Doctor Who: Harvest of Time

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘You are correct,’ said Susan Cooper, speaking in the same slow, slurred tones. ‘We should not complain about an error of a few hundred kilometres.’ Slowly, she reached up to smear a strand of drool from her lips. All of them were having trouble with some aspects of motor control. ‘All is in hand. The primary mission objective remains achievable.’

  They continued south. There was not much traffic on the roads at this early hour but occasionally they passed another vehicle or lone pedestrian. The sky brightened by degrees. Now and then they slipped through a small hamlet or town.

  ‘The unit McGinty found,’ Hawes said, speaking of the beachcomber as if he were not present at all. ‘The damaged ambulator. What became of its Sild?’

  ‘McGinty’s memories say it was consumed by indigenous fauna,’ answered the body of the beachcomber. With a flicker of revulsion the Sild riding McGinty thought of the grey and white flying things, the raucous scavengers. So alien, so mindlessly carnal. Seagulls, that was what McGinty had thought of them as. The very word carried torrents of horror. To cross billions of years of time, to submit oneself to the glory of a one-way mission, only to end up being digested in the belly of one of those flapping, squawking, barely sentient nightmares …

  ‘That could have been us,’ Ian Staple intoned.

  ‘Yes,’ said Susan Cooper.

  Pat McGinty chipped in with: ‘I dislike this world.’

  ‘Soon it will be different,’ said Archie Hawes. ‘The process of conversion has begun. The oceans and air of Praxilion will change it. Soon it will not be the same.’

  ‘Take the next left.’ A grubby road map was spread on Pat McGinty’s lap. He had been tracking their progress since they had departed the police station. ‘It will bring us to the sea. New arrivals should be coming in. We will meet them.’

  Hawes shifted gears awkwardly as the car negotiated the sharp junction. It took them from a secondary road onto what was little more than a single-tracked country lane, bordered on either side by high dark hedgerows.

  They met no other traffic. The hedgerows thinned away and the pothole-strewn road traversed a bare and windswept heath, before dipping gradually down to the sea. They passed a disused caravan site. At the end of the lane was a rubbish-littered dead end, a forlorn picnic area overlooking a short stretch of sand. The sea glittered in the morning light, low-breaking waves like lines of etched platinum. After a few moments the four occupants emerged from the panda car. They shuffled slowly to the top of the sand, their legs moving more than their arms. They walked like poorly animated figures in a cheaply produced cartoon.

  Susan Cooper stretched a hand and arm before her like a rustic signpost. ‘There. It forms.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Archie Hawes.

  A lens-shaped hole appeared in the cloudless air. It darkened to purple, then black. A shaft of water emerged, ramming down. It hit the sea about a kilometre from the shore, drawing up a veil of mist. The inundation continued for several seconds, before ceasing abruptly.

  ‘We must do better than this,’ McGinty said. ‘If we do not, it will take many centuries to drain Praxilion’s oceans and atmosphere. There is always a risk that the native Praxilions will resist our efforts to bleed their world. Their Red Queen is clever.’

  ‘We shall prevail,’ Cooper said. ‘When we have brought this facet into the Assemblage, our control will be limitless. We will hasten Praxilion’s demise. This world will soon be fit for Sild occupation.’

  ‘I see the newcomers,’ Susan Cooper announced, lowering the angle of her arm like a railway signal.

  From the froth and foam of the heavier waves stirred by the arrival of the water shaft, distinct bright things scuttled onto wet sand. Sild ambulators, in ones and twos, fours and fives and then tens and twenties, were coming ashore. The humans acting as Sild hosts had all seen similar sights on half-remembered wildlife documentaries, but this was no natural migration. The Sild pilots, drawing deep from the memories of their human vehicles, felt a prickle of awe. This was still no invasion force, not by the numbers that would come through in time. But at least there were enough to begin to get things done.

  The steel crabs scuttled up the sand. They moved in straggly lines and columns. They were homing in on the four watchers.

  ‘Ready the fifth host,’ said McGinty.

