Doctor Who BBCN04 - The Deviant Strain Read online

  ‘Nor me.’

  ‘I guessed that.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  They both stared down at the body on the couch. It was old and decaying, like the pilot. But it seemed a completely different species.

  In fact, it looked like more than one species. Parts of the body were almost human, or had been. But others seemed to have been grafted on. Or perhaps it was the other way round.

  The result was a grotesque amalgam of human and animal. Dried, wrinkled dead skin gave way to matted fur. The taut, parched skin round the mouth suddenly extended into a dark, brittle snout. What should have been a foot had long, jointed toes curled into a tight grip like a fist.

  ‘ Frankenstein meets Planet of the Apes,’ Rose said.

  Jack was checking the other couches. All had similar creatures lying under the sheets. Six in all. ‘What the hell happened here?’ he wondered.

  Before they could speculate, the hatch on the other side of the ship swung open. Sofia Barinska stepped into the ship. ‘I thought I might find you here,’ she said.

  ‘It’s OK. Just that policewoman,’ Jack said.

  94

  Rose stepped in front of him, keeping him back. ‘It’s not OK,’ she told him. ‘She was old, dying. Then she sort of revitalised in a chair thing.’

  Jack looked from Rose to Sofia, who was standing with her arms folded and watching them with amusement. ‘Really?’

  ‘Really. That was after she tried to kill me, of course.’

  Sofia unfolded her arms and started across the ship towards them.

  ‘I shall make a better job of it this time,’ she said.

  All trace of tiredness or age had gone as she leaped at them. Rose recognised the knife from the kitchen as it swung towards her.

  Her cry was lost in the sound of the gunshot. The knife went flying.

  Sofia was clutching her bloody hand. Jack was standing with the pistol braced in both hands. Rose’s coat had fallen from his shoulders and lay in a heap on the floor.

  The second shot caught Sofia in the chest, driving her backwards and knocking her off her feet.

  Rose grabbed her coat. ‘Come on.’

  But Sofia was struggling slowly to her feet, chest a mess of red, hands slick and wet as they scrabbled for a hold on the floor to push herself up.

  Another shot. Then Jack was grabbing Rose’s hand and pulling her the other way – back towards the medical area.

  ‘No, no,’ she protested. ‘We can get out down the tunnel.’

  But Jack wasn’t listening. He dragged her through the hatch and slammed it shut behind them.

  ‘She’s dead,’ Rose protested.

  ‘Sure? Because I’m not hanging around to check.’ He was spinning the locking wheel on the outside of the hatch. ‘There has to be a way to keep this closed.’

  ‘Why does there?’

  ‘Because we need it.’

  ‘And what now, then, Mastermind? I thought you’d had enough of swimming.’

  ‘I have.’ He was smiling. ‘We go up the steps.’

  ‘You what?’ Rose turned to see where Jack was pointing. ‘Oh, right.’

  95

  A flight of steps had been cut into the rock beside where the ship was embedded in the cave. She hadn’t seen that before, hidden as they were in the shadows. But then she’d been more concerned with stopping Jack from freezing to death.

  ‘I can guess where they go,’ he was saying as he led the way.

  Rose followed, pulling on her coat as she went. ‘Good. Because I’ve no idea where I am.’

  There was a door at the top. An ordinary door of the sort that might lead into an office. It opened a couple of inches, then stopped. Jack put his shoulder to it and Rose could hear something heavy shifting on the other side. She looked through the widening gap and saw a mass of cardboard boxes piled up against the door.

  The door jammed. Rose helped Jack shove, but it wouldn’t open any further. ‘We’re never getting through there,’ she said.

  As she spoke, a pair of hands appeared the other side of the door and started lifting the boxes away.

  ‘Friend or foe?’ Rose whispered.

  ‘We’ll soon find out.’

  The door was swinging open. Beyond it was a small room. The floor was stacked high with the cardboard boxes. Papers spilled across the floor. A rack of metal shelves dominated the opposite wall, more boxes crammed into it.

  And in the middle of it all stood a tall man with thinning, greying hair wearing a crumpled suit. Beside him was the Doctor.

