Doctor Who: Harvest of Time

by Alastair Reynolds

  And then he winked.

  The Doctor knew instantly that something was not as it seemed; that the Master had gained, or believed himself to have gained, the upper hand. How could this be?

  ‘Wait!’ the Doctor shouted, addressing now the Sild rather than their prisoner. ‘He’s cleverer than you! Whatever hold you think you have over him, it’s not strong enough!’

  But the Sild had no interest in the Doctor’s words. They knew only that the final piece of the Assemblage was now in their possession.

  ‘You may leave,’ the voice informed the Doctor. ‘Or stay. The choice is yours. You are of no consequence to us.’

  The Doctor glanced back at the waiting flier. It would return on automatic pilot to Praxilion, and once there the Red Queen would have no reason to deny him the TARDIS.

  But he could not leave.

  ‘If you don’t mind,’ he said, ‘I’ll hang around.’

  ‘Concern for your friend?’

  ‘Actually,’ the Doctor said, ‘it’s you I’d be more worried about.’

  They promenaded the vast and gloomy bowels of the ship, until at last they arrived at a place the Doctor recognised. It was the hemispherical chamber where they had seen the Master’s other incarnations, rows and rows of them, stacked all the way to the dizzying zenith. All the iterations of the Master, all faces and forms, unstitched from time.

  It was different now, as of course it had to be. There were very few unoccupied positions, and all the incarnations appeared to be alive, if this dismal condition could be dignified by such a term. Once more, the Doctor marvelled at the variety of guises his adversary had worn, from the faces and bodies of children to the greyest of wraiths. Men, women, humanoids and aliens – all human and non-human life was here. The Master had been all of these things. Would be, the Doctor corrected himself, needing a constant reminder that many of these incarnations were in fact from the Master’s future, or rather the future that now only existed as a shadow of itself.

  One position, in the lowest ring, was conspicuously vacant. This was where they were taking their prisoner. The Master, for his part, offered no visible resistance. He was still putting on an act, stumbling and wheezing, giving an impression of only feeble awareness of his predicament. But that wink had given the Doctor the lie. The Master, he was certain, was in total command of his faculties. He had been so from the moment the Infinite Cocoon released him.

  What had happened in there? What had the Master done?

  His Sild captors brought him to the empty position. There was a man-shaped aperture, around which was arranged the life-support and neural interface systems, the mechanisms which would keep him alive and connected into the Assemblage. The Master slotted into the gap like a precisely made puzzle piece. ‘Please,’ he wailed, with suitable histrionics. ‘Spare me this! I beg you!’

  ‘He’s pulling your leg, you know,’ the Doctor said, arms folded.

  The Sild-controlled aliens fixed the breathing mask over the Master’s face. There was just time for the eyes to swivel onto the Doctor, a definite mischief in them.

  A curving glass door hinged into place.

  ‘Initiate neural connection! Bring the final unit into the Assemblage!’

  From around the snug-fitting aperture, various silvery lines snaked out and began to probe the Master’s form. He wriggled slightly, but gave no indication of great discomfort. Not even when the lines pushed through the skin of his skull, and wormed visibly under the skin.

  ‘Contact established! Beginning integration!’

  All around the chamber, the other versions of the Master were responding to the introduction of the new element. They twitched and squirmed. Their eyes blinked or slid under tight eyelids.

  ‘The Assemblage recognises the final element! The symmetry is complete!’

  Patterns of light now danced across the chamber, following geometric pathways from one element to the another. At first the Doctor could follow the dance, but it soon became too rapid and complicated for study. It was like a speeded-up film of traffic moving through a city’s grid, accelerating into a blur of frenzied motion. These were the neural impulses flowing between different elements of the Assemblage. Any one version of the Master was potent enough, but linked together the effect was equivalent to a massively parallel supercomputer, executing many instruction steps simultaneously. This was what the Sild had wanted; this was what they had got.

  So far.

  ‘The Assemblage is stable! Mental power is now exceeding all previous limits! Initiate time rupture!’

