Doctor Who MA33 - The Well Mannered War by Gareth Roberts

Author:Gareth Roberts
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-07-13T02:20:43+00:00

Dolne shook his head. 'I don't understand you.' He was moving instinctively for the alarm button on his com-unit.

Viddeas moved in suddenly, raising a hand as if to strike, the fingers outspread and clawlike.

Dolne looked around for a weapon. His pistol was in the locked drawer in the comer, unloaded. Was there anything else?

His eyes lighted on Jafrid's ceremonial dagger, which still lay across the top of his suitcase. Nimbly he sprang forward and snatched it up, hefted it, then turned and waved the great barbed blade at Viddeas. 'Stay away. I'm prepared to use this.'

Viddeas sighed, and in a parody of his former hectoring manner said, 'I'm already dead, Dolne. It doesn't matter.' The flies around him started to move faster, surrounding his head, their buzzing increasing in its ferocity.

Dolne wasn't sure exactly how the next thing happened. Suddenly the dagger was out of his hands and in Viddeas's. A moment later he was pushed back over his bed, and a moment after that the blade was moving in and out of his own chest. Oddly, each strike felt softer and softer.

His senses started to fade out. Viddeas's odour dwindled away, the pain disappeared down a long tunnel, the room began to disappear forever.

The last thing Dolne saw was the frame containing his wife's holograph now spattered with blood. Before he lost life completely he had the time to be puzzled by something.

He had looked at the image only a minute before, when things seemed to be improving. Now, with the strange clarity of his dying senses, he saw the frame again. And it was empty.

The tank rolled on through the war zone. The Doctor had abandoned his attempts to either befriend or to hypnotize Seskwa, and had settled instead for ruminating on the situation. If he could persuade the humans to turn off their battle computers - and their leader had looked a kindly old sort - he could get down to investigating the true menace. Unfortunately, things in his life were rarely that easy. Also, the odd sensation he had felt ever since opening the TARDIS doors was growing stronger. A powerful sense of wrongness, that he shouldn't be here at all, increased by the minute.

His musings were interrupted by a tickle at his cheek. He reached out and caught the fly in his cupped hands. 'These things get everywhere.' He opened his thumbs a fraction and peered inside. 'Nice to know they're still about. One of the most redoubtable, most successful life forms in the universe.'

'It is only a fly,' said Seskwa. 'They get here from Metra, on the shuttles.

After every landing. Along with many insects. Too small to evade the decontaminant detectors. But they flounder soon enough.'

'This one looks very healthy.' The Doctor whispered to it, 'I wouldn't mind popping you under the micro-scope, old thing. If only to -' He broke off as a set of facts slotted together in his mind. Flies. The heat in the Chelonian base. The preservative. 'Seskwa. Stop this vehicle.

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