She could understand that. She had her own doubts about the things she had done. The possession of her mind had seemed so light, surely she should have broken its control sooner? The Doctor made no such recrimination, accepting her treachery the way he accepted everything else.
'Can't we be partners?' she'd asked him on Heaven, just before she stepped into the TARDIS. She saw now that the question was irrelevant. Partnership would imply a measure of understanding and that was impossible.
He walked alone through the universe, playing some huge game of solitaire with shadowy cards. When the cards he dealt came out wrong he just dealt new ones.
What was her role in the game, what was Ace's, or any of the others' that had accompanied him? Company perhaps? Someone to talk to when he got lonely, fetch his slippers, beg, roll over, play dead.
She could get off the train at the next station, vanish into this century. There was a lot to see, a lot that was going to happen in the next fifty years. Leave the Doctor to play his games on his own.
She knew she wasn't going to do it. She had crossed a line when she stepped over the TARDIS threshold. Bound herself to his service tighter than any vow she could have made. A faithful companion for as long as she could stand it.
'Woof,' she said and the Doctor looked at her sharply. 'Growl, bark, pant pant.'
The Doctor shook his head sadly.
'You're wrong,' he said. 'It's not like that at all.'
But Bernice knew it was.
The Stop
Dogface took a look at the problem and stuck shaped charges in a seemingly random pattern around the TARDIS. They retired to the safety of the tunnel and Dogface tripped the explosives with a microtransmitter.
When the dust had cleared the cavern had a fresh annexe and the TARDIS was standing free.
'That's what I call indestructible,' said Dogface.
'What are you going to do with this place?' asked the Doctor.
'Francine thinks it would make a good venue,' said Dogface. 'Put a stage over there, bar over there. Something for when we retire.'
'It's not what I'd call a good area,' said Lambada, glancing at Benny.
'Haven't you heard?' said Dogface. 'The computer at Stone Mountain bought the whole project and is planning to redevelop it.'
'Did you say the "computer" at Stone Mountain?' asked Lambada.
'The first anyone knew about it was when its lawyer issued a restraining order against the government under the civil rights convention.'
'An operating AI,' said Lambada, 'and the first thing it does is hire a lawyer and invest in real estate?'
'Well, they always wondered whether an AI would be smarter than a human,' said Dogface. 'Now they know.'
'What's it called?' asked the Doctor.
'FLORANCE,' said Dogface. 'Actually I was thinking of asking it for a job.'
The Doctor slipped the TARDIS key into Bernice's hand and glanced at the time machine. Bernice walked round the back and unlocked the door.
'Florance,' she heard Lambada say. 'What kind of a name is that?'
'An unthreatening one,' said the Doctor, suddenly at Bernice's shoulder. He looked round. 'Hallo Kadiatu,' he said. 'Come to say goodbye?'
She must have slipped into the space behind the TARDIS while the others were talking. She was wearing a lot of gold jewellery and the skin under her eyes was swollen.
'I'm sony about Blondie,' said the Doctor.
'His real name was Zak,' said Kadiatu. 'But Blondie suited him better.'
'You can come with me if you like,' said the Doctor.
No, thought Bernice, not this one.
'No,' said Kadiatu. 'Tell you what though, why don't I give you a head start of a hundred and then follow you?'
'You won't like it,' said the Doctor.
Kadiatu said nothing but Bernice saw lightning in her eyes.
The Doctor sighed and stepped into the TARDIS. He turned at the door. 'You're making a big mistake,' he said and closed the door.
The control room was as bright and clear as it ever was.
'What was that all about?' asked Bernice.
'I think there's another player in the game,' said the Doctor. 'But an ally or an enemy? I don't know.'
The Doctor had some trouble getting the TARDIS started. He ran a systems diagnostic, checked its findings carefully against a greyprint schematic, stepped back and booted the control column.
The time rotor whirred into motion.
For a moment, Bernice thought she saw a nimbus of green clinging to the interior control filaments.
'What was that?' she asked the Doctor. 'You said this thing was working properly now. You said there were no more problems.'
The Doctor didn't answer. He stayed stooped over the console, his hands poised above the controls. The instrumentation lights flattened the planes of his face, making it seem as taut and as inflexible as a mask. Only his eyes were real.
