by James Goss
I read it again, and actually, it didn’t seem so bad.
But still, the fact remained, the one person who could help me out of all this was the one person who couldn’t. Because the Doctor … because 428 was dead.
The door to my cell swung open. Standing there was the Doctor.
‘Oh,’ I said.
To my astonishment I started crying.
‘ “Hello” normally does just fine.’ The Doctor looked embarrassed.
Obviously, I did a reasonable amount of inarticulate babbling. The Doctor didn’t have much time for that.
‘Listen, Governor,’ he said. ‘I’m springing you out of your own prison. If you want to actually enjoy the irony of that, I suggest you follow me sharpish.’
‘Where to?’ I asked.
‘The last place anyone will think of looking for you,’ smiled 428. ‘My old cell.’
We got there, I later learned, because much of the CCTV had gone permanently off-line in the cascade failure. The system was keeping nearly all it could to itself to keep life support and gravity just about going. Even most of the Custodians had simply slid to a halt. Their Docking Stations still seemed to be working, but the power-up cycle refused to release them.
This meant that the remaining prisoners were having to be looked after by the human Guardians. Who were also rushed off their feet trying to hack back into the Prison systems.
Basically, the current regime was pretty lax. I made a note of all the various failings, should I need to counter-accuse Bentley of anything. ‘You could get away with murder here,’ I said.
‘Probably not the best thing to say in a prison, you know,’ answered 428, sliding the door of his cell open with a pretty nifty skeleton key.
‘Where did you get that from?’ I asked.
428 shrugged. ‘You said I could take what I want from the workshop. Well, I did. I’ve been busy.’
‘How long … how many days have I been in custody?’
‘About four hours,’ said 428. He shut the door of his cell behind us, and indicated we sit down on the bunk.
He plonked himself next to me. I flinched a little. Was I still afraid of him? Disgusted by him? Or somehow, despite everything, terribly pleased to see him?
‘So,’ said 428. ‘Let’s deal first of all with the good news. Which is my remarkable escape.’
‘Had you planned it?’
‘No. Well, not exactly. But if Clara asks, do say yes. I’m just quite a quick thinker. Especially when I’m running. Exercise really sharpens the synapses. You see, I went into that tunnel knowing that I was basically going into the exhaust duct for Level 7’s Baxter Drive. It all had to go somewhere. Now, then, you’ll remember I took that blowtorch with me? Well, once I’d used it to soften up the clamps, I left it running.’
‘Starting that small fire and all that smoke? Hardly a clever move.’
‘You think not?’ 428 arched an eyebrow. ‘On the contrary, it was very clever. It’s a powerful blowtorch. I turned it down to a lower setting so that anything flammable would smoulder and smoke, not burn. I needed smoke.’
‘Why?’
‘For the fire alarm. Remember it sounding? Well, I’d remembered what Bentley had said, that there was an ordinary fire alarm. And then there was the Flashpoint alarm, which went off thirty seconds prior to the section being sealed and the air from it being vented. I triggered the Flashpoint alarm. I’d done the maths in my head. If I could get myself vented far enough into space first then I wouldn’t be poached, fried and scrambled by the Baxter Drive.’
‘Oh.’
‘Good, isn’t it?’
‘Well, wouldn’t you still be in space?’
‘A little. But there’s an air-shell around the asteroid. Not much of one, I grant you, but enough of a safety net. And also, on my admittedly hurried way out, I did grab the blowtorch.’
‘Did you?’
‘All right then, fine, I’ll admit, none of us had much of a choice. I ended up floating in space with all the tools I’d grabbed and that silly anti-grav trolley – which turns out not to be so silly when you’re floating in space. Since tools are useful, I loaded as many of them as I could onto the trolley, and then fastened the blowtorch to the back of it. I turned the setting of it up to … 11. And then I escaped back into your prison.’
‘What?’
‘The Level 7 loading bay doors. Actually quite the weak spot. You should make a note of that. I just flew my trolley up to them and then used the blowtorch.’
‘Can I just stop you. You broke into my prison on a flying trolley?’
