Doctor Who: Harvest of Time

by Alastair Reynolds

  But sense or caution prevailed. The Doctor reached the TARDIS, opened the door, and the two of them fell inside. The Doctor slammed the door and dashed to the console. He started throwing switches, looking anxiously at the central column. It rose and fell, but stiffly. The Doctor tugged some levers and adjusted some knobs. On the external viewer, the spider’s red eyes glared like binary suns. It was circling the TARDIS.

  ‘What are you waiting for?’ the Master said. ‘Commence dematerialisation!’

  ‘The TARDIS suffered a power drain during our emergence – it was too violent. The accumulators are taking their time coming back to strength.’

  ‘And you only thought to mention this to me now?’

  ‘I assumed we’d take a little longer to look around.’ The Doctor moved to another segment of the console and made some further adjustments. ‘There’s nothing to worry about. We’re quite safe in here, and the TARDIS will be back to operational power in a very short while.’

  The TARDIS lurched. They felt the shove even inside the control room, despite its artificial gravity. The view through the monitor tilted abruptly.

  ‘It has us!’ The Master called. ‘The machine’s picked us up!’

  ‘The TARDIS is still quite safe.’ The Doctor coughed. ‘Whether we are is another question.’

  ‘If your inertial compensators were working properly, we wouldn’t be thrown around like this!’

  ‘It’s on my list of things to fix,’ the Doctor said.

  The view, red-lit by the glow from the spider’s eyes, showed that they were being carried down the rubble pile.

  ‘Do something! For all we know this thing wants to throw us into an annihilation furnace.’ The Master moved to the console and tried to shove the Doctor away from the controls.

  ‘It’s no use. We can’t dematerialise. The TARDIS has just enough power to maintain dimensional coherence and generate a protective field.’

  The Master was undeterred. ‘If we re-route power from the dimension stabiliser … there should be enough inertial lag to give us the time we need.’

  ‘You can’t do that in a Type Forty, not unless you fancy living in a space the size of a shoebox.’

  ‘If we had taken my TARDIS …’ The Master left the statement unfinished.

  ‘We’d almost certainly still be in a mess of some kind,’ the Doctor said.

  At length even the Master came to accept that there was nothing to be done except wait for the power to be restored. The spider had tucked the TARDIS under its belly, clutching it as if it was a tasty morsel to be taken back home and consumed at leisure. The spider scuttled through the dark warrens of the ship, as if on some urgent errand.

  Eventually it came to a spherical room not much larger than the spider itself. It squeezed itself inside, and a heavy doorway irised shut, sealing off the entrance. The Doctor and the Master exchanged apprehensive glances. Perhaps this was where the spider planned to eat the TARDIS.

  But after a few moments the door irised open again. They had come along a corridor, but now the view was of unremitting blackness. ‘Vacuum,’ the Doctor said, directing the Master’s attention to the environmental controls. ‘The air’s been sucked away.’

  ‘This must be some huge airlock,’ the Master said.

  The airlock was obviously like an eyeball in a socket. They had come in along the ‘optic nerve’, and now the eyeball had swivelled around so that the entrance door – the eye’s retinal patch – was facing the other direction, into open space.

  The spider scuttled outside, and with a propulsive twitch of its legs, flung itself away from the ship.

  The Master and the Doctor stared at the view screen, watching as the hull receded and more and more of the enormous craft came into view. It was vast and scarred and impossibly ancient, a humpback whale of a spaceship, miles wide and tens of miles long. Lit only by the red light of a dying sun, just the outline and highlights of the ship were visible; the rest was as black as the space beyond it. There were no lights, no illuminated windows, no obvious evidence that the ship was anything but a derelict.

  ‘I know it now,’ the Master said, quietly.

  ‘The Consolidator,’ the Doctor confirmed. ‘We should both have guessed a lot sooner than we did. But what is it doing here? It was destroyed! We both saw it destroyed!’

  ‘It would seem we were mistaken.’

