Doctor Who_ Slow Empire Part 8

The High Amba.s.sador wrenched the shard from the Doctor's chest and held it aloft, slathered and dripping with blood. He was vaguely aware of some disturbance behind him, of soldiers of the Order rushing from their appointed places, but for the moment he was too involved with his ritual to care about such things.

'Now!' he cried. 'Now we open our path to former glory!'

He turned and strode to the towering, damped, encrusted ma.s.s that was the Engine of Transubstantiation and slotted the final, missing piece into place.

Anji shoved her way desperately through the hessian-clad crowd, who didn't seem exactly in the best of condition and reacted more with surprise than anything else. From either side, though, bulkier men, whom she recognised as of the same sort who had abducted the Doctor from the circus encampment, were closing in. She was aware of Fitz barrelling into one of them and knocking him to the ground with a roundhouse punch. Another grabbed hold of him, and Fitz struggled against his grip, hauling him down to wrestle with him on the flagstone floor. That took care of some of the problem, Anji thought trouble was, that still left quite a number of the guards heading directly for her her.

'Ha-hah!' came a voice from behind her and up came Jamon de la Rocas, bounding around on the b.a.l.l.s of his feet, enthusiastically shadow-boxing and looking for all the world like a comedy nineteenth-century pugilist about to engage in fisticuffs and give some rotter the well-deserved thrashing of his life.

'Dare to touch one hair on the good lady's head, sirs,' he declared with gleeful bravado, 'and I swear it shall be the worse for you!'

It must have been sheer astonishment such as she herself was feeling, Anji decided, that allowed him to floor the two nearest guards with well-aimed punches. (It would only be later, looking back on the incident, that she would realise just how well aimed and controlled those punches actually were.) Then he was bobbing and weaving among the other guards as they tried to beat him down with blows that somehow never quite managed to connect.

'Well, go on, then,' he called to Anji, b.l.o.o.d.ying the nose of a convenient black-tattooed face. 'Attend to your business.'

Belatedly, Anji realised that this display had taken the focus of all hostile attention away from her. She ploughed her way free from the crowd and ran to the rack where the Doctor hung, bleeding and immobile.

'Don't be dead,' Anji muttered in a kind of despairing chant, vocalising the single, all-important thing in her mind. 'Don't be dead...'

The shackles holding the Doctor to the rack were secured around his wrists by a crude iron variety of b.u.t.terfly-wing bolt. Anji fumbled with the first until it finally gave. The Doctor's body dropped as though through a gallows trap to hang bonelessly from one arm, legs buckled under him by the floor and giving not even the minimal support as might be found in the alive but unconscious. The second bolt, and the body, dropped, lifeless, to the floor.

Then it simply rolled over and sat up.

There was no jerking or choking, no sense of galvanisation to life. The Doctor simply sat up and looked down at the hole in his chest.

'Well, that was a bit of a shock to the system,' he said. 'I suppose it's...' His voice trailed off as his attention was finally caught by what was happening nearby. 'Oh, dear.'

Anji realised that, in her overriding concern for the Doctor, she had neglected to keep an eye on current events. And 'current' was probably the last word to use at this point, in that same way that it's not the word one would particularly like to think of as one is strapped into an electric chair.

The High Amba.s.sador of the Order of Souls stood stock-still and rigid, every muscle cording as tendrils of sickly electrical discharge crawled over him, tethering him to the reconstructed cone of alien material. Every convention said that there should have been a crackling sound, a sound of exploding, tremendous energies, but there was nothing save the faint thrum and shriek of the crippled Pylon. He stood there, hand outstretched to the newly replaced shard, in silence.

Then, with entirely appropriate sounds, his flesh began to blister and burst, to seethe like a pan of fat on a stove at the point before it spontaneously ignites. Each and every bubble, before it burst and could one bear to look closely enough seemed to be a perfect human face in miniature, each and every tiny mouth screaming in pure agony.

The body of the High Amba.s.sador began to glow, his robes charring to powdery ash instantly. What was left of him staggered and lurched blindly, a flailing arm crashing into the Pylon and knocking several painstakingly reconstructed pieces loose.

