Doctor Who_ Original Sin Part 33

She ducked as the flesh-covered arm punched through the air next to her head.

'Is this the only door?' she shouted at Powerless Friendless.

The Hith nodded. 'I'm afraid so,' it said.

The flesh of the door stretched and distorted as the bot outside pushed against it. Bernice could make out the seams and rivets in its surface. Its blind, blank head swivelled to face her, a bizarre parody of humanity.

'I'm going to kill you, my dear,' it said, voice m.u.f.fled by the skin of the door.

'I am am going to kill you.' going to kill you.'

Vaughn's attention appeared to be momentarily distracted; his eyes, despite being metal, had a dreamy, abstracted quality, and his lips were moving. The Doctor thought he caught Bernice's name being mentioned, but he couldn't be sure. He took the opportunity to study the figure standing behind the desk, its skin gleaming in the reddish light of the window. Vaughn's body was obviously robotic, more robotic than the last time they had met, but designed more as 206an acknowledgement that he had once been human than as a facsimile of one.

How long had it been since they had last stood facing one another: another office, another time? A thousand years for Vaughn; five hundred or so for the Doctor. They were both older, but were they any wiser?

Vaughn's attention suddenly focused back on the Doctor. He was frowning slightly, as if he had received some unwelcome news.

'Tea?' he offered in that hatefully familiar voice. Even half a millennium couldn't erase the Doctor's instinctive reaction to Vaughn's patronizing tone.

'Forgive me, but I can't remember whether you take sugar and milk.' Vaughn smiled sleepily. 'Tell me, Doctor, do your tastes change when your body does, or do your likes and dislikes remain constant?'

'I still abhor evil,' the Doctor snarled, filing away for the moment the fact that Vaughn knew about his regenerative ability. How had he found that out?

From the Cybermen, perhaps? 'I still fight the guilty on behalf of the innocent.'

He felt rather petty, reacting so extravagantly to Vaughn's hospitality, but the man had always brought out the worst in the Doctor. That smooth, cultured facade concealed a mind as amoral and as calculating as any machine. The only difference between Vaughn in the twentieth century and Vaughn now was that his outside was now as hard as his inside.

'Doctor, I wouldn't have you any other way,' Vaughn said, and ran a gleaming finger across the surface of the desk. Lights rippled in response. 'It will take my butlerbot a few moments to prepare the tea; I hope you don't object.'

The glow from the window flickered, making his shadow shimmer across the desk.

Despite himself, the Doctor remembered.

He stood beside Vaughn, watching with horror as the flimsy double doors at the International Electromatics factory burst open, and three Cybermen strode the International Electromatics factory burst open, and three Cybermen strode forward. The sunlight glinted off skin like mercury. Vaughn once their ally but forward. The sunlight glinted off skin like mercury. Vaughn once their ally but now their enemy struggled with the ungainly shape of Professor Watkins' cere-brotron mentor, dropping two of the invaders to the concrete floor, but the third now their enemy struggled with the ungainly shape of Professor Watkins' cere-brotron mentor, dropping two of the invaders to the concrete floor, but the third Cyberman fired its X-ray laser and Vaughn's chest exploded. He fell forwards Cyberman fired its X-ray laser and Vaughn's chest exploded. He fell forwards onto an iron railing, trailing smoke behind him . . . onto an iron railing, trailing smoke behind him . . .

Soon after that, UNIT had arrived. The Doctor hadn't bothered looking for Vaughn's body after the battle had ended, and before long he and his companions had moved on to the Collection and that nasty business with the Bookworms. Obviously UNIT hadn't bothered either, and the question of the precise whereabouts of Vaughn's cadaver had got lost in the overall cover-up.

'It's been a long time,' he said.

For a second, Vaughn did not react, as if his attention was elsewhere. The Doctor had noticed that it happened every ten seconds or so.

'Longer for me, or for you, Doctor?' Vaughn finally replied, his normally 207benevolent voice suddenly sharp, betraying an underlying tension. 'I've lived through a millennium waiting for this moment.'

'Lived through? I would query that. You were killed. I saw you fall. n.o.body could live through that. n.o.body.'

