Doctor Who: Shada (34 page)

Skagra thrust her forward. ‘Come. It is time for you to meet Salyavin.’

They began to move down the hallway, Romana first, held tight in Skagra’s grasp, the Kraag Commander and the sphere following.

‘A little more history for you, historian,’ said Skagra. ‘Your Gallifreyan ancestors were caught in an interminable ethical dilemma. Could any crime justify the death penalty? Arguments raged back and forth for centuries. In the meantime, the criminals were placed here, outside the universe, outside time itself, suspended until the Time Lords’ great moral debate –’ he scoffed at these words – ‘was resolved.’

‘Capital punishment was restored,’ said Romana. ‘I know that.’

‘And Shada was deliberately “forgotten”, brushed under the carpet, removed from your history,’ continued Skagra. ‘So the High Council decreed.’

‘The High Council?’ Romana frowned. ‘The mental power required to blank something from the minds of generations of Time Lords would be enormous. I certainly don’t think the High Council would be capable of that. Is their involvement confirmed in all those books you stole?’

‘No,’ said Skagra. ‘But it happened. Shada
was
forgotten. By implication, the High Council decreed it.’

Romana struggled to understand. ‘Are you absolutely sure—’

‘Here!’ called Skagra suddenly. They had reached a junction with the letter ‘T’ marked above another thick red stone block.

‘Beyond this door, Salyavin,’ said Skagra.

He pressed his hand against a panel and the block began slowly to slide upwards.

Chapter 59

A CHIME LIKE a vesper bell rang through the Professor’s rooms. Chris shot up from the sofa where he’d been sitting next to Clare, studiously ignoring her. ‘What the hell was that?’

Clare grabbed him by the back of the shirt and pulled him down again. ‘It means we’ve arrived, that’s all.’ Chris noted that the glass-cased clock on the mantelpiece had ceased its upping and downing.

‘The young lady is quite right,’ said the Professor, turning agitatedly from the control panel. ‘We’ve arrived in Shada!’

‘Oh,’ said Chris. ‘Oh, it’s just I thought it might be a bumpier ride than that. After all, we don’t have the key and it’s locked away in this bubble-thing, outside the universe, apparently. Somehow.’

The Doctor laughed and patted the Professor’s shoulder. ‘And Professor Chronotis’s TARDIS is even older than mine, yes. But as we were following the space-time trail of my TARDIS we were able to slip through quite easily and undetected. Neat, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Doctor,’ pleaded the Professor, ‘this is all quite fascinating but we really must get on and stop Skagra. He’s already here!’ He started heading for the exit.

Chris and Clare got up from the sofa simultaneously. ‘Right behind you, Professor,’ said Clare with such gumption that Chris added, ‘Yes, we’ve got to stop him!’ because it sounded quite plucky and he was sick of feeling left out.

The Doctor whirled to face them. ‘Yes, of course, you two have a vital part to play, you must—’ he began.

‘Yes?’ asked Chris and Clare.

‘Stay here,’ finished the Doctor.

Chris and Clare opened their mouths to protest.

The Doctor waved his arms demonstratively and said ‘Sssh!’ Then he leaned in close to Clare and whispered – Chris thought, slightly oddly – ‘I am not at liberty to explain.’ He then turned to Chris. ‘Ditto,’ he said. Then he whirled away from them to face K-9. ‘Now K-9, you
can
come along.’

‘Master,’ said K-9 happily and trundled towards the door, which the Professor was already holding open with considerable agitation.

‘But, K-9,’ added the Doctor, stopping the dog in his tracks, ‘you are not to tangle with any Kraags! Understood?’

‘Affirmative, Master,’ said K-9.

‘Unless of course you have to tangle with any Kraags.’

‘Hurry, Doctor!’ cried the Professor. He seemed to have lost patience and was already heading through the door. He turned briefly towards Clare. ‘You will look after the old place for me, won’t you, my dear?’ he added.

‘Of course,’ said Clare, blinking.

The Doctor and K-9 followed the Professor through the door and it slammed shut behind them.

