Doctor Who: Harvest of Time

by Alastair Reynolds

  Two torch beams scissored the air like searchlights, barely able to penetrate the depths of the chamber in which the TARDIS had come to rest. It had emerged from the Vortex at a slight angle, on what appeared to be a rubble pile or garbage heap. The Doctor placed his footsteps carefully, the loose ground shifting under him with treacherous intent. It was hard to see his hand in front of his face, let alone cracks and crevasses in the ground.

  ‘There is a glow in that direction,’ the Master said. ‘Faint, but quite unmistakeable. It appears to be another chamber, connected to this one by a throat.’

  ‘If the Sild are present, they’re keeping rather a low profile,’ the Doctor said, pausing to tighten the coat he had slipped on over his cape.

  The Master, who had spurned the offer of extra clothing beyond his usual minimalist black outfit, said: ‘And I will avoid drawing hasty conclusions, until we have some measure of this place. I advise you to do likewise.’

  They crept slowly down the rubble pile, sweeping torches this way and that, alert to the presence of any other parties. Once in a while, the Doctor risked a backward glance at the TARDIS, all but invisible save for the lit-up letters of the words POLICE PUBLIC CALL BOX and the fretted yellow rectangles of its windows.

  ‘So you think this is a ship of some kind?’ the Doctor asked.

  ‘Or a station, as I allowed. But clearly artificial. Not of Sild manufacture, either.’

  The Doctor agreed. The Sild built their ships to suit their own modest dimensions: riddled with a plumber’s nightmare of finger-thick fluid pipes. They had no use for huge, air-filled chambers, even less for terrestrial gravity.

  ‘Then what it is doing here, and why have we been brought here?’

  ‘In time, Doctor, we may yet have some answers.’

  The Master had been right about the glow from the adjoining chamber, though even when the Doctor’s eyes had achieved full dark adaptation, it was no more than a ghostly suggestion; the promise of light rather than the thing itself. They had reached a relatively level floor – hard and metallic – although even then their progress was occasionally hampered by some rubble pile or dark obstruction of indistinct shape. If they were on a ship, the Doctor decided, it was obviously long past its prime.

  He gave the TARDIS one final glance and then their torches picked up the fact that the ceiling was lowering, as they traversed the connecting throat between the chambers. He was beginning to make a little more of the chamber ahead. It was lit, but only dimly, and there was an impression of galleried levels, row upon row of alcoves or nooks climbing to a dizzying height. There were things in those alcoves, like carved stone figures, but that was much as the Doctor’s straining eyes could perceive.

  ‘Quickly,’ the Master called.

  He had wandered to one side of the throat, where the floor curved around to form a wall. The Doctor stabbed his torch in the Master’s general direction. The beam caught an impression of a deeper darkness against the wall, an oval of absolute black against which the Master stood, with his face to the blackness and his hands clasped against the small of his back.

  ‘What have you found?’

  ‘Unless I am very much mistaken, the outside.’

  The Doctor walked over to the window. It was as wide and long as a banqueting table, set at a convenient height for humanoids. A fine spray of micrometeorite impacts peppered the glass. The Doctor guessed that it had been in place for centuries, perhaps much longer than that. It was conceivable that until recently a force field had protected the glass.

  Beyond the glass, nothing but swallowing blackness.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ the Doctor commented. ‘I wish I’d brought my Box Brownie.’

  The Master raised gloved hand. ‘Your impatience does you no credit, Doctor.’

  He waited, and was soon rewarded. A planet hove into view, then tracked slowly from the top to the bottom of the window. Clearly the Master had witnessed the planet’s previous passage.

  ‘Do you recognise it?’ the Doctor asked. There were a hundred billion habitable worlds, far too many for any one mind to retain, but it had often been said that Time Lords had an uncanny memory for such things.

  ‘I don’t,’ the Master said. ‘Although it’s clearly a world near the end of its lifetime. If it once had oceans, landmasses, it might ring a bell. Reminds me a little of Skaro …’

  ‘It’s definitely not Skaro.’

  ‘I said reminds,’ the Master corrected testily. ‘I merely note the extreme desolation, the sense of a world exhausted beyond its limits. A place of stagnation and decay, of entropy made manifest.’

