by Gary Russell
‘And what is it then, some part of your fake-grifting paraphernalia?’
Peter raised an eyebrow. ‘You what?’
‘Oh, Globb and I know what you lot are up to. Trying to pretend you are criminals, conmen, and we’re your marks. But you’re not; we saw straight through that. You can’t grift a grifter like Cyrrus Globb.’
Peter thought about this. ‘Is that so?’ he said finally.
Kik the Assassin nodded her mohawked head, smiling widely. ‘We had you lot marked out the moment your mother walked into the Pyramid Eternia on Aztec Moon. She’s no grifter, she was looking for the Glamour, like that stupid Jaanson was. She should have had the word “ARCHAEOLOGIST” in big red neon letters floating above her head. Globb reckoned what she and your friend “Doc” know about short and long cons can be written on the back of my hand.’ She held her hand up. ‘And I have very small hands.’
Peter smiled. ‘You got me, you got all of us.’
‘I bet she’s not even your mum. She looks human to me.’
‘She is.’
‘You’re not.’
‘I sort of am. My dad was Killoran. I was born on Deirbhile.’
‘A Stormcage planet, yes?’
Peter nodded. ‘Born there, brought up on KS-159, transported to the slave pits of Bastion, now living on Legion. I know all the best places it seems.’
Kik the Assassin pouted in mock sympathy. ‘Poor mongrel boy. All that dark angsty childhood. How did you get caught up with all this?’
‘She’s my mum.’
‘For real?’
Peter nodded.
Kik the Assassin absorbed this information. ‘Well, I think you’re pretty sexy and hot. For a moron, of course.’ Suddenly, the Deindum maser was pointed at his face, and all trace of charm was gone from Kik the Assassin’s face. She held up what she had taken from Peter. ‘And I reckon, despite what you say, that this is a keycoder, probably to whatever ship you came here in. And as I have absolutely no intention of going back to the Stormcage, this is going to give Globb and me access to freedom.’
‘You and Globb? Why?’
Kik the Assassin just shrugged. ‘None of your business, mongrel.’
Peter nodded at the device. ‘You’re right of course. It is a keycoder. It’s also a tracking device – it doesn’t just let you into the Doctor’s time ship, it tells you where he parked it.’
Kik the Assassin frowned momentarily. ‘Time ship?’
‘Yeah, steal it and programme it to get you back home. So long as you’re careful, don’t tread on any butterflies whilst you’re here, you should be fine. Besides –’ Peter waved his arms around the wrecked police station – ‘it’s not like you’re human, so none of your ancestors are likely to be here.’
‘But Cyrrus Globb has some heritage here. This could invalidate our contract.’
Peter laughed. ‘Sorry. That’s the risk you take coming to twenty-first-century Earth. Dirty, smelly, full of germs, inedible food and bad fashion. My mum loves it of course. Her favourite period of research.’ He smiled at Kik the Assassin’s expression. ‘Yup, she really is a proper archaeologist.’
Kik the Assassin shrugged again. ‘Then I’m glad she likes this time period, because you’re all stuck here now.’ She activated the device in her hand, screamed and dropped unconscious as a fairly hefty voltage shot through her body.
‘Not a keycoder,’ he muttered to her. ‘Another device I invented to capture idiots on Legion who think like you did. Oh, and another thing you didn’t realise about me,’ he said bending down towards her, ‘is that my Killoran heritage means I’m about three times stronger than a human my age and height.’ Effortlessly he picked the assassin up and flung her body over his shoulder.
He sheathed, and thus hid, each of his weapons and devices except his Legion pistol. That he simply carried.
He looked down at Senior Sergeant Rhodes as he stepped over his body. ‘Sorry Sergeant,’ he said. ‘You are going to wake up in about twenty minutes, along with everyone else in here. Alive. But you are going to spend most of your day in the toilet being very ill. My little neuro-stunners are designed to scramble your synapses, giving you extreme vertigo. Still, better than killing you all, I guess.’
With Kik the Assassin unconscious over his left shoulder, Peter wound his way around the devastated police station, and pushed open the glass front door.
Thirty armed SPG officers raised their guns, clicking off the safety catches audibly, all aiming at Peter from behind cars and armoured trucks.
