The Well-Mannered War Part 12

K9 nodded to Rabley's autocam, which Dolne had quite forgotten still lay in his hand. 'The tracker/scanner device you are holding I estimate to be the product of a level-five civilization. As is the systems a.n.a.lyser used by Mr Cadinot.' He swivelled on his castors, paying particular attention to the com-screen. 'However, most of the other instruments in this room I would estimate to be products of a late level-three civilization.'

The words meant nothing to Dolne. He pulled a face at Cadinot to say what what does it mean does it mean?

K9 saw him. 'Please address me directly. I am designed to interact on a personal level with a broad band of sentient creatures, and foremost with humans. My meaning is that there is an unnatural anachronism in these surroundings. Inference is there has been cross-cultural contact, although your a.s.sertion of historical isolation conflicts with this hypothesis.'

Dismayed by this stream of jargon, Dolne pa.s.sed the autocam to Cadinot and whispered, 'Do you think it's got confused?'

Cadinot shrugged as he placed the cam in a slot on the com-unit designed for playback. 'Possibly.' He reached out and ran his hands along the device's back panel. 'I could open it up and have a poke about.'

'Only the Doctor Master and Mistress Romana are qualified to poke this unit,' said K9, turning quickly to brush him off.

Dolne stood. He had to get back to the Strat Room before Viddeas could do anything foolish. 'I think we're just going to have to accept your word.

From the sound of things you could be quite useful to us.'

Cadinot interrupted him, indicating the com-screen. 'Sir, the recording.'

Dolne looked up. The screen showed a typical sector of the surface.

Rabley, his grin wide as ever, could be seen in semi-close-up, the autocam following its program to keep him in shot and flatter him at all times.

Codie and the other doomed troopers were milling in the background.

Rabley was in profile, his head angled up, apparently talking to somebody.

'I say, can you help us?' he was saying. 'You probably recognize me.' He shrugged. 'We've got lost, and the radios are dead, and we-'

A familiar tinny voice, strained to its fullest amplification, echoed in replay.

'Take cover! Take cover!' The autocam, obeying its instructions to the last, swung away to fit this newcomer into the picture. K9 was revealed, perched precariously on the upper slopes of the valley Rabley was traversing.

There was a screeching whistle and the screen went black.

Dolne felt a powerful sadness tug at his heart. He'd barely known Rabley, but the sight of the poor fellow trying so hard to be understood at the moment before his death would have upset anybody. As he looked into the blackness and pondered the general unfairness of things another thought occurred to him - one that, despite his sorrow, nearly made him burst out laughing. 'Ah,' he said. 'That complicates things rather.' He shot Cadinot a significant look. 'Think about it.'

Cadinot looked blank for a moment, then his eyebrows shot up. 'You don't mean const.i.tutional privilege?'

He indicated K9. 'For him?'

K9's head lifted suspiciously. 'Please explain reference.'

Romana was getting tired of Captain Viddeas. Not only was he an unpleasant character, but he smelt, and she had to hold back an urge to throw up several times as he led her through poorly lit, low-ceilinged corridors to the detention block. His questions, half shouted, half screamed, grew more insistent as they proceeded, as if he was trying to stir himself up into an unthinking rage. She countered this by keeping calm and polite.

After some minutes they emerged into an area that contained several caged and barred cells. The second along in the row contained a heap of sackcloth.

'Confess!' Viddeas shouted. 'You are an agent of the Chelonians.'

Romana raised a disapproving eyebrow as she looked around. 'Is this your detention block? You don't have any prisoners.'

Viddeas, keeping his pistol level, moved around to face her. 'They were handed back at the last solar quarter. As well you know.' There were traces of moisture around his mouth and his lips were unusually pale, almost blue.

'Please stop saying things like that,' said Romana. She watched as he swayed and shook his head. 'Are you all right?' She held back from reaching out to support him, as his uniform jacket was soaked with perspiration. 'This atmosphere's very unhealthy.' There was a tickle at her cheek that she brushed off instinctively. 'Lots of flies.'

The comment seemed to trouble Viddeas. He blinked and said quietly, 'What was that? What did you say?'

'I said it's very stuffy,' said Romana, fanning herself.

Viddeas shook his head. 'No, it wasn't that, I... about the...' His gun hand started to shake and he tottered away from her. The cells officer, a burly man in a nondescript set of coveralls, came forward to a.s.sist him.

'You need to sit down,' said Romana, trying to appear concerned.

Viddeas shrugged off the aid of the officer and pointed to the cells. 'Put her in there,' he blurted, drool now running from his mouth. 'I am perfectly all right! Do it!' He stumbled out, a hand pressed to his temple.

