The Indestructible Man Read online

  THE INDESTRUCTIBLE MAN

  SIMON MESSINGHAM

  DOCT

  OR WHO:

  THE INDESTRUCTIBLE MAN

  Commissioni

  ng Editor. Shirley Patton

  Creati

  ve Consultant. Justin Richards

  Project Edit or. Sarah Emsley

  Published by BBC Worldwide Ltd,

  Woodlands, 80 Wood Lane

  London W12 OTT

  First published 2004

  Copyright © Simon Messingham 2004

  The moral right of the author has been asserted Original series broadcast on the BBC

  Doctor Who and TARDIS are trademarks of the BBC

  ISBN 0 563 48623 6

  Imaging by Black Sheep, copyright © BBC 2004

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham Cover printed by Belmont Press Ltd, Northampton This book is dedicated to Doctor Caz

  for her invaluable help and support

  THANKS TO:

  My wife Julie

  Mike

  Alex

  Justin - for his enthusiasm

  theheritagetrail for their description in Chapter XXX

  and Mr Anderson, who did so much.

  ‘Such wonderful things. Such wonderful clarity. I was dying and the dead and the everliving.’

  JOHN FANTE

  Prologue

  AD 2068

  He would end the war today.

  He would end it.

  Kneeling in the dark, watching his best friend die.

  Adam Nelson lay in the lunar dust, coated in debris from the collapsed Myloki headquarters. Blood traced fine patterns across his ruined face. Harsh alien lights shimmered overhead, altering the flickering angles of Nelson’s Nordic bone structure. Blue eyes stared through blood and dust.

  ‘Do it,’ Adam coughed. ‘Do it now.’

  The Indestructible Man cradled his friend’s broken body. ‘I can’t,’ he said.

  A rustle somewhere in the shadowed ruins. He looked back, sharp.

  Just dust. Nothing but dust.

  ‘They’ll be coming,’ Adam croaked, his training keeping him conscious. Ignoring the pain. ‘You must.’

  The Indestructible Man triggered his cap-mike. The plastic receiver arm flipped down over his mouth. A squall of static.

  He felt something move in the darkness. A familiar dark tingle jolting his nervous system. Something approached.

  Them.

  ‘Captain Gray?’ He asked, watching the flickering shadows dance round the alien base.

  Gray’s strained voice emerged from the aural snow. He would be surprised by the communication. ‘MIC?’

  ‘Nelson is hurt. Immediate extraction required.’

  ‘What?’ asked Gray. Understandably, the shuttle pilot wouldn’t believe what he was hearing. ‘Say again?’

  With his good arm, Adam gripped his sleeve. Blood smeared the already scarlet uniform. Adam’s angry stare locked on to him. ‘No.’

  He barked into the receiver. ‘I said, immediate retrieval!’

  A noise from the other end. The co-pilot, yelling a warning about something external - something outside the orbiting Transporter. ‘Wait,’ said Gray, distracted. ‘I think they may have -’

  There was a brief hiss and the connection was severed. A boom from overhead and a pulse of energy shook the already damaged structure.

  The receiver arm flipped automatically back into his cap.

  The Indestructible Man rolled as dust and stone rained down. He sensed movement through the murk and hauled out his automatic pistol.

  A snarling figure launched itself out of the dark at him, gangly arms wielding a metal spar. The Indestructible Man shot the Shiner down. The corpse wore a PRISM technician’s uniform. It raised a cloud of dust as it hit the undulating floor.

  Tensed for more attacks, he crouched, scanning the area.

  Feeling his way through their base. His nervous system balked at their presence. They were still here. Many.

  He glanced back at Adam and realised that his friend was dead. The head was still, the gripping hand splayed. No life-light gleamed in the eyes. Nelson sprawled like a discarded doll.

  The Indestructible Man looked down at the blood on his own arm. Adam’s blood.

  He had to go through with this. Nothing else left.

