Doctor Who_ Infinite Requiem Part 20

The Doctor strode across the ridge where he had left the TARDIS, followed by a motley a.s.sortment of companions.

Immediately behind him was Darius Cheynor, dressed in battle uniform, and following at a couple of paces, trying to keep up, was Suzi Palsson, now bright-eyed, kitted out in fresh clothes from the Phoenix Phoenix: plain coveralls and a long cloak. Her quicksilver hair was glossy and fresh again, and she was looking human, free of the bonds of Shanstra. Bringing up the rear, motor unit humming gently, was the s.h.i.+ning globe of the Phracton Commandant.

Outside the rickety blue police box, they stopped, and the Doctor nodded.

'Everything in place?' he asked Cheynor.

The captain nodded. 'Leibniz has his instructions, Doctor. I just hope he and Bernice aren't being sent into danger '

'Bernice is more than capable. And I think Mr Leibniz can look after himself,'

the Doctor said, cryptically. 'All right, Suzi?'

157.

'I think so.' She smiled awkwardly, brushed some dust from her nose. 'Doctor, is it safe taking me with you? I mean, if I'm not free of Shanstra . . . '

'If that's the case, you won't be safe anywhere,' said the Doctor darkly. 'So you may as well come with me.' He unlocked the TARDIS door. 'Shall we go?'

Cheynor had been looking the blue box up and down with some apprehen-sion. 'I saw this thing arrive, once,' he said. 'Didn't believe my eyes at the time.' He swallowed hard. 'Seen a lot since then, of course,' he added with a degree of resolve. He went inside.

Suzi peered at the blue box. 'Is this the lift, Doctor?'

'Well, it is a kind of portal,' said the Doctor. He ushered her inside. 'A narrow one,' he added in concern, looking at the Phracton. 'Wait there, old fellow. Won't be a second.'

The Doctor popped inside the TARDIS. There was a swirl of dust as it faded from the landscape, accompanied by a sound of screeching machinery that made the Phracton oscillate with concern.

Seconds later the TARDIS rematerialized right where the Phracton had been, solidifying for just a second, and then the blue box disappeared from Gadrell Major once more.

The ridge was silent and empty. Far below, fires burned in the streets of Banksburgh, and the windows of the library caught the reflection of the setting sun. The ruined city, bathed in orange, could have looked almost beautiful: not half-destroyed, but rather half-formed, unborn, waiting to rise anew from its own ashes.

In the dimly lit Zero Room, Kelzen's eyes snapped open. She was aware that she had company.

The Doctor hovered in the greyish shadows by the door. 'No one knows you are here, yet, except me,' he said.

The Sensopath's eyes glowed in the semi-darkness. 'And you a.s.sume I choose to do it your way.'

'I a.s.sume you are sensible enough. Yes.'

Kelzen chuckled to herself. She unfurled her long body, the Doctor's cloak billowing around her, and she strolled over to stand next to him, her two-metre form towering above the small Time Lord.

'You could be playing with fire, Doctor, you know that?'

'Yes,' he answered, his voice charged with menace. 'Just as long as you don't try the same thing.'

'You do not have the power to keep me here by force,' said Kelzen, amused.

'I trust you to find Jirenal, which is why I have done as you suggested so far.

That is where we are going now, I take it?'

'Yes. I've brought some important friends along for the ride.'

158.

'Ah, Doctor. Still the chess player, surrounding yourself with p.a.w.ns?'

'Actually, no,' said the Doctor. 'I started to tire of chess a while ago. These days, I seem to be playing hopscotch.'

'You are amusing, Doctor.'

'You think so?' The Doctor beamed. 'You should have met my fourth incarnation, he was a real hoot.' The smile vanished rapidly. 'Take a friendly warning, Kelzen: some have found me distinctly unfunny in the past.'

The Sensopath's mouth was large and horrible, as she grinned across her malleable face and showed a barricade of perfect, incisive teeth. 'We have a very fragile trust, Doctor. You are protecting me from Shanstra, yet how do I know I do not need protecting from you?'

'You don't. That's what makes it interesting. And as for not having the power to force you to stay here, remember what I said earlier, about power.'

'I recall the conversation,' said Kelzen haughtily, as she closed her eyes and resumed her levitation posture. 'You advocate this "mercy". Having the power, and not using it.'

'Quite. I did so with the Key to Time. And on a number of occasions when I could have killed my mortal enemies. So, you see, by helping you, not entrapping you, I have won your trust.'