  ‘Oh, thank God, it’s you,’ Rose said. ‘Hey, you’ll never guess what we’ve found.’

  The Doctor was peering past them, although all he could possibly see was a rock wall and the steps leading down into the cave. ‘So that must be the secret way down to the old spaceship, right?’ he said. He grinned, hugged Rose to him with one hand and slapped Jack on the back with the other. ‘Fantastic!’

  96

  Alex Minin was looking bewildered. ‘I never knew that door was there,’ he said.

  ‘Hidden,’ the Doctor replied.

  ‘Someone deliberately stacked all

  these boxes in front of it.’

  ‘And what’s this about a spaceship?’ Minin laughed nervously, as if to show he knew they were joking really.

  ‘Yeah. Spaceship,’ the Doctor told him. ‘You know.’ He demon-strated by flattening his hand into a spaceship shape and flying it through the air between them. He made spaceship noises.

  ‘I don’t think I do actually,’ Minin said weakly.

  ‘Sure you do. You must get some version of Star Trek, even out here.’

  ‘The one with Mr Spocksky,’ Rose added helpfully.

  ‘A spaceship?’ Minin said.

  ‘A spaceship,’ Jack confirmed. ‘And a homicidal mad policewoman killer-zombie as well. No extra charge.’

  ‘Make that knife-wielding homicidal mad policewoman killer-zombie,’ Rose reminded him.

  97

  ‘Barinska?’ Minin was looking at each of them in turn, evidently convinced they were all mad.

  ‘That’d explain a lot,’ the Doctor said. ‘Right, let’s get going.’

  ‘Good move,’ Jack agreed. ‘I suggest a three-pronged initiative. The objectives, not in any order of priority, are the ship, the deadly glowing blobby creatures and the stone circle.’

  ‘Hold on,’ Minin said. He took a deep breath. ‘What deadly glowing blobby creatures?’

  ‘They’ll be the remotes,’ the Doctor said, as if this was obvious.

  ‘Remotes?’ Rose echoed.

  The Doctor nodded. ‘Shouldn’t be a problem.’

  ‘They’re killing people,’ she pointed out.

  ‘So, shouldn’t be a problem, but they are.’ The Doctor sucked in his cheeks and folded his arms. ‘Someone’s been messing about.’ He turned to look at Minin. ‘Monkey business,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Oh yeah, that’s something else,’ Rose put in. ‘You see, there’s these bodies.’

  The Doctor stopped her, pressing his finger to her lips. ‘First things first. Alex – go and find the colonel. Tell him his missing men have probably been blobbed by now and he’s to forget them. Then bring him down to the ship.’

  ‘He’ll never believe there’s a spaceship down there,’ Minin said. ‘ I don’t believe there’s a spaceship down there.’

  ‘He will when he sees it,’ Jack told him.

  ‘It crashed here centuries ago. Maybe millennia,’ the Doctor said.

  ‘Crew’s probably dead.’

  ‘Yep,’ Jack said.

  ‘And it landed at the base of the cliff. Maybe even in the sea. Then over time the land has moved, and now it’s buried under the cliff, close to this institute. Through that door.’

  ‘But hang on. . . ’ Minin pointed to the open door. ‘Why would anyone build a secret door leading down to a buried spaceship no one knows is there?’

  ‘That’s a really good question,’ the Do
ctor agreed. ‘You get Colonel Levin and we’ll try to get some answers.’

  98

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  On the way down to the ship, Jack and Rose told the Doctor their stories. He asked few questions and made few comments. But when Jack described the creatures that had cornered him and the soldiers in the submarine he exclaimed, ‘Blue? Don’t they know that’s such a cliché?’

  ‘Maybe where you’re from. They’re usually green here,’ Rose said.

  ‘I don’t care what colour danger is. It’s still. . . well, dangerous.’

  ‘Yeah, but I mean – dangerous and boring?’ the Doctor sneered. ‘Do me a favour. If you’re going to have your life threatened, it might as well be fun.’

  ‘Trip of a lifetime,’ Rose muttered.

  The hatch was still closed. Jack put his hand on the Doctor’s shoulder as the Doctor turned the locking wheel.

