Doctor Who_ Infinite Requiem Part 24

How do you communicate?'

'Oh, Doctor, we are bonded, we have a unity that transcends time. Our race has access to the vortex, and Time Lords are but a distant legend.'

'I know that. Through Kelzen.'

'Kelzen. Yes. There is that small matter.'

Jirenal strode up to the Doctor and, smiling, gripped his lapels. He hoisted him up so that the diminutive Time Lord, legs flailing, was eye to eye with him. The Sensopath's eyes were like spheres of polished jet, reflecting the depths of another world. 'You could choose to deliver Kelzen to me, or I could extract her whereabouts from your mind. It is a simple choice.'

The Doctor, red-faced and choking, managed to meet Jirenal's gaze with defiance. 'She . . . trusts me, Jirenal . . . I . . . helped to save her. She won't . . .

come willingly, even if I do tell you '

Jirenal's fingers radiated like sudden sunbeams. The Doctor crashed to the floor, his shoulder burning with old, revitalized pain.

The Sensopath kicked him, forcing him over on to his back, and then, suddenly, it was as if the pastel light of every surface in the room became an unbearable, cartoon brightness. At the centre of it all was the ghastly face of the Sensopath, pinning him to the floor with a bar of solid thought.

I will break you down, Doctor. I will smash the dungeons of your mind to yield their secrets. Give me Kelzen! their secrets. Give me Kelzen!

186.

And the thought returned, uncompromising, bright and ancient like a su-pernova from the dawn of time, shattering the Doctor's fragile thoughts as if they were coconut sh.e.l.ls.

Jirenal burned his mind. Blazing with a fire of determination.

The Sensopath crashed in, ram-raiding the Doctor's consciousness.

187.

24.

Pretty Occupied

The security network around the Phoenix Phoenix skimmer bays was totally automated. It took Livewire no more than the stolen key to get through to the airlock of bay three, and then she was faced with a simple combination lock. skimmer bays was totally automated. It took Livewire no more than the stolen key to get through to the airlock of bay three, and then she was faced with a simple combination lock.

She dropped to one knee, forced the keypad away from its housing, and took a small, circular object from her pocket. Ancient technology 22nd century, she was sure. It had been one of the first things she'd liberated when the looting began in earnest. Its display began to interact with the circuitry in the lock, showing each combination on its tiny LCD screen as it was tested.

Livewire held her breath.

The combination began to appear, digit by digit.

'You must get them out,' Cheynor pleaded. 'Something very, very wrong is happening here!'

He did not understand what was going on, but he had been consumed with the urge to do something. Weeks, months of hanging around waiting for the next move of the enemy: it had helped to galvanize Darius Cheynor into action. To be part of something important, something morally right. Kelzen had somehow communicated to him what he had to do, and although Cheynor did not trust Kelzen, he had faith in the Doctor, and he seemed to trust Kelzen.

On top of that, there was the urge to respond to the horror of seeing his Phracton friend reduced to a pulp. Cheynor had just enough of his old, almost prim restraint left to realize, deep down, how dangerous that made him now.

The Pridka exchanged the briefest of glances, and then, apparently responding to instructions, the younger one turned back to the globe-console, ready to place his hands on it and to send a request.

As he did so, the gateway blazed.

Cheynor saw a tall, mainly female Pridka step out on to the ramp, her emerald-green robes glittering in the light, and her face commanding and serenely beautiful. 'I am Amarill,' she said haughtily. 'I forbid you to interfere with what is to happen.'

'Who's she?' Cheynor snapped.

The senior Pridka looked shocked. 'That is Amarill dell'kat.i.t vo'Pridka, Pri-mary Healer and a.s.sistant to the Director.'

189.

'The Director is dead.' The voice that emerged from Amarill's mouth was almost robotic, as if something were using her vocal cords without prior experience of how they worked.

Cheynor felt a chill spreading through him, and in that same instant he saw Amarill lift one blue hand, palm outwards.

There was a scream, which lasted only a few seconds, because after that time, the young Pridka's mouth became a beak. His head warped, pushed out on both sides and twisted upwards, blossoming into giant wings. At the same time his body was shrinking conversely and his limbs were curving, forming giant, serrated talons.

