Doctor Who_ Eternity Weeps Part 21

The acid left a hundred sites of infection in its wake.

Imorkal gasped, 'Listen. Must listen. Formula. Tell you. Now?' He began to recite a number of extremely complex sounding chemical equations. I stood helplessly, hanging on to one of the ceiling straps as the chopper thrashed its way through the tumbling air. Not one word he said made any sense to me.

'I'm sorry. I don't have the training -'

He managed to wave a hand at me. There was something eerie about that hand. About its three fingers, its opposable thumb. Something at once familiar and alien. It gave me the creeps. Imorkal looked at me then. Two of his eyes were steaming puddles. His third eye opened and immediately came under attack by acid fumes. He jerked. He stared at me. I couldn't look away. He was. He was ... Oh G.o.d no please get out - he was putting something - out of my head get out of my - he was putting something into my - stop hitting me like that Daddy, no, please, no not again not - in my head he was putting something into my - I fell away with a scream. The race fear. I'd read about this. You'd think I was immune, the number of places I'd been, the amount of aliens I'd met.

But no. Here it was. The fear. The old fear of mankind. My fear. Of them. I blinked. I saw crystal cities, terrible violence, intelligence repressed, tortured and killed for sport and children's games. I saw an empty sky, I saw the Stranger loom there, larger every sleeping time, I saw devastation on an incalculable scale as oceans rose to swamp plains and pull down cities and mountains alike, the Judgement of G.o.d, the flood.

I screamed.

The Earth screamed.

The Stranger locked into orbit. They slept and we awoke.

Beneath a s.h.i.+ning Moon, we awoke.

I opened my eyes. Imorkal was dead. Whatever he was trying to tell me was gone. If it was the formula, that was now lost forever. His body bled acid out into the deck. The pa.s.senger compartment erupted with flame.

More flames licked at the fuselage, mirrors to the erupting ground beneath.

I could do nothing for Imorkal. He was dead. I scrambled back towards the c.o.c.kpit.

Chris fought the stick. Smoke was pouring out of the flight controls.

Beneath us, explosions ripped the night. Rock flung itself past, an upside-down rain of death.

Barely visible through the clouds of gas and smoke ahead was a low hill.

There was a light on top. It was flas.h.i.+ng. The TARDIS.

The light seemed to be growing even faster than our speed of approach would have made possible. I shook my head. Delirious. Shock. Could anyone blame me? I checked my watch. One minute to detonation.

Chris shoved the stick forward. The chopper tilted downward. We dived for the light. It was definitely bigger. And now there was another light beneath it, much larger, rectangular. The doors were open.

'What are you doing?' My voice wasn't so much edged with panic as smothered with it. 'You have to slow down, not accelerate!'

Chris was very calm. 'No. The light. Morse code. I know what I'm doing.'

'We're going to cras.h.!.+' 'We have to trust him.'

I did not have the strength to argue any more. Benny was gone. Liz was gone. Fielding was gone. Imorkal was gone. Agent Yellow is on the move.

Sorry, Benny. Condition Black. Repeat, Condition Black I tried. But it's so hard when Agent Yellow is, on the move and the night is on fire and I'm sorry because the Earth is burning and it's not a virus it's G.o.d and I'm sorry Benny, sorry I left you behind and sorry for Paris so sorry because I love you and - Thirty seconds before we hit the ground Chris vented the chopper's remaining fuel and took her in on a dead stick. Twenty seconds before we hit the ground I saw that the TARDIS was definitely bigger.

Ten seconds before we hit the ground it began to dissolve beneath us.

Rocks blew upwards, severing the rotors, punching holes in the engine, the airframe, the fuselage. A stunted tree flew past spilling acid rain. We hit the ground, pancaked, slid sideways towards the fast-growing TARDIS.

Behind me I was aware of a brilliant the bombs the bombs have gone off they've light. A thunderclap of air lifted the chopper and threw us into the air, just enough to clear the control console as we hurtled through the rugby-goalpost-sized doors into the s.h.i.+p, burst through the even larger door in the inner wall at a height of thirty feet and crashed sideways into a swimming pool the size of a lake filled with crash foam.

