Deep in the TARDIS storeroom, the Doctor surveyed his handiwork with less than total enthusiasm. But there was no time to improve the dubious aesthetics of the thing. A good five minutes had gone by since a soft, distant thump had signalled the TARDIS’s materialisation. It was now or never.
Carefully, reminding himself just how quickly it had been cobbled together, he lowered the thing onto his head. A tall gilt-edged mirror leant against one wall of the storeroom. The Doctor walked over to it, slowly and carefully, like a debutant with a book on her head, and checked his reflection. He sighed heavily.
‘With this thing on, it won’t matter whether it works or not,’ he mused to himself. ‘They’ll all be paralysed laughing at me.’
‘Crews report all ships are prepared,’ said the Kraag Commander.
Skagra fought down a wave of animal exultation. This was the time of destiny. His apotheosis. His plan had succeeded. But then he had always known it would. There was no need for excitement or unnecessary emotion of any kind. But perhaps a word or two to mark the occasion was appropriate.
‘Mark this moment,’ he said, calmly and smoothly as ever. The mind-slaves gathered behind him in a semicircle, looking with black eyes – his eyes – out at the stars. ‘This is the beginning of the new life, the new universe.’
He turned to the Kraag Commander and opened his mouth to give the order to launch the ships.
A wheezing, groaning sound came from behind him.
Skagra whipped around to see the wooden door of the Professor’s TARDIS fading up from transparency against the far wall.
All his thoughts of the Universal Mind were replaced by a sudden and terrible surge of violent hatred. And what made this even worse, what really made his blood boil, was that anyone could make his blood boil. For his whole life, Skagra had been cool, rational and logical, his emotions merely minor irritations. Now this one man, this buffoon, had consumed him with fury and animal rage. Skagra had long ago realised that other people in general were irritating. But how could one solitary person have taken being irritating to such an unbearably high level. But the worst offence the Doctor had committed against Skagra, the most unforgivable, was this emotional pollution. He had violated the inviolable. He would pay!
‘Doctor!’ he cried, the vein on his temple throbbing uncontrollably. ‘The man is like an itching flea on my skin! I shall eliminate him once and for all!’
He strode towards the wooden door, the mind-slaves following in perfect unison.
‘Out you come, Doctor!’ he cried. ‘Out you come! I know you are in there!’
But the door remained shut.
A voice from behind Skagra said, ‘Did someone call?’
Skagra head jerked around in the direction of the voice. The hated voice.
The Doctor was standing in the police box door of his own TARDIS. And he had something quite, quite ridiculous on his head.
Chapter 70
CLARE AND ROMANA were huddled around the scanner of the Professor’s TARDIS, staring in disbelief at the drama unfolding outside.
Clare would have been overwhelmed by the majesty of the asteroid’s celestial backdrop were it not for the rather small screen on which she was seeing it, and for the sight of poor Chris and those blank black eyes which threatened to overwhelm her in quite another way.
But when she saw the Doctor pop out from the police box behind Skagra, alive, well and wearing the most ludicrous collection of oddments jammed down over his curly hair, she felt like cheering and laughing. To her great relief, Romana obviously felt like cheering and laughing too, because she was.
‘He’s done it!’ Clare cried. ‘He made it!’
‘And he made that,’ said Romana, pointing to the thing on the Doctor’s head.
It looked like a cross between a colander, the back of an old Bakelite radio complete with knobs, a rusty car aerial, a string of fairy lights and bits of a dismembered computer. From the front sprouted a ridiculous bobbing prong with what appeared to be a tiny radar dish attached to the end. It was festooned with multicoloured wires, leads and connectors. At the very top was taped a boxy blue Ever Ready battery.
Clare’s smile faded slightly. ‘And that’s what’s going to save the day, is it?’
Skagra’s jaw dropped. ‘How-how-how…’ he stammered.
‘Er, “How did you get in there?”’ suggested the Doctor.
‘How-how did you get in there?’ spluttered Skagra.
The Doctor stepped insouciantly from the TARDIS.
‘What do you mean, “How did you get in there?”’ He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the police box. ‘It’s mine, I belong in there!’
