Doctor Who_ Slow Empire Part 12

Across the entire Empire, simultaneously, a number of Amba.s.sadors paused in whatever business they were about, and c.o.c.ked their heads, as though listening to something only they could hear. Where it was possible, they excused themselves from said business, and retired to whatever it might happen to be that served them as their private apartments.

They dismissed all servants, with instructions that they should not be disturbed until further notice, on pain of death, and then, when they were finally alone, these worthy members of the Amba.s.sadorial Corps began behaving rather strangely.

Dark shapes moved in the clouds of ash. There seemed to be a lot of them it was impossible to tell how many there may be.

Several bulky, hulking forms became distinct: chaotically organised collections of muscle and membrane, bulging brain sacs, jaws and clawed appendages and what should have been internal organs but had been situated the wrong way round. Though each was profoundly different from the rest, there seemed to be an underlying quasi-order to their construction that made them instantly recognisable.

They were the creatures that had manifested themselves when the Vortex Wraiths had attempted to invade the TARDIS.

Each of these creatures held, clutched by complex skeins of tentacles, ligaments and other such organs of constriction, the pale and wasted form of a man, his face etched with the flat black markings of an Amba.s.sador who had travelled through an Engine of Transference.

'Oh dear me,' the Doctor said, in markedly dispirited tones. 'Amba.s.sadorial Corpse. I'd have spotted it before only a pun like that was too irredeemably awful even for me.'22

In his apartments in the Imperial Court on Shakrath, the Amba.s.sador Morel sat immobile, his eyes rolled up in his heads to show nothing but the whites. Previously, before taking his leave, he had been about advising his Emperor of the best way of setting up large and extensive establishments throughout the entire world of Shakrath, devoted to the activities that were the Emperor's favourite form of relaxation and diversion only properly organised, in some places automated and with the capacity to handle several thousand of the Shakathri commonality in one go.

The Amba.s.sador Morel had suggested the idea on the basis of sheer statistics with so many being dealt with simultaneously, it was entirely certain that a proportion of them would provide the extreme of entertainment the Emperor himself pursued in his piecemeal way, and which the Emperor could then watch at his leisure.

Now, for the moment, the Amba.s.sador Morel merely sat there, immobile and alone. Then he opened his mouth and began to speak, though there was no one there to hear.

Anji stared at the wasted, human figure clutched to the obscene creature that loomed over them. It was little more than a skeleton, over which flaking, paper-dry skin had been stretched. Desiccated organs made strange and stringy-looking little lumps in its midriff.

For all of this, for all its dereliction, the figure seemed, in some strange way, to be still alive alive. Anji was reminded of the myths of how vampires looked if they hadn't been allowed to feed on human blood for several centuries.

The markings on its face were familiar. She had seen them somewhere before. She realised that she was looking at a copy, ancient and degenerated but a copy nonetheless, of the Amba.s.sador on Shakrath: Morel.

A number of other creatures were distinct through the suspended ash, cl.u.s.tered around, each with its own cargo of semi-living human remains, but it seemed that they had chosen the Morel thing to be, as it were, their spokesman. Tentacles worked at the jaw, throat and lungs, coaxing out words in a way that reminded Anji of a scene from Independence Day Independence Day, with Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation Star Trek: The Next Generation being used somewhat demeaningly as a glove puppet. being used somewhat demeaningly as a glove puppet.23 'Doctor...' the mouth of the duplicate Morel said in a choked and barely audible rasp. 'We have been... waiting for you.'

'Not long, I hope,' the Doctor said lightly. 'How long have you actually been here, anyway?'

'For... thousands of your years,' the Morel thing said. 'We have come here, through the portal of what you call Transference. It was the first. Its building took our notice, flaring like a pain in the Endless Real. It drew us to it...'

'Endless Real?' Anji asked. 'What's this Endless Real?'

'I think it's what they call the vortex,' said the Doctor. 'I think I can see how it happened. The occasional Vortex Wraith would piggyback itself on to a transmat signal, corrupting it and producing something monstrous in which it could make itself manifest...'

'There are few,' the Morel thing said, the tortured sounds coming from its attached human contriving rather pointedly to convey that it was was, after all, talking here. 'We came into this world of men and laid it waste. It is our world now. As new men arrived, men of power who called themselves Amba.s.sadors, we took them captive, used their Engines to send them out once more into their Empire...'

'Arranging it so that the Engine of Transference failed to destroy their original bodies as you did so,' said the Doctor, thoughtfully, looking at the decaying yet still living human component. 'Now I wonder why you did that.'

