Doctor Who_ Battlefield Part 20

'Liz? What's the matter?'

She shook her head. 'A woman touched my face and now I can see. She killed a girl and touched my face... and now I can see.'

'In you get, love,' said Pat and helped her up the step.

He turned to Peter and found the Doctor standing next to them.

Peter pushed Excalibur into the Doctor's arms. 'You'd better have this,' he said angrily.

'And I have a few questions I want answered,' added Pat.

Peter continued, 'I have absolutely no intention of being evacuated! Here is where I live.'

'You're angry,' said the Doctor, catching at the depths of Pat's eyes. 'And you want to leave,' he went on, turning his glance on Peter.

'No, we do not want to leave!' protested the archaeologist.

The Doctor looked straight ahead between his a.s.sailants. His voice became at once gravelly, compelling and persuasively subdued. 'Of course you want to leave.'

He turned towards Pat and fixed the agreement with his eyes. All rancour drained from the landlord's mind.

'Of course we want to leave,' he intoned gently. He could not imagine why he had thought otherwise.

'I wouldn't stand for any nonsense if I were you,' the Doctor warned Peter.

'Look, Doctor,' he complained as he took in the compulsion of the grey, blue, brown, whatever they were, eyes. 'The situation is perfectly simple. We are very angry.

And we want...' For a second he wondered what on earth he was talking about.

Of course, the eyes were reminding him...

'... we want to leave. Is that right, Pat?'

'Don't get in our way,' said Pat.

'I wouldn't dream of it,' said the Doctor politely.

Peter faltered for a moment. He looked confusedly at the Doctor. 'I can't leave without Cerberus,' he said.

'Is that all?' The Doctor set the whistle to his lips and blew hard again.

There was a distant bark and the huge wolfhound dashed across the lawn and nuzzled eagerly against its delighted master.

'You monster! How did you get out?' cried Peter indulgently.

'Off you go then,' said the Doctor to the hound and bundled the evacuees into the minibus.

The Brigadier had been watching with the astonished Major.

Husak pointed to his clipboard. 'At the risk of being totally baffled sir, I have one more evacuee on my list. A young Chinese girl. Her parents are waiting in the village.'

The Doctor glanced at Peter Warmsly's abandoned car and then around the car park. He looked the Czech officer in the eye and said, 'I think she's already gone, Major. Tell her parents she's making herself useful. Thank you very much.'

The Major turned away satisfied and gave the minibus the clearance to go.

'Nothing changes, does it, Doctor?' said Lethbridge-Stewart with a look of tempered approval.

The Doctor surveyed the organized chaos of the operation. 'You have enough weaponry here to fight an army,' he said.

'That's the general idea.'

'It's useless, Brigadier.'

Lethbridge-Stewart had dealt with the Doctor's moods before. 'Not this time, Doctor,' he said patiently.

He signalled to a soldier, who carried over an open ammunition box. Lifting up one of the polished rounds, he said, 'Armour piercing, solid core with a teflon coating. Go through a Dalek.'

The Doctor raised an eyebrow. 'A non-stick bullet?

They make frying pans out of this stuff.'

'UNIT R & D has been busy, Doctor. High explosive rounds for Yeti and a very efficient semi-armoured piercing high explosion round for giant robots. We even have gold-tipped rounds for you know what.'

'No silver bullets?' asked the Doctor.

'Silver bullets?'

The Doctor headed towards the hotel. 'You never know,' he said.

Good Lord, thought Lethbridge-Stewart. Now what?

'Quartermaster Sergeant!' he bellowed at parade ground volume.

The Sergeant was with him on the double.

'Silver bullets,' said the Brigadier. 'Do we have any?'

Elizabeth Rowlinson stared through the minibus window.

Colours and shapes she had forgotten over twenty-two years of darkness paraded before her eyes.

Movement had been instilled in her memory as a series of tiny frozen photographs that progressed with jerky grace like an animated film or flick book. Real life flowed seamlessly.

