Doctor Who_ The Blue Angel Part 10

They had triumphed.

'What are they?' Compa.s.sion stared about her. 'Are they real?'

The Doctor nodded. 'It's no illusion. Nothing in the Corridors is unreal. Everything has been brought here from somewhere, from some time. But it's all without rhyme or reason...'

They were still staring at the chamber of floating babies.

'We have to pa.s.s through,' said Compa.s.sion. 'Whoever put these here are depending on your soft-heartedness. They want to keep you here for ever.'

'So what do you suggest?' snapped the Doctor. 'That we roll right through in the bus? Squash them flat?'

'We don't even know what they are. They're nothing to do with us.'

'We have to leave the bus.'

She shook her head. 'It's the only bit of protection we have.'

He took her arm and pointed at the room. 'Look there are babies growing out of the walls, the ceilings, the floors... We can't just ride over them.'

'Then do what you should have done before.'

'What?'

'Her bus is a TARDIS, isn't it? Use it like one. Dematerialise. Come out the other end. Take us to Valcea.'

Compa.s.sion stalked back into the bus.

He followed.

'You've no idea how erratic this thing is. I found out last time and we're in a region of great instability. We've no idea what the Corridors will do.'

But Compa.s.sion was already at the controls as he closed the doors behind them.

Before he even knew what was going on, she was plunging the dematerialisation switch.

One minute they were charging and howling through the windswept blue of the Corridor.

The next, the dogs had dragged them into a white gla.s.s s.p.a.ce, crazed with fractures and filled with the sound of distant explosions.

Meisha screeched in exultation. 'We've made it! Praise be to Pesst for bringing us safely to Valcea!'

The dogs pulled their sleds to a halt and stood panting as the Ghillighast stared in some awe at the cathedral-sized s.p.a.ce around them.

Belinda poked her head out. 'Back again.'

Marn was appalled. 'There is little left of my city. This was our most sacred building.'

Behind them the blue Corridor sealed itself and vanished with barely a whisper.

The High Priestess Meisha was barking with triumph.

She had seen something none of the others had seen yet.

At the far end of the shattered cathedral, in a patch of pearly, spectral light, a gla.s.s pillar had fallen and, pinned beneath it, bleeding but still alive, lay the great leathery body of Daedalus.

One of his tusks had snapped. (Oh, how like Ganes.h.!.+ G.o.d of the broken tusk! Daedalus was ever alert to his own status as iconography.) He was breathing stertorously, glaring at them with contempt. His hide had turned an ashen grey.

As Belinda helped Marn out of the paG.o.da and back into his chair, and pushed him across the rubble-strewn floor, she watched the Ghillighast gather around the fallen king.

'Help me out!' he started to bellow: Help me out immediately!'

The Ghillighast shrieked with laughter. One or two picked up slivers of gla.s.s and p.r.i.c.ked at his hide to see him bleed and what colour flowed fresh from his wounds.

He moaned piteously and flapped his taloned hands. 'Let me out and I will give you this world. The Ghillighast will rule her unimpeached.'

Meisha was unimpressed. 'Daedalus, we already do.'

Blandish, Garrett and the rest of the bridge crew were shepherded into the captain's oval office.

They were locked in and forgotten about as the lumbering creatures ran amok on the bridge and throughout the s.h.i.+p.

There came the sounds of slaughter as the Sahmbekarts thinned down the crew numbers, but the prisoners in the oval office knew that they, at least, would need to be kept alive for now.

They were the s.h.i.+p's pilots. Only they could take it back to the worlds beyond the Enclave that the Sahmbekarts so coveted.

Garrett was overcome with misery and remorse.

'We should never have agreed to arbitration.' He glared down at his s.h.i.+p's Kitty and, in a moment of rare anger, flung it to one side. 'It was an expensive decision.'

Timon was even more bitter. 'We gave in. We should have gone down fighting. While they were firing on us, we should have given it all we had. We should have flung ourselves at the mother s.h.i.+p. Taken them with us.'

Blandish seemed curiously quiet. They looked at him and suddenly they knew he had hatched a plan. Just like his old self.

He hurried around to the other side of his desk and flipped open a hidden panel.