Tongues of electrical fire lashed out from the wounds, each heading directly for a hessian-clad member of the Order of Souls, each of whom began to jerk and boil as their High Amba.s.sador had done. Secondary discharges licked out, linking one to another, to another, to another in a dizzyingly complex and pulsing latticework. The thrumming from the Pylon changed, its frequency accelerating and becoming more erratic, discord piling upon sonic disruption...

'Take cover!' the Doctor shouted frantically. He looked wildly about himself, realised that there was nothing in the Chamber of Souls actually to take cover under or behind, and shouted again: 'Get out! Get out!'

Fitz and Jamon de la Rocas were already running for the chamber door. The Doctor bounded to his feet, darted forward and then staggered weakly. Anji was there to catch him before he hit the ground.

'Thank you,' he gasped, his face flickering greenly in the light of the energies expending themselves around him. 'It seems that recent events have taken more out of me than I thought...'

'Let's get you out of here,' said Anji.

He was lighter than she would have thought. Indeed, even though she had to support him as he hobbled through the screaming, mutating members of the Order, it was almost as if they were making better time than if she had been on her own and running.

They reached the doorway and made it quite some way down the hall from which they had originally entered before the Pylon finally detonated.

'Well, I've seen some explosions in my time,' said the Doctor, 'apparently, but this looks like it was a particularly impressive one. It almost seems a pity to have missed it.' He examined a section of where pulverised fragments of alien Pylon material had been driven into the wall. 'Then again, if we had had stayed around to watch, it would have obliterated every single one of us. So that's all right.' stayed around to watch, it would have obliterated every single one of us. So that's all right.'

It was later, after the dust had settled somewhat. At least, given the fact that the Pylon had exploded in a room containing several hundred busily mutating members of the Order of Souls, it was probably, on the whole, better to call it dust dust and leave it at that. and leave it at that.

The Collector was gleefully trundling around, picking up such fragments and shards of Pylon material as took its fancy and, not to put too fine a point upon it, dusting dusting them off. 'Is pretty things,' it was gurgling happily. 'Is to be lots of pretty things for me!' them off. 'Is pretty things,' it was gurgling happily. 'Is to be lots of pretty things for me!'

'Should he be doing that?' Fitz said worriedly, glancing from the Collector to the jagged, smoking base of what had once been the Pylon itself. 'That looks like really dangerous stuff.'

'Oh, it's probably better if he takes some of it away,' said the Doctor. 'That way there's less chance of some other band of idiots managing to piece the whole thing together again again, several thousand years down the line. Something like that we can all well do without. I certainly could.' He plucked a little fussily at his bloodied, wounded chest, fingering the wound in a way that seemed more connected with irritation than actual pain. 'Will you look at this? This shirt was brand-new a couple of months ago. I'll never get the stain out...'

Anji, watching him, for some reason found this far more distressing than the explosion-related carnage around them. 'Are you sure you're all right?' she asked. 'You're not in clinical shock or something?'

The Doctor considered this, thoughtfully. 'I suppose I might be. I might actually be in a lot of pain, when I start to feel it. My physiology is a bit different. I don't think anything that vital was. .h.i.t but, all things considered, it might be an idea to get back to the TARDIS and get a little medical help.'

And then he fell over.

[In Translation]

It was daylight by the time we made our egress from the Citadel and descended the atoll upon which it sat, by way of the iron elevator cage that the Order of Souls had utilised for that purpose. It was at that point that we encountered a problem somewhat milder than roaming bands of thugs with dogs and exploding mechanisms of Transference, but bad enough in its own small way. What with one thing and another, those of us who had left the Doctor's extraordinary conveyance that is, Anji, Fitz and myself had lost our sense of direction to the extent that we had no idea of where the TARDIS lay.

We might have found our way back via the tracks both we and the soldiers of the Order of Souls had made, but with the new day had come a burgeoning vegetative proliferation. I believe that the original founders of Thakrash as an Imperial colony had made some alteration to its plant life: it was possible to see the new plants as they grew towards the sunlight. By which I mean, of course, that one could see the movement of their growth. It's perfectly obvious that if something is there you can see it and I do think, personally, that pedantry tends towards being a much overrated virtue, thank you very much.