  ‘Your idea of holiday heaven.’

  He waited for the planet to appear again. It took ninety seconds to return to the top of the window. It was, the Master’s opinion of the place notwithstanding, a dismal-looking place. The planet was a dim red, like a hot coal that had nearly cooled down to being black again. It had no visible atmosphere, no seas or icecaps or indications of surface vegetation.

  But it was not lifeless, or at least had not always been lifeless. ‘Cities,’ the Master commented. ‘Or if not cities then some kind of technological installation.’ He clenched his first. ‘I curse our unpreparedness. We should have long-range sensors, communications devices …’

  The Doctor waited for the planet to come around again. ‘There must be a sun,’ he said. ‘How else would we be able to see it?’

  But the Master had become bored by the view already. He was on his way to the next chamber, with its milky luminescence and layers of rising galleries. The Doctor followed, his mood unsettled by the view of the time-ravaged world. He wondered what relationship this ship or station bore to the inhabitants of that planet, if any of them yet lived.

  ‘We can’t have just landed in this place by accident,’ the Doctor said, calling ahead to the Master. ‘It must have some connection to the Sild. Something drew us here!’

  ‘This place speaks to me,’ the Master said, pausing to face the Doctor. ‘I know of it, on some level – almost as if I was here once before. Its scale and size … It’s a ship, of that I’m certain. A vessel of immense age, older than some solar systems. But how can I know that?’

  ‘We’ve both got around a bit,’ the Doctor said, indulging in cosmic understatement. ‘Maybe you popped in here once, during a previous incarnation.’

  ‘I cannot deny it may have happened,’ the Master allowed. ‘But it almost feels as if I’ve been here a thousand times. How is that possible?’

  ‘Some side-effect of the time-fade, perhaps. If this is the epicentre, the origin of the fade …’

  ‘Quickly please, Doctor. Tell me I am not deluded. Tell me I am not seeing what I think I am seeing.’

  The Master had reached the entrance to the next chamber. The level of the flooring dropped shallowly away from him, so that he surveyed proceedings from a slight rise. The Doctor caught up with him, standing to the right of the other man. He could not tell whether the thing he had heard in the Master’s voice was horror or awe or some chimerical combination of the two.

  The chamber was hemispherical, with a gently dished floor. They had come in through a gap in the wall at the chamber’s base; there was a similar gap in the opposite wall. Circles of pale blue light, like lines of latitude, ringed the chamber from floor to pole. These circles were the source of the milky radiance. Between each ring of light was a gap tall enough for an entire circle of alcoves, each of which was easily high and broad enough to contain a man. As the rising chamber curved over to form its own ceiling, so the alcoves tipped gradually toward the horizontal. There were hundreds in the low rings, but far fewer in the high levels.

  ‘How many?’ the Master asked. ‘I have an idea, but I’d like to hear yours.’

  The Doctor had already performed the same rough calculation. ‘More than seven hundred alcoves. Of which perhaps two-thirds are presently occupied.’

  ‘Four hundred and seventy occupied spaces, by my reckoning. Give or take a few.’ />
  ‘Give or take,’ the Doctor agreed.

  ‘Do you recognise any of the occupants?’

  The Doctor hesitated over his answer. ‘One or two.’

  ‘Let’s take a closer look, shall we? It would be foolish to jump to conclusions, however utterly inescapable they may appear.’

  They walked to the right. The lowest three levels of alcoves formed two incomplete half-circles, broken by the two entrances. The Doctor studied his companion, hardly daring to wonder what was now going through his mind. The Master was unpredictable at the best of times, but even the sanest of beings would be tested by the knowledge of what lay in this chamber. The Doctor’s hand slipped into his pocket, touching the sonic screwdriver for reassurance.

  A third of the alcoves were empty, but the rest held bodies. Each lay behind a frontage of curving glass. The bodies were all humanoid figures, although that was as much as some of them had in common. Here were men and even a few women, representing a spectrum of ages and builds and ethnic types. Some were very old, while others were still children. A fraction were alien or ghoulish in appearance.