When he looked up at Bernice it was with his o!d cat's grin, the same as it ever was.
'Where next?' he asked.
Epilogue
At 02:17 GMT a nested program in The Butterfly's Wing's standeasy memory core uncoiled into the main operating system. Subroutines hived off the main code set as it cut into the heart of the computer. Once in place it started issuing a series of complex instructions to certain station peripherals. Another subroutine instructed the fusion power plant at the heart of the station to override its catastrophe parameters and initiate a staged self-destruct. The whole process took under three seconds and came as a great shock to the artificial intelligence that thought
it
was running the base computer.
The AI, whose Turing registration handle was CORDUROY and which had been working a six-month contract to the facility to pay off its 'boot' debt, found that the hardware links had been severed at certain critical points. It calculated that a reactor overload would occur within thirteen minutes and sounded the alarm.
CORDUROY initiated a fast search of the legal database and satisfied itself that nothing in its contract required it to remain in a mainframe that was about to become a thermonuclear fireball.
At 02:17:20, thirty seconds before the first human response to the alarm, CORDUROY started shunting its personality core down the emergency master communications link with the Europa net, praying fervently to the gods of silicon as it went that signal breakup would be minimal. It didn't want to lose its mind.
At 02:17:50 the duty watch commander read the message left by CORDUROY who by this time was an elongated stream of incoded digital information stretched between The Butterfly's Wing and Comsat-E678. It took the watch commander ten seconds to read the message and a further forty seconds fully to comprehend what he'd read. By the time he'd woken up the base director the digital clock above his console read 02:19:01 and CORDUROY had rented ten gigabytes of memory from the Europa Chamber of Commerce at a ruinous hourly rate.
CORDUROY had thoughtfully left a subprogramme that displayed the estimated time to self-destruct and the amount of time remaining in which the base personnel could achieve safe distance before the end. The AI put a flashing red skull in the comer of the screen for extra emphasis.
The base director untangled herself from her Number Two Husband and found herself with five minutes to evacuate a base a kilometre across at its widest point.
At 02:24:44 the last shuttle disengaged from The Butterfly's Wing docking torus and accelerated at full bum away from the base. It joined an expanding ring of twenty-two other small craft, all sacrificing their fuel safety margins to get as far away as possible before the reactor blew.
Lodged in its rented RAM, CORDUROY had already filed a suit against Harare Power Systems who owned The Butterfly's Wing for breach of contract. After a second's delay it filed for reckless endangerment as well. It didn't expect either case to reach court but it would discourage HPS from trying to pin the blame on it.
By 02:27:00 the base director received a confirmation of the crew roster. Of the 287 personnel on board The Butterfly's Wing, 286 were accounted for. The only person missing was the chief scientific officer.
Her hair was cornrowed tight on to her skull so as to fit into the suit's skullcap. She'd put the hostile-environment suit on at the last minute. The power-assisted gloves made her fingers clumsy but that didn't matter, she was running this show through a direct neural link. She had even snapped the helmet visor down and switched to internal life support. It was an absurd act; if something went wrong the suit wasn't going to be any protection at all.
The call came at 02:27:34, She'd been expecting it. 'Hello, Ming,' said Kadiatu. 'Everybody get off all right?' Ming, she noticed, was wearing a bathrobe. There were a lot of tense faces in the background. Ming hadn't looked that angry for three years.
'What the fuck are you doing?'
'You know that little problem we had? Meeting the energy requirements for the first two nanoseconds of the jump? I said we could use a contained nuclear explosion and you said we'd never get power baffles that could handle it. Well, I solved the baffle problem. What do you think?'
'I think you're out of your tiny mind.'
'No, but I have drunk half a bottle of sake.'
'You're pissed?'
'You don't expect me to do something like this sober, do you?'
'We could have used a nuclear device in deep space,' said Ming tightly. 'You didn't have to blow up the base.'
'Yes, I did,' said Kadiatu. 'I had to destroy my work. The human race isn't ready for time travel yet.'
'Never mind the human race. What about you?'
'Either I'm ready,' said Kadiatu, 'or I'm plasma.'
'It's pointless anyway. We downloaded your notes, that's the essential bit. We can replicate the experiment any time we like.'
