by Steve Cole
‘That’s your client?’ asked the parrot.
‘Yup.’
‘Doesn’t look the type. Looks much too respectable to be a receiver of stolen goods.’
The Corsair smiled. She had a remarkable smile, when she deployed it, whatever body she wore. ‘Looks,’ she said, ‘can be deceiving. Especially when it comes to our customer. Oh, he’s a bad boy, that one. He’s about to steal a Type 40 TARDIS. And then you won’t believe the trouble he’ll get into.’
The window shattered. Someone was firing at them.
Which reminded her.
‘Um. Would you mind very much following me back to my ship?’ she asked the leather box.
It continued to lie heavily on the floor.
‘Please?’ she added, as politely as she could.
Somewhere at the back of her head something that was not her felt like it was, reluctantly, waking up.
The box rose an inch, wobbled, then levitated, steadily, into the air, and remained there, unsupported, four feet above the ground.
‘Now what?’ asked the parrot, fluttering off the steamer trunk and circling the room.
‘Now,’ said the Corsair, ‘we run!’
She ran. The parrot flew ahead of her. The Corsair looked back, to see the steamer trunk hanging unmoving in the air behind them. ‘Oy!’ she shouted.
The trunk swayed in the air, as if trying to make its mind up about something, and then, smoothly, it followed them.
Above them, on the tower roof, the Corsair heard thumps and crashes. The building shook. Troop transporters were landing…
The Corsair ran down the dusty glass stairs as fast as she could, in a sort of controlled plummet. Not, she decided, the wisest way to descend. It was a broken neck waiting to happen, and this would be the worst possible time for a regeneration – not that there ever seemed to be a good time.
At the next landing she stopped for a moment, to catch her breath. The parrot circled above her.
The leather steamer trunk caught up with her and waited obediently beside her.
Below them, a window shattered. She heard shouted orders, the sound of many booted figures running up the stairs towards her.
She looked at the battered outside of the large steamer trunk. Inside it was the long-lost Hand of Omega: the fabled stellar manipulator of the earliest of the great Time Lords, technology that could turn any star into a supernova, that could rearrange the very fabric of the universe itself. She grabbed a handle with one hand, pulled herself up onto the trunk. It bobbed gently in the air, like a rowing boat, as she clambered on it.
‘Stop! Drop your weapons,’ shouted a voice from above her. ‘Or we shoot.’ Someone shot at her then, to make sure that she understood.
The Corsair didn’t have any weapons to drop, unless you counted the Hand of Omega, which wasn’t the kind of weapon they were thinking about.
She remembered where she had left the Esperanza, envisioned the little sloop in the under-cellar, tried to remember exactly the paths and staircases she had walked from her ship to where they were in the tower.
The Corsair called to the parrot, ‘Get under my coat! Now!’ The parrot dropped onto her shoulder, and edged into her coat, its blue and yellow head peering out from her collar.
The most powerful thing in this part of the universe purred impatiently beneath her.
‘Right,’ she said, drawing a map in her mind for it of the staircases in the Imperial Edifice of Infinite Steps, and the journey down to the sub-cellar in which she had left the Esperanza. ‘Let’s go home.’ And then, to be on the safe side, ‘Please?’
More shots, from above this time.
The steamer trunk moved cautiously through the air, as if it was getting used to being ridden. Then it picked up speed, sliding through the thin air faster than the Corsair had thought possible. The Corsair could feel both of her hearts pounding in her chest with excitement and delight, and she shouted, ‘Wheeeeee!’ as they lurched around a corner and slammed down yet another staircase.
‘You really aren’t getting paid anything for this job?’ asked the parrot, as the steamer trunk crashed through a squad of armed soldiers, sending them flying back down the steps. By the time the soldiers had picked themselves up, the trunk was a tiny dot far below them.
‘Not exactly,’ said the Corsair. ‘I mean, I’ve already been paid. The Doctor got me out of some rather sticky trouble, and so I promised I’d do a job for her in return.’
‘OK… and so we’re bringing this thing to her?’ asked the parrot.
