Doctor Who: The Blood Cell (19 page)

The Doctor was staring at me in horror. I didn’t need telepathy to know he thought this was a very stupid thing to do.

I stood there. Between my … my friends and the Custodians.

‘Custodians,’ I said. ‘What are your orders?’

The Custodians don’t, as a habit, speak. Some units had various simple vocabulary banks.

‘Halt,’ said the one in front of me.

‘Halt? Halt me? I am your Governor.’

‘Halt. Prisoners. Stop.’

‘Stop all of us?’

‘Command. Halt. Prisoners.’

‘You think we’re all prisoners? Is that it?’

I was painfully aware of how close the Custodian was to me. The air around it stank with electricity. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. It was still coming towards me. Slowly.

‘Prisoners. Halt.’

‘I am not a prisoner. I say again, I am your Governor. I order you to halt.’

‘Priority Command. Governor Protocol not recognised.’

The thing is, life sometimes offers you clarity. I’d got a lot wrong. But as the Doctor said, everyone must get something right occasionally, too. Sometimes. ‘Define your Priority Command.’

‘Priority: Once cascade systems failure initiated, the definition of Prisoner is extended to all life forms in The Prison. All Prisoners are to be restrained with lethal force. That is Emergency Protocol.’

The Custodian glided a little closer.

Abesse pulled up her gun, ready to fire again.

The Doctor’s hand was on my shoulder, ready to pull me back.

The Custodian was now so close the field around it tugged at the skin on my arms.

‘Emergency Protocol is superseded in one case,’ I said. I gestured to the people behind me. ‘This is a Medical Evacuation. She –’ I gestured to Marianne –‘is a critically ill patient. Scan her. I and Abesse here are her two guardians, and this –’ I tapped the Doctor

– ‘is her appointed physician. That’s a squad of four. As per the Protocols.’

The Custodian checked this. ‘Medical Evacuation is superseded—’

‘No,’ I insisted. ‘Isn’t that right, Doctor?’

‘Yes.’ The Doctor suddenly sounded very sure of himself. ‘Medical Evacuation is also an Emergency Protocol.’ He nodded emphatically. I wondered how – when – he’d read the manual. He just winked at me and suddenly that felt enormously encouraging.

‘And,’ I continued, ‘since this Medical Evacuation was already enacted before your Emergency Protocols, then it cannot be superseded. It’s a Prior Operation.’

The Custodians surveyed us. ‘Where is the Medical Evacuation taking place?’ the lead one asked.

‘We are removing this prisoner to Level 6. To …’ I faltered.

‘To the Secure Area,’ finished the Doctor approvingly.

‘Once Medical Evacuation is completed, then Termination Protocol will be activated,’ the Custodian informed us.

‘Yes, yes, of course.’ The Doctor sounded only a little testy. ‘Once we’ve saved her, then by all means kill us all. Perhaps, you know,’ he leant forward confidentially to the Custodian, ‘if you conveyed us directly to the Secure Area, then we could pick up the pace, eh?’

The Custodians conferred and then agreed.

And so, unbelievably, the Custodians acted as our escort to the Secure Area. It had been hidden from the entire prison population, but the Custodians had known where it was all the time. You just had to ask.

‘Machine logic,’ chuckled the Doctor, ‘Never fails.’

‘You have mobility issues?’ A Custodian had noticed the Doctor hobbling. Antennae shot out of it.

‘It’s just a toe, it’s fine,’ he reassured it. ‘There’s no need to execute me now. If you did so, my patient’s health would suffer.’

The Custodian considered this, but also remained fascinated by the Doctor’s toe. ‘Your progress is impeding the Priority Medical Evacuation.’ It moved backwards. ‘Stay there.’

‘What are you going to do?’ the Doctor demanded. ‘Don’t think you can dispose of me and order a
replacement. There aren’t any other medics on The Prison. You’ve killed them all So, you’ll just have to put up with me hobbling a little. It’s not too bad.’

The Custodian considered.

‘Just a little delay,’ repeated the Doctor, gesturing towards the stairs. ‘Shall we?’

The Custodian considered. And then shot the Doctor in the foot.

He screamed and fell to the floor.

‘Now you are injured enough for us to carry you,’ announced the Custodian smugly, and picked the Doctor up. A lift opened. ‘Efficiency improved.’