  Without a word, Archie Hawes and Susan Cooper went round to the back of the panda car. They opened the boot. They stared down at the policeman bound and gagged in the back of the car. This was their colleague, PC Nick Wheen. There had not been an ambulator available to control him when the police station was taken, so they had brought his body with them instead.

  Wheen squirmed against his restraints. His eyes bulged in terror and incomprehension. He did not understand why his friends and colleagues had turned against him in this manner.

  ‘We are Sild now,’ Susan Cooper explained, with a blank lack of empathy. ‘You are about to become Sild. The ambulator will attach itself to your nervous system and interface with your brain. You will retain some measure of consciousness, although there will not be free will. But you will begin to understand. Please stand by.’

  Wheen tried to say or scream something. Susan Cooper and Archie Hawes reached in and extracted him from the car. They placed him down on the ground, still with his knees tucked under him the way he had been stuffed into the car. They stood either side of him, their hands on his shoulders. Ambulators surrounded the kneeling form. Some began to scuttle nearer. Wheen’s eyes widened more than seemed possible. He shook his head like a damp dog. He did some more muffled screaming.

  Three of the ambulators were on him. Their pilots were keen to take first charge of a host. The crabs tussled and squabbled. Two dropped off, landing on their backs. The third made its nimble way up the top of Wheen’s back. Wheen thrashed splendidly. The Sild tugged down the back of his collar, exposing a washing label. The Sild pulled aside the label, revealing an area of skin. It gripped tight with legs and tentacles. It pushed its neural probes into Wheen. The probes extended self-replicating structures deep into him, hunting for cortical matter.

  Wheen jerked and spasmed.

  Wheen became Sild.

  He was still. The terror ebbed from his eyes.

  Wheen stood. He brushed dirt from his knees. He was stiffer even than the others. It would take a little while for his pilot to learn how to use the host.

  He looked down at his feet, at the many other scuttling crabs.

  ‘There is room for me in the passenger compartment. The other ambulators can go in the back of the vehicle. There is room for them. We will find other hosts for them soon.’

  The others agreed that this was a good plan.

  ‘So you’re off to see … so and so,’ Yates said, shovelling a second helping of bacon onto his plate.

  Jo looked amused. ‘You mean the Master? Yes, Mike, that’s why I’m having an early breakfast. The Doctor wanted to get going as soon as possible.’ Jo used metal tongs to place two pieces of limp toast on her plate, then carried the tray back to one of the many vacant tables, Yates following close behind.

  ‘You don’t think he’s mixed up in all of this, do you?’

  ‘It’s the Master, Mike. It’d be silly not to ask a few questions.’ Jo settled into her plastic-backed chair.

  ‘Have you met him?’

  Jo looked up, thrown by this odd enquiry. ‘Met who?’

  ‘The chap we were just talking about! You know, old … what’s his face.’ Yates made a show of scratching his chin, signifying the Master’s beard.

  Jo was starting to wonder if this wasn’t all some elaborate and not very tasteful prank. ‘Mike, of course I’ve met the Master. Many times. So have you! What an odd thing to ask!’

  Yates seemed unfazed. ‘We deal with so many funny characters, it’s hard not to lose track of them. If it’s not the Yeti, it’s the Cybermen; if it’s not them, it’s the Autons or the flipping Silurians. You can’t blame us poor old military sorts if we get a
bit muddled now and then.’

  Jo spread some grout-like butter onto the toast. ‘You remember all of them clearly enough.’

  ‘It’s not like they didn’t give us a few headaches, is it? The Doctor and the Brig at loggerheads, the world in peril …’

  Jo frowned, sensing that there was more to this than a bit of random mischief. ‘So you remember the Autons and cave monsters, but you can’t hold the Master’s name in your head for more than a few seconds? And yet the Master and the Nestene Consciousness were working together to direct the Auton invasion – or that’s what the Master thought, anyway.’

  Yates jabbed a fork into his bacon.

  ‘What who thought?’

