The Doctor stopped and stared at her.
‘Silence the Time Lady,’ said Skagra.
The Kraag Commander clamped its stony claw down on Romana’s shoulder. She cried out in pain as the material of her dress began to smoulder and blacken.
Chris automatically ran to help her, but the other Kraag barred his way and he was forced back by its unbearable aura of heat.
He saw that the Doctor, too, had been blocked by another of the massive creatures. ‘Stop it, Skagra!’ Chris shouted. ‘Let her go. Now!’
Skagra nodded to the Kraag Commander and it released its grip on Romana, who fell to her knees, clutching her injured shoulder.
Skagra surveyed his captives dispassionately. Then he turned to the Doctor. ‘So,’ he said, ‘does mention of the name Salyavin alter your opinion of my great purpose?’
Chris saw the ashen look on the Doctor’s face and a cold stab of fear ran through him.
‘Skagra,’ said the Doctor, in a quiet, defeated voice, with no trace of his former flippancy, ‘if you truly know the whereabouts of Salyavin, that changes everything.’
Chris and Romana exchanged horror-struck glances. K-9 shot forward a few inches, his tail drooping. ‘Negative, Master,’ he called.
‘Indeed?’ said Skagra, a trace of a smile on his full lips. ‘Tell on, Doctor, do.’ He waved a hand and dismissed the Kraag blocking the Doctor’s path.
The Doctor walked slowly towards Skagra, his head bowed as if in supplication. When he spoke, it was in little more than a cracked whisper.
‘I see it all now. Everything in its place. One Universal Mind, bring order to chaos. Such order.’ He raised his head, fixing Skagra with a look almost of awe. ‘Your order.’ Suddenly he straightened up and shouted, ‘Or an order like – K-9! Now!’
At the Doctor’s words, K-9 swivelled around, lightning fast, fixing Skagra in his sights. Chris suddenly realised that the Doctor had been arranging the whole scenario just to bring K-9 into position.
A bright red energy beam shot from the dog’s nose, hitting Skagra in the dead centre of his chest.
And then everything seemed to happen at once.
Skagra staggered a little but did not fall.
K-9 fired off another blast, but again Skagra withstood the assault. The Kraags moved automatically to protect their master, leaving the Doctor, Chris and Romana unguarded.
The Doctor made for the TARDIS, where Romana was climbing unsteadily to her feet.
Skagra’s voice rang out. ‘Maintain your positions. Guard the capsule. Kill the prisoners.’
Romana’s Kraags, who had been furthest from Skagra, turned instantly and aimed their already glowing claws at Romana. She held up her hands in surrender.
The Doctor skidded to a halt, yelling ‘Bristol, K-9, get out of here! Now!’
Chris snatched up K-9, and pelted towards the nearest archway. He couldn’t help but pause and turn back.
He saw the second pair of Kraags stomping towards the Doctor.
He saw the Doctor and Romana’s eyes lock across the chamber. She gave a tiny shake of her head.
He saw the Doctor set his jaw, nod to Romana, and then race towards the archway, just dodging a sizzling beam of fire from a pursuing Kraag. As he reached Chris and K-9, he virtually swept them along the dark, rocky passageway that lay ahead.
The only thing Chris heard him say, was ‘We’ll be back for her. Now run!’
They ran.
Skagra watched as the Kraags, their arms outstretched, advanced on Romana. She stood, still and composed, hands raised, as the creatures prepared to blast her to ashes. Skagra could see the pain in her eyes from her injury, but he saw no weakness, no sign that she would break down, weep, beg for her life. Her composure in the face of certain death stirred within Skagra what others might have called, though he never would, fellow feeling. He almost felt that something valuable might be lost with her destruction. The Kraags reached Romana, raised their claws to her face and prepared to discharge their devastating energy bolts at point-blank range. Even then, not so much as a flicker of fear crossed the woman’s face. And through all this her eyes had never once turned to him.
He waited four seconds more. Then commanded ‘Stop!’ The Kraags lowered their arms and took a step away from their captive.
Now she looked at Skagra. ‘Why do you want to keep me alive, Skagra?’ she asked simply.
‘That is the question you wish me to answer?’ Skagra said. ‘Not how I survived the attack from the Doctor’s robot? Not where the tunnel your companions escaped into will lead them?’
