The newly imposing Brother Alex, restored to his former charismatic stature, a classic figure in his timeless white robe, was on the platform in front of the ceremonial throne.
He held up his hand. The chatter subsided, and the groups dispersed to their seats.
He was standing as still as the statue of the Skang that Sarah Jane had described in London. Even with his diverse experience of decades of travel to some of the strangest civilisations in the farthest galaxies in the universe, the Doctor found it almost impossible to believe that this human being - whose face had at one time been on the front page of every tabloid - was nothing but an illusion, a mental image imposed by sheer psionic power.
Alex waited until the last of the fidgeting had stopped, and the murmurs had died down.
‘It does my heart good to be standing here,’ he said in the measured golden tones that had, on occasion, held more than six hundred MPs enthralled. ‘It does my heart good to see my comrades in this great endeavour ranged before me, in unity at last. It does my heart good to know that the bad times are over, the shillyshallying is behind us. We can go forward together in strength to meet our destiny!’
At this, there was a tentative clapping, which was picked up and swiftly grew into a full-blooded round of applause.
A murmur from behind the Doctor’s shoulder. ‘Typical claptrap!’ said Professor Hutchens. He had to agree.
‘And now... what we’ve all been waiting for. The moment fast approaches when our devoted followers...’
Was that the suspicion of a sneer?
‘...and indeed we ourselves will get our reward.’
‘Doctor!’ An urgent whisper behind him. ‘We must
do
something! They’re about to turn!’
If he leapt through the opening in front of him, he’d have a javelin in his back. If he tried to mount a diversion while Hilda escaped, they would almost certainly both be killed. He shrugged. They were helpless.
The applause died away. As soon as there was complete silence, Alex indicated that they should all stand up. They rose as one, let their heads fall back, and closed their eyes.
Once more the Doctor put his hands over his ears as he heard the alien voices, the crescendo of cacophony that had presaged the transformation before.
There was nothing to be done. Nothing that
could
be done.
He had failed. It was at this moment that the first missile arrived.
‘Just over! And to the right. Shorten range by fifty yards.’
Pete Andrews stood up from the voice-pipe, which was always used in action, rather than a microphone, as the electrics could so easily be knocked out.
‘Shorten range. Fifty yards.’ Bob Simkins’ voice floated back from the little gunnery control room deep below the bridge. From the radar scan in front of him, he would be able to confirm the CO’s report, and make the necessary adjustments.
The Brigadier, surveying the plume of smoke from behind the volcano through his glasses - and the cloud of shrieking sea birds that had taken off from the cliff - firmly put out of his mind the thought that once they got the range they would in all probability be killing the Doctor, and allowed himself to feel a certain professional satisfaction.
This was the answer, without a doubt. That first explosion was enormous. Another like that actually into the crater would mean the end of the Skang.
Chris’s voice came through from the foredeck. ‘Number Two, armed and ready!’
This was the drill. Only one missile at a time to be fully operational. For safety, especially in a rough sea. Now, however, the
Hallaton
was almost as steady as she would have been in the lagoon. The sea was as still as glass, stretching to the horizon like a sheet of blue ice, with only the slightest of swells, very nearly undetectable.
‘Steady on course,’ said the Cox’n.
The engines were at minimum revs to allow the ship to creep along with just enough way for the rudder to take hold.
The slightest swing to port or starboard would radically affect the aiming of the missiles.
‘Very good... In your own time, Number One,’ said Andrews into the voice-pipe, and lifted his glasses once more.
In the intensity of the stillness that overcame the ship as Bob swung the mounting fractionally to the left and waited for the precise moment to fire the second missile, the Brigadier heard a whisper from the corner of the bridge. He dropped his binoculars and looked over to Sarah. But she wasn’t talking to him. Her eyes were closed. She appeared to be praying.
The Doctor’s first response to the explosion was a surge of triumph. Lethbridge-Stewart had come up trumps! Time after time, they had disagreed fundamentally about the use of force. The Brigadier’s instinctive reaction seemed to be that there were very few problems that couldn’t be solved by blowing something up. But this time, it really did seem to be the necessary last resort.
There was only one snag. If the
Hallaton’s
aim improved, and Alex and his comrades were terminated, Hilda and he would certainly be terminated too, a consummation he devoutly wished to avoid. He
had
to escape.
But though the Doctor’s American friend, like Hilda, had thrown himself to the ground at the sound of the explosion, and was only now picking himself up, his colleague at the doorway had swung round, spear at the ready, as though the ear-splitting noise had been nothing more than a planned diversion.
Nothing had changed. Even the Skang chanting had continued, almost without a break. Indeed, the clamour from down below was almost reaching its climax.
He looked down and, in the sudden silence, again felt the shimmering in his brain that meant the Skang were about to turn. He brought the utmost concentration to his watching, trying to seize the moment of transmutation. But again he missed it. It felt as if they’d always been there, these strangely attractive grotesques.
Standing proudly on the platform, where the photogenically well-favoured politician Alex Whitbread had been, there was the most impressive Skang yet: a bronze masterpiece almost as magnificent as the illusory painting; a figure to venerate, to worship.
Both the guards on the stage fell to their knees. Out of the corner of his eye, the Doctor saw Hank do the same, staring with adoration at the embodiment of their devotion, wonderfully incarnate... and this time, three yards away, his fellow followed his example.
Now! Now was the time to escape!
But the ground shuddered, the sound of the blast filled the sky, and the world collapsed. The second missile landed above their heads, just the other side of the makeshift perimeter wall.