  ‘The Master, Mike! Are you really having that much difficulty remembering him?’ Jo bit into her toast. ‘But it’s not just you, is it? There was that whole strange conversation with the Brig last night. He put it down to tiredness, but now I’m starting to wonder.’

  ‘Wonder what?’

  ‘Mike, something weird’s happening. I need to talk to the Doctor.’ Jo stood from the table with a feeling of profound foreboding, as if the ground under her might give way at any moment. It was not the first time she had felt this way during her time at UNIT, but that did not make the sensation any more pleasant.

  ‘You’ve left some toast,’ Mike Yates pointed out.

  Jo pushed her tray over to Yates’s side of the table. ‘It’s your lucky day …’

  A sleek, shark-shaped black helicopter skulked low over the English countryside. The Master was enjoying the scenery, the deep-shadowed lanes, the frosted verges and neatly bordered fields still covered by a quilt of early morning mist. It was not that he took any great delight in these things in their own right, but they served as a pleasing reminder, reinforcing the fact that he would soon be leaving this planet and its deeply tedious pastoral vistas. He longed for space and the infinite, the playgrounds of chaos.

  ‘You needn’t look so pleased with yourself,’ Callow said, from the passenger seat opposite the Master. ‘One more slipup, one more thing you can’t explain, and we’ll forget this arrangement ever existed.’ He paused to pat down an aileron of stiff hair, lifting up from where it had been pasted onto his scalp. ‘That business with Lomax was the last straw. You were supposed to intimidate the man, not drive the poor beggar to suicide!’

  ‘Lomax was fragile,’ the Master answered placidly. ‘In his agitated mental state, his continued silence could not have been counted on. Or would you rather have run the risk of him speaking to UNIT again?’

  Callow jabbed a finger at the Master. ‘You overstepped your mark. Perhaps it is time to review our relationship. I should have listened to Lovelace … he never liked the idea of bringing you in on MERMAN.’

  The Master shrugged. ‘Without my technical assistance, you’d still be blundering around in the dark like the mental cavemen you are. But if you feel my usefulness has come to an end, so be it. I’m sure you can iron the remaining bugs out of your equipment, given about twenty years of trial and error.’

  ‘You know we can’t wait twenty years,’ Callow said. ‘We need it now. Before the Russians or Chinese get a march on us. Or, god forbid, the French. MERMAN must work!’

  MERMAN: Marine Equipment for the Reception, Modulation and Amplification of Neutrinos. It was the Navy’s latest piece of super-gadgetry, so secret that only a handful of top brass even knew that it existed.

  For years, military men had struggled with a way of communicating with their submarine fleets while at sea. Radio could not penetrate to the necessary depths, and was susceptible to interception and eavesdropping. Ultra-low frequency sound waves had tremendous range, but could be easily jammed by enemy installations.

  Neutrinos, on the other hand, were a gift from physics. These subatomic particles slipped through matter so effortlessly that it was possible to send a beam of them right through the Earth itself, from one side of the planet to the other. Of course, there were technical hurdles to be overcome before the idea could be made workable. The neutrinos had to be created, focused into some kind of beam that could be aimed in the right direction. The beam had to carry a signal. Harder still, the detection apparatus had to be compact enough to fit aboard a submarine.

  None of that was insurmountable. But after years of trying to get it all to work reliably, the government had reluctantly decided that they needed outside assistance.

  Who better than a resident alien, a humanoid genius with a grasp of science and technology far beyond anything known on Earth?

  At the highest level of government, the Master’s true nature was a matter of record. So Callow and Lovelace had come to him, even while he was still in prison. Their terms were simple. In return for offering technical assistance, the Master would be granted certain luxuries and relaxations in the terms of his confinement.

  The Master, to begin with, had turned them down. Their concessions were insufficiently attractive. The problem of making the neutrino equipment function was as boring and trivial to him as a game of noughts and crosses. He could have done it in his sleep, if he had ever had need for sleep.

  ‘Go and ask the Doctor,’ he had said. ‘He already works for the government.’