Romana shrugged, ‘Oh I imagine you’re wearing a personal force shield, and the Doctor, Chris and K-9 are heading down a dead end. It all seemed rather obvious, so I didn’t waste time asking about it.’
Skagra gave what could almost have been a small bow. ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘then I will answer your original question. I need you alive because you may still be of use to me on Shada. You are not essential, but a Time Lord prison may require Time Lord biology to access its systems.’ He walked over to the TARDIS, unlocked the door and held it open for Romana. ‘We have an appointment with Salyavin.’
Romana stared at him for a moment. ‘I did have one other question.’
Skagra nodded, still holding the TARDIS door.
‘I was just wondering,’ Romana began, ‘as the Doctor has already escaped from certain death once today, aren’t you a little bit worried he might do it again?’ She smiled sweetly up at him.
A tiny pulse twitched uncontrollably over Skagra’s right temple. He tried to suppress the violent images that surged up in his mind at this thought. He saw the Doctor being pushed off a very, very high cliff, crushed by an avalanche of enormous boulders, torn limb-from-limb by a pack of rabid dogs, bloodied shreds of scarf flying in all directions as his death screams echoed and echoed and echoed and –
Skagra straightened, under control once more. ‘Get inside,’ he ordered Romana. ‘Now.’
She ducked obediently under his arm and into the TARDIS, giving Skagra a satisfied smile as she passed. ‘Gotcha,’ she called back.
Chris, weighed down by K-9, was finding it hard to keep up with the Doctor as they fled, without any idea what they were fleeing towards, down a seemingly never-ending rock passage, lit only by K-9’s eye-screen and the distant glow of the pursuing Kraags. He was exhausted, near blind in this Stygian blackness, but still he kept running. He was surprised he had it in him. He’d always been useless at anything athletic. Perhaps if two Kraags had been chasing him around the 1500-metre track at Bristol Grammar School it might have been a different story. Though he could barely see him, Chris felt sure the Doctor would be taking all this in his enormous stride.
‘Clever feint, wasn’t it?’ the Doctor’s voice boomed back from just ahead. ‘Making them think I was trying to get to the TARDIS.’
‘What were you trying to do?’ puffed Chris.
‘Get to the TARDIS,’ admitted the Doctor from the gloom.
Chris let that one pass. Between breaths, he asked, ‘Doctor, that bloke must be mad, mustn’t he?’
‘Skagra, you mean?’
‘Yes, sorry, it’s not easy remembering alien names, particularly when running for one’s life.’
‘You’ll get used to it,’ the Doctor called back. ‘And as for Skagra. Well, madness, sanity, it’s all just a matter of opinion.’
‘And what’s your opinion?’ demanded Chris.
The Doctor stopped dead in his tracks, Chris only just managing to pull up before a painful collision. The Doctor turned and grinned down at him, the red light from K-9’s eye-screen giving him an almost demonic look.
‘He’s bonkers!’ His grin faded. ‘But infinitely dangerous, Bristol.’
‘You mean he really can do all that stuff? Make the universe into himself?’
The Doctor nodded, gravely. ‘It’s possible. If he really has found Salyavin.’
‘Who’s Salyavin?’ asked Chris. ‘I’m
not sure I can remember another silly name beginning with S.’
K-9 suddenly piped up. ‘Master. Kraags approaching.’
‘Thank you, K-9, I think we’re all very well aware of that,’ snapped the Doctor.
Chris looked over his shoulder and saw the rock walls more clearly now in the increasing glow of the gaining Kraags. He turned back to the Doctor. ‘So why have we stopped? Have you got a plan? A better plan, I mean?’
The Doctor coughed, tugged at his nose, shuffled his feet and Chris’s heart sank.
‘Well,’ the Doctor said, ‘we’ve stopped because there isn’t actually any tunnel worth speaking of in front of us.’
Chris pondered a second. ‘You mean it’s a dead end?’
‘Well, I was trying not to put it in such a final-sounding way. Why don’t we agree to say cul-de-sac?’
Chris felt a wave of panic. ‘You mean we’re going to die? There’s no way out?’
