Free Doctor Who: Sontaran Experiment by Ian Marter

sent Styr’s massively unwieldy frame trundling round and round like a run-down spinning top.
    With a shattering roar of fury, Styr struggled to regain his balance, triggering the lethal weapon concealed in the sleeve of his suit as he lurched around. The Doctor frantically dodged the deadly bolts of radiation as they swept crazily round the alcove, blasting whole sections of the circuitry embedded in the rockface into flaring, molten fragments. Rapidly weakening, he dived underneath Styr’s flailing arms and out into the ravine.
    The Sontaran lumbered a few metres in pursuit, but the Doctor had disappeared. ‘You will be found, wherever you are...’ Styr bellowed, and tramped back towards the crevasse where Sarah still lay among the smouldering circuits.
    The Doctor ran blindly through the ravine, his lungs bursting and his two hearts swelling as if to choke him.
    The strength in his legs began to dissolve and he fell down a steep slope into a thick bed of brittle ferns, their stems shattering like machine gun fire into a cloud of fine blackish dust which hung in the air before settling in a thin layer over his crumpled body.
    Harry moved cautiously through the rocks, calling out in the eerie silence and all the time trying to banish from his mind the terrible images Sarah’s agonised scream had created. The Doctor had far outstripped him, leaping through the gullies with the agility of a cat, and now he seemed to be completely lost again.
    He soon came across the dead body of the young crewman, dangling from its manacles in the hidden cleft, the lolling tongue black and hideously swollen, the eyes turned up in their sockets.
    ‘Murderer,’ Harry muttered through teeth clenched in frustration and fury. He hurried on, even more apprehensive of what would await him when he found Sarah—assuming that he ever did find her.
    As he battled his way through dense undergrowth, Harry suddenly caught sight of the Doctor’s hat, snared on some huge thorns. He freed it and began to search around with mingled feelings of foreboding and relief. He soon found the Doctor’s body hunched among the ferns, and listened anxiously to his chest for some sign of life. The Doctor’s hearts were fluttering weakly, and his breathing was spasmodic and shallow. Harry quickly loosened the Doctor’s scarf and jacket, rolled him on to his back, and began to apply artificial respiration.
    After a time, he paused and listened for any signs of improvement; but the Doctor appeared to be steadily fading. ‘Come on, Doctor... Come on,’ he gasped, pushing down on the Doctor’s chest with strong, rhythmic presses.
    ‘You’ve got an extra heart...you ought to be able... to do better than this.’ Again Harry stopped and listened, shaking his head in despair. ‘Please, Doctor... Please...’ he entreated, resuming the treatment.
    Harry carried on until he was exhausted, and was close to tears as he bowed his head in defeat, puzzled at the absence of any evident injury to the Doctor’s body, apart from blistered palms.
    ‘Fat lot of use I turned out to be as an M.O. on this expedition,’ he muttered. Without drugs and equipment there seemed to be little more he could do. He could not save the Doctor.
    Pulling himself together, he decided to continue his search for Sarah: at least he might be able to help her. As he turned reluctantly away, he heard something which made his blood run cold: the muffled, hollow gasping of the Sontaran. Instantly, Harry was fired with the desire for revenge. Losing all his fear, he ran along the ravine towards the sound. As he approached the opening to the crevasse, the Sontaran’s breathy speech grew more intelligible.
    ‘The reactions of the female subject remain unpredictable...’ Styr was saying, ‘...therefore the exact function of this organism cannot yet be evaluated...’
    Harry crept up and peered round the buttress. Styr was standing over Sarah’s twisted body, dictating into his micro-recorder unit.