Doctor Who BBC N03 - Winner Takes All Read online

  ‘Yes,’ said the Doctor, prising the top off the box, ‘it’s just a matter of time. . . ’

  ‘Five seconds. . . ’

  The Doctor jabbed a finger in, restored a connection. The top went back on. A button was pressed.

  ‘One second. . . ’

  Gerdix took a jerky step forward.

  And the door of the room exploded.

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  Rose was shocked when she found herself face to face with another Mantodean, amazed when she found herself shooting at it, and surprised but not unpleased to find herself delivering a hefty side-ways kick to its abdomen. Forget Buffy, this was Rose the Giant-Insect Slayer. . .

  She had been taken away from the creature, but then found herself standing still for what seemed like a very long time.

  Then, suddenly, she spoke again. ‘Rose, it’s me,’ her voice said. ‘It’s all gone a bit pear-shaped this end. I’m not going to be able to say much in case they notice what I’m doing. Can’t let you speed along either, they’d notice that too. I can’t get you out of there, not yet. If you don’t carry on to the middle, they’re going to kill everyone. But I’ll sort it. See you later.’ There was a pause, and then, as if he felt he should be signing off like on a letter, ‘Love, the Doctor.’

  And that was it.

  She felt a bit aggrieved, because she was his best friend, and he was choosing to save the lives of all these other people instead of her

  – and although he wouldn’t be the Doctor if he didn’t, and of course she’d have said, ‘No, no, save them not me,’ if she’d been asked, the 155

  point was she hadn’t been asked, and she thought it was perfectly reasonable to feel just slightly put out in the circumstances. The circumstances being her heading off to her probable death right now.

  The door had exploded, and three Quevvils armed with laser pistols had kicked their way through the smoking remains. Two of them held their weapons on the Doctor and Robert, while the third went to the intercom and reported to Frinel. A few minutes later Frinel himself joined them in the room.

  There had been some alarm when they’d seen Gerdix frozen in the middle of the room, one paw still raised just off the floor. Frinel had called in some sort of scientist Quevvil, who’d finally got the forehead disc removed. The Doctor had been muttering angrily under his breath while this had been going on, stuff about how they obviously hadn’t designed the things to be reversible. Robert was more glad than ever that his disc had never been activated, but he was worried about Rose. Oh, and the others. The Doctor said that once he’d got his sonic screwdriver back, removing the things would be a piece of cake.

  That was if Rose ever got out of the stronghold.

  ‘What about your plan?’ Robert had whispered to the Doctor. The Doctor said that his plan would still work. Was still on track. His main plan, his big, important plan, the saving-Earth one. It was just the getting Rose out part of it that had hit a snag. . .

  Frinel had said that it had been a mistake leaving the Doctor with only one guard. He would remedy that. Robert and the Doctor were marched out and taken to another room, a really big, important-looking room. There were loads of Quevvils there, bustling about, examining screens and dials and read-outs. There was a series of little booths that looked a bit like shower cubicles, each one lit by a muted yellow light.

  A small Quevvil had carried in the Doctor’s console, and was attaching it to one of the large screens. The control pad was given back to the Doctor.

  Another door opened, and the rest of the humans were led in: Sarah 156

  and her mum and scaredy George and all the rest. Robert wanted to call across to the still-weeping Daniel Goldberg that Rachel was all right, but knew he mustn’t. He tried to catch the man’s eye, but couldn’t. Then Robert was grabbed by a Quevvil and thrown back with the group. ‘It’ll be all right,’ the Doctor said as Robert was taken away.

  Frinel came over and spoke to the Doctor, loud enough for the humans to hear.

  ‘You have not played the game as we instructed. You have attempted sabotage. You have attacked a Quevvil. You were warned that if you did not obey our instructions, the human would die.’ He pointed at Robert.

  Robert had been feeling almost detached from what was going on.

  He’d been worried about the Doctor’s plan, about Rose, about getting the people out of the stronghold. The bigger picture. He’d almost forgotten about the threat to his own life. And here it was, all of a sudden. No wonderful heroic sacrifice. No taking a bullet meant for someone else. Just sudden, out of the blue, pointless death.

