Doctor Who: Harvest of Time

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘Boffins. Why can’t they leave well alone?’

  ‘The point, Mike, is that the Master must’ve pulled a fast one. That’s what the Doctor reckoned. Used this signalling equipment to send a message into time. And that’s what brought the Sild!’

  Even Jo was now finding it difficult to keep the facts about the Master straight in her head. It was like trying to remember a long telephone number while searching for a biro and a scrap of paper. The details kept slipping around, blurring, interchanging. The Doctor had been right; they weren’t immune to the time-fade just because they’d travelled in the TARDIS, just a bit better equipped to resist it.

  ‘But the Master couldn’t have wanted the Sild to come,’ she went on. ‘That can’t have been in his plans at all. And now the Sild are coming through in stronger and stronger numbers, and it’s got something to do with homing in on the MERMAN signal. So we’ve got two chances: deal with the Sild at their origin, somewhere else in space and time, or try and stop them coming through at this end. Maybe one won’t be enough without the other.’

  ‘We’re stuffed then, unless the Doctor can deal with the other bit.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ Jo said. ‘But the TARDIS wasn’t in the wreckage of the power station, was it?’

  ‘They couldn’t see it,’ Yates pointed out, not needing to elaborate that this was not quite the same as it not being there.

  ‘Even if the TARDIS got buried under all that rubble,’ Jo said, ‘it wouldn’t have been damaged. Provided the Doctor was able to get back to it in time … Look, I’d rather believe he did, all right? And I’d rather believe he’s out there now, somewhere or somewhen, doing whatever he can to stop the Sild coming through. And counting on us to do our bit here!’

  As Jo spoke, the helicopters sped out into open water. Nothing now stood between them and Mike Oscar Six except miles and miles of cold North Sea.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  ‘You cannot have lived this many lives,’ the Doctor said.

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘Please tell me it isn’t so. Please tell me you don’t recognise all these incarnations.’

  ‘Of course I don’t recognise them all, Doctor.’ The Master’s answer was scornful. ‘But enough of them to be sure. That’s what happens when you see yourself in the mirror.’

  The Master’s many faces, for the most part, were partly concealed by some sort of breathing apparatus, a mask with a long flexible trunk curling away from it and into the side of the surrounding alcove – the mask looked, horribly enough, as if it had grown into their faces, absorbing and reconfiguring living tissue. Some of the masks gave off a sickly yellow glow, echoed by the restraining devices and the complex biomedical support machinery surrounding the bodies.

  The Doctor reeled at the scale of what he was seeing. It cut against everything he had ever believed possible, that a single Time Lord should have had so many incarnations. Everything that he had ever believed right.

  ‘And the others?’

  ‘I would have thought it obvious. These are incarnations that have yet to happen … from my present perspective. Or potential incarnations that may never happen at all.’

  ‘This is an abomination.’

  ‘The existence of so many facets of me, or the fact that all of them are here, gathered into this one place?’

  ‘Both.’

  The Master scuffed a sleeve across the glassy frontage of one of the cabinets, swiping away a broad band of dust. ‘Take a look at this one. Quite the dapper young fellow, wouldn’t you agree?’

  It was no version of the Master that the Doctor recognised. A young man in a business suit, beardless, with a mop of boyish hair. His face, what the Doctor could see of it, seemed friendly and plausible. The face of a politician, the kind of man people would find it easy to trust. ‘He could almost be you,’ the Master commented.

  ‘Low, even by your standards.’

  The Master moved along a few spaces. Here was a version of himself reduced to a shrivelled corpse, a skeleton swaddled in a papery film of ash-grey flesh and dressed in a black suit with elaborate white sleeves and collar. The life-support mask, if that was what it was, gave off no illumination.

  ‘Many of them, like this one, have perished,’ the Master said, sweeping a hand around the chamber. ‘The mechanism clearly failed. Careless of whoever brought me here, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Or merciful.’