In any event, following the tracks we ourselves had made, in reverse, rapidly became impossible. Fortunately, though the good Doctor spent much of his time in a swoon, he would occasionally have moments of alert lucidity, during which he would direct our course towards that object with which, I am sure, he had some connection beyond the usual senses.

Even so, even with us carrying the Doctor on a makeshift litter, even with the Collector going on ahead and scything through the forest with a collection of blade-tipped limbs, it was hard going. The day of Thakrash was sweltering, and, by the time we reached our destination, I personally was sweating with what seemed something more than mere exertion.

The fact of the matter is that in the Citadel of Souls, when I had stared aghast at the crippled Pylon, watched as its twisted obscenities had turned the men aping Amba.s.sadors into boiling obscenities, something of those foul energies had seemed to touch me. I could feel my insides shifting in unfamiliar, fever-burning ways: shifting into something monstrous.

As we reached his TARDIS (now somewhat grown over by the resurgence of herbage displaced by its arrival) the Doctor came more fully to himself. Once inside, he directed us to take him to a smallish chamber with a pair of quite comfortable-looking beds and what I can only limn as a Healing Thing. It was not quite machine, not quite a living thing, but some complexly interwoven hybrid of the two. The Doctor affixed a set of tubes from it to his chest, and in a matter of seconds appeared to grow more healthy. I could see the horrible wound therein close up and heal at what was, given the nature of men's wounds, an impossible rate a rate of the sort, indeed, that the new plants of Thakrash grew.

As matters proceeded salubriously thus, the Doctor turned to me regarding me, I realised, with no small amount of concern.

'Are you feeling quite all right?' he asked me. 'If you don't mind my saying so, Mr de la Rocas, you seem to be looking a little worse for wear.'

I believe that I may have mumbled something about my fears concerning my exposure to the crippled Pylon. In any event, the Doctor frowned worriedly, and indicated the other of the brace of beds.

'It might be a good idea to run a few scans on you,' he said. 'It can't hurt. It can only help.'

While the Doctor and Jamon spent time in the medical room, Fitz and Anji repaired to the kitchen area, now completely free of any sign of Vortex Wraith invasion, and fixed themselves something to eat. There were still a couple of glitches with the automated systems, which presented Fitz with an avocado salad and Anji with a cholesterol-packed sandwich consisting of steak, cheese and bacon and with overhanging dumps of onions fried in lard. Anji and Fitz duly exchanged an incipient coronary and a rather smug sense of self-restraint.

Anji nibbled on a lettuce leaf pensively. They had lost track of the Collector, and once again she had visions of it tearing the inside of the TARDIS to pieces because it liked the colour, or the smell, or whatever it was that Collectors liked about things.

And that was just the tip of the iceberg, so far as worrying about things was concerned.

'I sometimes feel I'm never going to get home,' she said. 'I'm going to be stuck here with this stuff for ever especially with the way the Doctor's acting now.'

'Mgmph?' said Fitz, around his sandwich, and politely glossing over the fact that all the stuff that Anji was 'stuck' with was actually his life.

'Have you noticed that with every jump he's getting more... not mad, exactly, but complicated and unpredictable. Things keep coming out that I've never seen before. I keep expecting to... I don't know... come round a corner and find him eating cheese or something.'

'Why cheese?' said Fitz, swallowing.

'Why not? It's just something I've never seen him do. It just seems that there's a...'

'I mean,' said Fitz, 'it's not as though eating cheese were particularly odd. Everybody eats cheese, sometimes, most of them, anyway. I've eaten cheese all my life and I don't think it's '

'Will you shut up about the b.l.o.o.d.y cheese!' Anji shouted. 'The point is that we're completely dependent on a man who suddenly doesn't seem to know quite who he is or what he is from one minute to the next.'

What the Doctor was, in fact, at this particular minute, was walking up the corridor outside the kitchens with a more healthy-looking Jamon de la Rocas. Fitz and Anji met them as they walked out.

