The Doctor was still zig-zagging, slightly ahead of Jo because he had a longer stride,occasionally throwing in moments of running straight to throw off the Blitzer, great splotches of earth bursting up as the bolts missed their mark.
Jo looked ahead, her calf muscles tight and aching, her face sweaty. The TARDIS was about two hundred yards away. She gripped the key in her pocket to make sure it didn’t, somehow, fall out and then looked across the valley to see how the Doctor was doing.
Jo gasped – a bolt whizzed just over the top of his head and he tripped, obviously disoriented. As he fought to stay upright, he stumbled into the wide passage between the rock face and a large boulder.
‘No, Doctor, no…’ Jo whispered. Without realising it, she had stopped running.
And then the Doctor was dashing from behind the rock, towards the TARDIS. He must have seen Jo in his peripheral vision because his head turned. He was shouting something but she just couldn’t hear him over the constant boom of stun bolts.
And then she realised what he was telling her – she wasn’t running. ‘Yeah, right!’ she yelled, ‘sorry!’ and sped forward.
The Doctor’s zig-zagging had got him two-thirds of his way across the valley floor and now he bolted straight for the TARDIS.
‘MULTIPLE SONIC WEAPONS IDENTIFIED! DESTROY MODE!’
Jo looked back. One of the Blitzer’s arms was spraying the plain with red laser bolts in all directions, trying to take out these ‘weapons’ it had identified, while the other was still firing green stun bolts at the Doctor… But what was the thing talking about? There was only one weapon, the sonic screwdriver. There weren’t any extra weapons – nothing else for it to hit.
Jo turned her head: the TARDIS – it was fifty feet away and soon she got there, chest heaving, legs shaky, took out the key and shoved it into the lock.
And then she heard the Doctor cry out.
Jo turned her head – he was only twenty feet behind her but was toppling. He hit the ground.
‘HOSTILE NEUTRALIZED!’
‘Doctor!’
He didn’t move.
‘ENGAGE RESTRAINTS FOR HOSTILE!’
‘No…’
Two meaty, steel whips uncurled from the side of one of the Blitzer’s legs. It was going to fly the Doctor back to its den, Jo realized. He’d have a much better chance of escape if he had help and no matter the cost she was never going to abandon him… So, breathing hard, readying herself for the stun bolt, Jo began to run towards them.
And then, incredibly, a vast length of the rock wall from which the Doctor had been running shattered, a great crashing noise – immense – filling the air.
Stunned, Jo shrank back. ‘What the hell..?’
It was as though a gigantic hand grenade had been detonated from within, huge chunks of stone flying out. Volleys of shale jetted up behind them, falling to become a great tide of shards pouring across the valley floor.
The Blitzer turned from its prey, rising up and up to escape the hail of missiles hurtling in – ‘DESTROY MODE!’ – and firing into them.
Jo had to get the Doctor out of here and ran to him, eyes darting repeatedly from the sky to the ground.
High above – a hundred feet – the Blitzer vapourised rock after rock as it sped up and away.
Jo lurched back as a boulder the size of a fridge freezer smashed into the ground just five yards away from her. She moved forward again.
Wobbling as she felt a boulder thump down somewhere behind, Jo steadied herself and in a few more seconds reached the Doctor. Pulling both of his arms behind his head, she gripped his hands and dragged him backwards to the TARDIS.
Still looking skyward for fallings rocks, Jo saw a huge one – thirty feet across – smash into the Blitzer; the robot veered badly to the right, falling, an arm whirling out, lasering the rock into nothing. But then a giant shower of rubble ploughed into the Blitzer and crashed it to the ground. The barrage submerged it and, from beneath, nothing moved.
~~~
Inside the TARDIS, Jo let go of the Doctor’s hands – he’d have to stay on the floor because she knew she didn’t have the upper body strength to prop him in one of the armchairs. Jo started to feel herself breathe again… But it wasn’t over, she knew. There’d be another Blitzer coming. And maybe more than one? And when would the Doctor wake up? They had to leave now, before the thing got here –
Jo locked the doors.
‘HOSTILES DETECTED INSIDE SPACE CRAFT!’
On the scanner screen a third Blitzer was rocketing through the valley.
‘CONDUCTING TARGET ANALYSIS…
ANALYSIS COMPLETE: NO WEAPONS DETECTED.
SOLE PRIORITY: RETRIEVE SPACE CRAFT AND RETURN TO COMMAND CENTRE.
ENGAGE MAXIMUM STRENGTH RESTRAINTS!’
It wasn’t going to get into the TARDIS, Jo realised – at least not right now… It was going to take the ship back to its HQ in the same way the last one was going to do to the Doctor.
