“The Swarming”
A.k.a.
“My Cat’s got Robo-Fleas!”
Cast: The Professor, Pirx the Pilot, Theodora and Mme Bouviour, and introducing Dobbin and Tibbles as the fearless feline cavalry.
The Professor is mortified that he hasn’t set down on Skaro, but on a two-bit backwater in the middle of nowhere. (BBC Sandpit) He immediately takes it out on Mme. Bouviour, who is giving as good as she gets by this late stage of the series. They can see a blackened area surrounded by a firebreak, so they head down the hill, and into trouble. They realise that this area has been used for ceremonial burning, probably a funeral pyre of some kind. They find bones and teeth of both equine and feline remains. Pirx and Mme Bouviour, get the sneaking suspicion that they are being watched, and move away from a possible holy place. The Professor is more interested in some small lumps of metal that are scattered over the area. These look as if they have been melted in the pyre also. While he tramples around on holy ground, the others use Pirx’ brand-new-Hyper-binoptic glasses (Opera glasses with single flashing light -sprayed silver +’Bzzzt’ noise) to spy a lone watcher on the horizon. This watcher is a native of the planet, a feline-humanoid. His horse is a saffron coloured man-eating-horse. The Tardis crew aren’t worried too much until another couple of dozen line up on the ridge overlooking the pyre ground. The fearless feline cavalry make a charge down the hill, and the Professor takes the unusual step of shooting first, and tying up prisoners second. The fearless feline cavalry are beaten back, scared at Mme Bouviour’s gun skills; her small but extremely loud and smoky derringer, and her apparent disregard for feline life.
The Professor starts threatening the Felis warriors with flea collars, butter on the paws, and no Kit-E-Kat for a week, but all he gets are snarls and claws. The prisoners don’t reveal anything, so he decides to take them to the Tardis. The only trouble is that the fearless feline cavalry have brought up reinforcements, and now number several hundred.
The cavalry swoop down, and it is soon clear that they will overwhelm the party. The Professor goes completely against the grain, -and surrenders.
They are led away for about half an hour, and come into a stockaded village. The standard bearer goes to fetch the Felis King, named Meussa, and he declares that the aliens are spies and will be executed at noon tomorrow. They are lead off and placed in a corral where the carnivorous horses are kept. There seems little hope of escape, so they try to befriend a young kitling, and a monk-like figure who are also being held there. The monk seems rather dejected, and refuses to speak to any of the party, but Mme Bouviour manages to strike up a conversation with the young cat-girl, and finds out what has been going on. She tells them that the kingdom is under threat from a plague, and that several scouting parties have gone missing. They have been since found, but their flesh has been stripped from their bones, and there was always a sign of a struggle. Only their religion and the everlasting presence of the tower of the gods is keeping the communities together, but each day and each slain warrior is eating away at their faith.
They fall into a restless sleep, only to be awakened by sounds of a battle. It seems that the whole town is fighting some unseen invaders. Mme Bouviour is desperate to go and help, and manages to sneak past the horses and out into the town. The others convince the cat-girl to help them escape, and in the confusion they clear the corral, and get into the back-streets of the town. Mme Bouviour manages to get a vantage point beneath a grain store, and witnesses the horror of the plague.
The plague is hundreds of thousands of little silvery spiders. They are almost-but-not-quite-entirely-unlike black widow spiders, -sprayed silver, and fitted with microcircuits, and pinpoint-sized flashing lights. The little robotic horrors are swarming over the walls of the stockade, and jumping onto cat-people and horses. Mme Bouviour lets out the standard signal….A SCREAM! The others come to her aid, and realise the horrors of the little robo-spiders.
The Professor gets them to chase him through the town, and the pond, (and the tar-pit and the feather factory) before blasting them as they emerge. As the other spiders turn on the blasted ones, the Professor scoops up a handful of robo-bits for further analysis.
The others are battling valiantly, and manage to adapt some of their weapons to work in the infra-sound range. This stuns several dozen spiders at a time, and the active ones finish off the stunned ones. The efforts of the Tardis crew turns the tide of the battle and the robo-spiders turn tail, and make a dash back into the night. Pirx has got his scouting head on this evening, and follows a trail of the little buggers into the grassland. He comes across a little mound, and sees the robo-spiders disappearing over it. He steps up, and peers down….
Pirx follows the robo-spiders down into the hole, only to find a capsule in the bottom, with a hatch in the top-section. Inside the robo-spiders are in massed ranks, all seemingly dormant. Pirx concludes that they are in some sort of hibernation, maybe in a recharging pod, and that the pod itself was released from a craft in orbit around the planet.
Meanwhile, Theodora has decided that it seems rather quiet outside her room, and decides to go and find Pirx and the others. She cycles across the plains, and stumbles upon a black box. This also appears to be extra-terrestrial in origin, and it seems to be monitoring various environmental changes. Theodora searches all around the box, but doesn’t find a way in.
