Winner Takes All

by Jacqueline Rayner

  ‘We’ve tried to remove them,’ Robert told him. ‘But we just couldn’t.’

  ‘You’re not me,’ said the Doctor, grinning. But then his face fell. ‘Damn!’ he said. ‘I gave my sonic screwdriver to Rose. Oh well, improvisation it is then . . . Start yelling.’

  Robert did as he was told. The Quevvil might zombify him, but if it was what the Doctor wanted . . .

  ‘Let me go! Let me go!’ cried Robert at the top of his voice.

  The Quevvil picked up the silver control box and raised it threateningly.

  ‘Quick!’ called the Doctor, holding up the game’s control pad. ‘This thing’s gone wrong!’

  Robert and the Quevvil both looked at the screen. It certainly did look as if something had gone wrong – the picture was going up and down, up and down. Robert – but seemingly not the Quevvil – noticed that the Doctor was actually rapidly pressing one button with his thumb, again and again. ‘Sorry, Rose,’ murmured the Doctor. ‘Still, bit of exercise won’t do you any harm . . .’ He waved the control pad at the Quevvil. ‘I need this fixed.’

  The Quevvil approached them. It leaned over to take the control pad. And the Doctor hit it, right on its snub, hairy nose.

  The Quevvil reeled back, and the Doctor grabbed the silver box from its hand. Dropping the control pad, he prised off the top of the box, poked inside it, and suddenly pointed it at Robert’s forehead. Robert jerked back in alarm, but to his amazement and delight, instead of losing all control of his body, he felt a tickling sensation around the disc, as if the little metal hooks were retracting from his flesh! A second later, the disc tumbled off into his lap.

  But there was no time for rejoicing – the Quevvil had recovered from the blow and was staggering towards them, its quills straightening, ready to throw. The Doctor was still poking around inside the silver box. ‘Quick, on its head!’ he called out.

  In a split second, Robert realised what he meant. He grabbed the disc and pushed his hand forward in one rapid movement. His palm slammed into the Quevvil’s face, and he felt the metal legs push themselves into the monster’s coarsely furred forehead. The Doctor had the top back on the control box, and pressed a button.

  The Quevvil froze.

  ‘Well done!’ cried the Doctor, an enormous grin on his face. But Robert wasn’t grinning. He was gazing down at his hand. At the sharp quills that were sticking into his palm. The pain was intense. He choked back a sob.

  The Doctor followed his gaze. ‘Ow!’ he said in sympathy. Robert thought that didn’t even begin to cover it. But the Doctor was actually looking serious. ‘Got to get them out,’ he said. ‘They’re barbed, and they can work their way in really quickly. If they hit a major blood vessel . . .’

  Robert shivered. ‘What should I do?’ he asked, trying to keep his voice level.

  The Doctor looked him straight in the eye. ‘Can you bear some pain?’

  Robert took a deep breath, and nodded. He thought he’d been willing to die for this man. He couldn’t appear a coward in front of him now.

  The Doctor put a hand in his jacket pocket, and pulled out a scalpel and an apple. He gave the apple to Robert. ‘Bite into this,’ he said.

  Robert stuck his teeth into the apple, and held out his hand. There was a red-hot pain in his palm, and he crunched right into the apple in shock. He spat out the piece, and put the apple down. ‘I don’t think that’s really helping,’ he said weakly.

  ‘One more,’ said the Doctor. Robert felt another stab, and couldn’t help but whimper. ‘OK,’ said the Doctor. ‘All done.’ Robert looked down, and found the quills gone from his hand. The Doctor was holding them, and even at a distance it was obvious that the barbed points had expanded outwards till they looked like miniature Christmas trees. No wonder the Doctor had had to cut them out.

  The Doctor dropped the quills on the floor, and pulled a large white handkerchief out of his pocket. He began to bandage Robert’s hand. ‘Hold it tightly,’ he said. ‘But it shouldn’t bleed for long.’

  Robert nodded, gripping his palm as tight as he could with his left hand. But through the pain, he was happy. He’d helped! He’d actually helped! He’d helped the Doctor, and now they’d be able to rescue Rose, the most wonderful girl in the world . . .