Four thick, metal cords, two apiece from two of the Blitzer’s legs, began to uncurl. Each one had a great metal clamp on its end.
Jo bent over the Doctor. ‘Wake up!’
It was no good. Shaking and pushing him didn’t work, nor shouting his name again – he didn’t move.
She looked up at the scanner screen. The Blitzer was two thirds of its way along the valley. Until the Doctor came round they couldn’t dematerialize. Jo knew she couldn’t perform the procedure, that idea was hopeless. In this version of the TARDIS, a take-off was achieved by pushing three buttons in a complex sequence which she’d seen the Doctor do many times but knew she couldn’t remember.
‘Smelling salts!’ Jo said suddenly. ‘That might wake him up! Gotta be worth a try.’ Kneeling to the nearest of the cupboard spaces in the console podium she tore it open and looked for a medical kit. She couldn’t find one. Jo opened the next cupboard along and saw to her relief a green box with a white cross on the lid.
‘Thank God!’ Pulling out the box she turned back to the Doctor but swayed as the room suddenly jerked upwards. ‘No, no!’ she said, gripping the console’s rim to steady herself. She had to get to the Doctor and started to pull herself to her feet. The TARDIS was zooming higher and higher, really swinging in the Blitzer’s clutches and Jo, losing her hold, toppled back, crying out, dropping the box.
With a grunt she landed full upon the Doctor.
And then he moaned, his head moving.
‘Oh,’ Jo said, getting off him, kneeling, ‘you’ve made my day!’
A tic pulsed twice in his left cheek, she saw, and his eyes opened. He smiled. ‘Ah… You’re out of harm’s way, excellent – hang on, what’s going on..? We’re moving.’
‘That thing’s flying us back to its base – it’s got big, massive tow ropes! – you’ve got to do something!’
The Doctor leapt up and raced to the console. As he punched the take-off buttons the engines barked awake and the TARDIS dematerialized.
Space – Jo was very happy to see – suddenly filled the scanner, a dash of purple stars in the distance. She sighed. ‘Thank God…’
‘Yes,’ the Doctor said. ‘So, that was a third Blitzer, yes? The second was caught in the rock explosion?’
‘That’s right,’ Jo replied, joining him at the console.
‘Good.’ The Doctor examined his right hand. ‘Hmm… Not nice.’ It was very swollen, Jo saw, a garish red. The Doctor held out the palm where there was a plump bruise. ‘This wasn’t what knocked me out though, that was the fall. Yes, the stun bolt effect in the hand wouldn’t be enough to put a chap out. Now, the cranium, that would’ve been very different… Anyway, I’ll be as right as rain in a little bit.’
‘Hey, how’d you know about the rock fall..?’ Jo said – and then she nodded. ‘You caused it, of course.’
‘When’ the Doctor said, ‘the Blitzer followed me behind that boulder it smashed into the rock face, tearing out a great chunk. ‘That’s the only thing that stopped it taking me there and then, the crash disoriented it. Anyway, shingle began trickling out of the gaping hole it left behind and it made me think of a rock fall.’ He smiled. ‘I engineered one.’
‘How?’
‘Well, my screwdriver agitates objects via sound waves, hmm? So I put it on an Ultrasonic setting – that’s High Frequency sound that can’t be heard by most life forms – hoping it’d be intense enough to trigger a real blast. Now, while the sonic screwdriver can generate a far more powerful Ultrasonic signal than machines on your planet I still wasn’t sure if it would be enough; however, at this point, this really was the only plan of action I had.
‘Of course, I then needed to distract the Blitzer from destroying the sonic screwdriver before anything could happen; as a camouflage measure the device’s energy signature can be split into a hundred different versions of itself and automatically transmitted to different locations across a thousand yard radius, so that’s what I did.’
‘Sonic ventriloquism, right?’ Jo said. ‘Very sneaky. Right, of course! That’s what it meant when it was going on about ‘multiple weapons identified’. The Blitzer was trying to destroy what it thought was the sonic screwdriver all over the place while the real one was about to bring everything crashing down.’
‘Exactly.’
‘But how did you escape getting caught in the explosion?’
‘Well, I put the screwdriver on a pre-set timing not to activate until I’d reached the TARDIS. I then jammed it into a crack in the rock face. And even if the Blitzer had by chance taken out the screwdriver, I still had enough time to make it home.’
‘But how could you have known you’d have enough time..?’
‘Basic mental arithmetic, Jo, a rough calculation based on my running speed and how fast the Blitzer was travelling. Of course, as we know, it tagged me before I could get back.’