The big man looked after him, plainly confused. 'Stress, probably,' Romana suggested. She took the lead and walked across to the nearest cell, swinging the little barred door open and making herself comfortable on the bench within. 'I'd like a gla.s.s of water, if that's allowed.' She smiled sweetly at the officer, who locked her in and walked away, shaking his head in confusion.

Romana allowed herself a few moments of reflection. On the journey to the post she had learnt the bizarre history of the war from Grayn. It was just like the Doctor to land them here at the very moment things started to hot up. She considered using her sonic screwdriver to pick the lock of the cell, and decided it was probably better to keep on the good side of these people, who were, Viddeas excepted, pleasant enough. She sat back on the bench, drew her feet up, and allowed her head to fall back on the bars separating her cell from its neighbour. The pile of sacking in the next cell was placed conveniently for her to use as a pillow.

The sacking moved.

Romana sat up and turned to see a figure pushing itself out from beneath the covering. The initial shock of not being alone was compounded by the sight of the face revealed by this stirring. He was blinking with an unaccustomed grogginess, and he looked a few years older. There were new worry lines around his eyes and mouth. But the egg-like bald head, the hulking frame and the bloodless lips could have belonged to no one other than Menlove Stokes. She and the Doctor had encountered him not so long ago, in their own relative time-stream, during an encounter with the villainous Xais in the twenty-third century. He had then been employed as an artist, and not a very successful one, in a grotesque gallery of his own creation built into the bas.e.m.e.nt of a prison.* All of this flashed through Romana's mind in an instant. 'Great Ra.s.silon!' she shrieked, pulling herself up.

* See Doctor Who - The Romance of Crime.

Stokes peered at her from beneath heavy eyelids. 'Ah. You must be an illusion. A side effect of the sedative.' His voice was as affected and actorly as ever. 'Go away.' He pulled the sacking back over his head.

Romana considered for a moment the possibility that this was a distant descendant of the man she had met. But he had recognized her: She decided to be direct. 'I'm as solid as you are,' she said, reaching through the bars to tap him on the shoulder.

He refused to look up. 'No no, you are definitely the product of whatever unholy chemical mixture they've sent swimming through my bloodstream.'

He shifted his position slightly and stared out at her. 'Interesting, how my mind works. At this, perhaps the time of greatest crisis in all my days, it summons forth a spectre from my second-best adventure. The lovely Ramona.'

'Romana.' This was definitely Stokes. 'You're starting to irritate me and I may have to slap you.'

He nodded. 'Exactly what a mirage would say. There's no need to raise your hand as my haunted mind would, no doubt, simulate the pain of actual physical contact.' A thought seemed to strike him. 'Actual physical contact,'

he repeated slowly. Then he threw off the covering completely, revealing his battered, paint-spattered old raincoat and disordered cravat, and patted his knee. 'You don't fancy hopping on to Uncle Men's lap, do you?'

Romana had an idea. 'Stokes,' she said, 'you are a pompous, self-inflated fool with no talent whatever.'

He flushed and pulled himself upright, then clapped his hands together in astonishment, his tiredness seeming to vanish in an instant. 'You are real!

No hallucination of mine would dare to say that!' He pointed an aggressive finger at her. 'How dare you say it!' Then he checked his temper. 'Very clever. Of course, you didn't mean it.'

Romana changed the subject. 'I am pleased to see you,' she said, honestly.

'But what are you doing in this time and place? You must be millennia out of era.'

He shuffled awkwardly. 'It's a very long story.'

'I was afraid it might be.' She leant forward. 'What have you been up to?

Time travel?'

Stokes swelled with self-importance. 'Not exactly.' He coughed and began to declaim. Romana got the impression he had been rehearsing this speech. 'My tale begins shortly after our last meeting, and that unpleasantness aboard the Rock. That idiot Spiggot wrote a ludicrous account of what occurred there, casting himself as a hero and me as a b.u.mbling fool. You and your pop-eyed friend and that tin bath of yours were written out altogether. Anyway, I wasn't prepared to stand for it. I took legal advice and sued him for every credit of his royalties.'

Romana cast her eyes over his clothing. 'You lost?'

'I was ruined,' he said hotly. 'Made a laughing stock in open court. No witnesses, you see - my word against his. It was a disgrace. Worse, it swallowed up my unearned income. And the exhibition I had timed to coincide with my victory was ill-attended and took very bad reviews.'

He smacked his fist into his palm. 'From fools, I might say. That churl Bootle Anderson said that I was "rubbing the faces of my audience in my own vomit". That crazy pipe-smoking old harridan Sybilla Strang claimed my works "plumbed a new nadir of creative bankruptcy". But I didn't let it get to me.'