Before the Doctor could answer, K-9’s ears began to whirr furiously. ‘Alert!’ he chirruped. ‘Please adopt silent mode.’
The Doctor and Chris fell quiet as a familiar wheezing, groaning sound began to echo around the cavernous passageway. It seemed to come from all directions at once, then faded with an odd, muffled thump and a sound like creaking wood.
Chris frowned. ‘That was the TARDIS.’
The Doctor nodded. Then shook his head. ‘Yes. No. There was something very odd-sounding about it. And we shouldn’t be able to hear it all the way down here in this cul-de-sac.’
With a thrill of horror, Chris realised that the tunnel was now bathed in a strong red glow. At any second the Kraags would be upon them. And there was no possible escape. He looked ahead, beyond the Doctor, at the bare rock wall that blocked the passage and had condemned them to death. And was rather surprised to see a door in it.
Not a space door. A normal door. A wooden door. A panelled wooden door with a brass knob.
Chris pointed frantically ahead. ‘Look! There’s a door! You said it was a dead end, but there’s a whacking great door in it! There! Look!’
The Doctor whipped round. ‘That wasn’t there before. And anyway, we’d agreed to say cul-de-sac.’
Chris took a deep breath, bundled K-9 into the Doctor’s arms, ran to the door and turned the knob. It swung open and he burst through –
– into Professor Chronotis’s study. Chris barely heard the Doctor run in behind him, slamming the door shut and wedging K-9 against it like a novelty doorstop, because the unexpectedness of suddenly finding himself back at St Cedd’s was as nothing to the unexpectedness of seeing the deceased Professor Chronotis himself, on his feet and smiling across at him, tea tray in hand. But even that was as nothing to the unexpectedness of what Chris saw on the sofa, eating a cheese sandwich. It was Clare. Clare, here. And she’d had her hair done. And she was wearing that really lovely blue blouse that made her eyes sparkle. He wanted to run to her, take her in his arms, kiss her again and again and –
Clare leapt to her feet and ran towards him, smiling broadly, eyes brimming, her arms outstretched in what Chris could only assume was a reproving and aggressive manner. He took an involuntary step back. For some reason she crashed to a halt right in front of him. ‘Chris!’ she cried, in a voice bursting with emotion. Chris couldn’t tell which emotion it was. But probably somewhere between stern disapproval and loathing. What had he done now?
‘Er, hi there, Keightley,’ he mumbled awkwardly.
Meanwhile, the Doctor was staring, and staring, and staring at Professor Chronotis. But he didn’t say a word.
‘Tea, everybody?’ the Professor asked, brightly.
Chapter 56
NOTHING AND NOBODY can survive unprotected in the space-time vortex, that mysterious region where space and time are one. So there was nobody and nothing to observe the TARDIS as it spun through the howling maelstrom, the fragile wooden police box exterior tossed hither and thither by the shrieking time winds.
Inside, Romana – a Kraag standing close guard on either side of her – watched as Skagra turned the later pages of the book. ‘The key turns slowly in the lock,’ he whispered, his face lit by the eerie green glow from the central column. ‘The door to Shada opens!’
He started to turn the pages more quickly.
Suddenly the TARDIS jerked to one side, the engines grinding in protest. Emergency alarms blared, red lights blazed across the console. The illuminated circular panels on the walls dimmed and then flared back up, but instead of their usual warm yellow glow they too flickered a murky dark green, casting misshapen shadows as if the ship were being plunged deep underwater.
Romana felt a sickening plunging sensation in the pit of her stomach. She guessed the TARDIS was passing through a time-lock placed around Shada who knew how many thousands of years before. A time-lock was the usual way Gallifreyans kept the universe in general ignorant of their secrets. Or their misdeeds.
They were leaving the universe behind altogether, moving into a forbidden zone sealed safely away from the rest of reality. But this time Romana knew the Doctor was still alive. He would find some way to stop this, despite his less than impressive attempt at a rescue mission.
The TARDIS bucked and roared as Skagra turned the last few pages of The Worshipful and Ancient Law of Gallifrey.
That book had taken Romana back to her childhood nightmares, now it was literally taking her to meet them, face to face. All that Romana could think of, blotting out even the terrifying scene around her, was one image from Our Planet Story, the wild, screaming insanity on the face of the Great Mind Outlaw Salyavin.
