071 - Doctor Who and Warriors Gate

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The Doctor and his companions are trapped in an E-Space

universe, struggling to find the co-ordinates which will break

the deadlock and take them back into Normal Space.

When all else fails, the Doctor suggests programming the

TARDIS on the toss of a coin. Before he realises what is

happening, this is just what Adric has done...

When the TARDIS arrives at its destination, according to the

console read-outs the craft is nowhere—and nowhere is

exactly what it looks like...

ISBN 0 426 20146 9

DOCTOR WHO

AND

WARRIOR’S GATE

Based on the BBC television serial by Steve Gallagher by

arrangement with the British Broadcasting Corporation

JOHN LYDECKER

A TARGET BOOK

published by

The Paperback Division of

W. H. Allen & Co. Ltd

A Target Book

Published in 1982

by the Paperback Division of W.H. Allen & Co. Ltd

A Howard & WyndhamCompany

44 Hill Street, London W1X 8LB

Corporation 1982

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

The Anchor Press Ltd, Tiptree, Essex

ISBN 0 426 20146 9

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way

of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise

circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of

binding or cover other than that in which it is published and

without a similar condition including this condition being

imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

It was a mess of a planet, too big and too far out from its sun. If

it had ever had an atmosphere, it had lost it long ago. Much of

the surface showed long ridges and layers suggesting that water

may once have run in the lowlands; sharp-edged wadis cut by

storms in desert country, and wide alluvial fans where the storm

rivers had hit level ground and dumped their collected silt. Now

the water was gone, boiled away millenia before along with the

air, and there was only the endless landscape of pale yellow rock.

There was also life. The Antonine Killer was sure of it.

He handled the controls himself, freeing all of the craft’s

sensors for the groundscan. Command base was over the

horizon and temporarily out of contact, otherwise they’d be

opening up a cell for him right now as his reward for risking a

scout ship so close to a planetary surface without the protection

of electronic over-rides. He stayed low, so low that he seemed to

be racing his own shadow as he eased up and over the ridges,

and he kept the scan at full power and at its widest angle.

That would have earned more anger from command base,

but the Killer knew what he was doing. A wide angle meant a

wider energy spread, and he was covering so much ground that

a returning signal would be too weak to show. Even a raw cub

with his paws on the controls for the first time wouldn’t make

such a mistake – but then, a cub flew to please his trainers, and a

Killer, regardless of what command base might say, flew only to

please himself.

He could loop the planet until his motors failed and still

only cover an insignificant strip of its surface. Killer intuition

told him that the privateer was down there somewhere, hiding

in a deeper valley or the long shadow of a mountain, but the

chances of fixing it with a scan were small. So he spread the

beams as wide as they could go, and ignored the feedback on the

screens.

When the beam touched, the privateer would know it. The

crew would assume they’d been spotted and would try to break

away, and their panic would be a flag to the Killer; he’d slide

around under them as their engines burned to escape the

planet’s pull and he’d give them the belly shot, his favourite – a

light, carefully placed charge into the vulnerable underside of

the privateer, enough to shake the hull with the sounds of a

glancing blow or a near miss. The crew would thank their

various gods for his bad aim and put the privateer into

lightspeed before he could circle around for another try, and

those grateful prayers would be their last.

That was the beauty of the belly shot, the Killer’s specialty. It

took out the power of the lightspeed motors and made that final

jump spasmodic and self-destructive, a one-way trip to nowhere.

It had earned him the secret respect of the Antonine clan and it

kept his record clean with command base – after all, the

mandate was for search and capture, not search and destroy...

but one way or another, a Killer has to be true to his nature.

The sudden breakthrough of radio transmissions warned

him that he was no longer screened from command base by the

planet’s edge.

‘Three of their ships gone, we took them out down by the sun. Any

sign of the privateer?’

That was the voice of the control desk. Three gone, that

meant three clean kills by the Brothers all successfully disguised

as accidents or self-destructs. He narrowed his scan to within

acceptable limits and restored the safety over-rides. He heard

the voice of the Brother who’d been quartering the massive

southern continental plain.

‘I had them, and I lost them. They could have gone lightspeed.’

‘We’d have seen them go...’

It happened so quickly, he almost missed it; a red-white

burn on the line of the horizon, a star that glowed brighter than

all the others and which moved against the pattern of the drift.

The Killer was nearest. He rolled the scout ship to follow.

‘That’s them,’ he told control. ‘They’re making a run.’

He’d have to be careful, out here within sight of command

base; he’d have to seem eager and earnest, maybe so eager that

the accuracy of his disabling charges suffered. And then when

the privateer blew a hole in the fabric of space and sucked itself

through, he’d have to slap his brow, curse himself for his poor

shooting – blast it, another one vapourised and it’s all my fault –

and allow control to placate him with a few forgiving words.

The acting could be fun, but the killing was best.

Except that he was too far off; his trademark shot needed at

least visual identification distance and the privateer would be at

lightspeed before he could get close enough. He increased the

power so that he was pushed back hard into the scout ship’s

narrow couch and the stars outside the cockpit became blurred

streaks, but he knew he still wouldn’t make it. So it would have

to be an instrument shot or nothing.

The targeting screen’s electronics compensated for the scout

ship’s movement and presented a steady view of the horizon and

the starfield beyond. The privateer was represented as a moving

cross with the changing co-ordinates shown beside it. The

Killer’s paw moved to the input panel and he typed in his

estimate of the privateer’s course. After a moment a second cross

appeared, just off-centre from the first. Good, but not good

enough; he entered a correction and the crosses lined up

exactly, staying aligned as the privateer climbed.

