Doctor Who_ Autumn Mist Part 12

'Philadelphia,' Wiesniewski supplied.

'Philadelphia...' The Doctor suddenly grabbed Wiesniewski by the shoulders, and for a moment the lieutenant was afraid that the Doctor was going to kiss him. 'You're a genius!' The Doctor beamed, looking as energised as if someone had plugged him into the mains. 'That explains quite a bit.'

Garcia nodded, wearily. 'I don't suppose you'd care to share?'

'I'm not really sure I should,' said the Doctor, indignantly. 'It's all still cla.s.sified at this time, and I could get in terrible trouble for saying the wrong thing.' He carried straight on, but then Garcia had worked out by now that the Doctor didn't exactly care much for the rules.

'Well, basically, in October last year there was a top-secret experiment that didn't go entirely to plan. Trying to make a s.h.i.+p and its crew invisible within an electromagnetic field, you know the sort of thing. If Lewis was part of that, then it's possible he's trying to start up a variation on that experiment here. And if that's right, it would help explain a lot of the phenomena here.'

'You mean he's causing it?' asked Wiesniewski.

'No, not exactly. It would take tremendous power to do it with the crude methods available to Lewis, and he couldn't keep that a secret. But it does mean that he had the same help then as now; and it means I know how that help is getting around without being noticed by all and sundry. Phasing technology, and almost certainly electrical in nature.'

'I have no idea what that means,' said Garcia, sighing.

'Good! No one in this decade should know what that means.' He stopped in the middle of the street, as air-raid sirens began to sound. 'Ah. I wondered how long before we had one of those...' He spun on his heel. 'Come on! Back to the hospital; the patients are going to need care when they're moved to the shelters.'

Leitz saluted the handful of fighter-bombers that flew over Lanzerath on their way to put Bastogne under siege. Right now, he wished he could be up there with them, soaring above the land, looking down at this mess from on high...

As a boy, he had dreamed of being a pilot. Still, pity the man, someone had once told him, who fulfils all his dreams. Then, like Alexander, he would have no more worlds to conquer, and no more reason to live.

Or to die, he reminded himself.

Leitz lowered his eyes to look straight ahead as he entered the Cafe Scholzen. Everyone was rather nervously avoiding his gaze, and he knew immediately that there had been some communication from Wewelsburg.

'Well?' he asked Farber. 'What do they have to say?'

'They want the prisoner taken back to Wewelsburg for study.'

Leitz could feel things slipping away from him, as the droning of the aircraft faded into the distance. He swallowed hard. 'To the castle itself?'

Farber nodded, not looking any more pleased than Leitz felt. 'They've had new generators installed to keep it secure, and forged special barriers.' He handed over the communique, which Leitz saw was personally signed by that charlatan Himmler.

'What do we do?' Farber asked, his voice quiet.

Leitz said nothing.

As Leitz and Farber stood there, a trio of indistinct figures smoothly descended through the ceiling behind them, silent and unnoticed.

They separated and moved into different areas of the cafe.

Leitz paid no heed to the colours of SS camouflage smocks which pa.s.sed him by. Ordinary infantry soldiers under other men were facelessly uninteresting to him. He wondered absently which of them had left the front door open so that a draught could chill his back.

'If we return to Wewelsburg now, we'll never survive the debriefing,' Leitz said at length. 'Prepare the 232s. We'll simply have to go and find a new subject.'

'That could take some time,' Farber warned. 'And what if...' He looked noticeably paler. 'What if those things come back?'

Leitz considered the whole situation. If they failed to find another subject, well, he would still have three armoured cars and a clear route to neutral Switzerland. At least you could run from execution in many ways he'd sooner face that than those... things in the fog again.

But it was his scientific curiosity that held him, that left him so frustrated that the subject was gone. He needed to understand it. If the creatures did come after another prisoner, let them attack Wewelsburg, and solve his problems for him.

Himmler could play at black magic at Wewelsburg until the cows came home, but Leitz had more sense. He hadn't spent years at university just to be led by the nose by a bunch of people who thought chanting in robes would help them conquer the world.

One of the three figures that had descended into the cafe pa.s.sed two mortals discussing a piece of paper. Their human emotions were crude and loud.

It continued upstairs to where the Scholzen family's apartment had been turned into a little field medical station. There, it ignored the wounded men sitting around the living room, just as they ignored it.

It pa.s.sed silently through the door to the bedroom. The dying were there, and the dying were the ones it had come to visit.

The s.h.i.+p had carried Sam and Galastel to a city set amid a verdant forest. It was an odd-looking structure completely alien, and yet redolent of many different human architectural styles. Galastel told her it belonged to his own people, the Sidhe.

Dark spots caught her eye in the forest: scattered patches of painful decay. At first she thought they were simply some kind of fungus, something living on the trees. These things happened, and Sam wasn't one to query nature it generally knew what it was doing.