They had obviously been at the wardrobes. The Doctor had changed into a simple dark suit, rather nondescript apart from a greatcoat which billowed and flapped about him. Jamon now wore a splendid frogged jerkin and knickerbockers, and a hat that contrived to make him look like the fat one out of the Three Musketeers.

'...poor souls in the Citadel suffered c.u.mulative exposure over their entire lives,' the Doctor was saying. 'On the other hand, the level of cyborganic matter in the population of Thakrash, even among the Order, had become extremely rarefied. When the processes overloaded, the tainted emissions gave your physiognomy a blow, like the direct injection of a virus rather than the triggering of some already-present, buried disease. Oh, h.e.l.lo. I thought we might find you here.'

This last, of course, to Anji and Fitz. Anji turned her gaze up and down the corridor, mindful of her current worries. 'You haven't seen the Collector, have you?'

The Doctor smiled. 'Funnily enough, we ran into it a few minutes ago, fiddling with the big red b.u.t.ton labelled DO DO NOT NOT PUSH PUSH! which if it's pushed will make the entire TARDIS disappear instantly up its own pocket singularity. Yet again. I directed our acquisitive new friend off to one of the library rooms there's any number of old paperbacks in there which could do with a good clearing out.'

The Doctor gestured with a hand, inviting all to join him in his progress in the direction of the console room.

'I've been thinking about what we should be doing,' he continued. 'It's all connected, everything we've been through, and connected in a perfectly logical manner but we're missing some crucial pieces of information. Without it, we can't quite see see the connections. That's the problem we really need to solve at this point.' the connections. That's the problem we really need to solve at this point.'

'Thakrash has been cut off from the Empire for some considerable time,' said the Doctor, happily. 'I think this little break from the worst effects of sprained time have done the old girl a power of good. Most of the basic processes are operating, at least.'

A large viewscreen showed a pulsing lattice of connections, some strong and multiple, some weaker and more extruded, each pulsing at a different rate. Anji was uneasily reminded of the way that alien energies had flickered around the members of the Order of Souls, just before the object of their worship had exploded.

'It's an extrapolation more than anything else, of course,' the Doctor admitted. 'Based on perceivable light-speed emissions and run through several virtual polyfractal filter-constructs to give us an approximation of a relativity-free state.'

Anji glanced at Fitz, who was already getting a bit gla.s.sy-eyed. If quantum mechanics became progressively more frightening the deeper you got into them, the Doctor was fully capable of leaping out at you and biting your face off from fifteen impossible directions before breakfast.19 'Meaning?' she said.

'This is what the Empire looks like from the perspective of the one thing that can move instantaneously,' said the Doctor tartly, 'when everything else can't. Can you guess what that one thing is?'

He stepped back from the screen to take in its whole expanse, and frowned.

'Even in extrapolation,' he mused, 'you can tell that something's wrong.'

'How so?' Anji asked. 'It's all just dots and lines to me.'

'The interplay of it,' said the Doctor, 'the way the whole thing fits together and works. It's like the knocking sound in a car, or an orchestra with one instrument playing off-key...'

'Or like the TARDIS feels when you've done a bit of so-called harmless tinkering?' Anji asked sweetly.

'Well, yes, quite. Something, somewhere in all this, is exerting some malign influence. The source could be anywhere. We need hard information from which to track it.' The Doctor stepped forward again and planted a finger on a point from which strong connections proliferated. 'This seems to be one of the nexus points, in terms of data exchange...' He turned and strode over to the console, typed rapidly on a keypad and examined a readout. 'The planet Goronos, from what I can make out.'

'Goronos?' asked Jamon de la Rocas, who had been looking at the image on the screen in a manner of an intelligent arboreal savage who implicitly believed the world was flat and covered with jungle, and had wandered into Madame Tussaud's20 and learned that some people wear trousers. 'I believe that I have heard of the world Goronos. You understand, of course, that most worlds seem to believe that they themselves are the centre of Empire in their own way but Goronos is one of those worlds of whom most everyone has heard. A place from where comes news of far-flung provinces.' and learned that some people wear trousers. 'I believe that I have heard of the world Goronos. You understand, of course, that most worlds seem to believe that they themselves are the centre of Empire in their own way but Goronos is one of those worlds of whom most everyone has heard. A place from where comes news of far-flung provinces.'