  He looked up at the screen, expecting to see exactly the same view as when the Doctor had abandoned the game a few minutes before. But to his shock, he found that wasn’t the case.

  ‘Doctor!’ he screamed, too horrified to be embarrassed. ‘A Mantodean!’

  The Doctor spun round. There on the screen, the giant green figure of a Mantodean was approaching. Its jaws were open, coming closer and closer.

  SIXTEEN

  Rose’s thoughts about the Doctor were not complimentary. She’d been suffering the indignities of being walked and jumped and run around, and now she was frozen in one place, like a musical-statues world champion. One foot was just off the ground – under normal circumstances she’d have overbalanced quite quickly. The Doctor was probably having a good old laugh at stupid, helpless, puppet Rose.

  And just knowing that he almost certainly wasn’t didn’t stop her thinking about it. When she got hold of him . . .

  She’d give him a great big hug, because she’d still be alive and he’d still be alive and he’d probably have saved her life, lots of other people’s lives, and a planet or two into the bargain. And she wouldn’t mention the helplessness she’d felt; how she hated this more than anything ever.

  She wouldn’t mention how she was worried she was his puppet, doing things at his command, whether she could move by herself or not.

  She thought she’d chosen to travel with him of her own free will, but she’d figured out that he had his own agenda. Because he needed a companion. He needed her. Somehow, she validated him. If a tree fell in a forest when no one was there to hear it, did it make a sound? If a Time Lord saved a world when there was no one there to know it, was he still a hero?

  And she needed a hero right now, oh, God . . .

  There was a Mantodean. There was she, stuck like a lemon in the middle of the room, and she could see it down the corridor . . . any second now – oh, help, it had seen her, it had seen her . . .

  She tried to scream out with her mind, praying desperately that in a spectacular twist the implant in her forehead would turn out to be able to transmit thought waves to its controller. Doctor, help! Doctor, help!

  Doctor – It was skittering closer, multi-faceted eyes examining this intruder in its path, this alien creature that threatened the security of its home. Not that she was doing much threatening at the moment.

  As Rose watched, the creature’s mandibles sprang apart, like a gardener whipping open a pair of pruning shears. If they were slammed shut, her head would fall to the floor as easily as an unwanted twig.

  Doctor, help!

  And then . . . her knees braced, and she was flying into the air, soaring towards the high ceiling, and her arms were reaching over her head –

  – and she grabbed hold. Of what, she had no idea, she couldn’t look upwards, but for all she knew her fingernails were digging into solid rock. If she didn’t know what she was doing was impossible, she wouldn’t fall – like Wile E. Coyote happily running across thin air until he thought to look down.

  Her legs raised up, and her head was pointing downwards enough for her to see that the Mantodean could no longer reach her. It was scurrying about under her, probably very annoyed. She was just starting to feel – not safe, but some relief that she wasn’t about to die that very second – when she thought about grasshoppers, and the ‘hopper’ bit of their name, and weren’t praying mantises really like them, and weren’t Mantodeans really like praying mantises, and did that mean they could hop up high, say, ceiling high . . .

  The Mantodean was bouncing slightly on its back legs – preparing to jump? It was right under her, it would grab her, bring her down, snip off her head . . .

  Rose’s hands stopped gripping.

&n
bsp; They opened wide.

  She fell.

  She landed right on top of the Mantodean.

  Rose expected to be hurt, but she didn’t seem to be. She didn’t think the Mantodean was, either, just knocked to the ground, probably a bit dazed. She found herself jumping to her feet, running away, leaving the giant insect still lying in the middle of the floor. Round a corner, over a chasm, through a door, into a tunnel. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s SuperRose.

  The Doctor was back in control, and she was safe. Well, as safe as she could be round here, anyway.

  ‘There,’ said the Doctor, whose anxious eyes had belied his cry to the screen of ‘Soon get you out of there, Rose, no problem.’ His frantic fingers finally eased off the controls.

  ‘She’s OK,’ said Robert, relief flooding through him.