‘Machine logic,’ I couldn’t resist saying to the Doctor. ‘Never fails.’

You can tell a lot about a building by taking a journey in a lift.

The lifts in HomeWorld Parliament were impressive glass boxes designed to create a sense of awe.

The lift through The Prison was for emergency freight transportation only. A dull grey box. Prisoners and Guardians could use the stairs. Only Custodians had the pass key to the lift. Hindsight’s an interesting thing – it told you who’d really been in charge here all along.

I looked at my fellow passengers. They really didn’t tell me much. The Custodians were impassive. Marianne was asleep. Abesse looked straight ahead,
and actually, I didn’t really fancy looking the Doctor in the eye.

Instead I watched the floor indicator lights crawl by. We were on Level 4. Level 6 was the bottom. Beneath that was a light for the Level 7 docking bay. We reached Level 6. And halted. Then the Custodian’s claw extended into a socket and, with a tiny judder, the lift shook and moved further down.

Now it was impossible to ignore the look on the Doctor’s face. It was triumph. Triumph and ‘I told you so’, mixed, just a little, with ‘I’ve been shot’. I’d never really considered that there were more steps down to Level 7. It had always seemed appropriate that it was a tiny bit further away. It wasn’t really part of my job to wonder about it. Don’t think too hard. That wasn’t my job.

The lift scraped and juddered to a halt. And then the doors opened.

We walked out into a space that shouldn’t exist.

‘Oh my,’ said the Doctor.

The thing about the Blood Cell was just how wrong it all was.

The easy thing to describe was the room’s shape. It was a large cube hewn out of the rock. What had happened to it after that was as though a madman had been told to go enjoy himself.

The simple wrongness of the room was that it was.

I’ll try again.

Everything happened at once. Everything sort of happened. Everyone moved. Everyone stood still.

I can tell you that the Custodians glided from the lift to stand either side of us. As an escort, they looked absurdly like a wedding arch. The last time I’d been through one, my friends had been standing on either side of me, grinning wildly, and I’d been walking hand in hand with Helen. There’d been confetti. It had been the happiest day of my life.

Now I was travelling through a barricade of lethal robots. I was in procession with a trained killer, a
comatose ex-friend, and behind us came the Doctor, carried wriggling in the arms of a Custodian.

The whole situation, the whole sight of the Blood Cell was such that the Doctor somehow did two things simultaneously. Looking back, I’m not sure how this can have happened.

On the one hand, he shouted out Clara’s name.

On the other hand, as we came gliding through that dreadful arch of robots, he hummed ‘The Entry Of The Toreadors’ from
Carmen
. You know,
tum-tum-ti-tum-tum, tum-ti-tum-ti-tum …

I would have laughed, only the Blood Cell was … No. I still can’t quite describe it.

You could tell, right then, that the Doctor had been to places like this before, places that exist only in nightmares.

One thing. Abesse, who had led several battles, swore and turned away, revolted. I’m not sure that that helped her. The smell, that rich, metallic smell, it clogged the air.

My brain kept returning to it. Trying to step around it or through it.

Tiptoe past the sleeping giant.

Fee fi fo fum. I smell the blood

No no no.

Start again.

This is getting us nowhere. I’ve managed fine so far.
I’ve told you the story. I’ve not spared myself. I’ve told the truth. Even when notes that I’ve written earlier have made me out to be an idiot or a liar. I’ve done my best. But something about the Blood Cell. About how it could have happened.

The best way to approach it is to look at it another way. The whole room had been decorated and filled not by a madman, not even by a man. By something that sought to understand a man.

Perhaps, once you appreciate that what had happened there had been done by a machine, it might make more sense.

The Doctor later told me of a race of clockwork robots that viewed people as little more than a source of inferior spare parts. He also told me of a race of living silver suits of armour who viewed the people inside them as little more than a bad start. The Doctor talked, and these things all sounded like fairy stories. Fairy stories you’d tell particularly badly behaved children.

The room had been filed.

The Prison had been filed.

There was a reason the bodies of the Guardians had been left behind. There was no use for them. The owner of the Blood Cell had been happy to leave them to be wiped out by the Custodians. It had only been
interested in the prisoners.

Survivors are an odd thing. A handful of pages ago, I was delighted for the prisoners who’d managed to escape on Level 7. Then I was distraught when Level 7 was blown up. Then I was happy to learn that they’d survived.