'An informational nexus,' the Doctor said. 'That sounds just the ticket. I think the TARDIS is well up to making the trip by now and we might just finally find the truth of what we're up against.'

3.

In the Machine

JAMON DE LA ROCAS WOKE TO SEE THE SMILING FACE OF UNCLE CHUMLY ON THE TELESCREEN. HE BROKE HIS FAST NUTRITIOUSLY IN HIS APARTMENT-BUILDING CANTEEN. HE TOOK THE MONORAIL SWIFTLY AND EFICIENTLY TO HIS POST AT THE BUREAU OF INFORMATIONAL EXCHANGE. AFTER A PRODUCTIVE DAY OF WORK HE RETURNED TO HIS APARTMENT AND FELL ASLEEP, HAPPY IN THE KNOWLEDGE OF A JOB WELL DONE.

The grille of the elevator cage slink-ratchets back, and Anji steps out from ivory and polished bra.s.s and padded velvet plush, into spare, white-shot black marble. The air is cool without being chill, the perfect ambience for Impersonal but not unfriendly s.p.a.ces of a communal hallway.

Green-flecked almond eyes flick to left and right an unconscious, purely automatic action and then she's off, heels clicking purposefully on the tiled floor, shadow splitting, diverging and converging again to unity as she pa.s.ses the elegant, frosted cones of the lighting fixtures set between apartment doors on elegant, Art Deco holders. Anji prefers to perform even the most simple acts, such as walking, with conscious purpose, if at all possible. Absently though, with the absent-mindedness of familiarity, she walks her fingers lightly through the contents of her clutch bag, lighting at length on her apartment keys.

She reaches the door to her apartment 426 and fits the key into the Barron lock. There is something about the feel of the key as if it were shifting, squirming in her hand that arouses her suspicion even before the door swings open without the key being turned, the protruding tongue of the lock coming free from a hole where the mortise has already been torn from the frame, and offering not the slightest resistance.

Anji steps back, a knot of fear jerking tight around her stomach. For a while she waits, very quietly, watching the darkness beyond the door. No sign of movement, no sound of breathing. No sense of any presence other than her own. After some small while she plucks up the courage to enter.

Inside, dim city light from the screened window picks out the ma.s.ses and edges of her home and she can see that it is little more than wreckage. Chairs, tables and a.s.sorted objets d'art objets d'art lie scattered and crushed. There seems to have been no motive for this destruction save for its own sake, no sense of any search having been made, or even of things being flung around in a rage. It is a feeling rather than anything based on evidence, but Anji gets the distinct impression that her home has been destroyed, coldly and methodically, for the simple reason that it is hers, and destroying it will hurt her. lie scattered and crushed. There seems to have been no motive for this destruction save for its own sake, no sense of any search having been made, or even of things being flung around in a rage. It is a feeling rather than anything based on evidence, but Anji gets the distinct impression that her home has been destroyed, coldly and methodically, for the simple reason that it is hers, and destroying it will hurt her.

In a daze she steps forward. Her shin barks, sharply, against some item of debris and she stumbles, throws herself around slightly to regain her balance... and at last catches sight of the man who has been waiting, utterly quiet, utterly still, for her.

He is standing against the wall by the door that leads into the kitchen cubicle. He is very tall, very thin, dressed in a tight black suit that accentuates this. He is completely bald not in the sense of having shaved his head or that his hair has fallen out, but in the sense that hair has never grown. The skin of his smooth scalp is bone-white.

He smiles at her, ratlike. (The name Nosferatu Nosferatu goes through Anji's mind but she has no idea of its significance, if any.) There is a hiss of indrawn breath between his teeth. He holds up something slim and bright, as if proffering it for her inspection. goes through Anji's mind but she has no idea of its significance, if any.) There is a hiss of indrawn breath between his teeth. He holds up something slim and bright, as if proffering it for her inspection.