Barbara stopped, frozen with amazement and fear. She turned. One of the creatures had
spoken!
Its accent was strange, stilted, high-pitched, but the commanding words were clear, unmistakable.
Or was she still dreaming?
She flinched as the creature barring her escape prodded her with the glassy spar.
‘Who... who... are you...?’ she whispered.
The voice came from the creature which appeared to be their leader. It came slowly forward; its long, slim, black body ribbed with glowing green shone in the uncertain light. The gorgeous wings folded as it lowered its delicate arms.
It spoke again. ‘We are the Menoptera,’ it said.
‘Men... optera...?’ In her fear and amazement Barbara had difficulty with the word.
‘Lords of Vortis.’
The Menoptera gestured to the landscape beyond the mouth of the cave and turned its intent glittering stare on Barbara. Its mouth closed harshly.
‘How come you here?’
Barbara gathered the courage to speak but an angry movement from one of the surrounding Menoptera made her flinch back. Its voice crackled more harshly.
‘Kill her, Vrestin! Now!’
It raised its stalagmite spar ready to thrust and impale her on its cruel point. The taller Menoptera raised a hand, stayed the blow with a commanding wave.
‘First we speak!’
It paused, and in silence its burning gaze bored through Barbara. She mustered a calm and said, trembling a little,
‘... you... know our earth language? H-how...?’
‘
Answer
us only!’ A pause, then - ‘there are... more of you?
‘... er, yes... but...’
‘More?’
‘Four of us. But please - we mean no
harm
! We are peaceful, civilized. We have... lost our way... in space...’
Barbara halted lamely. The glaring scrutiny of four pairs of eyes on her was unrelenting, unmoved. One of the Menoptera creatures cast a nervous look back towards the cave mouth, and rounded angrily on the Menoptera it had addressed as ‘Vrestin’.
‘We are wrong to spare her. She must be killed -
quickly!’
Vrestin raised a hand for silence. He turned to Barbara.
His straight mouth opened and his stilted voice addressed her.
‘You say you are lost. That there are three others.’
Barbara nodded. ‘Yes, we...’
‘... yet we found you - wandering alone. How?’
Barbara tried to think. She said, hesitating, ‘I only know that... after we landed, two of our party went to explore, and...’
‘Explore...!’ A Menoptera repeated, hostile, scornful.
‘.. the last thing I remember was being in the ship, and the doors opening...’
Vrestin stared closely at her. ‘Ship?’
‘Yes. I... stayed aboard. But... something... made the doors open. All I can recall since then... is...’ she gestured helplessly, ‘... is... well, I was here...’
The most hostile of the four Menoptera thrust forward and gripped the shoulder of the tall one they called Vrestin. ‘We waste time and risk much! Kill her! Now!’
Vrestin hesitated. Another Menoptera came close. Its eyes studied her. Its voice was reedy, hoarse.
‘You chose ill, when you chose to land on Vortis.’
‘Hrostar is right!’
‘We didn’t
choose
!’ Barbara cried. ‘Our ship was
pulled
towards... this planet. We are helpless here!’
The Menoptera looked at each other.
The one called Hrostar spoke.
‘If we let you go back to your ship...’
‘No!’ The other interrupted. ‘A stranger must not be trusted!’
Their leader Vrestin shook his head too. ‘The Zarbi will treat them as enemies. If we refuse our help they will not survive.’
‘Their welfare is not our concern!’ The most hostile of these creatures pointed the spar he held at Barbara. ‘She was under the force of the Zarbi!’ He rounded accusingly on Vrestin. ‘What made you snatch her from them?’
Vrestin glared back at his glowering companion.
‘Challis — should we all shrink back into the dark while such vile things as the Zarbi practise their power on...
civilized creatures?’
‘The... Zarbi?’ Barbara asked. ‘W-who... are they, please?
Hrostar stared suspiciously. ‘You do not know them?
You did not
see
them?’
Barbara shook her head timidly.
‘The Zarbi have brought the Dark Age to Vortis,’
Vrestin said simply. ‘They have overrun it like a plague.
