Doctor Who_ Infinite Requiem Part 23

23.

You Win Some

Livewire stood at the curved window. In her white clothes, with her bow slung at her waist, she was like a statue of some ancient hunting G.o.ddess. They'd let her have the bow back because she had screamed until she got it. Unloaded, of course. That was the compromise.

A shadow fell across her, but she did not look around. She knew her brother's footfall. 'I can feel it growing,' she said. 'The pool of hatred.'

'Look,' Trinket said anxiously, 'do you think you've rested properly?'

Livewire turned to face him now. She could tell by the fear in his expression that he had noticed her bright, feverish eyes. Well, that was good. They were still afraid of her. 'I don't want rest,' she said. 'I won't rest until Banksburgh is our home again.'

Trinket ran a hand through his hair. 'Look, I've been asking a few questions. The relief ship's due shortly to take people off the orbital. I don't think anyone's going to be living here any more.'

'I will,' she said. 'I want to.' He looked perplexed, but then, she thought, he never had understood her. 'When the Phracs came,' she murmured, stroking her forefinger down his smooth face, 'we wanted to get them. To hit back.

And now it turns out the war was all a con anyway, and this, this creature turns up. Takes over my mind, kills Poly. Well, I tell you this. I'm not sharing Banksburgh with any alien. Not any sort.'

'What are you going to do?' Trinket asked. It was a reasonable question, but there was that very slight wavering, the undercurrent of fear. 'They won't let you go with them. Bernice and Cheynor said '

She moved closer to him, her eyes glinting. 'I don't care what they said.' She held something up. It was the size of a credit card, and inlaid with circuitry.

She was pleased by the way Trinket frowned.

'What is it?' he asked.

'Security key to a skimmer.'

Trinket paled. 'You're not fragging h.e.l.l, Livewire, how did you get that?'

A momentary expression of disgust crossed her features. 'This TechnOp took a fancy to me. Tzidirov, he was called. It only took me half an hour, and a bit of pride.' She patted his cheek. 'Don't try and stop me.'

'You're not armed. Your crossbow '

181.

'I'm going to improvise,' she said sharply.

She was by the door.

'You can't ' he began.

'I mean it, little brother. Follow me and the first arrow is yours.'

Her parting smile left him looking chilled, alone, lost.

Bernice Summerfield stood in the observation gallery of the Phoenix Phoenix and stared out over the higgledy-piggledy ruins of Banksburgh. and stared out over the higgledy-piggledy ruins of Banksburgh.

She reached into her pocket, then frowned, shook her head. Too easy. But a moment later she put her hand back in her pocket and took out the small holo-pyramid. Bernice stroked it, placed it on the walkway at her feet, and the image of the Doctor blossomed upward.

He was looking askance at her and leaning on his umbrella. 'You can't expect this program to solve all your problems, you know,' said the familiar voice. 'After all, if it could, there'd be two of me running around the Universe without even violating the laws of time.' The h-Doctor appeared thoughtful for a moment.

Benny smiled wearily. She was just starting to realize how recent events had taken their toll on her. 'There were times when it would have been very useful for you to be in two places at once. Like when I was left in India. And on the Vampires' planet.'

'Wait for the signal, Bernice.' The h-Doctor tapped the side of his nose.

'Would you like me to entertain you?' he asked hopefully. 'Now that I've tuned myself into the TARDIS circuits, I can offer you a reasonable range of '

'No. No, thank you,' she said hurriedly, holding up a hand. She remembered the time that an all too convincing virtuality of Heaven, her home-world, had been set up inside the TARDIS.

'So,' said the h-Doctor. 'Tell me what's on your mind and I'll ' Suddenly, without warning, he began to flicker in and out of phase. He shimmered into ghostly transparency through which Bernice could see the observation dome, then back into a kind of solidity, and back again.

'Doctor?' she said urgently. 'Doctor!' She sighed in exasperation, hands on hips. 'This is futile, Summerfield. And you're talking to yourself again, you realize that? Yes, I know '

'Not quite,' said Horst Leibniz, as he strode along the walkway to meet her.

He circled the flickering hologram, looking it up and down in a manner that suggested he had not had breakfast properly.