‘As of now, Doctor,’ said Skagra, ‘you don’t belong anywhere. Anywhere at all. There is no place for you in my new universe!’
The Doctor sighed and shook his head regretfully. His headgear rattled but stayed put. ‘Do you know, Skagra, I thought you were different. But that mad gleam, that “universe will soon be mine” stuff… I do seem to bring it out in people.’
‘Enough!’ Skagra cried, and with an imperious gesture waved his mind-slaves forward.
They advanced on the Doctor, their arms outstretched. Their faces were contorted with anger, expressions identical to that of Skagra.
‘You shall die, Doctor!’ shouted Skagra. ‘You shall die – now!’
‘Yes, that one too,’ sighed the Doctor. ‘It’s a very interesting little theory. Let’s try putting it to the test, shall we?’
He reached up and pressed a button on the side of his helmet. The prong at the front glowed soft pink, like a tea-candle at a dinner party. The radar dish began to spin like a miniature fan. At the same time, the Doctor smiled his unmistakable toothy, silly smile.
A moment later, the mind-slaves turned to face Skagra and smiled the same unmistakable toothy, silly smile. K-9’s ears swivelled back and forth jauntily and a small length of ticker-tape chattered from his mouth, almost as if he were sticking his tongue out.
‘What – have – you – done?’ cried Skagra. There was an edge of panic in his voice.
The Doctor blinked innocently. The mind-slaves blinked innocently.
‘What have I done?’ said the Doctor. ‘No, no, Skagra, it’s more a question of what have you done. You used that deranged billiard ball of yours once too often. You forgot that there’s a copy of my mind in the sphere’s operational matrix too, isn’t there?’
Skagra roared with anger. ‘Kill him!’
The mind-slaves roared with anger. ‘Kill him!’ they cried, advancing once more on the Doctor.
The Doctor laughed. ‘Put the kettle on!’
The mind-slaves laughed. ‘Put the kettle on!’ they cried, turning away from the Doctor.
‘Kill him!’ screamed Skagra.
‘Kill him!’ chorused the mind-slaves.
‘Put the kettle on!’ laughed the Doctor.
‘Put the kettle on!’ chorused the mind-slaves.
The heads of the mind-slaves turned between Skagra and the Doctor, just like the crowd at a tennis match.
‘You see, Skagra,’ said the Doctor airily, ‘all I had to do was build this rather fetching apparatus –’ he tapped the helmet and the prong wobbled alarmingly – ‘to allow me remote control of the copy of my mind in the sphere’s matrix and re-route the command circuit to me, and not you. So basically speaking, in layman’s terms, I now have full charge of the Universal Mind – or as far as it stretches at the moment. All six of ’em.’
‘My mind is stronger!’ spat Skagra. ‘The matrix is attuned to my consciousness. You will never overcome my control.’ He closed his eyes, a frown of concentration creasing his brow. ‘Kill him!’ he hissed.
‘Put the kettle on!’ cried the Doctor at the same time.
Subjatric and Rundgar, who were closest to Skagra, cried ‘Kill him!’ and staggered in the general direction of the Doctor.
Scintilla and Chronotis were nearest to the Doctor, and chorused ‘Put the kettle on!’
Chris was in the middle of the small group. The Doctor watched as his face took on a bemused, dithering expression, as if unsure whether to kill the Doctor or put the kettle on.
‘So what was that you were saying about your mind being stronger?’ goaded the Doctor. ‘I think your little bunch are in two minds about that already, aren’t they? Stalemate, I’d say.’
Still concentrating furiously, Skagra snapped his fingers, and the Kraag Commander came to attention.
‘Kill the Doctor!’ Skagra spat through gritted teeth. ‘Kill him now!’
The Kraag raised its glowing red claws and advanced on the Doctor.
The Doctor blanched in alarm. His concentration faltered for a moment, and the mind-slaves moved as one towards him, once again under Skagra’s control.
The Doctor’s face creased with effort. ‘K-9!’ he called.
K-9’s eye-screen remained black as night, his blaster extended. ‘You must die, Doctor,’ he said.
