‘Well it’s a possibility,’ said Romana. ‘If you ignore the ship itself being a fake.’
‘Ah.’
‘Also, the plans for the bomb are fake,’ the Doctor put in.
‘Strictly speaking, they’re not,’ countered Romana.
‘They are!’ said the Doctor hotly.
‘No, to be strictly accurate, they are real plans for a fake bomb.’
The Doctor wrinkled his forehead, his brow, and the rest of his body. ‘Fine. Fake ship. Fake bomb.’
‘So …’ Jal spoke with the tired voice of someone who has recently given birth and who simply wants to spend the rest of their life on a sofa. ‘If the bomb wasn’t on the ship then how did it get here?’
‘I can guess,’ the Doctor announced. ‘If I’m right, then you might be interested to know that the entire history of this planet has been subtly stage-managed since the year dot. Everything has been designed to shepherd Krikkit forward to the moment when you would require and use a Supernova Bomb, such as it is. Someone wants this planet to try and destroy the Universe.’
Finally the Doctor got the reaction he’d been looking for.
Romana’s jaw hung open. Sir Robot glared at him. Jal looked up from her babies, one of whom started to cry.
‘And now we have to stop the Krikkitmen.’
‘What, all five million of them?’
‘Yes.’
‘Before they slaughter the entire Galaxy?’
‘Yes.’
‘How can we do that?’
‘I don’t know,’ said the Doctor. ‘Come on.’
In the Great Square of Once Quite a Nice Meadow But Now an Armaments Factory walked a robot and a man. The robot was Sir Robot, and the man was the Doctor.
‘It goes without saying that I’m your prisoner,’ the Doctor said.
‘I see,’ said Sir Robot. ‘I’ve never had a prisoner before. I wouldn’t know what to do.’
‘Well, a bit of shoving and jostling normally goes a long way. A few pointless shouts here and there. Normally in the imperative. You know: “Move! Look Out! Silence!” – that kind of thing.’
‘But you’re already moving, you’re looking all around you and I’m not entirely sure you ever shut up.’
‘You would make a terrible guard.’
‘I wholeheartedly agree,’ said Sir Robot. ‘I just want to get back to Jal and check on the babies.’
‘Awww,’ said the Doctor. ‘Well, doing this is the best way you have of ensuring they’ll still be there at the end of the day.’
‘That’s heavy-handed of you.’
‘Shut up,’ the Doctor grumbled. ‘You’re supposed to be a heartless killing machine.’
‘I know,’ Sir Robot said, the red glow inside his helmet smirking. ‘I’m a terrible disappointment. Ah, there we go.’
He pointed to a small group of Krikkit robots standing on silent guard outside the Parliament building. ‘They’re here in force.’
‘And they don’t look all that subservient, do they?’ the Doctor whispered, whipping his hands up into the air.
‘No, I’m afraid they look quite aggressive.’
They approached the Krikkitmen, and the thin smile glowing inside Sir Robot thinned to a glower. ‘I have brought this prisoner to appear before the Elders of Krikkit.’
Inside the Parliament, they noticed that change had been rapid, and not for the better. Glum-looking Krikkitas scurried around, almost as terrified of the Krikkitmen as they were of alien life. Krikkitmen were everywhere, their helmets glowing with grim efficiency.
With Sir Robot by his side, the Doctor’s progress through the building was unimpeded. He even managed to pause to consult a map, pointing out objects of interest while keeping his hands in the air.
‘That’s the room we need,’ he said, with a tiny flap of his left hand.
The Central Programming Plant had been abandoned for several years. With no Krikkitmen on the planet, there’d been no need to keep it maintained. Two of the robots had been placed on guard.
The Doctor turned to Sir Robot. ‘If I’m right, inside that room is the master Krikkitmen deactivation control. I’d love to get my hands on it. Would you mind distracting the guards? Ask them something inane.’
Sir Robot turned the corner and approached the guards.