She was jolted back to the present as the TARDIS suddenly settled. The green glow brightened, the time column began to rise and fall, smoothly and silently, without its usual protesting squeaks and clanks. There was utter stillness and calm. A perfect harmony of technology. A TARDIS at the peak of its efficiency. And at the centre of it all stood Skagra, supremely calm and assured, as he turned the final page.
And Romana felt sick. It was as if the time ship had simply stopped fighting and surrendered itself to Skagra. As if the soul of the TARDIS was gone.
Chapter 57
CHRIS LOOKED AT Clare, and Clare looked at Chris. Chris had the strange sensation that Clare was waiting for him to say something significant, but he didn’t know where to start, as everything seemed equally and terribly significant. The universe was at stake, after all. So he continued to look at her without saying anything.
Eventually, Clare said something. ‘What are you doing here?’
To his own surprise Chris felt himself flaring up. He realised he must be storing up quite a lot of aggression under all his confusion, excitement and constant near-brushes with death, and it had now found its outlet. ‘How am I supposed to know!?’ he spluttered.
‘Don’t have a go at me!’ shouted Clare.
Chris gestured to the windows of the Professor’s study, which between the grubby flower-pattern curtains showed walls of sheer rock. Any hope that he had suddenly and impossibly been transported back to the relative normality of Cambridge had been swiftly crushed by the sight.
‘All right, you tell me what the Professor’s room is doing here, on an asteroid in the middle of outer space?’ he shouted at Clare.
‘Oh, you may well ask!’ snapped Clare back.
‘I am asking!’ shouted Chris.
‘Ask the Professor!’ shouted Clare, pointing at the little man, who stood next to the Doctor at the brass instrument panel.
‘But he’s dead!’ shouted Chris.
‘Well, durrr, I know that!’ shouted Clare.
‘Children, children, ssh!’ called the Doctor.
Clare and Chris stopped shouting and went back to looking at each other again.
The Doctor turned back to the Professor and slid his long fingers over the instrument panel. ‘A Type 12 Mark 1 TARDIS, if I’m not mistaken, Professor Chronotis?’
The Professor nodded. ‘Do you like it?’
‘O
h it’s ace, Professor,’ said the Doctor, ‘ace! And you arrived in your TARDIS just in the nick of time. I’m beginning to appreciate how wonderful it must be for other people when I do that.’
‘This is a TARDIS, too?’ boggled Chris, gesturing around and about.
‘Obviously,’ muttered Clare. She indicated K-9. ‘And that’s a robot dog, in case you hadn’t worked that one out either.’
The Professor squirmed up at the Doctor, looking a little guilty. ‘It’s strictly unofficial. I’m not really allowed one.’
‘No you aren’t,’ said the Doctor darkly. For a moment Chris wondered if the Doctor was about to release one of his sudden explosions of anger at the nice old man. But instead he grinned and hugged the Professor warmly. ‘And there’s no better way to hide it than by living in it, you old sly boots.’
The Professor smiled back but then his expression grew grave. ‘Doctor, where is Skagra?’
‘Skagra?’ said the Doctor as if he had all but forgotten the pressing business of the day. ‘Skagra? Oh yes, Skagra. Well. He’s got Romana. He’s got the TARDIS. And he’s got the book.’ Before the Professor could do more than look horrified at this news, the Doctor pointed at him and said loudly, but with an unnerving casualness, ‘I thought you were dead.’
‘Yes, so did I,’ said the Professor. ‘But about Skagra—’
‘Did you really?’ exclaimed the Doctor. He peered down at the brass controls. ‘I presume that you installed a very, very naughty emergency defence programme into your TARDIS’s sub-routines? Temporal orbit, crossing your own timeline to cheat death, that general sort of absolutely forbidden and highly criminal sort of thing?’
‘Well yes, I did,’ said the Professor sheepishly. ‘And then stabilised it with a little help from this charming young lady.’ He gestured to Clare.
Clare gave a little bow. To Chris it seemed quite a pointed little bow. Pointing at him.
‘You helped bring him back to life?’ he shouted.
‘So what if I did?’ snapped Clare. ‘I’m not an idiot.’
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