Doctor Who_ Relative Dementias Part 13

'I doubt it but I'm sure he'll be interested to speak to me.'

The little man leaned forwards and peered into the dining room where the tables were being set up for breakfast.

'I'll go and see, but it's a bit early. He may not be up yet.'

'I can wait.'

Bernard shrugged and gestured across the hallway to the lounge. Mr Smith nodded and strolled through whilst Bernard went upstairs to find Doctor Menzies.

No sooner had Bernard gone around the corner at the top of the stairs than the Doctor poked his head around the lounge doorway. Checking the coast was dear, he headed for the steps to the cellar.

The laboratory was still and quiet. A faint hint of bacon hung in the air. Joyce had said the transmat portal was somewhere in the middle of the kitchen. He looked down at the pristine white tiles on the floor, hoping to find some indication of its location, some marker. He knelt down and soon spotted a faint scratch in the tiles. Experimentally, he waved his umbrella around in the air above it, but nothing happened.

'Control panel, control panel,' he muttered to himself as he stood up and looked around the room. It had to be here somewhere. With a gleeful smile, he spotted the Bakelite light switches and scampered over to them. The switches themselves seemed fixed, unworking. But to his delight he discovered the whole block was hinged at the side, and swung away from the wall to reveal a flat-panel display, lights winking merrily. He tapped at it and it answered him with a beep. Closing it, he crossed back to the scratch and stuck out his umbrella. The end of it disappeared. He moved it backwards and forwards a few times and then stepped through.

The Doctor pulled a face at the state of the ship as he materialised in the corridor. Water ran in dribbles down the walls, and slimy skeins of algae reflected back the overhead lights, eerily green. Rivulets of rust trailed from leaking bolts, and the sounds of the ship's hull, creaking and groaning, reminded him of a medieval torture chamber.

'I wonder if Mary needs a part-time cleaning job,' he thought. As he strolled through the deserted ship, remembering Joyce's vague directions, it was easy to imagine it being haunted

dark, ungainly shadows were everywhere, and the omnipresent sounds of the vessel hinted that the ship's crew still strolled the corridors, incorporeal and angry. As he headed for the sleeper chambec he stopped to look over the few control panels that still showed any life, hoping for some due as to the purpose of this whole set-up. But all he could gather was that it had been there about three years, was running on emergency batteries, and would never be capable of leaving the Earth's atmosphere again.

He soon reached the chamber Other than the ten or so people on the couches it was deserted. Their total stillness was unsettling.

For a few minutes, he wandered from person to person, checking their pulse rates, their pupillary reflexes, their breathing. They all seemed well enough, although in a highly stimulated mental state, despite their almost comatose appearances. Then he turned his attention to the equipment to which they were wired, tracing the cables from the chromed cylinders to a large, rectangular metal box under one of the beds.

At his touch, a panel slid aside in the top, revealing controls and more displays. Curiouser and curiouser, he thought.

He stood up, tapping his chin with the handle of his umbrella. It was dear that someone was using the processing power of the human brains in the chamber. Joyce had been sure that they'd been performing calculations related to frequency.

The only thing now, the Doctor thought, was to find out exactly what those calculations were. He fished in his pocket for the implant he'd removed from Joyce's neck and sat down on one of the vacant couches.

Megan buckled up her black leather tunic with fierce determination, tucked the static pistol into her belt and slung the pulse rifle over her shoulder. It had been a long time since she'd dressed like this, used the rifle; shooting squirrels with an air-rifle just wasn't the same. She gave it a once-over to make sure it was in perfect working order, tied back her dirty blonde hair and checked herself in the bedroom mirror. The business, she thought, just the business: apart, obviously, from the purple and yellow of the bruising on her face, and the fact that she couldn't hold one eye open properly. But she'd do, she smiled to herself, thinking how shocked the residents would be if they could see her slack, loopy old Megan, armed to the teeth. She knocked back another painkiller.

