Doctor Who_ The Dying Days Part 4

Chapter Three

Return To Mars

Mrs f.u.kuyama and her husband had arrived in London the afternoon before, but until now their only contact with the city had been the view of the suburban streets from the window of the coach that had whisked them from the airport to their eight-storey hotel in Kensington. The view from their window was of a flat expanse of converted mews and modern hotels, broken only by a large building cal ed Earls Court. The hotel room was clean and air-conditioned, but could have been anywhere in the world from Boston to Beirut.

After breakfast, they had ventured out of the hotel to explore the City. The Tube station was just around the corner.

They'd bought their tickets and descended into the world beneath the city.

They had emerged at Big Ben, walked around it, taken their photos and walked a little way up the banks of the Thames. The city was busy, the roads full of traffic, but few of the shops were open yet. It had been a short walk from there to Trafalgar Square, or so it had appeared on the map. In actuality it had taken half an hour to get there, punctuated by a couple of stops at tea shops that had struggled open. It was a public holiday, apparently, something to do with the Mars Landing.

Now they were here, her husband's attention had been caught by a blue box sitting at the foot of Nelson's Column.

He was running his fingers along it.

'It's humming,' he concluded.

The door opened and a young man bounded out, almost cras.h.i.+ng into them. His clothes suggested he was a tour guide, or a street entertainer. The woman who trailed after him reinforced this impression: although it was not yet nine-thirty in the morning, she wore a strapless peach sequin dress, elbow-length lace gloves and pil -box hat. The two couples stared at each other for a second before her husband plucked up his courage and asked the strange man what the box was.

The reply came in perfect j.a.panese, 'This is a police box. They were more common before the advent of the walkie-talkie, but they're beginning to reappear now. You can call a policeman from here if you need help.'

'It is very striking. Would you mind taking a photograph of us in front of it?'

'I'll do it.' The Englishwoman took the camera, examined it for a moment and then pointed it towards the trio, who had posed themselves in front of the door. 'Say "cheese",' she ordered them, again in perfect j.a.panese.

There was a flash and the woman stepped back over.

'Thank you,' Mr f.u.kuyama said, checking his list, 'Now, how do my wife and myself get to the Tower of London?'

The strange man thought about the question. 'You could try committing treason,' he suggested gently.

The other three laughed, leaving him a little bewildered.

'Circle and District Line, the nearest stop is Tower Hil ,' the woman supplied.

The two tourists thanked them and set off to the nearest tube station.

'It is a very good job that my daughter is too young to know who you are.'

He kept his distance, standing at the other end of the churchyard. Despite the familiar voice, underneath that overcoat he'd grown fat. His hair had thinned, and that moustache of his was grey. Despite that, he'd managed to arrive without Christian seeing him. Crows were cawing in the next field.

'It's a very good job that she's old enough by now to have her own phone. Good morning, Alistair.'

Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart moved a little closer, became a little warier. 'Good morning, Lex,' he replied finally, when they were ten feet apart.

'You didn't call the police?'

The Brigadier straightened. 'When you telephoned I gave you my word that I wouldn't. Not until I came to hear what you have to say. You used to be one of my men. I owe a fel ow Guardsman that much.' His hands were deep in his coat pockets.

'Are you carrying a gun?'

'Wouldn't you be?'

Christian laughed, holding his hands away from his body. 'I'm not,' he answered.

Lethbridge-Stewart couldn't see the humour of the situation. 'Why did you call me?'

22.Alexander Christian bit his lip. 'Because you are the only person in the world that I can trust. Something's going to happen, Alistair. On Mars and here in Britain. Something you have to help me stop.'

At the main entrance of the National s.p.a.ce Museum, the doors were being opened. The VIPs invited to attend at Mission Control itself were going through an adjacent door, where their invitations were being careful y checked.

They'd pa.s.s through a couple of other security points before going below ground level to their social gathering.

