Youth is Wasted on the Young p.23
Dawn dawned to find everyone standing in line out of the mansion kitchen door, awaiting their cup of coffee and sweet roll. Janet was whipping her soldiers into order, packing all their gear onto three stealth shielded choppers. The choppers would drop their loads, then stand off as guards, while the others set up the substation.
Rory, Jeff, and Corporal Peterson checked their hoverbikes, and lashed the force projectors to the footboards between their feet, double checking that the bikes were working properly.
Colonel Tildaith conferred with Major Jensen about deployments once the shield was up.
Stanley was helping in the kitchen.
Amy wandered down the main stairs to find the Doctor pacing the guest hall, alternately gesticulating to himself to emphasize some internal thought and taking bites out of the sweet roll in the gesturing hand.
"What's got you all wound up?" she asked as she stepped down the last of the stairs.
"What?" He looked so startled that the childlike look of surprise on his face sent her pealing with laughter.
She took the half-eaten roll out of his hand and took a bite. "Mmm. That's good. Where can I get one?"
He took his roll back with an irritable scowl and waved toward the kitchen.
She snagged him by the sleeve and dragged him down the back stairs to the kitchen.
She spied Stanley doling out rolls. She waved her arms, careful of the ceiling. "Stanley! Starving grown-up here!"
He turned and stared at her and gave her a mock grumpy scowl. "You're always starving." But he picked up one of the thermoses intended for the chopper crews and a couple of danishes and brought them over to her.
"How's morale?" the Doctor asked as he polished off his own roll, licking the icing off his long fingers.
"Pretty good," Stanley said. He set the thermos on the end of the counter and handed Amy one of the danishes, taking a bite out of the other and unscrewing the top of the thermos. He handed the whole thing to Amy, it was about the size of a bottle of pop in her hand, and steam rose out. She sniffed, then took a swallow.
"Coffee!" She looked at Stanley. "You said you didn't have any caffeine."
"They're hybrid beans, naturally decaffeinated," the Doctor said. "Caffeine doesn't sit well with the Feyanoran biology."
Amy stared down at the twelve year old looking teenager and shrugged. She took a drink. "Not bad."
"So," the Doctor said. "Morale?"
"Everybody's calm, everyone knows what to do. It's all organized." The teenager shrugged. "As long as there's no hiccups it should all go smooth."
Amy set her coffee down slowly, she turned and looked at the Doctor. "Yeah," she said. "Smooth."
-----
Tildaith called them all together immediately after breakfast for one last planning session.
"You did what?!" Amy demanded.
"I cobbled together a mechanical cable runner and set it loose to lay cable to the hive," the Doctor said calmly.
"That was damn risky, Doctor, going out there by yourself!" Tildaith scolded him.
The Doctor shrugged and threw a defiant look at Amy, "It was less risky for one man on a bike to sneak out there than to send a whole troop. They never saw me, and with the runner running under the wheat, in the moonlight they'll never see it. The line will be in place by the time the substation is ready."
"Won't they detect the runner?" the chopper tech asked. "What about electromagn..."
"Shielded," the Doctor interrupted her.
"How did you fit four miles of cable in a device that fits on the back of a hoverbike?" Janet asked.
"Compression field." the Doctor said.
"For that matter," Dutch said, arms folded over his chest suspiciously. "How did you get all the way there and back in one night on a hoverbike?"
"Ah, well, hoverbikes can actually go a lot faster than most people can handle them," the Doctor said, scratching the back of his neck.
"But you can?" Tildaith asked, deadpan.
"I have very fast reflexes."
"However it was done, "Janet interrupted, "I was worrying about how we were going to lay a line that far without the Wirrn noticing. This actually solves that problem."
The Doctor bowed to her. "Thank you."
"You could at least have told one of us!" Amy said.
The Doctor shrugged. "You were all asleep."
Rory snorted in disgust.
"If you are all done mother-henning me," the Doctor said. "Can we get back to the plan?"
Tildaith waved a mocking hand for him to continue.
The Doctor pointed down at the large, high resolution photo of the hive spread across the conference room table. They could clearly see the texture of the wheat all around the hive and the position of all the suntube holes.
