Zamper Page 4

  The Doctor fiddled with some of the equipment, prodding at a row of stippled controls below a cluster of small triangular displays. ‘No. These controls have been locked off. Why should a pirate bother to do that?’ He took out a slim probe from one of his pockets and continued his manipulations.

  Bernice looked back at the mannequins. Despite her best efforts, her awareness was folding up. Already the edges of her vision were closing in, swallowed by a whirling pattern of lights. She wanted to shout, shriek, alert the Doctor, but – and this was really silly – she didn’t want him to think of her as a light-weight, somebody he had to look after all the while.

  ‘The sequence is impregnable. There isn’t even a flight computer. Most odd.’ The Doctor shrugged and put away his probe. The heat and the lack of air weren’t affecting him in the slightest, and he continued in lecture-room tones, ‘Suggesting these dummies were propped up in this thing, which is on a pre-programmed flight.’

  Bernice wondered why she was having trouble following his words and why her picture of him was fluttering. Her knees gave way, she tumbled against the wall. It was burning hot and scalded the skin on her fingers. The Doctor rushed over and supported her. He hefted her up and pulled one of her arms around his neck. ‘There’s no air!’ she coughed.

  ‘The TARDIS,’ he said firmly, dragging her away. The Doctor’s unique ancestry endowed him, she knew, with enviable resilience. He could be trusted, couldn’t he?

  Her head lolled back, the corrugated squares of the ceiling flipping past her like frames of a speeded-up film.

  Furious with himself, the Doctor let Bernice fall gently to the floor of the violently shaking companionway. Acrid fumes were pouring from puncture holes in the walls, making it even more difficult to orientate and fogging the faint light. The hatch leading back down to the conduit system was around here somewhere. He felt for the raised outline, ducking his head into a patch of vapour that nearly blinded him. There was no escape that way. He leapt up.

  The ship rocked, knocking him off his feet. He landed across Bernice, who was muttering faintly, blood pouring from a cut on her forehead. ‘It’s a test flight,’ she said, her voice full of smoke.

  The Doctor brushed her fringe gently. Her hair was plastered to her forehead in spikes by sweat. He considered the options. No way back to the TARDIS, and the repairs would take a couple of hours at least. Their only hope was the escape capsules this ship had to be carrying.

  Bernice draped over his shoulder, the Doctor gritted his teeth and ran on through the smoke, passing the bunk-rooms. He tried to ignore the vibration, the heat, and the grating, clanking boom of the engine as it died and the ship’s heat shields blew out. His legs ached and the dirty vapour chafed his throat.

  Something exploded in the darkness up ahead, igniting a wave of vapour that flared in puffs of blue. Just in front of the wave of crackling explosions was a wall compartmentalized in six.

  The Doctor threw himself at the nearest capsule, wrenching open the shield. Inside were two of the test dummies, propped up in cushioned rests, masks clamped over their mouths. ‘Sorry,’ he said, grabbing them and throwing them out. He slid Bernice from his shoulder and positioned her in one of the empty crash cushions.

  The flames licked at his shoulders.

  With no choice left to him, the Doctor jumped in to the capsule and pulled the shield shut.

  The slipstream of Smith’s air buggy, guided by the map-screen she’d compiled during her most recent survey, threw up purple dust as she returned to the site of her great discovery. The servitors were waiting at the foot of the small cliff, bleeping their recognition as she climbed from the driver’s seat.

  ‘Morning, boys.’

  ‘Good morning Smith. What are your instructions?’ they chorused.

  She waved her datalyzer at them. ‘These are the results of my latest geological survey.’ The screen on the device displayed the internal structure of the caverns beneath this section of the surface; a large area, about a mile down, was shaded yellow. She tried to keep the excitement from her voice as she revealed her findings. A servitor’s intelligence was basic and literal, and she had to give them the information in as straightforward a manner as possible. ‘The shaded section is new. The last survey, a routine sweep, was done about two hundred years ago. This cave was solid rock then. The structure has shifted, and there are some signs of movement.’

  The servitors buzzed and clicked, accepting the information and logging the route in their memories. ‘You wish us to examine this area?’

