Doctor Who - Downtime Part 28

She had grown up instructed in the virtues of faith and hope and charity. The three tiers on her mother's grave. Such values were antique in this new age of self-aggrandis.e.m.e.nt. Virtue was a sign written in neon that said, Use Me Use Me.

No matter now. She was stranded on the sidelines. A watcher, as events she had instigated hurtled past uncontrolled and out of her reach.

In her mind, she stood at the top of a stairway. From below, a lurid green glow seeped like a festering nest of hatred feeding in the dark recesses of her thoughts. A hatred just as real as wisdom or enlightenment.

Hatred is strength.

Now Travers was enthroned. She flanked him on one side, Christopher on the other, eager to grab at something she doubted was there for him to s.n.a.t.c.h.

Sliding out of her thoughts, she noticed that another person had joined them. A uniformed army officer whom she did not recognize was standing beside Christopher. A handsome, dark-haired man with ice-cold eyes and an arrogant demeanour. Under his arm he carried a battered file embossed with the initials 'MoD'. She wondered what he had been told or what he a.s.sumed but had never asked. And what was he doing in her office? She had run out of words. She had never felt so achingly, wearisomely alone.

Her nightmare resumed.

She heard the high metronomic pulse of a silver sphere control unit. The door swung open and a ma.s.sive bearlike creature strode into her office.

' Dzu-teh, dzu-teh Dzu-teh, dzu-teh', she heard the street vendor calling. She could no longer ignore what she already knew.

The Yeti gave a roar of greeting. Its s.h.a.ggy coat was red-brown and its haunches were caked with mud. It was slightly more compact than the robots she had seen in the London Underground during the London Event; and it was less bulky than the robots she had seen sixty years ago in the Himalayas.

Its movements were more instinctive, less mechanical, and its eyes burned like torched rubies. Something flapped around its rear leg above the clawed foot. It was the upper half of a trainer, still tied with blue lace, as if the foot had exploded out tearing the shoe apart.

Travers rose jerkily from the chair and his trembling hand stretched out. The Yeti dropped a little ivory figure into his palm. Victoria recognized the tiny carving as Travers's bony fingers tested its cracks and contours. She had spent years searching for this icon. This was the Locus that she had failed to recover. He had said it contained the power to unlock the future of all mankind.

She knew it could destroy them all.

He wasn't who he said he was.

She, so full of compa.s.sion, so blind to evil, had been so easy to take in.

She knew now. She was close to despair. She had opened the way to events, but could only watch helplessly as they unfolded.

'At last,' he growled.

She could see the muscles in his tortured throat contract and expand as if the usurper in his body was still learning how to use them.

'I created this tiny object. I invested it with my power and in turn it bound me in darkness.' He raised the p.a.w.n to the level of his cracked spectacles. 'Which of you shall release me?'

Victoria felt a frisson of excitement and fear. She reached instinctively for the object, but Travers's hand moved away out of her reach towards Christopher.

She watched him take the carving with a smile for her benefit. He dropped it onto the carpet and brought down his boot hard.

Thunder rumbled distantly as fragments of the Yeti p.a.w.n spun across the floor. The air crackled. Travers was thrown back into the chair, flares of blue light playing under his skin, silhouetting his bones, as if lightning was flickering inside his body. He gasped and croaked, his hands flying up to cover his eyes.

Finally he uncovered his face, squinting slowly about him.

The voice in Travers's throat was no longer weak. It was in shock, but it deepened with a growing malevolence.

'Light...Symmetry of colours and shapes. No more tomb of darkness. My strength is growing again.'

His hand rose and clawed at the texture of the air.

'I grasp it. Form and substance. Now let my Great Plan take its shape!'

The pyramid of ivory on the desk was flickering with white light. It began to steady, pulsing in time with the bleeping signal of the Yeti.

Victoria felt a pull of fascination in the light. She saw Christopher and the army officer, their cold eyes filling with the pulsing glow. They were being drawn in.

The officer's file tilted from his grip and spilled a cascade of doc.u.ments onto the floor. Among them, Victoria saw a photograph of the young Lethbridge-Stewart.

Her thoughts, chilled with shame and remorse, appeared resilient as marble. Decorum, deportment and carriage, just as her mother had taught her. She pulled away and left her office.

A tiny bolt of light cracked from the eyes in Travers's face and arced into the pyramid on the desk.