  The Doctor remembered the window in the adjoining chamber, where they had first glimpsed the ruined husk of Praxilion. He ran to it, the Sild oblivious to his movements, and again found the tall curving pane. He did not have long to wait before the world swung into view, descending from top to bottom.

  Praxilion had changed since that last view from orbit, but he had seen the world as it now was from the flier. He recognised the shrivelled remnants of oceans, not yet totally sucked dry. The atmosphere was an indigo soap bubble. But still, an atmosphere and seas. Where there was life, there was yet hope.

  ‘Time rupture commencing! Magnitude and stability of rupture already exceeding all prior efforts!’

  The Doctor noticed now that a glowing control panel had appeared on the pane, annotated in Gallifreyan. It had not been there in the future, but by then many of the Consolidator’s less essential systems must have broken down. He waited until the planet had come into view again, then tapped a series of commands onto the glass. The planet froze, then swelled. The Doctor zoomed in closer, directing his attention on one of the larger remaining oceans. There, in the middle of it, was an appalling thing to behold. The waters were spiralling around the open mouth of a time rupture many tens of kilometres across, creating a terrifying, island-sized whirlpool. Then, not too far to the north, another rupture opened and held. The Doctor touched the controls again. The view jerked west. Here was another rupture, opening into the atmosphere – an air-swallowing void so enormous that it was visible from space, like the giant storm on Jupiter.

  The Doctor reeled at the destruction he was witnessing. Had he misjudged things? Was the Master not, in fact, putting on any sort of act? Had the Sild got exactly what they had always sought: absolute control of time, achieved by harnessing the Master’s unsurpassed command of temporal physics?

  So it seemed. At this rate, Praxilion would be a dry and airless husk in mere weeks – if not sooner. The Master was only just getting into his stride, after all.

  The Doctor had seen enough. He dashed back into the main chamber. ‘Stop this! You’re butchering a world! Nothing can justify this crime!’

  ‘Why do you protest now?’ the electronic voice asked. ‘You must always have known this would be the outcome!’

  ‘You gave us no choice! At least spare the Praxilions. You’ve ruined their world. Let the survivors live in peace.’

  ‘Increase the time ruptures. We have what we need now. The Praxilions have no further strategic value. Their continued existence is an unnecessary detail.’

  ‘No!’ the Doctor shouted. ‘That was never the arrangement! You told the Queen you’d spare her people, in return for the Master!’

  ‘A necessary lie.’

  The Doctor sprinted to the compartment where the final incarnation had only recently been installed, slipping easily between the Sild-controlled aliens. He dug his fingers into the seam where the glass cover had closed over the Master, trying to lever it open.

  ‘Cease.’

  ‘No! I should never have let this happen!’

  The Doctor redoubled his efforts. With a crack, the glass cover sprung open. The Master, masked, seemed unaware of the intrusion. The Doctor tried to rip the neural connections free, but as soon as he had wrenched one of the silver lines from the Master’s flesh, another slithered in and replaced it. It was hopeless.

  The Sild had him. It was the Quagulan and the water-creature, the latter flowing itse
lf over him, exerting a soft but irresistible pressure. They tugged the Doctor away from the Master. With a free hand he tried to rip loose the Quagulan’s ambulator, but it was too firmly attached. His fingers closed around the cylinder containing the Sild pilot, but before he could do any harm the water-creature had smothered him, so that he was literally inside it, goggling at its floating, disconnected organs, like multicoloured goldfish in a plastic bag, the ambulator also floating inside. And then he was on his back, struggling for breath, before the water-creature flowed off him.

  ‘He is too unpredictable. He must die, or he must become Sild!’

  The fight had knocked the wind out of him. He tried to get to his feet, but his muscles had turned to jelly. The walking brain toppled slowly over, its spine-like legs tangled and limp. The brain’s ambulator had detached itself, abandoning its host organism. Now it was scuttling over the hard metal floor, heading straight for him.