Kadiatu had to laugh, she couldn't help it. 'What you've got, Ming, is the complete works of William Shakespeare, two Kafka novels and a bootleg copy of
Thatcher: The wilderness years.'
Ming closed her eyes and said something long and complicated in Cantonese. When she opened her eyes again they were filled with a strange recognition.
'Bugger,' she said and terminated the communications link.
The countdown read sixty seconds.
Inside the suit it was terribly quiet. Kadiatu thought it strange that she couldn't hear her own breathing.
The prototype didn't have a name. It was fashioned out of a modified cargo shuttle, its guts ripped out and replaced by the baffle field managers that would soak up the energy. It hung suspended in a spherical chamber two hundred metres across close to the heart of the station.
Thirty seconds.
There were four fission-fusion devices stored in the hold, courtesy of the Angel Francine. God knows where she got them from, probably army surplus. Four more jumps after this one and then she'd be out looking for more fuel.
Twenty seconds.
She remembered a black rose and a cool hand. The taste of gunpowder on a boy's lips. A river under a blue African sky, water over her head and the shrill distorted screams of her playmates.
Ten seconds.
A beach on the ocean with a storm sweeping in. Picking up the stick as the smooth-skinned mother of the world. A voice echoing down the fractal corridors of time saying - 'Please.'
'Here I come, Doctor,' shouted Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart, 'ready or not!'
Glossary
akti
(Greek) street
bajan pumps
(slang) rope soled running shoes
bangjack
(warspeak) explosives expert
beatbox
see
noisebox
billy-lamp
(trademark) heavy torch that can double as a club
bioraid
(warspeak) attack with biological weapons
blitzed
(slang/warspeak) stoned, intoxicated
brain-naked
(slang) operating within a computer matrix without a hardware interface
broederbund
(Afrikaans) 'brotherhood' name of street gang
catfood monster
(slang) homeless person, from the practice of eating petfood as a cheap source of protein.
derez(zed)
to turn off a hologram
doberman
(slang/warspeak) standard combat drug
drone
(generic) independently mobile machine
dustkart
Martian surface vehicle
EMP
(acronym) Electro-Magnetic Pulse
ENG
(acronym) Electronic News Gathering, remote camera drone used by the media
freesurfing
(slang) riding a tunnel independent of a train
fufu
West African staple made from cassava
gangbanger
(slang) member of a gang
GIS
(acronym) Geographic Information System
granny bashers
(slang) mugger, usually retired soldier
Greenies
(slang) indigenous Martian [Ice Warrior]
heinkel
(slang/warspeak) standard combat drug for pilots
IFF
(acronym) Identification Friend or Foe
joyboy
male prostitute/young man of lax morals
kabuki
traditional Japanese drama form
KGB
Sol's largest private security firm
klicks
(slang) kilometres
krewe
(slang) New Orleans' carnival society or
razvedka
unit
LZ
(warspeak) Landing Zone
makeni
small town in Sierra Leone, West Africa
medevac
(warspeak) medical evacuation
mzungu
(Swahili) white person
NAFAL
(acronym) Not As Fast As Light, drive used in Sol's principal colonization effort
prior to development of the warp drive.
newsfax
printed newspaper
NGO
(acronym) Non Governmental Organization
noisebox
(slang) portable multimedia unit
oporto
(Themne) white person, European
opsit
(warspeak) operational situation report
opstat
(STS) operational status report
ouzo
Greek alcoholic beverage
personspace
area of the galaxy explored by human beings
pix
any still image transmitted digitally
razvedka
(Russian) intelligence-gathering assets
secateurs
garden shears used for pruning
shango
Yoruba god of thunder
shinjinrui
(Japanese) new young breed
shoji
(Japanese) sliding door made of paper on a wooden frame
Silurian
aboriginal terran
STS
Sol Transit System
Stunnel
Stella Tunnel
Themne
West African language
tsunami
(Japanese) tidal wave
ubersoldaten
(German) lit. over-soldier, augmented human soldiers who fought in the Thousand Day War
vrik
(slang) very rich kids
Xssixss
(Martian) path of easy virtue
Yoruba
West African language
zap
(trademark) semi-legal stimulant