The old man jolted back in shock. A vice had just released its grip on his thoughts. He croaked from his dried throat and stared about in alarm at the office that he had never seen before.

A woman in a dark green suit was hurrying out of the door.

A huge Yeti-like creature, rearing on its hind quarters, stood rocking to and fro on the other side of the desk. Dzu-teh? Ye-teh? Dzu-teh? Ye-teh? No. Those species both had grey fur, camouflaged for the rocky terrain they inhabited between the forest and snow lines. No. Those species both had grey fur, camouflaged for the rocky terrain they inhabited between the forest and snow lines.

Not a recognized species then. Unless....

He listened to that wretched high bleeping in his ears.

d.a.m.ned tinnitus again. They were always playing this tune.

Two figures, one on either side of him, were leaning forward, staring intently into the strobing light from the pyramid.

Either they'd finally put him in a home or a disco. He was sure he'd forgotten to do something important, but was d.a.m.ned if he could remember what. He struggled painfully to his feet and pushed his way out past the tubby fellow with the hideous jumper.

He peered at the Yeti and it growled softly at him, but did not hinder his departure.

Why should it when he was already dead?

The corridors of New World were not a place to wander in.

The walls and fixtures, all inlaid, maintained and serviced by the computer, had become oppressive and threatening. The air did not move and the lighting had dimmed as the output of the university generators was redirected into the computer.

Victoria needed air and s.p.a.ce before she could think, so she headed for the upper terraces of the Bryce Gallery. The quickest route was through the computer studies room, but when she reached the entrance she heard the chanting begin.

She edged a glance round the side of the window. In the half-light, she could see the rows of Chillys seated unmoving at their terminals. Their chanting was no longer the gentle litany of their daily meditation. Their voices had deepened into an unearthly unified growl. It turned the Lotus prayer into a repeating ground ba.s.s of elemental power over which some new chaconne of horror, some dance of death, would be composed.

She thought of Danny Hinton and suddenly guessed his fate. Doors that had been deliberately slammed shut in her memory were creaking open to let in the cruel light of truth. It was an ominous grey dawn with clouds gathering like storm crows.

Behind her, she heard scuffled movement and the approach of something that wheezed as it breathed. She ran the full length of the corridor away from it and tried the lift. The response was sluggish. It was quicker to use the stairs.

The air outside was too humid for spring. She reached the terraces attached to the gallery building and crunched across the raked gravel. At least she could breathe again, but she could not think. She only saw, she could not react. The huge orange and silver carp in the pool swam to the edge, mouthing at her, expecting to be fed, but she had nothing for them.

The j.a.panese maples she had planted were showing their first scarlet leaves. Beneath them, there were drifts of white narcissi and the last of the crocuses. But it was still too early for her pride, the blue Himalayan poppies propagated from the stock that Charles Bryce had once sent her. Or was it just too late for her to see them again?

She looked down from the terrace over the New World campus. Chillys were moving everywhere like yellow-headed beetles. The purpose that her students had always displayed, that marked them out from the students at other establishments, was now all too clear. They were all on the business of the computer or rather, the ma.s.s of hateful thoughts that lived in the computer. Compa.s.sion and the search for what she most wanted had made her blind to that.

She heard the gravel crunch behind her, but she no longer cared who, or what, was approaching.

The voice of the old man sounded flat and tremulous in the open air. 'I had a daughter once. What happened to her?'

On a sudden impulse, she turned. 'Father?' She was looking up into the watery eyes of the intruder.

Travers peered down at her, studying her through his cracked spectacles. The face was no longer cruel or tortured, just searching and very lost. This was the real Travers again. A broken old man. After a moment, he shook his head angrily.

'No. No, not you. Anne.' He grunted with disapproval and turned his gaze out over the university and the hills beyond.

' Yeti Traversii Yeti Traversii,' he proclaimed in despairing tones.

'Brought It back from Tibet. All my fault!'

Victoria grasped the rail of the balcony and looked down into the depths. 'My father died on a cold world, a thousand light years away.'

Acrid smoke from the burning Dalek city and ash like coa.r.s.e grit blowing in Skaro's wind.

Chillys moving on their business.

Travers rallied a little in response to her words. 'I died fifteen years ago,' he informed her. 'Saw it in The Times.

"Professor Edward Travers CBE." Silly old fool!' He angrily yanked the white scarf from round his neck and threw it on the gravel. ' "No Flowers By Request." They still sent them though. No one listens!'

