Doctor Who_ Trading Futures Part 17

Jaxa was reaching for a silver tube at her belt. 'Doctor, you must be removed from this continuum and taken '

'Wait a moment,' the Doctor interrupted. 'Make up your mind. If you're right and this isn't a time machine, then what, exactly, am I guilty of? Supplying light bulbs?'

Roja was looking confused. 'He's right, Jaxa. If this isn't a time machine, then no crime has been committed.'

'But the Doctor himself claims that it is is a time machine.' a time machine.'

The Doctor smiled smugly. 'If you're going to put me on trial, you'll need better evidence than that. It'll be my word against mine.'

Jaxa was having none of it. 'You'll be taken to a place where your actions can be a.s.sessed and punished.'

As she unclipped the tube, Malady made her move she swept down with her hand, chopping Jaxa's gun out of her hand. She then swung round, kicking Roja hard in the face. He fell down, grabbing at his nose.

Malady grabbed the Doctor's sleeve. 'Time to go,' she told him.

The Doctor looked back over his shoulder. 'Who are are they?' they?'

Jaxa's Story Let me tell you how they did it (how they did it back in history, I mean).

Before it was done to me, I was an historian, so I ought to have known. I did know. On the threat of war, the Admiralty issued press warrants to their officers. Gangs of marines were sent out, led by some old, worn-out lieutenant, and all the merchant s.h.i.+ps were prevented from leaving port.

Everyone's heard of the press gangs. The common image is that they roamed the streets, grabbed drunks from the benches of the taverns and dragged them back to their s.h.i.+p. That happened, but not as often as you've been led to believe from old films. It didn't have to.

The press gangs did most of their work in the harbours, going on board the s.h.i.+ps. The crew of an English s.h.i.+p in an English port didn't get sh.o.r.e leave if they did, the captain would never see half of them again. Trusted men were granted it, in small groups, but you could spend ten years on your s.h.i.+p and never set foot on dry land. The mountain came to Mohammed every s.h.i.+p arriving in port was boarded by travelling salesmen, tobacconists, minstrels, barrels of beer, and women, of course. Plenty of women. More often than not, there were more 'Blue Sallys' on board a s.h.i.+p in port than there were crewmen.

And that's where the press gangs went first the lower decks of the big merchant s.h.i.+ps. They gave you a choice about it, too, contrary to what you might have heard. They told you if you volunteered, you got paid a bounty. If you didn't volunteer, of course, you were pressed into service anyway.

It's no coincidence that the phrase catch-22 was coined about a war. Every time there's a war, people make claims about the first casualty, and it's always an abstract truth, freedom, reason. No one ever talks about the first recruit, but that's an abstract, too logic. The Admiralty became a bastion of inescapable logic, the sort that confused Alice and kept Kafka up at night.

But there was something attractive about it, too. Suddenly, everything became maths, a straightforward proposition, the world became much easier to understand. You're either with us or against us. Everyone's in uniform, everyone knows their place. There are regulations, rules of engagement, there are orders. What was happening might not make much sense fighting for peace was always, at best, a problematic concept but why it was happening is perfectly straightforward. Everyone knew how they would be spending their days, what they had to do, what the reward would be. If it was a choice between death or glory... well, not many people volunteered for option (a).

But that didn't stop some people from running. I would have, when he came for me, if I'd had the choice.

The gangs caused chaos, of course the press gangs had regulations, but they weren't regulated. They were ruffians half the gang would only just have been captured themselves, and didn't see why anyone else should get away. Anyone they found got beaten to the ground, checked to see if they wore sailor's clothes underneath their coat, or had tar on their hands. Dead giveaways.

There were ways to avoid the press gang, ways more imaginative than just hiding or running. Get your friends to accuse you of some crime, get locked up for the night by the magistrate, then have them drop charges in the morning, when the gang had gone. That was a good one.

The best way, traditionally, was not to be physically present in the eighteenth century, to exist on a world with no sea, to live in the forty-ninth century, a far distant era of unparalleled peace and prosperity.

That was my way of avoiding the gangs. Extreme, I know, and imagine my surprise when it didn't work.