  Smith sighed. ‘Yes. Don’t you see, my dears?’

  The servitors hummed, saying nothing.

  ‘I’ve been working on this project for eight years, and at last I’m getting somewhere.’

  One of the servitors turned slightly. ‘Your project is to investigate the reasons for the fall in the Zamps’ rate of production. Query link with geological survey.’

  ‘Oh, for goodness sakes. The Zamp sub-herd, the breakaway group. I may have found where the little devils have squelched off to!’

  ‘To this new cave?’

  ‘Possibly! Do you need a reason for everything? I’d love to go down with you, but for safety considerations and all that.’ She beckoned them to the cliff face and pointed to a thin split in a fold of outward-sloping rock. ‘Now get going. Straight through there, boys.’

  ‘You request a visual record of our findings?’ the servitors asked as they prepared to descend.

  ‘Of course. I’m trying not to get too excited, but this may be the answer, you see. Something odd is going on down there, at any rate. Good luck.’ She lifted a thumb in their direction as, without another word, they tilted slightly and nipped one after the other through the split in the rock and down into the caverns. ‘I’ll wait up here,’ she called after them into the darkness. ‘Don’t be too long!’

  When the buzz of their departure had faded, she made herself comfortable back in the buggy, throwing a tartan rug over her knees. The sun had passed behind the clouds, and a cooler breeze was blowing. Outwardly calm, she was inwardly bubbling with new questions and theories. The most frustrating thing about her life on Zamper was that she had nobody with whom to share her scientific enthusiasm. She hadn’t been over to the Complex for years, and her opinions of her fellow workers were not generous. The Secunda – well, she’d always be plain Madge Beaumont to Smith; Jottipher was spineless; Taal was amusing but rather vulgar. She’d quite liked Nula, the little hostess, admired her pluck. The pluck that had earned her little accident. She pushed that thought to the back of her mind. It was unwise to question things on Zamper. The recent difficulties were unimportant. There was no real reason to worry.

  Her head lifted abruptly to the clouds as a sonic boom blared. ‘Strange,’ she muttered. The test sites were many miles away, and the new buyers expected today wouldn’t be approaching the Complex from this direction, surely. A small black shape tore through the lower atmosphere, its shielded sides flaring bright white as it curled, smoking, turning over and over, then slowed and coasted down further along the lakeside, crunching against the rocks that bordered the water. Then it disappeared around a fold in the cliffs, lost to her gaze.

  An identical shape followed, zooming off eastwards, towards the Complex. At the speed it was going, it would definitely undershoot and hit the water. Her memory jolted her, and Smith identified the objects. Escape capsules.

  ‘Very strange.’

  Perhaps there was a reason to worry.

  Chapter 3

  Getting knocked on the head every other day was a fact of Bernice’s life, as she supposed doing the pools or weeding the garden were to other people. She’d lost count of how many times her skull had taken a battering since she’d first stepped aboard the TARDIS. Eternal optimism was her flaw. No matter how bad her experiences, a few days’ rest in the TARDIS and she was ready for the next stop, smile at the ready. Always wrong. This occasion felt particularly painful. Moving was agony, although a pillow
or something had been thoughtfully provided.

  After a couple of minutes she sat up, gritting her teeth and screwing up her eyes against the pain. She found she was lying in a deep-cushioned, human-sized hole in a large metal container; an identical space adjacent was empty. The top half of the container had been thrown back on its hinges from the inside, presumably by the Doctor. Small footprints in the purple dust trailed away from what Bernice realized was an escape capsule, and ended in the cleft formed by two leaning stones. The place was almost pleasant. A temperate climate, fluffy violet cumulonimbus clouds. No signs of animal or vegetable life. Behind the rocks waves were breaking. She imagined a deserted beach. No birds, just the wind and the rising tide and the Doctor collecting pebbles.

  Carefully she climbed from the capsule, each movement driving a cold stabbing pain through her skull. Her legs threatened to give way but she forced herself to remain calm and conscious. ‘Wait for the Doctor,’ she told herself strictly. ‘Wait for the Doctor. Wait for the Doc… oh.’

