Irwin nodded. Watching out for crabs was very near the top of his agenda.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The TARDIS tumbled through the Vortex like a house brick tossed down a well, glancing from one pseudo-dimensional wall to the other. The Doctor had managed to regain some measure of stabilisation, but that was not remotely the same as saying that he had managed to bring the TARDIS back under true control.
As he moved around the console, trimming this, adjusting that, it began to dawn on him that there was more to this current lack of control than the jolt the TARDIS had received from the nuclear blast. Something about the Vortex itself was not right. There were currents and eddies where things should normally have been placid. A flow was pulling the TARDIS along.
The Doctor strove to apply more power. The TARDIS protested. The stresses on it were mounting.
‘It won’t work, you know.’
The Doctor had been so absorbed in his struggles that he had almost forgotten that he did not have the TARDIS to himself. But even then, it was a surprise to see that the Master was conscious, let alone capable of speech.
‘And you’re in a fit state to have an opinion on the matter, are you?’
The Master was still slumped against the wall where he had last come to rest. But his eyes were open and his head no longer lolling against his chest. ‘Even a simpleton, based on the evidence of his senses, could deduce that we are caught in some kind of temporal slipstream.’ His voice was thick, slurred, like a man waking up with a terrible hangover.
‘Well, obviously.’
‘Continue with unbiased field retardation and you’ll rip your precious TARDIS to shreds.’ The Master, with great effort, forced himself to his feet. He rubbed the back of his neck and stumbled toward the console, almost tripping before the Doctor caught him.
‘Steady on, old chap.’
The Master braced himself next to the console. ‘Field retardation will get you nowhere. Have you tried flux injection?’
‘Of course.’
‘Tachyon dampening?’
‘Naturally.’
‘And counter-gravitic torque equalisation?’
‘An Ogron would have tried counter-gravitic torque equalisation.’
‘And where did it get you?’
‘Insufficient quasi-mass. I tried to compensate, but all pseudo-time buffers were on overload.’
‘With a magnitude three disturbance, that scarcely surprises me.’ Without asking, the Master tapped some controls. He squinted at a set of dialled instruments. ‘How do I adjust your charged vacuum resonator to the next harmonic?’
‘You don’t.’ The Doctor coughed. ‘Because I haven’t got one. They didn’t start fitting them until the Type Forty-Fours.’
‘I see. And if I were to suggest cross-linking the output from your metric coupling module with the input from your neutron exchange?’
‘You’d be making a preposterous suggestion. You know, you really should sit down. A few minutes ago you had a Sild clamped to you. Just because you’re a Time Lord …’
‘A temporary inconvenience, no more than that.’ But the Master had no sooner completed this statement than he collapsed to the floor, lying half under the console’s overhang. The Doctor stepped over him gingerly, as one might a sleeping dog.
‘Cross-link metric coupling to neutron exchange – what a ridiculous idea,’ he muttered. ‘But if the flow is orthogonal to the Vortex, I suppose it might just work.’ Hurriedly, he made the necessary alterations. The change was not instantaneous, but gradually the flight of the TARDIS became smoother, more like her usual self.
The Doctor consulted the temporal indicators. They were still being pulled into the future at high velocity. This was still not independent time travel of the kind the TARDIS used to be capable of, before the Time Lords banished the Doctor to Earth – but either that injunction had been lifted remotely, to allow him to follow the Sild signal, or the temporal flow was simply too strong to be resisted.
But the Master’s suggestion had decoupled the TARDIS from the worst effects of that suction. With the right application of power, at the right time, it might even be possible to snap free and resume normal Vortex flight.
He studied the instruments again, and hovered his hand over the fat red mushroom of the emergency power boost.
‘Well. What are you waiting for?’
‘I don’t know.’
The Master hauled himself up from the floor and leaned against the console. ‘The Vortex flow is evidently the result of Sild interference.’
‘Then you believe me, finally?’
