Doctor Who_ Loving The Alien Part 34

O'Brien nodded. 'Two vents in the back of my skull. You can't just plug me into the d.a.m.ned mains!'

'Is that what they do?'

O'Brien nodded. 'My hydraulics are still working they can convert and use raw electricity but my flesh is wasting. Rotting on me!'

He drew his robe apart slightly at the neck. His torso was an even more elaborate filigree of intersecting wires. The effect might have been beautiful were it not for the great, hungry hollows in his flesh, and the patchwork of purple lesions and open sores that covered him.

'My body is dead but I remain alive, a prisoner of these savages!'

'Why can't you escape?' the Doctor asked. 'If your hydraulics are still working. I've felt your strength.'

O'Brien shook his gaunt head.

'You don't understand. When my ship crashed I damaged my legs.

These... barbarians... tried to repair them.'

He let his robe fall to the floor.

The Doctor closed his eyes for a moment in shock and sympathy.

'This is what they did to me.'

From the waist down O'Brien was a mess of metal plates and boxes, rubber tubes snaking in and out of them, industrial pistons, bolts and rivets.

He took a clumsy step forward, hissing and clonking, holding the wall for support.

'The operations...' he whispered. 'So many of them. Sometimes the pain's so bad I howl like a b.l.o.o.d.y animal.'

'If I can, I will help you,' said the Doctor. 'But first you must tell me what you were doing when you crashed.'

'High atmosphere engineering work,' said O'Brien. 'We were building a bridge.'

'A bridge...'

'A trans-dimensional bridge. We'd never tried it before. They'd had some success with smaller relays, but this was something new.'

The Doctor was open-mouthed.

'You tried to force a permanent, stable breach between dimensions...'

163.

'I'd opened the breach... everything was going smoothly, then there was an explosion from somewhere...'

'From the other side,' said the Doctor. 'This side. You were sucked through the breach.'

'I guessed that,' said O'Brien.

'But why?' said the Doctor. 'Aren't your people aware of the dangers of such an experiment?'

'The PM. himself told us it was safe,' said O'Brien. 'Said it was vital to the security of the realm.'

The Doctor's face creased in thought. He barely heard O'Brien's voice the other O'Brien echoing ghostly from the furnace.

'Doc,' he called. 'You up there? You've been rumbled.'

The Doctor's head snapped round with a sudden, horrified realisation. Davey's voice was getting louder and less reverberant. He was climbing the shaft.

'Davey, don't '

Too late. Davey O'Brien's soot-stained head appeared in the open hatchway. He started to haul himself through.

He hadn't yet noticed the third party in the room. He freed himself from the hatch and started dusting himself down, coughing.

'Neat ladder, Doc.'

'Davey '

O'Brien had seen. He froze, staring into the face of his hideous Doppelganger Doppelganger.

'So it's true,' he croaked. 'I knew, even from the sound of the voice in the stack.'

He let out a short, bitter laugh. 'Davey O'Brien, meet Davey O'Brien.'

'I know it's hard to take in,' said the Doctor gently. 'There are infinite numbers of us out there of every one of us. All us, but all different, with different fates and fortunes. We just don't normally get to meet them.'

'What happened to him?' O'Brien whispered.

'Your people did this to me!' his alter ego spat. 'They're killing me with their ignorance and savagery!'

'Why did you come up here, Davey?' the Doctor suddenly asked.

'G.o.d, yes...' O'Brien struggled to rea.s.semble his thoughts. 'They're on to you, Doc. They're searching the whole floor.'

The Doctor looked around the room. The door resembled that of a bank vault.

'So we're trapped,' he said.

'We should be safe up here for a while,' said O'Brien. 'I've left the hatch so it looks shut until you get right up to it. They won't think of 164 the chimney just yet.'

There was a coughing scuffling in the shaft. The Doctor shot O'Brien a sceptical glance. O'Brien tensed himself, fists clenched.

A pair of feet appeared in the hatchway, swung and slipped and tried to find something solid. The rest of the man followed. O'Brien sprang forward, arms swinging.

'Wait!' the Doctor shouted, jumping forward. 'It's all right, I know him.'

'You sure?'

'His name's Cody McBride. He's here to help us.'

'Hey Doc,' said a very sooty McBride. 'How's ' He suddenly stopped, then 'Jesus, what's that?'

'This,' said the Doctor, a little embarra.s.sed, 'is Captain Davey O'Brien. And so is this. It's a long story.'

'No time, Doc,' said McBride. 'We gotta go. This is a breakout.'

'Which way?'

'The way I came in. The Santa Claus way.'

'Is there no other way?' the Doctor asked, looking at the half-human O'Brien. 'I'd like to take our friend here.'

'We can't go down,' said his human double. 'All the guards are out.

Your friend started coming round off his medication. Attacked Hark.

s.n.a.t.c.hed a scalpel from his own pocket and tried to kill him. Gutsy sod I never realised they'd taken his legs.'

'What happened to him?' the Doctor asked.

'He's back under sedation. Hark guessed what you'd done and started looking for you.'

'Hang on,' McBride interrupted. 'Are you saying that Mullen's here.'

The Doctor nodded his head.

'Where?'

'One floor beneath us. He's very frail, I'm afraid. I don't think we can safely move him, and certainly not in these circ.u.mstances.'

'So you're saying we should leave him with these b.a.s.t.a.r.ds?'

'For a short time, yes. I don't think the inspector is in any imminent danger. He's been no use to them since he got sick. They're just keeping him sedated and waiting for him to die.'

'We can't leave him, Doc...'

'Then what do you propose we do? Go down there and try to shoot our way out while someone pushes Mullen in a wheelchair?'

The Doctor laid a hand on McBride's filthy sleeve.

'We will come back, Cody.'

He turned his gaze to the young, dying pilot from another dimension.

'For both of you.'

165.

A knotted rope hung down the shaft. O'Brien (the able-bodied one), McBride and the Doctor had little difficulty making the ascent. The first thing that the Doctor saw was a hulking figure silhouetted in the moonlight, a pair of bolt-cutters slung over one shoulder. The grille that had covered the top of the stack was now peeled back like the lid of a tin.

'Careful, the roofs slippery,' said McBride as the Doctor steadied himself.

'Here,' said the stranger, extending an arm to the Doctor. The moonlight caught his face, and the Doctor recognised him.

'Mr Dean, I believe,' he said dryly. 'A truly immortal actor.'

He swept aside the proffered arm.

'I can manage, thank you,' he said.

Then, 'Cody, what's going on?'

'Let's get off this roof first, Doc, then I'll explain everything, OK?'

One by one, using the knotted rope, they lowered themselves over the edge of the roof.

'Now just drop down onto that there fire escape,' said the late James Dean.

From there it was easy down the steep metal stairs and landings to the ground.

A car was waiting there, its lights off, its engine running.

'Cody '

'All right.'

The Doctor squeezed into the back seat with McBride, O'Brien and James Dean.

The car roared away.

There was a woman at the wheel.

'Right, back to Harley Street,' she said. The Doctor recognised her voice Drakefell's companion in the maze.

'You again. This is a surprise.'

'Oh, I love an adventure,' she beamed at him in her rear-view mirror. 'And I'll do anything for Uncle George!'

The sixth figure in the car, the front-seat pa.s.senger, a man in a worn-out tweed hat, craned his neck around.

'You can't imagine how much I have looked forward to this, Doctor,'

he said, 'or how I have enjoyed our little game of cat and mouse.'

'Limb,' the Doctor snarled.