Doctor How and the Deadly Anemones (25 page)

“Stuff this!” he yelled and swung his bat at a turd, which exploded forwards in a supersonic shockwave of expanding steam, carrying the stun grenades back out of the tunnel. The grenades detonated in the chamber in mid-air, combining with the blast from the disintegrated turd and the vaporised water, shattering most of the lights in the chamber. He was hit only by a small echo of the blast coming back down the pipe, but felt its massive power thundering through the surrounding earth and shaking his insides.

“Well played,” said the Doctor. “Very enterprising. You missed a career in county cricket. The only trouble is that you’ve upped the ante.”

“Not much I can do about that now, is there?”

Kevin reached the end of the pipe and surveyed the damage. He counted four special ops soldiers in various degrees of concussion. The worst was sitting in fifteen inches of sewage with his back against his wall. The best was staggering, dazed and blinded by the flash. He could see blood on their necks, and guessed that they’d suffered punctured eardrums and bleeding noses.

“Shouldn’t blow things up in confined spaces, any idiot knows that,” he muttered. “And I didn’t take no hypocritical oath.”

“Hippocratic, you mean.”

“Whatever. Look, they’re going to be alright. Where to now?”

“Same exit as Trini. Tim’s right behind you. What’s left of them.”

“You mean…?”

“They paid a heavy price. Get going.”

There was still a lot of gas around, and the only light was from the manhole above. With his goggles Kevin realised he was the only person who could see anything – these professional soldiers weren’t going to shoot blindly in the darkness at a sound in the water. He could hear shouting, and a rope ladder started jiggling, its end splashing in the water, as someone climbed down it. He waded across the chamber and entered the oval-shaped brickwork tunnel that led to the mouth of the Effra, still holding the dead polyp.

“Thanks, Tim,” said Kevin, as the last of the slime fell away from his suit and into the water. “You’d better be going, eh?” He motioned to the huge iron flap that led out onto the Thames. The tide was in and water occasionally splashed through as the wake of a tourist cruiser washed ashore.

“Tim are coming with us,” said the Doctor.

“But you said they’re toxic, and they just decontaminated me.”

“They’ve decontaminated you, yes – so they’re clean too. As for travelling with us, the Spectrel will make available another space for them.”

“You’re the boss.”

There was the sound of something heavy hitting the metal of the flap. There was a scraping noise as a piece of steel was pushed between the bottom of the flap and the masonry.

“Come on, Doc – they’re here!”

The Spectrel appeared, hovering just above the surface of the water. The door of the red telephone box swung open. Trinity jumped the six feet from the opposite wall and went straight in without touching the sides. Kevin stepped up onto the floor of the telephone box.

There was the sound of some machinery outside. The huge metal flap creaked and groaned as it began to inch open. More water splashed in and there was the sound of men’s voices.

“Get in!”

Kevin stepped through the back of the box to find himself not in the control room of the Spectrel but the en suite bathroom of his quarters. “I didn’t know you could do that,” he said.

“As I’ve said before – the advantage of something that doesn’t exist is that design is fluid. And I’m not having you stinking out the rest of the Spectrel.”

“Glad to know I’m appreciated, Doc. So you made a separate entrance for Tim?”

“Yes, what’s left of them.”

Kevin felt the weight of the Doctor’s statement. “Like, how serious was it?”

“You know that contingent who went up to the US embassy?”

“Yeah. They tripped up one of the soldiers.”

“They split up again, with half of them going back to help you. That was them.”

“And you’re saying they suffered some casualties, yeah?”

“One hundred percent. All gone. Dead.”

“I… I dunno what to say.”

“Just try being grateful to the rest of Tim when you see them next. It was brave, but foolish and unnecessary. Let that be a lesson to you.”

“Don’t you think you’re being a bit harsh and unsympathetic, Doctor?”

“They were in the clear, Kevin. They’d suffered some casualties, but it was a foolish thing to have done. You were safe. Well, fairly safe. Bulletproof, at least. They got caught up in the heat of battle. It happens. Particularly with super-predators. They get blinded: tunnel vision. As I say, let it be a lesson to you.”

“Man, that’s heavy.”

“It’s a lesson best observed, because the first time you make it is your last. Now, get cleaned up and join me in the lab.”