'Ah, but you forget,' that hated voice said, oozing false comradeship, 'I had a Cyber-body, and a Cyber-augmented brain. They built me well, you know.'

'They built you for a purpose. They were using you.'

'Of course.' Vaughn smiled. 'I knew that, but to use me they had to rebuild me. I took what they offered the immortality, the power, the vast increase in memory and processing power and played them along.'

'How did you survive?'

Vaughn shrugged, as if the information was of little concern, but the Doctor knew that he wanted to talk, had had to talk, and if the Doctor could keep him talking for long enough then something might happen. to talk, and if the Doctor could keep him talking for long enough then something might happen.

'I had other bodies, hidden away,' Vaughn replied. 'Copies I had made without the knowledge of the Cyberplanner in my office. Spares, if you like. I never trusted the Cybermen. I knew that they would betray me eventually.' A flicker of transient information in the desk cast highlights across his burnished metal face, his drooping eyelid, his sardonic smile.

'That's not the way I remember it,' the Doctor sneered in provocation. 'Perhaps your much vaunted memory increase is failing you. As I recall, you were shocked when the Cybermen showed their true colours. You had been completely sucked in by their pathetic offer of power.'

Vaughn looked away. 'Perhaps,' he said casually. 'It was a long time ago.

I . . . I disremember, in the words of a long-dead American president. I have moved on to other projects since then, and I have done it by myself. I don't need any help. You taught me that, Doctor.'

'If I had thought that anything of you might have survived the Cybermen's guns,' the Doctor said venomously, 'then I would have hunted down every last nut and bolt of you and melted them down for sc.r.a.p.'

'I was cleverer than you, even then,' Vaughn said calmly. 'When the Cybermen destroyed one body, my mind my personality, my essence was transmitted to an International Electronics communications satellite in geo-stationary orbit, then downloaded into another robot body in our New York office. From there I regained control over the company using a different ident.i.ty. Share prices had crashed, of course, but they picked up again. It was not difficult. Unbeknownst to the Cybermen, I had already established fifteen separate ident.i.ties around the world. Within three years, the entire board of Directors of International Electromatics consisted of various versions of myself.'

208.'That must have made board meetings interesting,' the Doctor said, amused despite himself.

'Especially considering the fact that I was the secretary as well,' Vaughn chuckled.

A sudden yellow flare outside the window reflected from Vaughn's metal skin and momentarily illuminated the office.

'Bonfire night?' the Doctor ventured. 'I'm afraid I didn't bring any sparklers.'

'Riots,' Vaughn said casually. 'Certain portions of the Overcity and Undertown are ablaze.'

'Riots?' The Doctor's brain raced through facts, a.s.sumptions and theories.

'Vaughn,' he said, leaning forward earnestly, 'I have to tell you something.

About these riots '

'They're due to the icaron radiation emitted by my Hith ship,' Vaughn said.

'I know.'

The Doctor felt a sudden wave of black anger welling up within him 'You know,' he hissed, 'and you don't care care?'

Vaughn shrugged. 'I take the long-term view, Doctor,' he said. 'And if that means a few million people have to die so that I get what I want, then so be it. I consider it to be a large-scale research project on the effects of icarons on the general populace.'

The Doctor was about to say something he would probably have regret-ted for the short time that it would have taken Vaughn to kill him, but just then Vaughn's butlerbot entered the office. Its face was a black ovoid, and numerous pairs of spindly arms radiated from its chest, each terminating in pincer-like hands sheathed in white gloves. It was carrying a teapot, two cups, two saucers, a jug of milk, a sugar bowl, two teaspoons and a plate of lemon slices.

'Ah,' said Vaughn. 'Shall I be mother?'

Doc Dantalion pa.s.sed a comblike front limb through his antennae. If he didn't get out of there soon, he was going to boil in his exoskeleton. The s.p.a.ceport Nineteen departure lounge was so full of humans that the air above them was rippling in the heat, and their exuded sweat was condensing on the walls and ceiling. The place stank of them: a greasy, dirty, meaty stench that, most offworld races agreed, was one of those things that distinguished humanity from most other bipedal humanoids.

