A buzzing, in threes, growled from the TARDIS console.‘Hmm,’ the Doctor said, ‘the old girl’s picking something up…’
‘Like a message?’
The Doctor moved round to the section of the console making the noise and studied a read-out.
‘Is it a message then? An SOS? They come in threes – ’
‘Jo, a little hush, please!’
‘Sorry.’
The Doctor began to murmur to himself, mulling things over. His eyes, she could see, were alive with joy, fascination. He was utterly absorbed. It was one of the reasons she forgave him his more than occasional snappiness – she knew she was a bit of a chatterbox. Well, a lot of a chatterbox.
After a little he flipped a switch and the buzzing stopped. He looked up with something like a smile and rubbed the back of his neck. ‘Sorry for, you know… Not my nicest trait…’
‘That’s alright,’ she said. ‘I know there’s really nothing meant by it, not really. So what’s going on..?’
‘That buzzing was telling us the TARDIS has found an energy signal she doesn’t recognise… and I’d really rather like to go and see what it is. I’ve never seen something quite like it, it’s structure… D’you mnd if our trip to Korlano Beta is postponed for a bit..?’
‘No worries.’
The Doctor winked at Jo and, once he’d tracked the signal to its point of origin, changed course. ‘This signal could be anything so I’ll put us down a little way off the exact spot, I want some space between it and the TARDIS. Yes,’ he went on, ‘we’re heading for a planetoid in the Milky Way.’
‘Planetoid?’
‘Yes, a much smaller planet – like Pluto, hmm?’
‘Excuse me..?’ Jo replied, frowning. ‘Pluto’s a proper planet, Doctor – the ninth planet.’
‘No, it’s been re-classified – ah, no, not until 2005. Yes, that’s when your chaps catch up.’
~~
After a few minutes the TARDIS engines surged as it began to materialise. They crumped into silence and the Doctor and Jo went out.
They stood in a valley of grey, uneven rock walls over three hundred feet high, the ground a plain of black earth. It was day, the air brisk, the sky overcast with clouds the colour of bleach stains. The valley walls spread out like the two long lines of a fat, inverted triangle, the TARDIS at its apex. A few boulders were scattered around.
Jo frowned. It was brutal. Not a spot of green anywhere. ‘I gotta say,’ she said, laughing, ‘another top notch location.’
‘Yes, jolly awful, isn’t it?’ From a pocket the Doctor took a small sliver box with a short aerial and buttons in its surface. He pushed one and a soft, low pulse sounded.
‘What’s that?’ Jo asked.
‘A little gadget connected to the TARDIS – a tracker – to give us the direction of where this signal originates.’
The Doctor fanned the box to the left and to the right and the pulse didn’t change. He strode forward and it jerked, rising a tone. Jo gave a thumbs-up and they made their way along the valley. As they did the tone rose and rose… In five minutes they came to a cliff edge beyond a large patch of ascending, broken ground.
‘Well, whatever this is lies down there…’ the Doctor said.
The terrain leading down from the cliff edge was a relatively gentle slope, soft ground for about three hundred metres, the surface below tossed with small rocks and boulders.
‘Let’s have a look to see if there’s any sign of civilization before we head down…’ He gave the tracker to Jo. The Doctor ran a hand through his jacket and produced a small brass telescope, its barrel encased in brown leather.
‘Who’s that from?’ Jo sniggered. ‘Nelson, yeah? It’s always someone super famous. You really are an awful name dropper!’
‘Yes.’ The Doctor chuckled. ‘I suppose I’m a bit of a show-off..?’ He pulled out the telescope’s eye-piece, looked through it and adjusted the lens. ‘Actually, this was a gift from Nelson’s friend, Lieutenant Hardy. Believe it or not, this telescope was used as part of a weapon I built to destroy a squad of Cybermen who turned up at the battle of Cape St Vincent. Hardy gave it to me as a thank you. Hullo..? What the devil’s that..?’ A patch of ground about ten feet across was starting to shimmer. ‘Something’s happening…’
‘What is it?’
