Doctor Who_ The Dying Days Part 11

The lift door slid smoothly open and Eve Waugh stepped out into Lord Greyhaven's office. She hadn't known what to expect of it - the headquarters of Greyhaven's company, EG, was an unprepossessing Victorian edifice near the Old Bailey. On the way up she had pictured the office one of two ways. It could have been a room like Sherlock Holmes' with antiques on the mantelpiece, leather-bound chairs and oil paintings on the wall. Either that or a chrome and steel symphony of state-of-the-art technology with a wall of flatpanel TVs. In the event it was a messy compromise of both styles that was rather less than the sum of its parts.

From this building, from this room, EG, a multinational string of electronics companies, component manufacturers and the like all across Europe were al co-ordinated. It wasn't a large company by international standards, but it was influential. The company's main a.s.set was its chairman, who was standing by the window, talking to a couple of men in trench coats. His office gave an impressive view out over St Paul's Cathedral.

'That wil be all,' he told the two men. There was a bulky canvas kit bag on the desk, which the taller of the two men took with him as he left. 'Oh, could you ask Adele to bring in a pot of coffee?' Greyhaven cal ed after them.

'Very good, Lord Greyhaven,' the tall man responded gruffly. He glanced at the new arrival appreciatively as he pa.s.sed her.

'Good afternoon, Eve,' Greyhaven said.

'Hi.' She looked around the office, taking it in. The desk was mahogany, and looked like an antique. 'This room is a lot smal er than I thought it would be.'

'We British are a modest race, Eve: we don't share the American taste for ostentation.'

'You're a bil ionaire, sir, I think you're allowed to buy yourself a new carpet.'

'I'm only a dollar dollar billionaire,' he noted lightly, removing a couple of tumblers and a decanter from a smal cabinet. billionaire,' he noted lightly, removing a couple of tumblers and a decanter from a smal cabinet.

She moved towards the high-backed chair in front of the desk.

Greyhaven chuckled, pointing over her shoulder. There was a closed white door.

'I have a flat... an apartment apartment here. It's a little less formal. You don't mind that?' here. It's a little less formal. You don't mind that?'

'No, not at all,' she said in a giddy-schoolgirl voice that she immediately regretted.

Greyhaven walked over to the door and held it open for Eve.

'Again, not very large, but a useful pied-a-terre. It makes commuting to work easy, if nothing else.'

The room was almost filled by a vast leather sofa and a low gla.s.s table, much of the rest of the s.p.a.ce was taken up by a little kitchen unit. Two doors led off: bathroom and bedroom, Eve guessed.

They walked over to the sofa together. Greyhaven sat down; Eve hovered for a moment. There was another good view of the Thames from here. Hanging on the wall was a neat row of photographs: Greyhaven with other senior politicians and scientists and various social events and public occasions.

'Is that the Queen? Sorry, that's a really dumb question.'

He watched her as she scrutinised them. 'A touch of ostentation, I'm afraid.'

The same fine middle-aged woman appeared on a couple of the photographs. 'Your wife?'

He smiled. 'Yes. Sit down.' He was pouring a generous double whisky for her. She sat close to him and took a sip of the whisky. As she had expected, it was the best she'd ever tasted.

'Does your wife know?' she asked.

Greyhaven arched his eyebrow. 'Know what?'

She leant over him, kissing his cheek, a little awkwardly.

'Doctor!'

The Brigadier came jogging across the park. Behind him was a flash of yel ow. Yes! - it was Bessie, the sprightly yel ow roadster which the Doctor had used as transport while on Earth, a long time ago now. The Brigadier had taken good care of the car over the years.

A tall man the Doctor didn't recognise was sitting in the pa.s.senger seat. The Doctor and Bernice hurried towards the Brigadier, both checking the small park for anyone who might have seen the old soldier arrive. They met around a hundred yards from the car. Lethbridge-Stewart was a little out of breath, and far too formal a chap to want a hug. They shook hands instead.

'You recognise me?' the Doctor asked as they set off for the car.

'Of course. You were wearing that face in Hong Kong, remember?'

The Doctor boggled. 'I was?'

'You must remember Hong Kong back in '88, when we discovered the secret of the Embodiment of Gris.'

'I didn't even know that there was was an Embodiment of Gris,' Bernice muttered. an Embodiment of Gris,' Bernice muttered.