‘I can hardly doubt the evidence of my senses. The flow will eventually pull us forward to their time, like water running out of a sink. If you do not break us loose, we will be carried far beyond the Epoch of Mass Time Travel, to whenever and wherever the Sild have their primary concentration. Very few individuals have ever travelled as far beyond the EMTT as we are about to!’
‘I’m well aware of that.’
‘Then why don’t you snap us out of the flow?’
‘It won’t end, even if we break free. The Sild want you very badly, and they’ll find you again. No matter where you go, they’ll track you down.’
‘But for you, Doctor? You have no business with the Sild. They have no business with you, either. This petty little world we have just departed … why let it concern you?’
‘Because that petty little world is the nearest thing I have to a home. Something you wouldn’t understand. And even if I turn back now, the Sild won’t stop attacking the Earth. They have a taste for blood.’
‘Then you leave me no choice. I must fight you for control of the TARDIS.’
‘In your present state? You couldn’t fight your way out of a paper bag.’
The Master chuckled quietly. ‘I confess, Doctor, that for once you have the better of me. I am … weakened.’
‘You’re lucky to be alive.’
‘I had the benefit of a little extra protection.’ The Master tugged down the edge of his collar, exposing a gleam of silver. ‘Callow and Lovelace fitted me with this device months ago. A simple mechanism, designed to ensure my compliance.’
‘Callow and Lovelace?’
‘The government men, Doctor. From the Ministry of Defence. When they had me away from my prison, they didn’t want me escaping. This collar ensured that. A primitive radio circuit, wired to a small explosive charge. Crude, but I won’t deny its effectiveness. Thankfully for me, it also served to obstruct the Sild, when it attempted to achieve nerve-linkage.’
‘If you hadn’t pushed me into the water, we’d both have been away from there before the Sild arrived!’
‘Hindsight, Doctor. A foolish distraction, even for time travellers.’ The Master nodded at the Doctor’s hand, still poised over the power boost. ‘Well?’
To the Master’s visible surprise and suspicion, the Doctor stepped back and offered his upturned palm to the control. ‘It’s all yours. If you feel so strongly about this, use the boost.’
The Master’s eyes were narrowed. ‘I presume there’s some subterfuge involved?’
‘Nothing of the sort. But since this involves you, the decision should be yours. Hit the boost, and the TARDIS will return on its homing setting to UNIT headquarters. Given the chaos back home, it shouldn’t be too difficult for you to contrive an escape.’ The Doctor shrugged. ‘I won’t even stop you, old chap. But I’ll tell you this. It won’t end. The time-fade will progress so far that even you don’t remember who you are. And whatever it is the Sild want of you, they’ll keep looking. They’ve reached back into the EMTT from the extreme end of history. That means their range is effectively infinite. That means there’s nowhere at all for you to hide.’
‘You paint such an attractive scenario, Doctor. And the alternative?’
‘We ride this stream, all the way to the Sild. And then we find what it is they want of you. And then – if there’s a chance – we try and stop whatever it is they�
�re doing. If we can reverse their time interference, begin to undo the time-fade … so much the better.’
‘I always knew you had an optimistic streak, Doctor. I never realised it shaded into the basest idiocy.’
‘The Sild are undermining time,’ the Doctor stated, ignoring the Master’s insult. ‘If we wait too long, time travel itself, as we understand it, may become impossible. And then the Sild will truly have won.’
‘That would be … unfortunate.’
‘As I said, the choice is yours. You can accept this fate, or we can try and do something about it.’
The Master touched one of the white flashes in his beard. ‘I admit I have some curiosity. Coupled with a natural instinct for vengeance.’
‘For what they have done to Earth?’ the Doctor asked, surprised and encouraged.
‘For what they have done to me. The Earth can rot, for all I care.’