  She woke again to his shoes, covered in purple scuffs. ‘I know what I want for my birthday.’

  He knelt down and applied his handkerchief, soaked in cold water, to her forehead. ‘This’ll sting a bit.’

  She flinched. ‘I want a crash helmet. Ow! And a ray gun.’

  The Doctor dabbed at the wound. ‘I’m sure I have a crash helmet somewhere in the TARDIS. And Ace left some of her weapons about, didn’t she?’

  ‘I don’t mean one of those big slabs of twenty-fifth century designer violence. Nothing so obvious. Something more feminine.’

  ‘A ray handbag?’

  She sat up. ‘You’ve got one?’

  ‘I was joking.’

  Bernice felt strong enough now to take the wet hanky from him. ‘How bad is the wound?’

  ‘The bleeding’s stopped.’ Having said this, he started poking about in the capsule for something. ‘The air feels very clean, so there’s little risk of infection. Temperature a cool sixty, plenty of water. But not much in the way of food. None in this either. They wouldn’t waste perishables on a test flight.’

  The events leading up to their evacuation from the ship returned slowly to Bernice’s memory. This felt rather like the morning after a drunken party, the recollection of each tawdry incident cranking up your embarrassment. ‘Where’s the TARDIS?’

  ‘Where we left it.’ The Doctor was now fiddling with a slender piece of metal he’d broken off the insides of the capsule. ‘The ship must have crashed by now, but the TARDIS should be fine. It’s very robust for a phone box. Christopher and Roz will be quite safe.’

  ‘Assuming they got back inside.’

  ‘Hmm. Now, the ship may have crashed on land or in water, and if this capsule works on the principle that most do, probably some distance away.’

  Bernice’s optimism floundered. ‘So we’re sat here, with no food, possibly thousands of miles from civilization?’

  The Doctor smiled infuriatingly. ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s like one of those old films. We go crazy and eventually eat bits of each other. Then just after we’ve died the helicopter arrives and the credits roll. Oh, the irony.’

  ‘Thankfully not.’ He waved the slender metal object in the air. ‘What do you think this is?’

  ‘Give up.’

  He tossed it to her. ‘Flight recorder, dummy.’

  Bernice jiggled the thing in her hand, her hopes growing. At one end a blue light was flashing steadily, in a reassuring way that put her in mind of the TARDIS. ‘Yes! They’ll want this before anything else. Just as well, there’s no meat on me. Life looks brighter. We’ll just sit here and wait, then?’

  The Doctor took his crumpled white hat from his pocket and popped it on. ‘Well, we could always go and have a look at that hut.’

  ‘What hut?’

  He pointed behind her, away from the water. ‘That hut.’

  Bernice turned her head, the pain temporarily forgotten. About half a mile away from them, sitting neatly on the level plain that led from the rocks, was a structure composed of interlocked sections of corrugated metal. It was roughly the size of a house, and boasted a line of big windows, a front door, and a solitary outbuilding. A receiver dish was bolted to the roof. It hummed across the plain at them.

  The Complex’s reception lounge was a sumptuously large spherical structure, decorated a tasteful neutral white. On one wall a slow-moving mural depicting the volcanic region of the planet Dalverius had been hung, the gouts of green lava casting bursts of emerald light that reflected off slow-turning mirrorballs. Potted plants pleased Mr Jottipher with their scents of musk and blossom as he entered and nodded to the Secunda. She smiled and nodded back, then handed him a thin sheet of gold plastic.

  This was the part of his job that he most disliked. His musical talents were one of the reasons he had been selected from thousands to become liaision executive for Zamper – in his old life, which he rarely thought about, he had been a distinguished soprano, touring in three systems – but the martial anthems of nation states restricted his range of expression. He longed for an aria of regret or loss or guilt, not more of the same tired tub-thumping jingoistic nonsense.

  ‘They’ve been told to switch on their translators,’ said the Secunda. ‘The landing was smooth, so I’m told.’

  Mr Jottipher said nothing. He concentrated on the golden sheet, trying to familiarize himself with the tune, but something in his face must have given away his thoughts.

