Doctor Who BBC872 - To the Slaughter

‘With difficulty,’ the Doctor suggested.
‘Anyway, humanity’s the weevil, and the solar system’s been the biscuit.
Everywhere’s been spoiled. Shafted. There’s pretty much nothing precious,
rare or useful left. Just rock, ice, a few metals maybe – the scrag they could
live without, which no one could be bothered to shift or dig up.’
He nodded stoically, taking the news on the chin.
‘Venus was used as a rubbish dump for a while,’ she went on. ‘Good for
burning everything up. Toxic waste, CFCs, nappies. Nappies take hundreds of
years to biodegrade, did you know? Anyway, it all went tits-up when they tried
terraforming – the whole atmosphere boiled away into space or something. . .
Hey, pity they couldn’t get old Welwyn Borr to help them out, isn’t it?’
The Doctor was looking grim. ‘Where does Halcyon come into this?’
‘I haven’t got to that bit yet,’ she chided. ‘I was lucky – his infomercial was
a really handy story-so-far. He wants it cut back for the actual vidcast.’
‘Does he?’
‘Uh-huh, so I almost missed out on all this stuff.’ She leaned back in her
chair. ‘Anyway – Venus couldn’t he used as a furnace any more, but they decided
to keep bunging rubbish there anyway since it wasn’t good for anything
else. And on Mercury too. Dump stuff on the hot side, and the Sun burns it
up. Not such a bad idea. The iron miners took huge hauls out with them. But
then they knackered its orbit somehow, trying to make it less ballistical. . . ’
‘Elliptical.’
‘Just checking you were listening.’
‘Against my better judgement.’
‘So, anyway – whoomph! Mercury falls into the Sun. But it didn’t matter,
’cause by then they were already going through the asteroid belt and Jupiter’s
moons, and, this lot out of the window there. . . ’
The Doctor crawled out from beneath the ship’s controls and pressed some
buttons, his face grave. ‘I get the picture,’ he said as an encouraging hum
started up. ‘Earth’s system’s in ruins, plague of interplanetary locusts, blah,
blah, blah. But that was all scores of decades ago. Humans must have an
empire stretching out for light years by now. So why return to the ancestral
seat? Why is sonic big business organisation here in orbit around Saturn? And
why demolish Jupiter’s moons?’
Trix sighed and savoured the moment like a smoker’s first puff of the morning.
‘Halcyon and Falsh have already blitzed a load of littl’uns around Neptune
and Uranus, you know. And the Asteroid Belt – that’s been properly unbuckled.
Mined hollow and the bits left over swept away and sold off to aliens to
use in their high-rises. . . ’ She gestured out of the window. ‘He’s got his eye
on some of this lot, too – all part of his Grand Orchestration. But Jupiter’s
the showpiece. Over sixty satellites going up in smoke. Bringing down the
29