Heart of Tardis Read online

  The Brigadier nodded seriously. ‘That business out in Haiti last year. I’d have killed for the proper kind of fetishes and a genuine obiman if I’d known how to get hold of one.’

  Delbane decided to check a decent dictionary the first chance she could, just so she could be sure that she’d really heard what she thought she had. It seemed that certain frankly unbelievable elements of her preliminary briefing by the concern for whom she truly worked might be true.

  ‘I should have a working database in the next few days,’

  she said out loud.

  ‘Good, good,’ the Brigadier said. ‘I had thought to get in a few days golfing before I went back to Geneva...’ He glanced down somewhat regretfully at his Harris tweed golfing outfit... but circumstances seem to have conspired to keep me here for a while.’ Another meaningful glance towards Benton. ‘Contact Yates and have him put a tracking squad on those, ah, Sicilians.’ He turned back to Delbane. ‘Keep up the good work, Delbane. I look forward to seeing your results.’

  His scarf flapping behind him, the object of his search still wrapped in its ghastly crochet throw-rug covering and cradled in his arms, the Doctor pelted back through the hall of Big Pretend-Move Animals But Don’t ‘Cos They’re Dead And Have Sand Stuck Up Them.

  From all around, from varying degrees of distance, came the cacophony of thousands upon thousands of bells, whistles, buzzers, hooters, sirens and other suchlike mechanisms that had been connected to the Collectors’ equivalent of a security system.

  Behind, and slowly gaining, came a pack of Collectors shouting things like: ‘Stop! Stop! Is horrible thief taking our valuable and lovely stuff!’

  The Collectors were metamorphic by physical nature, their soft and gel-like flesh able to twist into myriad forms by way of a complicatedly interlinked skeletal structure and a large biological array of potential organs and appendages which could be force-grown in real time. At the moment they were collectively trying for something terrifying and ferocious - but it would only be a matter of time before they hit upon the idea of redesigning themselves for speed...

  ‘Complex subtlety?’ Romana snapped as she pelted along beside the Doctor, her skirts streaming behind her less dramatically, if rather more attractively, than the Doctor’s scarf flapped behind him. She was coming to the conclusion, though, that crushed velvet and molecularly bonded gold-leaf trimming had been a bit of a mistake. She had also decided to regenerate herself a smaller, slightly more compact body the first chance she got, as soon as she could find a suitably elegant template. ‘I’d hardly call that subtle.’

  ‘I used the sonic screwdriver,’ said the Doctor indignantly.

  ‘Remarkably advanced Gallifreyan technology, the sonic screwdriver.’

  ‘Yes,’ fumed Romana. ‘And you used that remarkably advanced Gallifreyan technology to smash a big hole, grab the thing and then run like Skaro.’

  She decided that she sounded a little out of breath, so cut in her respiratory bypass system. ‘And quite why you decided to come here to look in the first place,’ she continued, her voice now completely cold and calm as she ran, ‘I simply can’t imagine and you never did tell...’

  They had reached the TARDIS. Romana opened it with her own key and ran inside without breaking stride. The Doctor followed and she slammed the doors behind him in the enraged and monstrous face-equivalents of the Collectors.

  ‘It was the easiest place to get to,’ the Doctor said, skidding to a halt, ‘all things considered.’ Now that the immediate danger of being torn limb from limb was over he seemed completely and utterly relaxed, without a care in the world. It was one of the places and times where I knew for a fact the chap would be, with little danger of impacting on the timeline when I retrieved him. Imagine the effect if I’d whisked him away from that happy young man’s birthday party in twentieth-century Manchester...’

  ‘Yes, but you’ve really got to stop forgetting about him and leaving him somewhere,’ said Romana, ‘and then turning the known universe upside down looking for him again. He must be the oldest single lump of coherent matter in it by now.’

  ‘Well, he was built to last, after all.’ The Doctor set his burden down on the console room floor and unwrapped its garish mantle. ‘Let’s have a look at you, K-9.’ He swung up an access cover in the side of the mobile cyberdynic unit and poked around the dormant innards with a not particularly gentle finger. ‘The key systems seem to be salvageable, and the personality backups seem to be intact. A couple of new power cells, a bit of work with the quantum spanner and a buckyball-suspension-fluid change and he’ll be good as new. You mark my words.’

