Doctor Who: The Also People (35 page)

A handful of remote-drones came sliding out of the sky to pack up the entertainment modules and deliver vital supplies to die-hard partygoers with the munchies.

'You bastard.' She said it out loud, meaning the Doctor. 'You did that on purpose.' Making her responsible for the decision, forcing her to see the patterns. But that didn't make sense – risking a war with the people just to teach Bernice a lesson – highly unlikely. There was some other plan below that plan, and below that? As an archaeologist she should know all about layers of meaning. I know that you know that I know, thought Bernice, but what you don't know is that I know that you know things I don't know. Unless the Doctor knew that of course.

Roz limped past her, grimacing and going 'ow' every time her left foot touched the ground.

Bernice watched the older woman hobble over to join Chris who was staring up at the hills behind the town. After a moment she realized that Roz was staring in the same direction as Chris and with the same thoughtful expression. Bernice paused to stretch her back and then wandered over to see what on earth it was they were looking at. The Doctor joined them, patting Bernice on the shoulder. The four of them looked up the hill to where the windmills turned in the wind.

It couldn't be that simple, could it?

'The night of the party,' said Chris, breaking the silence. 'I was playing a game with Dep.'

Bernice bit back on
I'll bet you were
. Now was
not
the time.

'There was a fault on the entertainment console which it blamed on a static build-up in the capacitors.'

'What do you reckon the storage capacity of those capacitors is?' asked Bernice.

'Enough,' said the Doctor, 'with a bit left over to mess up Christopher's game.'

'But I thought they were, you know, decorative,' said Roz.

'They like to build real things,' said Chris. 'Real steamships, real biplanes, real wind turbines.'

'What do we do now?' asked Bernice.

The Doctor suggested that they stopped staring at the windmills. 'Just in case someone is watching.' There were too many people, organic and machine, on the beach with them, too many eyes. Bernice thought there was such a thing as too paranoid and said so. 'A stitch with twine saves time,' said the Doctor. 'We're just four weary partygoers taking the scenic route home and when we're out of sight we'll nip up the hill and have a look at those windmills.'

'My feet are killing me,' said Roz. 'Why don't we just get the lift down to the station and then back up to the control centre?'

'Lifts can be monitored,' said the Doctor ominously.

'Barefoot dancing in the sand is so romantic,' said Bernice. 'Pity you picked a pebble beach.'

'Barefoot in the head more like,' muttered Roz. 'There's something I want to check out first,'

she said. 'If I don't meet you at the windmills, I'll catch you later at the villa.'

FeLixi wanted to come with her. 'At least let me keep you company in the travel capsule,' he said.

Roz managed a smile. 'Thanks, but I need to think about some things first.' She let him brush his nose against hers. 'I'll call you,' she said.

'I'll be waiting.'

She asked the travel capsule to black out its windows and spent the trip staring at her reflection in the shiny surface of the coffee table.

Starport Facility's topside was in darkness when she arrived, a corridor of flickering orange lights like regimented glow-worms lighting the pathway to the lifts. She watched the windows of the upside-down towers flick past her face as she rode down to the waiting ship. When she stepped out she found the atrium was deserted.

'I thought you might come and see me again,' said S-Lioness.

Roz said nothing.

'I thought you were very entertaining the other night,' said the ship. Its voice was artificial, of course, and so there was not a chance of it reflecting any true emotion, and yet Roz could swear that the S-Lioness was nervous.

'Where's your big friend?'

Roz stared resolutely straight ahead, just as she had all those years ago when Konstantine was shouting at her.

'Aren't you going to say something?'

'I'm waiting,' said Roz, 'for you to answer the question you know I'm going to ask.'

In answer a tray flew around the corner and into the atrium. It was carrying a matt black object the size of a pack of cards. Roz picked it off the tray. 'Is this it?' she asked.

'Yes,' said the S-Lioness. 'Press the top to get the screen.'

'Have you read it?'

'No,' said S-Lioness. 'I was afraid of what I might learn. How did you know I had it?'

'I guessed,' said Roz. 'Vi!Cari would have to leave it with someone he trusted. Once I decided you weren't the murderer you seemed the obvious choice.'