He was from the eighteenth century, you see. was from the eighteenth century, you see. He He was at war, looking for recruits. He also had a s.h.i.+p, which he rather fancifully sailed in the Mare Tranquillitatis. In his day, he would explain later, the astronomer-astrologers knew beyond any doubt that the dark patches on the Moon's surface really were seas, hence the names. That they weren't actually bodies of water wasn't important, it was the idea that was, it was their absolute faith that made his voyage possible. When I suggested to him that such a sentiment made no sense, he merely smiled. was at war, looking for recruits. He also had a s.h.i.+p, which he rather fancifully sailed in the Mare Tranquillitatis. In his day, he would explain later, the astronomer-astrologers knew beyond any doubt that the dark patches on the Moon's surface really were seas, hence the names. That they weren't actually bodies of water wasn't important, it was the idea that was, it was their absolute faith that made his voyage possible. When I suggested to him that such a sentiment made no sense, he merely smiled.

He looked... well, I'm a film scholar and archivist. My job is to return to the primitive times, and to go back and recover all the films and television programmes that were withdrawn, deaccessioned and junked. And to me, he looked like the middle-period Orson Welles, that is, after he started putting on weight but before he grew the beard. He might not have literally looked like that, you understand, and might not have appreciated the description, but I really didn't care.

I was dying.

A time jump had gone wrong placed me in the wrong century, before the Moon had an atmosphere, before the terraforming. I was barely three decades away from safety, I could reach out with my band, almost touch it.

The radiation was intense, and more than enough to destroy the fragile ubertronics of my time machine. The heat burned at my skin, toyed with me. In the circ.u.mstances, the total vacuum was a mild inconvenience.

Sabbath stood there, his coat-tails flapping in a non-existent sea breeze. His moon had an atmosphere, as well as men with umbrellas for noses, kittens the size of elephants, and rocks that sang shanties in fluent French.

He offered me a choice. If I didn't come with him, he'd... take me anyway. He needed timefarers for a great enterprise he was undertaking, and he was having difficulty finding a workforce. He said something about paying peanuts and only getting monkeys, which I took to be a private joke.

So I took his hand, and as I did, I felt the sea breeze on my face, and knew I'd never be able to go back.

Chapter Eleven.

Bankruptcy The Doctor and Malady were running out of the lift before the doors were even fully open.

They were out of reception, splas.h.i.+ng towards the Land Rover in seconds. The Doctor had the keys in his hand. He pointed them at the car, pressed the control to activate the central locking.

The Land Rover exploded.

While the Doctor examined the keychain, puzzled, Malady looked up. Jaxa was at a window, far above them, pointing a gun.

A second shot scored the air, but exploded harmlessly twenty feet from them.

'They've got us pinned down,' the Doctor said.

'She has we don't know where the boy is,' Malady corrected him.

'Come on!' the Doctor started running close along the side of the building.

Malady followed, one eye looking back, trying to spot the boy.

She almost missed the helicopter in front of them.

It was a Raven, a stealth guns.h.i.+p, a stalwart of the European air force. Malady had never seen one up close. It was larger, more solid, than she had imagined. The rotor blades were angled down a little, and were kicking up waves of spray.

The helicopter turned, almost lazily. The door at the side was open, an old man was crouched there, a rifle in his lap.

'Do you recognise him?' the Doctor asked.

She did. 'Jonah Cosgrove.'

'Give me your gun.'

'It doesn't have the range.'

'The gun gun,' the Doctor hissed.

Malady handed it over. The Doctor pa.s.sed it from hand to hand, as if deciding whether to fire left* or right*handed.

Cosgrove had his rifle on his shoulder, and was carefully aiming it. They were sixty feet apart possibly less. His gun did have the range. It also had computer*a.s.sisted scopes, but Malady suspected Cosgrove wouldn't need them.

The rifle muzzle flashed, just as the Doctor fired the pistol.

Two seconds later, Cosgrove, the Doctor and Malady were all still alive, which surprised her.

The Doctor fired again. The first time, Malady had thought she'd imagined it, but she saw it again: a smear of a spark in the air between them and the helicopter.