  Romana had been idly watching one of the glassblowers’

  bulls-eye mouldings which the Doctor affected on the white walls of the console room, and which had obligingly dilated to show the scene outside. The Collectors, having exhausted the cutting and sawing options of their various appendages on the TARDIS hull, were wheeling in a massive Chelonian matter-disrupter.

  ‘I think it might be an idea if we left that for later,’ she said.

  ‘Quite possibly.’ said the Doctor, looking over her shoulder.

  ‘They might do themselves some serious damage if they try to fire it in an enclosed space. So let’s not give them the opportunity.’ He turned to the console and coaxed it into life.

  ‘Where do you feel like? Paris in the spring? I’ve always loved Paris in the spring.’

  The time rotor flared, and Romana felt the comforting sensations of translation into the Vortex, the place where some small, deep part of the time aristocracy consciousness truly lived - and then she felt a lurch inside, the spraining in her soul that told her time, as such, was out of joint. It was a feeling - if it could be called such - that was becoming distressingly, and not a little depressingly familiar.

  ‘Oh no,’ she heard the Doctor say, as an anaesthetic numbness infused and shut down her fourteenth and twenty-seventh senses. ‘Not again...’

  Chapter Five

  In the Nation of the Solid State

  As the jeep jolted down the worn-out farm track, Colonel Haasterman could feel every minor increment of the damage it was doing to his 64-year-old spine. The land for miles around seemed barren and disused, not so much from soil-banking but rather as a direct result of Reaganomics in the abstract: wheat fields reverting into dustbowl country, the life and fertility sucked from them as though by some tangible and baleful supernatural force.

  ‘Supernatural,’ Haasterman muttered to himself. ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘Sir?’ said the driver, a corporal in the State National Guard, a detachment of which had been called out to the Table City airbase to serve in an auxiliary capacity should the need arise.

  ‘Nothing, corporal,’ Haasterman told him. ‘Nothing important to you. Keep your mind on the road.’

  The jeep crawled on under a flat grey sky that seemed bigger than all outdoors. Eventually they came to a rusting chain-link fence. With a start of something like fright, Haasterman saw the bodies of small animals strewn along the wire. Had the overt effects of the flare radiated this far? Then he relaxed as his mind worked it out: the fence had been electrified again after long years of disuse, and the local animal population had long since forgotten it was potentially lethal.

  Like the Golgotha Project itself, Haasterman thought, if it came to that. You build a catastrophe machine, and when you realise what you’ve done you try to shut it down. And then you bury it, and try to forget about it, jettisoning any number of lives and careers in the process - it was no coincidence that Haasterman himself had been sidelined into Project Blue Book and the mills of disinformation; a glass ceiling that had left him at the level where, in dealing with the overt Military hierarchies, he was pushing it to claim the authority even of

  ‘Colonel’...

  You bury the engines of destruction, and seed the ground with salt, and they lie dormant. Then they power themselves up again and flare.

  A pair of armed guards were w
aiting in an insulated picket gate where the road bisected the fence. Over their fatigues they wore airsealed polyethylene coveralls with integral life-support packs. Duct-taped to the coveralls, seemingly at random, were totems of an antique-looking and strangely eclectic nature: head-shop hippie peace symbols, reproduction SS-issue swastikas, a pentagram, a Star of David, fetish-feathers and mojo bags, dog-eared minor arcana tarot cards and pristine, mylar-bag-wrapped major league baseball cards... the cumulative effect was of men built up from clotted-together scraps and junk.

  Haasterman showed his ID to one of the ragged guardsmen who was eyeing him uneasily. ‘The site is hot?’

  The trooper shrugged.

  ‘Not so bad, this far out. You wouldn’t want to pitch a tent for long, is all.’

  He hung himself off the side of the jeep and they rode with him, past the big Sikorsky Sea King choppers that had brought in the crash team and to the modular command centre that the team had set up.