  The Doctor had no strength. Everything seemed to close down as the Sild neared. He was looking down a swirling, rushing tunnel – his own imminent annihilation. The Master had barely been able to endure the briefest of contacts with the Sild. The Doctor, much less mentally resilient, had no hope whatsoever.

  The ambulator vanished. It did not simply cease to exist on its own. So, too, had the circle of flooring immediately beneath it. And in the instant of its disappearance, there had been a cold cosmic chill. A time rupture, no larger than a beach ball, had swallowed the ambulator.

  The Doctor found some strength. He struggled to his feet. The Sild seemed confused, as well they might.

  From the Master, muffled by his breather mask, came the unmistakeable sound of laughter.

  ‘Send another unit!’

  Now it was the turn of the Social Craint to lose its controlling organism. The silver crab scuttled off the top-heavy creature, balanced on its strange cartilaginous unicycle. The Social Craint fell over. The crab whisked toward the Doctor.

  It too vanished. The rupture had been bigger this time.

  The laughter was spreading now. It had started with one facet, the version of the Master who had travelled with the Doctor from Earth, but others were joining in. Ones and twos, quietly at first, but echoing from one side of the chamber to the other. It was like a conversation, conducted in a particular sort of manic chuckling laughter.

  The Doctor said: ‘Of course! I should have known – it’s the Master, don’t you see? He’s achieved independent control! He can make the time ruptures happen whether you want him to or not!’

  ‘This is not possible! The Assemblage is our instrument! We are its master!’

  ‘I’ve a feeling the tables have just been turned.’ The Doctor was bent over, like a runner with a stitch. ‘But don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

  The Master’s laughter was becoming contagious.

  Men, women, children, aliens … they were joining in. The laughter amplified itself. It built and swelled in definite waves. It rose and fell. It was a cackle, then a shriek, then a dark burbling undercurrent. It was a thing with a mind of its own. The Doctor swivelled around, his eyes darting from one incarnation to the next. Though they were masked, their faces moved with laughter.

  Convulsions of laughter. An audience of Masters, in hysterics.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  ‘There is a fault with the Assemblage! Contain and rectify the fault!’

  ‘Rather too late for that,’ the Doctor said, a dim sort of understanding coming upon him. ‘He’s fooled you. Fooled me, come to think of it.’

  ‘This is not possible!’

  ‘He’s found a way to turn the Assemblage against you!’

  ‘This cannot be! The Assemblage is our own invention!’

  ‘Then you shouldn’t have left it lying around once you were finished with it!’ The Doctor could only see one way that the Master could possibly have triumphed. When they had overshot, visiting the future version of this ship, the Master had had time to study the architecture and logic of the Assemblage, tracing its connections with the Doctor’s own sonic screwdriver.

  It had seemed like innocent curiosity at the time. But nothing was ever innocent where the Master was concerned. He had used that information to shape his own mind in the Infinite Cocoon – not merely healing himself, but making himself into a kind of mental weapon. When the Sild probes sank into his mind, they had provided the means for the Master to begin his takeover.

  Not for the first time, the Doctor was forced to admire the extreme resourcefulness of his old adversary.

  ‘You have betrayed us!’ the Sild voice declared, trying to make itself heard over the laughter. ‘We trusted you to bring the Master to us! You will be punished!’

  ‘You’ve tried that!’

  ‘Destroy him!’

  The Quagulan raised an armoured arm. The armour adjusted itself in a complex manner, allowing a gleaming little weapon to pop out of the Quagulan’s sleeve. The weapon swivelled on a little turret, and its barrel clicked open.

  ‘Now steady on!’ the Doctor said.

  The Quagulan weapon fired, or began to fire – it would never be clear which. Either way, the Quagulan would not be shooting at anything else again. Its entire arm had vanished, along with a sizable chunk of its upper torso. The edges, where the body part had been scooped away, formed a perfect glistening concavity. The Quagulan dropped to the ground. The Doctor felt the faintest ghost of an energy pulse waft over him, no worse in its way than a pleasant summer breeze.