And like a plague, they destroy every living thing in their path.’
The hostile Challis grew impatient. ‘Vrestin, she is a danger to us!’
Vrestin nodded regretfully. ‘I know.’
The finality with which he said that scared Barbara. His was the only kindly face which looked down upon her, and now it hardened. Vrestin turned, beckoning to the others.
‘Please!’ Barbara pleaded. ‘We... we only want to get away from here! These... Zarbi you’re afraid of — perhaps we can, well, — help you...!
Challis sneered in amazement.
‘You?’
‘Our men have great gifts... wisdom... experience..
knowledge.’
Hrostar drew himself up haughtily. ‘You dare to believe you can withstand the Zarbi? That your wisdom is greater than ours? The Menoptera are the greatest civilization this galaxy has known, yet the Zarbi swept it from this planet!
Their power was invincible...!’
‘... they laid our greatness in... ashes,’ Vrestin added in a murmur.
Challis interrupted them, his high-pitched voice rising to a frenzied shriek. ‘If we are to restore it, we cannot risk betrayal! Let her go and she will tell the Zarbi where they can find us!’
Vrestin and Hrostar considered that doubtfully.
‘Please, I... promise I will not!’ Barbara urged them.
‘What are promises? They will extort it from her! And what proof have we of what she says? Killing her is the only answer!’
The fourth Menoptera, lingering in the background and keeping a watchful eye on the cave entrance, murmured his agreement.
Vrestin hesitated, inclined his head.
He said curtly, ‘We shall decide the matter. Come.
Challis, you will guard.’
The idea pleased the hostile Challis. He moved quickly and took up a grim stance with a spar levelled at Barbara’s throat.
Vrestin signed to their other two companions and led them farther into the dark recesses of the cave. Challis pushed the spar at Barbara, motioning her roughly to sit.
From the rear of the cave Barbara could hear the murmur of their strange, almost flute-like voices. It was impossible to pick up what they were saying.
The guard, Challis, who towered over her, also turned his head for a brief cautious moment to listen, but returned immediately to watching her. Her mouth was dry with fear. Barbara racked her brains for a way of appealing to these creatures — winning some sign of friendliness, trust.
They used human speech. But did they have feelings akin to human beings? Did they know mercy?
In such a grim place as this, it did not seem possible.
She shivered.
‘Please — you
must
see that I am harmless!’
At that Challis raised the spar menacingly. Barbara braved it, but her voice quavered a little.
‘We speak in the same way. We may have much in common that you can trust. At least let me...’
‘... silence!’ Challis snarled. He glared and thrust the spar until it was an inch from Barbara’s mouth.
A commotion from the rear of the cave made them both turn their heads. The voices of the three Menoptera were raised in dispute, but Barbara could not catch more than one or two words, oddly distorted as they echoed off the brittle walls.
‘... kill her... outright... and have done... the... Zarbi will...’
Barbara stared up at her captor. He glared back and then turned to listening, straining his ears. She cast around desperately, and her gaze lit on the rocks that glittered on the cave floor.
Slowly, so as not to excite Challis’ attention, her hand strayed towards a rock. Her fingers gripped it, and then, desperately, as Challis turned back and saw the rock in her hand, she hurled it at his head.
Without waiting she whirled to her feet and raced for the cave mouth. As she did so she heard Challis give a shriek. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the creature reel back with a winged hand to his eyes. His stalagmite spar gleamed as it dropped and he screamed.
‘Stop her!’
She ran, slipping and stumbling, her heart pounding wildly, towards the pale oval of light marking the cave mouth. Behind her she heard the shouts of the Menoptera as they came running from the rear of the cave towards their comrade Challis. Barbara leaped over a rock, came scrambling out of the cave mouth into the twilit pass and ran on till her breath gave out. She paused for a moment and leaned to catch her breath in the shadow of the cliffs.
She threw a quick look back towards the cave mouth, then stared fearfully around her, wondering where the ship was.
How would she find it? What direction should she take?
Barbara realized she had no idea, no memory of having walked through this place.