‘Oh, great,’ Peter said and looked into the night sky. ‘Mum? Jack? Ruth? Anyone, some help please?’
At which point, Sydney suffered another seizure, and all hell broke loose.
—
‘Now, Doctor, did you say Professor Horace Jaanson?’
The Doctor was talking to Keri Pakhar on Legion over speakerphone. Bernice could hear clearly because the smartphone was on the hotel room floor, and the Doctor was pacing around it, thinking.
‘We did,’ he said.
‘Interesting man,’ Keri said. ‘I’ve been researching him.’
‘Interesting is one word for him,’ Bernice conceded. ‘Arrogant, idiotic, egomaniac, ignorant – did I say idiotic?’
‘You did,’ Keri said. ‘But here’s the interesting thing. Pretty much everything we know about the Ancients of the Universe does actually come from his family. All of them. Going right back to when GalWiki started. Horace might well be a numpty riding on his forebears’ reputation, but without them, a lot of what we know about time-travel theory (Time Lords excepted, Doctor) would be gibberish. He’s the latest in a long line of important scientists.’
The Doctor nodded. ‘I knew the name was familiar. Wasn’t one of his maternal side responsible for proving the symbiotic link between the Time Squids of the Lower Vortex and the Crinis? I met a Crinis once – not fun.’
Keri just carried on. ‘So the Jaanson family speculated that, when the Ancients of the Universe did their bunk and vamoosed, various worlds that had been touched by their technology were left with guardians.’
Bernice grabbed the Doctor’s sleeve. ‘That man. Lue?’
The Doctor nodded. ‘Could be. He certainly knew more than he was letting on – and he exists in more than one time zone here on Earth.’
‘Well, here’s another, important thing about the Pyramid Eternia and why you need to get it off Earth urgently,’ Keri said.
‘Yes?’ the Doctor prompted. Then realised the phone was not responding. He turned back to look at it – only to find it smashed into lots of pieces by Cyrrus Globb’s big shoes.
Bernice was on her knees, arms behind her head. ‘Wherever we go together, Doctor,’ she was saying, ‘there’s always some mook with a gun pointing it in our faces, shouting and spitting and being incoherent with rage.’
Which pretty much summed up Professor Horace Jaanson at that moment, although the gun was in Cyrrus Globb’s hand, and he wasn’t upset at all. He seemed to be rather enjoying all this.
‘Stupid con artists,’ Jaanson was saying.
Globb let out a laugh that sounded not only like he didn’t laugh very often, but that it was coming from a very deep pit that didn’t encourage laughter because the noise it made was a bit terrifying. ‘They’re no con artists,’ he finally said.
‘Are too,’ said Bernice.
‘Are not,’ responded Globb. ‘I’ve been around, lady. Kik the Assassin and I twigged ages ago that you were playing us.’
‘We were?’ asked the Doctor.
‘They were?’ asked Jaanson. ‘They seemed pretty convincing to me.’
‘Makes you a perfect mark, then.’ Globb looked at Bernice. ‘Tell me some famous cons you’ve pulled off.’
‘Doc’s the leader, he’ll list them. He’s a long-con expert.’
The Doctor gave Bernice a look that suggested strangling her was pretty high on his list of priorities, before smiling at Globb. ‘Did you hear about the guy w
ho managed to sell the Sydney Opera House to five different people, until the cops got wind of it?’
‘That wasn’t you.’
‘Might have been. I’m not saying. You might be a cop.’
‘I’m not a cop, I’m a conman from the fifty-first century. And are you saying that was you?’
‘Could have been.’
‘Was it?’
‘Yes,’ lied the Doctor.
Globb snorted. ‘You are a really terrible liar, “Doc”. Now, what are you doing here?’
‘See?’ the Doctor looked at Bernice. ‘Everyone asks it eventually.’
‘Ever heard of the great Kirrin / Barnard conundrum?’ Bernice asked Jaanson and Globb. ‘You must have encountered it, Professor. Being so smart and all that.’