Since she and Sooal had arrived, she'd had precious little chance to exercise her combat skills: dragging the residents in from the garden for tea, listening to their interminable stories of how 'it wasn't like this in my day' and wiping s.h.i.tty a.r.s.es had blunted her edge, she was sure. She'd grown soft and sloppy.

She'd never have been caught out in the kitchen if her reflexes hadn't been dulled by three years of ministering to Graystairs'

residents. She had to keep reminding herself that she and Sooal had come here for a reason.

Megan slipped into the corridor and down the stairs to the kitchen, treading cat-light, pausing as she heard Harry and George heading down for breakfast. She smiled cruelly to herself: George was going to get one h.e.l.l of a shock now that Harry's treatment was complete, but it would be his turn soon enough. As they pa.s.sed, she headed on into the kitchen. She went to activate the transmat but found to her surprise that it was already active. Perhaps Sooal was aboard the ship, sorting out the mess with the processors. With a last look around, she stepped through.

Behind Megan in the kitchen, the storecupboard door swung open silently, just a crack. A pair of eyes peered out.

It was time to move.

Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong.

As the darkness closed in on the Doctor, he could feel the fine metal tendrils of the implant worming their way into his spine and up through the base of his brain. He hadn't thought that they might be confused by the alien wiring and structure of his brain, but he could sense that they were baffled, not finding the medulla, the pons, all the structures that they used as signposts to guide their way. A jolt of pain stabbed down his spine as they touched nerves that they never expected to encounter, a.n.a.lysing the signals they were picking up and moving on. Searching.

Around him, billowing up out of the past, out of the centuries of memories stored in his head, he suddenly saw Leela's face, named with a fur-trimmed hood. Thick flurries of snow sleeted across his vision as the smell of scotch came to him. Then it all vanished in a soundless pop pop. The blind, mindless fingers of the alien device continued to probe his brain, unaware of the memories they were stimulating.

With a sudden flare of pink light, and with blinding clarity, he saw a fragment of a face peering out at him from a broken window a single grey eye. The window shimmered orange and brown and yellow, a flurry of autumn leaves that swirled out and away from him. He smelled the woody tang of bonfire smoke, felt it curling around him like a coat. And although he could still only see that lone, baleful eye, somehow he knew that the mouth attached to it was moving; and he could hear a rich, sardonic voice whispering to him, asking him if he'd forgotten him already...

In a flash of utter darkness, it was suddenly gone, leaving him with a strange taste in his mouth, wondering whether the whole thing had just been an artefact of the silent, probing silver worms, still working their way through the damp, alien soil of his brain. He wanted to leap up, rip the wires from his head.

But it was only then he realised that, unfortunately, his brain hadn't been so alien that the filaments hadn't been able to disable his voluntary nervous system. He hadn't expected that.

He'd a.s.sumed that the sleepers were simply drugged to keep them in place. It was a mistake, he knew, that could well cost him his life, since he was now totally vulnerable.

He pushed thoughts of the eye and the leaves aside and turned his senses outwards as the intruders in his head drew closer to their goal. Although he couldn't open his eyes, he could hear, he could smell and he could touch. The sour odour of rust and mildew filled his nostrils, laced with the tang of ozone and rank, stagnant water. The ship seemed more alive than ever, a soundscape of dripping water, shifting metal plates and footsteps. Footsteps?

He felt his hearts speed up.

He wasn't alone.

In his pocket, Sooal's datapad began to bleep frantically. He'd picked out three of the residents as replacements for the missing processors and was about to find Steve or Menzies to have them taken down to the ship. Puzzled, he pulled out the datapad and stared at the display with growing incredulity: the activity of the array had shot up by eighty percent.

Got you! Megan laughed to herself as she saw the diminutive figure of the Doctor on the couch. Sooal must have beaten her to it.

