Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles Part 26

If this was life after the TARDIS, then it seemed like a good deal. Even if they were fugitives.

Even if he didn't know her real name.

He hadn't asked her about it. Not for the hour on the tube to Heathrow, not for the two hours at the airport, not for any of the seven-hour flight, not for the hour of the taxi ride to the hotel. Even he had not recognised her when she'd first emerged from the cloakroom at King's Cross. They'd slipped through security so easily it was faintly unnerving, her with a fake pa.s.sport that she just happened to have with her, him with one that wouldn't be issued for a few years. They'd been fingerprinted and photographed at JFK, and Fitz had thought the game was up, but apparently they did that with everyone now.

He took a cigarette out of the packet, then saw the big No Smoking sign.

You couldn't smoke in bars in New York now. He'd found that out last night.

153.

Fitz tiptoed over to the TV, switched it on and quickly turned the volume down.

He'd been too slow. Trix was stirring.

'What are you doing?'

'I didn't mean to wake you. I was just seeing if there's anything about us.'

'It's New York. Foreign news here is what's happening in Newark.'

'That's Big Ben. London,' he said, looking at the screen. He listened.

'. . . and coming up: what's the connection between the Vore attack and. . .

Hillary Clinton? You won't believe the answer, only here on Fox News.'

They went to a commercial break. Fitz pressed a control on the remote, and pressed a couple more until he found a news channel.

'. . . follows the sudden appearance of a second moon in the sky, in front of the moon. . . the original moon. Coastal areas in many parts of the world have been devastated.'

'. . . According to scientists, Stacey, the tides are caused by the moon's gravity. Having two moons in the sky clearly means there's more gravity around.'

'Thanks for that, Sir Isaac Newton,' Trix sighed, going over to the window.

'I don't see one moon, let alone two of them.'

'We can't leave him alone for five minutes.'

'You think this has something to do with the. . . What am I saying? Of course it does.'

Fitz had just noticed that there were words, fractured sentences like headlines, running along the bottom of the screen. The one that caught his eye ended: '. . . that UNIT have designated "the Vore" / Devastation immense / Mayor of London "eaten" reports.'

'Hang on, what's that?'

A woman was reading the actual headlines.

'. . . at the bottom of the hour: giant insects devastate Europe. I'm Sienna DeLorean.'

'I don't care what your name is, tell me about the monsters,' Fitz yelled at the television.

'. . . Europe has been attacked by what one eyewitness describes as, quote, a swarm of giant locusts that walk like men, unquote. Amid reports of millions of deaths, the White House has issued a statement saying it is monitoring the situation. Scientists say there may be a connection with Tuesday's unprecedented appearance of a second moon. In California, celebrity lawyer Wim McBrit today declared the latest allegations made against his client to be a physical as well as ethical impossibility. More of that in a moment. A car bomb went off in Baghdad Tuesday killing thirty. And, as you can see from these pictures, the residents of a town in Ohio are taking part in their annual 154 Throw A Potato Day. I'm Sienna DeLorean, and I'll be back at the top of the hour.'

An advertis.e.m.e.nt break started.

Fitz found another news channel. There were certainly enough of them.

'. . . SWAT teams have been readied to tackle the giant locusts.'

'Swat. Like you would do with insects, I suppose,' Fitz observed.

'Special Weapons and Tactics.'

'Ah.'

'. . . Not locusts, Jeff. From the pictures, I would say they looked more like robber flies, but robber flies are usually a few inches long, not the size of a person.'

'. . . Now, we've had an email on that topic from a viewer called Paul. He asks, "How can the trachae of these insects possibly function given the square-cube law?" I'm very glad you asked me that. The answer is simply. . . '

'All I want,' Fitz said quietly, 'is someone to tell me what the h.e.l.l is going on.'

'We need to get back,' Trix told him.

'Binks? Binky?'

Mr Winfield blamed the police for the disappearance of Binks. They'd ushered everyone in the street out of their houses just as they were getting ready for bed, told them there was an armed criminal next door and offered to put them up in a school hall. Mr Winfield had given them his sister-in-law's address and told them that was where he and his wife would be staying. There hadn't been time to round up Binks. It was dark, and she'd have been off on some feline amorous adventure. Or she'd just have found somewhere to sleep. Mr Winfield thought that was more likely, as he'd never really bought in to the theory that as cats slept all day it meant they were nocturnal. They'd been allowed back a couple of hours ago, but there was no sign of Binks. It was twenty past six, and starting to get light. Truth be told, Mr Winfield was already getting used to the second moon. The scientists didn't know where it had come from. That was scientists for you in a nutsh.e.l.l, wasn't it?