The Doctor looked blankly at his old friend. 'I think that must have happened in my future.'

The Brigadier chortled. A couple of decades ago, the Doctor would have needed to explain such a temporal paradox in more detail. Nowadays, Alistair was almost relaxed discussing them. After all he'd been through, he knew as much as anyone how convoluted time travel could become.

45.The Brigadier reached over to shake Bernice's hand. 'Good afternoon, Miss Summerfield. Now - I've aged twenty years since the last time we met, but you haven't.'

She smiled weakly.

'Bernice has got married since then, Alistair - you and Doris came to the wedding.'

'Really? That was in my future, I take it, Mrs - ?'

'I'm still a Summerfield.' Bernice was a little uncomfortable discussing her marriage. It was going through a bad patch at the moment, the Doctor remembered. 'And yes, it was in the future: 2010.'

The Brigadier looked a little surprised. 'I'm still around in thirteen years time, then?'

'Not only that,' Bernice a.s.sured him, 'you've never looked better.'

The Brigadier grimaced. 'That's what people have started saying to me now. I imagine it means that I'm on the way out. G.o.d knows what I'l be like a couple of decades from now.'

'Old soldiers never die, Alistair,' the Doctor said softly.

'Neither do Time Lords, Doctor, eh? Now, you two, about these Ice Warriors...'

The Doctor and Bernice both stopped and stared at him.

The Brigadier looked like the cat that got the cream. 'That is what you were about to tell me, I take it?'

They had reached the car and the Doctor recognised the Brigadier's companion. 'You're full of surprises today, Alistair.'

'You're Alexander Christian,' Bernice announced, betraying some considerable discomfort. 'I've just been reading about you.'

'Nothing bad, I hope?' he asked lightly. The Doctor found himself grinning and shaking his hand.

'It seems that Mr Christian has been misjudged.' The Brigadier clambered in to the back seat. 'You drive, Doctor.'

'I was framed,' Christian explained. 'I found out things on Mars that I shouldn't have done. I'll tell everyone when we get to UNIT.'

The Brigadier had got comfortable, and was clearing a s.p.a.ce for Bernice. 'We're only five minutes away from UNIT's London Office here. After your email message, I phoned Bambera. They're expecting us.'

'Well,' the Doctor said breezily, 'we mustn't keep Winifred waiting.' He located the ignition podule and started the engine.

The two men dressed as workmen reached the roof of the National s.p.a.ce Museum.

Pigeons scattered as they walked towards the edge of the roof.

'Dish Seven,' the gruff voiced one announced.

His col eague nodded, taking a pair of clippers from the pocket of his overalls.

'I don't understand why we still need to do this.'

'Neither do I. That isn't going to stop me.'

They located the dish, identifying it by the little panel screwed to the back. Together, they unplugged the coaxial cable at the back.

The gruff voiced man opened up his canvas kit bag and removed a bra.s.s cylinder the size of a Thermos flask. It was surprisingly light, with a socket at either end and a neat row of switches along its side. He adjusted the settings, then plugged it into the dish. His colleague connected the other end to the cable.

They eased the device into place, tucking it out of sight.

A bright yel ow vintage car turned into an anonymous-looking car park underneath an imposing Whitehall office block.

In a third-floor window opposite, one of the watchers took a photograph, the other made a note into a dictaphone.

'Six oh-five. Four entering. Three male, one female. Yellow vintage car, make unknown, registration Whisky Hotel Oscar Eight.'

Alan watched Oswald on the floor of the editing suite, rummaging through Eve's press pack. He'd seen the contents for himself at the Museum, when they'd been handing out the packs. Glossy photographs of the crew, with biographies on the back; maps of Mars; artist's impressions of what a Mars Colony might look like; description of Mars. Alan saw the piece of paper that he wanted, a glossy card bearing a diagram of a s.p.a.ce suit.

Alan and Oswald pulled it out, placing it alongside the screen grab he'd printed off. He ran his finger along the blurred image. Oswald showed Alan the air line. A corrugated white tube, the diameter of a vacuum cleaner hose.

A hose that on the picture in front of him had come free from its socket and was flapping about.

