Doctor Who_ Infinite Requiem Part 7

She looked over her shoulder into the shadows by the stairs.

There was nothing there. Of course. And yet something in the flat was making her very uneasy. It had to be, she decided, the thought of what might be growing inside Tilusha's womb. It was bad enough that it should have been put there by that belching animal in the kitchen, without something . . . else else.

Bernice shuddered, and turned round to enter the lounge again.

She saw a pair of dark eyes.

She jumped, before realizing that the Doctor had slipped out into the hallway without her seeing him. His hair was tousled, his face grim. 'You startled me,' she said.

'I know.' He smiled, but it was not a real one, she could sense that much.

'I'm sorry. I want to talk to you.'

'Is this capital-T Talk?' Benny stuck her hands in her pockets and swivelled on one heel.

'It's time to get the second phase going. Ever since the TARDIS brought us here I've had the feeling that one of us should be somewhere else. Benny, I'm going to try something very dangerous and I need your help. I'd ask ' The Doctor paused, shook his head, looking at an invisible globe of s.p.a.ce just a few centimetres below his eyes. 'No. I'm asking you you.'

He looked up again, and with a shock she recognized something that she did not often see. It was an expression on the Doctor's face, something so unusual that it seemed to transform that lined, wise countenance into the lost face of a much younger man, someone more uncertain of the ways of the universe than he ever liked to reveal.

The Doctor was frightened.

He said: 'I want you to go to the planet Gadrell Major, in UCD 2387.'

Bernice swallowed and did not answer for a moment. 'You're sending me in the TARDIS?' she asked eventually.

He nodded.

'Alone?'

He nodded, then paused. A half-smile, and a sideways glance. 'Not totally,'

he said. 'See you back in there.'

She did not fully realize what the Doctor had meant until she thought to slip a hand into the pocket of her velvet waistcoat, where it encountered the smoothness of a small pyramid. And then she remembered the Doctor who was not the Doctor, the uncannily responsive hologram which walked and talked and was, if anything, more enigmatic and frustrating than the genuine article.

59.And she began to wonder exactly how long the Doctor had known that she would be needing it.

In the fiery shadows of the sports centre's observation dome, Suzi was on her knees, gazing at Shanstra.

Above them, the plexigla.s.s dome glittered, and below them the city flickered and burned. The occasional cry or distant explosion could be heard. Out there, somewhere, fights and lives were being won and lost.

Kneeling on the blue carpet of the dome's huge floor, Suzi Palsson felt more calm and peaceful than she had done for many years. Shanstra's dark gaze held love. It held the love of Colm Oswyn and the love of her parents and the love of a new and trusted friend.

The alien woman had found herself something new to wear: a close-fitting black suit taken from the gravball lockers at the ice-rink. Over it, the stolen fake velvet cloak was draped. Both somehow looked tailor-made for Shanstra's giant body.

Suzi felt Shanstra's gloved palm descend on her head. Many will a.s.sail us, Many will a.s.sail us, Suzi. There are those who don't understand the love of the soul. The beauty in Suzi. There are those who don't understand the love of the soul. The beauty in the way creation harmonizes with destruction, into one. Do you know that? the way creation harmonizes with destruction, into one. Do you know that?

Suzi nodded.

On the wall by the curve of the lift doors, the indicator was climbing slowly up its column of lights.

Shanstra saw it, and was pleased. 'Now,' she said, using her voice, her lips moving in exquisite undulation. 'I want you to take out your gun, and to place it on the floor beside you.'

Suzi felt a twinge of panic above her calmness, like a wasp buzzing round her face on a soft summer's day.

'Don't worry,' said Shanstra. 'I knew you had it with you. I realize you are not a fool. And luckily, my dear, neither am I.'

Suzi pulled the Raz-33 out from concealment with a quiet swish of metal against material. It felt heavy in her hand, and she thought she could smell its angry heat; for the first time, it no longer felt like a friend. She placed the gun on the carpet beside her.

The lift was five floors down.

In the cylindrical lift, three faces. Three very different faces.