Without invitations, the Doctor and Benny weren't going to be able to get in. At least not through the front door. So, they joined a coach party and were herded through the public entrance, past the lobby and into the first of the public galleries. The hal was filled with display cases full of bulky s.p.a.ce suits. The tour guide hadn't noticed them join the edge of the group, she was too busy fielding questions about how astronauts went to the toilet and whether the boy astronauts ever had s.e.x with the girl astronauts. Benny found it rea.s.suring that amidst state-of-the-art technology and on the brink of interplanetary conquest, the human race still had its priorities right.

The Doctor and Benny mingled with the group, careful to remember their objective. Casually, the Doctor glanced at a map of the building hanging from one wall. Disguising it as a yawn, he managed to indicate to his companion where they needed to head next. As soon as possible, they extricated themselves and stepped through into the Main Hall.

An actual Mars Probe hung suspended in mid-air twenty feet above their heads. The hal was vast, but gleaming and white, packed with artefacts from the international s.p.a.ce programmes of the nineteen-seventies. They walked past the scale models, the photographs and the display case featuring the 'Astronaut's Survival Kit'. Benny paused at the full-sized mock-up of the inside of an old s.p.a.ce capsule. It was cramped, of course, but the thing that struck her was how old-fas.h.i.+oned it was: the displays were mechanical, not LED or even digital, the controls were clunky switches, the computer that took up half the room wouldn't have been powerful enough to run the average was.h.i.+ng machine even now, a couple of decades later. It was an object that belonged to the era of the eight-track cartridge, nylon slacks and the Ford Capri. This wasn't the retro-futurism of the TARDIS, with its incomprehensible forces hiding behind a Jules Verne veneer: this was the real thing.

The sound of the sonic screwdriver interrupted her train of thought.

The Doctor was bent over a display case, prising off the gla.s.s cover. The alarms hadn't gone off, but neither of them were exactly inconspicuous in their outfits. Benny strode across the room, and saw the Doctor sc.r.a.ping up some red dust into an empty test tube.

'Martian soil,' he announced by way of explanation.

'Yes, I know.'

The Doctor closed the case, sealing it up again. The test tube had already disappeared into the depths of his frock coat. 'Caldwel was concerned about the soil, remember?'

'Yes.'

'Look at this case, though. There's pounds of the stuff, on public display.'

'It's still in limited supply. It would cost hundreds of millions of pounds to get any more.'

'Bernice, ordinary Martian soil can't be of much scientific interest nowadays - once you've found out the exact composition, what else is there to know? That man was critically injured, but that soil was one of the only two things on his mind at that moment. No, I suspect that when we compare this soil with the sample we acquired this morning we'll find a big clue to this mystery.'

'Fine,' Benny conceded. She hesitated. 'Didn't Caldwell also say something about someone escaping?'

The Doctor grabbed Benny's arm and led her to a display board. Ranged in front of her were photographs of all the Mars crews, every one of them happy, smiling clean-cut folk in neat uniforms or s.h.i.+ny s.p.a.cesuits. The Doctor pointed to the very last picture. Three people, two men and a woman.

'Alexander Christian,' the Doctor declared. As Benny read, her jaw slowly began dropping.

'Some of you may need reminding about Alexander Christian,' Hal iwell began. 'Those of you old enough will remember him very well indeed, but you won't know the whole truth. The full facts were never released by the government for reasons that will become apparent.'

She had been driven down the M2 at high speed, with full police motorcycle escort. When the traffic parted and you didn't have to stick to the speed limit it was amazing how fast you could get around the country. She'd got from Whitehall to Canterbury in three quarters of an hour. Now she stood in front of a couple of dozen senior Kent policemen, the people who would be co-ordinating the manhunt on the ground.

23.She paused and put the first slide up on the screen. Alexander Christian at twenty-nine, resplendent in his s.p.a.ce Defence Division uniform. He had a movie-star face, not a bland Aryan look, but an odd and angular with eyebrows that looked like a symbol in shorthand. A memorable face.

'This is how "Lex" Christian looked just before Mars Probe 13 was launched.' She pressed the control and the picture changed. Now Christian had been joined by two others: a plump, white-haired man in his forties and a beautiful redhead in her mid-twenties. All three were smiling, Christian was in the middle with his arms around both of them.

