.

After a long silence they heard a tinkle of glass followed by several grenade explosions. The door of the blockhouse was blown off and a number of Cybermen staggered out to be greeted by a hail of machine-gun fire.

Isobel wriggled out of the Doctor's grasp and took a series of hurried pictures of the heap of wriggling, gasping aliens scattered over the roadway. More massive explosions followed and more Cybermen tottered into the dense barrage of bullets and collapsed twitching and smouldering on top of the others.

There was a long silence. At last the Brigadier staggered out, coughing and wiping his blackened face to hearty cheers from his men. He found the Doctor posing heroically on the fire escape, flourishing bits of dismembered Cyberman while Isobel snapped cheerfully away.

'When you're quite ready, Doctor...' he gasped resentfully, 'we have an invasion on our hands.'

The Doctor grinned cheekily at him. 'Oh really, Brig? It looks like soot to me!'

In the Henlow Flats bunker, Squadron Leader Bradwell and his team listened to the Brigadier's Situation Bulletin on the polyvox unit while keeping their eyes fixed on the radar scanners for any sign of the Cyber Mother Ship or of the Megatron Bomb.

'... By destroying the ion beam transmitter we have stopped the enemy triggering their bomb. However, their Cybership continues to transmit its hypnotic signal and therefore the world remains paralysed,' explained Lethbridge-Stewart. 'To stop this signal we must eliminate the Cybership. The Russian rocket should reach it in... in approximately six hours. If the warhead succeeds then humanity will be released from Cyber coercion and we shall be able to mobilise International Defences against the Cybermen already on the Earth...'

'Something on the screen, sir!' called out Flight Lieutenant Peters. 'It's coming in very fast.'

Bradwell hurried over. On the edge of the long-range sky radar was a large white blob. 'Sure it's not noise, Peters?'

'No, sir, it's there all right. True orbital path. Must be gigantic.'

Bradwell snatched up the polyvox. 'It must be the Cyber craft,'

he murmured.

'It's in a holding orbit, sir. Approximately five thousand miles.'

The Squadron Leader apologised for interrupting the Brigadier. 'We've picked up an enormous UFO, sir. It's orbiting about five thousand miles out.'

'Outside your range I suppose?' asked the Brigadier despondently.

'Oh yes, sir. Anyway we've only got some odds and ends left.

We chucked all our best stuff at the earlier lot.'

Lethbridge-Stewart grunted. 'Very well. Thank you, Bradwell.

Inform me of any change. Out.'

In the Operations Room inside the Hercules the atmosphere was fraught with anxiety. The Brigadier told Benton to contact Captain Turner at the Nykortny Base in Russia. Then he turned to the Doctor, who was silently brooding by himself.

'Why the devil would they move their Mother Ship in to a closer orbit?' he asked, completely mystified.

The Doctor roused himself. 'No doubt to deliver their bomb,'

he mused.

'But Doctor, we've destroyed the ion beam transmitter... so how...?'

The Doctor sighed. 'I must have been mistaken,' he confessed.

'Evidently the device does not require an ion field. However, if as I suspect it is highly unstable, then it must be confined within a giant magnetic field until shortly before detonation. Therefore it could hardly be fired by missile from the neighbourhood of the Moon some 230,000 miles away..

'You mean the magnetic field has to be generated inside the Mother Ship?' Zoe blurted out.

The Doctor nodded gloomily. 'Precisely, Zoe. So they have come in closer to Earth and are presumably about to launch the Megatron Bomb.'

'So they must have come in range of the Russian missile!'

exclaimed Zoe excitedly.

'Indeed, Zoe, but unfortunately travelling in the wrong direction.'

The Brigadier put up his hand for silence as Captain Turner's voice at last came through. 'Sorry about the delay, sir, but we've had an almighty flap on here...'

'Can the Russians re-direct their rocket, Jimmy?' demanded the Brigadier urgently, his eyes fixed on the Doctor's.

'Yes, they already have, sir. Estimate contact with Cyber craft in fifteen minutes.'

The Brigadier glanced at his watch. 'Could the Cybermen deliver their bomb in that time?' he asked the Doctor.

The Doctor nodded, gripping Zoe's hand protectively. 'Easily, I'm afraid.'

The Brigadier thanked Turner and sank into a chair. 'This is going to be a long fifteen minutes...' he sighed.

They sat in agonised silence, waiting. Once Benton knocked a tin mug flying and it clattered under the radio console, making everyone jump. The hapless Corporal mumbled his apologies sheepishly.

After a seemingly eternal vigil Squadron Leader Bradwell's excited voice burst from the polyvox receiver. 'We have the Russian rocket on radar, heading right on target, sir.'

Then a chorus of urgent voices was heard in the background.

'Now we've got a third echo sir, heading away from the Cyber ship!'

Bradwell shouted above the hubbub in the bunker.

The Doctor stood up, frantically ruffling his mop of hair as he glanced at Zoe in despair. 'The Megatron Bomb...' he whispered. 'It's on its way after all...'

In the bunker at Henlow Flats Squadron Leader Bradwell stared at the three traces on the radar screen. The small trace of the Russian rocket was fast approaching the large blob of the Cyber Mother Craft. A third echo, the Megatron Bomb, was moving rapidly away from the Mother Ship and towards the centre of the screen.

'Prime all remaining Taktiks,' he suddenly rapped out.

'Override checks programme and link into skyprobe radar guidance.'

'Target trajectory linked...' reported Peters. 'In range thirty seconds. You think this will work, sir?'

'No idea, but we've got nothing to lose,' Bradwell cried cheerfully, the light of battle shining in his eyes. 'Guidance locked on yet?'