Heart of Tardis Read online

  but knowing that it happened and why it happened were not much help when it was you who were going through it.

  ‘Yeah, OK.’ Norman said. ‘We’ll go left.’

  ‘The road led upwards, but in the dark the twists and turns contrived to mask how steep the incline in fact was - until they came to a bluff beyond which were sprawled the Lychburg city lights. You could make out the neon signs of Main Street, the lit-up clock face of City Hall which had stopped several years ago when it had been damaged by a lightning strike. You could see right across the city, even to the darkness of the hills and the tiny lights of the Drive-o-Rama beyond...

  The towering embarrassment of adolescence hit Norman again as he realised he had parked in one of Lychburg’s seriously notorious make-out spots without really meaning to.

  He started to apologise, but Myra was resting herself warm and casual against him.

  ‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ she said in a voice that told Norman she had known precisely where the left turn she’d suggested led. ‘I love it up here. I always love it when I come up here.

  What do you think? When you look at the City. What do you feel?’

  ‘Well, yeah, uh...’ Norman tried to sort out the feelings the question prompted. There was something vaguely disquieting about the way that Myra had said City, as though the word were capitalised, as though this was in some sense the only name Lychburg could ever have or need. ‘Yeah, well, it’s home, isn’t it?

  It’s our home town. It’s where we grew up. Everything we know.

  It’s just that sometimes...’

  ‘Yes?’ said Myra. Her voice was completely neutral: a simple prompt that triggered no fight-or-flight animal danger signals whatsoever.

  ‘It’s just that sometimes it seems so small,’ said Norman. ‘It’s like we live our little lives here, go to school and go to work and to the movies, and none of it really means anything. I mean, there’s a big wide world out there and...’

  ‘There is no other World,’ said Myra, voice still perfectly neutral. No human content to it at all. ‘There is no World but the City.’

  ‘What are you talking about? Just down the road from the drive-in there’s...’

  Norman’s voice trailed off as his thoughts slipped over the edge of some mental cliff. A chaos of partially formed images struck him - images of a road similar to those which ran from Lychburg to the drive-in, only somehow wider and with any number of roads running in parallel, all of them packed with pod-like cars; images of places that were like the town of Lychburg but entirely different in some way that he could not pin down; images of huge and unimaginably complicated places with strange buildings and people who looked and moved in different...

  Norman had been conscious of the outside, larger world in the same way he was conscious of having a right hand. It was something that you simply did not actively think about. The thought just never occurred. Now that it had, he realised, it was like falling into some mental void. There were places outside, and those places had names - but now that he tried to think of them, now that he tried to imagine some world other than, and outside from, the Lychburg city limits, he could not think of a single one.

  Not one.

  From down below, at the bottom of the bluff, he heard a sharply detonative sound like a rifle shot or a thunderclap close up - as though the air itself had split apart as something burst through it. There was the sound of some strange mechanism whirring to a stop.

  ‘Your thought processes have become erratic,’ Myra said in flat, inhuman tones, in the way that some science guy might discuss a bug under a glass slide. ‘Complexity of the host-sensorium is resurfacing. Starting to remember. The signifiers of the World are collapsing, deconstructing under an atypical and excessive sense of psychic introspection.

  Clearly, it has been infected by the forces of Discontinuity.’

  For the first time since they had parked here on the cliff-edge, Norman looked at her - turned to really look at her. Physically she seemed unchanged, but there was a hideous sense of wrongness about her, the positioning of her limbs, the muscles that moved them, set in postures that had no humanity about them; relaxed or tensed in manners that no human being could ever achieve.

  Her eyes were clear and steady and direct, with nothing, absolutely nothing, living inside them.

  ‘The Continuity must be protected,’ she said, and with an entirely relaxed and casual manner reached up her hand to plunge its splayed-open fingers deep into Norman Manley’s eyes.

  * * *

  Victoria would never have a complete memory of the events between the Doctor pulling the lever and her resurfacing into painful consciousness on the TARDIS floor. Such mental pictures and sensations that remained were fragmented and disjointed: megrimous and synesthesic fugue-amalgams that, even in retrospect, could not be forced into comprehensive sense. Images of ragged, faceless men with stunted parasites inside them marching in single file over some precipice to fall in impossible and somehow multiple directions under a gravity that no human had ever experienced. A flash of some fabricated, animated monstrosity lashed together from paint-flaking driftwood and oiled rope. Pale-faced, god-like beings that pawed at her with long, segmented, wormlike fingers and plunged those same digits into the matter of her head. The wrenching, churning sensation of being, in some manner unrelated to the purely physical, turned inside out... She hauled herself into what was more or less a sitting position with a groan. Her body felt bruised all over and her head was one enormous ache. She looked about: if the console room of the TARDIS had been in a state of disarray before, now it was in a state of complete disaster. Small fires spluttered behind the open cover plates and the air smelt faintly of ozone - the chemical compound rather than the smell of decomposing seaweed that people travel to seaside resorts to take for their health.

  Jamie was off to one side, caught up in a clump of snapped-off vulcanised tubing, still insensible but beginning to stir. Of the Doctor there was no immediate sign.