  ‘Not out of the woods yet,’ said the Doctor. ‘Robert, keep an eye on the screen. Tell me if you see anything – and I mean anything. Threatening bit of dust, anything.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Robert asked, doing as instructed but able to see out of the corner of his eye that the Doctor had levered the top off the console.

  ‘Few adjustments,’ said the Doctor. ‘This thing’s pretty sophisticated, but not enough, to my mind, not for what I need. Those Quevvils are good at this sort of thing, obviously, but they can’t make this sort of delicate adjustment, not with those great claws . . .’ He tutted. ‘Rose won’t like it, though.’

  ‘You mean you’re going to improve the controls? Make her do more things?’

  ‘Yeah and yeah.’

  ‘No, I don’t think she is going to like that.’

  ‘Nope.’

  The Doctor seemed to have stopped still all of a sudden. Robert held his breath – had the Doctor heard a Quevvil coming or something?

  He risked the tiniest glance at the man, and what he saw in his face was frightening. Hurriedly looking back at the screen, he whispered, ‘What is it?’

  The Doctor didn’t answer straight away. Robert tried hard not to stare as he got up and began to sweep things on to the floor, crash, smash. Robert was terrified the Quevvils might hear the noise, terrified the Doctor might break something important; most of all, terrified of the Doctor.

  ‘How dare they!’ the Doctor yelled, thumping the wall with his fist. ‘How dare they make me do this to her! Rose is not a toy!’

  ‘She’ll understand,’ Robert ventured after a moment, scared of making things worse, but knowing he had to say something. ‘She’ll know you had to do it, why you had to do it.’

  The Doctor didn’t seem to hear him. His voice was calmer now, but icier; scarier. ‘You don’t treat someone like that. You don’t treat a person like that. And they’re making me do it, making me degrade her like that. We’ll get out of this, won’t dwell on it, won’t ever mention it again. But, back of our minds, it’ll always be there.’ He thumped the wall again, then, after a frozen second, sat back down and picked up the controller. ‘I’ll just get on with augmenting my friend then.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Robert whispered.

  ‘I know,’ the Doctor whispered back. ‘Thank you.’

  Rose had stopped moving again, and was trying not to panic. Had the Doctor abandoned her? Would another Mantodean find her? What was that pain . . . in . . . her . . . head . . .?

  Things were moving inside her: in her mind’s eye she could see fibres worming around, wriggling along the pathways of her body. If she was X-rayed now, she’d look like one of those diagrams of the nervous system, a million wires threading through her, and she could feel every one of them. Then – after only a few seconds, or perhaps a lifetime – the pain faded, but a feeling remained, swamping every bit of her, from a tickle in her throat to a tingle in her toes.

  She started to move – involuntarily, as before, but smoothly, oh so smoothly – no longer was she a jerky string-puppet, now movement flowed like a ballerina swanning across a stage. An onlooker would find nothing risible in Rose’s deportment now, though they might well be in awe of her grace and strength and speed. She was a gazelle, a cheetah, a wonder of nature. Pits yawned beneath her, and were gone in the blink of an eye. Corridors flashed past, barriers were breached as she barely paused for breath. If Rose could have cried for joy, she would have done.

  ‘Wow,’ said Robert, watching the features of the Mantodean stronghold flash past, as if he was watching it on fast forward.

  ‘Pretty good, if I do say so myself,’ said the Doctor. He’d switched off his anger, pushed it back – was concentrating on the job at hand, not what it meant. ‘Lot of wasted potential, the human body. Right, time to get to work. I’m gonna be keeping a close eye on Rose –’ his eyes didn’t leave the screen at all while he was talking – ‘so I’m going to be relying on you, Robert.’

  Robert swelled with pride inside.

  ‘First, you need to get us untied.’

  Robert set to work. Their bonds were made of plastic and were tough, but now there was no watchful Quevvil waiting to pounce, he was able to set to and attack them with vigour. With the help of the Doctor’s scalpel, they were both soon free.

  ‘Now, you need to search around a bit. I’m hoping there’s a sort of map thing, a plan, diagram, anything that looks like that.’

  Robert began to explore the room. He felt nervous going past the frozen Quevvil – what if it came back to life just as he was in front of it? But he took deep breaths, and the monster remained statue-like, latest exhibition in the Chamber of Horrors, an expression of what might be shock still stuck on its hairy face.