‘But what about our ears? The signal… Well, I know we couldn’t hear it or anything, but was it so high that it’s done any damage to our hearing?’
‘I don’t know…’
Jo gasped. ‘What, really?’
‘Well,’ the Doctor replied, ‘the kinds of ultrasound levels you’ll find on Earth aren’t that dangerous, only in terms of long periods of exposure to them… But the signal needed to destroy the rock face had to be of a very, very high frequency…’ He gave her a pained, apologetic look and scratched the nape of his neck. ‘…So, the truth is, I don’t know… Quite possibly there is the chance of some impairment.’
‘Right…’
‘Please don’t worry, m’dear. If we do encounter some problems there’s any number of hospital planets out there able to deal with them.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Absolutely.’
Jo nodded. ‘OK then. Well,’ she went on after a moment, ‘it’s a pity your screwdriver had to get crushed under all that stuff...’
‘Don’t you worry, I always have a few spares knocking about.’
‘Good to know. Really got us out of the sticky stuff today. So, I suppose my next big question is just what are those things doing on that planet?’
‘That place is a weapons dump,’ the Doctor said. ‘You see, when the last Kaznid emperor died he left no heir and his two greatest generals went to war, seeking to replace him. These chaps had caches of Blitzers all over the Milky Way, kept on ice for when they might need them. Now then, it’s time to call the cavalry.’
‘Who is the ‘cavalry’? You mentioned them when this all started…’
‘Ridding Creation of a Blitzer army can’t be done alone, they’re too dangerous. We need to call the Shadow Proclamation.’ The Doctor went to another console panel and began typing on a key pad. ‘Inter-galactic police force. When the Kaznidian civil war ended there wasn’t a winner, the empire was dead, utterly ruined by it. The Shadow Proclamation did the job of finding weapons dumps and destroying the Blitzers to stop others using them to wage war.’
‘Well, they missed at least one then.’
‘Yes…’ the Doctor said uneasily. ‘And possibly others. Well, they won’t miss our one.’ He stopped typing and the console gave off a ticking that slowly grew faster and faster.
Jo giggled.
‘What is it..?’
‘Well, as brilliant as the TARDIS is, she does sometimes sound like a gadget knocked together by Benny Hill in ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’!’
The Doctor nodded, laughing, and the ticking peaked with a knock. A wide slot to his right opened and a platform rose holding a device that reminded Jo of a Trimphone but with a computer key pad. ‘A hotline installed by the Proclamation in case I need them,’ the Doctor said, lifting the receiver and tapping in numbers.
‘Put me through to the Senior Administrator for the High Justiciar’s office, please. This is the Doctor reporting an SB Code Red emergency.’ There was a pause. ‘You know Jo, it’s amazing: Vivaldi’s Four Seasons is the muzak used by every branch of officialdom I ever call no matter where they are in the universe – even the Time Lords!’
Jo laughed. Then – remembering – she said, ‘Oh, don’t forget to tell them there’s at least one Blitzer on the surface.’
‘No need, Jo. They won’t land till they’ve detonated something like that EMP we talked about earlier. Then they’ll move in, turn those things into scrap iron and cart them away.’
~~~
‘…032. Yes, 032, that’s right. Thank you. Now, my dear chap, be so kind as to read those coordinates back to me to make sure you have them correctly… 2184.4498, yes, by… 5761.2032. Excellent. And, as I said, my companion and I are at your team’s disposal to help in any way we can should there be any problems. Good bye.’ The Doctor hung up.
‘Are you sure we’ll be able to get back there?’ Jo said. ‘The TARDIS isn’t always that reliable, is she?’
An hour later, the Doctor’s hand was pretty much back to normal. He and Jo watched the TARDIS scanner screen where four gargantuan flying saucers hovered above the planetoid.
The Shadow Proclamation had just been in touch to give the Doctor a status update on their operation: They had thrown a force field around the planetoid to stop the Blitzers flying up to attack. However, there were some technical problems with the device to be used against them but the Proclamation officer was confident these would be solved in an hour or so. Then the force field would be cancelled and the weapon activated.
After a moment, Jo said, ‘The weather down there was a bit nippy. I’ll pop to the wardrobe and find a thick coat, in case they need us. Anything for you..?’
‘No thanks.’
‘Sure?’
The Doctor nodded.
‘Righto, then. Hey, that one you said was Catherine the Great’s is gorgeous!’ Jo made her way out. ‘Yes, very 18th century groovy. I saw something similar in Biba a few weeks ago.’
‘It’ll suit you very well,’ the Doctor called after her, smiling.