Doctor Who: BBC Past Doctor Adventures [020] - Deep Blue by Mark Morris

Author:Mark Morris
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science-Fiction - Doctor Who
ISBN: 9780563555711
Publisher: BBC Books
Published: 1999-02-27T23:00:00+00:00

Part Four

Changing Times

The thickening fog in the Brigadier’s mind was closing in on all sides, obliterating the landscape of his thoughts. The barrage of mathematical questions which the Doctor had been bombarding him with, and his responses to them, had been like a torch beam lighting his way, preventing him from straying off the path.

Even with the Doctor’s help, however, the torch batteries had been steadily failing, the light growing weaker the closer they came to the heart of darkness. The Brigadier might well have succumbed completely if it hadn’t been for the gunfire.

Although not as swiftly as the Doctor, the Brigadier had been able to do nothing but react to it. To him the sound denoted action and danger, but most especially duty. Duty to his men, to his country, to his world.

The fog receded a little. Now that the Doctor was gone, duty was the Brigadier’s torch, lighting his way. Hoping that the light would stay with him for as long as he needed it, he set off at a shambling lurch, ignoring limbs that felt stiff and awkward. His heart was heavy as a rock in his chest, and within seconds he was drenched in sweat, gasping for breath.

However, he forced himself on through sheer, bloody-minded willpower.

And then the shooting stopped.

The sudden silence threw the Brigadier into a momentary state of exhausted confusion that almost caused him to blunder off the path, straight into the fog. He thumped to a halt, heart labouring, head pounding.

Then, faintly and hesitantly at first, he heard a voice in his mind, and he realised that his sense of duty; his driving force, had not deserted him, after all.

There might be men dead or injured, the voice told him; men who needed his help, his guidance. He couldn’t abandon his duty; he had to lead by example, had to be seen to be counted.

‘Yes,’ he muttered, ‘yes.’ He set off again, duty lighting his way once more. When he was almost at his goal he slowed down, allowed his soldier’s instincts to take over. His semi-automatic clutched in his hand, he crept along, his back to the wall, towards the place where the track took an abrupt left turn. He wanted a vantage point where he could recce the situation, but before he could do that two further shots rang out, followed by a vast inhuman bellow of rage and pain.

It provoked a deep, almost primeval response in him. For a moment the fog swirled and eddied around him again, threatening to extinguish the light…

Then the enraged roar faded and another sound replaced it – a further cry of pain, from a smaller pair of lungs, but no less agonized.

‘Doctor!’ the Brigadier yelled. He ran around the corner, gun raised.

The scene before him had frozen into a kind of tableau, lit by a spotlight of torch-beams. Taking centre-stage was a creature from a nightmare, a hideous, giganticised conglomeration of bull, spider, crab and scorpion. Standing rigid before this creature, skewered by its

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