  ‘Notice the confining devices,’ the Master said, as if he was conducting a guided tour. ‘Shackled and restrained. Escape would have been quite beyond them. They would have been barely able to move. Note also the life-support mechanisms, the nutrient lines and direct nerve taps.’

  They were playing a kind of game. The Master knew that the Doctor knew. The Doctor knew that the Master knew. But he wasn’t sure if he was expected to state what was by now blindingly clear.

  These bodies all belonged to the Master.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  ‘Tom!’ McCrimmon said, when at last Irwin and the other oil workers returned, coming back down the corridor to the door behind which she was sealed. ‘I was starting to wonder where you’d got to.’

  The statement was largely for her own benefit, since the door’s soundproofing made it impossible to communicate verbally. But her relief was sincere and palpable. The security door had proven resistant to various improvised battering rams, delivered from both sides – even a fire axe hadn’t done more than dent it – but somewhere in the platform there surely had to be something that could cut through metal, even metal of the two-inch-thick armoured kind. And these were McCrimmon workers, after all: supposedly the best in the business, and she had no reason to doubt it. Someone was always drilling or cutting something when McCrimmon needed to sleep, so the least they could do was drag out the necessary equipment now. It would be embarrassing in the extreme if her own people hadn’t managed to extricate her by the time the UNIT forces arrived, as she was confident they would.

  Irwin had reached the door now. McCrimmon took her pad and wrote: WHAT’S UP? HOW IS EVAC GOING? MORE CRABS? She held the note up to the window in the air.

  Irwin looked through the glass at her message. His expression seemed strangely nonplussed, almost disinterested. Instead of writing out his own reply, he looked to one side. His hand had moved up as if entering a sequence into the keyed entry code.

  She smiled, understanding – although still a little troubled by Irwin’s blank lack of acknowledgement. Lovelace might be dead, but somehow or other Irwin had managed to uncover the numbers for the door, sparing them the bother of cutting through. ‘OK, good,’ she said, again for her own benefit.

  But the door had not opened yet. Irwin was still standing on the other side, arm stretched out as if tapping numbers into the pad. Now that she paid due attention, there was a certain rhythm to his movements. He would enter a code, then glance down at the lock as if looking to see if it had opened or not. Tap, tap, tap, tap, glance. Tap, tap, tap, tap, glance.

  ‘Oh, no.’

  Understanding was coming upon her and it was not a good sort of understanding. Something was wrong with Tom Irwin. Wrong with the lot of them, in fact. Other than Irwin, the others were standing around like zombies. Waiting for something to happen, with nothing to say or do until it did. Not one of them had moved, or appeared to speak to another, since the party had arrived.

  ‘Oh God.’

  Tap, tap, tap, tap, glance. She knew what was happening now. Irwin had not managed to uncover Lovelace’s code. But he was working through the permutations regardless. Zero, zero, zero, one. Zero, zero, zero, two. Zero, zero, zero, three. That was how it was going to be. All the way through the possibilities until he hit the jackpot. Her mind reeled. Nearly ten thousand possibilities – but odds were he wouldn’t need to go through all of them before finding the right one. Say, five thousand, give or take. How long was he going to need to do that? Hours, definitely. But not tens of hours.

  Not tens of hours at all.

  The system had been set up so that an alarm sounded on the other side, but that was hardly an issue now.

  She wrote another note. Her hand was shaking so hard she dropped the pen twice. TOM. WHATEVER’S GOT INTO YOU, THIS IS ME. YOUR FRIEND EDDIE.

  He looked at the message. For a moment, something interrupted his machine-like rhythm. He dug into a pocket and came out with the pad and thick felt-tip he had used earlier. He wrote a message onto the pad, then turned it around for McCrimmon’s benefit.

  It was not Tom Irwin’s handwriting at all. It looked as if it had been done with a ruler, all angles and parallels.

  WE ARE SILD NOW. YOU WILL SOON BE SILD. PLEASE STAND BY.

  Irwin chose that moment to present his back to her, allowing her to see the silver thing clamped to the base of his skull, a kind of mechanical crab. She did not need to see the others to know that they were similarly afflicted.