'Binky?'

He was walking past his neighbour's house. Marnal, the old writer. The Winfields had moved in ten years ago, but hadn't exchanged a word with him. Not even a Christmas card. Well, he was old. And a miserable so-and-so.

Mrs Winfield had found one of his books for 30p at Scope. They'd both given it a try, out of, well, loyalty. Unreadable, senseless, risible tat. All that stuff about black holes and people being stabbed dead one minute and alive and well the next, and giant s.p.a.ce needles. Rubbish.

There was a hiss from Marnal's garage.

155.

'Binks?' Mr Winfield called out, keeping his voice down.

The garage door was slightly ajar. He decided to go up to it.

The inside of the garage was bare, apart from some of the usual rusting paint cans and garden tools. Binks was standing in the middle of the garage, her back arched, howling at the monster in the corner.

Some insects could be beautiful. b.u.t.terflies were, no one argued with that, but even some mantises and beetles looked like pieces of jewellery. The monster was not beautiful It had an almost hunchbacked appearance, with a bul-bous body and tiny head. It wasn't quite symmetrical. The carapace was dull silver, with thick black bristles poking from the gaps. As it stood on its powerful hind legs it rose to about the height of a man. It had two sets of shorter fore limbs. All six legs were moulded into vicious spikes, and sharpened curves and hooks. All the limbs and both eyes were constantly twitching jerky, distract-ing movements.

It took one step towards Mr Winfield, watching him carefully. It had compound eyes like a fly, and a long, translucent abdomen that it seemed to be using to balance itself, like Binks used her tail. Its innards were visible in the abdomen.

Its mouth was moving in a complicated four-way chewing movement that seemed almost mechanical to Mr Winfield. Juices dripped from its mouth, and the smell reminded him of rotten fruit. Did that mean it was a vegetarian?

He stared at the creature, unsure what to do next.

'Welcome to our planet,' he said, trying not to sound scared.

The creature took another step forwards, plucked Binks from the floor and bit her in half, crunching off her head and shoulders. After a moment, it took the rest of her in its maw and gulped it down.

Mr Winfield gasped and stumbled out of the garage, and ran next door trying to find his wife. She heard him coming, and opened the door before he was halfway up the drive.

There were monsters all around him. Standing on his lawn, perched on his roof and in the trees, walking down the street. They were winged, he noticed.

Transparent, delicate wings, each the size and shape of a canoe.

Mrs Winfield was shouting for him to get inside.

A few of the monsters were moving to surround him. He turned but there were dozens of them in every direction. Hundreds now. The air was humming as though it was full of Lancaster bombers. He daren't look up.

The monster nearest him opened its mouth and rasped a stream of white powder over him. It stung his eyes, made him cough violently. It smelled of fly spray.

His wife was screaming.

156.

Across Europe, most people were woken by the buzzing above them. It was a little past dawn, but it grew dark again. A strange, restless darkness. But few people really noticed. Many had seen the news about the new moon and a.s.sumed this was a storm cloud or weather front a.s.sociated with it. The sky grew ever more black, the buzz ever more loud.

Across eastern Europe satellite signals had been erratic for a few minutes.

Digital signals were choppy, images pixellated, sounds disjointed. Aircraft started falling from the sky as the cloud pressed down, clogging up jet engines and jamming ailerons. Radar screens became bursts of static swarms of points of light circling around, descending. Despite this, air-traffic controllers could see that planes were dropping down ahead of the cloud. Some were doing it deliberately. Most had lost all control. Some of the aircraft had started to break up.

Telephones began ringing.

Emergency services and government hotlines were active, although many were affected by the loss of satellite signals. Prime ministers and presidents were woken. Army units were being deployed, emergency plans were being dusted off, key personnel were being located and ferried to secure locations.

None of these preparations made the slightest difference.

When the base of the cloud was around two hundred feet from the ground, it was possible to discern that it was a swarm of insects. It was difficult to judge its scale at first, until the monsters began swooping down wherever crowds were gathering, lifting up men and women and taking them away.

Half an hour later the next wave pa.s.sed over the crowds, spraying them with white powder, like crop dusters. Those not caught by this watched those who were die quickly and painlessly.

Armed police in Frankfurt were the first to fire on the monsters. It usually took two shots to down one. Hit it and it fell, twitched and died. Easy. But there were far more insects than there were bullets, and they converged on anyone shooting as though they were answering a call to prayer. The surviving police were soon falling back, trying to get other survivors inside buildings.

The streets of Geneva were thick with bodies, slowing down but not stopping people trying to escape and the ambulances and police cars that were making for the worst-affected areas. The sky was so black with swarms of the insects that every vehicle had its lights on. This only seemed to attract the monsters, which were strong and used their fore limbs like tin-openers to take the roofs off cars.

