Doctor Who_ Infinite Requiem Part 13

The consultant was staggering to his feet, rubbing at his reddened neck. He was helped by the ward sister, who was staring in horror at the figure in front of the lift.

The form, strangely androgynous now, stepped forward, its head tilted, looking curiously at the Doctor, as if to say, 'And why should I trust what you say?' Light seemed to billow in its wake, curling and spiralling like oil in water.

The Doctor looked into the long, brown face and saw changes happening as he watched: the eyes s.h.i.+fting from brown to green and back again, the skin rippling, chameleon-like . . . Was it the strong gaze of a young man in front of him now, or the angular face of a pale woman, her eyes and mouth unnaturally large?

The Doctor held out his umbrella like a boat-hook. 'Come with me,' he said.

'You're not safe here.'

The Sensopath hesitated. The hand that reached tentatively for safety was spindly, long, multi-jointed no, it was human. The Doctor sensed reality warping around him. The clock on the wall above the lift had dribbled down almost to the floor, where it solidified. Senses began to blur in an unwelcome synaesthesia, and the image of the clock jangled like an alarm in the Doctor's mind. There was laughter deep within the bell, laughter, it seemed, from distant sh.o.r.es of time.

'Please,' hissed the Doctor. 'We haven't much time before the TARDIS returns. And there are dangerous people on this world, people who would kill you as soon as look at you.'

The Sensopath gripped the hook of safety. Two eyes of myriad colours met the Doctor's, but he set his expression grimly and gave nothing away.

'Come on, then,' he said.

The pixie-like figure sitting on the table in the visitor lounge of the Phoenix Phoenix was, to all intents and purposes, the Doctor. was, to all intents and purposes, the Doctor.

Cheynor watched, open- mouthed, as the hologram performed that uncanny body language which he didn't realize he had remembered: the restless eyes, the finger tapping on 106 the chin. The coat was brown, Cheynor noticed, and the Doctor appeared to be wearing a loud jumper in contrast to the smart waistcoat he remembered.

That, along with a slight blue fizzing around the edges of the figure, was the only difference he perceived. The hologram seemed to be looking around the room without noticing the other occupants.

'The Doctor gave this to me,' Bernice explained. 'It came in useful back there in the plaza, didn't it?'

Cheynor did not want to admit that the bewildering succession of events had left him dazed. He had only been able to see, smell and hear the destruction of the Phractons with whom he had come to negotiate; nothing else seemed to matter. He caught her grin and wondered if it had been worth getting out of bed today. 'A portable Doctor,' he said faintly. 'Whatever next?'

'It can't actually do anything,' Benny continued, 'but it does seem programmed to respond to an infinite number of parameters.'

The hologram-Doctor looked up indignantly. 'Do?' he said. 'What exactly do you want me to do about this mess?'

Cheynor, taken aback, stood up, placing his gla.s.s of cordial down on the table with somewhat unsteady hands. He cleared his throat, and looked at Bernice for inspiration.

She shrugged. 'It's only a glorified computer simulation,' she said. 'Don't let it get above itself.'

'Simulations have rights too!' exclaimed the hologram-Doctor, and hopped down off the table. He stared intently at Bernice. 'But if you cut me, I will not bleed. If I cry . . . ' He frowned, then scowled at them both as if he would much rather be elsewhere, doing something more interesting. 'So, what have you come up with?'

'In less than an hour, I imagine the Phractons will attack us,' said Darius Cheynor. His voice carried surprising calmness. 'After all, the way they see it, we ma.s.sacred their diplomatic party.'

'Only it wasn't us,' said Bernice. 'It was the woman Trinket saw earlier. The one who had a blazing row with a chum of his.' She shuddered.

'Hmm.' The hologram-Doctor appeared to be examining the wood of the table for flaws. 'Well, if I were you I'd hope your opponents have noticed the presence of something more powerful than all of you. Because if they haven't . . . ' He straightened and smiled up at the ceiling, before deactivating gently into a four-foot globule of silver light, which rushed back down into the pyramid.

'Oh, great,' Benny said angrily. 'I bet he programmed it like that deliberately, too. No one gets to interrupt him, and he always has the last word.'

The door slid open, and Hogarth strode in. After looking Bernice up and down in a decidedly hostile manner, the communications officer addressed 107 Cheynor. It was not quite the exchange Bernice had been expecting.