His face was beaded with sweat, his dark, straggly hair plastered to his forehead. She noticed the hat, set jauntily atop the interface column. Her eyes ran over the displays set into its shiny surface and gave an appreciative chuckle. The probes were having difficulty, it seemed, in locating the Doctor's frontal cortex. Some of the readings didn't make any sense. Maybe this interface was damaged perhaps Ace had wrecked it when she'd rescued the other three processors. Sweet irony!

The instruments indicated quite clearly that the Doctor was only half an hour away from a total neural collapse. Gleefully whistling, she set off for the airlocks. One down, one to go.

The suit had been designed for use in the vacuum of s.p.a.ce, where the air in it would balloon it out not for the depths of the sea where the water pressure would smooth it across her body like a second skin, icy cold and claustrophobic. Pockets of trapped air formed bubbles, cl.u.s.tering around Ace's stomach and her rucksack, rising into the rigid helmet. As she rose swiftly through the dark waters, watching the dim lights of the ship recede below her, she tried to recall what little she knew about 'the bends': nitrogen bubbles acc.u.mulating in the blood vessels and joints as the sudden drop in pressure brought it out of solution in her blood. She felt her lungs swelling rapidly with the breath she didn't realise she was holding. Remembering something she'd heard about diving, she breathed out steadily with a low 'Aahhhh', swallowing every few seconds as she felt the pressure building up rapidly and painfully in her ears. The thought that, as she rose, nitrogen bubbles in her veins could be conspiring to kill her chilled her more than the coldness of the water around her. She couldn't remember all the symptoms of the bends, but she knew they were painful. She started breathing in and out rapidly as the world around her began to brighten, recalling that her rapid ascent through the last few dozen metres to the surface was probably the most dangerous.

Ace broke the surface with a shock of bright relief, taking in huge lungfuls of air as if she'd been deprived of it on the journey up from the ship. As droplets streamed down the faceplate, she began treading water, trying to orientate herself. She rotated around as best she could, looking for the land that she knew was there. As her arms started to tire and the suit restrained her movements, she began to panic. Having escaped from Sooal, was it only to drown, out here in sight of land?

She wondered if she should try to get out of the suit, but remembered how complicated it had been to put on: trying to take it off in the water would be even harder. The air in it offered her some buoyancy, but it wasn't enough to prevent her sinking every time she stopped treading water. It gave her an idea, and she fiddled with the air controls. A faint hiss reached her ears as the suit slowly swelled out around her. Gently, her legs swung out from beneath her until they lay flat on the waves, her face looking up at the vacant bowl of the sky, grey and dreary.

Great, she thought as she turned her head inside the helmet.

I might not drown, but there's a good chance I'll die of boredom.

John watched Alexander turn his find over in his hands, feeling strangely proprietorial about it. He took a last drag on his cigarette and stubbed it out in the saucer he was using as an ashtray.

'So we do nothing, then?' Alexander said. 'We just carry on with the survey as if nothing has happened, as if you hadn't found that?'

'Stop being such a drama queen,' John said, setting it down on the table. 'We've got another two weeks out here. Let's just get on, get it out of the way, and then we can sort this thing out.

If you want to use the tent radio to tell someone about it, then fine. But I can't see them sending out a rescue party.'

He reached for his cigarettes again. Alexander raised a disapproving eyebrow. 'You've only just put one out.'

John ignored him and lit up again, pointedly/ 'And how, exactly, do you suggest we finish the survey? Moby's knackered, the compa.s.s won't stop spinning, and every other electronic instrument we have has died on us. We can't do much of a survey without any equipment, can we?'

'What's to survey? As far as we can tell, the only things left around here are barnacles and seaweed. Just write that down, add a few charts and you're done.'

John sighed. 'That's easy for you to say it's not your PhD we're talking about, is it?'

'Hey, don't get at me.' Alexander raised his hands defensively 'I didn't have to come and help.'

John snorted, blowing out a bluish cloud of smoke. 'Yeah, and a great help you've been so far.'