The Kraag bore down on the Doctor, who leapt back, right into the path of K-9. Sweat erupted on the Doctor’s brow as he brought every ounce of his mental energy to bear on the metal dog.
‘K-9, I need you!’ the Doctor implored.
For a moment K-9’s eye-screen flickered red.
‘That’s it, boy!’ the Doctor cried. ‘Come on, you dear old thing, I’m giving you all I’ve got!’
He dodged another swipe from the furious Kraag, as K-9 shuddered, as if fighting his own internal battle. With a sudden metallic ping the tiny particle of sphere detached itself from K-9 and fell to the floor.
‘Master!’ chirped K-9, eye-screen now glowing a healthy red.
The Doctor beamed. ‘Well done! Now blast that Kraag!’ he ordered.
K-9’s ears swivelled in confusion. ‘But Master, this instruction contradicts your previous orders—’
‘I didn’t give you your mind back to quibble, K-9!’ shouted the Doctor. ‘Blast that Kraag!’
K-9’s nose laser fired at full power, the beam slicing into the great stony bulk of the Kraag Commander. It staggered back, away from the Doctor, and then stood transfixed, a few metres from the others, caught in the blazing laser energy.
The Doctor sighed with relief – just as the humanoid mind-slaves reached him, hands outstretched like claws, ready to tear him apart.
Skagra shouted an order. ‘The helmet! Destroy it!’ Chris obediently reached up to yank the device from the Doctor’s head.
The Doctor batted Chris’s hand away and, in the same sweeping movement, turned up a dial on the side of the helmet. The pink light of the prong glowed more intensely and the little radar dish became a spinning blur.
Instantly Chris and the other mind-slaves withdrew from the Doctor, turning as one back towards Skagra.
Skagra’s face was now red with the mental effort, his scar flushed a livid purple, the vein on his temple pulsed sickeningly.
The mind-slaves swung back towards the Doctor.
Sweat drenched the Doctor’s brow, and he gritted his teeth in pain.
The mind-slaves turned back to Skagra.
Clare felt Romana tugging at her sleeve. She tore her eyes from the scanner screen.
‘Now’s our chance,’ Romana said. She pointed at the scanner, to the large control console at the centre of the observation dome, some distance from the raging mind-battle. ‘I have to get to that console. You stay here.’
Clare looked again at the chaos on the screen. It would be easy to nod and stay put and follow orders. But she’d had enough of that. From Chris, from the Porter, from the Doctor and the Professor.
‘Not this time,’ Clare said firmly and strode to the door.
With a small smile of gratitude, Romana followed.
The Doctor barely registered the sight of the two women emerging from the wooden door in the far wall. He was all too conscious not only of the intense mental effort required of him to keep control of the slaves, but also the rapidly increasing heat emanating from the Kraag Commander transfixed in K-9’s ray.
‘Do you want to call half-time, Skagra?’ he called with a cheeriness he did not feel. ‘We can have a short break if you like, a few slices of lemon? Perk you up no end!’
In truth, the Doctor was also painfully aware that Skagra was probably right. His mind, programmed into the sphere’s matrix at its very beginning on the Think Tank, was inevitably going to reassert its control.
He began to feel the dark edges of unconsciousness tugging at his mind. How easy it would be, he thought, to relax, let go and join the minds in the sphere. He could feel all of them, their disjointed memories and personalities screaming out to him in that same thin, distorted inhuman babble he’d heard on the river what seemed like centuries ago.
Akrotiri, Ia, Caldera, Thira and Centauri, David Taylor, Professor Chronotis, Bernard Strong, Salyavin, Scintilla, Rundgar, Subjatric, and Chris Parsons –
Wave equations surfboard the Bird In Hand two lumps, no sugar sieve the wife I have to escape from Shada Gallifrey shall be mine the woven words Clare Clare I love you Clare –
‘I love you, Keightley!’ the Doctor cried out.
Clare and Romana ran to the control console, Clare’s eyes flicking instinctively towards Chris on the other side of the dome.
‘I love you, Keightley!’ cried the Doctor again.