  He slid away from the rubble that had fallen and crushed Nelson. God only knew how the internal pressure and oxygen was maintained Stars gleamed through blast holes in the roof.

  Flexing the muscle in his left wrist, he slid the Activator into his palm. The weight on his back seemed heavier. The device.

  Unbidden, a strange memory thrust itself into his conscious mind. Something from his school days. A summer’s day. A big building in a park. No, not a park.

  Grounds. The grounds of Winchester Cathedral, Hampshire, England. That huge, heavy, stone cathedral. Why that, now?

  Something growled in the dust-choked gloom. His senses prickled. Dust sifted. Rock slid.

  Adam raised his head. He was grinning.

  ‘Not him!’ shouted the Indestructible Man. He felt the anger course through him - good, strong, human anger.

  The thing that filled Adam Nelson’s body bared yellow teeth. Sightless eyes glared red.

  He felt the warmth of its hatred. Felt all their hatred. And their fear.

  At last, after all this time: their fear.

  It ends tonight.

  It ends now.

  The Indestructible Man squeezed.

  PART ONE

  AD 2096

  I

  When he could, Commander Hal Bishop still drove to work.

  The world hadn’t deteriorated that much.

  His car was a low-slung, tan Aston Martin, the final model rolled off the now silenced production line. A sleek, curvaceous racer.

  Bishop gunned the engine along the wooded back-roads of Berkshire. Through Maidenhead and on to the relatively clear tracks of the M4, the last functioning motorway in Britain.

  He put his foot down as he shot past the distant smoking ruins of Windsor and Slough, beneath the skeletal bridges of the defunct M25. Bishop enjoyed these last possible bursts of speed.

  The weather was wet and weak in a dismal autumn.

  Twenty years living here and Bishop still couldn’t get used to England. He pined for the Los Angeles sun.

  The car was armoured but, despite that, his advisors still quaked whenever he spoke about driving. About having a home in the country as opposed to the relative safety of SILOET headquarters. Bishop needed the peace and tranquillity of Britain’s frosty countryside. He enjoyed looking through his French windows out to the woods. Looking helped him think. He’d been there a fortnight, ostensibly on leave. Alex had been right. He’d needed it.

  The calm of the bungalow was worth the risk of the journey in. Twice, bandits had blocked him. Both times he’d rammed his way through.

  He had been thinking about his bungalow, about how he needed to repair the security camera on the perimeter gate, when the call had come through. Get back to SILOET, red alert.

  The weak sun failed to penetrate the smoky tints on his windscreen, so Bishop removed his shades. He flicked a switch on the dashboard; his steel blue eyes fixed on the road ahead. He was moving past Heathrow. There were some reports that the City had been making a move to reactivate the airport. Reports that he was going to have to have checked out.

  The Com Officer’s well-modulated tones were precise.

  ‘Commander Bishop. The scavengers are enroute to SILOET.

  ETA - 1220 hours. Confirm, two males and a female. IDs not yet established. No explanation for how they came to be on board SKYHOME.’

  Bishop wa
tched his own determined face in the rear-view.

  He looked troubled. He was blushing under his severe blond crew cut. The old giveaway.

  ‘I want a full isolation procedure,’ he ordered. ‘I don’t want anything left to chance. They don’t get anywhere until we know they’re clean. I’ll be there in forty minutes.’

  ‘MIC.’

  As Bishop reached the potholed ruins of Chiswick and began to pick his way up to Shepherd’s Bush, he realised he was breathing heavily. He felt his heart beat hard inside his chest. Not surprising. Something new had occurred He was getting excited. Dangerous. He concentrated on controlling his metabolism. This situation needed a cool head. As he drove closer to the Centre, Bishop unclipped his pistol, ready for trouble.

  Once his car was stored safety in the underground car park, Bishop made his way through the barriers to the Television Centre. Still impressive, the Centre’s bulk and curvature were a reminder of a bygone, greater age.