'Thanks a lot, John. If I hadn't come and remember it was Mother's idea, not mine you'd have had to find someone else, and if I recall correctly, they weren't exactly jumping at the chance of accompanying you back at uni, were they?'

John looked away, staring at the metal lump on the table. He suddenly wanted to chuck it back in the sea: it and that dome-thing had well and truly screwed up this trip. Two weeks it should have taken. Two weeks of taking fish samples, checking the quality of the water and working out whether sunken German ships were polluting the sea, and they should have been on their way back to write it all up. And what had they got?

Sweet FA.

Alexander fanned the smoke away from his face and stood up. 'I'm going up on deck for some fresh air,' he said, glowering at John.

His brother watched him go. 'Don't fall over the handrail,'

he called after him sourly.

'There's something out there!' Alexander shouted down the steps just seconds after he'd gone on deck.

'What?'

Alexander didn't answer. John could hear him clattering about above, running along the deck. With a throaty roar, the engine started up, sputtering and coughing. The metal object rattled on the tabletop, vibrating its way steadily towards the edge: John grabbed it and placed it on a seat cushion before racing upstairs to find out what the h.e.l.l was going on. He could hear the sound of the anchor winch reeling in the chain that had held the boat steady for the past few days.

As John emerged from below deck, Alexander pointed out to sea. He put the boat into gear and it began to chug forward, oily smoke billowing grumpily around the engine housing. Away in the distance, floating on the sea, was a glinting shape, reflecting back the sky like a crumpled chocolate wrapper. It took him a few seconds to realise that it was moving and that it was a person in a shiny suit.

'b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l! There's someone out there!' said John, sheltering his eyes from the sun.

'Well done Sherlock. Find the lifebelt and get ready to throw it when we get close enough.'

Weird suit, thought John as they drew close enough. It looked like a s.p.a.ce-age Michelin man. For an uncomfortable second, he wondered what they'd do if the suit contained a corpse. He remembered, as a child, finding a dead cat, tied up in a bin bag and thrown onto some waste ground near where they'd lived. He'd ripped open the bag, and the stench had made him throw up on the spot. If there was any suspicion that this suit contained anything other than a live, breathing human being, then he certainly wasn't going to be the one to open it up.

He needn't have worried: as they pulled up alongside, the new arrival made a sudden rocking motion, trying to flip itself over. John threw the life preserver overboard and watched the blimp unfasten the seal around the s.p.a.cesuit-like helmet. With a hiss and a froth of bubbles, it came loose, and suit began to deflate.

'Grab the ring!' shouted Alexander over his shoulder.

After a few seconds of floundering, the newcomer looped its arms through it and John began hauling on the rope, dragging the by now quite diminutive figure towards the boat.

'Careful of the handrail,' Alexander warned. 'It's been giving off electric shocks all week.'

John threw him a wary glance as their guest climbed the ladder on the side of the boat, removing the helmet.

Whatever John had expected, it certainly wasn't the young woman that stood before them.

The Doctor didn't move couldn't move. He lay, listening to the sound of Megan's footsteps departing, her whistling slowly fading away. What was she doing? What had had she done? she done?

Inside his brain, the living silver wires had found their goal, and with another intense flash, the darkness into which he'd been abruptly plunged flared into aching white light. He felt his mental faculties splitting, as his visual field darkened down again, now only illuminated by the streams and rivers of numbers which Joyce had described. One half of his mind could only observe a mute, impotent presence; the other half, out of his control, joined with the minds of the others present in the room, and started absorbing the flows of data. The Doctor found it hard not to be fascinated by the whole process, the ingenuity that had gone into this parallel processor: harnessing the computational power of a dozen human minds and using it to...

well, he expected that he'd come to that soon enough. But it was certainly an achievement.

