Doctor Who_ Beltempest Part 16

The room billowed softly around her, white linen blown in a cold wind.

Someone else was in the chapel.

Another girl.

No - the girl. The driver of the red car.

She was speaking - no, shouting; her body perfectly motionless, her mouth open and unmoving, the torrent of words coming from inside, inside where her heart still pushed blood around her body, threads of billowing life-red among the white.

Why Didn't You Save Her !.

Sam blinked, her eyelids crashed together, blotting the girl from her sight, then revealing her again, fists clenched impotently now, leaning forward as if to push her words out, to force him to hear them.

You Had The Choice !.

The girl unclenched her fists, lifted them beseechingly. They were red gloves; red like her car, red with Cherry's blood. More words.

Look At Yourself !.

You Have The Life You Denied Her !.

How Can You Bear To Look At Yourself ?.

A mirror.

The girl was a mirror.

Her eyes. Her accusing eyes were mirrored pools. Sam could see himself in them.A middle-aged man.A man of responsibility. A man of belief. A man whose belief was his entire universe.

'You don't understand. I did what was right! She is alive. Life eternal.'

The girl was crying now.

How could he make her see? See what he could see? What Cherry could see?

How could he make her believe that his choice was right?

'You would not have saved her. You could not save her. You would have condemned her.Your blood would have condemned her'

You Don't Understand !.

'It's youthat doesn't understand.'

Make Me Then !.

Make Me Understand Why Don't You Make Me Understand !.

The girl was screaming now, her voice a wind-torn shriek, twisting around htm, plucking at him with the force of her human need.

Good.

She was ready.

Now she could know.

Sam awoke shrieking, the sound an alien thing restlessly prowling the steel confinement of the s.h.i.+p. Her voice was an animal, her mind, too, battered at the cage of this one life, this isolated human existence.

Alone. So alone.

She hugged her arms across her chest.

Alone. Cold. Dying.

Denadi moved closer. 'Sam? You were screaming, I thought...'

She stared at him, her eyes wide, wide open, frantically searching for the last remnants of lives she had seen. He touched her. She recoiled, then grasped his hand, holding on to it as if it was her last link with normality, a torch to light the way back to her life.

'It's OK. I understand.'Was that her voice? So weak, feverish? 'He was me. I was him. I understand everything now.'

She told him."The Hoth. It was one of the Hoth. It was asking for help. But not for itself. Not for itself, do you see? It showed me... myself, in my memory. It was me. I was the girl's father. It was me asking why I hadn't saved her. It didn't understand.'

'Me neither.'

Sam struggled to sit upright, propped herself against the pilot's seat, 'la the communication, the Hoth saw itself as me. And me as the father - someone who denied another life. I couldn't understand why her father let her die - the Hoth didn't understand either.'

Denadi nodded slowly. 'If the Hoth was you and you were the father, who was the girl?'

'She represents those the Hoth want us to help.'

'And who is that?'

Sam licked her lips. 'It's not a "Who". It's a "They". There are billions of them. An entire species. We have to help another species to live.'

'How?'

'As far as I can tell... by letting the sun die.'

The fire in the alien sky burned brightly, consuming itself in the manner of a moth within a flame. The flutter of dying s.h.i.+ps and dying people was brief but telling. Its legacy was a debris field as large as a small city drifting in high orbit. Metal and flesh shredded together and abandoned to the whim of gravity. The survivors fled and the military staked out orbital s.p.a.ce with sensor rigs, an animal setting the boundaries of the land in which it lived and hunted.

Five military s.h.i.+ps had been destroyed. Only one by deliberate fire.

More than a hundred civilian vessels had also been destroyed.

Now Smoot sat, head in hands, in his private office, and asked himselfwhy Why had this happened? Why had these people sought their own deaths with such persistent diligence?

He realised that he'd asked the questions aloud when the Doctor replied, 'The power of belief is very strong.'

'How did you get into my room?'

'If you didn't want company you shouldn't have locked the door. I can never resist a locked door.'

Smoot shook his head distractedly. "They wanted to die?'