  Both helicopters and portacabins were daubed with sigils in liquid chalk, blood and other less palatable substances.

  Freshly slaughtered chicken giblets and dog entrails hung festively from the Sikorsky rotor blades. The canine offal, at least, had been rehydrated from its standard-issue code red vacuum packs, but all the same, Haasterman tried not to think of the scene if they had to evacuate and fire the choppers up quickly.

  The trooper dropped down from the jeep, snapped off a casual salute and hurried to open the door to one of the cabins.

  Haasterman turned to the National Guard driver, who was staring around with blank-faced horror. ‘Get a grip on yourself, soldier, and come with me.’ He hustled the guardsman into the cabin, then pulled a card bearing a minor Sign of Power and briefly showed it to him. ‘Sleep. Forget.’

  It wasn’t what you might call real Magick, Haasterman reflected - but then, in the end, hardly anything that was called Magick really was. In the same way that certain patterns of conflicting data can crash a computer, there were certain images, certain shapes in the world, that shut down the higher functions of the brain. The guardsman slumped bonelessly. Haasterman put the card away again, being careful to keep his eyes averted. ‘Keep him out of the way and look after him.’ he said to the trooper who had escorted them inside.

  The cabin was a cramped pandemonium of activity as totem-suited technicians worked their haphazardly bolted-together equipment. One wall was completely taken up by the big mainframe in its gimballed shock absorbers, its tape spools blitting and jerking. Its slaved terminals ranged from green-glowing , ultra-modern viewing screens with integral keyboards, to chattering printout units adapted from electrified typewriters.

  Dr Sohn was flicking through a sheaf of printouts on a clipboard, circling various elements heavily with a scowl and a purple plastic Flair. She turned her scowl on Haasterman. ‘How long until support arrives?’ Haasterman was the vanguard of the heavy-duty mechanisms that would be arriving to supplant the crash team. ‘And how much of it?’

  ‘One Hercules, four ARVs,’ said Haasterman, shortly, and regretted it. He had met Dr Sohn twice before, under distinctly different operational conditions, and had not found any way of getting along with her under either. It wasn’t a question of anger or dislike, he told himself; it was just that he couldn’t help noticing.

  Technically, in Section terms, he had the seniority and rank on Sohn, but Haasterman was entirely aware that she was on the fast track upwards via several separate affirmative action routes -

  whereas he was just this embittered old has-been with the wrecked dregs of a career, who was only ever called back in because, when the heads finally started to roll, they needed an expendable head on the sacrificial block. And given the basic nature of the Section these days, sacrificial was almost entirely apposite.

  Sohn gave a little sniff, and started tapping at her teeth with the barrel end of her Flair in a way that Haasterman found incredibly irritating. ‘I just hope that’s going to be enough.’

  ‘It’s all we’ve got.’ Haasterman snorted with a kind of generalised contempt for the entire world. ‘On this kind of notice. If it isn’t, then the Powers that be have only themselves to blame for going along with Reagan and sinking everything into Christian Fundamentalism and Star Wars.’

  Sohn shrugged unconcernedly. ‘The symbols are where you find them, and the symbols change. That was the way to go.

  Besides...’ She became pointed. ‘Our resources would have been perfectly adequate if you hadn’t made this mess in the first place.

  It’s your mess, Colonel .You made it. All those years ago.’ She gestured to a row of hanging totem suits. ‘Let’s go see what you have to clean up.’

  * * *

  ‘Well, I expected electrified ramps and death-ray installations at the very least,’ said the Doctor, in slightly disappointed tones. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and looked around with a manner reminiscent of a schoolboy who had been refused some rightfully-deserved treat. Then he brightened again and rubbed his hands. ‘I do fear, though, that this peaceful scene shall soon be rent by the horrific roars of who knows what hideous Evil...’

  ‘What, really?’ said Jamie.

  The Doctor’s face fell again. ‘Not really, Jamie, no.’