The scout ship’s cabin flared white as the charge was fired;

all of the transparent outer panels were supposed to turn

opaque for the split-second flash of a launch, but there was

always a lag and the Killer knew to keep his head down and his

eyes averted from any reflecting surfaces. When he looked up a

moment later, the charge was almost home.

And the crosses were starting to separate.

There was nothing he could do about it now; the energy

torpedo was running on its memory towards a spot where it had

been told it could expect the privateer to be. An uneven burn

from the privateer’s motors or an unexpected course change

could ruin an instrument shot... they had no finesse.

Before the two crosses could split completely, the torpedo

hit. Both targets faded, and an overlay on the screen gave the

computer’s estimate of his success; the privateer had shifted off-

centre, but it was an 85 per cent certainty that he’d put one into

the engines. Not bad... almost a belly shot after all.

‘Did I bring them down?’ he asked control, thinking Do I get

to claim the kill?

‘Main computer says not,’ the controller told him.

‘But I got the engines.’

‘Too late. They went lightspeed.’

It was what he’d wanted to hear. A ship going lightspeed

with its engines damaged at the critical moment was taking a

long drop with no parachute. Wherever they were heading,

they’d never arrive.

Four privateers had tried to run the blockade, all four of

them wiped out by the Antonine Killers, the Brotherhood, the

clan. The anti-slavery alliance could be fun, as long as you didn’t

take it too seriously.

WARP SYSTEMS HOLDING POWER AT 65 PER CENT

OVERLOAD SYSTEMS PRIMED AND HOLDING

MECHANICAL ESTIMATES - UNAVAILABLE

TARGET ESTIMATES - UNAVAILABLE

SUBLIGHT ORIENTATION - FIGURES UNAVAILABLE

DESTINATION CO-ORDINATES - UNAVAILABLE

FAIL-SAFE CUT-OUTS DISENGAGED IN ACCORDANCE WITH

SPECIAL EMERGENCY PROCEDURE NUMBER 2461189913

LOG REFERENCE 56/95/54; AUTHORITY RORVIK, CAPTAIN

SUPPORTING AUTHORITY PACKARD, FIRST OFFICER

SPECIAL CIRCUMSTANCES QUOTE, EXTRACTED MINADOS

WARP DRIVE GUARANTEE/SERVICE DOCUMENTS:

‘CONGRATULATIONS, BOOBS. YOU’VE SUCCEEDED IN

INVALIDATING YOUR WARP DRIVE WARRANTY.’

The last couple of lines worried Packard more than

anything. The privateer’s systems failed so often that it was

unusual to look at one of the bridge screens and see a full

report; but then, most of the time they didn’t much need to

know where they were or where they were going. Biroc would

handle it all, and the rest was just book-keeping.

He glanced across at Rorvik. He was across the bridge by the

helm, his face showing a mild pain at the sound of the

emergency klaxons that wouldn’t stop roaring until the fail-safes

were re-engaged. There was no knowing how long that would

take; the mild bump of an apparently inconsequential hit hadn’t

prepared them for the chaos that began when they moved to

lightspeed. Every navigation aid had suddenly registered zero,

and the inboard computer had panicked and closed itself down –

going off-line to sort and dump information, it was called, but it

had the same effect as running into a cupboard and pulling the

door closed.

Rorvik started to move. He’d said little in the past few

minutes, and Packard couldn’t tell whether he was being strong

and silent or if his mind had gone blank – sorry, gone off-line to

sort and dump information. Whilst the crew shouted and argued

around him, Rorvik watched Biroc.

And that, of course, was the answer; take away every

navigational aid they had, and Biroc would still get them home.

Packard wondered what kind of damage it was that could

take out the stellar compass, the mass comparison probes, the

sublight orientation; take them out in such a way that they didn’t

simply give wild readings as such units usually did when they

failed, but all pumped out a recurring row of zeroes. It was

almost as if they were nowhere, nowhere at all. Rorvik moved

around the upper gallery of the bridge and leaned across the rail

to shout at Packard.

‘How bad are the motors?’ he yelled, and still his voice

barely carried over the klaxons’ roar.

‘We’ve got damage,’ Packard shouted back, knowing that it

wasn’t much of an answer but having nothing else to offer.

‘I know we’ve got damage, but how bad?’

Packard wanted to shrug, but didn’t. Rorvik’s temper wasn’t

unpredictable – quite the opposite. It exploded at the least

provocation.

It was Sagan, the communications clerk, who came to the

rescue. He called across from his own desk. ‘Lane’s taking a

look,’ he said.

Lane wasn’t the fastest or the brightest, but he was the biggest

and that counted for a lot. If it was dangerous or dirty, send

Lane in; a little flattery kept him happy, and that was cheap

enough.

The motor section was isolated from the main body of the

privateer by a pressurised double skin, and Lane had to put on a

pressure suit and go through a small access airlock in the outer

wall of the cargo deck. As the vacuum door slid open he felt the

outward rush of air tugging at him, but after a few seconds it

stopped. The sudden silence was a welcome contrast to the

sirens that were whining all the way through the rest of the ship.

He moved out to the edge of the gangway and looked down.

The deep banks of cabling and conduit that were the outer

layers of the warp motor assemblies were lit for remote camera

inspection, but the cameras had long been out of use and about

half of the lights had failed, putting the motors in shadow. It

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摘要：

TheDoctorandhiscompanionsaretrappedinanE-Spaceuniverse,strugglingtofindtheco-ordinateswhichwillbreakthedeadlockandtakethembackintoNormalSpace.Whenallelsefails,theDoctorsuggestsprogrammingtheTARDISonthetossofacoin.Beforeherealiseswhatishappening,thisisjustwhatAdrichasdone...WhentheTARDISarrivesatitsd...

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071 - Doctor Who and Warriors Gate

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