Doctor How and the Deadly Anemones (30 page)

Doctor How stirred on his bed and rolled over, reaching for the sheet. Instead, his hand found the lapel of his jacket, and pulled. The feel of the jacket’s material and the resulting tug on his shoulder triggered something in his brain, and his level of consciousness went up a notch. He realised that he had slept in his suit. The question of why he’d slept in his suit threw the answer into his head, and he remembered the extreme pain and discomfort, and that he’d been put to bed by Kevin the night before. He knew exactly what the time was. After all, he was a Time Keeper.

He sat bolt upright.

Kevin
.

He shouldn’t have left Kevin alone in charge of the Spectrel for over twelve hours. He reassured himself that Trinity would have kept the lad in order, and that besides everything else, the Spectrel wouldn’t have let him do anything anyway. Nothing that didn’t require immediate operational attention, at least.

He put his shoes on and laced them up. For some reason they displeased him this morning. He found himself rotating his ankles so that he could look at them from a variety of different angles. This carried on for several seconds.

Kevin
.

He leapt up off the bed and walked down the corridor towards the control room.

“Trinity!” he said, putting a hand to his chest. Something didn’t feel quite right. “You gave me a bit of a start there.”

Trinity had reverted to her spider form, probably to eat her morning meal. She studied the Doctor for a couple of seconds.

“What? Did my regeneration go okay? What is it? Tell me.”

Trinity’s head bobbed up and down a couple of times, then stopped. She ran up onto the ceiling and let the Doctor pass underneath, keeping her eyes on him.

“Oh, be like that then.”

His bladder felt very full, so he went to the facilities adjacent to the control room first.

A few seconds later he burst into the control room, followed by Trinity.

“Kevin!” he shouted. “Kevin, wake up lad!”

Kevin fell off the steamer seat and rubbed the sleep from his eyes.

“Wassup, Doc?”

“Kevin!” said the Doctor, shaking him by the shoulders.

“You’re up. That’s great. Like, how’d the regeneration go?”

“I know who the Babushka Lady is!”

“What?”

“I know who the Babushka Lady is, Kevin.”

“Like, I don’t see what the big deal is. I know you know I like conspiracies and that, but I’m more worried about you and your regeneration. You get me?”

The Doctor was clutching his shoulders and looking into his eyes.

“I am the Babushka Lady. It’s
me
.”

“But…”

“I’m a
woman
.”

“Oh my life, Doctor. Oh.” Kevin stared. “I, like. I dunno what to say, man. Woman.”

“You have to help. I have a real emergency on my hands.”

“I can see that. You still look like a man. Exactly like a man, in fact. Are you sure you’re just not a bit – you know – tired or something?”

The Doctor felt the stubble on his face, and grimaced. “You’re right! But I’ve just been to the loo and I can assure you that…
down there
it’s all changed. And my
chest
.” The Doctor patted his chest, which was lumpier than it had been previously.

“So that’s the emergency? We have to get you some kind of operation? Shall I get the med-bots?”

“No, no! All that can wait. Look!” He pointed at his feet. “I have
got
to get rid of these shoes.”

Doctor How’s piece on the Kennedy assassination is based on historical facts, and you might be surprised at some of them.

Winston Churchill volunteered to serve as an infantry officer in WWI after resigning as an MP. He was called away from his trench by a telegraph message. There was no one there to meet him when he arrived at the rendezvous and there was no record of any telegraph message. On returning to his trench he discovered that a German artillery shell had landed where he would have been standing on duty. His life was saved by an apparent mistake… unless that mysterious message was an intervention?

JFK’s elder brother, Joe, was killed piloting a plane filled with explosives. These weapons were to have been used to destroy German U-boat pens in France, which were too well fortified to be damaged by conventional bombs. A pilot was needed for take-off and would then bail out, after which the aircraft would be flown by remote control from another aircraft. On too many occasions the planes exploded on take-off, or early in flight, and the concept was abandoned.

Tube Alloys was the codename for Britain’s nuclear weapons programme during WWII, but it was of course the American Manhattan Project which succeeded. As an aside, Trinity was the codename for the first nuclear explosion, which took place in the Jomada del Muerto desert in New Mexico on July 16
th
, 1945.

Jack Kennedy suffered from Addison’s Disease from an early age. There is speculation that many of his symptoms actually resulted from his abuse of steroids. That he was a womaniser is a matter of record. He was in the House of Commons as the declaration of war was read out on September 3
rd
, 1939. The title of his undergraduate thesis,
Why England Slept,
did nod to Churchill’s work, and it was a bestseller. He donated the British royalties to the people of Plymouth, and bought a green Buick convertible with the US royalties.

President Lincoln did indeed have a premonition about his own death just three days before his assassination, and it was exactly as described by Doctor How in this novel.

In 1947 Kennedy was hospitalised at the London Clinic, and seen by Sir Daniel Davis. The scene with Churchill and the Doctor is pure fiction… so far as we know.

JFK was shot and killed the day before the first episode of
Doctor Who
went to air in 1963. The timings of the motorcade are correct. The first bullet that hit Kennedy and then hit Connally was metal jacketed. Kennedy was killed by a dum-dum bullet which fragmented into over forty pieces. The hole in his skull was 6mm, and not the 6.5mm of the bullets fired by Oswald. In his 1992 book
Mortal Error
, author Bonar Menninger outlines a theory by ballistics expert Howard Donahue that JFK was shot accidentally by a bullet from an AR-15 fired by Secret Service agent George W. Hickey Jr. Hickey sued the publishers in 1997 but the case was thrown out because it was decreed that he’d waited too long. He settled out of court with the publishers of the book in 1998. He died in either 2005 or 2011 – bizarrely, it’s difficult to ascertain even that simple fact.

