by Dave Rudden
It did not go unnoticed. The ghost of annoyance appeared on Chyll’s mechanically precise features, as the cart purred into a huge service elevator, the platform corkscrewing downwards. Somewhere in the distance, a muffled siren wailed and was immediately cut short.
‘I imagine,’ Chyll said eventually, ‘I do not need to explain that I am a powerful man.’
Then why do it? Rory thought.
‘And not just powerful, but respected. The strategies outlined in my papers on the criminal mind are now standard practice in many facilities. I have interviewed utterly villainous individuals. The Butcher of Bamond, Amon the Destructovore. These are –’ his hands fluttered – ‘celebrities. And being the man to document them provides its own celebrity too.’
Rory pretty much always wished Amy was nearby, but now the pang was particularly sharp. He’d read once that sharks could smell a single drop of blood in the water from a hundred kilometres away, but that was nothing compared to Amelia Pond realising she had just gained the upper hand.
‘River,’ he said. ‘You want to interview River.’
‘Doctor Song is proving stubborn,’ Chyll said reluctantly. ‘Records of her … adventures are either confusing or outright contradictory. Her background is somewhere between unknown and completely unbelievable, and even our medical scans cannot seem to agree as to her genetics. I am still receiving word that she is out there in the universe, despite knowing that she is imprisoned here!’ Again, the fluttering, like birds trying to escape. ‘Put simply, she is frustrating – which means that the man who finally tells her story will be famous. I would like you to convince her to cooperate.’
‘I think,’ Rory said, because it was probably a better response, on the whole, than punching Chyll in the face, ‘she’s probably quite happy telling her own story. Why would she want you to do it?’
The hands stilled in that shining lap. ‘Because I can set her free. Or, at the very least, aid her escape. You know, I have always considered our transfer ships an accident waiting to happen. Practically prehistoric in terms of security. Why, all it would require is a little inattention on our part and a prisoner could be light years away.’
‘River doesn’t want to escape,’ Rory said carefully, adding permanently in his head. Stormcage was protection for her and the Doctor both. ‘And she’d be hunted even if she did. You can’t prevent that.’
‘Can’t I?’ Chyll said mildly. ‘For her to be hunted, someone would have to report her gone. If she is believed to be here, surely that is as good as being here, no? Christmas at home, Mr Pond. Wouldn’t that be nice?’
They made the rest of the trip in silence.
Stormcage was vast. It took another thirty minutes of bleached-white gantries and wide concrete corridors before they approached Cell 426 in Cell Block Humanoid 3.
Imprisonment came in many forms here, just like the prisoners; cell design had to be flexible when you were imprisoning hyperspace wyverns and Saturnian light-vampires and people who took whole planets for joyrides. River Song’s cell, much like River herself, had started out relatively normal – just a polished-stone square fronted by everything-proof glass and bookended by two hulking guards. However, that had very swiftly gone out of the window once they had put River Song inside.
Now, Cell 426 was an archaeologist’s dream. Every inch was piled with the tat and treasure of a thousand cultures, like all of history colliding in a space the size of Rory’s first apartment. Priceless French wardrobes had been stacked five high along one wall, their drawers yanked out and converted to bookshelves. Gems the size of baby potatoes glittered among stacks of tattered paperbacks – mysteries, and romance, and adventure, and crime. And sitting in the middle of it all, reclining on a mound of duvets like a dragon on its hoard, was River Song.
Doctor River Song.
Also, Professor River Song, quasi-Time Lord River Song, and Universe’s Most Wanted River Song, depending on the day you met her, and sometimes on the day she met you. She was also Rory’s daughter. The order of items on that list worried him sometimes.
‘Merry Christmas,’ he said.
‘And to you, father dear,’ she said, shaking out her explosion of curls. ‘I got your message. Is Amy’s mother OK?’
Rory gave her a small smile. ‘You can call her Gran, you know.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Maybe not to her face.’