  ‘You think we should have a servitor standing by?’

  ‘It is usual when we are entertaining our more captious guests, madam.’

  ‘The Chelonians have had few dealings with humans before today,’ she replied. ‘I consider it unwise to show them the slightest aggression.’

  ‘As you say.’ His brow furrowed as he looked down the sheet. ‘Madam, their anthem.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It has one hundred and eighty-five verses.’

  ‘As mere emissaries of the First Family, our guests are entitled only to the opening three.’

  Mr Jottipher loosened his collar and thanked goodness for the thoroughness of the Secunda’s research. ‘I am pleased.’

  As he spoke, he heard the grinding of the lift mechanism as the anti-grav beams aligned with the door of the lounge. In seconds he would be in the presence of the insulting creature he had glimpsed on the Outscreen. He composed himself, and tried to take strength from the Secunda. She never faltered.

  The lift door slid up slowly. The synthetic accompaniment to his song of greeting crashed into its opening bars, a dissonant farting of brassy stabs. In his mind, Mr Jottipher saw a collapsing bandstand. The chords of the piece changed rapidly. He found his place on the score-sheet as the introduction reached its barking crescendo, and started to sing as two sets of sharp-clawed reptilian feet were revealed.

  Chelonia, Chel – o – nia!

  Goddess preserve Chelonia as the boundaries of its dominion spread to a wideness that is almost unbelievable,

  And flagrantly incomprehensible to the minds of lesser creatures.

  Let the panoply of deities give expression to the desire of all Chelonians to stamp out parasitism wherever it is encountered,

  Particularly where this concerns the attempts by parasites to establish communities that, laughably, presume a degree of social intelligence.

  The bridge to the second verse, which contained an embarrassing number of explosion sound effects, caused Mr Jottipher reflection that this piece contained neither the most infectious of melodies, nor was it succinct lyrically.

  The door was now fully raised and the two Chelonians were revealed in their entirety. To Mr Jottipher they resembled overgrown examples of ordinary reasonably-sized terrestrial tortoises. They stood, if that was the right word, on their four legs; their shells were plated and looked tough; their grizzled heads swung on long necks that emerged from the fused scutes of the upper and lower halves of their shells. Although both were about the
same size, they were clearly distinguishable. The Chelonian to the left was the leader of the delegation. His jaw was tighter, his leathery green skin slightly more wrinkled, the rims of his pale yellow eyes clouded by faint branches of pink. Streaks of melanin darkened his shell a blackish-brown, with a pale areola in the centre of each scute. From his detailed study of the Secunda’s research, Mr Jottipher identified the bright red stripe that ran the length of the creature’s carapace as a mark of high command. He was at least a general. His junior’s shell was star-patterned, and his young eyes darted with vital anger about the lounge. Around his mid-section he wore a flexible metal belt. Its holsters were empty, apart from one that contained an unpowered hammering tool of some kind. Clasped in one of the junior’s front feet was a strongbox painted cabbage green. Both Chelonians were literally shaking with fury, an image compounded by the droplets of germwash fluid glistening on their shiny shells. Well, to be fair to himself, he had tried to warn them about that.

  It was time for the second verse.

  Chelonia, Chel – o – nia!

  Lift up your plastrons and sing for the swingeing retribution that will be exacted on those who in any circumstance conspire with parasites –

  The younger Chelonian caught Mr Jottipher’s eye, drew back his head, and roared. The fearsome noise drowned out the accompaniment. Mr Jottipher, gripped by terror, lost his place and decided to stop, quickly.

  The monster lurched from the open doorway at a speed that belied its resemblance to any shuffling Earth cousin. Mr Jottipher hiccoughed and scurried back a few steps, knocking over one of the plants.

  The General spoke. ‘You insult us! You, parasites, insult us!’

  Unruffled, the Secunda stepped forward. ‘I assure you, gentlemen, no insult is intended. Our custom is to greet guests with the anthem of their homeland, as a measure of our respect.’

  The junior snarled, stamping one of his front feet and raking the pile of the carpet with horribly pointed claws. ‘Respect is exchanged by equals. You are inferiors. You seek to mock us!’