Over a hundred prisoners had been left behind on The Prison. Once I’d regretted they’d been left behind, then been glad for them, then worried about the lingering fate that awaited them. Now it was too late. They’d all come here. Where they’d been processed. My latest failure.

When an inmate arrives at The Prison, they are entered into the system. It is a ritual. It serves the useful purpose of telling them that we are in charge. We take away their clothes, we take away their personal effects. We give them clothes and a number. We have logged and filed and sorted them.

The same thing had happened here in the Blood Cell. The remaining prisoners had been processed.

‘Processed’ is a good word. Logged and filed and sorted. Entered into a system. These are all reasonable phrases. When you are talking about objects and clothing. But not about bodies.

A fair amount of each prisoner had been taken away. And placed … placed into piles.

I hope you’re squeamish. I know I am. So I shan’t describe it any further than that. Unless I have to.

This is no fairy tale for naughty children.

There were three other things in the room. Bentley seemed fine. Clara seemed terrified. And then there was the creature itself.

It was the same thing that we’d encountered twice before. The thing that had attacked Lafcardio. The creature that had come for us on Level 6. But it was much bigger now.

It was basically a Custodian. In the same way you could argue that Marianne was basically a Custodian because her wheelchair was made out of one. But this was a very large Custodian. Previously it had been shrouded in plastic sheeting. Most of that was now gone. The bits that remained were splattered like a butcher’s apron.

This Custodian had grown. It had stolen several other Custodians and augmented itself from them, making itself considerably larger. But it hadn’t stopped at Custodians.

At first the Creature didn’t acknowledge us, simply moving between various unmentionable piles. Sorting. Adding to itself. Discarding.

‘Revolting isn’t it?’ called Clara.

‘Clara,’ the Doctor waved weakly, ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yeah,’ she said.

She clearly wasn’t. She was fastened to a grimly
stained bench and she was clearly terrified. ‘It’s ignored us so far. What about you? You got a robot nanny to carry you about now? Seriously? Because of your hurty toe?’

The Doctor wriggled in the Custodian’s arms. ‘Actually, my foot got shot.’

‘The same foot?’ Clara clucked, trying to seem casual and not at all terrified. ‘Unlucky.’

The Doctor didn’t answer her. He was surveying the room, making sense of it. The large creature. The piles of neatly sorted objects. Clara and Bentley’s benches were raised a little off the ground. Near a revolting-smelling drain cover.

I went over to Clara. The creature didn’t try and stop me.

‘I am sorry about this,’ I said to her. ‘No one should have to see this.’

‘It’s OK,’ Clara said. ‘I think my brain took one look and shut down. It’ll be a while before I dare have dreams.’

‘I had no idea this was here,’ I assured her. ‘I mean, really. None at all.’

Clara laughed. It sounded horrid in this room. ‘There was an abattoir in your prison, and you didn’t notice? You really are a total failure of a Governor.’

I nodded. ‘I’m not going to argue with you.’ I looked over to the Doctor. ‘What’s he going to do?’

‘Something,’ said Clara. ‘Hopefully.’

The Doctor continued to lie in the Custodian’s arms. Looking around the room. Thinking.

Bentley had woken up now as well, and was also staring at the Doctor. ‘Come on!’ she yelled. ‘Get us out of here.’

The Doctor shook his head. ‘I need to work out what to do.’

‘I’ll tell you what to do,’ Bentley shouted. ‘You don’t stand around thinking. You take action. You do something.’

The Doctor twisted his head to one side trying to see more of the room. Then he motioned to his Custodian and whispered, ‘Gee up!’ It glided towards Bentley, bringing him to her.

Bentley was shouting now. Terror and panic had driven her to hysteria. In her rage, she was holding the Doctor responsible for everything in The Prison, for the deaths of her Guardians, for Level 7, for everything on the HomeWorld, for the plague, for the steady collapse of the System.

‘It’s all happened,’ she was babbling, ‘because you wouldn’t do the right thing. No one would.’

The Doctor had reached Bentley. Draped in the Custodian’s arms, he was level with her face.

‘Tell me one thing,’ said the Doctor. ‘Why has this creature kept you alive? It didn’t need any of the other Guardians. It didn’t even need poor Lafcardio.
Because they were innocent. But it kept you. Didn’t it?’