Cosgrove fired, so did the Doctor. The third time, the third spark, and Malady realised what the Doctor was doing.

He was shooting Cosgrove's bullets out of the air.

Cosgrove hadn't worked it out. The helicopter was coming ever nearer he was shouting something to the pilot he thought there was something wrong with his gun.

An energy bolt sizzled between Malady and the Doctor, then on underneath the helicopter, before exploding into the half*collapsed office block opposite.

Malady turned to see the boy, only a few feet behind them, looking annoyed with himself for missing.

He aimed his gun again.

Malady did exactly what her training told her to she ran straight for him. The second energy bolt detonated where she had just been. She caught up with the boy as his face was just registering that she was heading his way.

She brought her forearm down to the child's wrist, deflecting his gun hand, brought her knee up between his legs, slammed his chin with the heel of her palm, then grabbed his wrist, planning to either get him to drop the gun or break his wrist. In the event, she did both.

He squealed. Malady recovered his gun, then gave him a swift chop to the back of the neck, and he fell face first into the floodwater.

She watched him struggle on to his hands and knees, spitting out dirty water, tears in his eyes, his hand hanging limply.

Chalk one up to the good guys.

She turned on her heel, raised the ray gun and fired at the helicopter. The energy bolt hit the tail fin, blowing a great chunk out of it. The helicopter pulled up and away, and she could hear Cosgrove turning the air blue as he ordered the pilot to get them back down there.

The Doctor was watching them go. Malady joined him.

'We need to get inside,' the Doctor told her, looking around for a building that didn't look like it was about to collapse. 'There,' he said finally.

Cosgrove was angry with the pilot for retreating, but now they were out of the area, he accepted it had been the right decision. The helicopter was labouring, the engine didn't sound healthy. Besides, he'd just had a call from the communications centre on the royal plane.

The helicopter pilot had wanted to get down to a.s.sess the damage, and had found a raised bit of wasteland where that was possible. With the engines powering down, it was possible to have a more meaningful conversation with the comms room.

Penny Lik had found something she thought Cosgrove might find useful. When she told him what it was, Cosgrove could only agree.

Jaxa found Roja propped against the wall of the office block, trying to stop himself crying.

'She hurt me. She stole my gun.'

'You let advanced technology fall into the hands of a primitive?'

'I didn't let let her. She hurt me.' her. She hurt me.'

For the first time in the two years she'd known him, Roja looked his age, and it struck Jaxa just how inhuman it was to expose a twelve*year*old child to danger.

Eighteenth*century ethics for you. Her employer prided himself on being ahead of his time, of being a man of the future. But his future was children down mines and up chimneys, it was only a third of women dying in childbirth, it was hunting animals to extinction to make billiard b.a.l.l.s and exotic rugs, only to discover that man himself was just a jumped*up monkey.

Sabbath's cabin boy was one of the lucky ones. Found in the street, he'd been given clothes and a bed, he'd been taught to read and write. When it had come to Sabbath's attention that he'd proved adept at that, he'd become a Boy First Cla.s.s, his training had become intense, if specialised mathematics, chronology, astrology*astronomy, high*energy physick.

Operational training with Jaxa was just part of his studies. This boy would be one of the Admirals of the Fleet, when he was a man. And when there was a Fleet.

'Stand up,' she ordered. He struggled to.

'There are locals after the Doctor and his companion,' Roja said. 'They have aircraft.'

'Then we will kill them.'

Baskerville smiled at Anji.

'Will you start, or should I?' he asked reasonably, using the cultured English accent, not the East European one he'd used when he didn't know she was listening in.

'You're not from the future?' He couldn't be, or the detector would be bleeping.

'No.'

'So where did you get your time machine?'

Baskerville shook his head. 'I have to keep some of my secrets. Now, my turn: How much do the CIA know?'

'Nothing.'

Baskerville looked her up and down, as if appreciating her for the first time. Anji kept her arms by her sides if he wanted a good look, he might as well have it.

'Nothing?' he asked.

'I'm not CIA.'

That clearly surprised him. 'You are are working for the EZSS, after all?' working for the EZSS, after all?'

'I'm not even sure what that is.'