428 grinned. ‘Why not? I’ve escaped from it enough times using just a spoon.’
I hit him.
He looked surprised. ‘That was … Well, that was ungrateful.’
‘A lot of people have died,’ I said.
‘Yes … about that.’ 428 stared at me. ‘Didn’t you think that was odd? The Defence Array firing like that?’
‘Well, yes. But—’
‘It wasn’t doing what it was supposed to.’
‘No.’
‘And the Oracle didn’t predict it. Funny, that.’
‘No. Not funny. Not funny at all. You can’t carry on running around like the world is just a grim joke to somehow laugh at. You’ve got to …’
‘What have I got to do?’ 428 rubbed his jaw, tired again. ‘I really don’t think you get to tell me how to behave any more, Governor. You’ve lost control of your Prison. Admit it. The Defence Array should have told you the game’s up.’
‘What do you mean?’
428 shook his head. ‘You’ll see in a bit. I’m very much afraid you will. But listen, just for the moment, let’s stop thinking about the children, let’s put the destruction of Level 7 to one side, shall we?’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’ll stop you thinking clearly. I don’t know about you, but it’s pretty much all even my head can think about, and that’s not helpful, is it?’
‘No,’ I said. I couldn’t. Not for a moment. I would never.
428 tapped me on the forehead and my thoughts cleared.
‘Good,’ said 428. ‘So, we’re going to find out what’s really going on here. And I think that’ll tell you why the Defence Array blew up Level 7.’
The Prison seemed eerily deserted.
‘Well, that’s wrong,’ I said. ‘There should be about a hundred prisoners remaining.’
428 nodded. ‘And we need to find them. Is Lafcardio still here?’
‘Yes. But he’s not talking to me.’
‘Ah.’ 428 smiled. ‘But he will to me.’
We found the old man carrying some tattered books. ‘When the prisoners fled, they left them behind,’ he muttered, almost to himself. ‘I knew they needed looking after. I just thought I’d collect them up and take them to the library. I was thinking of starting up again.’
‘But this place is finished,’ I did not say. ‘OK.’ That’s what I said. I noticed Lafcardio wasn’t looking at me. He was barely looking at 428. He was barely looking at anything.
‘Who is left?’ 428 asked him.
Lafcardio turned, focused with difficulty, and beamed at him, smiling. ‘Delighted, genuinely delighted.’ He pumped 428’s hand enthusiastically.
428 detached himself and took one of the books from Lafcardio. He leafed through it. ‘The Barber of Seville? It really is funny what survives down through history, don’t you think?’
Lafcardio nodded, seriously. ‘There was a time, less than a millennium ago when it was still possible to have read every important book and most of the trivial ones. To quote from and discuss intelligently all of them. Now, oh now …’ He laughed. ‘It’s not possible. It just isn’t. One of the things I’ve liked about this place. So few books. Actually a blessing. It’s made knowledge a finite thing. We had fewer than five thousand books. That’s about half a dozen each at a time. But it’s an easy sum for anyone to work through … Why, for the first time in my life, I found I ac
tually had something in common with people from the Southern Worlds. If you’d asked me that a few years ago, I’d have laughed. But it turns out, no matter what colony you’re from, you’re in broad agreement that Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less is Jeffrey Archer’s best work.’ He beamed at us both. ‘And the classics! Why, the most surprising people spent their nights reading The Arabian Nights and dreaming of escape on a flying carpet.’
‘I’ve flown on a carpet,’ said 428, seemingly serious. ‘It had fleas. And was worryingly saggy.’
Lafcardio smiled tolerantly. ‘Of course you have. We used to have a copy of The Phoenix and the Carpet.’ He looked suddenly crestfallen. ‘It’s gone now.’
We walked slowly along the corridors towards where the library had once been. Devoid of people, The Prison still made noises to itself. Ghost doors slammed. Metal walkways ticked away like clocks. And it was getting warmer. Stiflingly so.
Even 428 had noticed. ‘The air is getting stale. Oxygen content is becoming depleted already. The air units need to start recycling pretty soon.’
