Doctor Who: Shada (37 page)

‘No you couldn’t, Clare, you love him,’ said the Doctor casually.

‘Does she?’ said Romana, sounding surprised. ‘Why on earth would she want to do that?’

Clare blinked through forming tears. ‘How did you know?’ she asked the Doctor.

The Doctor coughed and lifted a finger. ‘The clues were all there, it was obvious. First, you may not realise it but whenever you mention his name your voice raises one tenth of an octave and your eyes go all gooey—’

Romana coughed. ‘I’m sure this is all very fascinating, but what about Skagra?’

Clare was glad of the subject being changed. ‘Well, what are we going to do about him, then?’ she challenged Romana.

Romana shrugged. ‘He’s beaten us on every point.’

The Doctor nodded gloomily. ‘I was quite enjoying clearing all the other stuff up,’ he protested. ‘Can we get some other less pressing details straightened out, it helps to distract me from the imminent threat to the universe?’

‘No,’ said Romana and Clare at the same time. This time, Clare felt that Romana’s smile to her was warm and genuine.

‘Oh, very well then,’ said the Doctor heavily. He slumped back in the sofa. ‘Let’s sum up. All the minds that Skagra’s stolen are now in the melting pot of the sphere matrix along with his own, all operating as one under his control. And with Salyavin’s mind in there too, Skagra can potentially drain and control anyone else. Everyone else in the entire universe!’

‘The universe is a pretty big place,’ pointed out Clare.

‘And the spheres are infinitely divisible, courtesy of the genius of the late Professor Akrotiri,’ said the Doctor. ‘From that asteroid, Skagra can launch them against the universe en masse, like a virulent, all-powerful disease. His mind will be universal, and invincible.’

There was a terrible silence.

Then Romana said quietly, ‘Doctor?’

‘Yes,’ said the Doctor perfunctorily. ‘I do so hope you’re going to say something wonderful and uplifting, it’s what I keep you girls for.’

‘May I just remind you of something?’ said Romana.

‘Yes,’ said the Doctor cautiously, his eyes slowly turning to meet hers, as if hoping against hope.

‘All the minds that Skagra’s stolen are in the melting pot, the spheres’ matrix,’ said Romana.

The Doctor snorted and flared up. ‘Yes, Romana, I think we’ve established that, in fact I just said it, I don’t need reminding about things that I’ve just said—’

‘That means there’s a copy of your mind in there too,’ said Romana quickly and sweetly, as if laying down a trump card.

‘Well, yes, of course, we’ve established that—’ began the Doctor impatiently.

Then suddenly he went very quiet. Clare watched as a number of expressions passed over his face in less than a second.

He stood up. ‘Romana?’ he said casually.

‘Yes, Doctor?’ said Romana, equally casually.

The Doctor reached into one of his pockets and pulled out a golden medal with a long, multicoloured ribbon. Carefully, almost formally, he pinned it to the front of her dress.

The medal read in big red letters:

I

AM A

GENIUS

Chapter 65

SKAGRA BASKED IN the Universal Mind. His gloved hands flicked almost without thinking over one facet of the control console in the Doctor’s TARDIS. The other facets were attended to in turn by Chronotis, Chris, Subjatric, Rundgar and Scintilla, small spheres still attached to their foreheads, all now sharing in the knowledge of its operation, every quirk and whim of the old machine. The black-screened K-9, small sphere on the top of his head, circuited the control room, nose laser extruded aggressively. The Kraag Commander looked on, as stonily impassive as ever.

This, thought Skagra, is only the beginning. From the command station he would launch a mighty fleet of small craft, ten thousand of them, crewed by the Kraags, each containing a portion of the infinitely divisible sphere. They were now ready for launch at a moment’s notice. He had not chosen that particular asteroid by chance. Location was everything. The asteroid was situated close to the central space lanes of the great civilisations of this galaxy. And the Kraags would crush any resistance – they felt no pain, they were virtually indestructible and, most cleverly, they would act as a distraction while the tiny spheres did their work.