Agent Yellow beat us out of the wreckage. By the time we were on the side of the pool the tiles were stained yellow and the foam was coughing sulphur compounds in thick gouts. The fire in the chopper was out and it sank slowly to the bottom of the pool, just the tail fin and a single bent rotor blade emerging to drip yellow crystals into the foam.

I pulled Chris past a couple of palm trees into a vestibule. The Doctor wasn't there. Behind us the infection was eating at the pool. Tiles and concrete cracked, burst apart in a flood of oxygen? The palms began to dissolve. I got dizzy fast. We ran out of the vestibule into the console room.

It was definitely larger than when I had last seen it. I got a confused glimpse of people: villagers, soldiers, children. I recognized Iapeth and Dilaver's uncle. The Doctor was working at the console. He slammed a set of switches when he saw us arrive. 'Anyone else with you?'

I shook my head. 'Good.'

Another set of switches clicked home. The Doctor straightened up with a sigh. 'A shame about the pool. And I'll miss the palms. But we can't have Agent Yellow throwing its weight around in the TARDIS.'

I drew in great gulps of air.

Chris said, 'You deleted the pool?' The Doctor nodded.

My legs gave way and I sat down suddenly. 'The. What. What about the.

Bombs?' I sucked in another breath, managed to get myself together enough to ask, 'Did it work? Has the area been sterilized? Are we safe?'

The Doctor smiled. 'Oh yes. We're perfectly safe.'

I felt like laughing hysterically. In fact I did. That drew stares from everyone around me. The villagers and soldiers backed off and gave me some s.p.a.ce.

I let my laughter subside, I was tired - h.e.l.l, I was utterly s.h.a.gged. I looked around at the people. They were still looking at me. I now noticed that mixed up with the people were dogs, goats, a sheep.

I smiled. 'It's a regular ... Noah's Ark you've got here,' I gasped.

The Doctor looked up from where he was working at the console. 'Isn't it?'

He adopted a theatrical pose. ' "And G.o.d said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; the Earth is filled with violence through them, and, behold, I will destroy them with the Earth." ' His expression became grave.

'But there's no need for you to worry, Jason. We're quite safe from the flood in here.'

He was wrong of course. Agent Yellow made it out of the pool before the Doctor deleted that section of TARDIS architecture. We found out only moments later as the cloister bell began to ring. By then we were materializing. Crusty yellow stains began to form on the interior wall as the central console boomed our arrival.

The Doctor opened the exterior doors and said, 'If you would all step outside please, my a.s.sistants Jason and Chris will now continue the conducted tour. Thank you. Move along now. Move along, please.' Its voice was quiet but carried to every one of the fifty or so people crowded into the console room. Under any other circ.u.mstances it would have been funny.

Chris and I were last out of the TARDIS. When we emerged we found ourselves in a huge spherical chamber. I had just enough time to register the fact that someone lying on the ground a few yards away was screaming madly at me. 'Jason, Jason, come here. I'm paralysed! I can't move!'

'Bernice!' Why was she on the ground? What had happened to her? 'Are you -?'

'I'm OK? But Tammuz has got a gun, he's killing people! He wants to take over the Ark but he doesn't know what he's doing! He'll destroy the world if we don't stop him!'

I lifted her up. I held her. She was cold, her limbs flopped uselessly. I started to cry. 'Jason we haven't got time for this, we have to - I was interrupted by the sound of gunfire. I looked up. Stupid, I know, but there you go. Tammuz was standing about two hundred metres away. He seemed to be screaming something but his words were lost in echoes. He was firing into the crowd.

One of the soldiers fell. Another returned Tammuz's fire. In moments bullets were flying everywhere.

I became aware that Bernice was screaming beside me: 'Get down! Get down, you'll get shot if you don't -'

A gentle, but very loud voice announced: 'Attention. This is the personality matrix of the Astronomer Royal. This installation has been breached by CarbonOxygen based life form. Infection in progress. Sterilization will commence immediately.'