“The lab?”

“I’d have thought you’d have had a good wander-round at some point and stuck your nose in. A house-bot will show you the way.”

“But why the lab?”

“Autopsy.”

“On who?”

“The polyp.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but cause of death was being hit by my Con-Bat.”

“Don’t be a smartarse, laddie. We need to study this, and check that we’ve eliminated the threat.”

“We got all three. Tim got one, then Trin, then me. Game over. Three-nil.”

“If only it
were
three-nil, Kevin. I seem to recall two dead Rindans, a dead Circarian who was working illegally in the sewers, two dead urban adventurers, a couple of dead MI6 officers and someone in the US embassy. I think that makes it eight-three to them. And if we’re going to use a football analogy, I don’t want us going into extra time.”

“Like, I was meaning us. Team How. The dream-team.”

“Just get cleaned up. And leave your ego in your bedroom.”

Kevin found himself in a spacious clinically-white room – so white and bright that the borders between walls, ceiling and floor were invisible, and the Doctor appeared to float in the middle next to what looked like a stainless-steel mortuary table. The only way Kevin knew there was a ceiling at all was because Trinity was upside down on it in her black furry spider form. She winked one of her pairs of large green eyes at him, whilst the other three pairs seemed to remain fixed on the table ten feet below her. He guessed she was there for security reasons, not just out of scientific curiosity.

The Doctor looked up. “Ah, glad you could make it. We’re just about to start.”

“Sure. This autopsy’s the only entertainment in town right now. Apparently.”

“Look, I appreciate the effort you put in getting this thing out. I really do.”

“You quite literally landed me in the shit, Doc.”

“But your government will be grateful to you for tackling this problem.”

“Not really. They ain’t allowed to know. Ever. Am I right?”

“There is such a thing as karma. And your reputation in the out-of-town community as a man of action is growing. You’ve got what all young men of your ilk seem to crave above all else: respect.”

“Like, a fat lot of use that does me in Tulse Hill.”

Trinity hissed at him.

“Quite right, Trin. She says she’d rather have status amongst the out-of-towners than a bunch of two-bit petty crooks.”

“Um…”

“Now, let’s get on with the autopsy. I know you can handle a dead Rindan so a polyp shouldn’t be much of a problem. Thankfully, you got it back whole. Nice work.”

“Uh, thanks. What happened to the other one, by the way?”

“Tim ate it, as per the plan. Now, what do you notice?”

“Erm. Apart from the fact that it’s brown bread?”

“Brown bread?”

“Dead.”

“Cockney rhyming slang. How twee. Now, be serious.”

“Like, four of them tentacles is long and the other ones is short.”

“Grammatically incorrect, but the right observation. Well done. Now, tell me why that is?”

“Injured in the fight and got cut off?”

“Nope. These were not traumatic amputations. And they’re all the same size.” The Doctor looked at him expectantly.

“I give in.”

“These are new. Completely new. Notice as well that there’s a line of scar tissue running down the body of the polyp, and that it carries on both to the mouth and the foot.”

“Scar tissue. Right.”

“It means that this polyp has reproduced asexually.”

“Dirty little polyp.”

“Asexually means
without
sex. Basically, it split into two. All terrestrial plants can do it, and many less complex animals too.”

“Yeah, and?”

“It did it pretty recently, which is why these tentacles are so small.”

“So you’re telling me… what?”

“That there’s at least one other.”

“I thought Trini reckoned there were three.”

“
Were
three. Past tense. The two you and Trini killed today were both actually only one of the three originals.”

“Aw, that
sucks
.”

“Well, quite. And now we don’t know where the other one is. There’s little chance that this one – or the one that was this one – could have travelled from Vauxhall to Brixton and back in the time that it did. So the other one was the one Trini nearly got before the emergency services prevented her from eliminating it.”

“So it’s still somewhere in the south of South London?”

“Yes, it is. Or
they
are, if it’s split. And that would seem likely, since this one did so after eating just one human.”

“Like, are you expecting me to go on another mad hunt around the sewers?”

“No, Tim’s already set off again. Like Trinity, they have a keen sense of smell, so they should be able to track it down. But of course the fastest and most aggressive of them bought the farm today.”

