Trial Of A Time Lord _ Mindwarp Part 4

The Matrona scrambled to do his bidding. Though the pulse imput increased markedly and the Alpha waves decreased, still the warrior struggled against the power that surged through his brain cells.

'Samcnanz... Cruz... Craz... Crome... die...!'

Worriedly the Matrona watched the muscles knot in the bulky arms.

'Why is the pacification not working?'

Crozier reached for an auxiliary power circuit and made a fine adjustment.

'It will now.' His dry voice was crisp and confident.

'Yrcanos is a barbarian King. He knows only one thing how to fight. Therefore he is trying to resist our attempts to bring him to peace and tranquillity.'

'Sc.u.m!' the Warlord spat out, then succ.u.mbed to the process that Crozier had devoted his life to perfecting the control and manipulation of behaviour.

Seeing the King at last made quiet, the scientist stretched his thin lips into a contemptuous half-smile.

'The stupider the subject, the longer it takes. Now, Matrona...' Crozier pointed to where an alien brain, the size of a water melon, lay open for dissection. Taking a slim stylus from the top pocket of his lemon-coloured coat he pointed to a stem of the opalescent ma.s.s. 'The ganglions have not yet recovered from the lesions of our last operation.'

The Matrona was an interested pupil. 'Why detach both junctions...?' The sound of the laboratory door opening interrupted her question. Angrily she turned to berate the intruders.

'You are forbidden!' she began, then broke off as she saw the lifeless creature held between the guards. 'What...

what's happened...?'

The Matrona moved across the floor of the laboratory but Crozier was quicker. 'An accident?' His voice was calm, detached, though the Matrona knew the disappointment the scientist must be feeling. The Raak represented one of Crozier's most notable experiments in alien brain enhancement.

'Answer!' the Matrona's voice was a whiplash that made Frax blurt out. 'Not an accident, murder!'

Crozier took in the word. It altered a lot of things.

'Whoever is responsible,' he said evenly, 'I expect their living brains to be delivered to me as recompense.'

Five.

The junction of tunnels looked vaguely familiar to the Doctor as he edged round a comer warily. The red light glaring out above the door of Crozier's laboratory confirmed his impression that they were headed back in the same direction taken previously. Peri urged the Doctor forward.

'We're going in the right direction for the TARDIS, Doctor, keep going!'

'Wait...' the Doctor warned.

'What?' Peri started to say, her voice bristling with impatience. 'Oh...'

From out of the doorway of the lab came a funeral party bearing the body of the Raak. The group, comprising Frax, two guards, Matrona and a sad-faced Crozier, came towards the junction of pa.s.sages where Peri and the Doctor were sheltering.

Already it was too late to run away with Frax and his guards almost upon them. Just as discovery seemed inevitable, Frax led his group away down the adjoining pa.s.sageway.

'Let's get on,' Peri said with relief.

'No, not yet.' The Doctor paused looking down at the red light that seemed to draw his attention.

Soon the Doctor and his reluctant companion were outside the laboratory. The Doctor pushed the circular steel door, which opened.

'Pooh!' Peri wrinlded her nose at the pungent smell that hung about the interior of the rectangular lab s.p.a.ce.

'What's that, old socks?'

'Formaldyhyde, among other things,' the Doctor said as he stepped inside.

Peri followed. 'Wow -- what's this, a pickle factory?'

'No...' the Doctor chuckled as they looked at the wall opposite where hundreds of brains, large and small, floated in jars of ethyl alcohol.

'Look!' Peri pointed to an operating table on which the Warlord, Yrcanos, lay. Strapped to his head was a helmet dotted with an agglomeration of sensors and electrodes and a profusion of wiring that led to an a.s.sorted ma.s.s of technological paraphernalia.

While Peri moved to examine the unconscious warrior, her companion went to an oscilloscope on which an intertwining wiggle of amplification lines waved across the screen, tracing the electricity being sent through the patient's brain. Fascinated, the Doctor examined an array of neurotransmitters, nerve structure models, synapse locators.

'What is is all this, Doctor?' all this, Doctor?'

'Isn't it obvious?'

'No...!' Peri gasped at the arrogance of the Doctor's question.

On the screen of the Matrix the court watched as the Doctor excitedly began to trace the patterns of circuitry towards the helmet that encased the head of King Yrcanos.

'If I might beg the court's indulgence,' the Valeyard interrupted. The image of the Doctor froze in mid-stride.

'Well?' the Inquisitor turned from the screen as the scene dissolved into neutral grey.

'Sagacity,' the oily tones insinuated. 'May I be so bold as to suggest we have already seen enough.'

'I second that. The sight of that Sil creature would turn anyone's stomach,' the Doctor said flippantly.

A frown of annoyance flicked across the brow of the Prosecutor. 'We have now seen many examples of the Doctor's interference. We have heard the pleas of his companion to be taken away from danger. Yet again the Doctor has ignored her and gone blindly forward on his misguided mission.'

The Doctor spread his hands. 'Minor misdemeanours...'

The look on the Inquisitor's face became forbidding.

'You have asked for the penalty of death, Valeyard. You will have to show firm evidence as to why I should take such allegations seriously.'

'As you wish.' The Valeyard sat down, huffily.

It was the Doctor's turn to address the Inquisitor. 'My lady, for some reason I cannot yet fathom, I can recall little of the events on Thoros-Beta neither my own actions nor the reasons why creatures like Sil acted as they did. May I see what the Matrix has to show, including all of the background material, so that I may see the truth of what happened to myself and why it is that Peri is no longer with me.'

The Valeyard jumped to his feet, his spare body trembling with rage. 'Preposterous timewasting. We will be here for months! And as for his oh-so-convenient loss of memory...!'

'Be quiet!' the Inquisitor regarded the accused and accuser thoughtfully. The time of her deliberation lengthened tantalisingly.

