Part 27 (2/2)

'Do we turn around and get Hartung?'

The Doctor folded his arms and refused to speak. Chris decided to change tack. 'Doctor. There's something I've been meaning to ask: you said before that Hugin blew up.

The Doctor seemed happy to explain. 'Yes. I heard a rumour that on March the first there had been a mysterious explosion above the bay at St Jaonnet. I sent Benny to investigate it. She retrieved a fragment, and I went with her to the crash site the next morning to examine the wreckage.'

'Where is she now?'

The Doctor consulted his watch. 'Benny is in Canterbury.

We got split up, but she sent me a note to say she was safe.

She's at the house in Allen Road.'

'So how did the British sabotage Hugin?'

'What?' The Doctor scowled. Something on the ground below had just caught his attention, and he was clearly annoyed to be distracted. 'The British don't know anything about Hartung's little project - that's one of the reasons I'm here. They couldn't even see it, let alone sabotage it.'

'Well, Hugin didn't blow itself up.'

The Doctor went very pale indeed, and scrabbled for his briefcase.

'What do I do?' said Chris, trying to remain calm. There were safer places to be than in an untested jet aircraft with a history of mysteriously exploding.

The Doctor was running his finger along a diagram of the fuel system. 'I don't know, it might be nothing. Oh no. Oh my giddy aunt. Oh, great jumping gobstoppers.'

That didn't sound promising.

'There's a design fault in the reserve fuel tank - in an effort to reduce hot emissions, a lot of the heat from the engine is dumped into the fuel. That can be done perfectly safely, as long as you can regulate the temperature of the fuel. Here, though, the temperature keeps building up, and as the tank empties, it reaches flashpoint.'

'So the plane we've stolen, and are now flying over the outskirts of London, is essentially an undetectable, very large, very fast giant bomb and there's nothing we can do about it?'

The Doctor was banging the palm of his hand against his forehead, as if he might dislodge the solution to their predicament. Finally, he looked up. 'Essentially, yes.'

Chris regarded himself as a polite person, so the volume and scatalogical precision of the expletive he shrieked out came as quite a surprise to him.

Even the Doctor blushed, and Chris apologized.

'I think I may have miscalculated,' said the Doctor, blinking.

The crosshairs appeared right between the cat's eyes, the gunsight framed his fluffy little face. Oblivious, he padded across the control room towards his basket, completely unaware that he was being tracked across the room by a trained killer.

Roz stopped pointing the stungun at Wolsey and checked the powerpack. Fully charged: enough for about a dozen shots at maximum intensity. She tucked the gun into her uniform jacket. Not even she could miss with a weapon that fired in a fortyfive-degree arc. The lightweight pistol was meant for riot control; it could bring down a small crowd of gravball hooligans with a single shot. 'Stungun', of course, was something of a euphemism - the citizens of s.p.a.ceport Overcity Five had always been wary of arming their police, and much preferred them to carry 'stunguns' than 'neural paralysis inducers'. This weapon was keyed to her thumbprint, which meant that it had a rather awkward firing position. More awkward for anyone else who tried to use it.

Forrester watched Benny tapping experimentally at the console.

'Are you sure that you can fly this thing?' Roz asked nervously. Every time Benny hit a b.u.t.ton there was a disconcerting electronic squeak or buzz. They were probably already on the other side of the galaxy. Benny was dressed up now as Ingmar Knopf, or whoever. She was again wearing her sungla.s.ses to disguise the bruising around her eyes, and looked very elegant for someone who ought to be in intensive care.

'To be honest, no. If I work out how to fly it, that'll be a bonus. I do know that the Doctor is linked to the TARDIS, somehow. I'm trying to see if the s.h.i.+p can home in on him. If we can't get to him, at least we'll know where he is.'

It was a good plan, in theory at least.

'Could we find Chris the same way?' Roz asked tentatively, not wanting to get her hopes up.

'I've been thinking about that. It might be possible to search northern France for someone with beppled genetic material. d.a.m.n - it's overriding me!'

Benny slammed her fist down on the console. Just as Roz was opening her mouth to speak, the scanner shutters opened and the screen flickered into life. It was a map of the south coast, running up to London. A green dot was hurtling across the image. A single word flashed red at the bottom of the screen.

INCOMING.

Benny's jaw had dropped.

'It's travelling at just over seven hundred miles an hour.'

That was roughly twice as fast as the typical aircraft of the period. A stream of weird alien script ran across the screen, and the scale of the map increased. Now they were looking at southern England, northern France and the Channel Islands. Benny could read the symbols.

'The incoming object was launched from a site just outside Granville.' As she said the name, the town's location flashed on the map and a flightpath began filling itself in. 'An extrapolation of its current trajectory suggests that it will hit Whitehall in about sixteen minutes.'

Roz remained calm. 'Why is the TARDIS telling us all this?'

'I think she's trying to warn us about the bomber.' Benny reached across and flicked a switch. I've set it to automatic flight and put the s.h.i.+p on second-stage defensive alert. If the TARDIS is about to be destroyed she'll dematerialize and land somewhere safe.' Roz looked worried until Benny a.s.sured her, 'The s.h.i.+p returns when the danger has pa.s.sed.'

Forrester had pulled down the door lever and hoisted the holdall over her shoulder.

'Where are you going?' Benny demanded.

'We've got a quarter of an hour. I've got to warn them.'

'If that's what it looks like... Stay here - you'll be safe.'

But Roz didn't look back and the door closed behind her, shutting her out. It was dark outside, colder than she had been expecting. Church bells were ringing all over London: the signal that the invasion had begun. She needed to find a phone.

There was an unearthly grinding, surging sound behind her. Roz turned.

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