'On the contrary. I believe they wanted very much to live.'

"Then why?'

'Because you took away any choice they might have had.'

Smoot looked up then. His expression spoke more eloquently than any words could.

The Doctor continued,'With your att.i.tude.Your military stance. You threatened them. They were frightened. They were trying in their own way to sort out the situation, make sense of it, even repair it if they could. Who knows how many in those s.h.i.+ps had already lost ones dear to them? And you told them they could not do the one thing every instinct in their bodies was telling them was theonly thing they could do: to get absolution, to find a resolution... you put their backs to the wall, Major.You took away their choice. You made the decision to die for them.'

Smoot sighed, rubbed his eyes and stood up. 'I have work to do.'

The Doctor nodded. His voice was a shade short of bitter. 'Of course. Reports to write,boxes to tick. People. Numbers. Are they really the same thing?' He waited. Smoot said nothing.'There's also the rescue mission.'

Smoot stiffened.'Indeed?'

'Three s.h.i.+ps crashed on the new planet. Conaway's was among them. I a.s.sume there will be a rescue mission to search for survivors.'

'a.s.sume nothing in my presence, Doctor. I am in charge here. You a.s.sume too much.'

'Do I?'

'My orders were clear. No contact with the alien.'

'Then get new orders.'

'There are no new orders. Contact has been lost with Belannia Yin. It's possible that tectonic disturbances have produced a communications blackout.'

The Doctor frowned. 'My gravity stabilisers should have been able to prevent - wait. If the cross-phase modulation was out of sync then... Oh dear.' The Doctor took two coloured crayons from his pocket and weighed them thoughtfully. A set of complex schematics hovered before his eyes. 'Now did I mark the oscillation frequency generator in red or yellow? I wonder.'

Unable to determine an answer to his question, the Doctor scratched his head, remembering at the last moment to put the crayons back into his pocket first. 'I have to go on the rescue mission.'

'There will be no rescue mission.'

The Doctor fixed Smoot with an unblinking stare. 'And you accused me of not being human.'

Smoot said nothing.

The Doctor put all the persuasion he could muster into his voice. 'You took away the choice of others today. Don't surrender your own as well.'

Sam and Denadi emerged again on to the ice field. A short trek brought them to Saketh and his followers. By the time they reached the ice grotto where they had settled, a headache was building behind her eyes that showed no signs of abating.

She knew what that was. Lack of oxygen. The air in her suit was getting stale, the recyclers unable to cope with the constant load.

Saketh waited for them. It was as if he knew they were coming.

There were more than a hundred refugees in the grotto. Faces glowing in the chill blue. No helmets. They did not need them any more.

And their faces.

Dear Lord, their faces - They were scarred by radiation, cracked by ice - motile visages, healing and bursting and healing again as she watched. The sound that filled the thinnest of atmosphere was a distant moan, barely able to compete with the movement of wind through the caverns and chimneys of ice. Men, women and children now with one voice. The voice of eternity.

Saketh, his own face more stable with scar tissue, had to shout so that Sam could hear him. "They are in pain but they will live. Their injuries will heal when we are rescued.'

The headache was intense now, ice picks hammering at her skull. Sam imagined an eternity of even worse pain and tried not to dwell on the madness that might bring. She thought instead of the Hoth - the Hoth and the understanding it brought. The Hoth had thought she was the girl's father. The Hoth had thought she could have helped the girl to live.

The message was so clear to her now.

If she refused to help, if she refused Saketh's offer, she would become the man who, in her future memory, she had hated for so long. She would have made his choice - and, worse, she would not even know why.

She turned her gaze fully to Saketh.

The air in her suit ran out.

'I'm ready now.'

Saketh smiled. In his face the expression was terrifying.

He took off the glove of his suit. His hand was black, the skin forming and reforming even as she watched.

'I offer you my flesh and my blood. Eat of me and live for ever.'

Sam took a deep breath. She opened her helmet. The stale air rushed out and was replaced by numbing cold. At the last moment she realised she had forgotten to shut her eyes. They froze open and she screamed. Air emptied from her lungs.