  Now it was the turn of the water-creature. It began to wobble its way toward the Doctor, shimmering and rippling like a single bloated raindrop – it moved itself like a man in a potato sack, forming two stubby foot-like appendages – before some sudden and violent force ripped it into a thousand wet pieces. The bits of the water-creature rained down around them. Its internal organs, separated from their support medium, twitched and spasmed in a most unpleasant fashion.

  The Doctor had both hands raised. ‘Enough!’

  The laughter ebbed away, until there was a kind of watchful silence. The Sild did not know what to do next. Nor, for that matter, did the Doctor.

  Suddenly there was movement, one of the glass covers being pushed aside. The Master, the familiar incarnation who had travelled with the Doctor, stepped out of his Master-shaped alcove, peeling away the breather mask and allowing the neural probes to slither from his flesh. He stopped, adjusted his sleeves and gloves, and took a moment to groom his hair, for all the world as if he had just stepped out of a changing room.

  ‘Destroy him!’ the Sild called. ‘He is the weapon! He is the one that has damaged the Assemblage!’

  But the Master raised a gloved hand, quite calmly. ‘I strongly suggest that you do nothing of the sort. I may no longer be physically bound to the Assemblage, but my control over it remains absolute. I can and will exercise my time control to eliminate you all. In fact I have every intention of doing so.’

  ‘Destroy him now!’

  The Master turned to face the remaining party of Sild-controlled aliens. He pointed his hand at them, palm raised, fingers spread, and made two of the aliens disappear.

  ‘You doubt my sincerity?’ he asked.

  ‘I think they’re getting the message,’ the Doctor said. ‘And I suppose I should offer my congratulations. You’ve done what you always do – turned the tables.’

  ‘Indeed, Doctor. But the Sild have only themselves to blame.’ Casually, he made another two aliens disappear. The Doctor wondered to what far corner of space and time they had been consigned, whether it was the airless cold of interstellar space or the blazing dense core of a star. He doubted very much that the Master had spared his victims. He had standards to live up to.

  But there were more Sild than the relative handful controlling these alien hosts. They must have been on their way for some while, drawn by the time ruptures, sweeping through the great corridors and halls of the Consolidator like a silver tide, until at last they began to approach the Assembla
ge. The Doctor heard them before he saw them: it was a low metallic rumbling, the sound of a million whisking metal legs. When the front of the stampede reached the chamber’s low-ceiling entrance, it paused. The Doctor and the Master had by then both turned to greet the oncoming army.

  It was a shifting, teetering wall of silver, easily as high as a man. Crab upon crab, thousands of them just in the very front of the advancing mass. Beyond, there must have been millions. They were locked together into a single organisational unit, bound by legs and tentacles, and packed so tightly that there was very little space between their bodies. The Doctor made out countless glass cylinders on the backs of the crabs, and within those cylinders countless squirming thumb-sized Sild, no two distinguishable. He understood then what he had always known, but until that moment not properly appreciated: the Sild had no conception of the individual. That was how they had conquered worlds and empires. They were the ultimate cannon fodder. And yet they came in such overwhelming numbers that they could absorb the most appalling losses. They had no fear, no remorse, no sense of loss at their fallen comrades. That was why they always won; why they would always win in the future.

  ‘Very good,’ the Master said. ‘You’ve spared me the trouble of demanding your presence.’ And he extended his hand and punched a hemispherical hole in the wall, vanishing perhaps a hundred Sild in one instant. But the hole quickly healed itself, as the Sild readjusted themselves to once again form a seamless surface.

  The Master chuckled and did it again, twice this time. The Sild reorganised.

  ‘Stop!’ the Doctor said. ‘You’re killing them for the sake of killing!’

  ‘Would you rather I destroyed all of them in an instant, Doctor? It is fully within my capabilities.’

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t kill them at all. There has to be a better way!’

  ‘Not with the Sild. I would have thought that was obvious by now.’

  Without warning, the entire chamber shook as if struck by a titanic hammer. The floor shuddered beneath the Doctor’s feet. He had to paddle his arms to regain his balance. Then the hammer blow came again.