A shape larger than a fighter shuttle began to lift itself up from the floor.

Cheynor, aghast, drew his sidearm, but the senior Pridka knocked it away.

'No! Something is interfering with reality. You will not injure a Pridka!'

Deep, rich laughter echoed from Amarill's mouth, and Cheynor, as he desperately ducked for safety under the console, knew that the voice could not be her own. d.a.m.n you, Doctor, he thought. Where the h.e.l.l are you?

A huge shadow, falling, blotted out the light from the gateway.

The office of the director became a palimpsest, a bridge to another layer of existence. A realm where colours screamed, where sounds stabbed at the Doctor's brain cells and shook the pupils of his eyes.

He recognized, vaguely, the reddish-black void in which he had communed with Kelzen. A place between life and death, where the mind never normally went.

I've communed with both of your other selves, Jirenal. You're making a big mistake. mistake.

Jirenal laughed. The sound travelled, hurtling towards the Doctor like an oncoming train in a close-fitting tunnel.

'This is not the way, Jirenal!' the Doctor shouted, and it echoed as if in the real world. He summoned his defences to meet Jirenal's a.s.sault.

Come, Doctor, do not resist. I merely want to know you. To help you.

'All right, know me, then!' he snarled. He thought of words, commonplaces.

Blocking the way to the higher centres of his mind 'I'm a mysterious traveller in time and s.p.a.ce known only as the Doctor '

Mysterious? You are as transparent as water!

'I travel in the time vortex in the TARDIS, which means Time and Relative Dimension in s.p.a.ce '

And we have never come across one another before.

'Disguised as a London police box from twentieth-century Earth ' Deliberately Deliberately ' And it's dimensionally transcendental, which means it's bigger on the 190 inside than on the outside, although of course terms such as inside and outside are purely relative when it comes to dimensional engineering. Which is where the confusion arises!'

And with his last word, the Doctor found himself back in the real world, kneeling on the floor of the director's office, with the dead eyes of the Pridka himself staring at him from the chair.

A huge, flickering pillar of darkness, outlined in tendrils of light, framed Jirenal. The Sensopath's face was huge, swollen with pleasure and concentration.

The reality around the pillar, where the tendrils touched it, began to warp subtly. Two paperweights mated angrily on the desk and burst into smithereens. The director's desk began to sprout broad red leaves and small buds.

The Doctor nodded grimly. He had temporarily managed to block Jirenal out of his mind. 'Too much else to do,' he muttered, breathless but satisfied. 'So many minds in his new collective. Like finding a needle in a box of needles.'

Keeping a wary eye on the Sensopath, he grabbed his umbrella, checked it over for impurities, and with a grim nod he slid through the wall and on to the gravpad.

'To the Dreamguide,' he said. 'Urgently.'

On the way down, with light rus.h.i.+ng in torrents on either side of him, he lifted his hands to his temples and felt Kelzen quiver inside his mind, like a player backstage, billowing the curtain.

Send it, said the Doctor. said the Doctor.

The Sensopath's answer came back, jolting, like a hit of adrenalin. Shanstra Shanstra will intercept. will intercept.

I know. Send it anyway!

And something rippled in the strange mental synthesis, linked by the TARDIS's telepathic circuits. Through the uncanny alliance of the Doctor's symbiotic nuclei, the alien in the Zero Room and the small pyramid in the pocket of Professor Bernice Summerfield.

'You abandoned me, Suzi. You left me to die.'

They walked, half floating, beside the lake of the dream. Mist curled like curious wraiths from its surface, coalescing into clouds that surrounded Suzi and the half-dissolved skeletal body of her lover.

She was not frightened of him.

Suzi scowled. 'Abandoned? I could say exactly the same of you. I became a victim thanks to you. A n.o.body. You prodded and poked me with your rejection for as long as I could stand it. If you hadn't died when you did, I 191 might have ended up killing you.' Her eyes shone with anger. 'I don't regret it. I feel good about it! So you can't use it against me as guilt any more!'

The bloated white face registered surprise. 'But Suzi I never meant to hurt you.'