Bernice had been startled, but managed to compose herself with remarkable swiftness. 'The Doctor's gone all two-dimensional on me,' she said in exasperation.

182.

Leibniz, thoughtfully, pa.s.sed a hand through the hologram. 'Or suddenly acquired greater depth,' he murmured to himself. 'The signal, remember?'

'That's not a signal. The Doctor said we'd be sure, and I know the Doctor better than that.'

The hologram snapped off and the pyramid clunked to the floor. Leibniz lunged for it, but Bernice was there first, and hung on determinedly to the little object.

'Oh, no, you don't, Mr Know-all. I'm not entirely sure if I trust you.'

Leibniz smiled placatingly, and spread his hands. 'Well, I may not be exactly what I seem,' he said, 'but then that's true of a lot of people, Professor Professor Summerfield.' Summerfield.'

Bernice went cold. 'What do you mean?'

'I had a poke around in your mind. While you weren't looking. It's rude, I know, but no more so than other kinds of search that private agents are forced to make.'

It dawned on Bernice that her gut feeling about Leibniz had not been wrong.

'Agents,' she said with a rueful smile. 'Who employs you, Trau Leibniz?'

'Earth Security Council. The Doctor knows.'

'The Doctor . . . ?' Bernice opened her mouth, closed it again, thought: stop it, you look like a goldfish. 'Well, doubtless he'll fill me in,' she said through gritted teeth. 'So, does Cheynor know about this?'

'Cheynor's a fool. His command of this ship is nonexistent, his mission a front for neatly killing two birds with one stone.' Leibniz leaned against the rail, raised his eyebrows impudently at her. 'Now don't tell me you didn't know that, either.'

'Actually, I did.' Bernice folded her arms and glowered at him. 'You're very cold about everything, aren't you?'

Horst Leibniz did not blink, but his eyes, momentarily, seemed to lose their penetrating stare. 'Most people find me that way. When my wife was murdered, all my feeling for the human race seemed to die with her. Compa.s.sion ceased to have any meaning for me.'

His calm collected tone made Bernice even more uncomfortable than reproof would have done. She flushed with embarra.s.sment.

'All I could do,' Leibniz murmured, 'was share in her pain. That was about six years ago, and that was when I first began to suspect I might be empathic.'

'I'm sorry,' she said. 'You must think I like the taste of my own toes or something.'

'Not to worry,' said Leibniz, but he had turned away from her, and she could not see his expression.

His communicator buzzed. It was one of the TechnOps on the bridge. 'Scans here, sir. We've got her.'

183.

'Mobilize all units,' said Leibniz crisply, 'according to the captain's instructions.' He exchanged a glance with Bernice. 'And I want the Phracs to know what they're doing, too.'

'Shouldn't we wait for the signal?' Benny demanded.

'Don't worry. We will.'

He ushered her into the elevator, but the doors were already opening, and Trinket stood there, his face flushed, looking agitatedly from one to the other.

'It's Livewire,' he said. 'She's going to get us all killed. You've got to stop her!'

Light flowed from Shanstra like glacial water. She gripped the arms of the chair, felt her hair blowing in the hurricane of her own mental power.

'The puny ones are gathering,' she said, in surprise. 'Strengthen your defences, my warriors. I must concentrate on my link to Jirenal.'

She saw her brother, herself, now, and his eyes stared at hers as if out of a mirror of time. Across the wastes of eternity.

With his mind, there oscillated those of thousands of others: a word formed in Shanstra's conscious mind, forcing itself in like a boot kicking a door open, like a baby screaming for its breath as it entered the world.

Pridka. The minds were Pridka.

Shanstra, delighted, felt their strength. It was beautiful, honey-sweet, a wash of emotion and love and faith, with the kick of a drug, the pungency and intensity of s.e.x. The Infinite Requiem was beginning.

Strengthen your defences, my warriors.

A score of Phracton globes bobbed, like bubbles on the wind, outside the white and gold house. Some stationed themselves on the lawn, overlooking the silent city. Once, in another life, some of the minds remembered that they had fought for that city, fought for another cause in the name of something called the Swarm.

That was long ago. There was no Swarm any more. The cause was history; the city was a mere protrusion in three dimensions, a detail of the physical world. They served a greater mistress now.