  ‘Kill him,’ said Frinel.

  Mrs Pye seemed to have got it into her head that they were policemen – and although they say that policemen look younger the older you are, that’s ridiculous, thought Mickey, looking at the two skinny teenagers accompanying him. She sat at her kitchen table, grumbling unintelligibly (she hadn’t bothered to put her false teeth in), while Mickey, Kevin and Jason guided their charges across the many TV

  screens. Finally, Mickey put down the last of the control pads with a sigh. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Now we wait for the Doctor. Jason, call Anil and find out how he’s getting on.’

  But Anil had had no luck either tracking the one remaining console, or persuading the other player to abandon his game.

  ‘What do we do?’ asked Kevin. ‘Should we just, like, go knocking on doors, see if we can find the last game?’

  Reluctantly, Mickey shook his head. Life or death decisions, he thought. He shouldn’t have to make those. ‘We stay here,’ he said.

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  ‘The games aren’t just on the Powell Estate, they’re all round here.

  It’ll be like looking for a needle in a haystack.’ He stared at the array of screens, all showing the same view; thought of the people poised at the end of telephones and email accounts, waiting for his signal. ‘And the Doctor might call on us any minute, yeah? We’ve gotta be ready for that, or it’s all for nothing.’

  So he just sat there, staring at his mobile and willing it to ring, hoping that he’d made the right choice.

  Frinel had ordered a Quevvil to kill him. Robert noticed, as everything became suddenly clear, that the Quevvil didn’t have a gun. It was bristling up – he remembered the feeling of the quills in his palm, and imagined that spread across his entire body. If you had to die, it really didn’t seem fair that you had to suffer pain too. . .

  But the Quevvil had picked up a silver box, and was pointing it at Robert. Robert was puzzled. So was the Quevvil, as nothing happened. The Quevvil turned to Frinel.

  ‘That one doesn’t have a control disc, you idiot!’ snapped Frinel.

  ‘Kill another one.’

  The silver box no longer pointed at Robert. He turned, feeling that he was doing it in slow motion, that it was taking him for ever. There was screaming: male screaming. Then the screaming changed to a sort of gurgling choke, as if the person was being strangled. Robert’s gaze finally arrived and took in the scene. It was George; he was lying on the floor, clutching his head. As Robert watched, he stopped choking, stopped clutching his head, lay still. Something trickled out of his ears; Robert looked hurriedly away again.

  Frinel spoke to the Doctor. ‘You were warned. From now on, the slightest deviation will result in the death of a human. Now, continue with the game.’

  The Doctor’s face had gone blank. Robert guessed he was feeling very, very angry and upset, and was trying not to show it. The Doctor picked up the control pad, and began to move Rose through the maze.

  One of the Quevvils, who was hunched over a display of some kind, suddenly called out, ‘The carrier is approaching another carrier again!’

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  Robert looked at the screen. Yes, he could just see a figure in the distance.

  ‘Don’t blame me,’ called out the Doctor. ‘I’m not doing it on purpose.

  I can’t even tell where the other players are any more.’

  Robert hel
d his breath as Frinel waddled over to the Doctor.

  They’d spent some time swapping Darren Pye stories – what he’d said, what he’d done, what they’d heard he’d done, who they’d heard he’d done in. It was quite a catalogue. Mickey would have found it ludi-crous if he hadn’t known for a fact that a good part of what sounded like scurrilous rumour really was true. But now they’d sort of sunk into an expectant hush, just waiting for something to happen.

  Suddenly, the sharp ring of a mobile phone cut through the silence in Mrs Pye’s living room. Mickey jumped. This was it! But it wasn’t his mobile, it was Jason’s.

  ‘It’s Anil,’ Jason reported. ‘That bloke’s got back in touch, the one who wouldn’t stop playing the game. He says. . . he says he thinks he’s discovered a new cheat code, cos he can see some bird on the screen. He’s gloating about it.’