  ‘Doctor?’ Victoria called weakly. ‘Are you there? Where are you?’

  ‘I’m over here,’ came a voice from, as she had already assumed would be the case, behind the central console. ‘I’m quite all right - although I seem to have become entangled with the hat stand.’

  Victoria climbed, wincing, to her feet and walked around the console. The situation was, indeed, as the Doctor had described. The little man lay on his front with the stand on top of him, its length contriving to run at some slight crosswise angle beneath his clothing so that the top end protruded from his collar and the bottom from the right cuff of his checked trousers.

  ‘If you could give me a bit of help,’ he said, ‘I’d be very grateful.’

  ‘If you think for one minute I’m going to take off your trousers,’ said Victoria, ‘then you’re sorely mistaken.’

  ‘The thought, my dear girl,’ said the Doctor, ‘never crossed my mind. I do have some sense of propriety.’ He lifted his right foot so that the protruding base of the hat stand bobbed up and down. ‘I think the bottom, if you’ll pardon the expression, screws right off.’

  Victoria unscrewed the base and pulled the remainder of the stand through the top of his clothing. ‘How did something like that happen in the first place?’ she asked.

  The Doctor stood up and dusted himself off - it seemed strange that he was constantly doing this, performing little fastidious gestures upon a general form that carried a vague but innate, and seemingly immutable, sense of shabbiness about it. It was as if, in some strange manner, he fully expected himself to be of some different form and was constantly surprised that he was not.

  ‘I think we have been subject to some severe gravmetic forces,’ he said. ‘Forces that operate upon completely different principles from the galvanistic and magnetic with which those of your place and time would be familiar.’ He frowned. ‘It’s a blessing that those forces seem to have spared us from more direct physical harm.’

  Across the console roo
m Jamie chose this moment to regain consciousness, disentangling himself from the tubes and muttering some fearful Celtish oath. Victoria thought to herself that it was probably a blessing she couldn’t understand it.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked the world in general, when the lapse into deplorable and untranslatable profanity subsided.

  ‘And where are we?’

  ‘Good questions,’ said the Doctor. ‘Astute and to the point, and I just wish I knew the answers to them.’ His glance took in both of his young friends and became slightly apologetic, a little shamefaced. ‘I was intending to take us to a place I know like the back of my hand...’ (Here the Doctor happened to actually glance at the back of his gesticulating hand, frowned momentarily, shrugged and then continued.) ‘London towards the latter end of the twentieth century, where I have a number of friends and, indeed, in some sense, family. The intention was to set a benchmark, to see if my modifications to the TARDIS had been successful...’

  ‘So how successful were they?’ said Jamie, sourly, rubbing at the side of his head on which a nasty bruise was already flowering.

  The Doctor looked down at the dials and counters of the console and sighed. ‘Not very. The instruments have been completely disrupted. There’s no real way to tell precisely when or where we are.’

  Victoria walked over to one of the viewing screens, which appeared to be showing nothing but a sizzling mass of monochromatic snow. she depressed the little switching mechanism set into its side and was rewarded by a flicker and then more though presumably different snow. She tried again. More snow.

  ‘So the long and the short of it is,’ she said, ‘that we could be absolutely anywhere. So what are we supposed to do now?’

  ‘Well, a great man of my acquaintance.’ said the Doctor,

  ‘once said that in moments of confusion the best thing to do is go for a walk and see what happens. Something almost always does.’

  With that, he set his shoulders and strolled briskly to the doors that led to the outside. Victoria was of a sudden struck by a horrible recollection - a remembrance of what the Doctor had so recently said about how, with the fail-safes of the TARDIS disabled, it was quite possible for it to materialise in any place from the heart of a sun, to the etheric vacuum of outer space, to (and this was the personal dread that she immediately flashed upon) the crushing depths of the ocean bed. She opened her mouth to remind the Doctor of these salient possibilities, but it was already too late - he was industriously cranking the handle that manually opened the doors and they, in turn, were inexorably swinging back.

  For some small while the Doctor, Jamie and Victoria gazed upon the scene revealed beyond.

  ‘Well,’ said the Doctor at length. ‘I’m not quite sure what I was expecting, but I certainly hadn’t expected this...’

  Chapter Four

  Developments of an Egregious Nature

  The precise location of the barracks must, at this time, remain classified, save that they afforded easy access to the centre of London and the City. They tended towards, and achieved, an almost perfect anonymity. To the casual observer they were completely unremarkable: a set of lovingly maintained, post-war, prefabricated huts behind a fence and gate, and a parade ground that appeared to have been given over to the parking of a basic and generic collection of military vehicles, Land Rovers and transport trucks, rather than parades. Such personnel as might be seen appeared sporadically and unarmed, obviously about some specific errand as opposed to being any part of massed ranks. The pubs and residents of the surrounding area might notice a distinct lack of off-duty troops making use of their facilities, but this was, quite frankly, given the general nature of off-duty squaddies, more a matter of relief than of comment.

