Free Doctor Who: The Rescue by Ian Marter

Bennett insisted.
    Barbara stepped forward to help him through the narrow opening.
    The big man rounded on her savagely. ‘ I said I can manage! ’ he snarled, almost hurling her aside.
    Barbara shied away, staring in confusion.
    Bennett quickly pulled himself together. Sweeping the lank black hair off his face, he smiled at her apologetically.
    ‘Thank you, but I shall be fine,’ he assured her quietly, moving inside and sliding the shutter closed.
    Vicki touched Barbara’s arm diffidently. ‘It is getting late. I must go out and collect the water,’ she confided meekly. ‘It grows dark very suddenly here on Dido. Would you be kind and set out the things for our meal, Barbara?’
    Barbara’s face brightened immediately. ‘I’m starving ,’
    she confessed.
    Vicki smiled. ‘We only have emergency rations,’ she warned. ‘Open a sachet and add water.’
    Barbara wrinkled her nose and shrugged. ‘Beggars can’t be choosers, Vicki. It sounds just like home. Show me where everything is.’
    Along the base of the cliffs at some distance from the wreck of Astra Nine there was a huge shallow crater in the sand and scree. Under the cliff, just below the lip of the crater, a thin trickle of discoloured water issued out of the rock close to the mouth of a low tunnel. In fact, the water ran out of a broken-off pipe, buckled sections of which could be seen sticking up at intervals out of the sand between the crater and the ruined terraces nearby.
    The pipe had obviously once provided the water supply to the former community from some source up in the range of mountains. All around the broken stump of pipe, a profusion of glossy-leaved shrubs and small trees not found elsewhere on the arid plains grew in the waterlogged sand among the rocks and boulders. Many of the bushes were torn and splintered and stripped of their lush foliage as if some large creature had feasted off them regularly. The muddy sand was trampled and beaten and bore the countless prints of large three-toed feet.
    In the low evening light, Vicki’s long shadow stretched across the crater as she walked around the edge to the broken pipe. She carried a pair of plastic containers suspended from her shoulder by a cord. Humming to herself, she watched the warm murky liquid cut its short dark trail in the sand before being quickly swallowed up into the insatiable desert. A few giant flying beetles were foraging around in the mud and Vicki gazed dreamily at the brilliant colours encrusting their hard shells like precious stones as she positioned the first container under the jagged end of the pipe.
    She frowned as she noticed that the noise of the water running into the bottle sounded feebler than usual. ‘The supply must be drying up...’ she murmured to herself, acutely aware of how vital that faltering trickle was to the survival of herself and of Bennett, and now perhaps of Barbara too. She glanced up into the dull coppery sky.
    Dido’s one currently visible sun now hung low close to the horizon, and the scattered solitary thorns and cacti raised their arms to the heavens in perpetual despair, like refugees in the distance.
    It took ages for the container to fill and Vicki started daydreaming as she knelt in the hot sand. She was totally unaware of the slow, heavy dragging sound coming from the tunnel entrance a short distance away along the base of the cliff
     
    She did not notice the monstrous bulk of the sand creature emerging into the open and advancing through the scrub and thorns towards the lusher vegetation around the crater. Its huge head tossed and sniffed at the air and its great gaping jaws opened and sliced shut again with relentless purpose as it loomed up behind the innocent figure kneeling in the sand.
    Barbara soon completed the simple task of laying out the items for their coming meal. She was so famished that even the prospect of soup and a kind of reconstituted meatloaf held all the promise of a magnificent banquet.
    She browsed