  ‘Rose!’ yelled Mickey. ‘Tell him to do that thing, now! Tell him you’ve discovered a quicker way to the end, if he follows our instructions!’

  ‘Did you hear that?’ Jason said into the phone. There was a pause.

  Then Jason said, ‘Anil says he doesn’t believe him. He says that Anil’s just trying to put him off, feed him a false route, cos Anil wants to finish first. He’s going to keep on playing. He says. . . he says if that bird’s a rival, he’s going to nobble her. . . ’

  Rose felt as if she had ten-ton weights in her trainers. The Doctor was moving her at that slow, clunking pace again, each step an event.

  Her head turned, and she caught a glimpse of a figure some way ahead of her. Brilliant! Was everything back to normal? But she had suddenly stopped still, she wasn’t hurrying forward to meet it like before.

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  The figure was still coming forward, though, and with a start, Rose realised who it was.

  Darren Pye.

  She knew he was on the planet with them, and anyway the Doctor had told Mickey about it through her, but he hadn’t said a word about Darren being sent to the stronghold. She wondered if the Doctor knew. Surely he wouldn’t be so eager to rescue every last person if he did. She sighed. Yes, he would, he was the Doctor.

  Darren was clumping towards her like a lead-booted ape. She instinctively tried to get out of his way, even though she obviously couldn’t. When he got close, she was amazed to see that he was scowling. It wasn’t that his face had frozen in an angry grimace, he was actually scowling. And there was more: every now and then he would almost pull back a limb, resisting the imperative placed upon him by the wires in his brain. He’s strong, Rose thought, so strong. If he can fight against this. . .

  She could tell when Darren had seen her, because his expression changed. His eyes narrowed, and the hatred directed at her was so intense Rose felt it like a blow. If she had been able to move, she would have staggered back.

  Easy, tiger, she thought, as he lurched nearer and nearer. Now would really be a good time for the Doctor to do something. Because seeing Rose was only going to act as an incentive for Darren to really regain control of his limbs. . .

  ‘The carriers should not be able to approach each other!’ shouted Frinel. ‘This game was designed so each carrier would follow a separate route! If the human controllers caught sight of the carriers. . . ’

  A nervous-looking Quevvil hurried over and examined the console.

  ‘He has negated the repulsion field of the control disc, Frinel!’

  Robert held his breath. Would they discover the other refinements the Doctor had made to the controls?

  ‘Then change it back!’ snapped Frinel.

  ‘I. . . I’m not sure if I can,’ squeaked the Quevvil.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

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  Darren Pye was in front of Rose now. She couldn’t help but stare right into his face. She could see every zit, every broken blood vessel, every snotty hair bristling out of his nostrils.

  And then she sensed movement, and forced her eyeballs to look down, as far as they would go. Darren was raising his gun. Was it a superhuman effort on his part? Was it an instruction from his controller? And what have I ever done to you? Rose screamed inside her head.

  Darren Pye grinned. His mouth opened slowly, and with an obvious effort he forced out the words: ‘Baa baa beech. . . ’

  Bye, bye, thought Rose, and braced herself.

  ‘There!’ cried the Quevvil, slamming the top back on the console and hurrying off to be as far outside Frinel’s circle of awareness as possible.

  ‘No!’ shouted the Doctor.

  It hit Rose like a bullet. Pain exploded, blossomed within her, till there was nothing else.

  The impact threw her backwards. And that was all she knew.

  Robert, watching the screen, gave a cry.

  The man, the ugly man, had been pulled from view, as if he was on the end of a horizontal bungee rope.

  The Doctor, not seeming to care that he was surrounded by monsters with spikes and guns and brain-squishing devices, started yelling at Frinel. ‘How stupid are you? I thought the whole idea was to get her through to the end! If you’ve hurt her. . . ’

  Frinel appeared unconcerned. He gestured at the screen, which was showing a view of a rocky ceiling. ‘The neural relays are still transmitting, therefore the carrier has not been damaged.’

  The Doctor spoke through clenched teeth. ‘She is not “the carrier”.

  She is a person, and her name is Rose Tyler.’

  Frinel waved this away.