‘Of course not. We’re taking it back to the fellow in the Astrakhan you saw projecting his eidolon into the room up there. He knows he needs the Hand of Omega, doesn’t quite know the reason, has no earthly idea why he has an overwhelming urge to take the Hand to Earth and hide it there, but he expects he’ll figure it out sooner or later.’
‘Will he? Figure it out?’
‘Yes. Much, much later, though. Then he’ll use it to send a star nova and incidentally start a Time War. Not the Time War. Just a little one. The little one will get erased by the big one. And then nobody will remember it at all.’
‘You remember it,’ said the parrot. ‘You remember everything.’
‘The snake,’ said the Corsair, ‘swallows its tail. And we all wind up where we began.’
‘As you say,’ said the parrot. ‘But I fail to see what your tattoo has to do with… STOP THIS THING I SAID STOP IT OR WE ARE DOOMED!’ For the Hand of Omega was aiming itself for the floor at the bottom of the steps, and it did not appear to be slowing down. The parrot closed its eyes, while the Corsair braced herself for a collision and was surprised when the heavy glass paving stones that made up the floor shimmered and dissolved.
‘Hand of Omega,’ said the Corsair to the steamer trunk, ‘you are full of surprises.’
It did not reply, but, for a moment, the Corsair felt a wave of perfect smugness waft up from the steamer trunk and wash over her. The roof reformed above them.
‘How did the Hand of Omega get to the City Obsidian in the first place?’ asked the parrot, as they drifted on their steamer trunk through the cellar-darkness. ‘It’s the last place you’d expect to find a long-lost Time Lord stellar manipulator, isn’t it? In a hidden room in an abandoned city.’
‘Good point,’ said the Corsair. ‘Probably I’ll need to hide it there a few hundred years ago. We’ll need to steal it from Omega and Rassilon and the other bloke first, of course. That’s going to be interesting. Still, they’ve never met this body before. Might give me the element of surprise.’
She let go of the handle, slipped off the steamer-trunk onto the cellar-floor, and walked forward in the darkness. The parrot edged carefully out of the coat and back onto the Corsair’s shoulder.
They were in a lightless cellar, in the centre of a deserted city – abandoned and forgotten amid a dry and barren desert, but the Corsair smelled saltwater, and heard a sail flap in the breeze, and she knew they were almost home.
‘Light, Esperanza,’ said the Corsair, and the little piratical sloop was illuminated by tiny lights that twinkled and shone and danced across her deck and vanished high into the rigging. Far above them, in the building, something went boom, and something else crashed and reverberated. The Corsair strode up the gangplank.
‘Right,’ said the Corsair to the steamer trunk, which had followed her onto the deck. ‘You settle down by that hatch over there, and we’ll be casting off in moments.’
The trunk settled on the deck as if it weighed nothing at all.
‘Did you miss me, dear?’ asked the Corsair as she took the helm. She gripped the ship’s wheel in her hands, felt Esperanza growl happily under her touch. The Esperanza was a model 60 TARDIS: she was old – the Corsair liked to think of her as vintage – and she lacked the refinements of modern vehicles, but she was still the best ship there was. There was a whumpf as the winds of space-time filled Esperanza’s sails, and billowed them out into the nothing-at-all…
> A swarm of lights flickered over Esperanza’s deck and mast like demented fireflies. There was a grinding, dematerialising sound, like the sound of a universe in pain, and the TARDIS was gone.
Moments later an army transporter crashed into the cellar, and a number of soldiers looked around in puzzlement, seeing nothing out of the ordinary of any kind, apart from a hyacinth-blue feather. They took the feather back with them to their Supreme Leader, who sent images of it across the star system, along with messages pointing out that a healthy reward would be paid for information leading to the capture of the owner of the feather.
The reward would not be collected for several years, not until a strapping big fellow marched up to the Supreme Leader’s throne room, with information he claimed would lead to the capture of both of the owners of the feather – the woman and the bird.
The Supreme Leader, who prided themselves on being an excellent judge of character, trusted the man immediately. He had the kind of face that made you want to trust him, after all. A really honest and good-natured smile.