The Doctor took out a marker and circled three of the holes, forming a triangle. "Jeff, Rory, Corporal, these are the holes you need to target." He wrote a name beside each hole. "They will provide the best coverage of the hive for both mapping and force field coverage." Rory and the others leaned forward over the table to study their assignments.
"If, for some reason you can't reach these holes, just chuck them in whatever hole is handiest and get out." He saw the uncomfortable looks everyone was giving him. "It won't be optimal but it will still work.
"Peterson," he turned to the corporal. "You'll go in first, Once you've deposited your projector, you'll need to sweep your hoverbike down over this spot." He drew a red X over a spot just to the south of the hive. "That's where the the runner will be staked down. I've fitted your hoverbike with an electromagnet. Jeff's bike is too small, and Rory doesn't have enough experience, so it had to be you. Your hoverbike will automatically pick up the cable spool and you need to make at least one full sweep around the hive to lay it out. Jeff and Rory will provide a distraction if you need it." The Doctor looked at Jeff and Rory, they nodded.
"As soon as you've completed the loop, hit the electromagnet to detach the spool and leave. High tail it out of there, any direction except west, we don't want to draw the Wirrn's attention to Janet's group or the power line.
"Once the forcefield activates, circle around and rendezvous with us at the substation. We move out as soon as Janet gives the word."
He clapped his hands. "Any questions?"
-----
They all scattered to their tasks. The Doctor and Amy followed Dutch and Janet to Dutch's ATV. The supply choppers were finishing loading the substation equipment, and the tarmac was busy with early morning soldiers scrambling to their assignments.
Amy looked at the growing munitions pile beside the wheat silos with dismay. "Colonel Tildaith has been busy. And he didn't exactly tell us what he's been planning, did he?" she observed.
"No," the Doctor said quietly, following her gaze to the mountain of ammunition. "It's his job to protect this planet, any way he has to. He..."
The Doctor cut off as two whiz ball cameras suddenly swooped down to get a closeup of his face, another swirled around Amy, swishing right past her face, blowing her hair in her eyes, it stung. "Ow! I thought the reporters were all gone!"
"Apparently not all of them," the Doctor said. He waved his hand negligently and stalked on, "Just ignore them." Two steps later he changed his mind, turned back, whipped out his sonic screwdriver, and buzzed it. The two whiz balls, popped, coughed, and fell with a clack.
"Ah! That's better!" The Doctor grinned like a loon, he twirled his sonic screwdriver and repocketed it. "I was getting tired of having to watch what I say."
Amy just shook her head. "You're incorrigible."
-----
The Doctor followed Janet and Dutch into the ATV. He turned in the hatch. "You'll be okay alone?"
"What alone?" Amy said. "I'm here, Rory's here, I'm in the middle of an army. Go, go, I'll be fine."
-----
The Doctor directed Dutch back to the electrical tower they had visited the day before. He showed Janet where he'd staked down the cable while the stealth shielded choppers landed their load nets in the field around them. It was a somewhat surreal experience since the nets only appeared once the choppers took off again. And a dozen half-pint soldiers seemed to walk out of thin air as they disembarked.
Janet left her second in command, a boy named Grover, setting up the substation equipment while she and the Doctor ascended in the ATV, trailing cable, to tap into the power line overhead.
It was necessary to use the ATV, because the choppers couldn't get close enough to the power lines with their rotor blades, and military ATVs were too large. The Doctor had offered his expertise to be Janet's technical backup, so she wouldn't have to rely on untrained Marines.
He had a few hair-raising minutes as she clipped her belt harness to each side of the ATV doorway, leaned out on the extended platform over a couple of hundred feet of thin air and metal girders, and proceeded to casually tap into enough power to fry an elephant.
He handed her tools and kept his mouth shut. He was a nervous wreck. But the girl was a consummate professional and her father had nerves of steel and a steady hand on the controls of the hovering ATV.
The Doctor left them assembling the substation in the morning light, with a platoon of Marines who were busy setting up gun placements and camouflage netting.
As the Doctor flew back to the farm on one of the supply choppers he looked back through the window, the substation was already invisible, merely another hump in the undulating wheat fields.