  ‘And even if she is alive, and you can just count yourself lucky, pal, that she is, she might still be “damaged”. Like poles repel, an’ all that.

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  You switch that back on when they’re next to each other, and what did you expect to happen?’

  ‘Continue playing,’ said Frinel, ‘or we kill another human.’

  ‘Oh, that’s your answer to everything,’ spat the Doctor, but he picked up the control pad again.

  Suddenly one of the other Quevvils called out, ‘Frinel! Mantodeans approaching!’

  Robert swivelled his head to look. There was only the one screen in the room, the one showing Rose’s point of view, but this Quevvil had a chart that looked like the one from the other room, only it showed a cluster of small red lights. They were approaching a single, shining white light.

  ‘Evade the Mantodeans!’ Frinel snapped to the Doctor.

  But the other Quevvil interrupted. ‘No, Frinel, they are approaching the other carrier. The one being controlled from Earth.’

  Frinel waved a paw. ‘Then it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter?’ said the Doctor. ‘That’s a human being! At least let me try to help them!’

  ‘They are unimportant,’ said Frinel. ‘You will continue to play the game.’

  Robert was still watching the chart. The red dots had now totally surrounded the white dot. And then, as he looked, the white light blinked out.

  ‘Too late,’ said the Quevvil.

  Jason got a text message from Anil. ‘He says the bloke messaged him.

  He says it’s game over. He’s blaming Anil, though I can’t see where he gets that from.’

  And Mickey’s stomach dropped like a stone, as he thought, someone’s just died. A human being’s just died. And I should have been able to stop it. If I’d just thought of the right things to say.

  Sod this hero stuff for a lark.

  But, on the plus side, at least he’d got his telly back.

  Rose, not dead, woke up. It took her about six seconds to remember 162

  where she was and what was happening. And when she’d remembered it all, she felt very, very cross.

  Something bumped against her feet. She couldn’t look to see what it was. Then she felt herself move. She began to stand up. As she did, she saw the thing at her feet. It was Darren Pye’s head.

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  Rose had been taken away from Darren Pye’s head, away from the Mantodeans she could see in the distance, chomping away at something unseen, but perfectly imaginable, on the
floor.

  She had been taken down many more tunnels, across chasms, up steps, and through she wasn’t sure how many encrypted locks and booby-trapped doors, and she was really fed up.

  Then, just as she’d given up hope of ever hearing another human voice again, she spoke to herself.

  ‘Rose, it’s me. You’re nearly there, so I’ve got to risk it.’

  Her hand pulled the mobile out of her pocket, and began to dial.

  ‘Just got to speak to Mickey again. Listen, I’m going to get you out of there. Once you’re at close enough range, they’re going to activate the disruptors. I don’t know what’s going to happen then. But you’ll be OK. Trust me.’

  The phone was held up to her ear.

  ‘What’s that you were saying about being OK and trusting me?’ said Mickey’s voice. ‘Is everything all right, Rose? God, I hope you’re OK.’

  But Rose couldn’t answer him, and the Doctor couldn’t hear him.

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  ‘Mickey?’ Rose said, in the Doctor’s words. ‘I hope you’re all set.

  Because it’s going to be any minute now.’

  There was an air of barely suppressed excitement in the Quevvil control room.

  As soon as Rose had started the final approach to the centre, Frinel had ordered the Quevvils into the yellow-lit shower cubicles, which apparently were teleport booths. Nearly every Quevvil had squeezed in, leaving only one or two manning the various bits and pieces around the room.

  Frinel himself was standing outside the nearest booth. The Quevvil called Herryan was in place to activate the disruptors, and then, the instant they were switched on, to teleport the Quevvils across to the heart of the Mantodean stronghold.

  ‘I shall lead the charge myself,’ Frinel had announced. ‘It is only fitting.’ He waved his fist in the air triumphantly. ‘Final victory approaches!’

  The final lock was the trickiest yet. Rose avoided the acid flow and the razor blades that thudded out at head height, while standing at the top of a sheer cliff, and finally cracked the code. Or rather, the Doctor did all that.