On closer inspection, though, she realised that the decaying areas had radial lines stretching out from the central rotting core and little satellite patches around them... Like debris fields, around the image of an impact crater...

With sudden clarity, Sam realised that that was exactly what this was. These rotting patches were how the sh.e.l.ls and bombs from the war affected the Sidhe's plane of residence that she could currently perceive. Presumably they had different effects on all the different levels that the Sidhe themselves could operate on. Perhaps they were patches of blinding light on one level, or bottomless pits on another...

Sam suspected that the list of possible perceptions was longer than the casualty list for the whole war, but she was willing to bet that none of them were good.

Like the forest, the city was suffering. Once-golden domes were now cracked and tarnished, and there was a rank smell in the air, that of poor sanitation and unhealthy people... Worse still, being a place of altered perceptions, it affected the emotions directly; this was a sad and dying place.

Sam couldn't quite catch her breath for a moment, as the woes of the population washed around her, and even the buildings wept.

The attacking aircraft were only Messerschmitt 110s; designed as fighters, they had a very limited load of light bombs. Nevertheless, it was enough to cut people down in the city centre with shrapnel and blast waves.

Some bolder soldiers opened fire at them from rooftops, but without any apparent success. Soldiers and the few remaining local civilians alike dived for shelter as explosions began to shake the buildings.

Bearclaw staggered slightly as the hospital shook, but didn't let go of the one-legged man he was helping down to the cellar. The Doctor was already returning from helping someone else down there. 'Need a hand?' the Doctor asked, taking the wounded man's other arm.

Bearclaw was glad to see him. 'No, but I'm grateful anyway. He's the last one from upstairs.'

They had crossed the lobby and almost reached the cellar door beside the desk, when the doors burst inward with the force of a blast. Plaster and wood swirled around the room and Bearclaw was slammed headlong into the desk, while the Doctor and the one-legged man were pitched across the floor.

The Doctor picked himself up. Bearclaw couldn't hear what he was saying over the noise of the bombs, but he could see the Doctor bending to check the man's pulse. Then he straightened and pulled Bearclaw to the cellar stairs.

Bearclaw tried to resist. 'But what about '

'He took the brunt of the blast. He's dead. And so will you be if you take another knock like that.' He led Bearclaw down the stairs.

Dead? Bearclaw thought. What a d.a.m.n stupid way to go. There was no meaning in it. No purpose. Just another one that he had jinxed and couldn't save when promised.

Was that all he was good for? s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up and getting unarmed people around him killed. What G.o.dd.a.m.ned use was that? He'd had enough of his own failure. More than enough, in fact.

Audibly snarling, Bearclaw descended to the crowded cellar. It was filled with medics and patients trying to make themselves as comfortable as possible amid the boilers and was.h.i.+ng machines and wine racks. He was there just long enough to pick up a Thompson, then turned to go back up. He barely saw the others in the cellar just the aircraft he wanted to bring down.

He b.u.mped physically into a body on the stairs, and took a moment to realise that it was the Doctor, blocking his way. 'No.' The Doctor's face was calm and mild, but unmoving, as if it was steel painted in flesh tones.

'I'm no good here,' Bearclaw growled. 'I should be out there fighting for this place.' He knew the Doctor was smart enough to understand that.

'Then they win. They weaken your resolve not to be pushed around. They make your choices for you.' He was advancing slowly, and Bearclaw found himself involuntarily stepping backward.

'You're just going to let them get away with killing that man?' Bearclaw demanded, shocked and disappointed at the Doctor's reaction.

'You're just going to desert all the others who need you, just to salve your pride in your ability to fight?' the Doctor countered. 'You're going to risk your life for a futile gesture of defiance that your enemy can't even see, let alone be harmed by, and in turn endanger these others who may depend on you? You're going to let your enemy draw you into betraying and abandoning your principles, your comrades and your friends?'

Bearclaw b.u.mped up against a small table behind him, on which someone had set up a phonograph. He desperately wanted to argue, but he couldn't think of anything to say.

He wanted to punch the Doctor's lights out and go on up anyway.

He slammed the gun down on to the table, then, with a scream of rage, kicked the table over. Phonograph and record smashed on the stone floor, and he kicked the pieces away one by one into the darkness.

Gradually he felt eyes upon him, watching him. Bearclaw's fury subsided, dampened by guilt as he realised the nurses were watching his outburst. Guilt that was backed by shame as he recognised the look of fear on their faces.

'You seem troubled,' the Doctor said, holding out a china cup to Bearclaw with a smile. 'Tea?' he offered.

Bearclaw blinked and took the cup numbly, not asking when or how the Doctor had picked it up. He let the Doctor steer him to a couple of small beer kegs, on which they sat.

'I'm sorry, Doctor,' he said at length. 'I... It's just that sometimes I feel if I don't let it out something will burst in here.' He tapped his head. 'If you know what I mean.'