'Will you catch the murderer?'

'Oh yes,' said Roz. 'You were very fond of vi!Cari, weren't you?'

'The drone was there and now it has gone,' said the ship. 'We had memories in common. Now that it is gone I have become less than what I was.'

Roz nodded. 'A simple yes would have done.'

'You find it,' said S-Lioness. 'You find the machine that did it and you disassemble them. You hear me, Roslyn Forrester?'

'I hear you.' She stepped back into the lift and turned. 'Evening all,' she said. She waited until she was halfway up the shaft before saying in a loud voice – 'One of you is for the scrap heap because I've got vi!Cari's diary.'

One second later, someone tried to kill her.

'Let me see,' said the Doctor. 'The power comes from the turbines on the pylons and is fed into the capacitors there, which connects to that thing over there which I don't recognize and into that converter.'

'Which does what?' asked Bernice.

'Converts it, I assume,' said the Doctor.

'What are we looking for?' asked Chris.

'The thingumajig that records where the power goes,' said the Doctor. 'We're lucky that, however designed, this place had a thing about antique machinery.'

The main control panel was a bank of radial dials with analogue pointers, sixteen ranks high and twenty across. Chris strongly suspected that most of them were for show. A sloping shelf jutted out of the wall at chest height, mounted with big-handled rheostats and shiny metal switches. It looked like something out of the museum of ancient engineering at Spaceport Three.

Chris tried to remember the layout. Ducking under the shelf he saw a line of plain metal panels with hinges and handles. He tried one and it opened. Inside he could see tangles of multicoloured wiring held onto connections with cute little crocodile clips. He was sure he saw valves glowing in the background.

He heard Bernice complaining that the place was a prehistoric pile of junk. 'But I thought you liked prehistoric junk,' said the Doctor.

Chris opened the next panel and found much the same stuff as before.

'Only when it's
real
prehistoric junk,' said Bernice. 'This stuff is about as authentic as that dinosaur park in Costa Rica.'

He found it behind the fourth panel: a pair of slowly turning metal drums with lined paper spooling between them. Three mechanical arms with pens on the end traced continuous lines across the paper.

'Down here, Doctor.'

The Doctor stuck his head into the panel. 'Good work, Chris, just what I was looking for. See if you can get the drum out.'

Chris reached around the back of the drums and found a pair of locking clamps, then with Bernice's help he lifted them out as a single unit. The Doctor unwound the paper by the simple expedient of kicking the drum along the floor. He got down on his knees and started to work his way along.

'If we assume that the top line is the turbine input,' he said, 'the middle line is the whatever-it-is and the bottom line is the capacitors. Then we should be looking for a place where the lines diverge.' He slapped his hand down on one section of the sheet. 'Here we are, lots of power going in, plenty of power to the thingamywhatsit but none going to the capacitors. And all this happening three days, sixteen hours, five minutes and twenty-two seconds ago. Which as you all know was the night of the murder.'

'There's no time code, Doctor,' said Bernice. 'How can you possibly tell when it happened?'

'Because,' he said, 'I made a note of how fast the drums were rotating.'

'So now we know for sure where the artificial lightning bolt came from,' said Chris.

'Yes,' said the Doctor. 'But we still don't know how it was done.'

'Perhaps someone modified the thingamywhatsit doodad,' said Chris, pointing at the gunmetal grey box that was situated halfway up the wall.

'Don't
you
start with the metasyntaxic variables,' said Bernice.

'What makes you say that, Chris?' asked the Doctor.

'Because,' Bernice said before Chris could answer, 'someone has forced the cabinet open. Fairly recently by the look of it. Right, Chris?'

'Well, you had better force it open again,' said the Doctor.

They had to find a tool kit first. Bernice located one by the side of the balcony door. 'For emergency exits I suppose,' she said.

Chris noted with interest that a crowbar is a crowbar in any civilization. When he tried to lever open one side the whole front of the cabinet fell away. The Doctor picked it up and smelt the edges. 'Some kind of epoxy,' he said. 'Very low tech. I wonder why?'

'God,' said Bernice, 'would be scanning for high technology materials and equipment.

Something antique would blend right into the background.'