  The spider was accelerating, by some unknown means, towards the planet that the dark ship orbited. For the first time, as their point of view changed, the Doctor made out the bloated dim sphere which was the star around which this world and ship orbited. It was a red giant, a star nearing the end of its Main Sequence lifetime. Once, not so many millions of years ago, it would have been bright and compact, undergoing steady fusion. But as the star gradually exhausted its supply of hydrogen, so its envelope swelled to hundreds of times its former radius.

  In his travels the Doctor had witnessed the deaths of many worlds. He had even seen the Earth itself incinerated, as the enlarging Sun spread its envelope nearly all the way to the orbit of Mars. Time Lords, more than anyone else, understood the awesome fragility of worlds. They grasped the moth-like impermanence of stars. All was flux, all was change, all was death and renewal. Nothing endured, except nothing itself.

  The Doctor imagined this world in better times, before sickness swelled its star. It was still possible to tell where there had been oceans and continents. Their outlines were still there, as if pressed into clay. Mountain ranges, mid-ocean ridges, chains of islands and deep benthic gorges. He had seen enough worlds to imagine seas and forests and a mantle of luscious white clouds, pressed beneath the merest kiss of indigo atmosphere. There was a time when he would have wept to see a world reduced to this. But there had been too many, and even a Time Lord’s tears were exhaustible.

  The spider took them down. They swept low over the world, untroubled by atmosphere. The surface rocketed by at orbital speed, the spider plunging through the notches in mountain ridges, along canyons so deep and wide you could have bowled a moon down them, across ocean beds and continental plains strewn with odd jagged formations. It took the Doctor a few moments to realise that these were the remains of cities, melted into blobby chrome slag by waves of stellar heat. Their architecture, in so far as it could be inferred from these molten ruins, was of towering, tapering palaces supported above the ground on mighty straddling legs. But it had clearly been aeons since these cities had known life and commerce.

  ‘If I am not mistaken,’ the Master said, ‘we now have sufficient power to attempt dematerialisation. I wonder why you hesitate, Doctor?’

  The Doctor allowed himself a smile. ‘I’m surprised you have to ask.’

  The Master nodded. ‘We’re being taken somewhere, do not seem to be in immediate peril, and one cannot help but be curious as to the destination.’

  ‘There’s also the matter of why.’

  ‘I won’t deny that that is also of interest. But let me be plain about one thing. My sole thought is for my own self-preservation. While that modest little objective happens to align with your own trifling concerns, we shall have no cause for disharmony. But should I find myself obstructed, do not imagine that I will let you stand in my way.’

  ‘And they say gratitude is a dying art.’

  ‘Ought I to be grateful, Doctor? It’s true that you rescued me from Durlston A. But let’s not pretend that you were in any way motivated by concern for my welfare.’ The Master pointed to the view screen. ‘Well, we seem to arriving somewhere, if I’m not mistaken.’

  It was a city, perhaps the largest that they had yet seen. It rose in tiers, each smaller than the one below and supported on legs, a sagging chrome wedding cake, rising from a craquelured plain of radiation-blasted ochre, taller than any surviving mountain on this corpse of a world. Tall enough, indeed, that the city’s topmost levels might once have pushed beyond the atmosphere, into lofty near-vacuum. Yet in all essential respects the city seemed as dead and decayed a
s any they had observed. The Master scrutinised displays, shaking his head at the antiquated and unreliable sensors. ‘There is a trickle of energy coming from somewhere near the middle levels, but so little that it barely registers. Perhaps enough to sustain a few simple machines, but no more than that.’

  ‘Someone sent this spider,’ the Doctor said.

  ‘But that spider may have been in that ship for a very long while.’

  They descended. The spider took them down between four of the highest spires, descending through a thickening confusion of buttresses and bridges, until at last no part of the world beyond the city was visible. And still they descended, and descended, until eventually the spider entered another eye-like airlock, perhaps close to the energy source that the Master had detected. The airlock swivelled, and its door opened to admit a gush of stale cold air.

  The spider, still clutching its payload, scuttled out of the airlock. And with an unceremonious jolt, the TARDIS was set down like a chess piece.

