Doctor Who: Harvest of Time

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked the Master.

  ‘Nothing. I believe the Sild are using the Consolidator’s defences against the surface of Praxilion.’

  The Doctor would have rushed to the window again, but the wall of Sild blocked his way. But he could imagine the spectacle well enough. Weapons of awesome destructive potential, raining energy down on the scattered remnants of that once great civilisation.

  ‘Stop!’ the Doctor shouted, hoping that he was addressing the Sild. ‘The Praxilions have done you no harm! They delivered the Master! You have no reason to punish them further!’

  ‘We have every reason!’ came back the reply. ‘They delivered a trick!’

  ‘That was the Master’s own doing – even I didn’t know what he was planning!’

  ‘Ignorance is no excuse. The bombardments will continue!’

  The chamber shook again.

  The Doctor reached into his pocket and found the object waiting there. He produced it slowly, allowing all a good chance to see it. Then he tossed the golden sphere from his palm once, as one might a cricket ball, before catching it deftly. ‘This ends now! No more deaths! No more punishment! There’s been enough!’

  The Master, his arm still outstretched, eyed the fist-sized sphere. His eyes met the Doctor’s questioningly.

  The Doctor nodded. ‘The Red Queen’s sceptre. The Axumillary Orb.’

  ‘The most concentrated explosive device in history,’ the Master said. ‘How strange, to see it now! The paradoxes of time travel never cease to fascinate.’

  ‘It’s the same device that the Red Queen used,’ the Doctor confirmed. ‘But earlier in its existence. The Red Queen hadn’t yet learned how to operate it by remote control. But she showed me how to trigger it manually.’ The Doctor rolled the sphere in his fingers.

  The Master’s smile was tight.

  ‘Would you?’

  ‘If it meant an end to this butchery.’

  ‘It would mean an end to you. To both of us. To all of me.’

  ‘I’m afraid that strikes me as a small price to pay.’ The Doctor paused. ‘But this is an instrument of last resort. The Sild will cease their attacks against Praxilion. You will cease your attacks against the Sild.’

  The Master tilted his chin. ‘Sympathy for them, Doctor? After all they’ve done?’

  ‘There’s no crime in the universe large enough to justify genocide.’

  ‘Tell that to the Time Lords, who made this ship.’

  ‘We made a terrible mistake. I’m not about to make a second.’ The chamber clanged again. The Doctor shouted: ‘The attacks will cease! You will obey me!’

  The Master nodded appreciatively. ‘I couldn’t have put it better myself.’

  The Doctor shuddered. He had held this much power only once or twice in his career. It was not a feeling he much cared for.

  ‘And you will stop attacking the Sild.’

  ‘Very well.’ Slowly, the Master lowered his outspread hand, tightening it to a fist as he did so. ‘I believe the point has been made. So what do we have now, Doctor? Stalemate?’

  ‘I prefer ceasefire.’

  A section of the wall of Sild vanished, leaving a scooped-out hollow. Another followed, to the right. A moment later there was a third, to the left. The remaining Sild tumbled and scrambled to fill the voids. There seemed no end to them.

  ‘You contemptible …’ the Doctor began.

  The Master’s eyes were wide. His arms were at his side. ‘I did not do that!’ Then he looked around, up and up, taking in the Assemblage, all the masked faces. ‘I did not do it,’ he repeated, with an urgency the Doctor found hard to dismiss.

  ‘They did.’

  ‘They are you.’

  ‘My control over them is … not absolute.’ There was fear in his eyes now. ‘They seem unwilling to accept your terms, Doctor. They seem not to believe that you would really destroy us all.’

  ‘Then you’d better convince them!’

  ‘I have seen the Axumillary Orb in action – they have not!’

  More Sild vanished. In retaliation, the Sild reinitiated their planetary bombardment. The chamber resonated, as if it had been hammer-struck. The Doctor nearly went stumbling. He flailed for balance, but by some great good fortune managed not to lose his grip on the sphere.

  The Master spread his arms, a theatrical impresario greeting his audience. ‘Listen to me! The Doctor is sincere! He will bring destruction down upon us all!’