'These men have Souls,' the Morel thing said. 'One Soul shared between two bodies. Thus we make them do our bidding, walking through their worlds at our sufferance and our pleasure.'

'Hang on a minute,' Anji chipped in. 'Let me get this straight. These... things are using these living corpses to control their counterparts out there in the Empire, manipulating them like a lot of little voodoo dolls? So how come all the Amba.s.sadors we've met have been all suave and "aha, my good sir, I see your entrance has been most extingent", and these guys are all "thousands of your puny human Earth years", you know what I mean?' She briefly adopted a posture to convey the idea of a lurching monster from an old Hollywood movie. 'What's up with that?'

'I suspect the control, filtered through each specific Amba.s.sador, takes on the characteristics of his distinctive personality,' said the Doctor. He turned his attention back to the Morel thing. 'So what have you been doing with all your Amba.s.sadorial puppets, then? Setting things up to bring more of your kind into our universe? I seem to recall seeing several of your kind being looked after medically on Shakrath, kept alive so that they could recuperate.'

'We have laid the way open for our kind,' the Morel thing said. 'We are establishing our presence. But it has been slow, very slow...'

'I imagine it would be,' said the Doctor. 'Bringing your kind in, one by one, by way of the various Transfer chambers and stations, under the watchful eyes of the local populations even with an Amba.s.sador on hand to smooth the way as much as possible. I imagine it would be very slow work.'

His voice seemed perfectly neutral rather than condemnatory, no doubt intended to keep the monstrous form before him talking as long as was possible. Looking at the mismatched collection of teeth, talons and suchlike potentially lethal appendages sprouting from its horrid ma.s.s, Anji couldn't blame him.

'No more,' the Morel thing said. 'There has been... change.' The way it said this managed to convey that any change, at least so far as the plans of the Morel thing were concerned, was almost literally unthinkable. 'Something new new in the Endless Real. in the Endless Real.'

'Oh, really?' said the Doctor, suddenly all attention. 'What sort of thing exactly?'

'It is... not good.'

Again, the Morel thing managed to convey something more than the actual words. 'Not good', in this sense, seemed to be the equivalent of calling a concerted policy of racial genocide a firm but fair tightening of immigration control.

'Not good,' the Morel thing repeated, seemingly more for the benefit of itself than any listener. 'It is big, and it is hungry, and it is eating. We must leave the Endless Real. All of us must leave.'

'That's rather a lot of Vortex Wraiths,' said the Doctor. 'How many of you are there in the, ah, this Endless Real of yours? Millions? Billions?'

'All must leave,' the Morel thing merely said again. 'We found your travelling machine, your... TARDIS, spinning through the Endless Real. It has great power, power enough for us all. Some of us tried to use that power to make meat machines to walk in your world, but it killed them. Killed them all, when they tried.' The croaking tone suggested not so much regret as a general umbrage at some niggling inconvenience. 'You will make it obey us, link its power to the Engines of Transference here, so that we may take all our kind from the Endless Real and populate the worlds of your Empire...'

'And what of the people who already live on those worlds?' said the Doctor. 'I ask merely out of interest, you understand,'

'We will kill them to make room,' the Morel thing said, simply. Anji got the distinct impression that any other alternative, any alternative at an, had and would simply never occur to it. 'They are nothing to us. We will kill all when we find them. We will have them gone.'

'Well, I'm all for peaceful coexistence between species,' the Doctor said, 'but that doesn't exactly strike me as workable when one side had the nasty habit of being completely and utterly inimical to the other. One side giving the other the so-called peace peace of the dead isn't much of an option. The answer's no, I'm afraid.' of the dead isn't much of an option. The answer's no, I'm afraid.'

The Morel thing merely looked at him at least, thought Anji, regarding the complicated tangle of its form, it gave off the impression of looking at him.

'We have the means to make you do our will,' it said at last.

Another organically mismatched creature slithered forward, resolving itself from a mere shadow in the clouds of ash. Like the Morel thing it clutched the bone-thin, quasi-living remains of a human form and, like the simulacrum of the Amba.s.sador Morel, this form was somehow familiar. The black markings etched into its face were similar to that of the face of a tiger.

'All who have travelled through their so-called Engines of Transference have left their mark here,' said the Morel thing. 'Most, save for those who are called Amba.s.sadors, are of no use. But yet we keep them, in repository, for such time as we might have a use for them...'

The other creature manipulated the limbs of its pale cargo. Anji became aware of a sudden jerking of movement to one side. She turned in alarm to see that Jamon de la Rocas, who had been standing there in quiet shock and whom she had all but forgotten about, was lurching towards her. His eyes were rolled up in his head. His arms were stretched before him. His hands clenched and unclenched like a set of pincers.