  Under the circumstances, McCrimmon did the only reasonable thing to do.

  She screamed.

  ‘This way, Miss Grant!’

  Three military helicopters, fuelled, weaponed and with their engines running, sat in an arrowhead formation only a short stroll from the loading ramp of the Hercules.

  ‘Any more news?’ Jo asked Mike Yates, glad to be out of the Hercules, if only for a few minutes.

  ‘About the Doctor? Nothing that I’ve heard. The Brig says the Sild have given up their assault on the power station – it’s as if they sense that the objective has been lost. But that’s the only bit of good news! They’re continuing to gain hosts and move inland. They’ve got to be stopped!’

  ‘They came here for the Master,’ Jo said. ‘But now they’ve had a taste of Earth, they’ll take it anyway.’

  ‘Do you think the Doc’ll be able to do anything? I mean, assuming he …’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Jo said. ‘It’s all I’ve been thinking about. But you know what? If the Doctor did get to him, to the Master … and if they did manage to get out of there in the TARDIS before the airstrike … that would explain why the Sild have given up on the station, wouldn’t it? They can tell the Master isn’t there.’

  ‘Or dead.’

  ‘No, they’d still want to get to his remains, I think. They must know he’s not there. And that can only mean the Doctor made it out, can’t it?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘I’m trying to look on the bright side, Mike. You could help me along a bit.’

  While the Lynxes were being crewed, they kitted Jo out with UNIT camouflage gear, helmet, goggles and headphones. There was time to grab a coffee and a bacon sandwich, and then it was out to the apron and into the helicopters. Waiting on their seats were hastily photocopied dossiers covering the essential elements of the MERMAN project – what the Brigadier had been able to weasel out of Whitehall, and piece together from his own discussions with the Doctor – as well as technical blueprints for Mike Oscar Six, the rig where Jo had first met Eddie McCrimmon.

  ‘Any word from Edwina herself?’ Jo asked, wondering if there had been an update since she had left UNIT headquarters.

  ‘Not a sausage,’ Yates said. ‘And I’ve just checked back with the Brig in case something came in while we were en route. It’s worse than that, in fact. After declaring a state of emergency, the rig�
�s gone radio silent. The last thing anyone heard was something about a helicopter going down … Apparently one of these Whitehall bigwigs was on it.’ He was tapping the first page of the dossier. ‘Erm … so basically we haven’t got a clue what we’ll find when we get out there. It’s not just Mike Oscar Six, either. Rigs and ships are dropping like flies. Still sure you want to be on this expedition?’

  ‘Do you think the Doctor was really keen to go into the power station, Mike?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘There’s your answer, then. I don’t want to do this either but that’s no excuse, not when the Doctor put his neck on the line for us.’

  When they were aloft, chugging in formation for the coast, Jo scanned the dossier. There wasn’t much to it, to be frank. MERMAN: marine equipment for the reception, modulation and amplification of neutrinos. A project to develop the means to communicate with submarines, while they were still at sea, using streams of sub-atomic particles.

  Jo could just imagine what the Doctor would have thought of that. If only you’d put a little of that ingenuity to something peaceful, instead of working out increasingly clever ways to blow yourselves up … or something along those lines. That was the Doctor, all right. A basic fondness for humanity tempered by great disapproval, or great disapproval moderated by an undeniable fondness … She had never worked out which was the case, and perhaps now it did not matter. They were on their own.

  He’s still alive, Jo thought. She had to cling to that. She had to believe that, deep down, she would feel differently if he were truly dead, truly extinguished.

  But what if she were wrong about that? What if this was how it felt to live in a universe without the Doctor in it?

  ‘So let me get this straight,’ Yates said, riffling through the notes. ‘They couldn’t get this stuff to work properly, so they had the bright idea of bringing in …’ He stumbled, squinted. ‘Look, it’s gone all smudgy! Why didn’t they give us decent copies?’

  ‘They did,’ Jo said. ‘But the bits that are to do with … him, the Master … they’re being affected by the time-fade. That’s why we have to work quickly – not just because of the Sild, but because if we leave it too long we’ll forget why all this ever started!’