Doctor Who: Harvest of Time

by Alastair Reynolds

  She drove the extinguisher home again. It was hard work, sapping strength with every swing, but on every second or third impact she felt that same splintering crunch. This was probably not the way fire extinguishers were meant to be handled, it was true. She just hoped the door would give in first.

  ‘And then you and me, Lovelace, we’re going to have words,’ McCrimmon said.

  At that same moment, oblivious to the escape attempt going on below, Lovelace was making his furtive way through the rig. He had the automatic in his hand, but concealed behind his back, just in case he had the misfortune to bump into anyone along the way. He knew his way around the place by now, but it was never an environment in which he was going to feel at home. Corridors of metal and plumbing, with tiny windows or no windows at all, made him nervous, as if he was a rat in a laboratory maze. Nice whitewashed corridors of power were more his thing. The sooner this mess was sorted out and he could go back to the calm hierarchies of the Ministry, the better.

  He didn’t like what he’d had to do to the McCrimmon woman, but it wasn’t as if she hadn’t been asking for it, poking her nose into government business she’d been told to keep well out of. Trouble had been brewing from the moment the other platform vanished into the sea. It would have been a lot easier for all involved if the Lomax man hadn’t had the bad form to actually survive, and start blabbing about the sea opening up. Of course they would have had to shut him up one way or the other. But it had been a mistake to let the other one anywhere near him.

  Lovelace froze, momentarily troubled. The other one, the man they arranged to extract from the prison when he was needed, and return when he was not … him. But the man’s name felt elusive, like one of those puzzle pictures where you had to squint to see something in the picture, something that kept flickering in and out of focus. The Bast … the Master. That was it, the Master.

  The alien. The Time Lord.

  Him.

  Concussion, Lovelace thought. The woman had delivered a good whack with that fire extinguisher. Deserved all she got in return, too. The upstart Scot was lucky he hadn’t shot her and dumped her body overboard. With everything at stake, he’d have been within his rights. Did she honestly think her life counted for more than national security?

  Lovelace smeared a hand under his nose – the blood was beginning to dry up, though his nose made an ominous and painful click when he touched it.

  He opened a metal door, climbed the staircase back up to the administrative level, still keeping the pistol tucked into the small of his back. Quickly he reached the corridor where McCrimmon kept her office. He thought of her down below, kicking and screaming against the electronically locked door. With all the noise that came with a working oil rig, even one in the middle of a phased shutdown of normal operations, there wasn’t a chance of anyone hearing her.

  He touched his nose again. Felt like there was something hard and bony moving around in there, some cartilaginous thing that was no longer connected to the surrounding tissue.

  ‘Where’s Eddie?’

  Lovelace stopped. It was Irwin, McCrimmon’s burly deputy – he had just come around the corner at the other end of the corridor. Another Scot with a chip on both shoulders – it was like they had a production line running. Lovelace had taken an instinctive dislike to the bearded Glaswegian from their first meeting.

  ‘Miss McCrimmon?’ Lovelace hammed. ‘I was wondering the same thing! She seems to have abandoned her duties.’

  ‘Not too likely, if I know Eddie.’ The Scot’s eyes were naturally squinty and suspicious. Now he made them ever squintier. ‘What’s up with your face? Why are you keeping your hand behind your back?’

  Nothing for it. Lovelace brought the automatic into plain view. ‘Shut up.’

  ‘What have you done? Where’s Eddie?’

  ‘Safe. More than you’ll be, if you don’t shut up.’

  ‘You’ve locked her somewhere, haven’t you?’

  Lovelace jabbed the pistol threateningly. ‘I said shut up.’

  ‘Listen to me carefully, Callow. I don’t know what you or your pal are up to, and frankly I don’t care.’

  ‘I’m Lovelace,’ he said.

  ‘Callow, Lovelace, you’re both interchangeable, like Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum. And you know what? It disnae matter. I’ve got more important matters on my mind than some bampots from the government. We’re in the middle of an evacuation! We’ve lost one rig, lost contact with another, and there’s something not right on a third! I’d very much like to have a wee chat with my boss. And you’ve got the cheek to think you can point that thing at me?’