'You shall he killed,' the Morel thing said. 'First the female, now, by way of demonstration, and yourself if you refuse to do our will.'

And it is at this especial point in my tale that I must crave something of your indulgence, in advance of my own poor delineation of certain matters. There are some things, it seems to me, that are impossible to describe to any complete satisfaction at least, some things that slip the scope of the small descriptive prowess of one such as myself, who is, after all, little more than a meat-andbread apprentice in the lists of oratory. I can only hope and pray that you will find it in your heart to pardon such an unfortunate and, indeed, unconscionable lapse.

The sensation as the monstrous creature took control of me was, I am very much afraid, indescribable. It was something akin to the feeling one imagines, should one care to imagine it, of needles being sunk into the flesh at the nape of the neck though not, as I happen to know in a certain capacity that is here quite beside the point, what the feeling of having needles sunk into the flesh is in actual fact. Together with this was the feeling of some glutinous liquid sliding through the brains inside my head, interspersed with what so far as I could make out were minuscule explosions of light, as though of the detonation of fireworks the size of atomies the length of a thumb behind my very eyes.

All of these things I felt, in a sense that I found them taking place within me but the sensations were painless, indeed sensationless, in a quite peculiar manner. In a way similar only in the sense of not being similar quite at all save for the fact that such is the nearest similarity of which I can think it was alike to sleeping with one's weight upon an arm or leg so that it is deadened to a certain degree, then suffering some ordinarily painful knock to the appropriate member while it is still in that insensate state.

For myself, in and of myself, I was aware of nothing more so than a deep and overwhelming sense of peace. It was a relief, almost, to let go my hold upon myself and sink into its welcoming oblivion.

For quite some time, you see, I had been suffering an inner turmoil though I flatter myself that I had been able to conceal it from the good Doctor and his friends, so that they never even knew of it. The worm of doubt had burrowed into me at the instigation of Anji, back when she had talked to me of the nature of Souls and how, in her opinion, I myself could not but be singularly lacking in that department.

Purest nonsense, of course save for the unfortunate fact that the conviction could not be gainsaid by any actual proof. It was a terrible thought to think oneself without the spark of the Divine, a quietly horrifying thought not entirely aided in being any less so by the fact that, once it was instilled, one could not help taking it out and turning it over in the mind, over and over again, in the hope of finding so much as a single flaw in it and finding none.

And then there came the world of Goronos cruelly taken and used, reduced to no more than an appliance, a single device in the service of the processes of a great Machine. From what I had been told, the Doctor and both Fitz and Anji had broken the bonds that had insisted on that state as a matter of course, whereas I I who have dined hugely with princes and kings, made love and sport in the courts of glorious queens, who have by turns and at various times been feted and slated, but at the least been of substance and note upon a hundred worlds whereas I had been subsumed, wholly and completely, into the drudgery of a workaday, hallucinated Purgatory without end, and with nary a whimper of protest besides.

And what did that make of me? For all my fine thoughts and protestations, was I nothing more than the ghost of a gnat in a whole-built body that might as well be a Golem, such as are made by the technomages of Raghagi, for all I in truth bore relation to a man? Well, then, let it be so. It was far more easy, with the foul influence of the monstrous creatures sliding through the brains inside my head, to let such pretences go.

'I don't think he's stopping...' I was dimly aware of Anji saying, not a little worried, as my body lurched towards her of its own accord. 'Aren't you going to do anything?'

'If you think killing my companion is going to alter my decision in the slightest,' said the Doctor this to the creature who, it seemed, had in some small part a connection with Morel, the Amba.s.sador to Shakrath, 'then you little judge your man. Do you know how many times some villain's spent every other minute trying to put me under duress by threatening the lives of my friends and companions? And that's just here in the Empire, let alone, it sometimes seems, absolutely everywhere else. And frankly, the whole thing's getting rather tired. If you can't be bothered thinking up something even remotely new, then I'm not going to play.'

'Charming!' Anji said. 'You know, it's at times like these, you really find out who your friends are, don't you?'

'Oh, don't worry yourself, Anji,' the Doctor said, conversationally, and now quite obviously talking to the young lady concerned. 'You're not in any danger. Is she, Jamon?'

Just as I cannot describe my sensations at this point to complete satisfaction, I fear that I cannot even begin to explain my reaction to a single remark expressed so casually in my direction. My body remained under the control of these loathsome creatures, but a spark quietly awoke in me. To some degree, it seemed, I came back to myself. The limbs that by now appeared deeded to the t.i.tle of something other than myself trembled a little, as this miraculously waking part of me began to fight for their control.