  The Doctor rubbed the dust from the next cabinet. This was a female version of the Master: still alive, if this ghastly state counted as life. Like the corpse, she also wore a frilled black outfit. Her hair was black, veined in white, combed back from her forehead. Unlike the Doctor’s present companion, her face was beardless. The mask hid most of it. But he recognised something in her cheekbones and brow, a family likeness that was clearly intentional. Time Lords generally had their incarnations thrust upon them without the luxury of choice. But the Master had selected all his faces, and each bore the imprint of his mind.

  ‘Your sonic screwdriver.’ The Master had extended his hand, palm upraised, like a surgeon waiting to be handed a scalpel.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I have need of it for a moment. I wish to trace the neural connections between these life-support units.’

  The Doctor hesitated. ‘Look, I’m not sure …’

  ‘My dear fellow, if we are to make any progress, we must trust each other.’

  ‘I trust you about as far as …’ But the Doctor knew that the Master had a point, as unpalatable as he found it. ‘Here,’ he said, slipping out the sonic screwdriver and thumping it onto the Master’s palm with bad grace. ‘And I’d like it back in one piece, if that isn’t too much trouble.’

  The Master made a few deft adjustments to the sonic screwdriver’s settings and pointed it at the nearest cabinet. The screwdriver emitted a whining hum. The Master jiggled it and the pitch of the hum varied. ‘Picking up an active neural connection,’ he said. ‘The cabinets aren’t just linked; there is still mental activity flowing between them.’

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘The ones that are still alive, at any rate. They’re coupled together, forming a single vast intellect.’

  ‘One of you’s bad enough,’ the Doctor said.

  ‘And in this instance, given that I did not submit to this condition voluntarily, I am inclined to agree with you.’ The Master continued sweeping the screwdriver, the pitch rising and falling as he traced the neural connections. Without warning, something appeared in the air above them, billowing as if caught on a breeze. It was a long chain of mathematical symbols. Slowly the chain faded, and a second took its place. Then a third appeared at the same time as the second, and the chains seemed to dance around each other. Now more symbols appeared, strings of them spiralling and interpenetrating faster than the eye could track, like the banners and scarves of a dancer.

  ‘The pure mathematics of advanced time engineering,’ the Doctor said, unable to hide the awe he felt. There was a searing beauty to this mathematics. It was the clockwork of the universe laid bare, in all its glittering, meshing harmony.

  ‘I agree,’ the Master said. ‘The screwdriver must have triggered this holographic realisation. I believe it represents a distillation of the current mental state of the linked minds. They are thinking about the manipulation of time, and very little else.’

  ‘Or being made to think.’

  ‘Quite. A totality of minds, each of which was already superlatively attuned to the task of solving the thorniest time equations … There is almost nothing that the totality could not accomplish!’

  ‘But to what purpose now? This ship feels deserted.’

  The Master was continuing his sweep of the chamber. ‘This really is fascinating, Doctor. All the cabinets are cross-linked to one degree or another but there are certain nodes which have stronger and more numerous connections than the others – almost as if these represent more dominant incarnations, versions of me which are assigned more auth
ority and influence in the network.’

  The Doctor, despite himself, could not help but be swept along by the sheer thrill of scientific enquiry. ‘A scale-free network with a small number of hubs. Compared to a network in which the nodes have equal value, it’s a vastly more efficient way of processing information.’

  ‘With the sole disadvantage that the network is reliant on those few hubs,’ the Master said. He swivelled on his heels, raising and lowering the screwdriver. ‘Ah, now this is remarkable. Even the nodes are cross-linked at different potentialities! One node in particular is stronger than all the others …’

  ‘The Master Master?’

  ‘A little less of your paltry attempts at wit, Doctor, while I concentrate.’

  ‘I’d get a move on, if I were you.’

  Irritated, the Master lowered the screwdriver. ‘Why, exactly?’