Queues were snaking across the room, crossing and recrossing each other, joining ticket booths to baggage checkin areas, drinks dispensers to insurance bots, quick-sleep booths to fastline booths. Dantalion could have sworn that the front ends of some of the queues had joined up to their own rear ends, 209and that the people standing so patiently in them had been shuffling in circles for hours.

Not that it seemed to matter. n.o.body was going anywhere.

Olias was standing some twenty metres ahead of Dantalion, in front of the offworld ticket booth. Behind her, her retinue of mainly offworld, mainly Undertown friends, colleagues and servants was attracting glowers and barbed comments from the ma.s.s. Her Ogron bodyguards had created a s.p.a.ce around her which moved through the fetid atmosphere like a bubble of air through the stagnant waters of the Undertown ca.n.a.ls. The bodyguards loomed over the hara.s.sed ticket clerk like a mountain range of grey flesh. His face was drenched in sweat, and it wasn't just from the heat.

'I keep tellin' you, they're all booked solid for the next six months. Every scheduled flight is full!'

Olias's skin rippled in barely concealed anger. 'I don't care what it costs,'

she boomed, her voice cutting through conversations across the other side of the cavernous hall and echoing back like thunder. 'I am leaving this miserable planet, and I am leaving it now!'

'On what?' the clerk suddenly screamed, his eyes bulging and his face flushed. Dantalion took a step backwards. He recognized the signs of sudden, irrational anger. ''Less you offworlders can fly through hard vacuum by yourselves, you ain't goin' nowhere!'

The Ogrons also recognized the man's state. Their hands swung to their weapons: battered blasters as long as their arms and almost as thick.

The clerk's fists clenched. Slowly, he stood up, face to chest with the leading Ogron. Shaking with anger, he gazed up into its small, bloodshot eyes for a long, silent moment.

And then he reached up and hit it on the nose so hard that Dantalion could hear the sound of cartilage grind against bone.

The Ogrons didn't shoot him. They just pulled him to pieces and watched him bleed to death.

'Forrester?'

Cwej looked around, but the dead-end corridor was empty. Forrester had vanished. Ahead of him the corridor twisted to the left and rose slightly before disappearing. As far as Cwej and Forrester had been able to ascertain, it corkscrewed around the backbone of the ship for about five hundred yards, providing access to the weapons rooms, which were now stripped voids open to hypers.p.a.ce. The corridor linked the forward compartments and the control room to the engine room in the rear. Except that the engine room was presumably behind this veined, spongy dead end.

210.'Stop playing games!' he yelled, his voice slightly shriller than he would have liked. This cat and mouse game was getting on his nerves.

The wall beside Cwej suddenly screamed and flinched. Instinctively he dived to the ground as the blaster bolt seared its way across the fleshy substance toward him, blistering and burning as it went. The beam pa.s.sed over his head; he rolled sideways and returned fire. The beam from his judicial weapon hit the spindly four-armed bot squarely in the chest. It staggered, but it didn't fall.

Another two bots appeared around the curve of the corridor.

Their greyhound-like snouts jerked from side to side until the multi-spectral sensors on either side pinpointed his position. They raised their lower sets of arms: the ones with the built-in weapons. He might be able to put one of them off its aim with a well-placed blaster bolt, but not all three. He could swear that he could see the red sparks of the nascent beams, deep in the barrels of the bots' arms. This was it: curtains, finito, s'vetch finito, s'vetch!

He tried to climb to his feet and run, but there were two bots coming up behind him. No sign of Forrester: looked like she'd got away, thank G.o.ddess.

He'd hate for anything to happen to her.

The bots advanced on him. They moved slowly, enjoying their moment of victory. He tried to raise his blaster for one last, despairing volley, but he couldn't even decide which of the machines to shoot at. In the end, it didn't matter. They had him cold. It had never occurred to him that it might end this way, but then, until the flitter crash, it had never occurred to him that it might end at all. Dying in the line of duty was about as good as it could get.