  A crude banner stretched across the reinforced double doorway. BRITISH FILM AND TELEVISION CORPORATION’ -

  an amalgam of the last gasps of public broadcasting money.

  Bishop didn’t spare the sign a second glance as he strolled past the guards employed to look like receptionists, security staff and visitors. He waved aside the various ‘Mornings’. He had business to attend to, not this sham.

  It was amazing to reflect that, despite the whole BFTV

  operation being an expensive con (the corporation hadn’t produced anything original or interesting in decades), there were still sufficient layabout ‘creatives’ who kept burdening them with CVs and proposals and pitches. How did they live?

  And where?

  All this of course necessitated a costly and pointless exercise in sham meetings and a mountain of rejection letters.

  Bishop tried to ignore this, as he did every time he came through reception, but he was still sufficiently irritated by the utter banality of it all that he was forced to control his breathing once more. He lit a thin cigar to help, puffing blue smoke through three more security checkpoints.

  Finally, Bishop strode along the corridor to ‘S’ block and composed himself. Forget about the facade, who’s left to bother breaching it? Bishop smiled to himself. Yeah. Who?

  He had more pressing problems to attend to. But he wouldn’t let them consume him just yet. He wanted the enjoyment of his morning drive to linger a little longer.

  His office was locked, of course, and the reception area empty. Bishop gripped the cigar between his teeth and smiled at the freshly mounted nameplate on the oak door. HAL

  BISHOP - DIRECTOR GENERAL. Alex Storm’s idea of a joke, no doubt.

  The door hummed under a wave from Bishop’s hand and he strode in.

  It was just as he had left it. A simple room, a handful of movie posters on the walls, a filing cabinet and a desk. A decanter of whisky. Oh, and an ashtray. The ashtray.

  He was back. And maybe this time it really was kicking off.

  Deep down inside SILOET, the staff were on red alert. Bishop patrolled the sensor arrays.

  The great cabinets, with their whirring tape machines, were recording and analysing all incoming data. Everything that could be monitored was being monitored. Nothing could get through the net. So Bishop had always thought.

  Thank God Alex had been on duty. He trusted his number two with his life and that was the only reason he hadn’t ordered a helicopter to come and fetch him from his bungalow straight away.

  Bishop stared at the spinning spools, trying to clear his mind. He blocked out the bustle of his operatives as they checked and re-checked monitors, focusing solely on the spinning tapes. Lycra-clad women sat calmly at terminals, issuing steady streams of orders into microphones.

  Could they be back? Really?

  If so, why SKYHOME? There was nothing up there but junk.

  He sensed Alex behind him, ever-present clipboard in hand. Bishop nodded to himself. Facts. He needed facts.

  ‘Okay Alex,’ Bishop said to the terminals. ‘What have we got?’

  At last he turned, taking in Alex Storm’s pockmarked, brutal face. A face that hid a searing intelligence. Oh, and a psychotic homicidal personality.

  Alex smiled. ‘Relaxing holiday?’

  ‘I know, I know,’ Bishop replied. ‘Always the way. Never go on leave. Something always happens when you go on leave.’

  Niceties over. ‘Now tell me. Who are these intruders? And how the hell did they get up on SKYHOME?’

  ‘We don’t know. That’s the answer to both questions. But we got ‘em, whoever they are. They’re in a jet on their way down right now ETA two hours.’

  Bishop nodded. ‘Just how did we get them?’

  ‘I triggered a stun alert. As soon as contact was lost, I ordered an immediate spring clean.’

  Spring clean, thought Bishop. Automatic nerve gas sprinkler system. A blanket spray that knocks out every living thing on board for six hours. Time enough to land a retrieval jet.

  ‘What about SEWARD? Did we detect anything?’

  Alex shook his head emphatically. ‘Nothing moving out there but planets.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Bishop. ‘What were they doing there?’

  Alex shrugged. He looked down at his clipboard. ‘It seems they were repairing the air conditioning.’