It was a single frame of videotape. With the air line disconnected, the next few seconds should have seen the astronaut collapse, gasping for air. His blood vessels would have burst, and his eyes would have started to bulge as though he was being strangled. His colleagues should have bounced over, trying to keep themselves from panicking. They'd be slotting the pipe back into place, pulling him back to the Lander, knowing that it was already too late to prevent permanent brain damage.

46.That wasn't how it had happened. The astronaut had bounced out of shot like a kid in a playground, live on a billion television screens.

'See?' Oswald said excitedly. 'Whatever that guy is breathing, it didn't come from the tanks on his back.'

'The pictures are fakes,' Alan said incredulously. These pictures of British astronauts that they'd all been watching on TV a few hours ago weren't taken on Mars at all.

'That's not true. The Mars 97 is real enough, in fact those pictures prove it. The Apollo missions were faked by Disney, sure, everyone knows that, but - '

Alan rounded on him, almost yel ing the information on the press sheet he had just found.' "The Martian atmosphere is chiefly carbon dioxide, with virtually no oxygen or hydrogen. Some scientists believe that it might, in the long term, be possible to make the Martian atmosphere like that of Earth. This process is called 'terraforming', and a number of experiments wil be carried out on the Mars 97 mission." Explain that.'

Oswald snorted. 'You believe that propaganda?'

Alan turned on him. 'As a matter of fact, yes I do believe a wealth of scientific evidence over some fruitcake who thinks that the world's flat and that Elvis had crash-landed at Roswell.'

'I love you too, Alan.'

'How do you explain the fact that that man is breathing nitrogen nitrogen and he isn't dead?' and he isn't dead?'

'The Martian atmosphere is breathable. Thin but breathable. Why do you think the British government would invest billions of pounds trying to set up a colony on a planet without a breathable atmosphere?'

'It says that here that they will terraform it.'

'Alan, listen to what you are saying. Even heard of the ozone hole? Mars' atmosphere is one big ozone hole. If British scientists could fix an ozone hole and turn the main greenhouse gas into lovely fresh oxygen, they'd fix the atmosphere we've got down here first.'

Alan ignored him. 'The Mars 97's a fake, like that Di video last year. The whole Mars Project is just another crummy British sci-fi drama. This is the story of the decade.'

A billion people had seen those pictures; he couldn't be the only one to spot that the astronaut hadn't done his suit up properly. He couldn't be the only cameraman who'd spent the last few hours staring at the picture.

He couldn't wait for Eve.

They were in the briefing room deep in the heart of the UNIT Offices in London. Bambera had ushered them all down here, where her senior officers - two captains, two sergeants - were waiting.

Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart looked around the room. It was a far cry from his day when budgets were tight and he, Benton and Yates could solve the world's problems with a mug of cocoa each and a telephone between them.

This was just the Whitehall Office - heaven knew what UNIT HQ looked like now.

A long, black conference table ran the length of the room. The far wall was a bank of video screens of various sizes. Scrol ing readouts, video pictures and computer graphics were constantly flashing up and renewing themselves. The Doctor and Mrs Summerfield had supplied some of the information: computer disks with Mars data, given to them by some chap at the s.p.a.ce Centre. Two sets of near-identical data were flashing all over the place. It was al terribly confusing.

A prim young corporal was sitting at the far end of the desk, tapping instructions into a keyboard that controlled the displays.

Alistair looked around at the three people he'd brought along. Bernice sat to his left, looking a little uncomfortable.

The Doctor paced the room for a moment, before realising that he was also meant to be seated. Both seemed out of place in such a spotless, disciplined place. Alexander Christian sat at Lethbridge-Stewart's right side, much more at ease. The Captain to his right was more nervous.

Bambera stood in front of the multimedia display. 'OK. Here's how I see the situation. There was some flap at the s.p.a.ce Centre. The astronauts discovered a doorway made by extraterrestrials. Since then, there's been a clampdown at Mission Control. I've been trying to get them to return my calls for five hours now, and they won't. A couple of press contacts say they've had no luck, either.'

'If they've encountered evidence of alien life, they're doing the right thing to keep it secret,' one of the Captains noted.

Bambera nodded. 'I agree - and it wouldn't be the first time that the British government had covered up ETs and kept UNIT out of the loop. So I phoned NUIT HQ, Paris and got them to listen in on the Mars transmissions.

Corporal - '