Excited, hyper-mental chatter pa.s.sed between the Phracton renegades, their globes pulsing with irregular illumination like mountain lightning. Clicking, twittering sounds echoed out across the green lawns of the house.

Inside, their mistress was preparing, and they had to protect her. To ward off the imminent puny attacks of the humans, and also others of their own kind, those who had joined the humans in their treachery.

This was to be no ordinary battle. This was to be a battle where the weapons were not arrows, or bullets, or plasma bolts. The weapons were the misguided attackers themselves.

184.

The Pridka minion now monitoring the gate to the Dreamguide sensed a commotion at the back of the hall. An angry, uniformed human strode in, accompanied by an ineffectual escort of two drones and an agitated senior Pridka.

Voices were being raised as they hurried across the hall, and that sort of thing was never permitted here.

The monitor bobbed nervously as the deputation strode up to him.

'Who's in there?' the angry human demanded. 'Tell me who's in there!' The young monitor looked nervously to his senior for advice.

Tell Trau Cheynor what he wishes to know, came the wary instruction. came the wary instruction. He He appears unnecessarily agitated. appears unnecessarily agitated.

The young Pridka cleared his throat and tried to speak. As he had done little but train his mental faculties in communion with the senior Pridka for several cycles now, the voice was rusty with disuse. 'The Dreamguide . . . is at present occupied with three visitors, sir.' The young Pridka consulted his info-projector, and data glowed in the air above the black square. 'A Miss Suzanne Palsson from the Terran Empire, and the Director's a.s.sistant, Amarill dell'kat.i.t vo'Pridka. She is leading a proxy session with the third visitor.'

'A proxy session?' The human, Cheynor, seemed confused, and the elder Pridka stepped in to explain.

'Our best-trained healers can arrange for a link to the Dreamguide in special circ.u.mstances. It is like an, ah, account, if you like.'

'And so who is it for?'

'For a Mr Jirenal. On whom I have ' the monitor frowned ' no data.'

Something nagged in the back of his mind There was a reason for the lack of data on the third visitor. There had to be.

The human was aghast. 'Stop this session! You must stop it, now!'

The Doctor gritted his teeth and tried hard to keep his voice level. 'You bar-baric animal,' he muttered eventually.

Jirenal raised an eyebrow. 'The thing about advanced telepathy,' he said, strolling over to the desk and helping himself to a crystallized fruit, 'is that you really need to have the head for it.' He munched, offered the dish to the Doctor, who responded with an icy stare.

'This was not necessary,' the Doctor said. He met Jirenal's dark gaze, held it. 'How can you say this was necessary?'

Jirenal shrugged his enormous shoulders. 'There was no other way I could have become director of this centre,' he explained, as if the Doctor were miss-ing something reasonable and obvious. 'Where I come from, it is considered n.o.ble and just to rise in power by eliminating the contenders.'

'What did you hope to gain from this butchery?'

185.

'Minds, Doctor. Minds. Only the Director's mind-imprint could allow me access to the Dreamguide's world. He would not give it willingly, so I took it by force, and disposed of the, er . . . ' Jirenal waved a vague hand at the Director's body. '. . . container. Part of my consciousness is now with the Dreamguide, arranging things to my satisfaction.'

The Doctor's face was shadowed, watching, as alert as an owl at night. 'You don't know what you're doing what Shanstra is doing,' he muttered, his voice low and threatening. It became a growl. 'You must stop this, now.'

'And through the Dreamguide,' continued Jirenal, as if the Doctor had not spoken, 'it is possible to infiltrate all the Pridka's thoughts. The centre becomes me. With all that mental power behind it, all the minds become us.'

'And in comparison to this, control of the Phracton Swarm was a mere rehearsal,' said the Doctor bitterly.

Jirenal gave a dazzling, horrible smile. 'Why, Doctor, I do believe you're using your intelligence. I'm glad you've started. You see, Shanstra's signals are becoming ever stronger in my mind. When she failed to communicate with Kelzen largely due to your interference in her booster link with the Phractons she gathered her strength again, to try and break through to me.'

'Harder, I'd imagine. The signal so weak, the distance so great . . . ' The Doctor nodded slowly. 'But possible. I was unprepared, I should have seen.