Chris and Clare were left alone. They sat back down on the sofa.

‘Well,’ said Chris.

‘Well,’ said Clare.

That having seemed to cover everything, they went back to ignoring one another.

The wooden door of the Professor’s room was positioned incongruously in the wall of a tall, imposing hallway of red stone. The Professor, his face a picture of concern, was hurrying down the passage. The Doctor tapped him on the shoulder and pointed the other way. ‘Professor Chronotis,’ he whispered, ‘judging by the coordinates on your time-path indicator, I’d say my TARDIS was in this direction.’

‘But Skagra will have gone in this direction,’ said the Professor, pointing very definitely down the hallway to make his point. ‘I’m quite sure I heard footsteps,’ he added hurriedly.

The Doctor nodded. ‘But if we can get to my TARDIS first we can stop Skagra getting it back. He’ll be trapped here. In a prison. Which is rather fitting for such a rotter.’

‘Doctor,’ pleaded the Professor, almost hopping up and down, ‘it is imperative we find Skagra before he finds Salyavin!’

The Doctor held up a hand and started backing down the long hallway in the direction of his TARDIS. ‘Yes, but let’s just exercise a little strategy, shall we?’ he said.

The Professor sagged. ‘Oh, very well,’ he huffed. ‘But please hurry.’

Cautiously the Doctor led K-9 and the Professor down the echoing hallway. The Doctor looked about him at the red walls with their glowing circular light-panels. ‘Rather eerie, this state of timelessness,’ he whispered. ‘This architecture suggests the grandeur of the Rassilon era. Almost like stepping back into the past.’

‘You are always stepping back into the past, Master,’ whispered K-9.

‘Not my own past, the past of Gallifrey,’ the Doctor whispered back. ‘I suppose this is how it must feel for normal people.’

The very end of the passageway opened out into a huge chamber, and at its centre sat the comforting blue shape of the TARDIS.

‘You see,’ the Doctor whispered to the Professor, ‘strategy.’

He was just about to step out into the open and vault over to the TARDIS when a Kraag stomped around the side of the police box, eyes glowing fiercely, and obviously very much on guard duty.

The Doctor flattened himself against the wall of the passageway and gestured the others back.

‘So much for strategy,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘I think we’ll try this your way, Professor Chronotis.’

They turned about and hurried in the other direction. The Professor took the lead, wringing his hands and tutting continually like the White Rabbit.

‘By all the suns, I hope we’re not too late,’ he muttered. Suddenly a thought seemed to strike him and he turned and looked down. ‘K-9?’

‘Professor?’ queried K-9.

‘Be alert. If Skagra tries to use the sphere on –’ he faltered for a moment – ‘on anybody, you must destroy it!’

‘Affirmative, Professor,’ said K-9.

The Professor hurried on down the hallway, K-9 and the Doctor following. ‘I rather thought we were going to destroy it anyway,’ the Doctor mused into his shirt-collar, never taking his eyes off the Professor’s threadbare-tweeded back. ‘Yes, I’d sort of taken that as read.’

The strange little party continued to move through the deep, dark hallways of Shada, quiet as ghosts, each one lost in his own thoughts.

Chapter 60

THE MASSIVE INNER doorway of Chamber T slid slowly upwards. Skagra pushed Romana through, then followed her inside with the sphere and the Kraag Commander.

Romana looked around. The chamber was roughly circular, and consisted of hundreds of sealed black cabinets that resembled upright coffins. They were arranged regularly around the curving walls. Each cabinet was marked with an identifying sequence of numbers and letters in Gallifreyan notation. A connecting ramp led to higher levels, the cabinets stretching upwards into the darkness.

‘The prisoners of Shada,’ said Skagra. ‘Each in their own separate cryogenic cell. Alive, but frozen in time, in perpetual imprisonment.’ He turned to Romana with a slight smirk. ‘A very humane solution, don’t you think?’

Romana shrugged. ‘Don’t look at me. I’m not answerable for the Time Lords.’

‘Soon no one will be,’ said Skagra, ‘as the Time Lords, like every other race, will become irrelevant!’