'The crew of Mars Probe 13. Alexander Christian, Albert Fitzwil iam and Madeline Goodfellow. Christian shared quarters with Fitzwilliam, he was the sometime lover of Goodfellow. They had been friends for nearly five years.

This is what he did to them.'

The inside of a s.p.a.ce capsule, in full colour. Blood smeared over the chrome and plastic, two bodies in the centre of the picture, their chests split open exposing glistening organs, their eyes missing. Behind them a bank of monitors had been smashed, the computer panels had been smashed apart.

'As he left Mars, thirty-two weeks into the Mars 13 mission he was commanding, Alexander Christian, hero of the British s.p.a.ce programme, took a fire axe and did that to his best friends. For eight months, he sat among the blood and filth and smashed equipment. Every day, at nine o'clock GMT precisely, he would send messages to mission control. These were little more than rants, littered with swear words and Biblical allusions.

'The messages were never released, of course, but one of the American networks managed to intercept one. This is what they broadcast of it.' She pressed the tape recorder b.u.t.ton.

'Had to die. Had to -bleep-die. World -bleep-. -bleep-.' She pressed the 'stop' b.u.t.ton.

'Well, you get the gist. At no point did he offer explanations, at no point did he talk to the psychologists or negotiators on the ground. After eight months, his capsule automatically splashed down in the North Atlantic. The HMS Sheffield was waiting for him, and he was arrested by armed sailors. At a court martial held in camera, Alexander Christian was committed to a top security mental inst.i.tution, with the unanimous recommendation being that he should never be released. The thirteen Mars missions cost the British taxpayer nearly five billion pounds.

That was a lot of money back in those days - over a year's worth of North Sea Oil revenue. Alexander Christian had been a national hero, now he was an insane killer, and the whole affair was very embarra.s.sing for a lot of people. So, it was hushed up, the evidence was destroyed, the tabloids were told to go easy on Christian, and everyone but everyone involved was sworn to silence. The victims had no living relatives: Fitzwilliam's aunt died while he was en route to Mars. There were no pictures of Christian al owed when he returned to Earth. Starved of any new information or photographs, the story died. Mars 13 was the last mission to Mars for twenty years. Until today, in fact.'

'Excuse me, Director, but what drove him mad?'

Veronica Halliwell shrugged. 'Claustrophobia, a fear of the unknown. He was trapped in that steel box for the best part of a year, with only those two as company. The day before, he'd radioed in as normal.'

Halliwell paused, sipped from her water and put up another slide, showing a map of Kent. The crash-site was ringed in red.

'An hour and a half ago, Alexander Christian escaped. As you know, over the years the Mars astronauts have been unlucky - they've had more than their fair share of car crashes, boating accidents and nervous breakdowns.

Alexander Christian was always the most experienced Mars astronaut - he'd been there twice before Mars Probe 13. They wanted him at s.p.a.ce Centre in Devesham to provide his expertise in the event of problems with the mission. En route from Fortress Island, his helicopter crashed in Kent, just south of Canterbury. Everyone with him died, not all of them in the crash. He is now on the loose, he is possibly armed, and he is most definitely dangerous. We're bringing in army helicopters, and there's an SAS squad on its way. Your men are not to approach Christian when they find him.'

'Is that the only photo of him?' the Chief Constable asked. Hal iwel pressed the projector control again.

'There are no more recent photographs of him, but prison staff have helped us come up with this computer-enhanced picture of what he looks like now. They say that he's resourceful, daring and intel igent. He has attempted to escape his prisons a dozen times, using a different method each time, and came d.a.m.n close to getting out.'

'Are we telling the public?'

'Not yet. I was with the Home Secretary when we heard about the escape. He doesn't want to cause a panic, but he's agreed that if we haven't found him by noon-thirty then warnings will be posted on the lunchtime news.'

'Do we know what his objectives might be?'

'A link with the Mars landing seems the most likely. We've posted extra guards at Devesham and at the National s.p.a.ce Museum.'

24.'An axe-murderer? An escaped axe-murdering ex-astronaut?'

'Yes. Trying saying that three times when you're drunk.'