'For the moment, Doctor,' said Kelzen, 'for the moment.' And she opened her eyes briefly to look at him again.

For a second or two, they were Sanjay Meswani's eyes, big and deep and dark and sorrowful. His dead mother's eyes. Then the feline gaze of Kelzen returned. 'The boy's body is safe as long as I am, Doctor,' she said. 'Remember that.'

The Doctor gritted his teeth. 'I'll remember,' he snarled.

He stepped out of the Zero Room, sealing the door behind him.

Bernice was beginning to wonder what she had got herself into. She was sitting at the Phoenix Phoenix briefing table with Leibniz whom she found faintly unnerving, a marked contrast to the affable Cheynor and several TechnOps. briefing table with Leibniz whom she found faintly unnerving, a marked contrast to the affable Cheynor and several TechnOps.

Also present were Trinket and Livewire, both looking rather awkward at the end of the table.

'The Doctor has his plans,' Leibniz was saying, 'which he has discussed with the captain. But, for reasons of safety, he has not confided them fully to any of us. We are dealing, lest we forget, with an immensely powerful telepathic alien. If she were to get an inkling from any of us of what the Doctor hopes to do, then the entire mission could be jeopardized.'

Benny was watching Leibniz carefully, and thought to herself that his body language rather betrayed his discomfort during his last little speech. His pale face became, for a few seconds, slightly pinker, and the incisive eyes behind 159 his gla.s.ses avoided meeting the gaze of any single one of them. She bet herself he had sweaty palms.

'She's a kind of telekinetic as well.' All eyes were on Livewire, who had spoken, calmly and emotionlessly. 'Her thoughts, given enough power behind them, can affect the physical world. It's almost as if she can will molecular structures to change.'

Benny nodded, remembering the shattered Phracton globes and the strange plexigla.s.s tree that now stood in the centre of Londinium Plaza.

'She digs deep into your brain and pulls up the things that are rotting there, things you thought were dead. Your hatred. Your fear. Worst of all, she makes you believe that, all the time, you're the one in control. That you're getting your revenge on those who hurt you.'

'Which is why she made you kill the Phractons,' Bernice said. 'It's what you wanted to do, isn't it? Save Banksburgh single-handed.'

Livewire looked away, sullen now, not speaking. Bernice silently chided herself for having said the wrong thing again, for forgetting that this young woman was no more than a confused adolescent with conflicting voices in her head and heart.

'And what do you think, er . . . ' Leibniz gestured vaguely at Trinket.

The boy realized he was being addressed and sat up straight, licking his lips.

Bernice held her breath. Don't say anything belligerent, she thought desperately.

'What I understand is, the Doctor wants us to create a diversion, right?'

There was a general murmur of a.s.sent. 'We can't play it too rough. She did for Poly. Burned her to a crisp. Just by looking at her. I don't think we can even get too close to this ' he chose his word carefully ' creature.'

'On the other hand,' said Leibniz, 'there will be a small army of us, humans and Phractons. And she is only one.'

'But with some rogue Phracs on her side,' Benny put in. 'And you've all seen the damage they can do.'

There was a momentary, charged silence, as the absence of Ca.s.sie Hogarth from the briefing was felt. They knew, Benny had been able to gather, that her s.h.i.+p had gone down somewhere in the river, taking a couple of Phrac units with her, but that it had not been recovered.

'All right, then,' Leibniz said calmly. 'We wait for the Doctor's signal.'

And all eyes, at that moment, became fixed on the small silver holo-pyramid, which was sitting on the table in front of Bernice Summerfield.

'You've what?' Darius Cheynor stared at the Doctor across the main console of the TARDIS.

160.

The Doctor met his gaze, his face set grimly. 'Don't agitate yourself, Trau Cheynor. The Zero Room is the safest place for her to be at the moment.'

Cheynor straightened up, shaking his head in astonishment. 'We're dealing with one of the most dangerous extraterrestrials ever encountered by Earth forces, and you've got her other half, whatever it is enjoying your hospitality? You could have got us all killed on Gadrell Major!'

The soft glow of the Phracton Commandant's mobile unit flared brighter for a brief moment, and the alien crackled quietly to itself. The movement was rather more of a threat than Cheynor's hectoring.

Suzi, sitting in the wicker chair in the corner of the console room, spoke.

'Darius is right, Doctor. You should have told us.'

The Doctor scowled. 'I can't be expected to inform everyone of everything.