She was entirely lost and alone. She stared up at the craggy cliffs. Could she climb up there – find a vantage point from which to see the land around her? The sides were too glassy, too steep.
As Barbara decided this, a sound checked her. It was something she had first heard in the control room of
Tardis
, and with its return the memory flooded back too.
It was fainter now, a humming, a chirruping.
But it was enough. Her mind flashed back to the chaos that awful sound had caused in the control room. She remembered the metal canisters jumping and scattering across the floor, the control table spinning wildly, how her own arm had jerked in front of her as though controlled by something else – and how the doors of
Tardis
had opened.
It was immensely evil – this sound.
Barbara gave a shriek and clapped her hands to her ears.
She turned and ran blindly up the pass, no longer wondering where to go, obeying only the panic impulse to run from the great humming, to hide, to find somewhere blessedly silent, safe from it.
As she ran and stumbled along the rocky pass she turned her head wildly to the right and left as if expecting to see whatever was making the sound suddenly appear from the shadows and close in on her.
She checked and darted up a small gorge leading off the pass. There she halted and turned to run in a new direction.
But whichever way Barbara turned, the sound grew louder.
And now she could run no more. She was utterly spent.
She simply dropped there, holding her aching sides, her heart pounding like a steam-hammer, fighting to get her breath.
As she straightened again, summoning the strength to go on, she saw clusters of light appear from behind the rocks in the gloom. Then to her right the hideous sleek shape of a Zarbi reared on its hind legs out of the gloom, glaring down, and with a slithering sound began to scramble towards her. The other lights converged and took shape too. The pass ahead of her and to her right was swarming with these loathsome creatures, and the chirruping sound they made, as they came crowding and slithering down towards her, bored echoingly through her head and vibrated on every nerve.
Barbara stopped stock-still and moaned, ‘No... no...!’
She backed away into a small gorge, turned to run, but saw her retreat was cut off by a solid wall of rock.
She cowered back against it, eyes wide, mouth quivering, trembling all over with a cold sickness.
Two of the Zarbi loomed now right in front of her.
Barbara pressed herself desperately into a crack in the rock.
The leading Zarbi reached out with its great shiny foreleg.
Its pincer claws clamped like sharp steel on her arms.
She screamed, and the sound echoed off every crag.
There was chaos inside the control room of
Tardis
. It lurched and tilted in every direction, its hull scraping over rock and rough ground.
Vicki, alone in the ship, clung to the control table for support and ventured another look at the screen.
Through it, the landscape outside had lightened, and she saw what seemed to be ropes stretching far out ahead of the ship, ending in moving figures whose shapes she could not make out clearly.
Then a scuttling, slithering noise echoed above her head and she opened her mouth dumbly in terror at the object which now suddenly appeared at the inspection window.
Two giant, glaring eyes in a shiny, pointed head peered through the scanner window. The eyes, huge and distorted as through a great magnifying glass, stared inward, looking this way and that – then caught and held Vicki, and burned venomously right through her.
Vicki screamed and plunged for the switches on the control table to blot out the sight.
She thought she heard a strange high-pitched cry, then a slithering sound, as she fumbled haphazardly with the controls before finding the inspection off-switch.
The screen blanked out, but the ship went lurching on.
Outside the ship, a host of Zarbi swarmed around it. A great web had been spread over the exterior of its police-box shell, and from this a number of long, thin, rope-like strands, glittering like glass, radiated outward to a group of Zarbi, who toiled along, their shiny bodies reared upright, pulling steadily.
They looked for all the world like giant ants, gripping the strands between pincer claws and lurching along with their ungainly, slithering gait.
Their bodies were long and jointed in sections like an insect’s – first the great shiny head with huge eyes and cruel proboscis jaw that moved and clamped together like the tips of an enormous tweezer; then a short trunk, dark, shiny, smooth, shell-like too; and finally the glistening swollen posterior which ended in a point like the sting-end of a bee. They moved on the hind pair of six steely legs, and now it was clear that the shrill chirruping which Doctor Who and the others had heard came from these creatures.