  More Sild vanished – along with a sizable chunk of the chamber’s own floor. This was met by another assault against Praxilion.

  ‘They’re not listening,’ the Doctor said.

  ‘They will.’ The Master now outstretched his hand and directed it at one of the elements in the Assemblage – one of the versions of himself. He set his jaw, his face tensing with effort, his eyes narrowed to concentrated slits. A circle of distortion began to form around the incarnation that the Master had selected – it was the beardless young man in a suit that the Doctor remembered from their first visit to this chamber. The circle wobbled, as if its integrity were being resisted. The Master grimaced. The circle stabilised, gained definition, and with a pop the space inside it – including the alcove, and the young man in a suit – ceased to exist.

  ‘No!’ the Doctor said, horrified at what he’d just witnessed. ‘You can’t wage war on yourself!’

  ‘If it is a matter of self-preservation …’ the Master said, straining with the effort, ‘then I am more than willing.’ He pivoted on his heels, his outstretched arm rising and falling as he sought another victim. This time it was a child, no more than a boy. The Master scrunched up his face again. He grunted with the exertion. The circle – the surface defining the time rupture’s volume – began to form.

  But the Master went flying, knocked back by an invisible force. ‘They resist!’ he said, struggling back to his feet. ‘But I am stronger! Are they so foolish to think their combined will is superior to mine?’

  ‘You can’t hope to win!’ the Doctor said. ‘They’re you!’

  ‘And my mind has been reshaped to exploit the Assemblage,’ the Master said, pausing to wipe spittle from his chin. ‘I will triumph!’ He raised his hand again, but this time the Doctor could not help but notice a tremor in the outstretched limb, a quivering in the fingertips. The Master shut his eyes and tried to project another time rupture. But a similar rupture was starting to form around the Master himself. The Assemblage was trying to spit him out of this timeframe.

  ‘They’re fighting back!’ the Doctor shouted.

  ‘Let them! I am stronger!’

  Even the Doctor was beginning to feel the desperate crackle of psychokinetic energies, as the Master warred with the ranked counterparts of himself. Both time ruptures had collapsed before they had a chance to stabilise, but now others were opening and collapsing all around. There were dozens – some as large as beach balls, some as small as soap bubbles. They quivered and popped too rapidly for the Doctor to track. It was almost pretty. It was also war, as both sides grappled with the ancient time machinery and tried to gain a decisive advantage.

  Civil war amongst the incarnations of the Master? The Doctor realised that the universe still had some surprises up its sleeve. Not that he had ever come close to doubting that.

  Cautiously, he slipped the golden sphere back into his pocket. He had a feeling it had outlasted its usefulness, at least for the moment.

  ‘I should have known it,’ he said. ‘I can barely get on with myself, and I’m not half as vain and arrogant as you.’

  The Master went sprawling again. It was a wonder he had managed to avoid being ejected into time. But there was something new in his expression now. He looked around the chamber anxiously, sweeping his gaze along the rows and ranks of himself. Time ruptures were opening and closing at random, biting spherical chunks out of the Assemblage. Spheres and partial spheres were appearing in the floor, in the wall of the Sild, in the very fabric of the Consolidat
or. The Doctor danced to one side as a void opened under his feet.

  ‘Runaway instability!’ the Master declared. ‘The time equipment is going into overload!’

  ‘Can you stop it?’

  ‘No! It’s beyond my control now – beyond all control!’

  The Doctor watched, numbed, as the Master’s incarnations vanished in ones and twos, scooped out of existence.

  ‘Where are they going?’

  ‘Anywhere, anywhen – back where they originally came from! I’m being scattered back into time!’

  The pace of the time ruptures was growing furious now. Even the Sild could barely maintain their wall. They too were being snatched out of existence, hurled into the vastness of eternity.

  ‘The ship won’t last much longer,’ the Doctor said.