'Believe me, I do know exactly what you mean. Probably more than you can imagine. Perhaps it comes with age.'

'You don't look any older than me,' Bearclaw argued.

'Well... I'm a little more mature than my appearance suggests.'

'Sure you are,' said Bearclaw, sceptically. 'How old? Forty?' He certainly couldn't be much more than that.

'One thousand and eighteen,' said the Doctor, with a perfectly straight face. 'But they say life begins at fifteen hundred. Or they do now, anyway. Are you quite all right?'

'Fine,' Bearclaw said, choking slightly.

'It's interesting,' the Doctor went on. 'You know, for all humanity's violence, wherever I go, I still meet people who pa.s.sionately want to hold back death. Who take great responsibility for it. Like Garcia, and you.'

'Me?'

The Doctor nodded. 'That's what's bothering you, isn't it? That you couldn't hold back death from the other men in the field. I think they call it "survivor guilt", don't they?'

Bearclaw shook his head. 'Maybe, I guess. I already lost my crew earlier... G.o.d knows that's bad enough. But what really gets me is the civilians, you know? Like your friend Sam.' The Doctor merely regarded him coolly. 'Not just because I survived and she didn't... It's my fault she was there at all... I gave her and a couple of GIs a lift in my jeep. If I hadn't, they might be prisoners somewhere else, but they... They wouldn't have been in that field.'

He could already feel tears forming. 'I said I'd get her home, you know? I said I'd get her home, and I got her killed instead.'

'No no no...' The Doctor shook his head. 'It was my fault for bringing her to this country in the first place. Her own fault for wanting to travel with me. Jochen Peiper's fault for not controlling his own men. The gunman's fault for shooting... Where does the blame end?'

'I don't know,' Bearclaw admitted.

'The best way to fix things,' the Doctor said, 'is to work out what's wrong, and to deal with it as best we can. If you waste time working out who to blame, then everything falls apart before you can fix it. And if we let that happen then Sam died in vain. And...' He hesitated, his voice not quite cracking. 'And I don't think either of us wants that. And neither would she.'

'So what do we do?' Bearclaw said, bitterly. 'Tell people not to shoot each other and hope they listen?'

'Something a little more practical.' The Doctor looked at the ceiling, but Bearclaw got the distinct impression that he was really seeing the stars far above. 'I think someone's goading one or both sides, interfering with the natural conclusion of the war.'

'You mean some other country that isn't involved?'

'No. I mean some other party. One not native to this world in this time.'

'Sure. Kachinas?'

'If you like.'

'I wish I had your calm,' Bearclaw admitted.

The Doctor sighed. 'I wish I wasn't so often right.'

Kovacs gazed at the pink ceiling of his room at the local brothel, wondering whether a bomb would come through it, and if he would sense it coming before it arrived.

He could have run out into the street and taken pot shots at the Luftwaffe, but he was smart enough to know that they were too high to be effectively threatened by small-arms fire. Or he could have run down into the cellar with everybody else, but that would have given the impression that he was scared. Screw that.

Besides, if a bomb did come down, he'd rather go quick and painless than be crushed and suffocated, buried under rubble in a weak cellar. Kovacs had never been afraid of death. Life just went on till it stopped. Death was the off switch. Why waste time wondering when it would be tripped?

He dug out his little black notebook from under the bed, deciding that this would be a good time to work out what he was owed by various customers and suppliers, both in terms of the catering goods he was black-marketeering, and the legitimate supplies his unit would need next time they went out into the field.

New black flaws were spreading across the walls nearby as Sam waited in a vaulted antechamber. Strangely, now that she recognised that this was just a place being hurt by the war, she found it much easier to deal with. There were more than enough examples of this sort of thing in her own time, and it was something she knew how to handle in her mind. It was something she knew how to hate and plead against.

She could hear a feast going on somewhere, too. Cheers and laughter vied with clas.h.i.+ng crockery and cutlery for the attention of her ears.

After a few minutes, Galastel seemed to wake from the fugue state he'd been in, and led Sam to a golden door. 'The Queen will see you now.' Before Sam could compose herself and think about how to behave in front of a Queen, she was through the doors whether they had opened or not and into a banqueting hall straight out of the Middle Ages.

No, she corrected herself. A banqueting hall straight out of some Hollywood art-house auteur's impression of the Middle Ages. Everything was clean and gleaming despite the dozens of people crowded around the long feast table.

Fuelless fires burned steadily, and the pots from which punch was being served never seemed to get any emptier. The people around were all like Galastel: quick, agile and somehow catlike in spite of their flowing hair and silk clothes.

At the head of the table, the Queen waited, and Sam noticed she wasn't eating or drinking with the others, though she was in the middle of pouring some drink for someone else. Sam frowned. Her eyes were certainly seeing something she somehow recognised as a queen, but her brain seemed incapable of really registering what it was.