'No,' she said disparagingly. 'That's what they all say.' She put her hands on her hips and shouted into the mist. 'This is you, isn't it? Rummaging into my memories and trying to frighten me? Well, it isn't going to work!' She reached out to the nearest tree and snapped off a branch. It was fungus-encrusted, and came away from the tree as if made of toffee. 'He doesn't frighten me any more!' Suzi yelled, and, swinging the branch back as far as she could, she dealt the Cohn-zombie a hefty blow right in the middle of its face. Chunks of flesh burst outwards, off-white globules like soft wax. The faceless image disappeared.

Suzi let the branch fall from her hands, heard her own breath in her ears.

'Cancel,' she ordered. 'Get me out of here!'

There were times when Cheynor considered giving it all up and going into something less perilous: intergalactic marketing, maybe, or the leisure business. Times when he had wondered what the point of his life was. Times like now.

The giant eagle which, a few seconds ago, had been a Pridka flapped its wings at the top of the gateway and wheeled, beginning to descend.

Cheynor contemplated the tactics of his withdrawal under the console, and wondered whether it might have appeared cowardly. Certainly, there was a marked contrast with the elderly Pridka, who just stood there, fingers pressed together, looking up into the vaults with an expression of slight concern.

'Frightened, Trau Cheynor?' Again, that voice from Amarill's lips, but hollow.

He aimed his sidearm, tried to get a clear sighting on the eagle. It was circling him, alarmingly low, its wings like giant sails and its beak a great skewer that looked as if it could quite comfortably take his head off.

'The eagle is not the enemy. You misunderstand the enemy, Trau Cheynor.'

'Perhaps,' he shouted back. 'I like to shoot at what I can see.'

'That was always your problem, was it not? You misunderstood the Phractons, and your own Earth Council, who found you disposable.'

'Mind-reading might be a clever party piece,' said a familiar voice from the doorway, 'but when you've seen it once, it does pall a little.'

Cheynor saw the Doctor, who was leaning on his umbrella in the doorway, raise his hat to Amarill.

'Now,' he said, raising his eyebrows, 'why don't we stop this nonsense, right away?'

192.

Leibniz flicked the switches above his head, powering up the skimmer, running all the tests. Bernice, in the copilot's seat, watched his hands playing over the keyboard with intricate skill. He nodded to Bernice, and the two of them pulled protective goggles down over their eyes.

'Leader to Blue Unit,' snapped Leibniz into his comlink. 'Initiate launch.'

The force the last, desperate hope of soaking up Shanstra's attention, her deadly energy might be a suicide squad. Of that, Bernice was painfully aware. But after what she had seen happening in Tilusha's flat in 1997, and to the Phractons in Londinium Plaza, she wanted to be part of it. She wanted to be there at the heart of the action, because in her experience it was those who just sat back and did nothing who got hurt.

And she wanted to be there for Livewire. She had promised Trinket as much.

The girl's trace had been picked up, about five minutes after the unauthorized launch of a skimmer from bay three had been reported. She was just two klicks outside Banksburgh, and Leibniz intended to catch her up. But there was one thing he was not going to have, and that was Trinket cluttering up the team. So he had made Bernice promise to do the boy's job for him, and bring his sister back.

The signal had come an instant later. It had taken the form of the h-Doctor in 25th-century battle dress, brandis.h.i.+ng his umbrella and reciting a famous speech from Osterling's The Good Soldier The Good Soldier.

Bernice had raised an eyebrow, but she had been in no doubt. 'That's it,'

she said. 'We'd better go, or he'll do it once more, with feeling.'

The force was to be composed of two p.r.o.ngs. First, a ground unit of six armed skimmers, and several of the silver Phracton tanks that Benny had heard the humans calling flamers. She had not forgotten her nightmare pur-suit through the streets of Banksburgh, and still shuddered when she saw the machines. The second p.r.o.ng was the air support from the Phoenix Phoenix fighters fighters as many as could be mustered after the Battle of Banksburgh and the Phractons.

'You realize, when we get there,' Bernice said, 'that there'll be no way of telling our Phracs from hers?'

'Yeah,' answered Leibniz. 'I'd thought of that.'

'And do you have a solution?'

'No,' he said, and smiled briefly.

The skimmer powered up, and shot out of its launch tube, on to the reddish-brown surface of the planet. Others followed.

The final battle for Gadrell Major had begun.

193.