Though it stuck in the Brigadier’s craw, there was nothing for it but to extract his men from the vicinity of what remained of Durlston Heath. With Sild-controlled elements advancing from all directions – you could tell as much from the reports coming in from frightened and confused civilians – the small detachment of UNIT soldiers would have been easy prey. Air support was coming in now, helicopter and fast jet, and for the time being this was the only effective countermeasure – strafing and bombing anything that even looked suspicious, even a herd of animals moving in peculiar formation. A curfew had been established, people told to stay indoors – by now it was clear that the cover story of a military exercise could not be maintained.
But the Brigadier knew that the Sild advance could only be slowed, not stopped, and it would not just be the British Isles in peril. The time ruptures were continuing, reports coming in from other UNIT bases and personnel. More Sild were coming out of the sea, stretching the coastal defences to the limit. Despite UNIT’s best efforts, the aliens were managing to find hosts.
The Brigadier could only hope that he had done the right thing in attacking the power station. It was up to the Doctor now … if the Doctor was still alive.
Lethbridge-Stewart snatched up one of his many desk telephones. ‘Any news on those over-flights? I want photographic coverage the instant the dust settles. If you find the TARDIS in the ruins, I want to know the instant it happens. If you don’t find the TARDIS I want to know that as well.’
It was Yates on the other end, raising his voice above the thud of rotor blades. ‘Where do you want to deploy us, sir? If we’re being pulled out of the Durlston Heath area …’
‘I want you to rendezvous with Miss Grant at Eastmere – I’ve told them to hold that Hercules on the ground until you arrive.’
‘I see, sir. And Miss Grant – what do you want us to do with her – escort her back to headquarters for a dressing down?’
‘Don’t be an imbecile, Yates. I want you to go with her to Scotland. I have three helicopters on standby. If we can’t stop the Sild here, then our next best chance is where this mess all started, with the MERMAN project.’
‘MERMAN, sir?’
‘I’ll have briefing notes ready for you in Scotland.’
Lethbridge-Stewart placed the telephone back down, his mind in turmoil. He had given the Doctor more time than he had promised. It had been the right action, hadn’t it?
Not for the first time that day, the Brigadier thought back to those happy, innocent days of his early military career, when the only enemies you had to be concerned about were foreign powers, and where ‘time’ was something you only worried about at the end of a long evening in the officers’ bar. Back before he had to bother himself with Yetis or Cybermen or strange men in blue boxes.
‘Come back to us, Doctor,’ he whispered. ‘Much as I may rue the day we ever met, things do seem to make fractionally more sense with you around.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Master was the first to sense the transition. ‘The flow’s grip on us is weakening. We must be getting very near the origin.’ With the Doctor’s tacit consent, he threw switches and tapped keys on the console. ‘Turbulence setting in. Multiple time streams bunching, cross-threading. It may start getting rough again.’
‘Perhaps we should try and break free before it does,’ the Doctor said. ‘We’ll still arrive somewhere near the origin, but under our own control.’
‘And possibly undershoot by centuries, even thousands of years. No, Doctor! You have persuaded me that I must confront my adversary head on.’
‘In which case, remind me to be somewhat less persuasive in future.’
‘The future,’ the Master declared sternly, ‘is a luxury we may both soon find in short supply.’ He had braced himself against the console, facing the Doctor across the central pillar.
Neither the Doctor, nor the Master, or even the TARDIS itself had any real notion of how far they had come, except that the temporal distance was at least billions of years. They were adrift in deep time, without maps or compass. All they could be sure of was that neither of them had ever travelled this far into the extreme future of the galaxy.
Or was ever likely to again.
When the Vortex did at last release the TARDIS, it was with another series of lurching jolts and bumps. The Doctor and the Master fought to maintain stability as the TARDIS barrelled down these temporal rapids. The Doctor dared not think how much power it would take to return home again, fighting against this vicious current.
But at length all was quiet. The central column had ceased its rise and fall. The external environment sensors registered conditions that were almost unsettlingly normal. A little on the cold side, but there was air and gravity out there.