  Of course, if these particular troops had been on the streets in force there would, as like as not, have been no local residents left alive to comment, and the pubs would have been blown up by creatures to whom a pie and a pint was the last thing on their minds, assuming they could metabolise them in the first place.

  Katharine Delbane checked in at the gatehouse and strolled towards one of the huts, with a confidence that was less the result of knowing that she belonged here than of faith in the credentials she had presented, several weeks ago, when she had first arrived. The documentation had stated, with great sincerity, that she was a first lieutenant in the Women’s Royal Army Corps, with special expertise in the fields of computer science and tactical logistics, on secondment to the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce (British Arm) in an auxiliary capacity and with an honorary bump in rank to that of captain.

  In fact - much in the same way that the lovingly preserved exterior of the barracks themselves hid what lay within - she was nothing of the kind.

  Sergeant Benton was already in the tactical analysis room when Delbane entered, inexpertly tapping away on a brand-new Apple Macintosh, one of the several that UNIT had acquired by way of the sort of unconventional diverting of funds that Delbane was in fact, investigating. Benton was one of those NCOs who seem to have been built rather than born, fully formed to fill his rank - you couldn’t imagine him as a private, and you couldn’t imagine him as an officer.

  For all this, he seemed remarkably casual in his manner -

  friendly rather than otherwise, and not exactly offensive, but with a complete disregard for the protocols and conduct common in the regular army when dealing with superiors.

  Indeed, his first words upon meeting Delbane for the first time several weeks before had been a cheery ‘So you’re the girl who knows how to work these bloody things, are you? Pains in the bloody arse they are, I can tell you. Want a cup of tea before we get cracking?’

  In the weeks since she had come here, Delbane had noticed that the UNIT troops seemed to operate in a kind of family atmosphere, as opposed to a more traditional and hierarchical military discipline. Since she wanted to fit in as well as she could, the last thing she could do was haul people like Benton up for insubordination, but it preyed on her mind and never failed to put her in a bad mood. In and of herself, without really thinking about it, Delbane was the sort of person who believes that underlings are there to do as they are told and speak only when spoken to, if they really have to speak at all.

  A bluff and distinguished-looking man of around fifty, in civilian Harris tweed plus fours and matching cap, was also in the room. Delbane had not met him before. He was leaning over Benton’s shoulder, watching the computer screen with the frowning concentration of one who was even less of an expert than Benton.

  ‘...so the incursions are remaining constant?’ he was saying.

  ‘Not constant,’ Benton said. ‘It’s the rate of their proliferation that’s constant, in line with their accelerating birth rate. And they breed like rats. Those damn Si -’

  Both Benton and the visitor realised that Delbane was standing behind them.

  ‘Those damn Sicilians,’ Benton continued hurriedly.

  ‘Bringing arms in with their, uh, Mafia contacts here in the Italian community and supplying them to...’ He trailed off as inspiration seemed to fail him.

  ‘That’s the question, isn’t it?’ said the older man, barely fumbling the catch. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re ultimately headed across the Irish Sea - though which side might end up with ‘erm I dread to think. Bad show, either way. And I’ll remind you, Benton,’ he continued, rather more sternly, ‘national slurs about birth rates and so forth might have been... allowed in the bad old days of Empire, but they were loathsome and abhorrent even then. They certainly have no place under any command of mine. Do you understand me, Sergeant?’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir.’ Benton looked suitably chastened, as if he really thought Delbane was stupid enough to be buying their pitiful attempt at a smoke screen for one second. ‘I spoke without thinking. I was out of order.’

  This was merely the latest such automatic-seeming reversal Delbane had encountered. She would walk into the canteen to find the animated conversation of the privat
e soldiers faltering into uneasy silence while they wracked their collective brains to come up with any subject other than the one they’d all been talking about. Divisional briefings by the divisional commander, Colonel Critchton, seemed to be a marvel of implication and double-meaning for which she could not quite find the key Even the fact that the warrant officer, Smythe, had found lodgings for her in one of the better local hotels, rather than in the decidedly spartan and communal dormitory huts, seemed to be part of a concerted effort to keep her off-site as much as possible rather than the result of any consideration for her comfort.

  It wasn’t that she herself was actively under suspicion, Delbane judged; it was merely the blanket distrust of any outsider felt by people who had something to hide. And she was going to find out what they were hiding.

  Benton now climbed to his feet and turned to Delbane with a slightly incongruous sense of formality. ‘Have you met, uh, Captain Delbane, sir? She’s on attachment.’

  ‘I don’t believe I have.’ The other man likewise turned, and regarded her with the innate courtesy of an English gentleman of the old school. ‘Lethbridge-Stewart.’

  Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Delbane thought. Commander-in-Chief of the European arm of UNIT and with a contingently effective rank - should certain and specific states of emergency be declared - surpassing even that of field marshal. Even in the regular army, and its rather more irregular divisions, the Brigadier was the stuff of legend. She tried not to seem overly impressed.

  ‘Delbane’s working on the deployment of resources,’ said Benton. ‘You know how it is at the moment. We have so many, uh, unconventional areas we can draw upon that they can get lost. Some poor sod at the blunt end doesn’t call them up because it never even occurs to him that they might exist...’