The Supreme Leader paid the reward in full, and even gave the strapping big fellow the feather – to use, the big fellow explained, to bait the trap. And neither the blue feather, nor the reward, nor the strapping big fellow with the snake-swallowing-its-tail tattoo on the inside of his left wrist, and nor for that matter the contents of the Inner Treasure Vault of the Imperial Treasury have been seen since.
But as the poet Byron wrote, somewhat earlier (according to one way of looking at the universe) or much, much later (if you were inspecting the universe from a different direction):
For him they raise not the recording stone –
His death yet dubious, deeds too widely known;
He left a Corsair’s name to other times,
Link’d with one virtue, and a thousand crimes.
Lockdown 2020
Isle of Skye
8
The Simple Things
by Joy Wilkinson
Graham wasn’t keen on bucket lists. He didn’t want to be ticking things off as if there’d come a point where he’d had his fill, and he knew that, when the darkness loomed, he found as much solace in the small things – watching the garden birds, dusting Grace’s frog ornaments, hiding the TV remote from Ryan – as he would in bungee jumping off the mountains of Mars.
But when the Doctor offered him the chance to go wherever and whenever he wanted, he knew exactly what to ask for. A small thing, and yet the biggest – a simple kickabout with the first West Ham team to win the cup.
He’d dreamed about it for years. A quick trip back to the glory days of 1964 to tackle Bobby Moore on the training ground. Graham was fully prepared to fall flat on his face in the mud. It would be an honour and a privilege. But this… this was just bloody typical!
‘That TARDIS hates me,’ Graham despaired. The TARDIS had turned up in a noisy, filthy factory corner, nowhere near Bobby Moore.
‘That’s weird,’ said the Doctor, checking the sonic.
‘No it’s not. It’s exactly what I’d expect. It’s been like that ever since I brought my own cushion along, as if it’s a personal criticism. I tried to explain – it’s memory foam—’
‘No, it’s weird because we are in the right place,’ she managed to cut in. ‘West Ham. Monday 20th April, 1896.’
‘Did West Ham even exist in 1896?’ Yaz asked, trying to give a stuff about football for Graham’s sake.
‘The place probably did, but not the football club,’ said Ryan, who had tuned out as much of Graham’s West Ham trivia as he could, but had unwittingly picked bits up.
‘No, hang about…’ gasped Graham, his eyes starting to sparkle. ‘Listen.’
They tried to, but it wasn’t easy to hear anything with the CLANK-CLANK-CLANK of the factory racketing on.
‘This is an ironworks – that’s what they were called at first – Thames Ironworks FC. That’s why they’re called the Hammers.’ Graham’s heart was CLANKING now.
‘Surely it’s Hammers because of the Ham?’ Yaz said.
Graham shot her a withering look, but was soon sparkling again as he figured it out. ‘I never said which cup, did I? So it’s brought us to our first ever final against Barking – the Charity Cup. Last rematch after drawing twice. We win the trophy 1-0 in our first ever season – today!’
‘Keep it down, Granddad,’ warned Ryan. ‘If the players are around, you don’t want to give the game away. If you jinx it and they lose, you’ll change the club’s whole history.’
‘Did they play here in the Ironworks?’ Yaz risked another withering look, but Graham was too enthused to admonish now.
‘No, but they worked here, so they must be having a last kickabout before heading to the match. I take it back – I could kiss that TARDIS. I’m going to train with Charlie Dove!’
‘Or maybe not.’ The Doctor was suddenly grave. ‘What does this place make, Graham?’
‘Ships, mostly. Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company, if memory serves.’
‘Warships?’
‘That’s right. For the Navy. And some other countries—’
‘How about for aliens?’
He stared at her. They all did. She wasn’t kidding. They followed the trace the sonic had picked up, through the heat and cacophony of the ironworks to a large door that led into a vast workshop. Or that would have done, if it weren’t locked. A group of young men were hanging around outside, clutching a ball. Graham went quiet, like a shy little kid. The Doctor was still troubled – as were the men.
‘Have you got us locked out?’ said the man with the ball. ‘It’s the only empty space. We need to get in and practise, but the boss won’t let us because of some big customer.’
