Doctor Who. Zamper

by Gareth Roberts

  Big Mother cradled the ruptured body of the young officer and raised his head. ‘We are not idiots, nor cowards,’ he said proudly. ‘You are an enemy – and we defeated you!’

  Not the enemy he had thirsted to defeat, he admitted to himself. But compromise was perhaps an important part of growing up.

  The Doctor curled himself into a crash position. He shut down the forward screen and watched the reaction begin on the sensornet panel. First the flagship crackled and disappeared, as if beginning a jump into hyperspace. But it did not totally vanish. A moment later its warp-snares slipped and the mass of time-cooled anti-matter at the ship’s heart burst forth with all the furious power of nature unleashed. A hole was punched in the fabric of time and space, distorting the shapes of the nearest ships on either side. It strained, wobbled, and gulped horribly, wrenching them apart and setting off the series. The distortion expanded, tugging at the Doctor’s senses. Before he was overcome he checked the navigation status of the pod.

  He was beyond the range of the warp snare.

  He collapsed.

  The still-smoking crash wreckage covered a mountainous region two miles wide. Bernice looked over the side of the stuttering air-buggy, looking for the tiniest patch of blue amongst the torn heaps of grey. Taal was looking behind them at the pursuing loops, whose nightmarish screeching and howling had kept at a steady distance after the initial sighting. Cwej had pushed the buggy to its limits, but after so much strain it was now showing signs of weakness.

  ‘If it stops now…’ Bernice heard Forrester say.

  ‘It’s not going to stop!’ Cwej barked. ‘Keep looking for the TARDIS!’

  For a moment Bernice wasn’t sure if she’d jumped at the sound of the word. Then she saw it, tall, blue and beautiful, leaning at forty-five degrees in an area clear of rubble to their right. ‘There!’ She pointed.

  Forrester stood up, craning her neck to see. Cwej banked the buggy to one side and the police box came into view again, emerging from the shadow of the buggy in all its unlikeliness.

  ‘That can’t be your ship,’ said Taal, who stared at Bernice as if she was mad.

  ‘I’m afraid it is. Now how the hell are we going to reach it, without…?’ She jerked her thumb over her shoulder.

  ‘Whatever happens,’ Forrester shouted, taking command. ‘We stick together, right?’

  Cwej swung them round again, veering at an acute angle to put the loops off the trail and then zig-zagging backwards to bring them closer to the TARDIS. ‘If we stop, they’ll have us,’ he said.

  ‘I know!’ Forrester shouted.

  The door of the TARDIS was only feet away from them as they passed by it a third time, but Bernice didn’t have to point out that to attempt to leap across would be pointless. The loops were gaining, and somehow had converted Cwej’s manoeuvre to their advantage. They were closer to the TARDIS than its crew members.

  Cwej turned the buggy almost sideways and zoomed away, stoking up the vehicle to full power, the muscles in his back straining with the effort of keeping them away from their pursuers.

  The buggy’s concealed motor sighed, spluttered and fell silent. In the second before they dropped and were scattered, toppling over and over onto the soft sandy ground, Bernice heard Forrester’s cry of pure rage and frustration.

  Her face was buried in the sand. The jolt of the crash had numbed her shoulders and midriff, but she forced herself, with the extra reserve of energy she had come to depend upon, to stand up.

  Of course, the other three had all been knocked out.

  She bit on her knuckles.

  The loops giggled with the voice of the Management, a macabre chitter that resounded about the purple dustbowl. Overcome by glee they leapt from their buggy, flying metres through the air to land with hard thumps just before her. Abandoned, their buggy dived into the side of the TARDIS. In a less fraught moment it might have amused Bernice to see the way the nose-section crumpled on contact with the outwardly frail wooden exterior of the time-space craft.

  She backed away from the loops, which were between herself and the TARDIS. Instinctively she scampered to one side, thinking perhaps she could outrun them, at least lead them away from the others. But there were six of the buggers, and three were already slithering over to the bodies of Cwej, Forrester and Taal.