“Yeah, but the others should be well angry. Plus they ate one of these things, so they should get their strength back.”

“True. Anyway, they wanted to get right back on the case. Whilst you were cleaning up I reinserted them around the Brixton Market area. As you can imagine, police activity there has died down somewhat in the wake of today’s events.”

“So what’s our next move?”

“Unfortunately, the next move is down to Tim or the polyp – or maybe polyps plural. We can but wait.”

“Like, how’s Tim feeling about their loss?”

“Not the happiest creatures in the universe. The Americans have the remains in a specimen jar. Every culture has its rituals for the dead, and I feel truly awful about that. At least the Rindans had the chance to dispose of their irresponsible consul and her husband with the appropriate dignity. I’m still out of pocket for it. There’s no justice in the universe.”

“Tough day at the office, Doc.”

“You’re right. I’m sick of today. Let’s go back to yesterday.”

Some distance east of Streatham Hill, the polyp slid to a halt at the convergence of a couple of pipes. There was the faint scent of something that it recognised. It trailed its tentacles in the water to check. The scent was not something it had experienced directly itself as an individual, but from before its split. It was more than just a memory – deeper than that, far deeper. It was the kind of memory that a species has programmed into it from inception: an instinctual memory. In the way that a bird doesn’t need to be taught that a worm is a meal, the polyp recognised this as the most desirable food.

It splayed its tentacles out wider to confirm that the scent really was there.

The scent was definitely not in the water coming from the pipe it had just left, but was in the water after the convergence. The polyp backed up and tested the water in the other pipe. It was rich in the smell, and that triggered a powerful feeding response in the polyp. This was the smell of home, and nothing would stop it from getting to the source. And when it got there, it would gorge itself. It set off with purpose.

“Congratulations,” said the Doctor. “You’re just about to become a proper time traveller. Outside the Spectrel it’s yesterday, and you will step into it.”

“Oh, man. This is
incredible
.”

“I’d agree with you as the original meaning of the word. To your primitive society it is indeed hard to believe that we have done this. But in your meaning of the word it may be somewhat of a disappointment. You may be aware that yesterday was very much like any other. Furthermore, you will find that a Chinese factory is just as boring as a British factory.”

“Doc, you’re always raining on my parade.”

“It’s my parade, and I determine whether or not there is precipitation.”

“Whatever. But this is huge for me. I’ll be in two places at once!”

“Yes, but if you recall, you were blissfully unaware of that yesterday. Only one of you knows, or ever will have known.”

“Unless…”

“Don’t bother speculating.”

Kevin could see he was on a losing wicket. “Why’s Trini coming in her cat form?”

“She has her reasons. Now come on.”

“Do I need to wear my goggles?”

“Stick them on your head in case you need to slip them on. Thankfully, this isn’t a sewer.”

“Yeah, otherwise you’d be staying here.” Kevin sighed, slipped the balaclava back over his head and set the goggles on his forehead. He unclipped the retainer on his Con-Bat’s holster. The Doctor led the way out of the Spectrel, his Ultraknife at the ready. Trinity followed Kevin silently.

The factory was just as bland as the Doctor had said it would be. The big industrial lights thirty feet above had only been dimmed, lending the place a ghostly look. Over the stacks of palletised cardboard boxes he could see that the roof continued for at least a hundred yards in every direction. They’d emerged from the Spectrel near the start of an assembly line. There were two others close by, each running for about fifty yards towards an area where boxes of the finished goods were being assembled into pallets. Cardboard boxes were piled at various points along the line. The only difference Kevin could see, in his limited experience of factories, was that the lettering on the boxes and on signs was in Chinese characters.

“Like, aren’t they going to see us?” whispered Kevin.

“They’ve not bothered with internal CCTV for a factory making cheap plastic goods by the million – just a couple of guards to go on the occasional patrol. Even if we do encounter them, I’ve got full masking on, you’re in camouflage mode and Trini’s a cat. Now do you understand?”

“Right. They just see a cat. And cats are lucky in Chinese culture. Or they might even keep cats to kill rodents.”