For a moment Horace Jaanson looked confused, caught Globb’s eye, and swallowed. Hard. ‘Of course I have, it postulates that, umm…’
‘You’re as bad at lying as the others, Prof,’ Globb said with a dark smile. ‘I really don’t like liars. I’m not listening to any more twaddle.’
‘Then listen to this, Mr Globb,’ the Doctor said, standing up, pushing the gun away. ‘Listen carefully. You are not from the twenty-first century but you are human, so you can’t stay here. I suspect that’s true of the Professor, too. If we don’t get the Glamour back to that pyramid, find a way in and get it off this world and back to Aztec Moon, this planet will explode.’
‘So?’
‘So your ancestors will cease to exist. So will you. Just. Like. This.’ He clicked his fingers. ‘Gone in a big bang.’
‘He’s lying,’ Jaanson said.
Globb stared into the Doctor’s eyes, and then nodded. ‘Nah, he’s not. He’s on the level.’ He looked at Jaanson. ‘This was fun while it lasted, but I don’t want to die here and now.’
For the first time in his life, Horace Jaanson ignored the bullies and the cleverer people and the ones who said they knew better, and he snatched the gun out of Globb’s fat, sweaty hand.
He aimed it at all three of them. ‘I want the Glamour. The Ancients of the Universe, that pyramid and all their secrets are mine. I have devoted my life to those secrets and I won’t be denied.’
He started to squeeze the trigger.
—
It was 22 December 2015, and Mr Thomas Gordon Taylor was not having a great night. He had returned home to discover that the Rabbitohs had lost and his daughter had scratched his wife’s car with her bicycle. To top it all off, at twenty past two in the morning he’d been telephoned and told that the Power Station’s alarms had all gone off.
According to his security teams, someone had stolen the weird rock his parents had told him was so important. To be honest, Mr Taylor wasn’t too upset by this. OK, so it had been in his family for nearly one hundred years, but he didn’t much like it, and his father and grandfather had always been a bit cagey as to how Great Grandad Tomas had got it. There were all sorts of rumours and stories about Nazi sympathisers, Hitler, the occult and the fact that Great Grandma had disappeared overnight. Mr Taylor didn’t want to look too deeply into his family history. As a result, the stupid Glamour rock thing had only been in the museum because it was in various wills – an instruction that it had to be for ever and ever. Somehow the news that it had been nicked made Mr Taylor very happy.
Maybe now he could shrug off the ghosts and debts of his ancestors and sell the stupid museum and move to the Gold Coast.
Truth was, after a really bad day, he was now having a good night. He settled back to sleep, having told his staff to coordinate with the police and he’d be in work in the morning to sort things out.
He was just dozing off, when he and his wife fell out of bed as an earthquake shook Sydney badly.
Very badly indeed.
12
Burning the Ground
The night sky in Sydney was cool and refreshing. Peaceful and serene. Beautiful even. Normally. This particular evening however, it was anything but.
The skies were red with flame, volcanoes that had previously been flat land, were wrenched towards the heavens, drenching the city in volcanic lava, choking it with burning ash.
The Doctor stood outside their hotel and looked upwards. It was like Pompeii, Montserrat and Atlantis all in one. He grabbed Bernice’s hand. ‘We have to get to the pyramid. Where’re Jack and the others?’
‘I don’t know,’ Bernice yelled over the noise of people screaming, car horns and other terrible sounds that depicted a city about to die. ‘The Bluetooth isn’t working.’
‘How clever are they?’
‘Very,’ she said instantly. ‘The cleverest people I know.’
‘Then hopefully they’ll head for the Pyramid Eternia. Come on!’
‘What about Globb and the Professor?’
The Doctor looked back. Globb was striding along, his enormous bulk pouring sweat in the heat, but his face showed his determination not to be left behind. In one hand he dragged the Professor, in the other he carried his gun, which he’d retrieved when the earthquake threw Jaanson off his feet. He’d been all for throwing Jaanson into the maw of death that surrounded them, but the Doctor had reminded him that, as they were out of time, displaced chronologically, if the Professor died here before he was ever born, it might cause a few problems with the Web of Time. Total nonsense of course, but in the literal heat of the moment, Globb bought into it.
The Doctor carried the rock.