  Two of the loops struck at once, the first knocking her to her knees with one cracking lash. The other wrapped itself around her and lowered its foul glistening jaw.

  She closed her eyes.

  The loops spat.

  The Management had no time to trace the source of the disturbance. His crew flexed their looped bodies in agitation as the carrier shuddered and began to elongate, its front dragged into the reaction that consumed one of the Chelonian ships after another. They shrieked as the pain pressed against their compacted brains and shredded their monstrous bodies to ghoulishly wriggling fibres.

  A part of him was dying.

  He tried to withdraw. The herdmind. It was separate, it was his link. The source of his great power. Half of his soul. He needed it!

  It screamed and died with its spawn.

  The carrier, flattened impossibly, was crushed along with the Chelonian ships, torn asunder, torn to fragments, pulverized and swallowed by the huge invisible rip in space.

  And he was alone, finally.

  Alone, but alive.

  Chapter 11

  Taal focused on the man. The little man in the white hat carrying the umbrella. Silhouetted against a perfect purple sky. The Doctor fellow.

  ‘You saved us.’ He laughed. Something felt wrong, but he’d worry about that later. ‘You went and bloody saved us, you little marvel.’

  The Doctor smiled, although he still looked troubled. He put the back of his hand against Taal’s brow as if checking for a fever. Taal’s eyes wouldn’t focus, but then that was nothing unusual. ‘Taal. I can take you somewhere. Anywhere. Where would you like to go?’

  He tried to sit up, but there was something wrong and he couldn’t. ‘Careful now, Doctor. We’re not supposed to talk about the old life. Management doesn’t like it.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘He is gone, isn’t he? Dead and gone?’

  ‘He’s gone, yes.’

  ‘Ha ha.’ He raised two fingers and stuck them up in the general direction of the rest of the universe. ‘Got you at last.’

  ‘Taal, it’s important. Your choice of destination.’

  ‘Can’t it wait? I need to think.’

  ‘No.’

  Taal closed his eyes. ‘Bikkornal terminus. That’s on Aristarchus, a housing cube.’

  ‘You have family there?’

  ‘Maybe. Well, it’s been fourteen years… apartment 1235. My sister.’ He smiled. ‘Can’t believe I’m going back. You’re a marvel, a…’ He tried to lift his head and his mouth fell wide open. The Doctor blurred again, the wind brushed a stinging cloud of grit against his cheeks, and the afternoon sunlight grew dimmer and dimmer as life left him.

  Holding back her tears, Bernice fetched the medical kit from the TARDIS. The Doctor took the slender grey box, nodded his thanks and started to fuss over Cwej and Forrester. He had propped both of them up against the side of the crashed buggy in the recovery position. Taal’s shattered body lay in a shapeless bundle next to them.

  After several years of eventful travel she was beginning to learn about perspective and the difference it made to your emotions. That was where people got the Doctor wrong. He wasn’t heartless. He was efficient. She’d woken to find him unwrapping the lifeless loops from her body and wiping the fluid from her face.

  ‘Your plan worked, then?’ she’d asked.

  ‘Not quite how I’d expected, but in all the general details. The Management’s link to the physical world is gone. And just in time by the look of things.’

  At the news of Smith’s death he had only winced and closed his eyes for a moment.

  Now, he dabbed at Forrester’s brow with a piece of cotto
n wool dipped in iodine. ‘Superficial injuries. Doesn’t she look sweet when she’s asleep?’ He rattled inside the kit and drew out a probe which he used to examine her eyes for concussion.

  ‘I’m not ready yet, Doctor,’ said Bernice. He looked blank. ‘For cracking jokes over dead bodies.’

  ‘Oh. Sorry.’ He squinted up at the sun, and she noticed that he was wearing a very strange pair of spectacles. ‘A rest called for, I think. Earth? Allen Road?’

  ‘Whatever.’