“Well done.” The Doctor moved over to the assembly line to examine it. He picked up what Kevin recognised to be a green plastic leaf from a toy flower like the ones they’d seen back in London. “Bingo!” said the Doctor. “Looks like they were making them again today, and they’ll be making them tomorrow too.” He nodded over at a cardboard box full of the leaves.

“But if we left on Monday and yesterday is today, then today’s Sunday, innit?”

“This is China. In the run-up to Christmas I bet this place runs twenty-four hours a day.”

“So what are we going to do?”

“This is just the assembly line. We need to find the line where the plastic leaves are made. The circuitry is inserted at that stage. I don’t care if they make these things or not, just so long as they don’t contain this technology.” He pocketed the leaf. “I have to say that moving only that one leaf makes me feel pretty awful.”

“Why? The lights in here surely aren’t bright enough?”

“Remember that the solar cell is only there to make the leaves move. It’s the movement through the Earth’s magnetic field that energises the circuitry that’s embedded in the leaves.”

“Oh, gotcha. I wish I could feel it.”

“You should be glad you can’t. I can sense them.” The Doctor’s eyes seemed focused at a greater distance than Kevin could actually see, as if he were seeing through the warehoused stock.

“Sense what?”

“The components.” He started walking slowly but deliberately away from the assembly lines, as if in a trance.

“Are you alright, Doctor?” asked Kevin, tagging along behind. Trinity was padding silently along behind, looking around her, scanning for danger.

“I’m concentrating, lad. Just the slight alterations in the Earth’s magnetic field are proving enough for me to be able to sense them.” He began to walk more briskly, and now they found themselves on a broad walkway, whose polished concrete bore painted marks like a road. The sides were lined with yet more cardboard boxes.

Kevin fingered the tip of his Con-Bat nervously, but was relying on Trinity to spot anything untoward. He spotted a CCTV camera of the variety that comes as a mirrored globe – the same kind that he’d grown up with on his estate in Tulse Hill. He wondered just how well-masked the three of them were. He looked down at Trinity and saw that she’d adopted the same light grey as the concrete, but wasn’t too concerned. She gave him a reassuring
meow
.

They made some sharp turns and then headed through some plastic strips that separated the production lines and warehousing from a different unit. The ceiling was as high as the previous unit, but the scene was totally different. This was what Kevin understood to be a proper factory, and he realised the difference between an assembly line – like the ones he’d just seen – and a production line. There were large machines of varying heights, each with an array of metal and reinforced plastic tubing, red and green buttons, control panels, LED displays, conveyor belts, and rotating moulds. Over all of these grey metal machines someone had splashed a riot of multi-coloured waxy-looking drops, which he realised were plastic. There were few near the tops of the machines, but the density increased nearer the floor, and the floor itself was covered in them. The room was warm – his combat suit let him feel the ambient air temperature. He saw a furnace in the corner.

“Total disregard for health and safety,” said the Doctor, coming out of his trance.

“Huh?”

“That’s all hot, molten plastic that’s been splashing around. Nasty. No natural gas supplies, so they’re using an oil-fired furnace to provide the heat to melt the plastic for all of these machines.”

“Uh. Okay. Well, they’re not on, so it’s safe. Right?”

“Safe? You don’t see what I see. This is a disaster area. That,” he stabbed a finger at one of the smallest machines, “is the source of all our current woes.”

“Come on, let’s have a butcher’s.”

They walked over to the machine and looked it over. To Kevin’s eyes it looked innocent enough. There was a large rotating metal mould into which he could see that green plastic would be injected, and the cooled green leaves ejected into a hopper which fed onto a small conveyor belt, at the end of which there was a cardboard box half-filled with green leaves.

“Very clever,” said the Doctor. “See that?” He pointed to a hopper. Beneath the pointed end of the hopper ran a compressed air hose. He traced it down towards a small nozzle which pointed at the moulds just before they reached the enclosed part of the machine. “It fires one of the tiny little printed circuits into each mould before the plastic is injected.”

“Can’t we just sabotage it, then?”

“They’ll just replace it. I need to destroy these.” He pointed at a box full of what looked like fine, polished gravel. There are seventy-five thousand left in that box alone, and it’s three-quarters full. If you look over there, there are a hundred and twenty boxes.”

“Wow! That’s enough for… for a lot of these things, innit?”