‘We’re about two miles from the Harbour Bridge,’ Bernice shouted. ‘I’m not sure we’ll make it!’
All around them, chaos literally erupted as the city convulsed and cracked open. Whole buildings, whole areas sunk instantly into the lava, everything and everyone burned to a crisp in seconds.
Focusing on getting to the Pyramid Eternia so all this could be put right, the Doctor spied a white van nearby. ‘Get in,’ he yelled.
Bernice got into the driving seat as Globb yanked the rear doors completely away and threw the Professor then himself into the back. Bernice ripped under the steering column until she could hotwire the engine and it roared into life.
‘Who taught you that?’ the Doctor said as he clambered in beside her.
‘Mutual friend,’ she said back. ‘I call it Ace-ing the engine!’ As they moved forward, Bernice looked at the Doctor. ‘I don’t recall Sydney being destroyed in 2015.’
‘It wasn’t. But it could be. You know how history likes to reinvent itself. Oh and if you could avoid hitting things, that’d be good.’
Bernice clipped a bin on a kerb as she roared down George Street towards the Harbour.
The Doctor glanced into the wing mirror and watched in horrified fascination as the road and buildings behind them sank into flame.
‘I don’t think you need to worry about the speed limit, Benny,’ he shouted over all the noise from outside.
Another car careering towards them had to swerve and go left.
‘That’s not good,’ Bernice yelled.
‘Why not?’ growled Globb.
‘Because he was driving away from where we need to go which suggests to me that maybe it’s already gone. Poof. Up in smoke.’
‘I smell burning,’ Horace Jaanson whined.
‘It’s the tyres,’ Bernice said. ‘We are actually on fire.’
The Doctor opened his door to look at the tyres. Sure enough, tiny flames sparkled amidst the smoke. ‘They’re melting into the tarmac,’ he reported.
‘If it ignites the fuel, we’re dead,’ Bernice said matter-of-factly. ‘We’ve not got much further to go. Do we risk blowing up or risk getting out, running and burning our feet off?’
‘Drive!’ all three men yelled.
Bernice drove.
—
When the armed policemen had fallen over, Peter Guy Summerfield had momentarily considered running. But these guys would be better than the normal cops in the station. They were trained for fast reaction and it only took one of them to shoot him dead.
So h
e stood his ground.
Some of the team staggered to their feet, when a second, larger shake occurred, followed by a noise of a kind Peter had never heard before.
It was like the whole planet had felt this tremor and was screaming out in pain. Or rage. It was an awful, primal noise that frightened him to his very core and, for the first time in his life, Peter was frozen by indecision.
Decision, however, was made when he felt himself scooped up and almost thrown onto the flat roof of the police station, the unconscious Kik the Assassin rolling away from him. She rolled to Ruth’s feet, and Peter realised his rescuer was Jack, leaping as he always did so well.
Unaccustomed as he was to gratuitous displays of emotion, Peter hugged Jack, whispering ‘Thank you’ over and over again.
Then the lava erupted. Peter risked a glance back down, but there was nothing left of any of the people down there, flash fried in a split second. Lava was raining down onto the steps of the station.
‘This roof isn’t safe,’ Ruth said.
‘Where to?’ asked Peter. ‘The hotel?’
‘No,’ Jack said quietly. ‘I think we should head to the pyramid – that’s where the Doctor and Benny will go eventually.’
Peter again scooped up Kik the Assassin, but Jack was torn. Of course, he could only carry one person at a time. The pyramid was only maybe a minute away if he jumped from building to building and then down onto the parkland beneath the Bridge.
Peter smiled at them both. ‘Take Ruth, I’ll be safe here,’ he lied.
Jack looked at him. ‘Anything happens to you, Benny’ll kill me. Slowly. Don’t go away or try anything brave. Or stupid.’ Then he and Ruth were gone.
Peter looked down again and felt the whole station drop slightly as it started to sink. He looked ahead – the water that surrounded Sydney’s collapsing CBD was steaming and with a colossal crash, the Harbour Bridge itself broke in two, the north end dropping into the boiling waterway.
All he could see for miles now was red lava consuming buildings as it roared down from volcanic geysers and he could only imagine that the death toll was going to be, well, indescribable.