Firstly, and with the very greatest of pleasure, the Universal Mind would take Gallifrey. Any resistance from the Time Lords (or anybody else in the universe, for that matter) would be futile. The sphere was indestructible. It would simply divide and multiply, scattering itself like the seed pods of a dandelion throughout the planet of the Time Lords. All of the ancient powers of Gallifrey, all the secret knowledge of that indolent race, would be his.

And then the Universal Mind would spread through all time and all space. The spheres, now tinier than the smallest nanite would do their work unseen and unchallenged. Skaro, Telos, Sontar, all the so-called mighty empires would bend to his unquestionably supreme will.

Then the real work of the Universal Mind could begin. Every intelligence, every resource, would be employed to reorder creation in Skagra’s image.

The place needed tidying up, for a start. So many solar systems were random and irritatingly erratic. He would use his new knowledge to reshape them in neat, square alignments around a precise grid-like system, with the people living their new lives in a precise, grid-like system.

The Universal Mind would then conquer the threat of entropy. A solution would be found to the supposedly damning sentence passed by the second law of thermodynamics. Then Skagra would ensure there would be no collapse into eternal darkness and decay.

The universe, and the Universal Mind of Skagra, would endure for eternity. Nothing could stop him now!

Chapter 66

DESPITE HER CRASH course in temporal mechanics, Clare was finding it hard to follow the Doctor and Romana’s plan. She could grasp the basics – it was going to involve performing a hazardous manoeuvre in the space-time vortex itself – but the specifics were well beyond her. But anything that could rescue Chris from the clutches of Skagra had to be attempted.

Perhaps that was why she couldn’t quite follow the plan, mused Clare. The Doctor and Romana were capable of caring for the universe, which was too big a thing for her mind to get around. Her human emotions could only think of poor Chris, and how she was going to grab him and snog the very life out of him the moment he was returned to her. Life really was too short, a fact that the presence of a Time Lord knocking on 800 only served to rub in.

‘It’s going to be very tricky, isn’t it?’ said the Doctor, almost flippantly.

‘It’s going to be appallingly dangerous,’ said Romana severely.

The Doctor shrugged. ‘Just a touch.’

Romana sighed heavily. ‘Doctor, it’ll be terribly, appallingly dangerous for
you
. In fact, you stand as much chance as—’ She broke off, thinking.

‘As much chance as what?’ asked the Doctor.

Romana gave up. ‘Well, as much chance as anything that stands as little chance as you will out there!’ She gestured vaguely in the general direction of the door.

The Doctor smiled like a child at his birthday party. ‘Really? Well then, I’ll just have to be very, very brave, won’t I?’

‘Doctor!’ cried Romana harshly. Clare was astonished to see there were tears forming in the corners of Romana’s eyes. Perhaps she’d been wrong about the alien capacity to ignore the individual for the good of the many. ‘It isn’t funny!’

The Doctor knocked Romana lightly on the shoulder with his knuckles. ‘Listen,’ he said agreeably, ‘I can do your part if you can do mine.’

Romana sniffed, and then smiled. ‘I’ll try.’

The Doctor tapped the medal on her chest. ‘You’re a genius. Remember?’

Romana nodded.

The Doctor turned his attention to Clare. ‘Clare?’

‘Yes, Doctor?’ Clare said brightly.

The Doctor nodded to the control panel. ‘Do we have a fix on my TARDIS?’

Clare read off the coordinates on the time-path indicator. ‘It’s on our vector. We left Shada first, yes, but they have greater relative speed.’ Clare patched through the indicator display to the main scanner. The image on the screen showed two dots, one representing the Professor’s TARDIS, the other the Doctor’s TARDIS, some little way ahead.

‘Right,’ said the Doctor. He waved Romana forward to the panel. He coughed. ‘First we have to catch them up.’

Romana and Clare reached for the same lever. Their eyes locked. Clare decided she was not going to give way. After all, she had some of the owner’s natural affinity with this craft.