‘Don’t know yet,’ the Doctor said. ‘I think a force field is opening up…’
‘Let me see.’
‘Jo, hold on, please.’ He could see that the ground was fading away, something rising up – a head and shoulders. The face was blunt, metal, holding freezing blue eyes, the skull stretching back into shards like butcher knives.
‘Great balls of fire!’
‘What is it?’
‘A Skovox Blitzer.’
‘What’s that?’
‘A killing machine. They were created by Jacan Skovox, a technological mercenary with a genius in marrying robotics with military technology. He sold them to the Kaznid empire. They were one of the most vicious dictatorships ever known and twenty thousand years ago conquered most of the Milky Way with these things... Turn the tracker off, Jo, and put it away, we no longer need it.’
She did as he asked and put it into her pocket. The Doctor handed her the telescope and she looked through it. The robot had cleared the hole. It was man-sized and had two stubby arms with a body that fattened into a great cube from which sprouted four chunky, segmented legs, like a giant spider’s. ‘The TARDIS’s arrival,’ Jo heard the Doctor say, ‘has triggered an alarm in a battle computer in the planet and woken this thing, assuming we have hostile intentions in coming here.’
‘Well why should it do that? We don’t have any ‘hostile intentions’.’
‘Because that’s how the computer is programmed. It and the Blitzers are war machines. And if this one doesn’t kill us both straight away it’ll capture and torture us for what it thinks we know until we die. We’ve got to get back to the TARDIS.’
Jo handed him back the telescope and he looked through it again.
‘Well, what’s it doing here?’ Jo said.
‘Ssh.’
The Blitzer was completely still. It spoke, its voice an electric grunt: ‘DOWNLOADING COORDINATES FROM MAIN COMPUTER…’
‘There’s one thing that might work, slow it down so it’s got a slimmer chance of catching us,’ the Doctor said. He lowered the telescope, closed and pocketed it and focused back on Jo. ‘But you need to get to the TARDIS because what I have planned is a very long shot indeed and I want you as close to the ship as possible. Whatever the result, I’ll catch you up and we can get out of here and contact the cavalry.’
He gave Jo the ship’s door key and she slipped it into a pocket.
‘We’re not dealing with this situation on our own then, Doctor?’
‘If I’m right, there’s millions of these things inside this planet.’ He took out his sonic screwdriver and held it up. ‘And apart from this, we don’t have any weapons.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Well, I could use the TARDIS to rig an EMP… No, no – that’d take too long, what with giving the old girl adequate shielding against the explosion. An EMP is – ’
‘Electro-magnetic pulse. Big blast of radiation that fries anything with electronics.’
‘Excellent,’ the Doctor said, grinning. ‘Yes, very good.’
Jo felt a rush of happiness. She always wanted to sound sharper for the Doctor. The fact that she admired and wanted to impress him aside she was sick of being so totally clueless about all the super heavy science that was his whole life. When not on a TARDIS trip Jo worked her way – painfully – through copies of Nature and New Scientist.
‘Thanks! Always nice to get an A+!’
‘COORDINATES DOWNLOADED – HOSTILES AND SPACE CRAFT LOCATED!’
‘Now, Jo!’ He shooed her off.
She did as he said and began to pick her way down the shattered stones.
‘PRIORITY ONE: NEUTRALIZE HOSTILES FOR INTERROGATION – ENGAGE STUN MODE.
PRIORITY TWO: RETRIEVE SPACE CRAFT FOR ANALYSIS.’
The Doctor put away the telescope and looked back over the cliff face. The Blitzer was two thirds of its way up the valley floor and then rose from the ground, gaining speed.
The Doctor took out his sonic screwdriver and began backing away.
Jerking back, the Doctor raced away, gravel, pebbles and dust flying up from the impact.