  Bishop spent the next two hours thinking. He felt haunted, constantly revisiting his own past, looking for clues.

  His own brush with the invaders never went away. It was while he was still a captain in PRISM, very young, very inexperienced. Pictures ran through the projector of his memory - his wife coming at him with the scissors, the sharp pain in his stomach, her intractable efforts to cut the suitcase from his wrist. His own punches and finally her prone body where he’d pummelled her with the ashtray. Her blood leaking into the carpet, mingling with his own. The ashtray that sat in his fake office upstairs. The ferocity of her attack was tremendous. Did she know what she was doing?

  Had she known? Had Helen had anything of herself left?

  The world was dying. He knew it, deep in his heart. The Myloki may have gone away, but they had won. They had taken something. Humanity’s belief, even perhaps their arrogance, that they were the toughest, most resourceful and intelligent life forms in the universe. Stage by stage, the world was giving up. Bishop felt like a priest performing the last rites - the old and useless rituals.

  He tried to dismiss these negative thoughts. They served no function. Everything that could be known about the Myloki was known. Only two components of their living presence remained on Earth. One was safely locked away never to be freed. The other...

  God knows, thought Bishop. God knows.

  His desk communicator warbled. Immediately Bishop sat up.

  ‘Alex?’

  ‘The jet is landing, Commander. They’re here.’

  The cylindrical monoliths that comprised the BFTV Centre loomed over a circular recreation area, complete with benches, bushes and concrete walkways. This area was never used and had grown into a broken playground adorned with a carpet of paper, broken paving stones and rotten office furniture.

  The blank windows of the deserted high-rise offices stared down at the recreation area like the multifaceted eyes of a fly.

  A weak winter sun caught the glass on the western side, flaring a watery yellow burst of light. And then, as one, the eyes seemed to slowly draw themselves shut. Alloy shutters lowered themselves, shrieking, over the glass. The windows went dark.

  Somewhere beneath the paving slabs, a muffled, mechanical groaning started up.

  The recreation area cracked down the middle. With a protesting shriek it split into semicircles and giant hydraulic arms folded the two halves into the ground. The rubbish and slurry that littered the surface slid off into the dark space below.

  With a final echoing click, the process ceased. A great black hole now gaped where the recreation area had once been.

  In the distance: the
roar of a jet engine.

  The SILOET Transporter jet dropped from the sky at a frightening speed. It was a bulky, blue bird of an aircraft - a fat miniature Concorde. As it approached the BFTV Centre its four VTOL engines twirled on their gyros to point straight down. The exhaust from the motors blasted dust from the walls of the surrounding Centre’s buildings. The Transporter reared up, its beaked nose rising as the aircraft fought gravity. Three sets of bulky wheels emerged from its belly.

  Engines screaming, the plane manoeuvred and lowered itself into the space recently vacated by the shifting concrete plates.

  Landing lights flared up as the plane dropped into the hole.

  It settled comfortably on to the reinforced landing pad. The pilot cut the engines and the roaring noise became a piercing dying whistle. Overhead, the hydraulic arms pushed the recreation area back into place. The whole operation had taken less than three minutes.

  Acceptable, thought Bishop as he watched from the monitor in his office. But the beating of his heart gave him away. Watching the circus rolling again, that was more than acceptable. That was thrilling.

  Dangerous emotions.

  He flicked his intercom switch. He took a deep breath, thinking before he spoke.

  ‘Tell the crew to stand down. Alex, I’m coming over.’

  The jet still whined with the effort of landing. Ground crew swarmed round the arrow-shaped craft, connecting refuelling pipes and carrying out their safety checks. Bishop rose up from the hydraulic elevator into the stink of engine oil and warm metal.

  Alex nodded and Security Chief Bain dispersed his team across the landing bay, SMGs at the ready. Bishop was heartened by their efficiency - veterans from the war, disciplined and experienced. These were soldiers who had faced the Myloki.