River grinned back, a tad awkwardly. They had spent relatively little time alone with each other, for father and daughter. River had been kidnapped as a baby by the Church of the Silence, taken from Rory and Amy and shaped into a weapon aimed straight for the Doctor’s heart. It was complicated – and Rory wasn’t great at complicated. He was, he knew, possibly too simple a person to be running around different timelines and futures and planets, but he knew he was going wherever Amy was going, and that was that. River had gone somewhere he couldn’t follow just ten minutes after she was born, and by the time he did find her (by way of a thousand confusing interactions before and after her birth) he was so far behind he didn’t think he would ever catch up.
‘It’s good to see you,’ River said. ‘Really. And – is that Chief Psychiatrist Chyll?’
Her smile turned tigerish. Rory had seen Daleks die in front of a smile like that.
‘I told you, Henrik,’ she said. ‘I write theses. I don’t star in them.’
‘River Song,’ Chyll said. His hands were fluttering again. ‘I thought we had cleaned all the contraband out of your cell.’
She picked her way across a pile of broadswords to lean against a vase the size of Rory. ‘What contraband?’
Chyll gave Rory a long-suffering look, which Rory avoided by glancing warily into Cell 427 across the corridor. As always, it was pitch-black and silent; a cube of darkness like the tank of some strange deep-sea fish. He’d always meant to ask River who was in there, but it felt somehow rude to do it within earshot.
The guards snapped to attention as Chyll disembarked from the cart, and River’s smile disappeared.
‘You know he’s wired them to do that? Synaptic controllers surgically implanted in all of their heads so he can pull their strings.’ She shook her head scornfully. ‘Sometimes, Henrik, I think if you didn’t have captives to experiment on you’d probably experiment on yourself.’
Chyll’s words replayed in Rory’s head: They can’t help it. It’s how I designed them.
‘You’re hardly in a position to take the moral high ground,’ Chyll snapped. ‘Or you wouldn’t be trapped on the other side of those bars.’
River indicated the trove of artefacts around her with a lazy wave of her hand. ‘Do I look trapped to you?’
The lights went out.
Rory’s vision exploded in purples and blues as the overheads cut off with a series of snaps. The guards’ needle-thin targeting lasers vanished. Even Chyll’s suit shut off. The corridor was plunged into darkness so complete that it felt like Rory’s brain had suddenly been dropped in ink.
‘Stay still, everyone,’ Rory said reflexively. He had been a guard once. Amy had been imprisoned somewhere, and Rory had spent a very long time guarding her, with sword and axe and blade and bow and knife and fist. He tried not to think about it too much. That’s why he liked Leadworth – a place so relentlessly normal you couldn’t help but be normal too.
But you didn’t spend centuries being a prison guard without gaining an instinct for when things had gone terribly wrong, and it took a conscious effort to pull his hand away from his hip, where a sword had hung for the best part of those two thousand years.
‘River?’
‘Getting a torch!’
‘Good.’
It was so dark. Not the dark of night, which wasn’t really dark at all – not with the moon and light pollution and a million other things to break up the black. This was the dark of a hole. The dark of a grave. The kind of dark you only got underground.
Someone was whimpering.
‘Chyll?’ Rory said. ‘Is this a power outage?�
�
No answer.
‘Chyll.’
‘Stormcage works off a geothermal siphon.’ River’s voice was muffled. It sounded like she was rummaging through dozens of scrolls. ‘Unless someone found a way to turn off the planet’s core, it isn’t a power outage.’
‘Then what is it?’
Stormcage answered for her.
Unmoored and disorientated by the blinding dark, Rory felt as though every other one of his senses had spun into overdrive. Gears ground. Vibrations stung his boot soles and chattered his teeth. He flinched backwards as a deafening rasp echoed from the vague direction of River’s cell. He had no idea what it was, until he heard it again, and again, and again, chasing itself through the corridors of Cell Block Humanoid 3 like a legion preparing for war.
The doors.
The cell doors were opening.
Alarms began to howl. Screams rose with them. A hundred, a thousand, overlapping and competing; the joyous, chaotic symphony of prisoners smelling freedom in the air. It very nearly drowned out the sound of Cell 427’s door retracting into the wall behind Rory, then a voice swam out of the blackness, thick as bubbling fat.