-----
The Doctor hopped out of the chopper back at the farm airfield and trotted off to the mansion. He felt like he needed to be doing more, working faster. But it was still barely mid-morning. Things were actually going well. The tarmac was practically deserted, with most of the choppers and ATVs out on patrol and scouting for Wirrn.
He found Amy assisting Stanley and the chopper tech, Hansen, in the communications room. Stanley was sitting in the corner muttering to himself as he tinkered with his tracker board.
He looked up when he saw the Doctor poke his head in the short doorway. "You did a right job buggering up this board!" he groused.
The Doctor grinned and sauntered in. He looked down over Stanley's shoulder. "What are you trying to do?"
"I think I've figured out your sensor modifications, now I'm trying to reconfigure them to detect Wirrn instead of human." Stanley stuck his screwdriver behind his ear, closed the back of the board and turned it over, adjusting the sliders. "The range is lousy without the components we used for the projector detectors, but if I can map it out, I can send it to the other Sheriff's stations and they can reconfigure their equipment to search."
The Doctor's eyebrows flew up, impressed. He left the boy to his puttering.
He turned to Amy who was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of a coffee table she'd apparently borrowed from one of the other rooms. She'd obviously given up trying to squeeze her long legs under the childsized Feyanoran desks. Her coffee table was covered with stacks of paper and photos. She was sorting them into different piles, entering notes on an electronic pad with a stylus.
"Any luck?" the Doctor asked.
The copper haired tech at the communication's console turned around and pulled her headphones down around her neck, she leaned over and handed Amy another stack of readouts. "Not much so far," she said with a shake of her head. "We're still looking." She turned back to her console and the incoming calls.
The Doctor looked down at Amy. Amy waved her stylus at the piles around her. "I'd expected to find more. We've got reports from all the other Sheriff's stations, local police, emergency crews, outlying farms, and factories, and shipping companies who run regular flights between Landing and Jacobs City. Nobody's seen anything. Or not much. Hints, clues, but nothing solid. If it weren't for the satellite photos I'd wonder if we were chasing phantoms."
"What about the forestry services?" the Doctor asked, picking up the satellite photos and flipping through them.
"They've actually been our best lead," Amy said. "They've noticed an unusual reduction in herds lately. Mutilated animals, and a rise in stampedes. But it's all after the fact, only a few of them have actually seen anything that might have been a Wirrn. Our patrols here have seen more than anyone else. And they've only seen a few."
"Well," the Doctor said, "It is a lot of ground to cover, millions of acres." He tossed the photos back on the table.
Amy sighed and straightened them.
She looked up and saw him frowning. "What's wrong? I know it seems weird, I mean, I know I saw Wirrn going in and out while I was there. But the fewer Wirrn outside the hive the better chance we have of getting them all. That's good isn't it?"
"Yes, yes, yes, it's good." He pulled on his lower lip.
-----
"No, no, no, no. Don't hide!" the Doctor said, walking up to Jeff and Rory at the base of the airfield tower. They were all expecting the go-ahead from Janet any minute and the bike riders were getting prepared.
From somewhere the Marines had scared up a pair of wheat-colored camouflage fatigues large enough to fit Rory. Jeff was busy painting camouflage patterns on Rory's face to help him blend in with the wheat fields.
The Doctor stalked up and reached past Rory to thumb the controls of his hoverbike. The mimetic surface changed from camouflage gold, to eggshell white to bright blue with red racing stripes.
"There," the Doctor said. "Much better!"
He took a handkerchief out of his pocket, licked it, and started scrubbing the camouflage paint off Rory's face. Rory grimaced and turned his head away but the Doctor followed him.
"Be big, bold, loud!" The Doctor said, making the words big with gestures of his hands. "You go zooming in decked out like this and you may as well paint, 'I'M SNEAKING!' on your forehead." He stopped scrubbing and handed Rory the handkerchief.
"Predators are designed to detect motion, and you can't hide that, so don't hide at all. Go in roaring! Swoop around, pop wheelies, ramp over the hive. Whoop it up!" he said, gesturing grandly.
"But won't they notice us then?" Rory said, wiping off the rest of the ruined makeup.
"Yes! But better to be noticed as a fool than as a threat!" the Doctor said.
"Is that why you do it?" Rory asked.
"Do what?" the Doctor asked in perfect innocence, hands in his pockets.