The Babushka Lady was seen filming the motorcade and was very close to the action. Her identity has proved impossible to establish, her nickname having been given to her because she had a scarf wrapped around her head. In four different films she is seen still standing taking photographs whilst most other witnesses have taken cover – so she was one heck of a cool customer. Her photographs would have been extraordinary, and could well have given definitive answers about the assassination. Despite a nationwide appeal to film processors, neither she nor the film she shot have ever been traced. To this day, the identity of the Babushka Lady remains a mystery. If you know who she is, call 1-800-FOUND-ELVIS. (Just kidding.)

End of book two

Thanks for reading – I hope you enjoyed it! Please leave a four or five-star review if you did. Please don’t reveal the exact nature of the shock ending – I’d love to keep it a secret as long as possible. As an indie author the only publicity I have is word of mouth. I really appreciate your help!

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Read on for a preview of
Doctor How and the Alien Invasion
.

Atruk was lying in wait, certain that the enemy hadn’t seen him dive for the cover of a stack of sandbags. His pulse was racing and he was filled with hatred and thoughts of revenge. But he knew the most important thing he could do was stay still.

The last of the invaders concentrated its blaster on an infantry carrier. The vehicle was racing for the cover of a pill box that had been taken out half an hour earlier, when there had been three of the bipedal alien invaders. Eliminating the other two had been a bloody struggle, and Atruk had lost almost a battalion of his own warriors. This last one was proving to be a fearsome fighter, and he was threatening to reach the innermost citadel of his culture. This wasn’t the first attack they’d experienced, and from the style of its fighting, Atruk was fairly certain of the alien’s name.

He watched as the rounds burst onto the armour plating of the vehicle, desperately hoping it could take his comrades to cover in time. For a moment it looked as if the driver had made it but, against the odds, the tenth round caught the rear of the vehicle and it erupted in a massive explosion, killing the squad of infantry it had been about to disgorge.

Atruk knew that the enemy’s rapid burst of fire would have depleted its weapon, and that it would take a few moments to recharge. He leapt up and let off the maximum three consecutive rounds from his blaster, cursing the limits of his culture’s technology. The enemy saw the glowing balls of energy flying at it across the wasteland of bodies, infantry carriers, ruined buildings and craters. It pointed its weapon at Atruk and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened – the weapon was still recharging. The alien juddered as the first round hit, then twisted as the second made its mark. One bolt of energy escaped the alien’s blaster and went harmlessly into the sky as Atruk’s third round hit. The alien vaporised. Suddenly all was still.

“Captain Atruk reporting,” he spoke into his helmet microphone. “Latest assault defeated, Your Highness.”

“Too close this time, Captain,” came the Emperor’s voice in his ear. “They will be back. Again. And again.”

“We must rebuild, Your Highness.”

“I’m tired of rebuilding. As soon as we rebuild, they come back and destroy us. I cannot bear to watch any more of my brave warriors slain by these aliens. One day they will break us. That day will come soon.”

“But Your Highness, what can we do? They appear from nowhere. Their technology is far superior to ours. Their blasters fire ten rounds to our three, and their rounds travel twice as fast. It takes just one shot to kill one of our men, but three in quick succession to kill them. We are never able to capture their weapons because they vaporise as soon as they die. We don’t know who they are, where they come from, or why they attack us. All we know is that they wish to destroy us.”

“Our technicians have been working on this, Captain Atruk. We have found a weakness.”

“A weakness?”

“Yes. A connection to their home planet.”

“Can we destroy this connection, Your Highness?”

“Alas, it is not in our power to do so.”

“I do not understand.”

“Another civilisation holds open the connection between our two worlds.”

“Then what can we do?”

“We must take the war to them, Captain Atruk. We must kill those who would kill us.”

Atruk surveyed the destroyed landscape. “And you are looking for volunteers to go on this mission, Your Highness?”

“Yes, Captain.”

“It would be my greatest honour to serve you on this mission, Your Highness.”

“Thank you, most loyal captain. This mission breaks many of the Agreements of the Pleasant universe.”

“I understand, Your Highness.”

“We will have complete deniability. You will be the only warrior on this mission, Captain Atruk.”

“Your Highness?”

“Alone, but not unaccompanied, Captain. Our technicians have prepared a surprise for the enemy. If all goes to plan, you will be able to direct operations from a safe distance.”

“When do I leave?”

“The connection will close again in under a minute. We will transport you to your ship now.”

“I understand, Your Highness.”

“Their gods are writing the list of fallen in the sky.”

And so it was. In the grey, smoke-filled sky above Atruk he could make out a list in an alien alphabet. There were ten lines of red characters; what his civilisation interpreted as a list of the alien dead in order of their bravery in battle. It had taken them weeks of programming time to decode the basics of the alien language in a desperate bid to understand the repeated assaults.

“They taunt us every time, Your Highness. As if our casualties are meaningless and theirs are immortal. And they
are
immortal – it is mostly the same warriors reincarnated who come back to destroy us.”

“You will end this, Captain Atruk. You must kill their best warriors. But you must hurry. We have sent ahead an advance party. It will test the alien defences and gather intelligence for you. You will take longer to travel.”

As he boarded the transporter that would take him to the gateway, Atruk glanced up again. The list of names was burnished on his memory. At the top was the most hated of all, and it was flashing proudly yet again.

KevT1994

The hatch of the transporter slammed shut and he felt his body push against his armour as the craft accelerated.

“KevT1994 must die,” said Atruk.

Doctor How and the Alien Invasion
is book three of the Doctor How series and will be out in late 2015. Probably.