“Yes,” said the Doctor. “Enough to make life just about impossible for me and my cousins.”

“No time like the present,” said Kevin. “Well, except that it’s actually yesterday.” He bent down, picked up the cardboard box and took two steps towards the furnace.

“
Aaargh
!” the Doctor let out a strangled cry and fell against the conveyor belt. Trinity leapt at Kevin and landed inside the box, her large frame filling it. His combat suit took the extra weight for him. She looked up and hissed angrily.

“Oh, man. Oh, Doc I’m so sorry.” He began to lower the box of circuits very slowly, watching the Doctor contort as he moved the seventy-five thousand components through the Earth’s magnetic field. “I didn’t think, man.”

He put the box down on the floor and Trinity stepped out, glaring at him. “How was I to know?” he said to her. If a cat could have told him that he should have worked it out for himself, then that’s what her look said to him. She jumped up onto the conveyor belt and nuzzled against the Doctor’s head. He groaned.

“Don’t
ever
do that again, Kevin.”

“I said I was sorry, Doc.”

“Don’t ever not think through your actions, is what I meant. Please. Although they were moving very slowly, there were an awful lot of them. I can’t imagine how painful it would be when that machine’s working and there are three or four per second shooting down that pipe at high velocity.”

“I was going to incinerate them in that boiler.”

“You’re right, that wouldn’t half be a bad idea,” said the Doctor, getting back on his feet. But you’d just clog it up and it’d stop working.”

“So are we going to burn the factory down then?”

“That’s an option. The way I feel right now it’s very tempting to take it out. But it’s not the fault of these Chinese. They’ve been duped.”

“Duped? By who?”

“No. He’s got nothing to do with it. They’ve been duped by those blasted illegal aliens. The ones whose idea of fun was to bring giant gas-guzzling beetles to Earth, and who tried to hack into my Spectrel. They’ve co-opted this factory. That’s another law they’ve broken – bringing yet more advanced technology to this planet.”

There was a noise behind Kevin. He spun round. Two uniformed Chinese guards pushed aside the plastic flaps that separated the production area from the assembly lines. He stood still, knowing his suit would blend into the background. The Doctor was on the other side of the machine, in full view. Kevin knew his memory masking should cover him. That left Trinity.

Trinity was sitting on the conveyor belt. She’d turned herself white and pink, and flattened her fur to make it sleek and shiny, like plastic. Her right foreleg was waving rhythmically back and forward like a giant version of the good luck cat in the window of Kevin’s local Chinese restaurant.

The guards looked at each other and then back at Trinity. They walked over slowly, apparently oblivious to the Doctor, who was standing with his back to the machine, just three feet away from her. From where Kevin was standing, he could tell that they must be looking straight into her eyes, and he remembered what the Doctor had told him about her hypnotic powers. Her right forearm continued to wave back and forth, but ever more slowly, until after half a minute it stopped. He found that he was holding his breath. The two guards stared with wide eyes, their faces blank. They turned and walked silently, zombie-like, back through the plastic strips, and were gone.

“Good girl,” said the Doctor, stroking the back of her head. In that instant, Trinity’s fur changed back to black and she nuzzled her head into the Doctor’s hand. “It never pays to create a fuss. We don’t need any fancy pyrotechnics to deal with these situations.”

“So what are you going to do about these dangerous chips then?”

“Well that’s ea –”

The Doctor was frozen in mid-sentence.

“Doc? Wassup?”

He could see that the Doctor was straining, but unable to move.

Kevin heard the faint purring of an engine getting closer. It was coming from behind the fronds of plastic. A forklift truck burst through. On its prongs was a pallet of boxes. It slowed down as it closed the thirty yards between them.

Kevin twigged in an instant what was in the boxes, and that they didn’t need to move quite so fast as they got closer. Something from his Physics classes about distance and inverse squares with electromagnetic fields popped into his head.

He ran forwards and the forklift truck veered towards him. He spun to the side to avoid one of the prongs and collided with the wooden edge of the pallet. Remembering the powers of his suit, he pushed back and stopped the vehicle in its path, its rubber wheels making a scuffing noise against the polished concrete. Something metal whooshed past, followed by another and another, but he didn’t have a chance to see what they were.