‘Oh, I shouldn’t worry,’ Lafcardio muttered. ‘They always sort it out here. The Governor is efficient to a fault.’ He addressed this last remark to me, seemingly without realising I used to be the Governor. ‘Ah, here we are.’
The Library was a mess. Many of the shelves had gone to make canteen furniture, but a few still remained, stretching away into the shadows of the room. Huge piles of unknowable junk, charred remnants of the venting, were cluttered around grilles. Even though the air had been emptied and recycled several times, the whole place still reeked, a sickly rich smell of burnt plastic.
Lafcardio placed his little handful of books on a shelf. They looked pathetic. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘It’s a start, isn’t it? Every man has to start somewhere. And I’ll get there.’
He pottered off among the debris, pulling out the occasional singed fragment of a book, sometimes little more than a spine and burnt margins, placing it hopefully on a shelf.
Soon he forgot we were even there, moving around, muttering to himself.
‘We’ll get you some more books,’ I offered.
428 nodded. It was the right thing to say.
‘Oh good.’ Lafcardio rubbed his hands, then went back to plunging through the teetering stacks of debris. ‘Something’s glinting in here … All that glitters …’
We left him alone.
‘The poor man’s gone mad. He really wasn’t much help,’ I said to 428.
He gave me one of his chilling looks. ‘Really? Did it not tell you that sometimes, somehow, life finds a way of continuing, of pressing on? Even if it has to blinker itself to a few unfortunate details of reality.’
‘He needs help,’ I said.
‘No, no.’ 428 smiled. ‘I think you’ll find he’s the happiest person in here.’
Which was when we heard Lafcardio’s scream.
We raced back through to the Library without even thinking of the danger we were in.
In a corner of the room lay the little old man’s body, broken.
Looking around, the darkness loomed over us, huge and sinister. The piles of debris, the empty shelves, everything threw ominous shadows.
‘Something in here killed him,’ I said.
428 crouched over his body. ‘Yes,’ he said sadly. ‘He was reading.’ He tapped the open book still clutched in the man’s hand. ‘The Magician’s Nephew. That’s a good one.’ He closed the book gently, laid it to rest on Lafcardio’s chest, and then straightened slowly up. ‘We should go.’
‘Really?’
428’s voice was very low. ‘The door is just there. We should go.’
‘But why?’
‘Can you never whisper?’ 428 hissed, ‘Because the door is there and nothing came out of this room so …’
‘What killed him is still in here?’ I gasped.
‘Oh, so you can whisper.’ 428 nodded curtly.
We didn’t make it for the door before it came for us. One of the piles of debris shifted and something rushed out of it at us. It was hard to see exactly what it was, what form it took, but it was swift and deadly.
It went for 428, or, rather, 428 went for it with a chair. All I could really see was him moving among shadows, crying out occasionally.
I made for the door.
I stood on the outside, pausing, trying to work out what to do next. I could seal the door. That was probably the safest thing. It would mean losing 428, but it would also mean I had trapped that creature – something else that may, just, have caused the problems I was accused of. Evidence. I tapped in the code to seal the door. It didn’t work. They’d changed my passcode.
428 shot out. ‘Ah, you waited for me? Brilliant!’ He beamed at me. I noticed the jagged tears in his prison uniform. He was holding the battered remains of a chair. He tossed it back inside, and then pulled a spoon from his pocket. ‘I made another one,’ he laughed. With a whirr of noise, the door to the library sealed.
‘What was that?’ I asked.
‘Frightening,’ he replied. His smile had faded from his face. ‘I’ve still no idea what it is, but it’s lethal. It also appears to just kill.’
‘How so?’
‘It’s no longer as curious. Nor is it cautious any more.’
‘Any more?’
‘It’s the same thing we encountered on Level 6. It had been taking pains to cover up its tracks. Now it left Lafcardio’s body for us to find. Either because it didn’t care, or because he didn’t have what it wanted, or it was luring us to …’ His smile was grim, ‘It’s certainly clever.’ He tapped his teeth with his fingers, ‘It’s a trap … in a trap.’