Whatever the thingamy doodad was it had clearly been modified. Chris saw what he recognized as a set of old-fashioned silicon microprocessors mounted on a stiff motherboard. Wires trailed from the edge connectors to various points inside the cabinet.

'Sshh,' said the Doctor. 'Did you hear that, a sort of buzzing noise?'

Chris listened. It was coming from behind the jury-rigged silicon. Very carefully he eased the motherboard to one side. Something whirred past his ear with a furious buzzing sound. 'Quick,'

said the Doctor, 'don't let it get away.'

Bernice grabbed hold of the crowbar and swung it wildly at the minute flying thing. Incredibly she hit it and it pinged away to smash into the far wall, bounced off and landed on the floor.

'Grab it,' yelled the Doctor.

'Why?' yelled Bernice.

Chris scooped up one of the drums and smashed the edge down on the insect.

'Because it's one of the bugs the ships use,' said the Doctor. He squatted down, withdrew a magnifying glass from his coat pocket and peered through it at the insect. The thing buzzed feebly and waved bent legs. 'And I'll just bet that God can identify which ship it came from.'

It got dark very suddenly.

'Who turned the lights out?' asked the Doctor.

'Er, Doctor,' said Bernice, 'there weren't any lights on to start with. This room has a skylight.'

'So what you're saying,' said the Doctor, 'and correct me if I'm wrong, is that for some reason, the sun has gone out.'

One nanosecond.

– what's going on?

– who is using a disruption field in the Spaceport?

– not me, God.

– someone's blown a chunk out of the facility.

– GPSs to rescue stations, VASs to defensive positions.

– I told you we should have gone after the Time Lords.

– shut up, P-Cor, I'm trying to think.

– now they've caught us with our metaphoricals round our ankles.

– it's !C-Mel, it's moving out of the port and into the sphere.

– somebody stop that ship.

– would you like to tell me how? I can't fire. !C-Mel's got half a million people on board.

– aghhh!

– what now?

– sorry, God, !C-Mel just blew out my drive section.

– it's going into sphere, it's going into the sphere.

– oh oh, are we in trouble now.

Two nanoseconds.

The unbreakable transparent titanium of the grav-lift shaft didn't so much break as shatter. Roz Forrester found herself sucked into empty space. 'Oh shit,' she screamed, 'this is it, I'm going to die!' She carried on screaming for a while until she realized that she was still breathing. For some reason she seemed to be surrounded by a bubble of breathable air.

'Don't worry,' said a soothing voice. 'You are probably not going to die anytime soon.'

'What do you mean soon,' yelled Roz. 'Who am I talking to?'

'It's me,' said the soothing voice, 'the S-Lioness.'

Roz looked around. She was floating away from the shattered remains of the grav-lift shaft.

There seemed to be some damage to portions of the upside-down tower as well. In the distance she could see other people suspended in temporary force bubbles. As she watched a piece of another tower slowly broke away in a cloud of glittering sparks.

'Who's doing this?' she asked.

'The !C-Mel,' said S-Lioness. 'I thought you planned this.'

'Of course I did,' said Roz. 'I just forgot how fast you ships think.'

'You should be pleased then,' said the S-Lioness.

Roz was about to say – Yes, thrilled, when her force bubble burst and she began to choke in earnest. Roz had done decompression procedures at the academy but the training exercises had always been posited on the assumption that you were somewhere near emergency equipment.

'Let's face it,' said the instructor, 'if you're not then you're dead.'

There was a terrible pain in her ears and a feeling of pressure in her chest. She tried to hang on to what little air she had left in her lungs but the urge to breathe in was becoming overwhelming. As her sight faded Roz thought she saw the grey walls of the Overcity rushing past her and heard the thin sound of screaming children.

'Now there's something you don't see every day,' said the Doctor.

They stood on the balcony. Now that the sun was turned off they could clearly see the dark portal of the Spaceport and from it, growing larger every second, was the TSH !C-Mel, a city falling towards them.

God had sent one of its remote-drones to provide a communications link. There was a lot of outraged shouting on the organic comms channels. God said it was much the same on the machine channels, only faster and slightly more hysterical.