But although it was the Doctor’s voice speaking, Clare somehow knew that it was Chris Parsons talking.
‘Chris! I love you too!’ she cried back.
Romana jerked Clare’s arm to get her attention. ‘Well now that we’ve finally got that out in the open, can I just remind you the universe is at stake?’
‘Sorry, sorry,’ said Clare. Romana gestured urgently to the console. ‘If we can bypass the isomorphic control, we can destroy this place!’
Clare blinked and tried to concentrate on the instrumentation as they had planned. Romana had explained that, theoretically, there must be a way to override Skagra’s bio-print, or at least bypass it, allowing them to activate the self-destruct sequence, blowing the asteroid to pieces before the Kraag ships could be launched.
Romana’s hands moved desperately over the controls. ‘I have to find a way,’ she said, hammering at a keyboard. ‘Where’s the subsidiary router on this thing?’
Clare felt a sudden surge of heat – coming not from the glowing Kraag but from the opposite direction.
She turned and gasped in horror. A platoon of Kraags, at least fifty of them, had entered the dome and was heading right for them.
Romana grabbed Clare and leapt back from the console as the nearest of the Kraags raised their glowing claws –
A moment later the control console was a heap of twisted, molten metal.
Romana looked despairingly at the smoking remains. ‘Trust Skagra to have a contingency plan,’ she sighed.
The Kraags advanced on Clare and Romana – and Clare remembered the face she’d seen when she’d first touched the book. That vision, she now knew, had been a premonition of her death –
But then she remembered the second vision. Her kissing Chris, her own voice saying ‘I suppose a police station is as good a place to start as any—’
That hadn’t happened yet. So there was still a chance. A chance for a future.
Clare grabbed a scorched pipe from the floor, suddenly emboldened by hope. She raised the pipe over her head and let out a feral cry of defiance in the face of fate.
The Kraags towered above her like a living wall of rock.
And then, quite suddenly – they dissolved. Each Kraag melted into twisting turning ashes.
Romana and Clare looked between the mounds of cinders where the Kraags had stood and each other.
‘What did you just do?’ gasped Clare at last.
‘I didn’t do anything,’ stammered Romana.
Clare looked behind her. The Doctor and Skagra remained locked in battle for control of the slaves, faces contorted in concentration, oblivious to everything going on around
them – but the Kraag Commander was sinking to its knees with a groan. Then its knees turned to powder and it disintegrated into red hot embers.
K-9 snapped off his beam. ‘Illogical outcome,’ he said, sounding terribly confused.
Clare lowered her pipe and Romana grabbed her hand as the dome began to shake and shudder around them, almost knocking them off their feet. The great rock walls that lined the perimeter began to creak and splinter, casting off clouds of choking dust.
‘But you must have done it,’ Clare called to Romana over the noise of cracking rock. ‘You must have switched on the self-destruct!’
Romana shook her head. ‘I didn’t even get past the access code,’ she said. ‘I don’t understand.’
Suddenly a voice echoed around the dome. ‘You silly pair,’ it said. ‘I did it, didn’t I?’
Clare boggled. The voice sounded matronly, rather stern but rather kind at the same time.
‘Don’t you see, my dears?’ the voice continued airily. ‘When those Kraags blew up the console, my subsidiary controls came on line. Skagra always has a contingency plan.’
‘And who – and what – are you?’ called Romana, looking utterly perplexed.
‘Another friend of the Doctor,’ said the voice. ‘We girls are very important to him, you know.’
‘So what have you done?’ asked Clare.
‘Oh I merely helped you along. I set up a reverse feed from the main Kraag generation chamber into the atmosphere. And unmade all of those frankly tiresome creatures. Do you know, there were ten thousand of the things tucked away in this dreary rock. There aren’t any longer.’
The asteroid lurched again and Clare shuddered as she saw a crack form in the invisible skin of the huge dome above them.
The voice gave a small, embarrassed cough. ‘The problem is, though, that this asteroid is made of much the same material. And my daring rescue has unfortunately set the whole place on the path of fairly instant destruction. Whoops!’
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