  ‘Because something’s coming towards us.’ The Doctor pointed to the entrance on the opposite side of the chamber. What had been a dark maw was now beginning to lighten, as if some illuminated thing were approaching them. The approaching glow was red, and as it neared the Doctor made out many complex whisking shadows, in addition to the glow.

  ‘A moment,’ the Master said distractedly. The screwdriver’s hum rose decisively. The Master strode forward, then pointed high up at the rows of alcoves. ‘There, Doctor. That one. Of all the nodes, that is the most powerfully connected. That incarnation above all others …’ But the Master faltered, as his sharp eyes picked out the still-living form. ‘No. It’s not possible.’

  ‘I really think we ought to be giving some consideration to leaving,’ the Doctor said.

  ‘Wait. Don’t you see?’

  ‘I see it all right, old chap. It’s you.’

  The Master lowered the screwdriver until it hung limply at his side. ‘My present incarnation – the body I am in now. Up there. How can this be?’

  ‘My guess,’ the Doctor said, ‘is that the Sild have messed things up so thoroughly that all classes of time paradox are now allowed. Even a type three Blinovitch crossover.’ Gently, feeling something not entirely distanced from compassion, he took the screwdriver out of the Master’s hand and made a few quick adjustments to its settings. Then he nodded at the approaching light. ‘We really must be on our way.’

  The Doctor slipped the screwdriver back into his pocket.

  The Master was at last able to tear himself away from the spectacle of himself, masked and still animate, high above them. ‘For once, Doctor, we find ourselves as of one mind.’

  ‘Let’s not make a habit of it,’ the Doctor said.

  That was when the red metal spider burst into the chamber.

  It was a vile thought to entertain, but McCrimmon kept coming back to the same thing: thank God that Lovelace was dead. Not because she hated him that much, even after what he had done to her – it was more a case of pitying men like that, bullies who got their kicks from asserting their authority over others – but because only Lovelace had known the combination for the door. The aliens, the crab things, whatever these monsters were, they obviously didn’t know the code. They had no choice but to go through the combinations one by one, methodical as clockwork. If Lovelace had still been on the rig, then there might have been a way for them to torture it out of him, or use him as one of these puppets, the way they were using dear Tom Irwin, her closest friend on Mike Oscar Six. But she hated Irwin now, or at least the mindless thing Irwin had been turned into. A machine for opening doors.

  Tap, tap, tap, tap, glance. Tap, tap, tap, tap, glance. How far had they come? She had been so shocked that she hadn’t looked at her watch until long after the tapping began, but it had already been more than an hour since she had checked the time. Enough to work through hundreds of combinations, perhaps more than a thousand. What if, by some horrible twist, Lovelace had chosen the year of his birth – or the date of the Battle of Hastings?

  Stuck behind the door, there was nothing McCrimmon could do. She had gone from desperately wanting to break down that door, to hoping it stayed shut as long as possible. There was nowhere else for her to go, no windows or ducts to escape through into the rest of the rig. Callow and Lovelace had been much too thorough for that.

  So what did the crabs want? As much as it suited her ego to believe otherwise, she had a feeling she wasn’t the immediate objective. She was just something that was going to get in their way temporarily, before being brushed aside or made into one of those puppets. The aliens were fairly obviously trying to reach the MERMAN equipment. It meant something to them. They either wanted to smash it or secure it, one of the two.

  What had Irwin told her, before the crabs took him over? She thought back to the words he’d scrawled, done in his handwriting, rather than the robot-like script he had used last time. Something about Lovelace planning to destroy the equipment, but chickening out. And now Irwin reckoned they had to do it instead.

  But the MERMAN gear was behind another security door, just as inaccessible to McCrimmon as McCrimmon was to the monsters.

  Suddenly a possibility presented itself. Not much of one, it was true. But if the aliens were prepared to go through the combinations on their lock, she could do the same thing with the door to the MERMAN gear. She wouldn’t be as quick as Irwin, or as methodical – she was bound to skip a few numbers – and Irwin already had a massive head start. But it was still a numbers game, wasn’t it? Luck could still be on her side.

