Winner Takes All (9 page)

He appeared slightly mollified by that. ‘Reckon they meant to, though. Probably just distracted by all of what was going on.'

‘Probably dizzy with high blood pressure from a salt overdose,' said Rose.

‘What about the Doctor, though? Reckon they got him?'

Rose had been trying not to think about that. ‘Nah. He'd've got out of the way in time, easy. They were looking at us. And anyway, they want him to play that game. Even if they caught him, they wouldn't have hurt him.' But she wasn't anywhere near as sure as she sounded.

She helped Mickey up on to a chair. ‘Will you be all right?' she said.

‘Yeah, I'm fine, babe. I can always play a game to pass the time,' he said, and then added, ‘I'm joking,' at her scandalised face. ‘Of course I'm joking. Because one, it's obviously a joke. And two, someone's nicked the telly.'

Rose looked. He was right. ‘Oh, what?!' she said. ‘Oh, brilliant. He'll only go and say “I told you so” now.'

‘Don't tell me, the Doctor,' said Mickey. ‘I bet it's that bloomin' Darren Pye that's nicked it. Anyway, that's not important now.'

Rose laughed. ‘You, saying telly's not important?'

But Mickey suddenly looked as serious as she'd ever seen him. ‘You just get out there and collect them up, all those consoles. You've gotta stop it, Rose. Stop them from killing people.' And then Mickey was trying to push himself up off the chair. ‘I've gotta come with you, gotta help. Can't sit around when there are people still playing that game.' He started running on, babbling almost, panicking, about the people going on the holidays and the people sat at home, killing them . . . All very well for the Doctor to say it wasn't his fault, but Mickey still had the guilt, she could see that.

She tried to calm him down, explain why he couldn't help. ‘You can hardly stand up, let alone get up and down all the stairs round here!' But looking at his agonised face, she had an idea. ‘Tell you what, how about this? If we can get you to the computer, you can go online. Tell people not to play the game – that there's a fault or a bug, or it explodes if played for too long or something.'

‘Yeah, all right,' he said. ‘If the computer's still here.'

But Rose checked and it was, and so she helped him up, and he hobbled, leaning on her shoulder, into the bedroom.

They both heard it, the noise from outside. ‘Front door's probably still open from where they kicked it in,' said Rose. ‘Probably the wind blowing it.'

‘Probably whoever nicked the telly come back for more,' said Mickey.

‘Or only just left,' said Rose. ‘Could have been out there the whole time . . .'

She went to look. Couldn't see anyone, but they'd have had plenty of time to get away. If there'd been anyone there at all.

She came back in, shut the door firmly behind her. Went back to Mickey, realised he was shaking. Shock.

She picked up the quilt from off the bed, wrapped it round him, went and made him hot, sweet tea, like they said you should. Looked in the cupboards in case there was brandy, even though she knew there'd just be beer. He was still shivering when she got back, but he was beginning to look embarrassed about it, so she knew he was getting a bit better.

They sat in silence for a while, neither knowing what to say. Then the silence was broken by the sound of a siren, somewhere on the estate outside, and it made her think of hospitals, of doctors. The other sort of doctor. But Mickey said he didn't need a doctor, and she couldn't force him. He kept saying she had to go, had to leave him and fetch those games, and she knew she must. ‘You phone me if you need me,' she said, and then realised she didn't have her phone any more. So she said, ‘I'll come back later. Let you know what's happening. Let you know when the Doctor's back.'

And she didn't allow herself to think
if
the Doctor gets back. Because she knew he'd be all right. He just had to be.

The Doctor was hiding behind the pile of old office equipment in the corner of the room. He'd dived into cover the moment he'd activated the teleporter, the moment the Quevvil had entered the room, and then he'd spent a sticky few seconds wondering if it'd spotted him or not. The Quevvil had fired an energy weapon, but he was pretty sure Rose and Mickey had vanished by then. Trouble was, they were dealing with split seconds here, and they were always tricky to judge. But he thought the two of them would be OK. Just hoped they'd do what he asked, collect up those games; reduce the number of players and you'd reduce the number of people being used, the number of people dying. He hoped.

He didn't have a particular plan, he just knew he had to find the location of the Quevvils' planet, so he could bring home all the people trapped there. And sort out the Quevvils as well, of course. They couldn't keep on doing this sort of thing. He'd known maniacs who played human chess – real chess, not symbolic – and that was bad enough, making a knight stick a lance through a castle, making a bishop decapitate a pawn. But there was something so prosaic about what the Quevvils were doing: just using humans to do their dirty work – or rather, worse, tricking humans into doing it. Using their greed. Playing on their desire to get a free lunch. And there ain't any such thing.

The other Quevvils had joined their fellow now, one of them limping a bit. Good ol' Rose and her lip balm. They seemed to be arguing about who would report the loss of the Doctor and Mickey to Frinel. The leader of the Quevvils was obviously feared.

‘Frinel will be displeased!' a Quevvil said. ‘We had assured him that victory was near at hand. He will have prepared for the final defeat of the Mantodeans.'

‘Death to the Mantodeans!' shouted the other three Quevvils, shaking their fists in the air. Their arms were so short and stubby that, even at the fullest extent, they reached no higher than their snouts.

There was a beeping noise from the control panel in the wall. One of the Quevvils moved over to it. ‘Incoming message,' he said. The Doctor pricked up his ears.

A voice came out of the panel, of a harsher timbre than those Quevvil voices the Doctor had heard so far. ‘This is Frinel speaking. Respond, Earth party.'

The Quevvil said, ‘Earth party here, Frinel. This is Revik.'