  Lovelace opened the door. ‘Get inside.’

  Irwin looked at the automatic, seemed to weigh his chances, before thinking better of offering resistance. ‘You’re mad, Lovelace. Totally doolally flip.’

  ‘I said get inside.’

  He stood away from the opening door, waggling the automatic to encourage Irwin to enter the office. ‘Stand over there, by the filing cabinet.’ Lovelace followed Irwin inside and closed the door behind them.

  ‘What are you hoping to get away with?’

  ‘Stand still. One move, and I’ll shoot you. And don’t give me any nonsense about critical systems. We’re a long way from the drilling gear here.’

  Lovelace pulled the office chair out on its castors and settled into the desk, his back to the window. Good, the computer was still switched on. He placed the automatic within easy reach and hammered at the keys, until the lines of flickering green text on the screen began to update. Irwin twitched and Lovelace proved how quickly he could pick up the automatic again. ‘I’m quite serious, Mr Irwin. I shall not hesitate.’

  With the secure connection to the Ministry established, Lovelace picked up the telephone handset. ‘Yes. Yes, it’s Lovelace. Get me Callow, immediately. No, I can’t wait.’

  ‘Having a chinwag with your pal, are you?’ Irwin asked.

  Lovelace ignored him, waiting for Callow to come on the line. He heard the rattle of typewriters, the hum of traffic through poorly insulated windows, the distant chime of Big Ben. He had definitely drawn the short straw, having to nurse the equipment back here while Callow returned to the familiar comforts of town.

  ‘Yes?’ Callow sounded irritated.

  ‘It’s Lovelace. What the blue blazes is happening? Who authorised this evacuation?’

  ‘I tried to reach you,’ Callow said suavely. ‘There’s some disturbance on the coast – army and air force mobilised, UNIT involvement. Cover story is it’s an exercise, but I think we can draw …’

  ‘Never mind that. What about the platforms?’ He glanced at Irwin again. ‘Is it true? Has another platform vanished?’

  ‘Communications are a bit muddled at the moment – lot of misinformation flying around. I’d sit tight if I were you. Probably all have blown over by morning.’

  ‘I’m not an idiot, Callow. It can’t be a coincidence that all this has happened since we initiated the experiment …’ He directed another look at Irwin, debating with himself how much he dared reveal. If he was going to have to end up shooting or silencing Irwin, it really didn’t matter. ‘The man. The chap.’

  ‘The chap, old boy?’

  ‘The one in the prison. Him. What’s his … status?’

  ‘Status?’

  ‘For pity’s sake, it’s a simple question!’ Lovelace used his free hand to knead his temples. ‘Perishing woman hit me with a fire extinguisher. I think I’ve suffered local amnesia. Can’t seem to hold the chap’s name in my head …’

  ‘No,’ Callow said, a wondering tone in his voice. ‘It’s not just you. I’ve been having … difficulty. Ever since we returned him to the prison. Him … his name.’

  ‘I almost had it just now. The M … The M …’ But that was as far as Lovelace could go.

  ‘Something’s wrong,’ Callow said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘It’s tied in. The platforms … the military activity. The amnesia. We’ve
opened a can of worms, Lovelace.’

  ‘I want to get off the platform,’ he said decisively, all of his options suddenly crystallising. ‘There’s a queue to get aboard the helicopters. But I can use government privilege to secure a seat.’

  Irwin shook his head, disgusted.

  ‘What about the equipment?’ Callow’s voice was a buzzing little irritant on the other end of the telephone. ‘You can’t just leave it unattended! If the platform isn’t lost, and the Russians …’

  ‘I’ll destroy it. That was always the plan, wasn’t it? Scuttle the equipment, if there’s any chance of it falling into enemy hands?’

  ‘Is it still operating?’

  ‘As we left it. But I can power it down, and initiate the self-destruct.’

  ‘After all we invested …’

  ‘It has to be done, Callow. There’s no other choice.’

