Doctor Who_ The Dying Days Part 35

I looked up, but the Martian s.h.i.+p had been atomised, the Harriers had returned to their base. The only thing up there was a cloud of black smoke, criss-crossed with white jet trails, and even that was begin to disperse.

Nothing had escaped. No Ice Warriors, no sonic cannons, no Red Death. Nothing.

End of extract ***

The Doctor a.s.sessed the situation. There was good news and bad news. Taking the negative first: the ground was nearly ten thousand metres away, straight down. On the plus side, it was getting closer. Through the wispy clouds London was a dark grey expanse, broken up by great square patches of green and the grey squiggle of the Thames. It was so quiet. The air rus.h.i.+ng past him was so thin that it hadn't the strength to carry sound - Only one way out. He turned to Grace.

'Not afraid of heights are you?'

'Yeah!'

'So am I!'

In an instant he brought his body under control: slowing his hearts rate, regulating the adrenaline flow. The cold, the shock, the thin air, the friction might have been enough to kill a human, but were mere technicalities to a Time Lord. He increased the rate of his mental activity, and attempted to dedicate it al to one question. But his life was flas.h.i.+ng in front of him, random memories and emotions. That hadn't happened in Adisham. Was that a bad sign?

It was a short life, especial y compared with some of his other - 'How do we get down?'

He turned to Benny, a sad smile on his face. 'Ask me again in a week's time.'

He would fall at roughly thirty metres a second, allowing for wind resistance and updraft. He would soon reach terminal velocity. He had about five and a half minutes to solve the problem using only the materials at hand.

His usual a.s.sortment of junk: a cricket ball, an elephant feather, a bag of kola nuts, a big ball of string, a piece of the True Cross, even a dog whistle.

Of course! The Flying Elephants of Saltaris III. Their wings were soaked in isocryte, the amazing antigravity material that - He handed everything but the string to Benny.

The Doctor scowled.

That struck a chord in his memory.

'Curtain rings,' Bernice scowled.

'They might be important. Or they could come in useful.'

He flipped himself over onto his back, bending his knees slightly. The universe rotated until the Martian s.h.i.+p was directly above him. The fuselage was fragmenting, lit from within. The beams and vaults that gave the hul its strength were visible, like an X-ray. The skin of the hull was warping and melting under the intense heat. The fins atomised, streams of fuel streaking out across the afternoon sky. The Doctor hardly noticed.

They had stopped off at Mrs Darling's shop to buy some milk and bin bags.

120.

Every Martian in the s.h.i.+p was dead, the Doctor realised. All their weapons and personal possessions had gone.

The Martian Invasion was over, the Earth and every human, every living thing on it had been saved. He might die, but five bil ion humans, twenty five bil ion trees, ten trillion insects and twelve hundred pandas were going to live. It was a simple transaction: one life for many.

There wasn't time for this. He had to concentrate on - Helium.

And the Doctor realised that with five minutes and eight seconds to go, the chords in his memory had suddenly become a symphony.

The Doctor let go of the cylinder of helium, which continued to fall at the same velocity as him. He took the string for his pocket and tied one end to his left wrist. He retrieved the packet of curtain rings, biting it open with his teeth, careful not to spill any. He did a little mental arithmetic and threaded forty eight of them along the string, discarding the rest.

That took twenty two seconds. He'd fallen a little under a mile by now, less than a sixth of the total distance.

Now for the difficult part.

The Doctor tugged the roll of bin bags out of his pockets, unwound the first one, careful not to open it up. He drew the open side of the bag through the first curtain ring, creating a narrow aperture. The process had taken him a little under two seconds. He repeated it forty seven times, until all the bags were whipping up and down on the line like a row of bunting.

He'd been falling for two minutes. He was still well over five and a half kilometres above London. When he had started working, the clouds he had been falling through were the rounded cirroc.u.mulus clouds - the ones that looked like fish skin from the ground. Now they were the larger altoc.u.mulus variety. The air was getting warmer and thicker as he hit the first hint of convection currents rising from the city.

The Doctor let go of the string and reached over for the helium canister. Calmly, he plucked it from the air and slotted the nozzle into the first big bag. A quick burst of the gas inflated it. Imperceptibly, the Doctor slowed down.

Extract from the memoirs of Professor Bernice Summerfield 'Professor Summerfield,' a lad said gently. It wasn't one of the soldiers, it was the chap who ran the Internet Cafe.

'I won't be long. He ... he might have had a parachute or something.'

I kept my binoculars fixed upwards, but I could imagine his expression.