'You wouldn't listen, would you?' she said, black-gloved palms flat on the table. Her tone held grim resolution, but also a hint of gloating. 'Give the colony to the Phractons? Peaceful settlement? No, Captain. War is what we came here for, and war is all that's going to happen.'

Cheynor turned away from her in anger. 'So what would you have done, Ca.s.sie? Blasted the Phracs the second they appeared under truce?'

'Taken armaments with us. At least we could have defended ourselves against that girl!' Hogarth's visible eye was open wide, unnaturally so, showing stark egg-whiteness.

'And what would that have achieved? Apart from killing an innocent party?'

Cheynor's righteous anger gave him new strength as he rounded on Hogarth.

Bernice remembered seeing him like this in their previous encounter: a man with something shattered but strangely n.o.ble about him.

Hogarth was undeterred. 'That girl is uncanny. That stunt with the Phracs, it was just to gain our confidence. She's like them. Twisted. And in case you'd forgotten, sir sir, she's currently sitting in our medlab, waiting for the moment when she can pull her next trick!'

'No,' said Bernice, stepping forward. 'I don't believe she'll do anything.'

Hogarth barely spared her a glance. 'I don't listen to civilians.'

'That's a shame. Because they often talk sense.' Bernice strode up to the woman, deliberately making herself closer than was comfortable for either of them. She got the impression of something knotted up inside Ca.s.sie Hogarth, physically and mentally. 'I don't think for a moment that Trinket's sister is the evil here, and nor did Captain Cheynor. We know know there's something evil out there, and the girl was just the channel for some . . . ' Bernice shrugged. 'Some force that seemed to tear her apart. You saw her after the Phractons died. As if she'd been burned out too, inside.' there's something evil out there, and the girl was just the channel for some . . . ' Bernice shrugged. 'Some force that seemed to tear her apart. You saw her after the Phractons died. As if she'd been burned out too, inside.'

Bernice stopped, aware that her voice was louder than she would have liked and her throat was very dry. She was taking something of a risk; after all, her knowledge of what was happening was based on the Doctor's theories about Tilusha Meswani, and she did not see Hogarth responding favourably to the idea that she had come forward in time to prevent a tragedy.

'This woman's talking rubbish, Captain,' Hogarth said coolly, apparently unshaken. 'I just hope you've got that medlab well guarded.' She turned on her heel and strode out of the room typically, for the Phoenix Phoenix crew, without waiting to be dismissed. crew, without waiting to be dismissed.

Cheynor looked back at Bernice. 'I'll be needed on the bridge,' he said. 'I've beamed requests for a.s.sistance through the comsat, obviously, but I can't see anyone bothering with us in time.' He sighed deeply and, just for a second, 108 closed his eyes against the world. It did not go away. 'That's not the idea, you see. We weren't sent here to win.'

'What do you mean?' Bernice poured them both another gla.s.s of the fruit cordial.

'Well, I suppose I have to tell someone. And it can't be Leibniz or Hogarth.'

Cheynor sat down, and scratched his beard with one hand while tapping the arm of his chair with the other. 'We were sent here to defend Gadrell Major's porizium deposits. By the time we got here, most of the city was in ruins.

Defence became skirmishes, and we got most of the civilians out. And now we're not allowed to leave. It got me wondering, you see, Bernice. Wondering about how valuable this lump of rock really is to Earth Council.'

'I don't see what you're saying.'

Cheynor sighed. 'This conflict is not about porizium or any other mineral deposit. There hasn't been porizium in abundance here since . . . ' He shrugged, waved a hand. 'Way back. But the Phracs don't know that, do they?'

Bernice met his gaze. 'And if there's one way to keep your enemies out of your hair . . . '

'Exactly. The largest military deployment ever seen by the Phracton Swarm has been arriving on this planet for weeks now. They're prepared to colonize it once they've destroyed and rebuilt it, and my guess is they're ready to start digging. For a valuable mineral that doesn't exist.' Cheynor smiled grimly, just on one side of his face. 'And Earth Council sends a disposable s.h.i.+p that's been out on patrol for too long, with a commander who doesn't quite fit in because he hasn't made a great success of anything much. It's all rather neat, isn't it? I imagine the intention is for us all to rot here.'