  ‘Behind you,’ Irwin said.

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘I’d look behind you, if I were you.’ The Scotsman’s voice was icily calm. ‘There’s something crawling up the outside of the window.’

  Yates swerved hard as a middle-aged man, wearing wellingtons and a brown overcoat, ventured into the path of the lorry. The lorry clipped the man and sent him flying into bushes along the road. Yates made to brake, but the Doctor touched a hand to the steering wheel.

  ‘Carry on, Mike. That man’s long past any help we can give him. He was dead from the moment the Sild took control of his body.’

  Yates breathed out heavily. He had seen some dreadful things in his time with UNIT, but little to compare with what the day had already brought. But he nodded and continued, trusting the Doctor’s word.

  After that, it only got worse. The vehicles, skewed across the road, presented no hindrance to the heavy UNIT lorries. Even a double-decker bus, parked diagonally, was not too large to be shoved aside. But the Doctor eyed the empty bus with extreme trepidation. The Sild took their hosts in ones and twos to begin with, but always their operational objective would be to claim larger groupings. No sooner had this fear crystallised than a trio of elderly women emerged from behind the cover of a white Transit van, tipped over on its side. The women shuffled out into the middle of the road, arms hanging stiffly at their sides, heads lolling as if they had nodded off halfway through a game of bingo. Again Yates’s reaction was to swerve, though there was barely room for the lorry.

  Yates’s hands had a death grip on the steering wheel. His eyes were nearly closed.

  ‘I can’t do this.’

  ‘Mike, listen to me carefully. These people are already dead. What you are driving towards are alien creatures, no different from the Axons or Autons – you understand? They’re not people, not any more. Now, in all likelihood there are dozens of Sild waiting in hiding, waiting for us to slow or hesitate. If one of those things gets aboard this vehicle, we’ve had it.’

  ‘It still seems like you’re asking me to drive through innocent people.’

  ‘They’re not people any more. They’re Sild weapons.’

  They drove on. Yates kept his nerve, even when three police officers stepped out into the road and raised their hands, in stiff unison, as if all three were being worked by the same puppeteer. The lorry hit the police and bounced over them, exactly as if they were speed bumps.

  The horror of it, the unspeakable horror, the thing the Doctor dared not communicate to his friends, was that Sild control was nowhere near as simple as instantaneous death for the host. True, death was guaranteed from the moment of Sild attachment. True also that the host had lost all volition, all conscious control of their own body and to a degree their own higher mental processes. But something remained – enough residual awareness to know that they were being ridden and controlled.

  ‘Director Childers on the radio for you, sir,’ said Benton, passing the Doctor one of the handsets.

  ‘We see smoke,’ the Doctor said. ‘It looks to be coming from inside the perimeter. Have you managed to keep them out?’

  Childers sounded faint but otherwise his normal self. ‘For now. The smoke’s coming from outside – they’ve crashed some cars against the fence and set fire to them, trying to break through. Where are you?’

  The Doctor glanced at Yates. ‘About a mile from the gatehouse. It’s getting pretty thick out here, but we should be able to make it through. Is the Master … the prisoner … still under observation?’

  ‘The … man? Yes.’ Childers seemed to lose himself. ‘What were we talking about?’

  ‘Director Childers, listen to me carefully. For reasons that I won’t go into, you may be finding it very hard to keep the idea of the prisoner in mind.’

  ‘Yes …’ Childers said, with a peculiar mixture of relief and suspicion. ‘I thought it was me. It’s only started happening in the last hour or so.’

  ‘It’s not just you, but it is very, very important that you cling on to the idea that there’s a man in your care. Nothing matters more than this, Childers. You’ve got to keep that man safe. Don’t let him out of your sight, and don’t let anyone near him.’

  So it had reached Childers. That was a measure of how far the fade was progressing. Childers, who knew nothing of the Master’s true identity, who knew him only as Prisoner M, was beginning to lose grip on his memories as well.

  ‘Checkpoint ahead, sir,’ Benton said. ‘Looks like they’re still holding the fort.’