Finally, when the Inquisitor spoke, her voice was even and une motional in her judgement. 'I will allow all Matrix material to be viewed by the court. To take all the lives of a Time Lord is without precedent. If that is to be the fate of the Doctor then it must not be said that the verdict for execution was reached without every effort being made to reach the truth.'

'My lady.' The Doctor bowed. He did not care for the references to execution but he was strangely elated. Now he would see what it was he had done. Good or evil, at least now he would know why he was here on trial and what had happened to Peri.

The screen of the Matrix glowed vibrantly once more and revealed not the scene of the Doctor exploring Crozier's laboratory but another location showing Kiv and Sil busily engaged in their Profit Room. Kiv was droning into a contract transposer. 'In the event of a major mining discovery, our lease from the Thordonians will be for thirty years at a royalty rate of forty per cent.' Kiv's large head lifted on a wave of pain. 'Or did I mean forty years at thirty per cent, Sil?'

'Thirty at forty is better, Magnificence.'

'Well, anyway, it will be enough to keep you in Marsh Minnows... aah!'

'My lord...' Sil watched his superior rock to and fro in a vain attempt to escape the effects of brain compression.

'My head...' Kiv's mouth opened with the agony he was experiencing.

'It will soon pa.s.s,' Sil said.

The heavy head lifted wearily as the attack began to abate a little. 'The pressure grows worse each time.

Something must be done or soon you will be hailed as Magnificence.'

Sil looked suitably abashed at the awful prospect. 'Long may that day be postponed, great Kiv.'

At that moment the doors of the Profit Room were flung open. Horrified at the intrusion, Sil twisted on his water tank. The sight of Crozier and the guards crowding in caused him to escalate into hysteria. 'You must not enter the sacred room of commerce while profit is in progress!'

Crozier ignored Sil and addressed Kiv bluntly. 'There is trouble.'

'Concerning what?'

Crozier's grey eyes stared towards the leader of the Mentors.

'What has happened?' Kiv spoke quietly in contrast to the bombast of his a.s.sistant.

'The Raak is dead.' Crozier's tone was cold, his voice flat. 'Killed by intruders.'

Frax stepped forward. 'They claimed the Raak attacked them.'

Sil waved a short green arm imperiously. 'Then manufacture another experiment!'

Crozier gave him a look of utter contempt. 'That is not easily done. Neither is it the point of my concern.'

The Matrona spoke next. 'The Raak was no longer aggressive.'

'So?' Sil did not understand the problem.

Patiently, Crozier outlined his dilemma. 'If the Raak, unprovoked, did attack these intruders, then he might have regressed genetically. Until I know, until I can question the strangers in every detail, I cannot guarantee the success of your brain transference, Lord Kiv.'

'You must relieve my suffering!' Kiv's voice, at the thought that hope of relief might be taken from him, had an edge of panic.

'My Lord...' the Matrona intervened. Sometimes only her soothing tones could calm the stricken leader. 'We have hopes that the radical treatment you require will be successful, Lord.'

Jealously, Sil attempted to block the influence of the Matrona's encouragement. Glaring at the scientist and his a.s.sistant, he adopted a hectoring manner. 'So much depends on the life of Lord Kiv. The making of mega wealth for the funding of your work, Crozier.' The little red eyes, buried in the green scaled face, gleamed when scoring this last point.

Crozier refused to be budged from his position of scientific objectivity. 'I must be certain. I must know that the chances of success in the brain transplantation are as favourable as possible.'

Sil turned his attention to the officer of the guard while Kiv once more hung his head as another surge of pain and nausea spread through his mottled brown head and body.

'Where are these strangers?' Sil asked.

Frax swallowed, he had feared this question, 'Escaped, Mentor Sil.'

'Sil, take charge!' Kiv's voice rasped out. 'Stupid guards, moronic bearers, incompetent officers! I will be dead as that Raak if I wait for them to find the intruders.. His reedy voice faltered with the anguish of further neural compression. 'Find them at once! Before I perish, then where will you all be? Huh? Leaderless and poor poor!'

Sil trembled at the prospect. He did not care too much about Kiv but the prospect of losing Kiv's mastery of stock-market manipulation galvanised him into action and soon he was spitting out orders that sent all available officers, guards and bearers scurrying in a desperate hunt for Peri and the Doctor.

'Ugh!' Peri turned away from a shelf that contained the pickled entrails of a giant swamp maggot. Next she stared through a magnifying panel that was focused on the open brain that had so engrossed the Matrona and Crozier an hour earlier.

While Peri wandered from one disturbing sight to the next the Doctor had been occupying himself in tracing the technology that was linked to the helmet enclosing the head of the inert warrior.

A movement on the operating table caught Peri's eye.

'He's coming round.'

'Not necessarily,' said the Doctor, engrossed in the complex combinations of neural formulae that flashed across the display panei of the electroencephalograph.

There was much to understand in the pacification system, but finally the process began to make sense. The Doctor decided to take a calculated risk by lessening what he decided must be the power impulse into the helmet.

'What's going on, Doctor?'

The Doctor indicated a neural impulse pa.s.sing across the oscilloscope. 'Not sure. But that brainwave belongs to that chap... I've lessened the...' Before the Doctor could finish, the doar to the laboratory was suddenly thrust open.

Peri and the Doctor turned to face half a dozen phasers held by black-uniformed guards who then stepped aside to allow a small green Mentor to be borne towards them by his muscular bearers.

'How nice to see a familiar mug again.' The Doctor smiled at Sil, then nodded a courteous greeting towards Crozier who had entered immediately after Sil.

Sil smirked in satisfaction at his capture. 'Doctor... and, ah, yes, your revoltingly ugly a.s.sistant.' He stared at Peri.