The day was dazzling. Light on the gra.s.s, shadows among the trees. Thousands of shadow shades of shifting colours. Straight, angled and tangled: hard and soft: faces and bodies; all part of a giant, glowing kaleidoscope.

At last, things made sense.

Dear Pat was looking tired and Peter had the sort of kind face she had always envisaged. Cerberus dribbled.

Along the drive were dark rhododendrons, pale multi-greened dogwoods and two girls darting for cover.

Elizabeth met the eyes of the English-looking girl and smiled. The other girl had long black hair, almond eyes and could only be Shou Yuing.

Pat squeezed Elizabeth's hand. He was looking the other way. She had seen something he had missed. Now she had her own secrets again, not just what she was told.

It was too much to take in. She closed her eyes.

'You can come out now. They've gone,' said Ace.

Shou Yuing emerged from the bushes and said, 'That was close. I nearly got evacuated.'

Ace grinned. 'You may wish you had.'

At the front of the hotel, a group of soldiers were unloading a long shape shrouded in tarpaulin. Ace and Shou Yuing slipped round to the back and got inside through the garden door.

As soon as he saw them, the Doctor stepped in front of a dark shape that lay on the lounge floor. Ace didn't notice that he looked thoughtful and was holding his hat the way people do at funerals.

She did notice that he was trying to hide something.

'What's that?' she said.

'A shadow,' he sighed. He looked at Shou Yuing. 'You shouldn't be here,' he said.

'I know. My parents'll kill me.'

He nodded. 'A slight exaggeration, I expect.'

'Professor,' said Ace, 'we think we've sussed out where the legend of King Arthur comes from.'

'Oh? Which Arthur's that?'

'How many are there?' she complained.

'There's the eighth-century chieftain stroke rabble-rouser. He united all the warring tribes against the invading Saxons. But he wasn't a real king. Who did you have in mind?'

'The one in the ship, of course.'

'Ah. Tell me about him, Ace.'

Lethbridge-Stewart walked into the lounge. 'I'm sorry, Miss... erm young lady, but the Doctor and I have important matters to discuss.'

Ace ignored him. 'We reckon that when Ancelyn's lot dumped the freeze-dried King here, they must have told the story to some of the locals.'

'But they couldn't cope with the more outre aspects,'

added Shou Yuing.

'So they translated it into terms they could understand,'

Ace went on. 'And old frozen chicken becomes the King of the Britons.'

The Doctor's eyes narrowed with concentration. 'So the real King Arthur becomes the real Real Arthur...'

'Doctor.' said Lethbridge-Stewart.

'No, Brigadier, this is important.'

The ancient sword lay beside its scabbard on the coffee table. Ace lifted the weapon. It was heavy again.

'And since this is Excalibur...' she said.

The Doctor snapped his fingers in triumph. 'Then it must be the source of Arthur's power. Why didn't I think of that?'

Ace grinned at Shou Yuing. 'And so it's a vital control element of the s.p.a.ceship under the lake.' She raised the sword vertically with both hands and plunged it down. 'It wasn't stuck in the stone. It was plugged in!'

'Yes, you could be right,' the Doctor enthused. 'That's the trouble with parallel worlds.'

'What?'

He shook his head. 'They're parallel.'

Ace held up the sword again. 'I bet Ancelyn knows...

knew.' She looked at the floor, embarra.s.sed.

The Brigadier took his opportunity at last. 'Doctor, Major Husak has taken a detachment to recover the bodies of Brigadier Bambera and Ancelyn.'

'What good are their bodies?' snapped Ace. She felt the Doctor's hand on her shoulder.

'UNIT looks after its own, alive or dead.' The Brigadier looked down at the human shape that lay burnt against the floor. 'And I want these ashes buried with honour.'

Ace went cold. She hadn't realized what she was standing in the same room with.

'Sorry,' she said. She didn't seem to have done much right lately.

The Doctor stroked her chin with the back of his fingers. 'That was very clever, Ace, what you worked out with the sword.'

'It was Shou Yuing too.'

'Yes. But I can't think of everything at once.'