"Never mind."
"If we go in whooping it up like fools, Doctor," Jeff said. "They're going to notice us."
"Yes, but they're going to notice you anyway. If you go in looking like you're up to no good they're more likely to try to stop you. If you go in looking like a bunch of guys just out for a bit of weekend fun, there's a chance, not a big one, but a chance that they'll lie low and hope you'll go away."
"And if they attack us instead?" Rory said, tossing the ruined handkerchief aside.
The Doctor looked sad and held out his hand solemnly to shake Rory's. Rory automatically took it, feeling grim, then jumped as something shocked his palm.
The Doctor laughed and held up his hand, showing the electric buzzer underneath his ring. He wiggled his fingers. "I amped these up. Wirrn are susceptible to electric shock. If one attacks you, all you have to do is grab them, and this should stun them, at least long enough for you to get away." He worked the ring off and tossed it to Rory, Rory caught it. "I made one for each of you," the Doctor said. He tossed two more to Jeff.
Rory looked down at the child's buzzer in his hand. He looked up at the Doctor.
"Don't you take anything seriously?" he asked.
The Doctor stuffed his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels. "I'm serious about what I do, Rory." He grinned. "Not necessarily the way I do it."
-----
Lunch came and went with no word, but finally Colonel Tildaith announced that Janet had declared the substation up and ready to go.
Rory had been too nervous to eat, so Amy and the Doctor walked back down to the airfield to see off the hoverbike chopper.
"What's with Corporal Peterson?" Amy asked, spying the lanky blond racing for the chopper as they followed the now familiar footpath.
"What do you mean?" the Doctor asked.
"He looks like a teenager, thirteen or fourteen. Stanley's seventeen and he doesn't look that old."
"I believe Peterson's twenty-eight."
Amy threw up her hands in disgust, "Colonel Tildaith has got to be older than that, but he still looks twelve! You said Feyanorans didn't enter puberty. What gives?"
The Doctor smiled at her and sauntered along, donning that "teacher" look she found so annoying. "Peterson's one of the exceptions that proves the rule. The average Feyanoran can't produce enough hormones to trigger puberty, but a few, a very few, actually manage to produce enough to start the change."
"So he'll grow up? Like a normal human?" Amy asked.
"There's nothing abnormal about the Feyanorans, Amy. But, no, he's as old as he'll probably ever look. It's like you and me. You're in your 20s, I'm in my 900s, but we look about the same age."
"That's because you're a Time Lord."
"No. That's because we have different chemicals controlling our development. I've looked considerably older than you on occasion. And it's the same with individuals of the same species, not everyone ages at the same rate or exhibits the same levels of gender traits."
"Hormones," she said.
"The building blocks of life," the Doctor said with satisfaction.
Amy got a naughty look in her eye, she opened her mouth.
"Don't say it," the Doctor warned.
She stuck her tongue out at him. "You're no fun."
"Save it for Rory." He nodded toward the choppers. "There he is."
-----
"You don't have to do this," Amy said, straightening the collar of his puffy vest, not looking at him.
"Yes I do," Rory said, taking her hands and urging her to look at him. "We already argued about this, you know my reasons. I can't just let them get away with what they did to you. Besides, if I can prevent even one of these little people from being hurt I've got to do that, right?" He tilted his head to look into her downcast eyes.
She cocked a look up at him and smiled softly.
"That's my girl." He wrapped his long arms around her and she gave him a big hero kiss as a sendoff.
He turned and saluted the Doctor. "Doctor."
"Rory." He saluted back in his usual mocking fashion. "You be careful."
"Bit late for that." Rory gave him another salute and trotted off. Jeff pulled him into the chopper, the door sealed and they lifted away.
"And you wondered why I chose him," Amy said.
-----
Jeff, Rory, and Peterson sat astride their hoverbikes in the chopper, lined up, pointing at the door. They were all decked out in civilian gear, the bikes dialed over to commercial colors.
The chopper was flying in under stealth mode, Rory saw the mound of the Wirrn hive appear over the horizon through the cockpit window.