The bots stopped a few metres away, their smooth metal bodies reflecting his drawn face back at him. He sank back against the resilient warmth of the wall and tried to think of something smart to say, something they could etch on his gravestone, but all he could come up with was: 'Order of Adjudicators!

Freeze, sc.u.msuckers!'

It wasn't much of an epitaph.

As Vaughn poured tea for himself and the Doctor, the diminutive Time Lord gazed across the office at the comforting yet unreachable form of the TARDIS.

So near, as the phrase went, and yet so far.

From the corner of his eye he saw a movement behind him. Turning slightly, he found that the butlerbot was poised a few feet away, its sensors twitching with his every move.

'I can't drink tea myself,' Vaughn said as he placed the Doctor's cup on the corner of the desk. Walking around to the other side of the desk with his own cup, he sat and sniffed at the steaming liquid. 'But there is something about holding a steaming cup that I find therapeutic. The Cybermen conferred so 211many advantages on me when they gave me the choice of abandoning the flesh, but there are times when I wish I were human again, and could enjoy a lobster thermidor, or a creme brulee creme brulee, or a fine Armagnac.'

The Doctor sniffed cautiously at his tea. There was something lurking beneath Vaughn's words, something worth probing for. 'Yes, that's something I was going to ask,' he said. 'The body that you had the last time we met could have pa.s.sed for human. Did pa.s.s for human, in fact. This present one ' He gestured at Vaughn's gleaming metal form. ' is hardly comparable, now is it?

Aren't you slumming it rather?'

Vaughn smiled slightly, and looked away, but the Doctor could tell from the way his drooping eyelid twitched and the way his hand clenched upon his cup that the question bothered him.

'The Cybermen are an old race,' Vaughn said, 'and, even when I first met them, they had forgotten more about bionic technology than humanity ever knew. Even with all the resources of INITEC and a thousand years of research, it is a source of some regret that I have not been able to build myself as good a body as they did. This is the best I have been able to do, 'and even this . . .

inadequate . . . simulacrum represents a triumph of engineering, Doctor.'

'But you can't eat a creme brulee creme brulee.'

Vaughn closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair.

'No,' said a voice behind the Doctor's head, 'but there are advantages.'

A pair of white-gloved steel pincers bit into the Doctor's shoulder. Dropping his cup and spilling tea over Vaughn's deep carpet, he gasped at the agony that spread like wildfire along his nerve fibres.

'I am every bot built by INITEC,' Vaughn's voice said from the butlerbot's bland face, 'I am every bot that contains a component built by INITEC. I am every bot that runs software designed by INITEC. I am everywhere. I am everything.'

'Yes,' the Doctor gasped, 'but you're not human, are you? You aren't the Tobias Vaughn that I met in London in the nineteen seventies. That Vaughn died when the Cybermen copied his mind and placed it in one of their metal sh.e.l.ls. It thought it was Vaughn, but it was a bad reproduction. And you?

You're another generation down the line: a copy of a copy. Or has it gone further than that, Vaughn? How much of yourself has been lost along the way?'

The claws dug deeper into the Doctor's flesh, sending pain radiating outwards through his chest and down his arms.

'I am Tobias Vaughn,' Vaughn said from his own mouth. 'I have his memories. I have his experiences.'

'"His"?' the Doctor cried, squirming in his seat as he tried to prise the pincers from his shoulders. 'How thinly have you spread yourself, Vaughn?

212.How many pint pots is your quart divided between?'

'I was in the bot who waved to you when you first arrived in your time machine,' Vaughn said, ignoring the Doctor's words. 'Do you remember? I had been waiting for you, Doctor. I discovered from the Cybermen that you were a traveller in time and s.p.a.ce, and with a thousand years at my disposal, I have searched every database, every video recording, every simularity, every holovid, every simcord for you. I know more about your adventures on Earth than you do, Doctor.'

'And what exactly do you need me for, if I might make so bold?' the Doctor hissed through clenched teeth. He was on the verge of blacking out; the world had turned fuzzy around the edges and the fuzziness was encroaching further and further upon his vision.

Vaughn gestured languidly towards the TARDIS. 'Time travel, of course,' he said.

213.

Chapter 16.