‘Let’s take a look, shall we?’ the Doctor said, activating the external viewer.
He swept through 360 degrees. It was a panorama of gloom and darkness. The sensors registered an enclosed volume, but it was a huge one. They could have been in a collapsed building or an underground cave. The only thing that was clear was they had arrived somewhere, rather than just floating in empty space.
‘There’s a cyclic oscillation to the gravity,’ the Master observed. ‘At the microsecond level.’
The Doctor cursed himself for not noticing that. ‘Yes, I noticed. Implying …’
‘That the field is artificially generated, not produced by the mere concentration of bulk matter. That, in other words, we may have arrived in a station or ship of some kind, with a functioning gravity generator.’ The Master tugged down the hem of his tunic. ‘I propose an investigation. I take it there are torches somewhere aboard, or would that be a presumption too far?’
‘Before we step outside,’ the Doctor said, ‘I think you and I need to have a little discussion.’
‘You have some doubts about my trustworthiness?’
‘Well, now that you mention it.’ The Doctor rubbed his chin. ‘There is the small matter that you’ve tried to kill me on a number of occasions.’ The Doctor’s hand wandered down to caress his neck. He was remembering how it felt to have an animate telephone cord strangling the life out of him.
‘We were at odds then, Doctor. Our goals were opposed, and you placed me in an insupportable position. Things are very different now.’
‘Are they really?’
‘If it’s concrete reassurance you want, this collar of mine is still activated. The triggering circuit is coupled to a bi-state antenna with a resonant frequency of …’
‘Never mind,’ the Doctor said.
But when the Master was not looking, he slipped his hand into his pocket and found solace in the sonic screwdriver.
Better safe than sorry.
‘Brig on the line for you, Miss Grant.’
Jo took the handset with trepidation. They were halfway to Scotland, Jo and Mike Yates, Benton and the rest of the UNIT detachment in the noisy, draughty whale-ribbed hold of the Hercules. It had been bumpy all the way out from Eastmere. The Sild time ruptures were beginning to cause local weather anomalies, presaging the world-chan
ging storms and havoc that would follow.
‘Jo here, sir,’ she said, taking the handset from Benton. ‘Any … news?’ She had to gulp down hard before finishing her sentence. ‘I know you had to go ahead with the strike.’
‘If there had been any other way, Miss Grant.’
‘And the Doctor?’
‘We don’t know. All we do know is that the TARDIS has not returned to headquarters, and there’s been no sighting of it anywhere near the power station.’
Jo could hardly believe that the Brigadier was delivering this devastating news in such an offhand fashion. Didn’t he also count the Doctor as a friend, even if that relationship was sometimes a bit strained? How could he sound so detached?
‘Then what you’re saying … the Doctor’s dead.’ A sudden coldness entered Jo’s tone now. It was infectious. ‘Is that it?’
‘That’s a possibility,’ the Brigadier answered. ‘The Doctor knew that there was a great risk in going into the power station ahead of the Sild. He knew that we’d have no choice but to use this weapon of last resort. But there’s a glimmer of hope, Miss Grant!’
‘Is there?’
‘The blast cloud has cleared. Radiation levels are low enough that I’ve authorised helicopter over-flights, with spotters and photographic equipment. The strike was a precision attack, and it succeeded in destroying exactly the area where the … chap, him, the objective, was incarcerated. But there’s no sign of the TARDIS.’
‘Maybe the TARDIS got blown up.’
‘The Doctor always insisted that it was indestructible, Miss Grant. I think on this occasion I may be inclined to take him at his word. Of course, there’s rather a lot of rubble to sift through, and we can’t begin to do that until … well, you take my point. But until I have evidence to the contrary, firm evidence, I will continue to base my judgements on the assumption that the Doctor is alive and well.’
‘But where is he, in that case?’
‘An excellent question, Miss Grant. To which the only possible answer is: anywhere, and anywhen.’
Doctor Who: Harvest of Time Page 18