Hank and Helmut disappeared, buried, broken, laid low by the rolling boulders from above; and the Doctor’s cave was buried.
It felt as if she were being torn apart. The near-miss meant only one thing. The next one would be smack on target - and even if it wasn’t, there would still be one chance left.
One more chance to kill the Doctor.
Sarah found that she was clutching her upper arms, trying to stop the violent shuddering that had overtaken her. This was what he wanted, yes, but it was unthinkable, unbearable, to know that the world - no, she herself - was about to lose this extraordinary figure, whose cranky intellect concealed a depth of compassion, and a more-than-human warmth that she’d never even glimpsed in anybody she’d ever known.
‘Number Three, armed and ready!’
She shut her eyes. She couldn’t bear to look.
‘Very good. Okay, Bob, it’s all yours.’
Again that moment when the world held its breath.
‘Good God!’ said the Brigadier.
‘Hold it, Bob!’ called the CO at the same time.
What?
For a moment, even after she’d opened her eyes, she had no idea why they’d stopped.
And then she realised. Rising out of the volcano crater was a flock of flying creatures like deformed giant bats.
The Skang had taken to the air, and were flying towards the ship.
The Doctor pulled himself to his feet and peered through the fog of stone dust. It wasn’t quite dark, and that must mean that there was a gap for the light to get in. He half expected to see the figure of a Skang behind him but there, struggling to stand, was the frail woman who’d been his friend for a short time - no, who was still his friend, no matter what had happened to her since they met in Oxford.
He hurried over to give her a helping hand. ‘Are you all right, Dame Hilda?’
‘No bones broken,’ she said, as she sat down heavily on her chair. ‘I’m somewhat shaken, I have to admit. Your friends are more determined than our revered leader would have us believe. Curiously enough, I’ve never fancied being buried alive.’
A grim thought; and a real possibility if they didn’t manage to escape before the next explosion; and that could be at any minute. He quickly turned towards the light. Yes, two of the boulders that obscured the window opening had a chink between them. He gave them a shove in turn.
The one on the left was immoveable, but the other rocked slightly as he pushed. Unfortunately it was the bigger, and seemed much too heavy to shift.
His mind flashed back to a beach near Athens, where he had been out for a walk with the leading scientist of his day, the Einstein of his time. It was only a few months ago - and yet, at the same time, it was some two centuries before the ships of Gaius Julius crossed the English Channel. It was always pleasant to listen to a mind like his.
‘Give me a firm place to stand on, and I’ll move the Earth,’
Archimedes had said.
The Doctor was desperately looking round for something to use as a lever.
Grabbing the other bamboo chair by the leg, he raised it above his head and smashed it to the ground. It obligingly fell to pieces, leaving him with a length of bamboo at least as thick as the spears of the guards, and nearly three feet long.
It fitted neatly into the crack beneath the stone, and the edge of the window - the corner, for stability - was the ideal place to provide a fulcrum. He had a mechanical advantage of nearly four to one.
But he still couldn’t persuade the boulder to move more than a few inches, no matter how he heaved on the end of the chair leg... Until his hands were joined by the arthritic grip of his aged companion; and together they swung the lever down as easily as if he’d been joined by an Olympic weightlifter; and the light flooded in.
‘The feeling in my body is that the strength of my muscles fits my appearance,’ she said. ‘But it’s an illusion, like the rest. Whenever I’ve remembered, my real strength has turned out to be quite useful.’
The Doctor acknowledged her contribution with a wry grin.
‘But not useful enough on this occasion, it would seem,’
she went on dispassionately.
She was right. Though they could now see out into the arena, the gap was still far too small for either of them to climb through. The Doctor poked his head out to see if he could spot how to enlarge it - and was rewarded by seeing something very odd.
The assembled Skang, including the Alex figure on the stage, seemed to have lost it completely. They were tearing at their white gowns, frantically pulling them to pieces, and flinging them off. The sheen of the bronze bodies that were revealed was at the same time beautiful and shocking, even to the Doctor. In spite of their semi-humanoid shape, in the mass they seemed as utterly alien as any Dalek.
But a greater surprise was to come. As they became free of the trammels of their clothes, they unfurled smallish wings like those of a fairy-tale dragon, which had been invisibly moulded to their backs, and rose into the air, circling the crater as they waited for one another.
‘I wondered if they might do that,’ said Hilda, when he let her have a look.
‘But... but it’s impossible. Creatures of that size would need colossal wings - and a breastbone to match, just to anchor their muscles!’
‘Not at all,’ said Hilda. ‘The Skang body is far less dense than the human. How do you think they... we... are able to grow so fast inside? Think of the pumice in your bath. It looks like a stone; it feels like a stone; and yet it floats.’
‘Of course,’ said the Doctor, remembering how light the Skang corpse at the bottom of the cliff had been.
As the last one joined them, the hovering, circling creatures came together and swooped into the sky like a flock of migrating swallows, with such a gust from their wings that it blew the dust from the second explosion right into the Doctor’s face.
So they weren’t to die quite yet, he thought, wiping his eyes. But what about the others, on board the
Hallaton?
‘Got him!’
Even as Sarah heard the cry of triumph from behind her, she saw one of the leaders of the flying pack seem to falter and drop, as ungainly as a shot pheasant, with a broken wing vainly grasping at the air.
As part of the drill for going into action, a machine gun was manned on each side of the upper bridge, as were a brace of them mounted outside the wing doors of the lower, covered bridge.