  ‘Slow down,’ the Doctor said.

  The approach to the checkpoint was a chaos of cars, smashed, toppled and burned. Scarves of smoke and mist obscured the view. People were moving between the vehicles, and some of them had weapons. Rifles, shotguns – enough to trouble even a fully armed UNIT detachment. As one of the figures, a milkman, turned his back to the lorry, the Doctor made out the glass-and-silver ambulator clamped to his neck. Some of the other hosts bore evidence of recent gunshot injuries, gruesome enough in one or two cases that it seemed impossible that the human could be still breathing. Indeed, they didn’t have to be. Sild could make corpses move, for a while.

  Once again, revulsion touched the Doctor to the absolute core of his being. This could not continue.

  ‘Shouldn’t there be a barrier here?’ Benton asked.

  The Doctor nodded. The kiosk and barrier were gone, but the entrance was still under guard. Four uniformed men waited at the entrance. Every now and then one of them would aim their sub-machine gun over the heads of the gathering hosts, warning them to move back.

  The Doctor nodded. ‘Benton’s right. It’s too easy. Those guards are under Sild control.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Yates asked. ‘I know one of those chaps – Atkins. He was in my old regiment.’

  ‘Look at the bulges at the backs of their necks,’ the Doctor answered. ‘They’ve been clamped. Including, I’m afraid, your friend Atkins.’

  ‘But Childers said …’ Benton began.

  ‘Childers was mistaken.’ The Doctor settled his hand on the lorry’s steering wheel. ‘Something’s broken through the perimeter. Durlston Heath has already been compromised!’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Picking up the automatic, Lovelace swivelled the chair just enough to bring the window into view, while still being able to keep half an eye on Irwin.

  The Glaswegian had not been lying. Something was on the other side of the window. Lovelace’s first impression was that it was a very strange kind of crab. They were hundreds of feet above the waves and somehow this crab had managed to climb out of the water, all the way up the outside of the platform, clinging on against the wind and the spray, or had perhaps been scooped out of the water by a bird, then somehow dropped here, on the high levels, and not been broken or killed in the process. But, as his second glance confirmed, it was not really a crab at all.

  ‘That thing …’ he said slowly. ‘Is it … something to do with the rig?’

  ‘Are you out your mind, Lovelace? Does it look like it’s anything to do with the rig?’

  The crab was mechanic
al, Lovelace now saw. It had a fist-sized central body, made of some silvery metal or plastic, and long spindly legs radiating out from the middle. It was spread across the window, from one part of the frame to the next. In addition to the legs, it also had whip-thin tentacles or feelers. They were tapping the glass, moving up and down the edge where the glass slotted into the frame. Tap, tap, tap, gentle enough that he had not been aware of it during the telephone conversation. But now it was quite clear that the crab-machine was trying to find a way into the room from the outside.

  ‘It’s a robot … or something.’

  ‘There’s something on its back,’ Irwin said. ‘I can see it from this angle. A sort of glass pod or bottle. Has this got anything to do with your experiment, Lovelace?’

  The crab’s tapping had intensified. Lovelace remembered the telephone. ‘Callow … listen to me. There’s something trying to get into the rig.’

  The glass made a scraping noise, jarring in the frame.

  ‘It’s going to have that window loose any moment now,’ Irwin said. ‘Eddie was always saying it was draughty in here!’

  Callow said: ‘You’re imagining things, Lovelace. That concussion of yours is obviously—’

  ‘Shoot it!’

  For once, it seemed to Lovelace that Irwin offered excellent advice. He did not like that crab at all. It seemed profoundly wrong on any number of levels. He aimed the automatic at the window, put down the telephone handset to screen his eyes against splintering glass, and fired.

  The gun made a surprisingly loud crack. The window shattered. The crab was still there, still spread across the frame, even though jagged pieces of glass were stuck into it. A snap of cold, salty air came through the broken window. The bullet had gone right through the body of the crab. He could see sky through it: a perfect circle of cloudy grey.