There was a snort from Frinel. ‘Report status, Revik. You assured us you had found a controller who would complete the task. Two controllers, in fact. But the carrier controlled by one was killed by the Mantodeans. And the other was somehow allowed to remove his carrier from the Mantodean stronghold! Explain!'

Revik paused, obviously not relishing the task. ‘We were forced to leave our positions temporarily,' he said at last. ‘It was a matter of urgency. When we returned, it had happened as you describe it.'

‘Then you will deal with the situation!' screeched Frinel through the speaker. ‘Or you will be replaced!'

‘It will be done as you say,' replied Revik.

A beep indicated that Frinel had terminated the link.

Revik turned back to the other Quevvils. ‘We must recapture the controllers,' he said.

‘But we do not know their location,' replied one of them. ‘Unless they play the game again . . .'

‘We do know their location,' said Revik. ‘They obviously reversed the teleportation field. It will have returned them to their original location. We merely need to follow and retrieve them. Ready your weapons.'

Revik reached out a paw for the control panel. But the Doctor had already moved. Before the teleporter could be activated, he had grabbed hold of a cracked computer monitor, heaved it off the pile of junk, and thrown it as hard as he could. His aim was good. There was a shower of sparks as it smashed into the control panel. No one would be teleporting anywhere, certainly not to Mickey's flat. Rose and Mickey would be safe. On the other hand, though, dodgy vision or no, the Quevvils could now hardly fail to notice that there was someone else in the room with them.

The Doctor raised his hands above his head as he stood up straight. ‘Hello,' he said. ‘No need to go after anyone. You've got one of your controllers right here.'

Four guns were aimed straight at him.

‘You don't want to shoot me,' he carried on. ‘You were just running on to Frinel there how you were going to be getting me back. I've saved you the bother.'

One of the Quevvils turned to Revik. ‘This is the human who got the furthest with the task,' he said. ‘He is the one most likely to bring us victory.'

‘But he has destroyed our teleporter! We cannot return to Toop! He must be punished!' Revik's quills started to bristle. The Doctor couldn't decide which he'd prefer the least, being blasted with energy weapons or turned into a pincushion by an angry Revik.

‘It is inconvenient. But it can be repaired,' said a Quevvil.

‘And we must not return to Toop until a controller has completed the game,' said another Quevvil. ‘This is the controller that will do it.'

All four seemed to agree. Revik relaxed, his quills no longer quivering. The guns, however, were not lowered.

‘This controller shall play the game again,' he said. ‘And this time, he will complete it. And we will watch him every second, no matter what – distractions – there are.'

The four guns gestured in the direction of the room with the games consoles, and the Doctor moved as indicated. Whatever happened, though, one thing was certain. He was not going to play the game again.

Rose decided to go to her own flat first. She could pick up her phone, and her mum'd probably know a few of the people who'd won stuff, that would be a start.

As she opened the door to the stairwell, she noticed a police car stopped out on the road. But as she looked, it started off again. Didn't have its lights on or anything, so probably wasn't important. Maybe it wasn't just Mickey who'd had a telly nicked. Hey, there was no sign of Darren Pye loitering around. Maybe he'd been in the back of it. Well, she could hope.

This time, Rose used her key. She pushed open the front door. ‘Mum! You'll never believe it, there are only aliens here again . . . Mum?'

There was no reply. She pushed open the lounge door, but the telly was off and there was no sign of Jackie. She called down the hall, ‘Mum? Are you home?' Still nothing. Oh, my god, they've got her too. The aliens have got her too!

No, that's silly. The front door was locked. She's fine.

Rose went into the kitchen. Empty. Mum's out, she thought. She's out, and she doesn't know there are aliens on the loose, but she's fine.

And then she saw the note. It was stuck on the fridge under a magnet that said ‘Best Mum in the World', a Mother's Day present from years before. She sighed.

Rose wanted to scream. She tried to get angry, angry with her mum for being willing to rush off at a moment's notice, never mind that she'd got her daughter home for once, but her stomach had plummeted with fear and the anger couldn't drown it out, because she knew what these holidays were, what they really were, and she knew what might be happening to her mum right now. She thought she might be sick. ‘You never get something for nothing!' she yelled, screwing up the note and throwing it across the room.

She took a deep breath, and then thought, the phone. I can phone her. I can let her know what's happening. They wouldn't have counted on that, on someone having a phone that works across space and time, couldn't possibly have counted on that. She'd phone her mum, tell her all about it, what was going on, and Jackie could lead a revolution and it'd all be OK until the Doctor could get there, wherever it was, and bring everyone back home.

And inside, a tiny voice was saying, but they'd know what was going on, they couldn't help noticing that they're not on an aeroplane going to Ibiza, they're being taken to an alien planet and made to fight and die, even knowing that no one's ever come back, so ringing up and going, ‘Oh, you've been kidnapped by aliens,' isn't going to come as a big surprise and isn't going to help.

But, of course, she had to phone anyway.

It took her a second or two to remember her own number – you got out of the habit of giving it to people when you were trotting around the nineteenth century or whatever. But then she dialled.

It rang. And it rang and it rang and it rang.

She began to get panicky. The aliens would have heard the phone. They'd tracked it down, pounced on her mum. They'd think she was an alien because she had alien technology; they'd think she was a threat; they'd kill her.

Or maybe they'd heard the phone, and they were still tracking it down, and her mum was too scared to answer it but they hadn't found her yet, and if she left the phone ringing for just one more ring the aliens would find Jackie and kill her . . .

Or maybe if she left it for just one ring, Jackie would answer.

She left the phone ringing, knowing it was pointless, not being able to bring herself to put it down, to surrender that one chance of contact.