  ‘Wherever we are,’ the Doctor said, ‘we would appear to have arrived.’

  ‘Your talent for the pointlessly tautological statement remains unsurpassed,’ the Master said, bending to consult instruments. ‘It’s a vault, as large as any of the chambers on the ship. Energy sources nearby. Atmosphere breathable, if a little on the cold side. Gravity close to terrestrial normal. Radiation and pathogen levels tolerable.’

  ‘What about the spider?’

  ‘It’s just stopped. I think it was programmed to bring us here, and then await further orders.’ The Master extended an inviting hand to the door. ‘It would be rude not to see who had summoned us. Shall we investigate?’

  ‘After you, dear fellow.’

  ‘No, I insist. After you.’

  ‘And leave you alone in here, even for a second? Not much chance of that.’

  The Master chuckled and flung open the TARDIS door. ‘Universes will evaporate, before you and I change our ways.’

  The Doctor felt the gasp of cold, even in the control room. He locked the TARDIS controls, reassured himself that the sonic screwdriver was still snug in his pocket, and followed the Master.

  They were in an arched space of supreme gloominess. The spider, as the Master had intimated, was looming over the TARDIS but now otherwise inert. Dim red light filtered through tall stained-glass windows, soaring up into the vaulted obscurity of a distant ceiling. The Doctor, in his travels, had acquired a keen sense of antiquity – an almost subliminal impression of time hanging heavy, of ages and aeons having passed. He had felt it on the ship, but he felt it even more acutely now, perhaps more powerfully than at almost any time in his life. Vast unremembered eternities had passed in this place.

  There had been a visitor before them, the Doctor observed. A space-suited body lay slumped on the ground at the foot of a flight of broad stone stairs. The stairs led up to a kind of throne.

  It was complex. The throne was situated in the space formed between three fluted gold columns, which rose up to form a kind of plinth or cradle, upon which, tilted at an angle, rested what was unmistakeably a small saucer-shaped spacecraft. The Doctor had seen nothing exactly like it, but its basic design was typical enough of a small scout vehicle. The saucer’s middle was domed, bulging above and below the midline. There were portholes in the dome, and space inside for anything between one and a dozen occupants, depending on how cramped the conditions they were prepared to tolerate.

  The saucer was obviously incredibly old, covered in gold and jewelled ornamentation that appeared to have been worked into place after the saucer had been fixed above the three columns. This ornamentation obscured much of the original hull. It seemed to be made of bare metal, but here and there the Doctor detected the orange or red chips of what must have been the original paint scheme. That the saucer had some connection with the occupant of the throne was beyond doubt.

  But of that occupant, much less was clear.

  The throne was a heavy gold chair, surrounded not only by the bases of the three columns but also what the Doctor immediately recognised as rudimentary time-management technology.

  ‘Stasis generators,’ the Master confirmed, stooping down to examine the space-suited figure. ‘Time dams, of a particularly crude and inefficient variety.’

  The stasis-generators formed a bubble of retarded time – slowed down, but not stopped – just large enough to encompass the throne and its occupant. The Doctor made out the trembling blurred edge where the boundary of the retarded time commenced. The metal outside the bubble, even the gold, was duller than that within.

  The throne’s occupant was a humanoid woman of tremendous age. The Doctor wondered if he had ever seen so visibly ancient a specimen. She was clearly near the end of a very long life, at least by normal human standards. Everything about her was pale or translucent, like a picture that had been exposed to too much light. She wore a high-collared gown of white, grey and silver brocade. Her hair, held back by a delicate silver crown, was so white and fine that it more resembled a spray of fibre-optic threads erupting from her scalp. Her skin was colourless, like very old bones or driftwood. One hand, gloved, clutched the end of the chair’s armrest. The other, ungloved, maintained an equally firm grip on the end of a plain golden rod, fixed to the chair’s side like a walking stick.

  ‘How long do you think she’s been here?’ the Doctor asked.

  The Master’s black-gloved hand pushed right through the helmet of the fallen figure. It crumbled into grey dust, as if it had never been made of anything more substantial than compacted ash. ‘More than a little while, if this fellow’s any indication. I wonder if he came for an audience with the queen, or to rob her tomb?’