  The Master’s chest heaved up and down with the effort of breathing. ‘I concur. From this point on, the runaway instability will only escalate. We may have only minutes …’

  The Doctor dug his hand into his pocket. ‘You’ve seen the Axumillary Orb! Don’t think I won’t use it!’ He began to walk toward the Sild. ‘You’re going to give us passage. Both of us. That’s all we want.’

  ‘They won’t listen to you.’

  ‘They will. The Sild wanted to escape into time. That’s what they’re getting! Not as an all-conquering military force, focused on one objective – but hurled at random into all time and space! They’ll all be scattered and divided, militarily useless! But that’s better than annihilation!’

  ‘I hope they see it that way.’

  The Doctor advanced on the wall of silver crabs. It began to part, cleaving wide to allow the two Time Lords to walk down it, the Doctor first, his hand still in his pocket, the Master close behind, the silver sea closing on them the moment they had passed. Time ruptures continued – even deep within the mass of Sild. Parts of the ship were disappearing at an alarming rate. Before very long, its basic integrity would be weakened.

  ‘We had best make haste,’ the Doctor said.

  ‘After you,’ the Master said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  By the time they reached the flier it was clear that the Consolidator did not have long to live. Awful groans sounded throughout its fabric, as if a living thing were suffering the torments of the damned. Blasts of wind now howled down corridors where the air had been crypt-still for a thousand centuries. Artificial gravity surged and faded, making the ship feel like a roller-coaster ride. The hull was holed. The vessel was surrendering to the void, even as the time ruptures consumed it from within.

  But the flier was mercifully intact. The Doctor and the Master raced up the connecting ramp, having long since seen the last of the Sild. Working together, they operated the alien controls as if born to them. The autopilot systems began to lift the flier and spin it around for departure. They had no need to wait for the great door to open, for the time ruptures were serving the same purpose. The fabric of the Consolidator was winking out of existence even as they watched. The flier’s navigational computer selected one of these holes and shot them through it.

  ‘One question,’ the Master said, bracing himself against a console, when they had regained something like level flight. ‘How confident were you that the Sild – not to mention my counterparts – would fall for your bluff?’

  ‘My bluff?’ the Doctor asked, surprised.

  ‘The Axumillary Orb. A weapon of unspeakable destructive potency, Doctor. If the Sild had bothered to learn the slightest thing about you, they would have known of your spineless inability to deliver on a threat.’

  ‘I just saved your life. Lives. Don’t I deserve a little gratitude?’

  ‘You deserve nothing, Doctor, save my undying contempt.’

  ‘Coming from you, that’s not far off a compliment.’ But the Doctor’s levity was short lived. ‘There she goes,’ he said, nodding to the rear window.

  The Consolidator was breaking up, becoming a disconnected cloud of pieces, drifting slowly apart in a pale nimbus of escaping atmosphere.

  ‘We should consider ourselves fortunate,’ the Master said. ‘Very few individuals have ever seen the same ship destroyed twice. Your precious Blinovitch would be spinning in his grave, if he were anything but a myth.’

  ‘Time is resilient,’ the Doctor said. ‘It can stand the odd paradox or two.’

  The flier pitched, nosing down toward Praxilion. The Doctor had been doing his best not to dwell on what the Sild had done to that already ruined world, but the evidence was now hard to ignore. New craters, still livid from the heat of their creation, pocked the surface. Mountains of shattered crust had been lofted into orbit, blanketing the world from pole to pole. The Red Queen could not possibly have survived the bombardment, could she?

  But the flier was heading home regardless.

  ‘What of us now, Doctor?’ the Master asked, as the flier approached the smoking stump that had been the palace. ‘It would seem we find ourselves at something of a crossroads.’

  ‘Will you consent to return to the twentieth century?’

  ‘Back to a miserable prison cell, with only a colour television for company? Why yes, Doctor: what a splendid suggestion.’

  ‘Then you’re going to be stranded here on a dying world, at the end of time, with no possible hope of escape. That television set’s looking better and better, isn’t it?’

  ‘There are ways and means.’

  ‘You mean, stealing my TARDIS?’

  The Master looked affronted. ‘My dear fellow, the thought had not even begun to cross my mind.’