'I think I might just take you up on that.' The caption underneath the photograph was a model of understatement, but it managed to convey the information that Alexander Christian had kil ed his s.h.i.+pmates.

The Doctor plucked his pocket watch from his waistcoat. It was the same watch that he had worn before he changed, and he used the same technique to flick it open with one hand. 'Ten thirty. Time to join the party.'

The great and the good had been drifting past them for the last ten minutes or so. They were getting a condensed version of the guided tour as they headed to the stairways at the back of the Main Hall. The Doctor's plan was that they would join a group of VIPs and follow them down to Mission Control.

Benny tried to keep her mind off Alexander Christian by standing at the edge of the Hall and identifying as many of the guests as she could as they walked past. The first one she had got had been Steven Hawking. He'd been deep in conversation with Richard Dawkins and his wife, and had been helped down the stairs by a couple of hefty security guards. Jarvis c.o.c.ker and Chris Evans followed, chatting about something. The next woman Benny recognised was either Mystic Meg or Lady Di (Benny always got them mixed up). She had no problem identifying Lady Creighton-Ward - she didn't live far from the house in Allen Road and Benny had often seen her being driven around the Kent countryside. All were wearing their poshest outfits, and despite her earlier anxieties that she'd be under - or over-dressed, Benny felt that her own ensemble had been well-judged.

The Doctor took her arm, and Benny found herself following Gillian Anderson through a low archway down a short stairway and into the party. No-one checked for an invite, but a man on the door gave them the once-over. Benny smiled at him with her best 'I'm meant to be here' look.

There were about two hundred people in the room, more if you included the waiters milling around the little social groups that had begun to form. The reception was being held in an observation gallery that overhung Mission Control. Beneath them, two dozen scientists were at their posts, eyes fixed on the giant screen that dominated the back wall. Up here there was row upon row of red chairs arranged to watch the show. A big digital clock above the observation bay window was counting down to the landing. It was currently hovering just over the ten minutes mark. There was a podium at one side of the bay window, complete with a TV monitor and autocue.

A buffet had been laid out down one wal and the rich and the famous were picking away at it. In one corner Richard Branson and Alan Yentob were arguing about something, in another Geoffrey Hoyt was sharing a drink with Dame Emma Knight. Beneath the gentle rumble of conversation music was playing: Holst. Around the edge of the room film crews had set up, and journalists from around the world were pulling celebrities from the edge of the crowd to share a few words of wisdom with their viewers.

A waiter hurried by, and Benny plucked a champagne gla.s.s from his tray with an expertise born of years s.n.a.t.c.hing free drinks.

She sniffed it and sipped it. 'Nice,' she concluded.

'A 1982 Ayala. A good year.' The Doctor hadn't taken any for himself, and had apparently identified the vintage just by looking at the gla.s.s or catching a whiff of it on her breath.

'I've just seen someone I recognise,' he declared, disappearing into the crowd.

'Great, leave me here with my champagne,' Benny moaned. 'Second thoughts, Doctor, you do that.' She took another sip and gazed around the room. She was rather disappointed that none of the big celebrities were here.

Her intensive study of The Mirror over the last week meant that she knew exactly which pop stars and models ought to be at such a bash, but virtually everyone here was a politician or a scientist.

'I'm sorry to hear about the problems with your marriage,' a voice piped up nearby. Benny looked down. A little old woman in a red coat and hat was standing in front of her, clutching a handbag in front of her.

Benny swallowed a little more champagne. 'Heavens, word gets around, doesn't it?'

The old woman blinked at her through big round gla.s.ses. 'If it's any consolation, it sounds like it was al his fault.

And I loved Sense and Sensibility.' She disappeared back into the gathering, waving at someone with a TV camera.

'Er yes ... me too!' Benny cal ed after her.

The Doctor bobbed through the crowds. He b.u.mped straight into a man in a dark suit, stopping them both in their tracks. The man he had obstructed was in his late sixties, with thin white hair and an aquiline face.

'I know you ... ' the Doctor began.

25.'I should certainly hope so,' the man said, smiling a politician's smile. A couple of the people around him laughed nervously. They were all senior members of the government.