  The spacesuit’s bulbous, top-heavy proportions spoke of alien anatomy. The Doctor caught a glimpse of a fish-like skull with saucer-sized eye sockets, before that too crumbled away.

  ‘Ring any bells?’

  ‘No …’ the Master said, on a troubled note. But then something caught his eye. He reached for something clutched in the alien’s glove. Strangely, the glove was still intact. There was a bubble of dust around it, which popped into nothingness as the Master broke the integrity of some field-generated membrane.

  He levered apart the fingers and prised loose a sleek object of black and chrome.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘A weapon, generating a self-preservation aura.’ The Master inspected the pistol-like device, touched a stud in its side and aimed it nonchalantly at the Doctor, tucking his finger into the trigger guard.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘My dear fellow, I thought it was self-explanatory. Aiming a neutron blaster at you.’

  Eight thousand, eight hundred and fifty-one. Red light, alarm. Eight thousand, eight hundred and fifty. Red light, alarm. Eight thousand, eight hundred and forty-eight … no nine, she’d skipped one. Go back, do it again. Damn, but her fingers were useless! There was almost no illumination now, which made things even harder. The main power supply had cut out, the rig switching to back-up generators and batteries. The emergency lights were not much use.

  McCrimmon had worked steadily for the first thousand combinations, ninety minutes by her watch, but she had stopped before proceeding with the numbers below nine thousand, unable to resist returning to the outer door. There had been no noise, at least none that she stood a chance of hearing over the multiple alarms, and she had allowed herself to hope that the others had abandoned their efforts to get through the door. But this was not the case. They were still at it, Irwin tapping in the combinations with a tirelessness that she could not hope to emulate. She hardly dared wonder where he had got to now. Up into the three, four thousands? Any minute, any second, he might hit the right sequence. And all she had done was waste precious time of her own.

  From somewhere else in the fabric of Mike Oscar Six there came a muted metallic crash, and then another. The floor under her feet tremored, and then seemed to give, gaining a slight but ominous tilt that had not been there befo
re. In the absence of windows, it was hard to be certain. But it seemed likely that something catastrophic was in the process of happening to the rig.

  Her rig.

  Jo tucked the MERMAN dossier under her seat. She had read it front to back, back to front, three times, but now her eyes were having trouble focusing on the text – and not just the blurred parts that referred to … him, the man whose name she was now in the habit of forgetting more than she liked. The helicopters were encountering increasingly rough weather, bucking and pitching in a most unsettling manner. It was one thing to hit choppy skies over land, where you always had the option of finding somewhere to touch down. But under them now was just swirling, turbulent sea, grey as slate, slimed with huge rafts of mucus-like foam.

  The omens were not auspicious. They had already passed one oil platform that was on fire, its entire upper structure wreathed in flames, and another that was simply gone, with just three concrete leg stumps jutting from the water as evidence that it had ever existed. They had passed an oil tanker, snapped in two like a big bar of chocolate, the edges of the bite unnervingly clean and circular, down to polished metal, and as they overflew the wounded ship they had watched both parts gradually pitch end-up and lower into the water. They had seen, halfway to the horizon, a hemisphere of water disappear, scooped out of existence – and then watched as the sea reclaimed itself, walls of water closing in like a puckering mouth. They had watched columns of water rain out of the heavens. They had seen whirlpools of air open in clear sky, sucking atmosphere to who knew where.

  Clearly the Sild offensive was taking more than one form, with time ruptures snatching entire structures and vessels out of existence, while the Sild who managed to come through with the ruptures were attempting the takeover of any kind of human installation, seaborne or dry land. Contact had now been lost with almost all North Sea maritime traffic and production platforms, including Mike Oscar Six. Isolated incidents were coming in from further afield. Trouble in the Irish Sea, the English Channel, the Bay of Biscay. The Sild had concentrated their initial efforts in the vicinity of the United Kingdom because that was where the Master was being held. But no part of the planet would eventually be spared.