'Evidently,' said Romana.

'Envy, that was all. It's been the same down the ages:true endeavour crushed by jealous chatterers. Think of Van Gogh, Matisse, Whiteread. All deceased and dispirited before the next generation, unenc.u.mbered by the judgements of their sniping rivals, recognized their actual worth. I was not prepared to follow that route. And, thanks to the technology of my native century, I did not have to.'

Romana grasped his meaning. 'Suspended animation?'

'Yes. I booked myself into the Dozing Decades cryo-mort on Fridgya, and took up a lease on a berth with the last few crumbs in my possession. I specified to be woken only when my work was re-evaluated and properly appreciated.'

There was an unpleasant silence. At length, Romana said, as politely as she could, 'Stokes, we're getting close to the very end of the universe.'

'There was a slight delay, yes. Fridgya was laid waste in the fifth Thargon-Sorson war and the cryo-mort was left unattended.'

Romana consulted her encyclopaedic memory of major galactic events. 'In 2660?'

Stokes nodded. 'Many, many thousands of years later archaeologists came to Fridgya and unearthed my fellow sleepers and myself. Unfortunately they were stupidly superst.i.tious and packed us off, still frozen, in drifting, unpowered mini-pods. I ended up here in the Fostrix galaxy, a fair while later. Where the good Femdroids of Metralubit hauled me in. And what joys I stumbled on. I take it you haven't been down there?' Romana shook her head and he went on, 'It's a beautiful place. A Utopia. A rationally organized, harmonic society, governed by benevolent democracy.' His eyes glazed over. 'You must visit it. Great white towers stretching ever upward, free transport with no pollutants, rolling green s.p.a.ces. I was welcomed and made so comfortable. The Metralubitans leapt at the work I provided for them. Even one of my lesser abstracts fetches a generous sum there. At last I was appreciated.' He snapped himself back to the present. 'But after some months of excessive comfort I started to thirst for a challenge and volunteered my services as a war artist, that I might capture some of the flavour of these bloodless hostilities. Now I wish I never had.

Those reptilian beasts are going to plunge us all into disaster! And that uptight idiot Viddeas won't let me leave.'

Romana shook her head in wonderment. 'Astonishing. The level of coincidence, I mean. Our meeting is the most unlikely thing that could happen. Perhaps the Doctor was right about the Randomiser.'

'He's here?' Stokes groaned. 'No doubt the general level of mayhem will increase accordingly.'

'The Doctor saved your life,' Romana pointed out.

'Politeness is for mediocrities,' he said casually. His weariness had left him, and he got up from his bench and started to pace his cell. 'How long am I going to be subject to this whitewash! Will we all be dead?'

Romana looked up as Viddeas, now looking more controlled, returned to the detention block. Stokes pointed to him. 'You. I want to see the Admiral.

Now.'

Viddeas's attention was all on Romana. 'Shut up. Or I will order your sedation.'

Stokes grimaced. 'There's been another attack, hasn't there? Now do you see I'm right? I'm a civilian - you can't hold me. Let me speak to the Admiral. Remind him that I'm known to Premier Harmock and that I'm not without influence on Metra.'

Viddeas ignored him and advanced on Romana's cell. 'You will give me details of the Chelonians' plans. Immediately. If you do not it is within my rights to have you tortured.'

She smiled back. 'That won't be necessary. I can prove my story. Stokes, tell him who I am. Stokes turned to Viddeas. 'Please, do I have to be shut up with this madwoman? Is this part of your game against me, Viddeas?'

Romana went on. 'He can vouch for me. We're known to each other.'

Stokes gave her a scathing look. 'Please ignore her ramblings,' he told Viddeas. 'I've never seen her before in my life.'

Inwardly, Dolne was rather amused by the scandalized look on Cadinot's fresh face. The young man kept looking between him and K9 and shaking his head. 'You're not serious, sir. Say you aren't.'

Dolne wagged a finger and slid a thick leatherbound volume from his bookshelf. 'There's nothing in here to say it can't happen.' He handed the book over. 'Times have changed. In my academy days we learnt every page of the const.i.tution.'

Cadinot turned the book over in his hands, as if afraid to open it. 'But a robot? Not much more than a Femdroid?'

'An artificial intelligence,' Dolne corrected him. 'Who can tell? It might be the best thing for Metralubit.' As he spoke he took the book and placed it before K9, who started to read eagerly, using his eyestalk to turn the pages. 'Better than old Harmock.'

The com-screen bleeped suddenly, and without preamble Harmock's face appeared on it. 'I've spent hours trying to get through to you,' he said, frowning. 'Your satellite bands are thick with distortion.'