Romana removed her hand with slightly bad grace.

Clare threw the lever.

There was a jarring jolt and the Professor’s room shuddered. The Doctor, Clare and Romana were thrown off their feet.

Clare clambered up as the room steadied. The scanner screen now displayed an image of the two dots much closer to each other.

‘Good work!’ called the Doctor. ‘Now then, phase two. I want you two girls, working together and playing nicely, thank you very much, to extrude the force field out from this TARDIS.’

Clare gasped. ‘But that’s insane!’ she said. The tampered-with part of her mind flared in alarm at the prospect. ‘I mean – that is appallingly dangerous!’

Romana slipped past her and started adjusting the force-field controls. ‘That’s what I’ve been trying to tell him,’ she said. ‘And that’s only the beginning of his plan.’ She gave Clare a desperate smile. ‘But it’s the only way.’

A red light started to flash on the console panel where Chris Parsons was stationed. Skagra saw it via the sphere matrix, as he could now see and sense everything that his mind-slaves, as mere extensions of his sentience, experienced.

‘Vortex turbulence,’ he said. ‘It is not important.’

The TARDIS shook slightly.

The Doctor stood by the exit door of Professor Chronotis’s rooms – or, as Clare supposed she ought to learn to refer to it, Professor Chronotis’s TARDIS. Or Salyavin’s TARDIS, considering the Professor was actually Salyavin. Or the ghost of him. Or, now, the zombie-ghost of… Clare gave up.

‘Ready?’ the Doctor called.

‘Yes,’ said Clare and Romana at the same time. Their hands hovered over particularly large levers on the console.

‘Right,’ said the Doctor, looking considerably less flippant and casual than he had only moments before. ‘Patch the force field through to the external door…’ He paused and grabbed at the lintel of the door. ‘Now!’

Romana and Clare threw their levers.

If any creature could have existed in the howling space-time vortex, and had been happening to pass the ‘place’ where the two TARDISes were drawn level, they would have seen a most extraordinary sight.

A small Georgian ground-floor flat appeared to be sidling up to a 1950s police box.

Suddenly, the door of the flat began to glow with bright white light. Slowly, the light began to extend towards the police box, forming a shimmering rectangular tunnel that snaked ever closer to the battered blue booth.

Skagra flinched as sparks showered from the console panel before him, spinning from the synchronic feedback array like a miniature firework. The Doctor’s knowledge of TARDIS operations, relayed through the sphere’s matrix, suggested that this was nothing much to worry about and that this kind of thing happened all the time. Skagra didn’t doubt that.

The hands of the mind-slaves worked busily over the five other facets of the console. Each of them frowned at the same moment as Skagra.

‘What is wrong, my Lord?’ asked the Kraag Commander, the only creature present not privy to Skagra’s every thought.

‘An external influence,’ Skagra snapped. He had no need to consult the Time Lord minds within the sphere matrix. He knew it could mean only one thing. ‘There is something else out there, in the space-time vortex.’ He twisted the scanner-screen switch with the hands of Rundgar.

The shutters parted.

Skagra let out an involuntary cry of sheer frustration.

A section of the architecture of St Cedd’s College, Cambridge was bobbing unsteadily alongside them, a bright white glow streaming from it.

A reverse angle on the same image appeared in the scanner of the pursuing TARDIS. Everything in the Professor’s rooms was rattling and humming like a neurotic tuning fork with the effort the poor old machine was being put to. This included Clare’s teeth. The very air seemed to vibrate and shimmer.

The Doctor, peering through the keyhole of the door chuckled as the room came to rest with a bump. ‘Ha, got them! Locked tight! Well done Romana, well done Clare, well done me for thinking it up in the first place!’

‘We haven’t got to the hard bit yet,’ said Clare.

Romana frowned as she read off a console display. ‘We might never get to it. The force field’s very unstable.’

Clare stared at the image on the scanner. ‘That’s what we’re chasing? But it’s a police box!’