‘What?’ I said.
‘I think that’ll become apparent. We should go.’
‘Too late,’ said Bentley.
She was standing behind us, with a squadron of Guardians. They looked tired but very, very angry.
‘Ah, hello,’ said 428. ‘You shouldn’t have found us yet.’
‘No,’ agreed Bentley. ‘But the Governor just used his pincode on the library door.’
‘Oh. Oh, I see.’ 428 gave me a look. I didn’t see what it was, as I was staring at the floor. I took some comfort from the fact that Bentley had still called me Governor.
428 strode into the space between us and Bentley’s Guardians.
‘Now then, the problem is that I wanted to lay out a theory to you. A careful theory which convinced all of you, Prisoners and Guardians, to work together if you wanted to live.’
‘I don’t have any more time for your clever, lethal theories,’ snapped Bentley. She stepped forward, and 428 swept up a hand.
‘Neither do I,’ he snapped. ‘I needed to gather evidence. Build a convincing case. Avoid you finding us with any dead bodies. I’ve a procedure. It’s tried and tested. Still,’ he sighed, ‘sometimes you improvise.’
428 held up his spoon.
Before any of the Guardians could draw and fire, the door to the library had sprung open and the thing was upon us all.
‘What is that?’ yelled Bentley.
‘Later,’ snapped 428. ‘Just shoot it.’
The thing? I suppose I should describe the thing as it appeared. It was a fast-moving mass, taller than a man, and wider. At first it seemed to be wearing shadows, and then a cloak, and then I realised … It was covered in scraps of black plastic sheeting from the debris in the library. The tatters fluttered around it like streamers, disguising its true shape. Something glinted underneath. But I also had the strangest memory of childhood – seeing an ancient pantomime enacted. One where a dragon rushed across the stage. The dragon was a terrifying spectacle (especially when you were a 6-year-old boy), but even I could see that as it moved and twisted, the costume shifted and the joins revealed tiny hints of the operators inside – bits of an arm or a flank. It was the same here. Inside all that black sheeting was metal, but also what seemed to be a person.
It made a horrifying spectacle as it bore down on us. O
n the Guardians. On all of us.
‘You heard the Doctor,’ I yelled. ‘Just shoot it!’
The Guardians pulled out their blasters and fired at the thing.
‘Brilliant!’ enthused the Doctor. ‘Just as I thought. No effect. That’s splendid. That means you have to listen to me if you want to live.’
‘What?’ Bentley stared at him in disbelief.
‘Your guns don’t work,’ the Doctor was saying, ‘and shortly after that happens, everyone always decides they need me—’
One of the Guardians got too close. She vanished screaming into the black mass. Seconds later something wet was thrown out of it.
‘Trust me. Trust me now,’ snapped the Doctor. ‘You can’t stop that creature. We all need to run.’
Bentley glanced in horror at the Guardian’s body. At the black, glinting, whirring mass heading towards us.
‘Fall back,’ she snapped.
We all ran then, following the Doctor, who ran quickly, like he’d had a lifetime of running.
Bentley drew up to me. ‘So, you’re trusting 428 now?’ she said.
‘For the moment, I have to.’
‘Don’t be fooled,’ she told me. ‘Remember the report on him. He gets close to you so that he can attack you.’
‘And what about you?’ My voice was terse. ‘Isn’t that what you’ve done?’
‘I was …’ Bentley faltered. Or maybe she was running out of breath. ‘I was obeying Protocols.’
The Doctor took us round a corner, and waited until we’d passed through an archway. As soon as the last Guardian was through, the Doctor brought up his spoon and a blast shield slammed down. Seconds later, the shield buckled under a terrific impact. The creature itself was utterly silent, but the metal it was attacking screamed.
‘We do not …’ the Doctor began and then his eyes drifted to the blast shield. All of us were watching it. ‘We really don’t have very long. It’s got a lot stronger.’
Bentley marched up to him and knocked him to the floor. ‘You let that thing loose on us. Because of you, another one of my Guardians is dead. When are you going stop?’