  ‘Good, because it won’t do you an ounce of good trying. And remember, I’ve still got this.’ The Doctor pulled the Axumillary Orb from his pocket.

  ‘It’s good that we understand each other,’ the Master said. ‘No room for doubt.’

  ‘None at all.’

  The flier nosed its way between the still-smoking spires of the palace. The Doctor felt a deep apprehension as they came in for landing. The palace was a wreck, blasted and gutted. The TARDIS might have survived – even that was not guaranteed – but he had grave fears for the Red Queen.

  ‘She’s endured so much,’ he said. ‘Millions of years. All that accumulated wisdom. It can’t end like this.’

  ‘Everything ends,’ the Master said. ‘That’s the beauty of it.’

  They landed, settling in through a faint but still active pressure containment field. The flier touched down on rubble, the remains of part of the palace which had collapsed in on itself.

  The Doctor and the Master stepped out into clouds of dust, both men shielding their mouths.

  ‘I fear the worst,’ the Master said.

  ‘That she might have survived?’

  ‘No, Doctor. That she might have died.’ Then the Master halted, and pointed to three small forms waiting in the dust-haze. ‘Praxilions! Some of them are still alive!’

  The Doctor and the Master stepped over obstacles, batting dust from their faces. ‘Your queen!’ the Doctor called. ‘Is she …?’

  ‘Come quickly,’ said one of the Praxilions. ‘There isn’t much time.’

  ‘She’s still alive?’

  ‘On the edge of death. But the machine … you have used it once, and proven your control of it. Could you use it again?’

  ‘The Infinite Cocoon?’ the Doctor asked.

  ‘It is her only chance.’

  They brought the Doctor and the Master to the machine. Praxilions waited next to it, with the queen’s exhausted and injured form cradled between them. Both men regarded the alien machine with foreboding. There could be no mastery of this technology, only a temporary truce with it.

  ‘Well?’ the Master asked. ‘Is it damaged?’

  The Doctor used his sleeve to wipe a layer of whitish dust from the lid. ‘It should still function – it’s very sturdy technology. But I don’t suppose I have to tell any of you that there’s a terrible risk in using it.’

  ‘Do what you must,’ said the Praxilion. �
��Without it, she has nothing left to lose.’

  The Doctor stationed himself at the control panel. He touched buttons. Yellow light fanned in a widening arc as the lid slid to one side. ‘Place her inside,’ he told the aliens. ‘Carefully!’

  ‘It’s hopeless,’ the Master said, his arms crossed. ‘The woman is beyond salvation.’

  ‘Her neural patterns should still be recoverable,’ the Doctor said. ‘Maybe not the most recent additions, but the deep structures … her oldest memories. It has to be worth a try!’

  ‘To what end?’ the Master asked sceptically. ‘So she can govern a ruined world?’

  The Praxilions had lowered the Red Queen into the machine. The Doctor tapped controls, desperately trying to recover his rusty knowledge of this ancient alien symbolic language, its subtleties and pitfalls. He was sure that the Cocoon had the capability to bring Edwina McCrimmon back to life. Equally sure that the slightest error could prove catastrophic. Nor was there much time to ponder the exercise. The palace was shaking on its foundations. It would not be long now.

  ‘There. I’ve done what I can. It’s up to the machine now.’ The Doctor glared at the Master. ‘No help from you!’

  ‘The difference between you and me, Doctor, is that I understand when something is futile.’

  The lid began to close. The machine commenced its humming and gurgling. Patterns of illumination began to chase themselves around the control matrix, gaining in speed and complexity.

  ‘It’s starting,’ the Doctor said. ‘Support medium flooding in … metabolic breakdown beginning.’ He tapped a set of commands. ‘You’ve been through this. What was it like?’

  ‘A cleansing. But I recovered.’

  ‘More’s the pity.’

  ‘We are what we are, Doctor. If I did not exist, the universe would soon fill the void left by my absence. You could almost say that the universe requires us. We are order and disorder. We balance each other very effectively.’

  ‘Yes. Well I’d almost started to get used to the idea of the universe without you. I’m not sure I like this new turn of events.’