'The Sahmbekarts don't know about this. I had this installed after the first five-year mission. How many times before that did we need something to override the main controls? How many times was our bridge taken over by hostile alien forces?'

He was grinning now, full of bravado once more.

'Forty-seven times in all,' said Garrett.

'Exactly!' cried Blandish. 'And we always came through, didn't we?' Then he started tapping and typing busily at the b.u.t.tons on the hidden controls. 'We always always come through.' come through.'

'What are you doing?' asked Timon.

'I'm taking your cue. Since you're in the mood for a kamikaze mission, I'm giving instructions to override the bridge. I'm telling the Nepotist Nepotist to crash-land on Valcea!' to crash-land on Valcea!'

It was Belinda's voice that startled them all then. Hers was the prerecorded voice that spoke, with chilling calm and precision, counting down the moment of impact for sixty seconds.

'Everyone,' said Blandish, with a rakish, somewhat hysterical grin, 'brace yourselves.'

Chapter Thirty-Six.

I Was Panicking Over Dinner...

I was panicking over dinner.

The potatoes had turned mushy at the parboiling stage. And then I was diverted by noise in the hallway.

Fitz was greeting our guests.

They were swaddled up in winter things, coated in fresh snow.

Sally was breathless and pink-faced, beaming, glad to be here, brandis.h.i.+ng a bottle of expensive red wine.

Under her other arm she carried that strange dirty dog of hers.

With her stood the fattest, oldest woman I had ever seen. She wore about twenty layers of coats and cardigans which she enlisted the gallant Fitz to help her remove.

Fitz stifled his laughter as he helped the old woman with her endless layers and hung them on the hatstand in the hall.

'This is my neighbour, Iris,' said Sally brightly.

And the old woman fixed me with a roguish look. I didn't like it at all. When I took her hand it was scratchy and dry.

She looked like Baba Yaga Baba Yaga in the old Russian fairy tales my mother used to tell me on long snowy evenings like this one. in the old Russian fairy tales my mother used to tell me on long snowy evenings like this one.

The long snowy evenings we had been stuck in for weeks.

Baba Yaga flew about the world in a mortar and pestle, and she lived in a shed on chicken legs. Her home could run about the place. flew about the world in a mortar and pestle, and she lived in a shed on chicken legs. Her home could run about the place.

She wore a cloak woven from the feathers of every bird in the world.

This old Iris took ages to let go of my hand. Behind her Fitz was dying to laugh.

'And so you are the Doctor,' she cackled. 'Sally has told me a surprising amount about you, young man.'

'Has she?'

'You have a very great destiny,' she said, eyelashes fluttering, as if she were in a trance. 'Or a very great past. Which is it?'

I gulped. 'I must go and check on dinner.'

I made Fitz show them into the dining room and told him to persuade Compa.s.sion never at her best in strange company to be sociable and nice.

I heard Iris asking about the lizard and the angel fish in our tanks.

Sally followed me into the kitchen. I didn't hear her until I had my head inside the oven.

'Don't mind Iris. She likes to go on all mysterious.'

I was balancing the roasting dish, carrying it spitting to the bench, where I set to work carving the meat into delicate slivers.

'I feel like I've seen her before,' I said.

'Perhaps you have.' She pinched a bit of meat. 'Melts in your mouth,' she smiled. 'You always could cook.'

'I saw my mother this week.'

'How is she?'

I shrugged. Sally and my mother had never approved of each other. Each convinced that the other was about to take me away.

As I started transferring the meat to the warmed plates, Sally said, 'You haven't said anything yet.'

'What about?'

She looked hurt. 'My book. That I gave you last week. You've had a whole week to read it.'

'You know I'm not a fast reader. My concentration has been all over the place.'

She pulled a face, disappointed.

'And...' I went on, straining vegetables over the sink, 'with the weather like it's been...'

'What's the weather got to do with it?'

'Everything's been... like a struggle for survival recently. As though we were slipping into a second ice age.'

'And that stops you reading a book by your oldest, dearest friend. Who really needs your opinion.'

Whoops. I'd hurt her feelings.

As I started arranging things nicely on the plates she was poking away at something on the kitchen table. A leather-bound volume on the oilcloth.