The air began to fill with a choking gas. Sulphur dioxide. Forty-eight villagers, seven soldiers, three dogs, sixteen chickens and a sheep all tried to get back into the TARDIS at the same time. No good. The doors, stained yellow, were shut. I saw Chris buried under a panicking crowd of people.

Bullets flew everywhere. One ricocheted off the ground a hand's width from my face? Bernice jerked suddenly. Was she hit? I began to panic. If she was. .h.i.t what could I do? I tried to touch her face. Blood appeared there as if by magic. I realized it was my blood, that I had been shot, not-her, that I had been shot, me, that I was going to My thoughts were interrupted by a wave of brown gas. I fell to the ground beside my wife and started to choke. Her expression was one of annoyance mixed with frustration? I knew what that look meant. I couldn't love her properly. I couldn't even save her. All I could do now, like everyone around me and everyone else on the Earth, it seemed, was die.

GENT****TRANSMISSION***'URGENT****TRANSMISSION****URGENT**

**TRANSMISSI.

FROM: DEPT HEALTH GENEVA.

TO: WHITE HOUSE EMERGENCY COMMITTEE.

TIME: DAY ZERO PLUS THIRTY SIX HOURS.

*BEGIN TRANSMISSION*

*CONDITION BLACK*STOP*AGENT YELLOW ON MOVE*STOP*

*AIRBORNE TRANSMISSION BY NUCLEAR BLAST HAS.

ACCELERATED*

*REPEAT ACCELERATED SPREAD OF INFECTION*STOP*

*ISTANBUL*THESSALONIKI*ALMAWSIL*TBILISI*KRASNODAR*INFECTI ON TOTAL*

*HUMAN POPULATION ZERO*STOP*GEOLOGICAL COLLAPSE IN.

PROGRESS*STOP*

*INFECTION.

SPREADING*ANKARA*BALIKESIR*BURSA*IZMIR*DENIZLI*STOP*

*EXPECTED*PARIS*CAIRO*MOSCOW*BOMBAY*TWENTY FOUR.

HOURS*STOP*

*WORLDWIDE EXPOSURE ESTIMATED*THIRTY-SIX HOURS*STOP*

*WORLDWIDE ZERO HUMAN POPULATION ESTIMATED*FORTY-EIGHT HOURS*STOP*

*I'LL TRY TO GET BACK BUT THEY NEED ME HERE*STOP*

*KISS THE KIDS FOR ME*STOP*LOVE YOU*STOP*MAGS*STOP*

*END TRANSMISSION*

GENT****TRANSMISSION****URGENT****TRANSMISSION****URGENT*

***TRANSMISSI.

GENT****TRANSMISSION****URGENT****TRANSMISSION****URGENT'*

***TRANSMISSI.

FROM: PRESIDENTIAL OFFICE WHITE HOUSE.

TO: MARGARET SPRINGSTEEN DEPT HEALTH GENEVA.

DATE: DAY ZERO PLUS THIRTY-EIGHT, HOURS.

*BEGIN TRANSMISSION*

*THEY'RE SAYING ITS MY FAULT*STOP*ARE THEY RIGHT*STOP*I DON'T KNOW ANYMORE*STOP*KIDS ARE IN THE.

BUNKERS*STOP*LOVE YOU HONEY*STOP*BRUCE*

*STOP*

*END TRANSMISSION*

GENT**'*TRANSMISSION****URGENT'****TRANSMISSION****URGENT*

***TRANSMISSI.

***URGENT*** ***DEPT OF PUBLIC INFORMATION*'* **'URGENT**'.

!!PROTECT AND SURVIVE!!.

AGENT YELLOW.

AGENT YELLOW IS NOW ESTABLISHED IN YOUR AREA.

SIGNS OF INFECTION INCLUDE.

*YELLOW POWDER DEPOSITS ON NON-ORGANIC SURFACES*

*THE SMELL OF ROTTEN EGGS*

*EARTH TREMORS*

SIGNS OF HUMAN INFECTION INCLUDE.

*THE SMELL OF ROTTEN EGGS*