'The medics have arrived if you need one. The Brigadier's trying to rustle up some tea and coffee. My name's Doug, by the way. I'm sorry to hear about your friend.'

I looked away for the first time. Around me, Tower Green was full of ambulances and heavy army trucks. Outside, the crowd were being tended to by an army of paramedics and policemen. A great cl.u.s.ter of Provisional Government men were sitting in a circle, their weapons taken away from them. A couple of the UNIT men were taking their names and checking if they needed food or medicine. Al around, people were cheering and celebrating - I could hear a riverboat honking cheerfully, and the bells of all the cathedrals and churches were ringing. The whole country would be like this - street parties, crowded pubs and city squares. Everyone cheering, everyone rejoicing.

And I felt dead inside, because the one man who deserved to be here wasn't.

I turned my binoculars back to the sky.

Two hundred metres up was a ma.s.s of black. Not a parachute or a hot air bal oon, but something between the two. It was drifting down. Underneath it al was a man wearing a flowing bottle-green velvet coat, baggy tan trousers and a grin. With his free hand he waved down at me.

The balloons had slowed the Doctor down, but he was still travelling too fast. I tried to shout a warning to him, but he was still too high to hear. The shouts alerted Lethbridge-Stewart and the others, though. Tower Green began to buzz with excitement. Everyone was pointing up, gasping, some were even laughing.

Alan had swung his camera up, and was tracking the Doctor down as he fell.

'Do you real y think those bin bags can support his weight?' Doug was asking. 'I reckon a few techos on the Net might argue with that. I like his style, though.'

I turned back to the sky. Barely clearing the walls now, the Doctor was clambering up, over the bal oons. It was tricky going, but he reached the top of the pile just as the apparatus reached the ground. Now they acted like a cus.h.i.+on or a safety mat.

The Doctor and his improvised parachute crashed into the ground mere feet from me, bouncing slightly. As he tumbled along, his limbs surfaced and disappeared back into the ma.s.s of black plastic. As he rol ed to a halt, he had reached the top of the bags.

I ran over, closely followed by Doug, the Brigadier, Lex Christian and Eve. The Doctor was lying on the pile of balloons, perfectly still. His eyes were closed, his head was bent back.

He wasn't moving.

'Doctor!' Doug shouted.

'Doctor,' Eve called over to the paramedics.

'Doctor,' the Brigadier called, clearly concerned.

I bent over him. 'Doctor?'

His pale blue eyes fluttered open and he pulled himself upright.

121.

'h.e.l.lo Bernice,' the Doctor beamed.

As he clambered off the crash-mat he had improvised, the bin bags began drifting away, up into the bright spring sky. He turned, watching them float over the walls of the Tower and off along the Thames - upstream, towards Tower Bridge. The Doctor plucked a cat hair from his lapel and grinned.

'I didn't think I'd see you again,' I told him. 'I thought you'd gone forever.'

'You of al people should have had a little more faith, Benny. I'm not ready to die yet,' the Doctor declared. 'In fact, I've never felt better.'

I opened my mouth but couldn't think of anything else to say. I hugged him, the Brigadier was slapping him on the back. All around us, the whole of London was cheering.

The Doctor was alive, the entire human race had been saved. Al was well with the world.

End of extract 122.

Epilogue.Kisses to the Future Wednesday, 8 May 2593 'The student reputation for outrageous behaviour and excessive consumption of alcohol is, of course, a myth.

Most students are extremely studious and hard-working,' Benny announced knowledgeably. 'If we want to uncover evidence of hedonism, one need look no further than the teaching staff. Professors in particular spend much of the time in a state of advanced inebriation.'

'Bernice, you sound like a professor already,' the Doctor a.s.sured her.

'Thank you.' Benny knocked back another vodka. 'Robarman, another round, please, if you would.'

'Certainly, Professor Summerfield.' Two more gla.s.ses joined their friends on their table. The college bar, quaintly named The Witch and Whirlwind, was decorated with rather wonderful gold fittings that warranted further in-depth investigation.

Benny sipped her ale. A rich taste that also warranted further in-depth investigation. She looked up at the Doctor.

'After this, I really think we should get my stuff out of the TARDIS and up to my room.'

The TARDIS had landed in a concrete expanse that Benny's induction pack had rather optimistically labelled a piazza. It had been raining since they had arrived, longer judging by the torrents of water gus.h.i.+ng down the overflow channels. Benny's new home, the Garland College Hall of Residence, was a vast barrel shaped building in soaked brick. Its corridors and stairways were empty. A month before the start of term, the entire planet seemed deserted.