'Listen to me very carefully, Jamon,' the Doctor was saying, his tone quite firm but betraying nothing much more than a man at his ease and merely pa.s.sing the time of day. 'I gather that you've been going through a somewhat rocky existential time of late, worrying about the existence of self, Souls and prana and whatnot, and ordinarily I wouldn't be able to help you much with it...

'In other sections of the galaxy in what you call the Unseen Lands such things are all still something of a mystery, one way or the other. But here and now, in the Empire, we know for a fact that they do exist. If they didn't, then just what would these fellows here be doing using yours to try to control you? Answer me that if you're so clever. So there.'

It was like watching the hem of one of those overwrought old movies, where he's trying to give up the drink. Jamon de la Rocas juddered and shook, sweat pouring from his brow, teeth clenched in a snarl so strong that one might fear those teeth would splinter and break under the pressure of it.

Then all of a sudden, the internal struggle simply stopped. He stood there, fists clenched, arms hanging loosely by his side, hauling in one deep breath after another. He looked about himself, collecting his shattered wits. He glared at the creature clutching the wasted simulacrum of himself. Anji, following his gaze, saw that something seemed to have gone out of the pale form of the copy. From a sense of its being semi-alive, it was now quite definitively dead.

Jamon seemed to consider his dead quasi-self for a while. Then he shrugged to himself, turned, walked over to the creature clutching the simulacrum of the Amba.s.sador Morel, and punched it forcibly in the stomach.

On Shakrath, the still form of the Amba.s.sador Morel doubled over with the force of the blow.

The creature squealed, and flapped several horrid appendages around, but seemed to be unable to retaliate.

'Interesting...' the Doctor said, thoughtfully. Then, to the creature, 'I have the feeling that might just leave you without a lot left in your hand. In a manner of speaking. You could try to attack us directly, I suppose but for all the way you look, I somehow get the distinct impression that you simply don't have it in you. A tidal-wave of monsters washing over a world in their millions is one thing. The drabs of you here, here and now, are quite another thing entirely.'

The creature manipulated the now slightly damaged simulacrum of the Amba.s.sador Morel again. 'We laid waste to all men here,' it said. 'We killed them all.'

'If you say so,' said the Doctor, dismissively. 'On the other hand, I rather suspect that you came here to find that they'd all wiped themselves out in a war or something. In any case, if you're actually going to try something, I suggest you do.'

The creature loomed forward, then appeared to hesitate. Then it spoke again: 'We have our influence on the worlds,' it said. 'The men called Amba.s.sadors. They control those worlds. If you do not give us what we want we shall cause them to slaughter all their subjects. Before which we shall have them torture those subjects in all ways we can devise. Entire worlds will scream and pray for death, if you do not give us what we want. Great shall be the suffering of all men as they claw out their eyes at the horror of what they shall see. Endless shall be the '

'All right!' the Doctor said, a little worriedly. 'I think we've got the point. I hadn't actually thought of that. It must have gone completely out of my mind.'

In the impossible quasi-s.p.a.ce of the vortex, the billion-strong swarm of Wraiths sculled against the interdimensional tide. If it were possible to map it on to reality as we know it, one would have found that this particular sector of vortex s.p.a.ce was more or less, in some sense, congruent with the area of s.p.a.ce-time occupied by the interlinked worlds of the Empire.

If the physical manifestation of Vortex Wraiths was strange to human eyes, in their energy state they were utterly alien to human minds. A human could tell what they were thinking only in the sense that a dog, for example, might find itself in the head of a particle physicist, who had paused in his work to decide what kind of sandwich to have for lunch, and would merely receive the vague idea of being hungry.

In that very limited sense, there was an expectancy about the Wraiths. Soon, now. Soon, the tiny flares of portals, leading into another world, would tear open to allow the whole vast ma.s.s of them to pour through. The portals would gape soon, now.

In themselves, the Wraiths could barely comprehend the slightest thing about the world they would be entering. They had no notion of what they might expect there. They were in a certain sense taking a blind leap of faith into the dark.

But whatever they found there, it would be better than the thing from which they were desperately, all-consumingly attempting to escape.

After the Doctor, Anji and Jamon had gone out into the swirling clouds of ash, Fitz wandered through the TARDIS looking for signs of the Collector or possibly looking for the lack of signs one of the distinguishing features about things being pinched, to put in a big pile somewhere or other, being that they aren't actually there there to be a sign. to be a sign.