Benny's mind was racing. If what Cheynor was saying was true, and the whole humanPhracton conflict on Gadrell Major was just a diversion designed to keep the Phracton fleet away from Earth's solar system, then it was the most staggeringly audacious betrayal she had ever known the Earth administration to be capable of.

But, even more importantly for their current situation, it meant that the human and Phracton forces stood a chance of being brought together to fight the true enemy in their midst. An enemy who could burn people to death with a single thought.

Benny's mind drifted back to the Doctor the real Doctor. What was he doing or rather, what had he done, five hundred years in the past? (That sort of thinking always set her head reeling, so she preferred to think of their activities as simultaneous. In terms of the timeline she and the Doctor lived on, they were.) If he had contacted the Sensopath inside Tilusha's child, then he would be arriving in the recalled TARDIS at any moment. She just hoped 109 the creaky time machine was being reliable.

'I need to talk to Trinket and Livewire,' Bernice said. 'I think I can be useful there.'

Cheynor nodded.

110.

14.

Time Out

The Doctor stood at the main console of the TARDIS. The light in the room seemed somehow dimmer than usual. He thought briefly of all the transient lives who had pa.s.sed through there, and of those who had died in this very room some of his own previous selves among them.

After he had activated the Stattenheim remote, the police box had popped back into view just where he had left it, at the foot of the City Hall steps. One or two people had given it a double take, as if sensing that it had not been there two seconds ago, but the Doctor had ignored them.

Now, he operated the controls, locking on to a signal which the TARDIS had stored in its databanks. After nodding in satisfaction, he strolled over to the large wing-chair in the corner of the console room, by the hatstand, and his shadow fell over its impa.s.sive occupant.

The body which the Sensopath inhabited had grown at an alarming rate.

Sanjay Meswani for the jet-black eyes that looked up now to meet the Doctor's were his was now a handsome young man of some twenty years, with high cheekbones and a firm, expressive mouth. His hair fell almost to his shoulders, tucked behind his ear on one side. He had borrowed a baggy, white s.h.i.+rt from the TARDIS wardrobe room one of the Doctor's old ones, in fact, with tiny symbols, similar to question marks, embroidered on the collar along with the trousers from a dinner suit which the Doctor vaguely knew he ought to recognize. Sanjay's large, smooth hands rested gently on the arms of the chair and his legs were neatly crossed.

The Doctor peered at him in a troubled way. He knew that these physical characteristics were being controlled by Kelzen to some extent, but he had already seen the physical world showing the mental struggle as Sanjay's own mind tried to a.s.sert itself. The mouth, the Doctor thought, was Kelzen's. This seemed to be confirmed when it grew as he watched, filling out with red-blackness and stretching the skin of the face.

'Why did you get involved, Doctor? What advantage is there for you?' The voice was educated, slightly mocking, and could have been that of a young man or a deep-voiced woman.

'None,' said the Doctor. 'I make a habit of sticking my nose in other people's affairs some would call it philanthropic. I was worried about the child.'

111.

The Sensopath tilted back the head of its new body, and let out a deep, velvety laugh. 'Your concern extends to the unborn, Doctor?'

'My concern is for all life, whatever its form. Of course, for the infant, the division between the self and the external world is nothing like as distinct as for the adult almost the fusion of the drug addict or the dreamer. I suppose that's what made it such an ideal receptacle for you.' The Sensopath was silent. The Doctor squatted down beside the chair. 'Marvellous thing, birth,'

he added. 'More males of the species should know what it's like, though. Do you know about sea horses? No, I suppose you don't. The female sea horse has an appendage, you see, and it transfers the eggs into the male's pouch, where he fertilizes them.' The Doctor beamed. 'And then there's the groove-billed anis bird, another denizen of Earth. Once it has chased off all the other males, its hormone levels adapt, the testosterone level in its body drops and it incubates the eggs itself.'

'You are very well informed, Doctor.'

'Full of useless information. Now try to keep calm,' the Doctor said urgently.

'The last thing you want to do is create a channel for either of the others. Do you understand?'

'Why not?' The dark irises seemed to grow bigger, filling out the whites of the eyes. 'Isn't that for me to decide? I am a free agent, you know.' Sanjay/Kelzen crossed its legs, and settled back in the chair with a relaxed and superior expression on its unstable features.

