Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies Part 35

There was only one conclusion the Celestis could draw. The Doctor had tricked them. Even for those who'd been laughing, the thought was alarming. Firstly, because it proved a mere corporeal life-form could outplay the Celestis, and secondly, because the Doctor had committed the worst sin imaginable.

He'd gone back on his word. He'd broken the rules. And for the Celestis, that was a crime which could not, and would not, be tolerated.

'You buried Laika,' Sarah had said. 'But who'll bury you you?'

The Doctor trudged across the surface of Quiescia, the casket following in his wake. Wake; an apt word, he told himself, because that was exactly what this was. A one-man wake, a funeral with him as gravedigger, pallbearer, mourner, priest, and corpse. He could have asked Sam to help, but he knew she would have asked too many questions. Somehow, she'd managed to get through this whole affair without finding out whose body was in the box, and he didn't want to have to break the news to her now the worst of it was over.

She was asleep right now, back in the TARDIS. When she woke up, fully rested, she'd start querying the events of the past few hours. The Doctor decided he'd have to tell her the body was some alien super-weapon or other. Not a million miles from the truth.

It was a funny thing. These last few months, he'd come to think of himself as an honest life-form, not like his last regeneration at all. Now he was having to go through the old routine again, desperately covering up the cracks in his own history. He wasn't sure whether to feel ashamed or comforted.

He reached the top of the hill, the pale blue pebbles crunching and shifting under his shoes. Quiescia was exactly as it had been the day he'd come here with Sarah. Exactly. He doubted a single stone had been moved, until he'd stepped out of the TARDIS. The tombstone on the hilltop was smaller than he remembered, but the inscription was as it should have been. LAIKA. One word, no dates.

The Doctor had no idea how long it took him to reopen the grave. Time wasn't an issue here. That was why he'd chosen the place, after all. When his hands finally touched the surface of Laika's box, he started widening the hole, making it large enough for the second coffin. The casket floated behind him as he worked, patiently waiting for him to finish. He wondered if the "Relic" knew it was going to be laid to rest, at last.

When the grave was ready, he stepped back, and issued a mental command to the casket. He had no idea whether it understood him, or whether it acted on some instinct of its own, but it moved towards the hole without a second's hesitation. The voice inside the box was silent now, as it had been ever since the Doctor had left the ziggurat. Did the body know it was in safe hands, then? Or did it simply think its message would never be heard, at least not by the human ears it seemed to need?

The casket came to rest at the bottom of the pit, one coffin resting on top of the other. The Doctor reached into his pocket. The item he wanted came to hand immediately; it was the peacefulness of this place, he decided, it was easy to be at one with your pockets here. He weighed the thermosystron bomb up in his palm. Pink letters danced across the face of the device, instructions and copyright notices in gaudy Selachian hieroglyphs. The Doctor primed the bomb with a few gentle strokes of his forefinger, then knelt down, and slipped it into the grave.

He stood by the hole for a few minutes more, his eyes closed, his lips moving. He couldn't think of a decent prayer, so he settled for a piece of prose he thought his future self would have approved of. He didn't bother marking the gravestone with another name.

The last thing he did on the hilltop was throw a handful of blue dirt down onto the top of the casket. The casket stopped glowing as soon as the soil hit it, though that could have been coincidence. Suddenly, it was dull, lifeless, just a box in the ground. Just a box, thought the Doctor. Nothing special.

He hadn't expected it to be like this. He'd thought about his funeral, more than once, and he'd always imagined his grave-side being surrounded by people. Old friends come to pay their last respects, old enemies come to gloat, only to find that there was something missing from their lives all of a sudden. But he hadn't expected this. No, nothing like this.

He didn't hurry on his way back to the TARDIS. There was no need to. He'd set the bomb quite carefully, he knew how much time he had before the blast.

As it happened, the device detonated when he was at the bottom of the hill, much sooner than he'd expected. Faulty timing mechanism; he'd been lucky not to get caught in the implosion. Still, he'd always been lucky. Behind him, there was the sound of collapsing s.p.a.ce-time, as the bomb turned a ten-foot-wide area of the planet's surface into a small, and carefully contained, neutron star.

The Doctor imagined all the things that had ceased to be, up on the hilltop. The casket, the tombstone, the remains of a small Russian dog. And more, of course.

But he didn't turn around.

He stepped into the TARDIS, closed the doors behind him, and pressed the dematerialisation switch before he'd even bothered to lay in a new course. The ship slid away from the planet, leaving behind nothing but silence and a few loose pebbles.

Another hundred million nights pa.s.sed on Quiescia. Nothing changed, and no one else came.

On an island in the East Indies, in a lost city buried deep in the heart of the rainforest, agents of the most formidable powers in the galaxy are gathering. They have been invited there to bid for what could turn out to be the deadliest weapon ever created.

When the Doctor and Sam arrive in the city, the Time Lord soon realises they've walked into the middle of the strangest auction in history and what's on sale to the highest bidder is something more horrifying than even the Doctor could have imagined, something that could change his life forever.

And just when it seems things can't get any worse, the Doctor finds out who else is on the guest list...

This book is another in the series of adventures featuring the Eighth Doctor and Sam.