  On the wall behind them, he uncovered what the Doctor wanted. It was a bit like a tube map, only loads more complicated, all spaghetti lines twisting and turning and intersecting each other. Here and there tiny coloured lights blinked, some blue, some white. The white ones were moving along spaghetti strands, one noticeably faster than the others, while the blue remained immobile. As Robert watched, a white light became still, and changed to blue. A few moments later, another blue light flickered and disappeared.

  ‘That’s it,’ said the Doctor, looking quickly around before turning back to the screen. ‘Brilliant. Now for stage – how many stages have we had so far? Stage whatever of the plan.’

  Rose soared over a Mantodean, the poor misguided creature having had the idea that stalking towards her with its jaws open would somehow worry her. Catch me if you can, she thought, leaping ever higher and faster.

  She reached the top of a series of stone steps, and there she finally stopped, gliding to a graceful halt. She wasn’t out of breath; she didn’t ache or have a stitch. Technology like this, and they use it to further a war. Just went to show how people could be clever and yet have no brains at all.

  Her hand went to her pocket – and pulled out her recently retrieved mobile phone. Her other hand started to press its keys. It scrolled through the address book. It stopped at a name. It pressed ‘dial’. It held up the phone to Rose’s ear.

  Mickey jumped when his mobile rang. To his astonishment, the display told him that it was Rose calling. He clicked it on hurriedly. ‘Hello? Rose?’

  Rose’s voice said, ‘Hello, this is the Doctor.’

  Mickey took the phone away from his ear and looked at it. It still said ‘Rose’. That’d definitely been a female voice. Rose’s voice.

  ‘You don’t sound yourself, Doctor,’ he said. ‘D’you have some sort of accident?’

  ‘You’re probably a bit surprised,’ the voice said. ‘Or more likely you’ve just tried to be witty. Rose can hear you but I can’t, and she can’t answer back, so you might as well just shut up and listen. I need you to do something. It’s really important, and unfortunately I don’t have anyone else I can ask.’

  ‘Thanks a lot,’ Mickey muttered, convinced by the rudeness that this really was the Doctor, who was for some reason using Rose’s voice to speak to him. And further than that, he really didn’t want to speculate.

  ‘Now,’ continued the Doctor, �
�I hope you’re better at playing Death to Mantodeans than you seemed, cos believe me, you’re gonna have to play like you’ve never played before . . .’

  Rose listened to herself in some amazement as she outlined the plan. Her mouth was opening and her tongue was going up and down and words were coming out, and she couldn’t do a thing about it. It was totally and utterly freaky.

  And she seemed to have developed a northern accent.

  Mickey was feeling slightly stunned. It was one thing to get a phone call from your ex-girlfriend, it was quite another to get a call from her new man using her vocal cords to speak to you, or something, and it was yet another thing entirely for him/her to casually drop into the conversation that she’s – he’s – calling from another planet, and needs your help to save the world again. Or a world, anyway, he wasn’t too sure about that. All he knew was that the plan the Doctor had outlined was not only impossible, as well as bordering on the insane, but practically speaking totally difficult because it involved him having a telly, which he didn’t any more. That actually felt like a far more insurmountable problem than the loony saving-the-world bits. It was getting latish now, nearly eleven, he’d have to find someone who’d let him come in and play a dozen games of Death to Mantodeans without asking awkward questions. If Jackie had been home he’d have had a chance – after the lecture about disturbing her beauty sleep . . . Maybe he could break in to Rose’s flat – but if he got caught, the police wouldn’t listen, they’d lock him up, and then who’d save the world?

  A thought struck him. There was a telly at the youth club. The club was supposed to shut at ten, but Bob, who ran it, let some of the older lads hang out for longer if it wasn’t a school night. Worth a go.

  Mickey bundled all the games consoles into Mrs Burton’s shopping basket on wheels, and limped off. The stairs were a bit of an ordeal, especially with the basket thumping down behind him, but he made it eventually.

  As he headed down to the youth club, Mickey threw a quick glance up behind him, at Rose’s flat. The windows were dark, of course.