Livewire, set and chiselled, as if every emotion had been programmed, every response mapped out and followed to the letter. It was not calmness more a kind of channelled tension.

Trinket, whose eyes could not keep still, whose tongue ran over too-dry lips, making them drier.

60.Polymer, with lazy, hooded eyes above a cruel and blubbery face, not really antic.i.p.ating what was to come.

Going up.

Coming down, there would only be one of them.

Shanstra's head turned at the sound of the lift doors. She smiled.

'Welcome,' she said.

Trinket was to remember that it had happened like this.

He had just a couple of seconds to register the contents of the room: the plush carpet, the smooth, padded furniture, the observation panels. At the centre, there were two women, one kneeling and the other, dark-clad and impossibly tall, standing.

The woman in black gave them a smile like running blood, and she said something which he did not hear.

He saw the gun glinting on the floor, in the thickness of the carpet, and he supposed Livewire must have spotted it at the same time.

It was Livewire who shouted at Polymer to get the gun, and to Trinket's surprise, Poly obeyed, making a lunge across the floor at Suzi Palsson.

In that same instant, or so it seemed, there was a flash of the brightest green, like the very heart of a coppery flame. Trinket was bowled off his feet by a force that lifted him from underneath and threw him back, luckily for him, into the nearest of the padded seats. Livewire's arrow, which had been fired an instant earlier, curled up in midair like a dying slug. It fizzed green sparks and thrashed in currents of invisible power before shattering. Livewire, angered, was knocked aside as further radiance streamed from the woman's eyes and hands.

Polymer actually got quite near to the gun. Her fingers closed over the b.u.t.t. Unfortunately, they remained attached to the rest of her body for only a further half-second.

Trinket blinked as he saw Polymer apparently hit by a wall of streaming green flame. There was a sound like petrol igniting and she was hurled back minus her right hand. Copious flesh was stripped from her body, and it sizzled on the carpet in fatty pools. The carbonized skeleton, all that remained of Poly, twisted once and crumbled as it hit the wall by the lift doors. Slithering to the burnt carpet, it left a smeary trail of charcoal.

Green sparks buzzed like hungry flies between the body and Shanstra's hand. Trinket realized then that the woman's smiling face was turning round towards him.

He threw himself towards the lift, his heart pounding, thinking that at any moment he might be turned to ash.

61.The doors swished open.

Trinket's memory would forever be burned with the memory of the woman smiling, her head c.o.c.ked slightly to one side as in reproof, her black hair streaming out behind her like an executioner's cloak, standing amid the green swirl of light and chaos and the ashes of Polymer's body. With Livewire struggling to her feet against the far wall.

And then the door clamped shut and the image was gone, and the lift began to descend.

Trinket was shaking. He felt himself sliding to the floor, and was not inclined to stop himself because his legs could not support him any longer.

Livewire. Still up there.

The thought did not deter him from running as fast as he could when the lift reached the bottom floor. He ran out across the foyer, through the plexigla.s.s door they had smashed on their way in.

There was something happening out on the street. Whatever else might be going on, there was still a war in progress. This occurred to Trinket with sudden clarity when he saw two low-life scavengers running across the rubble, momentarily picked out in a beam of light.

A Phracton search beam. So now, he was safe nowhere. And unarmed.

Although, Trinket thought in frustration, it wasn't as if he'd have much ability with a gun even if he did possess one.

He ducked behind a cl.u.s.ter of metal bins.

Something squealed and thumped like a firework, and then he saw a fountain of incinerated rubbish spewing out in a flash of light. The Phracs were on to his hiding-place.

If Trinket had been in a more thoughtful frame of mind, he might have stopped to wonder why the Phractons should be bothered with him, when according to the bulletins they had made clear their policy of not attacking civilians. But Trinket accepted his role as prey now, and saw every shadow as a hunter. He was not in the mood to question.

He saw the glint of their hovering globes as he made a dash across Corporation Boulevard. The Phractons were right behind, the droning of their travel units shrill and clear in the night.

He made it behind a vid-booth in one of the central islands of the boulevard.