'Yes, and you're getting a free ride too!' The Doctor's voice hardened. 'This clash of wills has already caused enough damage in the physical world. It killed Sanjay's mother. Don't let it kill him as well.'

Anger flashed in the dark eyes. 'I do not need a lecture from a Time Lord!'

'Ahhh.' The Doctor leaned back slightly, and his face fell into shadow. He tapped his mouth with his forefinger, nodding like some wise gnome. 'So, you know who I am. And if you know that, then you should appreciate that a lecture is perhaps exactly what you do need.'

'Time Lords are just a legend for our race, Doctor. In the time I come from, whole star systems have been born from chaos and been swallowed by super-novas since the time of Gallifrey. Would you you listen to a voice from a primitive, ancient race?' listen to a voice from a primitive, ancient race?'

'Yes, actually,' said the Doctor. 'I've met more legends than I'd care to mention, and some of them have been very wise indeed.'

Kelzen/Sanjay made a dismissive sound, and looked away from the Doctor.

The skin, rippling under the light, became paler, and the nose took on a more bony and streamlined appearance.

The alien side was still there, fighting with the human.

112.

It burned, the pain of the onslaught. The whole Swarm had felt it. Now, the Phracton web glittered and shook with a thousand scalding, angered impulses, all directed into the Commandant's personal receiver.

At first, he could not believe it. An accident, surely? His four aides had somehow malfunctioned an error in the programming of their life-support systems?

No, came the answer from his Secondary, spiked like daggers. came the answer from his Secondary, spiked like daggers. The bipeds The bipeds killed them. The bipeds destroyed our Swarm-brothers. You said we could trust killed them. The bipeds destroyed our Swarm-brothers. You said we could trust them. You are to blame. them. You are to blame.

The Commandant retreated into his thinking-s.p.a.ce. He considered detaching himself from the web and undertaking a personal mission to the humans'

s.h.i.+p. It would be risking his life, but then here, in the heart of the web, a concerted effort by the caustic Secondary and his followers would be enough to kill him, too, so he had little to lose.

Nothing to risk but another failure.

As soon as he uncloaked from his personal s.p.a.ce, the thoughts skewered him, shot with virulence along all strands of the web.

A counter-offensive.

Now.

Honour demands that our Swarm-brothers be avenged.

Then honour is a fool, riposted the Commandant. riposted the Commandant. There may be some force There may be some force on this world of which we have no knowledge, something attempting, for its own on this world of which we have no knowledge, something attempting, for its own evil purposes, to set bipeds and Phractons at one another evil purposes, to set bipeds and Phractons at one another Honour! Now! The swift, angry thoughts began to stab at his senses like a thousand needles. The swift, angry thoughts began to stab at his senses like a thousand needles.

And he knew, then, that his command was slipping away from him.

The Doctor said, 'Power brings with it responsibility, Kelzen. Think about that word for a while. Responsibility.'

The Sensopath turned back to the Doctor and smiled. There were large, square teeth behind the broad lips. 'As you do, Doctor?'

The Time Lord turned his head slightly, his eyes flicking down and back up again.

'Yes,' Kelzen/Sanjay went on, 'I have noticed your guilt during our moments of communion. You confronted much of it, some time ago, when an ent.i.ty called the Timewyrm made you enter your own mind. But since then there has been more. Much, much more. You feel . . . responsible to use your word for a great deal.'

'Perhaps I do. But I don't misuse power.' The Doctor scurried round so that he was confronting the Sensopath, and held a hand up, the fingers slightly curved towards the ceiling. 'Anyone's hand can hold a weapon. To kill, to maim, to play with the destinies of others for sport. That's what your sister, 113 your fellow Shanstra is like, isn't it?' The Doctor drew a deep breath and clenched his fingers slowly into the palm of his hand. 'Anyone can abuse their abilities. It doesn't take much, and it's not power. I've met enough dictators to be able to say that for certain, Kelzen. No.' The Doctor lowered his hand.

'Real power. Imagine knowing yourself to be capable of killing, of hurting.

And choosing not to. When you make the conscious decision to be merciful, Kelzen, is when you truly evolve beyond the stage of saying, "I'm bigger than you, so I'll hurt you." Mercy that is power.'

'Time Lord philosophy.' The Sensopath was haughtily dismissive.