‘It isn’t a power outage. Is it, Chyll?’ said Prisoner 427.
Henrik Chyll’s suit had rekindled in slow and sickly flashes, painting his skin the colour of a corpse.
‘It’s a prison break.’
It occurred to Rory, as Prisoner 427 burst from its cage in a blur of limbs, that humanoid was a far broader term that he had originally thought. He had just enough time to register snapping jaws and wet, glistening muscle before he threw himself past the cart and into River’s cell.
The creature hammered into the cart with one meaty shoulder, rocking the half-tonne vehicle up on two wheels before it righted itself with a deafening slam. Chyll shrieked. Rory flung a baking tray. And Prisoner 427, fully twelve feet of scales and serrated crustacean limbs, reared up to its full, ceiling-scraping height, clacking its mandibles like a hungry man at a buffet.
That was the first and last mistake of its newly freed life.
The light of River’s blaster would have been blinding even if the darkness hadn’t been near total. As it was, it felt like standing beside the birth of a star. Rory rose to his feet holding a broadsword, just as everything above Prisoner 427’s neck came away in light and noise. Drizzling fluid, it curled in on itself like a dead spider, flattening the cart as it fell.
‘Dad?’ River asked eventually. ‘Are you OK?’
‘It was only the sprouts,’ Rory said. ‘I’m fine.’
‘That’s contraband,’ Chyll whispered.
They found him at the feet of one of the guards, neither of whom had moved a muscle during the fight.
Synaptic controllers, Rory thought. They need Chyll pulling the strings. If they’re on the same circuit as the rest of Stormcage, then every guard in the prison might be down.
‘Blasters are contraband,’ Chyll muttered. ‘Swords are contraband. Sprouts are contraband.’
‘Chyll,’ River said. ‘Focus. Stormcage’s systems have failed. We could be looking at a mass outbreak –’
‘They haven’t failed,’ Chyll retorted. The chance to contradict River had snapped him at least partially out of his trance. ‘Not all of them. Life support is working, obviously. The alarms are working. It’s only select systems that are down, which means …’
Chyll raised a hand to stroke his right sleeve. Trails of soft light followed his fingertips before fading back into the cloth, and suddenly an image appeared across the folds of his suit. Bent and distorted by his arm underneath, it was still recognisable by its white concrete as somewhere inside Stormcage.
‘The cameras are untouched,’ he murmured. ‘Of course they are. They probably want this on public record. To bring Stormcage to its knees – well, that’s career-making, isn’t it? And criminals love the dramatic.’ Something ugly darted across his face. ‘Isn’t that right, Doctor Song?’
‘What are you looking for?’ Rory asked, before River got her blaster out again. He had retrieved and switched on some battery-operated Christmas lights from the trolley he and Amy had packed, and was wrapping them round his arm as a makeshift torch.
‘Control of the prison network can only be taken from the panopticon – that’s Stormcage’s nerve centre, on level three,’ the psychiatrist explained. The image on his suit panned silently, before coming to rest over banks of computers and glowing screens. ‘There.’
Figures hunched over keyboards, cloaked in the white garb of Stormcage technicians, their body language unmistakably terrified. Pacing behind them was a creature so large it only appeared in fragments – a swirling cloak, elongated limbs, an elephantine skull underneath a jagged wire crown.
Rory’s voice was hushed. ‘Who … who is that?’
‘Isolde Rubel.’
River stiffened. ‘This is where Rubel ended up?’
‘Only after I pulled a lot of strings,’ Chyll said proudly. ‘Fascinating individual.’
‘That’s one way of putting it,’ River said. ‘But how did she escape?’
‘Looking for tips?’ Chyll said sardonically. ‘I don’t know, Song. She could have been planning this for months. The woman is a genius. A polymath. Biologist, roboticist, geneticist – utterly dedicated to pushing the limits of what the body can achieve. Particularly her own.’
‘And others’,’ River said darkly.
‘Well,’ Chyll said, ‘I do try to avoid using the term “mad scientist”.’
They watched the colossal skull turn this way and that, surgical scars gleaming. Some of them looked fresh. Some looked home-made.