'Do you think it wil ever stop raining?' Benny asked.

The Doctor considered the question, peering off over her shoulder. 'The orbital lift has permanently altered the weather patterns by the look of it,' he concluded, pointing over to the north. A silver line had been drawn, bisecting the sky. The lift was a design familiar from a thousand Outer Planets, a metal spire tall enough to poke out of the atmosphere, al owing incredibly energy-efficient launches into low orbit. Cheap s.p.a.ceflight, with a heavy cost to the local environment.

'Bother,' Benny said, moderating her language in the Doctor's presence. Then she realised he'd disappeared into the TARDIS, so she repeated the sentiment using the F-word, just because she could.

The Time Lord emerged. 'You'l be needing this more than I will,' he said, handing her an umbrella. The umbrella.

She opened it up. It was a hundred yards and three flights of steps between her new room and her old one, and it took an hour of moving heavy boxes and cases between the two before the job was finished. Benny took a last look at the TARDIS and then walked up to her new room. It was what an estate agent would describe as 'compact', but there was a perfectly serviceable kitchenette sort of thing, a nice bathroom, a study big enough for half a dozen students (if they breathed in) and all her books. Final y, there was the bedroom.

She flopped down onto the bed next to the Doctor, who was looking a bit sad. Wolsey brushed against her legs.

'You need a companion,' the Doctor announced.

'Won't you miss him?'

'I'll miss him.' He hesitated, brus.h.i.+ng back a lock of hair. 'Look, Bernice, I don't like goodbyes, but sometimes... '

He produced a very large bottle of champagne and grinned. 'Napoleon gave this to me, for services rendered. The very first magnum of Brut Imperial. I've been saving it for a special occasion.'

He popped the cork.

'Er, this is a tremendous oversight on my part, but I don't have any wine gla.s.ses.'

'Mugs wil do.'

Benny unpacked a couple and the Doctor poured. When he had finished, they held them up. Wolsey watched the proceedings with interest.

'To the adventures of Professor Bernice Summerfield,' the Doctor declared.

'To a,' Benny paused for a moment, and then smiled, 'Doctor who might change, but won't ever die.'

'To the future, wherever and whatever it might be,' the Doctor said.

'The future,' Benny echoed.

They clinked their mugs together.

'I had better go,' the Doctor said quietly, when he had finished his champagne.

Benny hesitated, looking into those deep blue eyes of his. 'Yes. Look, before you leave, there's one thing I have to do. I'd never forgive myself otherwise.'

The Doctor looked puzzled. 'What would that - '

She grabbed the lapels of his frock coat, kissed him square on the mouth and pushed him down hard onto the bed.

Wolsey jumped out of the way.

123.

Sunday, November 23rd 1997 It was a beautiful morning.

The bright winter sun poured through the stained gla.s.s of Westminster Abbey, bathing the Lords, Ladies, Gentlemen and television cameras a.s.sembled to witness a unique occasion: the only Recoronation in the history of the United Kingdom. Six months on, the Martian Invasion was a distant memory. One author, a man named Oswald, even claimed that there had never been any Martians, it had al been part of the coup leaders' conspiracy to divert attention while they seized power. His main observation was that few people had actual y seen a Martian, and no items of alien technology had been recovered. Any 'sightings' of the Martians or their s.h.i.+p could be put down to ma.s.s hysteria or ball lightning. Oswald's book had become a best-seller, and his theory was particularly popular in the United States of America.

Queen Elizabeth sat on the coronation throne, the Imperial State Crown on her head, restored to its former glory.

The Recoronation would clear the const.i.tutional way for the election of a new Parliament. Every single surviving member of the Provisional Government was in prison, caught trying to flee the country they had betrayed. David Staines had been one of the first, found trying to catch a Eurostar while disguised as a woman. The resultant police mugshot was destined to become one of the most enduring images of the Invasion.

Representatives of every nation on Earth were calling 'G.o.d save the Queen'. The European Union, the United States and the j.a.panese had made generous reconstruction grants, although Britain would continue to remember their inaction during the Dying Days for some considerable years. There was a great deal that needed doing, especial y in the northern cities. Things were changing, there was a new sense of optimism, of hope for the future.

Perhaps it would get worse before it would get better, but everyone knew that it would get better.

Behind the various amba.s.sadors and heads of state stood the senior military men and other heroes of the Invasion. Outside, the crowds were cheering again, the sound percolating through the thick walls of the Abbey.