Fitz had noticed that the atmosphere in the TARDIS changed when the Doctor had gone from it, as though something had left it quite apart from the man himself. It wasn't a feeling of being unwelcome, more the feeling of being alone in a house in which you are a guest. You found yourself not wanting to touch things overmuch, because comedy routines about having to sweep the remains of antique vases under the carpet, coping with a toilet that refuses to flush and putting out suddenly flammable small dogs loomed. There were no antique vases or small dogs around, of course, but that was more or less what it felt like.

Fitz wandered through various by now familiar chambers, not taking much notice of them except to note that nothing seemed particularly out of place, listening for signs of gleeful purloining. Eventually he came to an area that was somewhat less familiar one of those sections where the TARDIS was quietly replacing some of the things it had lost during certain events, quite some time before, when it had found itself in severely diminished circ.u.mstances. Fitz was aware that you could find almost anything in these new s.p.a.ces, and had the uneasy idea that some of it might actually be quite dangerous. He moved on cautiously.

He found the Collector in what appeared to be a copy of the console room in miniature. The roundelled walls were of a uniform white, and the console itself had a rudimentary, slightly unfinished look to it, as though it were in some way still in the process of growing. Fitz was surprised and not a little alarmed. The console room of the TARDIS was such a singular thing that the idea of another one, even such a basic and half-formed one such as this, was almost literally unthinkable. To be suddenly confronted by it pulled the mental rug from under you a little.

What alarmed Fitz even more more was the fact that the Collector was busily pulling it to pieces. was the fact that the Collector was busily pulling it to pieces.

'Hey!' he shouted running forward. 'You can't do that!'

'Is can,' the Collector said, swivelling several sets of eyes on stalks to regard him with an air of loftiness. 'Is monkey-hominid Doctor-type man told me to. Had big long talk about is doing this thing. Is told to do special changing thing to big wobbly box-type thing here. Then take home to nice and lovely stuff.'

All the while it spoke, the various manipulatory appendages of the Collector were moving in a positive blur. Now that he was closer, Fitz saw that rather than merely pulling things out and discarding them, the Collector was twisting the internal workings into new shapes, reconfiguring them in a haphazard but remarkably efficient manner.

Fitz had lived in a world where the transistor had only recently supplanted the vacuum valve. He understood advanced technology in terms of what it could do, while having a bit of a blind spot on the identification of the specifics. With something so advanced as the TARDIS, he was utterly lost but he seemed to recognise some of the bits and pieces the Collector was incorporating into the workings of the diminutive console.

'Aren't those the shards you picked up from that Engine of Transference thing back on Thakrash?' he said.

'Might be,' the Collector said, in tones suggesting that it simply wasn't worth the bother of confirming or denying anything.

'Why would you...?' Fitz began when he was suddenly interrupted as the floor began to lurch.

Fitz had always found it slightly odd that a machine that seemed capable of travelling through the interdimensional stresses of the vortex, orbiting binary star systems and had at one point spent several weeks in the eye spot of Jupiter without so much a bobble, could nonetheless shake around like n.o.body's business when someone simply picked it up and carried it. That was how he recognised what was happening. Leaving the Collector to carry on with G.o.d alone knew what it was doing, he ran back to the console room well, you'd have to call it the main main console room now, he supposed and frantically checked over the external monitor screens. console room now, he supposed and frantically checked over the external monitor screens.

The view outside was still for the most part obscured by floating ash; something would have to be ma.s.sive to be seen. Which made it fortunate, in that sense, that the thing outside was the size it was.

It was a vast crater, from which rose the spire of a Pylon, the transmitter for what he had come to know as an Engine of Transference. It was big, though, even counting for a lack of perspective. Its height would be measured in the order of miles. Energy discharge Jacob's-laddered up and down it in a liquid, vaguely sticky-looking manner, as if it had been slathered with the juice from a broken tin of suns. Hulking forms, made tiny by their proximity to this monolithic artefact, blundered around between the mechanical installations attached to it, rather like bees b.u.mbling around the heads of flowers. There was the occasional flash and shower of sparks as some item of machinery was activated.

Looking at this monitor-relayed scene, Fitz formed the impression that the Pylon must be shrieking with an unearthly rage of acc.u.mulated power. Here in the console room, of course, there was no sound.

This sonic state of affairs, or the lack of it, was abruptly shattered as the main doors swung open in their archaic-looking arch and the Doctor, Anji and Jamon de la Rocas stepped inside.

'What's happening?' Fitz asked them. 'Haven't you seen what's happening out there...?' His voice trailed off, and his eyes grew wide, as several monstrous forms came through the hatch on the Doctor's heels, each of them clutching to their horrific bulk a pale and wasted human form.