‘At least, not without making my own diagnosis,’ he added.
Rory took River by the arm and led her away from Chyll, who was still stroking the sleeve of his suit like a puppy yearning to be let back into a room.
‘Can we call the Doctor?’ he asked.
River shook her head. ‘Last we spoke, he said he was going to find the exact nanosecond when Christmas Eve became Christmas Day and park there to have a nap.’ She grinned. ‘Besides, this could be fun. A little father–daughter time.’
‘River, I’m holding a broadsword. It doesn’t feel like father–daughter time.’
Rory had met River before he’d conceived her. He’d seen her at the death of the universe. He’d seen her taken from him and her mother, and then he’d seen her reappear with secrets and a smile. But he’d never seen her look hurt.
‘Doesn’t it?’ she said.
Rory turned to find Chyll hovering behind them, the images on his suit now replaced by that sickly flashing glow.
‘So, let me get this straight,’ Rory said. ‘Control of the prison can only be wrested back from this … nerve centre. This panopticon.’
‘Yes.’
‘Which is currently being guarded,’ Rory continued, ‘by a notoriously mad scientist?’
‘The mad scientist,’ River offered unhelpfully. ‘The worst this century has to offer.’
Chyll tapped his chin. ‘Hmm. One could make a case for Magnus Greel being slightly ahead in terms of general unpleasantness, but, for all intents and purposes, yes, I would have to agree.’
They digested this in silence for a moment.
‘River?’
‘Yes, Rory?’
‘Would you like me to make you a little plate?’
The ham tasted funny.
River was scrounging in her cell for ammunition. Chyll was trying to plot some sort of route to the panopticon that wouldn’t run them directly into any brawling inmates. And Rory was absent-mindedly chewing a cold piece of ham and wondering, Is this just Christmas now?
He had always wanted kids. Some nurses didn’t. Working in a paediatric ward could do that, sometimes. It was hard to see families on their worst days. On helpless days. On days when you could do nothing but say ‘I’m sorry’ over and over again. Rory had seen a lot of frightened parents in his time. Sometimes he thought that
having a kid was like keeping your heart outside your chest – open, exposed, at the mercy of the world.
So you did little things. You put tinsel on ECG machines. You sprayed non-toxic snow on all the windows. You kept a smile on your face no matter what. You pretended everything was normal and the universe made sense, in the hope that you might somehow make it true.
Rory took another bite. The ham always tasted funny in the hospital too.
‘Can’t be easy.’ Chyll eased himself to the floor beside Rory, his skin grey and washed out in the half-light of his suit.
Rory didn’t say anything. He just chewed. Maybe he would get to like the taste. People could get used to anything.
Chyll waved his hand, indicating the dark corridor, the open cell, the wailing alarms. ‘I doubt this is anyone’s ideal Christmas.’
Rory shrugged. ‘I’ve had weirder,’ he said, before realising with a start that it was true. At least the whole thing with the space sharks had snow. He eyed Chyll warily. ‘I’m not going to convince River for you.’
‘I didn’t think you would. Honestly, I can’t imagine the lengths you’d have to go to in order to convince River Song to do anything.’
I can, Rory thought. I’ve seen it. Amy had explained to him just what River had gone through after her abduction. The training. The brainwashing. There had been a flow chart.
I wish Amy was here.
‘You know,’ Chyll said gently. ‘I see families at odds here all the time. Families who have nothing in common. Families who have let each other down. Sometimes it helps to –’
‘Right, you two.’ River was loading her blaster with heavy, gleaming rounds. ‘I’ve got six more shots in this. Rory, you have a … broadsword. And, Chyll, you have a route.’
The psychiatrist nodded. ‘I can swing us round the riots on level two, using the cameras to scout ahead. With a little luck, we can avoid most of the prisoners until we get to the panopticon.’
‘And Rubel?’ Rory said grimly, getting to his feet. ‘Do we have a plan for her?’
River cocked her blaster. ‘I’m going to shoot her. See if that works.’ She stared at them for a moment. ‘What were you two talking about?’