Romana coughed. ‘You’re starting to get that mad gleam in your eye that the Doctor was talking about,’ she said, with a small sigh. ‘I knew you would. This is, after all, quite insane.’

Skagra walked slowly closer to her. ‘You are afraid.’

Romana tried to keep her gaze level. The longer she kept him talking, the greater the chance that something – anything – might stop him. ‘Of course.
I’d
be insane if I wasn’t afraid,’ she said.

‘There will be no fear in the Universal Mind,’ said Skagra. ‘But perhaps, just one last time, I should like to see that primitive animal emotion. I should like to see
your
fear,
your
terror. The terror of a Time Lord.’

‘You are seeing it,’ said Romana. ‘Is it worth it?’

Skagra smiled, a broad, terrible smile, and strode to the nearest cabinet. He read the nameplate. ‘Subjatric the tyrant!’ Then he punched out a command sequence into a tiny panel built into the side of the cabinet.

Immediately there was a scrape and a clank from somewhere deep in the dormant machinery. The door of the cabinet shuddered. Icy vapour began to swirl from within, the chemical tang catching at Romana’s throat.

Skagra moved to the next cabinet and read off its nameplate. ‘Rundgar, brother to Subjatric. Together, they dragged Gallifrey down into a second Dark Age!’ He punched at the cabinet’s panel and there was another clanking noise and more freezing cryogenic gas swirled.

‘What are you doing, Skagra?’ demanded Romana. ‘You came here for Salyavin. These others can’t possibly mean anything to you.’

Skagra moved to another cabinet. ‘But they mean something to you,’ he said. ‘It is a rare honour to bring a Time Lord’s nightmares to life.’ He entered the release code. Again the vapour poured out. ‘Lady Scintilla!’ he read from the nameplate. ‘And my actions have a practical purpose, as ever. They, along with you, of course, can become the first to participate in the Universal Mind!’

Romana watched appalled as the doors of the cabinets, each one containing a forgotten horror of Gallifreyan civilisation, began slowly to creak open.

Chapter 61

CHRIS DECIDED TO break the silence. It was hard to think of anything worth saying to Clare in the face of the incredible events of the last few hours, and he’d have to choose his words carefully to avoid another argument. He was tempted to observe that it was odd how some days turned out, but realised that would just sound incredibly trite. Then he considered launching into a detailed and no doubt pertinent reappraisal of what their experiences might mean for science, but something told him that Clare might murder him before he could get to any particularly juicy bits of insight.

So, as the universe might soon be coming to what might as well be an end, he decided to say, ‘I love you.’

It was surprisingly easy once he’d made the actual decision. His lips were ready at last to form the first of those three little words. Here goes –

‘Chris,’ said Clare, breaking the silence. ‘There’s something very strange about Professor Chronotis.’

Chris’s moment was lost. ‘Why single out the Professor?’ he asked instead, surprised and disappointed at how easily he’d given up. He looked anxiously towards the door. ‘And who knows what’s going on out there? Aliens, time travellers, ghosts, tin dogs, they’re all odd.’

‘Perhaps we can find out what’s happening,’ said Clare. She got up from the sofa and examined the control console. ‘There should be a scanner, and we could throw out an external line.’ She drummed her fingers on the edge of the panel.

‘I don’t like getting left behind,’ continued Chris. ‘I mean, just because we come from Earth doesn’t give everyone the right to be patronising to us.’

Clare selected a control on the panel.

‘I wouldn’t,’ Chris advised, jumping up to guide her away from it. He looked down at the maze of instrumentation, shaking his head. ‘Admittedly, all this does make us look a bit primitive. I don’t have even the faintest idea how it all works.’

‘I have,’ said Clare, and pressed the control.

Immediately there was the whirr and tick of hidden hydraulics, and a small screen extended from the control console. The screen showed a large, empty red-walled hallway.

Chris blinked. ‘You have?’ He looked between Clare and the screen. ‘Yes, you obviously have.’ A thought struck him. And it would explain so much! ‘Of course! You’re from another planet!?’ he spluttered.