She leaves it for the time being, and meets up with Pirx. They both take another look inside the capsule, and Theodora extracts one of the spiders for a closer examination. As they look at it more closely, the others wake up, and decide to examine Pirx and Theodora more closely. Our heroes decide that cowardice is the better part of survival, and ride the bike at speed ‘R-17’ -and possibly above- to find the Professor and Mme Bouviour coming the other way. The Professor and Mme Bouviour are not talking, having had a furious row over testing of electronic components. Cheeba helps them all to get back to the village, where they are given their reluctant freedom. They take their freedom, and crash out for the remainder of the night.
Pirx says “I hear a runbling sound in the fifty-hertz to one hertz range.”
Mme Bouvier replies. “Either the entire cat village is purring in unison, or they’re drilling for oil; or the Professor is snoring again!”
p>Theodora is up early, asking questions about the tribe’s traditions and their religion. Theirs is a simple polytheistic religion, which numbers several war gods. They also believe in the power of protection afforded by the tower that stands alone in the middle of the plains. As this is a forbidden area, the crew decide to visit it immediately.
They get a small escort, but on the way, they are distracted by another of the mysterious black boxes. Eager to discover what lies within, they tip it over and unscrew the bottom. Inside is a bomb. Several seconds later everybody is flat on the ground with their fingers in their ears. For some reason the Professor doesn’t expect an explosion. He is then seen flat on his back with a blackened face and two little white eyes peeking out. Theodora wonders what the last signals from the box could mean, and they continue on their way.
The last signal from the box has alerted the aliens in orbit up above to the fact that someone has been tampering with their monitoring device, so they decide to send down a couple of scout/fighters to investigate. The party on the ground are buzzed by the scout ships, which of course arouses their curiosity, but not as fast as it arouses their blood lust. They all open fire on the lead ship as is swoops in for another pass, and a lucky shot penetrates the bomb bay, just as it releases a familiar looking canister of robo-spiders. The ship erupts into a blazing fireball, and then executes a 60-g landing -nose first.
Pirx and the crew are on the scene in minutes, but no pilot can be identified from the wreckage. Having searched quite thoroughly, they tell Pirx that it was an unmanned craft, rather than the manned ship he correctly identified it as….
They regroup, and head for the tower. They spot another of the Black boxes, and detour to have a look. At this point they see the monk, running for the tower. Their delay has cost them precious seconds however, and just before they can intercept him, a door miraculously appears in the tower, and the monk dives through, pausing only to grasp his hat as the door slams shut. Seconds later the tower vanishes completely.
Back at the black box, the crew decide to avoid the booby trap this time, much to the relief of the Professor’s eyebrows, and they discover environment monitors inside, powerful enough to broadcast into space. The Tempus particle sensor readings have dropped after being steady for some time, and for the slow ones in the audience, (Americans) the Tardis crew realise that the tower was a Tardis in disguise.
The aliens meantime have decided that the threat of the Tardis has been removed, and the invasion can begin. They send another scout ship, which lands nearby, and two cowled aliens step forward with their disruptor pistols leveled at our Heroes….
The Professor doesn’t surrender peacefully, but blasts one alien to a million pieces. The other Alien manages to stun the Professor, and starts dragging him aboard his craft. The others withdraw tactfully, leaving the Professor to suffer the consequences of his actions. Mme Bouviour realises that the Professor is her ticket out of this place, and valiantly goes to his rescue. She places her gun against the alien’s head, and squeezes the trigger. The alien’s head explodes in a mass of sparks and wrecked electronics. Under the cowls, and robes, the silver aliens are revealed….Movellans!
Once the Professor has revived, his blood is up again, and they hot-foot it into the Movellan shuttle. Pirx takes the helm, and submits them to a 10-g takeoff. Theodora slowly peels herself from the back wall of the ship, and scans the computer. She manages to find the docking codes for the Movellan mothership in orbit. The shuttle bay doors open silently and in they slide. The Professor is still feeling a little groggy, (he hasn’t shot anyone in the last ten minutes) and so the girls go off to sabotage the Movellan ship’s computer, and disable the Awoogas. They set a charge for 12 minutes and make their escape. In the meantime Pirx has disabled the safety interlocks that prevents him from firing the shuttle’s guns inside the mother ship. Theodora and Mme Bouviour sabotage the computer to set off the reactor, but on escaping, get caught in a pit that opens in front of them. They manage to scramble to safety only to find a security squad between them and the ship. They signal Pirx, who lets them have it with both barrels of the ship’s guns, -which sets off the long awaited Awoogas.
The Professor discovers another Movellan silently closing the blast doors to seal off the shuttle bay. Needless to say, this Movellan ends up a sparking wreck. Theodora and Mme Bouviour scramble aboard, and are just closing the hatch when the Professor runs up. The others help him aboard, as the first explosions rock the mothership. Not wanting to spend another minute aboard the Movellan vessel, Pirx executes a quick 180 degree turn, blasts the shuttle bay doors, and speeds out of there. Theodora sends a hybernate signal to all the robo-spider colonies, and they all retreat back into their pods.
They touchdown on the planet’s surface, and say their farewells to the cat-people. Theodora leaves guidance on how to destroy the pods using the explosives in the black box recorders. As usual Mme Bouviour wants to go home. The Professor disguises the Movellan shuttle as a copy of the vanishing tower, and departs to new adventures in the next series….