Victoria was gazing out into nothing, seeing nothing.

'Sometimes I can't even remember his face.'

She was slightly startled as she felt the old man's hand move gently onto her shoulder. She brought up her hand to touch his.

'And I travelled in time,' she said. 'Where do I belong now?' Anger, simmering for so long behind doors that had been slammed shut in her mind, finally spilled out. She rounded angrily on Travers. 'Don't you see? We've been tricked. It was the Intelligence all the time!'

A rage began to seethe up in him too. He rocked back and forth and spluttered into his beard. 'Unfinished business!' he stammered. Tears were streaming down his wizened cheeks.

A loud boom echoed across the campus. They saw the apex of the pyramid roof of the central computer block stabbing shafts of concentrated light up into the lowering clouds.

27.

Special Powers arah had a problem keeping up with the UNIT convoy.

SGetting past the hundreds of abandoned gridlocked vehicles was less of a problem for them than for her. The UNIT jeeps simply drove full speed on the pavements, but Sarah's Spitfire had to take it more carefully.

Brigadier Crichton had not wanted her to come, but she insisted that she knew the layout of the university and would have followed even if he had warned her off.

The new UNIT helicopters, complete with their computer data feeds, were not deemed safe transport either. In fact, with no radio and most of the latest razor-smart computer weaponry up the Swannee, they were back to basics. Sarah suspected that her own Brigadier would feel very much at home, if only they could find him.

It transpired that Desmond Pennington MP, the Education Secretary, had been concerned about New World University for some time. Although initially enthusiastic for these ground-breaking computerized developments in further education, he had been disturbed by the behaviour of some of New World's luminaries. In particular their Marketing Facilitator, a grasping young man with a penchant for power and pullovers like knitted migraines. Pennington had spent an unnecessary but fascinating amount of time discovering just how far Christopher Rice's ambition extended. He reckoned he was nowhere near the limit, when events, the computer virus and the threat of being beaten to the post by the hot-air-powered Clive Kirkham, decided that action must be taken.

There were also increasing numbers of accusations about computerized brainwashing cults and the general appearance and behaviour of the Chillys, as the tabloids had dubbed them.

Such things were fine restricted to California, but not in the government's own backyard. Pennington, an old Brendonian, had been MoD liaison with UNIT before the last reshuffle but one, and had spent time studying the organization's cla.s.sified reports. He had been much bemused to discover the part played in UNIT's origins by his former maths master.

He had already revealed most of this when he realized that Sarah, who was sitting in on the conference, was a working journalist. Crichton had to vouch for her security clearance, before the minister was prepared to continue.

Pennington had no chance of consultation with the Defence Secretary, who was on vacation on Mauritius. The PM was on holiday on the Isle of Wight. No one even knew where the Home Secretary was. The UN was incommunicado. Every possible communications channel had been knocked out by the virus. Pennington therefore took it on his own back and promised Crichton the carte blanche carte blanche mauve card for Extraordinary Peacetime Operations. Someone, he said, had to make a move. mauve card for Extraordinary Peacetime Operations. Someone, he said, had to make a move.

Crichton was following laid-down contingencies for socio-and techno-disintegration scenarios. He immediately rounded up the few troops he had to hand and sent his own adjutant to call out support platoons from UNIT's green-field HQ near Guildford. Leading the sortie himself, he and the convoy set off for New World with Sarah in pursuit.

They were travelling along the emergency lane of Westway when the lights in the sky started. Pencils of green and white light were shooting up into the cloud base. They seemed to be coming from somewhere north of Ealing Alperton or Perivale. The direction of New World University.

Kate Lethbridge-Stewart watched the flashes in the sky from the window of the Mananda Mananda. She could hear the booms like approaching thunder. Her head couldn't begin to cope with what had happened, let alone believe what she had seen. Her dad had brought chaos into her home. Her emotions were all over the place. The only thing that had helped was the sudden unearthing of the secret she had kept hidden far too long. But now she felt deep remorse for having kept her dad in the dark all this time. Gordy would have to meet his grandfather one day, except that his grandfather was mixed up in something inexplicable that she had to protect her son from.

That made up her mind. For better or worse, she would not see her dad again.

She started to clear up the mess, picking up strewn books and the overturned photo of Grandad, who lived on the shelf.