  She left the door, ran back to the sealed entrance to the equipment room. Punched zero, zero, zero, zero into the pad. The lock flashed red, gave an alarm buzz which was all but inaudible over the still-sounding emergency alarms.

  No, that was stupid. Assume – assume – that Irwin had started with four zeroes as well. If they were chasing the same combination, then it was pointless trying to catch up. She might as well start with four nines and count down.

  What if Irwin had started at the top as well? What if the combinations were not the same? What was the optimum search strategy?

  To hell with it.

  She entered four nines. Then nine, nine, nine eight. Then nine, nine, nine, seven. She wasn’t as fast as Irwin, her hands were shaking and sweaty, and she kept fumbling the digits. But she was doing something now, not just waiting for the inevitable.

  Big Cal would have approved.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  It was a robot, a thing as a big as a house. It had a spherical body, a smaller spherical head equipped with talons, pincers and probes, and attached to the body a multitude of powerful hinged and piston-driven legs, each of which ended in a barbed point sharp enough (the Doctor felt sure) to pierce a man right through. The spider’s two multifaceted eyes were blazing red carnelians, the source of the glow and the shadows he had already seen.

  The spider, having eased its bulk into the chamber, paused to study the two newcomers. The Doctor had seen nothing like it. Still he sensed a curious mechanical belligerence, a kind of dim-witted malevolence rather than outright calculating evil. Some of his best friends had been robots. But it was equally the case that among robots he had also made some splendid enemies.

  The Doctor, always willing to give someone or something the benefit of the doubt, took a few cautious steps in the direction of the spider.

  ‘I say!’ he bellowed. ‘Would you mind answering a few simple questions? We find ourselves at a bit of a loss as to where and when we are. Are you the custodian of this ship?’ The Doctor, cautiously encouraged, took another step. ‘It’s just that …’

  The spider sprang forward, leaping into the air and coming down with an audible clang a few tens of feet from the Doctor. He stumbled back, only just keeping his footing. The spider made a low, purposeful humming.

  ‘I only asked!’

  ‘Doubtless a very simple machine,’ the Master said. ‘Well, Doctor, how would you rate your chances of making it back to the TARDIS?’

  The Doctor stared up at the spider’s blazing red eyes. ‘Rather less tha
n excellent.’

  ‘I concur. The sonic screwdriver again, if you would be so kind.’

  The Doctor had trusted the Master once; it was not so very hard to do so again.

  ‘What do you have in mind?’

  ‘This.’ The Master, having adjusted the screwdriver to his own satisfaction, levelled it at the spider and emitted an energy pulse. The spider’s eyes dimmed and the robot sank down, its body lowering to the ground as if its legs could no longer support it. ‘I recommend haste,’ the Master said. ‘I have merely incapacitated it.’

  ‘Getting soft in your old age?’

  ‘Believe me, Doctor, if your sonic screwdriver had the power to kill it, I would have taken that option. Here.’

  The Master had thrown the Doctor his sonic screwdriver. The Doctor caught it deftly, and slipped it back into his pocket.

  They ran out of the chamber, back along the connecting throat, past the great window with its periodic view of the passing planet, back up the rubble heap. The TARDIS was still where they had left it, yellow windows aglow.

  ‘It’s coming!’ The Doctor shouted, aware that the spider had picked itself up and was gaining ground on them.

  The Master, who had a head start on the Doctor, was the first at the TARDIS. He was looking over the Doctor’s shoulder. The Doctor did not dare risk looking back, but even as he neared the TARDIS he heard the sound of rubble moving around behind him, and the rising hum that told him the robot spider was now very near.

  ‘Quickly!’ The Master hissed.

  The Doctor thought, for a moment, of throwing the Master the keys to the TARDIS. It cut against every instinct he knew. But at least one of them would survive, and if it took the Master to undo the work of the Sild, then that was a vastly better outcome than both of them dying here.