The information was on a need-to-know basis. And you '

'Didn't need to know. Yes, Doctor, it's a familiar story,' said Cheynor wearily.

'That sort of excuse is a favourite of Earth Council, I think you'll find.'

'Are you going to fill us in, Doctor?' Suzi demanded, arms folded. 'Because I don't think I want to cooperate with you if you're keeping anything back from me.'

'So you don't trust me,' the Doctor muttered. 'I should have known.' He began to pace moodily around the console, hands folded behind his back. 'You, Darius, after I distracted Shanstra for you, dislocated her from the Phracton Secondary for long enough for both sides to see sense. And you, Commandant ' The Doctor squared up to the scarred, pitted globe of the alien, bend-ing low to speak into its grille. ' if it hadn't been for my telepathic interference, you would never have wrested control of the Swarm back from your late second-in-command.' The Doctor straightened up. The silence in the console room was uncomfortable. 'And Suzi!' he exclaimed, pointing dramatically in her direction. 'It was only my hypnosis a very dangerous task, given your state of mind at the time, if I may say so that helped you overcome the influence of Shanstra. Don't forget that.'

'I haven't forgotten, Doctor,' said Suzi sullenly, unable to meet his gaze. 'All right, so you've got her where you want her, on this s.h.i.+p. What's going to happen? Can you guarantee it'll be safe?'

'The Sensopath is going to tune in with her third self for us,' said the Doctor.

'Discreetly, I hope, so as not to attract attention, and before Shanstra manages to do so. That way, we might have some hope of restabilizing them, bringing them back together into one before Shanstra the evil, rogue side of the personality has a chance to have free rein.' The Doctor shook his head and gazed into the distance. 'If we fail, the consequences could be incalculable,'

he muttered.

161.

The time rotor stopped and the lighting in the TARDIS console room became momentarily brighter.

'Ah,' said the Doctor, and beamed at them all. 'We have arrived.'

'Where, exactly?' Cheynor wanted to know.

'At the edge of civilization, Captain. Millennia after the death of your solar system.'

Cheynor exchanged a look with Suzi. 'Well,' he said, 'I'm going to believe this when I see it.'

Kelzen had felt the music of the TARDIS. Its crescendo and diminuendo as it rode the waves of the Vortex; its soaring symphonies of effortlessly changing keys forming their pictures in the caverns of her mind. Images came and went, like desert sandstorms, like snow hissing under the light of a brace of suns, like those same suns sinking, falling behind hills of blue that billowed and erupted into the atmosphere.

She had never before communed with an ent.i.ty like the TARDIS. Time boiled up over it in great clouds of vortex surf, and she felt it shudder.

Portals whizzed by, exits and entrances, as she sensed its control, its discipline. And deep within the ent.i.ty, she sensed a hint of its owner, a link with the irascible, unpredictable being called the Doctor.

Kelzen concentrated. There was so much within her now. The TARDIS, like a sea of rippling blue gra.s.s. The Doctor, like a grim statue on the cliff-top where the gra.s.s ended. And the boy Sanjay, running, confused, through the crumbling ruins of a building, first one way, then the other, shadows rising up to block his path.

I am sorry, Kelzen tried to say to him. Kelzen tried to say to him. I meant you no harm, but I had to I meant you no harm, but I had to place myself somewhere. place myself somewhere. She felt his mind. The anguish of being human, but somehow tougher and more shockproof than others. A child conceived in anger and bitterness, in loveless brutality. Loss, longing, love. She felt his mind. The anguish of being human, but somehow tougher and more shockproof than others. A child conceived in anger and bitterness, in loveless brutality. Loss, longing, love.

Loss, longing, love . . .

It came back to her, like an echo from the highest caverns. Reflected, enhanced From the TARDIS.

The TARDIS, through Kelzen, recognized Sanjay's feelings, could speak of them, know them.

Kelzen backed out, rode the surface instead of the depths of the time machine's consciousness. She did not know why, but she felt she had disturbed something of the relations.h.i.+p between the Doctor and his machine, something that she should have left untouched.

The journey was ended. The solid, physical world came back to Kelzen in the form of the huge, pinkish-grey O-shaped walls of the Zero Room.

162.

She reached to Sanjay. He was still there, sharing her body and mind, and she rea.s.sured him. No more outbursts. No more uncontrollable anger and frustration, causing chaos in reality.

For the moment, there was no signal from Shanstra.

She breathed a huge, long sigh.

163.

21.

Misguided Tour