Captain Morris signaled them to get ready, her platinum blond hair showing under her combat helmet. Rory's hands got sweaty. He gripped the handlebars, reviewing in his mind what Jeff had told him. The chopper wouldn't land when it dropped them off, they'd just hover low and open the doors. Rory looked at his controls, touching them in turn with his thumb, increase the vertical axis, apply forward velocity, lean back slightly to keep the nose up until he hit bottom.
He inspected the projector egg strapped onto the runner board between his feet, then looked up and checked Jeff and Peterson. They were running the same mental checklist.
"Now!" Captain Morris said, dropping her hand. The Marines slid open the side hatch and the wind from the rotor blades slammed through the door. Jeff was up and off, sliding out of the chopper with practiced ease, Peterson followed with a well placed bump and trailed him out over the fields.
Rory gulped, gave it some gas and closed his eyes. He felt the jolt and his stomach flip as he dropped the few feet to the wheat fields, then the forward glide as he accelerated away from the chopper. He opened his eyes. The invisible chopper lifted away behind him, only detectable by the backwash of air.
It was just the three of them now. Jeff and Peterson were already several hundred yards ahead of him. He leaned into the handlebars and sped to catch up.
-----
It was actually very peaceful gliding over the wheatfields on the silent hoverbike. The grain slapped at the base of the skid if he flew too low, and he found himself doing little swishing turns just to hear the waterlike sounds. It was almost like surfing, the waving ocean of wheat below him and cloudless blue sky overhead.
The chopper had dropped them six miles from the hive, it was only a few minutes drive on the hoverbikes, but he could see Jeff and Peterson were taking the Doctor's advice ahead of him, doing circles and weaving back and forth across each other's trail. They were quiet, but to anyone watching it would just look like a bunch of guys out for some fun.
Rory really, really hoped no one was watching.
The hive got bigger, looming toward them on the horizon. Rory nervously scanned the skies over it for Wirrn.
Three miles. Two miles. Rory swung wide to the left, even as Jeff paused to do a donut and Peterson pulled ahead of them, positioning himself for his run.
Then they were there. Rory watched as Peterson rode straight up and over the hump of the hive, casually dropping something as he cleared the top. One away. Rory breathed a sigh of relief. He swung his hoverbike back around to the right, coming at the hill on a tangent, his assigned hole was to the west of the opening, about one third of the way down from the top. He saw Jeff skid his bike around in a curve in the wheat and head for the opposite side of the hill where his own hole was. None of them were whooping yet, there were no Wirrn to fool and they weren't going to draw attention to themselves unless necessary.
Rory hit the edge of the hive and tilted upward, the skid slid soundlessly up the grass-covered hill they'd rescued Amy from only yesterday. His heart beat painfully in his chest, he was trying to look everywhere at once, his eyes were instinctively drawn to the sky, and the top of the hill where the opening to the hive lay, yet at the same time he was trying to scan the ground for his drop hole. There seemed to be a lot more holes than he remembered.
He leaned down and jerked loose the belt latch holding his forcefield projector in place, he fumbled it up into one hand, trying to drive and not drop it at the same time. He slowed down unconsciously, trying to juggle driving, the egg, and keeping an eye on the skies. His hole loomed up on the curve of the hill he was partially circling, he dug his fingers into the metal weave around the projector and started lifting it to the side, bike sliding forward, reminding himself to go around the edge of the hole to avoid losing lift. The wind sang up the side of the hill as he swung the projector out to the side in one hand, the grasses shushed in the breeze, then the wind died.
And he could hear the hot angry buzzing behind him.
He turned, every hair on his body stood straight up in primal fear. A Wirrn hovered over the opening of the hive, not a hundred feet away.
Something wasn't right. It looked mad, insane, its eyes red, its wings whirring. Strips of flesh hung off it, fluttering like the tattered remains of a shroud. It jerked around, trying to keep all the hoverbikes in sight, its antenna twitched. It locked its eyes on Rory, who realized he'd stopped above the hole. Swallowing convulsively on a dry mouth, he quietly loosed his fingers on the projector, under cover of his hoverbike, and let it fall down the hole, hoping the Wirrn couldn't see it.
The bug twitched, gave a primal scream, and dove. Rory gunned the bike but it was too late. The Wirrn slammed into him, wrapped all six legs around him and wrested him off his bike.
Previous Chapter
Next Chapter