  She kicked at one of the rubbery coils with the toe of her boot. ‘Only an hour ago you were very frightening,’ she told it. ‘But in the end you were all mouth and no knickers, like the rest.’ She started to laugh.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I really am beginning to sound like you.’

  When Forrester eventually woke some hours later it was to find herself in a particularly weird room, which was decorated in gold-striped wallpaper. She was tucked up under a woollen bedspread. On the wall facing her was a framed photograph of a woman eating candyfloss.

  Sat at a table by a grimy window was Bernice, who was doing a jigsaw. She wore a fluffy jumper that made her look very much younger. She smiled when Forrester sat up. ‘This is our retreat,’ she said. ‘We all need a rest.’

  ‘Where’s Chris?’

  ‘Safe and well and out shopping with the Doctor. We need light bulbs.’ She slotted another piece into the puzzle. ‘Do you want feeding?’

  ‘What happened? On Zamper?’

  Bernice told her. ‘The Doctor got the TARDIS repaired and we cleared out,’ she concluded. ‘Last night he went out for a word with Taal’s family.’

  ‘Did he find them?’

  ‘Yes, but he won’t elaborate.’ She stood up. ‘Do you want feeding?’ she asked again.

  Autumnal light came through the four squares of the dirty window, framing Bernice’s lithe fluffy-edged form. Forrester felt for the first time some of the culture shock the Doctor had warned her time travel could bring. Her head fell back on the pillow.

  Zamper. Thousands of years in the future, on the other side of the galaxy. The Management, thwarted in its scheme to break out and dominate the universe. The Chelonians, at this moment probably still living in the mire of their homeworld, unaware of their rise and fall.

  Unsought, a memory flashed up. She saw herself in the construction yard, retracing her steps in her search for Cwej, Taal and Christie. She squeezed her head through a gap in the rock. Beyond was a small arched cavity, about a hundred metres long. Packed with row upon row of slime-coated orange-brown eggs.

  ‘Bernice,’ she said. ‘On Zamper, I saw –’ She stopped herself.

  Bernice raised an enquiring eyebrow. ‘Roz?’

  ‘It’s not important.’

  Not now, perhaps. In forty thousand years, when those eggs hatched, the Management would have its link restored. And it was her responsibility. She was the only person in the whole of time and space that knew. She would have to tell the Doctor, and one day he could go back, or forward, or whatever, and sort it out. Save the universe again.

  Because it wasn’t her job.

  A couple of days later, when she had grown to feel a bit more happy with the notion of having slipped nearly a thousand years back from her own time, Forrester allowed the Doctor to take her on an exploratory walk around the nearest town. He assured her that she was absolutely safe from most of the period’s common infections, and after a while she got a kick out of listening to the conversations in the street.

  ‘It’s like an old photo come to life,’ she told the Doctor.

  His nose was stuck in a mould-encrusted annual he’d picked up from a stall outside a bookshop. Schoolboy’s Companion. On the flyleaf was written in watery fountain pen To Douglas, from Aunt Eve, Christmas 1919. ‘Pardon?’

  ‘I said it’s like an old photo come to life.’

  ‘Eh?’ His eyes flicked back down to the open book. ‘Old, new, yesterday, tomorrow.’ He shrugged. ‘Lost their meaning to me many…’ He trailed off and smiled broadly. ‘Many years ago.’

  Encouraged, she revealed what she knew of the eggs.

  He listened in silence, then scribbled a note on the flyleaf of his book, under the dedication. ‘Thank you,’ he said finally, and strode off purposefully down the high street. Big drops of rain started to fall and he put up his umbrella. There was a mean set to his features.

  Forrester groaned inwardly. ‘We’re going back there?’

  ‘Oh no. Not yet, anyway. I’ve a thousand and one things to do. Yesterday and tomorrow. Whenever.’ He chuckled and pointed out a cafe. ‘How about breakfast?’

  ‘It’s nearly four o’clock in the afternoon.’

  ‘Not when we’re going it isn’t.’

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11