  They were in a sparsely wooded area, off to one side of a sharply inclined cliff face. To the other, the land ran down into a river-basin valley in which could be seen the lights of a town. To Jamie and Victoria, those lights seemed unnaturally regular, even over and above the fact that a town or a city could not by its very nature be called natural. In their travels with the Doctor, they had both long since become used to the strange brightness and constancy of electrical lighting, but these lights were laid out in a vast and utterly regular and mechanical grid. It would have taken gangs of labourers centuries to build up such an expanse.

  ‘Now, yon place there doesn’t look to be the work of any hand of man...’ Jamie said dubiously.

  The Doctor sucked his lower lip consideringly. ‘I don’t think so, Jamie. Unless I’m very much mistaken, that looks to me like a smallish twentieth-century American town. Relatively small, I should say, and quite possibly a city. The colonials tended to give things big names, I seem to remember...’

  ‘So this was not built by some fearful and incursive alien force, then,’ said Victoria, with a not entirely insignificant sense of relief.

  ‘Not at all.’ The Doctor considered a little further. ‘Not in that sense, anyway. I have to admit, I’ve never really seemed to get on with America, really, what with one thing and another...’ Quite what that one thing was, was never fully elucidated. The other thing, too, remained similarly opaque, for at that moment there came the wrenching, tearing sound of metal sliding on rock. There was a burst of flame above them, and something hurtled down the cliff face. Both Jamie and Victoria instinctively made to dive desperately out of its way, then realised that this burning object was plummeting off to one side.

  For his part, the Doctor merely watched it with concern. The burning object hit the ground with a second and rather more impressive explosion. It was a variety of automobile, and must once have had a squat but almost archetypical sense of bigness about it. Now it was a crushed and twisted wreck from which strangely liquid-looking and globular flames and greasy smoke poured.

  Jamie turned to the Doctor, failed to see him and only then realised that the little man was running at full pelt for the wreckage. ‘Stay here,’ he told Victoria, who was staring at this sudden destruction in shock, and set off after him. The heat from the flames beat Jamie back before he caught up with the Doctor, but he was able to see the ragged and skeletal remains of a man, flame pluming from the empty eye sockets in his skull.

  ‘Come along, Jamie,’ said the Doctor, laying a sympathetic hand on his shoulder, though whether it was sympathy for the burning man or Jamie. Jamie couldn’t tell. ‘There’s nothing we can do for the poor chap, now.’

  ‘Doctor!’

  The cry came from Vic
toria, who had seen something lying in the scrub land over to one side and had gone over to investigate.

  ‘It’s a young, ah, lady,’ she called. ‘I think she’s alive.’

  The young lady lay sprawled and unconscious in a patch of sage brush, in a scorched skirt and cardigan of some fine and hazy bright pink substance that Victoria for one thought a trifle immodest - if not in the actual cut then in the clingy tightness of it. Her face was painted in a way that had the words ‘a certain sort’ forming in Victoria’s mind - but then she saw the bruised complexion under the cosmetic tinctures and instantly quashed such obdurate thoughts. The young lady was clearly hurt.

  ‘She must have been thrown clear,’ the Doctor said, arriving beside Victoria with a slightly winded Jamie in tow.

  He regarded the unconscious girl with a kind of sympathetic but critical detachment. ‘I don’t see any signs of severe injury. I think it might be safe to move her - but the sooner she has proper medical attention, I think, the better. Jamie - gently, now

  - if you could assist her, we’ll see what we can do.’

  Jamie gathered up the girl in his arms, and he and Victoria set off after the Doctor as he headed rapidly for the TARDIS.

  ‘I have to admit, I’m not as well versed in the medical sciences as I once was...’ The Doctor fumbled through his pockets for the TARDIS key. ‘I’m sure I’ve got some books on medicine somewhere, though, and there are of course a number of interesting and quite advanced devices I’ve picked up here and there on my... Oh, hello Jamie, Victoria. What are you, ah... oh.’

  There had been no sense of transition. The Doctor had opened the TARDIS doorway, stepped into the darkness behind it and had instantly stepped out again. Now he turned and tried it again - and once again stepped straight out.