  ‘You sure you want to go in there?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Mrs Knife-Attack might be waiting. I shot her a few times, but she didn’t seem as impressed as she should have been.’

  ‘Probably not. She’s been dosed up on mutagenic revivification en-hancement energy for a while.’ Rose looked at Jack. ‘What’s he on about?’

  ‘MRE,’ Jack said. ‘Like, life force.’

  ‘Then why not say “life force”?’ Rose said.

  ‘Look, I didn’t write the manual,’ the Doctor protested. The hatch swung open. ‘Anyway, she’s probably legged it back to her house to recharge by now.’

  ‘Let’s hope,’ Rose said. ‘So you know all about it, then? Recognise the ship?’

  ‘General type,’ the Doctor admitted. ‘Can’t say for certain, but the technology’s pretty standard for the Arcane Collegiate.’

  ‘Never heard of it,’ Jack admitted.

  ‘It’s pretty. . . esoteric.’ The Doctor was examining one of the mutated, fused bodies. He drew the sheet back over it sadly. ‘Like I said.

  Monkey business. Someone’s been mucking about with the receptors.’

  99

  Rose was getting impatient. ‘Look, will you just tell us what is going on here? Those of us who don’t speak Spaceman would like an explanation.’

  ‘And those of us who do wouldn’t object,’ Jack added.

  ‘OK.’ The Doctor wandered across to what seemed to be the main control area. He tipped the remains of the pilot out of its seat and flopped down in its place.

  Rose gaped. ‘Oh, gross.’

  ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’

  The Doctor waved at them to make themselves comfortable. Rose sat on the floor, while Jack leaned against an instrument panel.

  ‘He was probably killed in the crash, or at least his body was,’ the Doctor said. ‘Not much sign of damage, so the auto-repair fixed the ship up. But no pilot, so it’s stuck. Thinks it’s missed something, probably – some component that still needs attention. Or it needs new parts. So the ship sends out a signal. Come and help, please.

  Run out of fuel or need a new carburettor or whatever.’

  ‘And who does it send this message to?’

  ‘No one. Everyone. Just beams it out into space. Probably quite a strong signal to begin with. We caught the tail end – as the power runs down, it weakens.’

  ‘Then what?’ Rose asked.

  ‘It gets more power,’ Jack said.

  He was nodding as if things were becoming clear to him. They were clear as mud to Rose.

  ‘That’s right. It doesn’t need much, not till it gets ready for flight.

  Just enough to keep the systems up and running, ticking over, and to keep the message going. Now it can absorb energy from the environment. Heat, light, power of the wind, anything.’

  ‘Life force,’ Rose said quietly.

  The Doctor nodded. ‘That too. But not just that. Not in theory.

  Anyway, it sticks up its antennae and starts to draw the power.’

  ‘Antennae?’

  ‘The stones,’ Jack told her. ‘That’s right, isn’t it, Doctor? We’re right under the stones here.’

  100

  ‘This ship is made of stone?’ Rose asked. She looked round at the instrument panels – what she had assumed was brittle plastic could be stone, she realised. Thin, sculpted, shaped. . .

  ‘Sort of, yeah. Like I said, the stones are antennae, prodded up through the ground till they reach daylight,’ the Doctor said. ‘Absorbing power. Same substance as the remotes, the blobs. Only solidified to withstand the elements and the test of time. It’s all based on some pseudo-silicate material.’

  ‘And then anyone who touches the stones,’ Rose said. ‘they’d be, like, drained of life force.’

  ‘I doubt that was the original intention. It just needs a steady stream, a trickle of energy. But someone’s tampered with the systems. It’s designed to accept any type, any strain, of energy. Maybe it has a safety feature that excludes the life force from intelligent beings

  – even humans,’ he added with a grin.

  ‘Oh, ta,’ Rose told him.

  ‘But now someone’s changed things round. They’ve adapted them so they deviate from the original plans and just take one defined strain of energy – life force. And probably just the life force of human beings.

  Certainly it didn’t like mine when I activated a bit of stone, though it took Catherine’s no problem. So it’s no longer working to design. Now it’s only interested in the deviant strain.’

  ‘You mean us.’

  ‘I mean you.’

  ‘Hang on, what do you mean by “activated”?’ Rose asked.