He flattened himself against its smoothness and risked a glance.

He heard the multi-frequency crackles that always seemed to accompany the Phractons, and knew they had to be close behind him twenty metres at the most.

Well, he would give them a good run. Trinket clenched his fists, told himself again and again that he was not an acceptable casualty. And then he broke cover, and ran for the nearest alleyway.

62.It tingled inside Benny's head now, and it was beginning to annoy her. Just on the edge of hearing the sound lurked, and she wondered how it sounded to Tilusha, stretched out on the sofa. If she had understood the Doctor correctly, Tilusha was hearing an amplified version of the same signal.

She rubbed the back of her neck, and tried to concentrate on what the Doctor had said to her in the dimness of the hall.

He had held up a flat, round device with a single red control on it.

'Stattenheim remote-control for the TARDIS,' he explained. 'Been broken for a long while, but I repaired it recently.' He grinned rather sheepishly at her. 'After that time I had to get back to you in San Francisco, I thought I could do with a quicker method of recalling her.'

'Very tidy. And so?'

'It's programmed,' the Doctor said, 'to give you six Earth hours. That's how long you'll have to find the source of the Sensopathic emissions. After six hours precisely, the TARDIS will return to its starting point here in England.'

'Why? Why can't I just come back?'

The Doctor had appeared agitated, looking over his shoulder as if he ought to be getting back to the situation in the lounge. 'We're moving on, Benny. I want you to start something for me, and then I'll join you as soon as I can.'

Bernice nodded, drawing breath. 'I suppose there's no point asking why I can't stay here with you?'

'It might not be safe.'

'Really? Wonders will never cease.'

'I don't know why the Sensopathic distress signal should have been split into segments. If my hunch is right, the whole structure of the cosmos could be at stake and the focus of the danger is here on Earth.'

'Charity begins at home,' Benny sighed.

And now, Bernice Summerfield, with the holo-pyramid and TARDIS key in her pocket, stood in the thickening rain outside the City Hall and contemplated the TARDIS. She could refuse, of course, she thought as she pushed strands of damp hair out of her eyes. She could slip away from the grey city in the TARDIS and leave the Doctor to sort it all out. Escape from it for good.

But there were several problems, naturally, with that approach. What would be the cost of non-intervention? When the Doctor had interfered in the past, it had usually been for the best. He had told her all the stories about his people, the Time Lords, and how they pretended to despise the thought of stepping in to change history. They had even put the Doctor on trial for it twice, but were not averse to using him as an intergalactic troubleshooter whenever they did not want to get their hands dirty.

And now, as she kicked a puddle and looked up again at the dark blue police box which was waiting for her, she knew that she could not let the 63 Doctor down.

She slipped the key into the lock, noting, as she had before, the way that it seemed to become part of the door, to guide her hand to open it. She took one last look at the city: the cars swis.h.i.+ng through puddles, the bobbing multi-coloured umbrellas, the workmen shovelling furiously in a coned-off hole on the other side of the road.

Bernice frowned. She had visited twentieth-century Earth several times now, but this was the first time that the sheer ordinariness of it all had unsettled her. It was almost as if she was wondering, momentarily, if this slightly melancholy view would be the last she would ever see of this planet in this time.

The TARDIS door closed behind her.

The doors hummed as they admitted Bernice to the main console room, and folded to behind her. There was a series of clicks from the console as the pre-programmed settings activated themselves.

She kicked her shoes off, slumped into the basket-chair and let out a long sigh. The time rotor clicked into action and began to move up and down, indicating that the s.h.i.+p was in flight.

Just like old times, Bernice told herself wryly.

Except, of course, for the fact that she didn't have the Doctor with her.

64.

Part Two

BROKEN LAND.

The one who bewitches you with sleep or darkness and lies with you we will drive him away from here.

from a prayer for the safety of the embryo, in the Rig Veda Medusa was once renowned for her beauty, and roused jealous hopes in the hearts of many suitors. Of all the beauties she possessed, none was more striking than her lovely hair.

Ovid, Metamorphoses Metamorphoses

8.