Part 31 (1/2)

There was a crack of electricity that threw her back in her chair. The screen flared white and went dead.

Kate sat in the dark alone, squeezing her scorched fingers.

A sudden fresh breeze from the door stirred the cobwebs. The apparition of Danny had blown away.

The lift doors on Floor Five cranked themselves open.

The Chillys fell back.

With a roar of rage, the released Yeti emerged and strode forward in search of its prey.

29.

Call in the Cavalry he Brigadier was drowning on dry land. Waves of hands T smothered him, dragged and pinioned him against a stack of dusty chairs in the corner of the stairwell.

A face swam into view. A clean-cut youth with empty eyes like blue ice. Lethbridge-Stewart was sure the Chilly had been one of his pupils. It was revenge at last for all the boring lessons and preps and detentions he had inflicted. The young man impa.s.sively raised a pair of headphones. They emitted the relentless bleep of the silver sphere.

'Acolytes!'

A voice echoed down the concrete stairwell. The Chillys faltered. An old man, leaning heavily on a stick, stood on the steps above them.

'You know me. Now stand away!'

Travers, thought the Brigadier.

Surely not. Professor Edward Travers had died years ago.

The old man waved his stick angrily. 'Release him! Let him go free!' He began to edge painfully down the stairs. The woman went to his a.s.sistance, taking his arm proudly in hers.

It was Travers, the Brigadier was sure of it. And the old fellow was no zombie either. Today everything that he'd reckoned dead and buried was up and walking as if it was some sort of medieval judgement day.

The Chillys were starting to back slowly off. Harrods pulled free of his captors and was immediately at the Brigadier's side.

The woman, now he could see her properly, wasn't the apparition he'd dreamed about at all. Her modern executive clothes were at odds with the Victorian ghost that haunted him. Yet at a distance, in the gloom, the likeness had been uncanny.

The fire door all but crashed off its hinges. The Yeti stormed into the area with a ma.s.sive roar. The stack of chairs collapsed across the floor. The Chillys fell back as the Yeti launched straight at the Brigadier.

'Sir!' Harrods grabbed up the discarded fire-extinguisher and swung it at the monster.

The weapon was torn out of his hands and tossed away.

The Yeti seized Harrods' head between its claws. As his body was dragged to the floor, they heard his skull splinter.

The Yeti let the little man's body drop onto the concrete with a smack. It rounded on the others and faced the woman who was nearest. She held its gaze for a moment that almost seemed like a recognition. The Yeti growled softly as it swayed in front of her.

Travers stumbled past, determinedly heading for the door.

'Must shut down the mainframe,' he muttered. 'Professor!'

shouted the woman.

The Yeti flung an arm wide and knocked the old man to the floor. It began to advance on the Brigadier.

He grabbed up a chair and, holding it by its back, tried to fend the brute off lion-tamer style.

The Yeti seized the legs and tore the chair apart like matchwood.

'Leave him alone!' the woman yelled.

The Chillys suddenly pincered in from the sides and held the Brigadier, offering him to the monster.

The Yeti loomed over its victim. One claw lunged out and clamped around the back of the Brigadier's neck.

'All right. All right, I was coming anyway,' he choked.

Like a march to the scaffold, he thought, as the monster drove him forward. He saw that the woman was also being held tightly, but there was no sign at all of the ancient Professor Travers.

The Yeti led its prisoner back towards the lift, followed by its entourage of Chillys.

In the distance, the Brigadier could hear the sound of claxons.

Through the surveillance systems, the Intelligence saw the convoy approaching the campus. This was the threat it had antic.i.p.ated.

Sixteen silver sphere control units activated and plunged into the chests of the Chillys a.s.signed as hosts. A frenzied chorus of staccato bleeping. Chairs clattered to the floor of the computer room. Figures reeled and tore at the web that blanketed them. Nano-instructions from the control spheres induced immediate atomic restructuring and multiplication.

Shapes rose ma.s.sively in the gloom. Sixteen pairs of burning red eyes. A clamour of roaring as the new Yeti quit the room.

The remaining Chillys sat in pa.s.sive contemplation of the patterns of web on their terminal screens.

The convoy drew up on the outer perimeter road of the university. Brigadier Crichton, not a happy man, surveyed his meagre squad of twenty as they piled out of the UNIT jeeps.

He'd taken every available soldier he could find, leaving UNIT HQ on skeleton staff. They were highly skilled soldiers, trained to deploy cutting edge weaponry gadgets that the regular forces would pay their eye teeth to be able to afford.

Except that computer technology had outsmarted them. It was suddenly too dangerous. UNIT was back to basics, issued with entirely manually operated guns. When they'd broken them out of store, the men had joked about The Antiques Roadshow The Antiques Roadshow and about not knowing which way round to hold the weapons. and about not knowing which way round to hold the weapons.

Crichton was taking no chances. He was out on a limb. One time or another they'd all trained with these guns, but it was just training, not put into practice. He positioned his men to cover the front of the main block and tried to call his adjutant on an ancient walkie-talkie.

There was no response from her.

'Captain Bambera? Do you read me? Please respond.'