Fifteen minutes into the attack on Lyons, and policemen kitted up in riot gear were finding that tear gas had some effect in dispersing the swarms. It was also incapacitating the people they were trying to save. Whatever the insects were spraying could penetrate gas masks. Once again, as everywhere 157 else, the police fell back.

Hospitals braced themselves for a catastrophe, fearing that they were about to be overwhelmed. Health-service managers knew, even if they never admitted it, that one nuclear strike on a city would generate more casualties than any nation's health service could deal with. But there weren't that many bodies left behind after the monsters had pa.s.sed over.

The reports coming in were putting the number of deaths in the tens of thousands in just the first few minutes. There were almost no injuries. Fewer, in fact, than in a typical morning rush-hour. Most were the result of people trying to get away: there were car accidents and casualties caused by stampedes.

Anyone who survived tended to be uninjured. Hospitals were inundated with people looking for relatives, and many people needed treatment for shock.

Anyone who didn't escape died.

In various bunkers, urgent messages determined a name for the monsters: the Vore. No one was quite sure who coined it first, but it quickly caught on.

Military planners started wondering whether anyone would be left alive by nightfall. It would be an hour before the question was asked out loud. By then, it was obvious: praying for a miracle wasn't working.

The Vore swarm made another pa.s.s, rasping white gas over troops taking cover behind a wall and a dozen or so civvies who'd made a run for it, despite being told to stay down. Sergeant Cartwright, huddled close by in another position, behind a van in front of HMV, saw them die. Civilians presumably were screaming all around him. He crouched down, out of sight, a small part of his brain hoping that if he couldn't see the monsters they didn't really exist.

He could hear shots even after four years in the army he wasn't used to how much louder real ones were than gunfire on TV and gla.s.s smas.h.i.+ng. Over every other sound was the buzzing of insect wings.

Modern military doctrine was to aim for ten-to-one superiority; that was the way the Americans wanted it. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of Vore for each soldier. British army training didn't cover their tactics, and hadn't since the First World War. Rows of enemies hurling themselves at armed positions. Conventional wisdom had it that you couldn't win a battle if the enemy had control of the skies. There were so many Vore up there Cartwright couldn't even see the sky any more.

The sergeant's five minutes of fighting the Vore had proved that shooting brought them down in great numbers. Anything more substantial, like a tossed grenade or mortar, just arced up and fell back to earth again before exploding. At first, Cartwright thought it was like firing into a flock of birds.

He almost felt sorry for the insects as they rained down. Was there some in-sane leader, safe in the monster equivalent of a chateau fifty miles from the 158 front line, ordering them out regardless of the cost in lives?

Then the truth dawned: the swarm wasn't getting any smaller. Now, shooting into it felt more like shooting at a hurricane or an avalanche. The insects kept coming, kept spraying the lethal white gas that affected everyone wearing a gas mask, let alone civilians whose idea of protective clothing was a raincoat. The air was black with them, like a storm cloud.

'Covering fire!' someone shouted.

A small group of soldiers obliged, and were targeted with the gas for their trouble.

Cartwright's radio crackled. 'Change of plan: covering fire, escort civilians to safety, then fall back.'

Where, exactly, was 'safety'? He had a quick look round for it. The Vore were rampaging down the high street, tearing the roofs off cars, and flying into shop windows and smas.h.i.+ng them (it wasn't clear whether this was planned or whether they just didn't see the gla.s.s).

Twenty feet behind him two Vore were emerging from HMV dragging a couple of screaming teenage girls out by their hair. They leant in, ready to gas them.

Cartwright stood up and fired three rounds. The first and third shots. .h.i.t the Vore square in their mid sections the 'thorax' if he remembered the quick briefing he'd been given. The second grazed the forehead of one of the girls, who swayed and dropped to the pavement alongside the insects.

He swore and ran over to the girls.

The one he'd shot was on the ground, blood pouring from her head. She was groaning long, low moans that were trying to be words.

'You shot her, you ' the other girl started, the rest of her words melting into a ma.s.s of obscenities. She'd be a good-looker normally, he thought. Probably a bit older than she'd seemed at first too.

He did his best to ignore what she was saying. 'Keep still,' he told the wounded girl, whose eyes were rolling. There was no sign of a response.

'Medic!' he shouted.

One hurried over from a nearby alleyway and knelt beside the girl.

'Thought you'd be busy,' Cartwright said.

'Twiddling my thumbs. This is my first injury.'

As the medic tended to the girl the sergeant took another look around.