The Blitzer rose above the cliff edge, spraying bolts, the Doctor dodging back, but stumbling. Sitting up quickly, he made a setting adjustment on the screwdriver and held it aloft.
Jo heard an electronic shriek and turned: The Doctor was holding out the sonic screwdriver; the Blitzer, at the cliff-face froze, an alarm signal screeching out; a second later the robot started to retreat. Jo saw that great, sizzling cracks were tearing open all across its casing. The metal skin started to peel away and then poured off like steaming water, exposing exo-skeleton and gleaming circuitry. ‘DAMAGE SUSTAINED TOO GREAT TO CONTINUE MISSION!’ the Blitzer said, turned and sped back down the lower valley.
Jo smiled. Fantastic – he’d done it! She ran back to the Doctor and tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Oh, well done!’
He turned to her. ‘For heaven’s sake,’ he said wearily, ‘I did say get as far away as possible.’
‘Well, come on,’ Jo replied, ‘I could see that you’d dealt with it, yeah? I was just so happy, that’s all.’
‘I know, my dear, but you really should think far more pragmatically. Remember what I said, hmm? I suspect there are millions of these robots deep in this planet… Much like the good old London bus there’ll be another along very soon. So we’re not out of the woods yet.’
‘Oh yeah, right – sorry.’ Jo hated moments like this, when she forgot to think straight, stay focused.
‘And another thing…’ the Doctor said. ‘That Blitzer is linked to the battle computer that deployed it, so the computer knows I’ve disabled it and how. So the next one will be a different version, with greater defenses, which means that what I did to stop the first one I can’t do again. In short, we’re defenseless.’
‘So, what did you do to stop it..?’
‘Luckily, as I hoped, it was susceptible to a Zino-Omega wave. That’s a sound pulse that attacks the sub atomic bonds of certain military grade alloys… A gamble which thankfully came good…’
Looking into the valley, the Doctor saw that the robot was floating awkwardly into the aperture from which it had appeared. ‘Come on,’ he said to Jo, turning back to her. He took her hand and led her back the way they had come.
‘So why didn’t this computer send up its toughest one for us?’ she said. ‘Doesn’t make sense for it not to have done.’
‘Well think it through… We’re facing a tactical machine that thinks like your chess chaps, Spassky and Fischer, hmm? It detected two humanoids – that’s all. It wasn’t going to send out the big guns unless it felt it needed to.’
The rough, uneven ground they hurried along was levelling out.
‘And who is the cavalry you mentioned?’ Jo asked. ‘The Time Lords?’
‘REPORTED SONIC WEAPON IDENTIFIED!’ suddenly grated behind them.
Jo and the Doctor looked back. A new Blitzer had risen above the cliff face, flying at them.
‘FULL DESTRUCTIVE CAPABILITY OF SONIC WEAPON UNKNOWN.
PRIORITY ONE: NEUTRALIZE HOSTILE HOLDING SONIC WEAPON FOR INTERROGATION.
PRIORITY TWO: NEUTRALIZE SECOND HOSTILE FOR INTERROGATION.
PRIORITY THREE: WHEN BOTH HOSTILES ARE NEUTRALIZED, CAPTURE ALIEN SPACE CRAFT FOR ANALYSIS.’
‘As I thought,’ the Doctor said. ‘It’ll come after me because the other Blitzer will have reported I’ve a weapon of some kind. Jo: just get to the TARDIS!’
He hurled Jo forward. She heard the ear-splitting zaps – POW! POW! POW! – from a volley of stun bolts. In her peripheral vision the Doctor veered away from her, zig-zagging – making him a harder target. He was headed for the right of the valley – keeping her out of the way of stray bolts meant for him, she realised.
She ran, looking to the Doctor as often as she could but still be able to see where she was going. The Blitzer’s arms poured out stun bolts at him, the air filling slowly with a metallic stink.
Jo wobbled on an unseen stone, skidded, but righted herself.