  ‘They don’t do it all the time. Just when the ship needs some power.

  It’s automatic unless there’s some other need for the power. Then someone, the pilot usually, switches it on.’

  ‘Except someone else has changed things, so now they can activate the probes and draw life force whenever they need it,’ Jack said.

  ‘No prizes for guessing who,’ Rose realised.

  ‘But it’s going crazy now,’ Jack said. ‘There’s attack of the blob monsters out there, and the stones are probably getting thirstier all the time. Is that all down to Mrs Knife-Killer Barinska going bananas?’

  ‘Doubt it,’ the Doctor said. ‘That’s all someone else’s fault.’

  101

  Jack shook his head. ‘Wait till I get my hands on them. Have you ever crawled through a torpedo tube in the dark with water pouring in?’ He hesitated. ‘OK, you probably have. So whose fault is it?’

  The Doctor was examining his fingernails. ‘Actually,’ he said, looking up at Jack, ‘it’s yours.’

  ‘What?!’

  The Doctor shrugged and went back to looking at his nails. ‘You answered the message. You told the ship we were coming to get it. So now it’s preparing to be rescued, getting ready to leave.’

  ‘And it needs more power,’ Rose said. ‘Is that it?’

  ‘Yep. The stones are no longer drawing enough for it, especially as up till now they’ve only got power when they’re switched on here and someone touches them.’

  ‘Switched on?’

  ‘Yeah, there’s a manual switch wired in rather crudely on that panel.’ He nodded at where Jack was leaning. ‘Don’t shuffle your bum too much or you might turn them on again.’

  ‘And these blob creatures?’

  ‘Remote probes. Energy sources don’t come to it, so it goes looking for them. They drain the energy and beam it back. The radio interference is a side effect as the ether fills with life-force transmissions.’

  Rose thought about all this. ‘Thanks, Jack,’ she said at last. ‘Good one.’

  Jack sighed. ‘So, at the risk of sounding as if I’m changing the subject, why did Barinska adapt the systems and what’s she need the energy for?’

  Rose was wondering that too. She thought about Barinska’s face

  – lined and aged almost beyond recognition. . . ‘She’s old, isn’t she?

  She needs the lif
e force to stay young.’

  ‘Seems likely. That’s why only human energy would do. I doubt she’s the only one either. There’s been a lot of mucking about with these systems. Lots of trial and error to get to this point. Though a lot of it is informed guesswork. I think they’ve had help, even though they may not realise it.’

  ‘I wonder how old she really is,’ Jack said.

  102

  ‘She looked ancient,’ Rose told him. ‘So, come on then. What happens now?’

  ‘The ship keeps searching for energy. It’ll store all it can until take-off.’

  ‘Except it isn’t gonna take off,’ Jack pointed out. ‘The pilot’s dead, no help is coming. Unless, we. . . ’ He pushed himself away from the panel and turned to examine it.

  ‘No good,’ the Doctor told him. ‘No way this thing can fly now. Too much damage and adaptation.’

  ‘So, what – it just keeps looking for energy?’ Rose asked. ‘For people to kill?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘Till it leaves.’

  Rose stared at him. ‘But. . . that’s for ever.’

  ‘Yep. Unless we can find a way to drain it right down, even the emergency reserves. Then the systems will stop.’

  ‘How do we do that?’ Jack was ready at the control panel.

  ‘Dunno. Dunno if it can even be done until I take a proper look.’

  ‘Oh, you’re a real help in a crisis,’ Rose told him.

  ‘So what happens now?’ Jack asked.

  The Doctor opened his mouth to reply. But it was not him who answered.

  ‘Now, you die,’ a voice said.

  It came from behind the panel where Jack was. He swung round in surprise. Just as Sofia Barinska’s bloodstained figure rose up from behind it.

  ‘We shall get all the energy we need,’ she said. ‘For ever.’

  The knife flashed as it caught the light, stabbing down towards Jack.

  103

  The Doctor did not seem at all fazed by the fact the woman was forcing a knife down at Jack’s throat.

  ‘How old are you?’ He sounded as if he was telling off a schoolkid.

  ‘I mean, really – how old?’