  ‘The Doctor won’t touch a military project,’ Callow had pointed out. ‘You, on the other hand, should have no such qualms. You love weapons and warfare. You’ve maimed and murdered thousands. You kill without the slightest hesitation.’

  ‘You’re too kind.’

  But when the Master had had time to reflect on their offer, he had begun to see a possibility quite beyond anything Callow and Lovelace might have had in mind.

  Their neutrino generating and receiving equipment was exceedingly primitive. They barely understood how it worked. With a tweak here, a tweak there, the Master could easily make it do all that Callow and Lovelace wished. Instantaneous, unbreakable communication with submarines, no matter where they were in the world.

  But more than that? Why not?

  Could MERMAN also offer a way to achieve his complete freedom?

  It had seemed almost too good to be true. And yet the evidence was already mounting that he had been right to take the initiative. He had sent out a plea for action. The plea had been answered – or was at least in the course of being answered. In a very little while, he felt certain, help would arrive. No mere terrestrial prison could hold him – not even the elaborate measures of Durlston Heath. The Master would be free again. And he would have no one to thank but himself.

  He liked it that way.

  ‘We’re nearly there,’ Callow said. He dug into his pocket and came out with a stubby grey box, the size of a match case. ‘You know what I have to do now. Are you ready?’

  There had never been a moment when the Master had not been aware of the bite of the metal collar fixed around his neck, just under the fabric of his tunic. ‘Is it really necessary?’

  ‘You know it is. Childers must keep believing you’re being taken away for interrogation.’

  ‘The man is a fool.’ The Master settled back into his seat. ‘Do what you must, Callow. It must be some compensation for the torments you endured in boarding school.’

  There were three buttons on the grey box, each of which was protected by a flip-up cover. The first one armed the unit. The second delivered an incapacitating electrical pulse, enough to kill most men and easily stun a Time Lord. The third, if depressed, would trigger a small but lethal explosive charge. The Master was in no doubt that Callow or Lovelace would use that button, if they thought he was trying to make a run for it. They had used the stun option many times.

  ‘Steel yourself,’ Callow said, flipping up the protective cover and hovering his thumb over the second button.

  ‘I am.’

  Callow delivered the stun. The electrical shock hit the Master. He grimaced, barely able to move, even as the pain consumed every conscious thought. And then there was dreamless oblivion. Of course it was dreamless. The Master had never dream
ed in his life.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Jo found the Doctor bent over a cluttered brown desk in the UNIT laboratory. A jeweller’s lens was jammed into one eye. Clamped before him on the desk was the TARDIS chronometric stress analyser, into which the Doctor was poking and prodding a pair of tweezers. The Doctor broke off from a piece of particularly unmelodious humming.

  ‘Just a moment, Susan …’

  ‘It’s not Susan! It’s me, Jo! Remember?’ She plonked a mug of coffee down on the bench next to the apparatus. ‘I thought you wanted to make an early start! Don’t tell me you’ve been up all night fiddling with that thing?’

  The Doctor sighed, withdrawing the tweezers and popping the lens from his eye. ‘And I was getting somewhere, until you created a small seismic shockwave with that mug.’ But the Doctor’s irritated mood was temporary. He glanced at the wall clock. ‘Goodness – it really is time to leave, isn’t it? I’m afraid I got carried away.’

  ‘Have you nearly repaired it?’

  ‘That’s the thing. I think I have, but it’s giving very strange readings. Either the thing’s broken beyond repair, or the time disruptions are about ten times stronger and more frequent than they were yesterday!’ The Doctor took a cautious sip from the coffee. ‘I suppose we ought to have a word with Lethbridge-Stewart, see if there haven’t been more reports …’

  ‘Doctor, I’m a bit worried about something.’

  Give the Doctor credit: he could be dismissive and absent, but when Jo really had something on her mind, he took her perfectly seriously. ‘What is it, Jo?’

  ‘Who’s the man we’re going to visit today?’

  ‘That’s rather a peculiar question, if you don’t mind my saying so.’

  ‘All the same, would you mind answering it?’

  ‘The Master, of course. He may or may not be mixed up in all this, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t have a word.’