Another spike of pain lanced along his spine and his sense of touch vanished as if a switch had been thrown. Perhaps his body shuddered, or spasmed. Perhaps he'd rolled off the couch and was now lying in a pool of rancid water on the floor. His sense of balance seemed unaffected, but how could he be certain? He was totally cut off from his body, the ultimate in sensory deprivation. Pragmatically, he realised there was nothing he could do about that now, and turned his attention to working out what this colossal processing power was being used for.

Joyce had been right about the frequency a.n.a.lyses being performed: someone had huge amounts of data to wade through and, from what he could judge, the processing was far from complete. He realised, to his delight, that although he couldn't alter the raw data, he could influence what he saw, which equations presented themselves to him, and the efficiency of some of the algorithms. As if flicking through the pages of a book, the Doctor scanned the information, watching streams of numbers, huge matrices of values, frequencies and timings, rotate around him as if he were the centre of their universe.

Suddenly the image shuddered as if someone had thumped the side of a television set. He winced as the figures began to flicker in and out of sight, overlapping, dissolving into each other. And deep inside his brain, he felt sharp electrical crackles and imagined he could smell ozone. Something was wrong. He felt his hearts speeding up, losing their asynchrony, starting to beat dangerously in time with each other.

Surely it wasn't all going to end like this, wired up to a computer, powerless. No gloating megalomaniac, no invading army of alien lizards spitting fire at him. Just silence and disconnection, like someone pulling a plug.

He was going to die.

Chapter Nine.

Ace unfastened the suit and slipped out of it, letting it pool around her feet, a sloughed silver skin. Her rucksack tumbled onto the deck and she scratched her scalp, itchy from the confinement of the helmet, breathed the fresh, salty air and felt droplets of spray on her face.

'Ace,' she said, seeing as no one else seemed to want to break the silence, and stuck out her hand. The curly-haired one shook it grimly. The other one held back but gave her a cautious smile. She winced, feeling a tiny stabbing pain in her elbow. For a moment, she remembered the bends, nitrogen bubbles, and took a few deep breaths, hoping that it was the right thing to do.

She reckoned they were probably brothers - there was a similarity about the eyes, the set of the mouth. They both had dark hair one short, one longer and curlier; and the short-haired one had a neatly-trimmed moustache. In their early twenties, she expected.

'I'm John,' said Curly. 'And this is Alexander, my brother.'

'Nice to meet you both oh, and thanks for the rescue. I was beginning to wonder how long I'd be floating around out there. Good job I don't get sea-sick easily. Any chance of a cuppa and something to eat. I'm starving!'

'Yeah, sure, said John, clearly trying not to be too thrown by her sudden appearance from the sea. 'Come on downstairs and we'll get you something.'

And before either of them could start on the questions that Ace knew must be on the tips of their tongues, she picked up her rucksack and the suit and headed down the stairs. Despite its ratty, peeling exterior, the inside of the boat was surprisingly cosy, if a little cluttered. Above the padded seats running round the dining area which Ace a.s.sumed doubled as beds were wide, high-edged shelves packed with bits of electrical equipment, charts and all sorts of sailing paraphernalia. High up in the walls were tiny windows which let light in from above. She plonked herself down and smiled at Alexander who sat down opposite her. She could hear John in the galley, rattling pots and pans and cutlery. Her mouthful of bacon b.u.t.ty seemed weeks ago; she wondered if sudden, ravenous hunger was a symptom of decompression sickness.

'What were you doing out there?' asked Alexander. 'I mean, we're miles from nowhere and suddenly there's an inflatable woman in the water.'

'No wonder you hauled me aboard so quickly then,' she smiled.

He rolled his eyes.

Where should she begin? She looked at Alexander, trying to weigh up whether he was the no-nonsense sort who would just laugh at the idea of aliens and s.p.a.ceship and transmats; or whether he was at least open-minded enough to consider them as possibilities. She wished that the Doctor was here so that he could sidestep all the usual introductions in his usual handwavey way. But he wasn't, and she didn't think that cryptically saying 'I'll explain later' would get her very far.