The whole team glared at them, suspicious of the strangers who seemed to fit the ‘big customer’ bill.
‘Don’t worry, I’ve got a bone to pick with them too. Wait there, won’t be a tick.’ The Doctor sonicked the lock and slipped inside. Yaz and Ryan followed, with Graham last, eyes riveted on his heroes, still unable to speak for fear he might only be able to squeak.
The gigantic room was indeed completely empty, until the Doctor revealed what was behind the perception filter. A leviathan of a spaceship. Iron-wrought like a First World War dreadnought, but a very different shape, tooled for intergalactic skies not seas. Turrets rose on all sides, ready to be decked with alien armaments. A hundred cannons at least.
‘Draconian Galaxy-class battlecruiser,’ the Doctor breathed in horror. ‘Early model, but I guess it’s another seven centuries before they use them to wage war on humans. I didn’t know you’d crossed paths yet.’
Before the others could get her to break that into bite-sized chunks, another door opened and a man in a suit entered with a tall reptilian humanoid woman in a green robe. The gang needed no help to figure out that this was the boss with the big customer, who wasn’t happy to see them sniffing around her gunship. Before the Draconian could declare war, the Doctor was ready with her gambit, for once not even needing to fib.
‘Morning! I’m the Doctor – your fifteenth Emperor made me a noble of Draconia. That’s all right, no need to bow, just tell me what on Earth you think you’re doing building gunships here on Earth?’
The Draconian frowned, but took her at her word and answered simply, ‘Where else should we build it? Our civilisation is too advanced to have our own people do such lowly labour. Our specialists will install the high-tech weaponry and systems, but the basic toil is best left to the basic species. It makes perfect economic sense for us both.’
The boss blushed at being dismissed as primitive and was keen to keep face. ‘Why wouldn’t she come here? We’re the best shipbuilders on the planet, and we’re almost bankrupt. I’ll take work wherever we can get it rather than see our people starve.’
The gang waited for the Doctor to lay into them both, to tell them the warship would be used against humans one day, and that any warship used against anyone was not good, and t
hat humans weren’t expendable and exploitable by any empire that rocked up with a poxy chequebook… but the Doctor could see that the boss cared about his men, and that the Draconian was just a procurement clerk, and that warships would always be built by poorer worlds and used by richer worlds to destroy each other, and all of a sudden this nice day had nosedived and she felt the darkness loom and then she said –
‘Brilliant! Makes perfect sense… except that I’ve brought my mate Graham here to have a kickabout with the guys waiting outside, so would you mind letting them in for fifteen minutes? Go on, you can stay and watch if you pop your perception filters back on.’
Graham never knew if it was the fifteenth Emperor’s honour or just the coolly authoritative way she said it that won them over but, before he knew it, the ship had vanished, the Draconian woman turned into another man in a suit, and soon the whistle was blowing and he was playing footie with Charlie Dove, and all the lads, booting the ball around the vast workshop, with Yaz and Ryan standing strategically to stop it hitting the ship.
The Doctor watched alongside the Draconian, commentating in such a way as to pass on all the fundamentals (including the offside rule) and a whole heap of passion, so that when the time was up, the ground was laid.
‘Mind if I have this?’ She stopped the ball on a rebound and booted it to the Draconian, who picked it up, curious.
‘Such a simple object,’ said she – or he, as the big customer guise appeared. ‘And yet, it’s quite fascinating. May I take this back with me to show the Emperor?’
Charlie Dove was about to protest – as was Graham, who’d hoped for a souvenir – but the Doctor cut in once more. ‘Please do. You never know, it might help you beat more people than a warship.’
She grinned. So did Graham, realising what she was up to. He reassured Charlie that the team would be fine without their lucky ball and gave them his West Ham pin instead.
‘West Ham FC? That’s a good name for a team,’ said Charlie. ‘Shame it’s taken.’
‘It’s not – yet. I – uh – made it up. You can have it if you want,’ Graham stammered, as the prototype Hammers thanked him and headed off to their match – to win the cup.