‘Good afternoon,’ he said, in an appalling attempt to sound like a Krikkitman. ‘Have you seen my prisoner?’
The guards glared at Sir Robot with their empty red helmets. Their blank expressions swiftly appraised him as a newer, less-efficient model, and dismissed him. While they were doing this, they missed the Doctor sneaking into the room behind them.
Sir Robot tried to work out what to do next. The Krikkitmen showed no signs of stopping working. Instead, they continued to glare at him pitilessly.
‘My prisoner had information on the Rebel Leader,’ continued Sir Robot. ‘Important information. I shouldn’t have let him get away. Perhaps you’ll help me look for him?’
The two Krikkitmen did not move. The air around them fizzed with electricity. Sir Robot flinched. He was a Krikkitman, and even he had an urge to run away screaming. The guards leaned towards him, and the crackling in the air grew louder.
There was a discreet cough behind them.
They whipped around to find the Doctor leaning against the door to the Central Programming Plant.
‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘I was looking for my prison cell and seem to have got a trifle lost. Could you help me?’
Time passed.
Another figure appeared in the square.
She was immaculately dressed and effortlessly projected an air of bright enthusiasm and boredom. Her hands were slung casually up in surrender.
‘Hello,’ she said to the Krikkitmen guarding the Parliament. ‘You’ve got a friend of mine. He’s an alien. Come to think of it, I am too. Perhaps you’d better arrest me.’
More time passed.
Romana sat in her cell. She’d been in better. She’d been in worse.
Occasionally, someone would appear at a grille, yell at her and then go away. Sometimes she could hear the Doctor bellowing as some form of exquisite torture or other got at him.
Mostly she worried about the light switch. They’d provided her with one, which was curious. She’d loosened it and discovered no access to a mainframe or power couplings. Just an isolated switch.
Most of the time she was quite content to sit in the dark. After all, pi wasn’t going to finish itself, now, was it?
Something buzzed, disturbing her calculations.
She looked around in the darkness, but couldn’t see it.
She went back to chewing through some primes that had popped up.
Something buzzed again.
How annoying.
She flicked on the light switch.
The buzzing became a fluttering.
A moth was circling the light.
Romana stared at it. How had it got in here? There were no windows. The grille in the door was sealed. It was baffling. And yet the moth continued to circle the light.
Eventually, Romana grew tired of watching it, and decided to go back to mathematics. She turned off the light.
The buzzing continued. If anything, it grew louder.
Romana tried to ignore it.
The buzzing and fluttering was louder still.
She turned the light back on.
There were now two moths circling the light.
Romana sat in her cell listening to the Doctor’s agonised cries.
‘It’s never going to work,’ she remarked to the Krikkit robot fastening her manacles.
The door creaked open wearily, and a table was wheeled in, followed wearily by an old man. He was enormously fat, his body crammed with blubber, bursting from the seams as if, having stuffed his waist and inflated his neck, it was now spilling from his boots. Even his gauntlets were somehow obese. His flesh hung off him in gathered folds like drying laundry, and his face sagged at
her with disgust. He did not look at her, but instead rapped at the wall.
‘Repugnant alien, I am Grayce, Chief Elder of Krikkit. You are here to tell us all we need to know, and you will tell us in any way that we so devise.’ Grayce paused, listening to the cries drifting down the corridor. ‘As you can hear, your colleague’s agonies are such that soon he will beg to tell us all he knows. He is a cockroach, a despicable worm. It is best that you talk to us before he does. You would not enjoy our attentions.’
‘Are you sure you’re qualified for this job?’ Romana asked.
Grayce nearly looked in her direction. Nearly, but not quite. ‘How dare you?’ he hissed.
‘It was merely a question. I like to make sure of my torturer’s credentials. I’m not looking for a full curriculum vitae. Just a few key points. Any academic merits. Reasons for leaving previous assignments and so on.’ With a scrape and a bump she levered her chair over to the patch of wall that Grayce was glaring at. ‘This is an interesting wall. You don’t mind me staring at it, do you?’
The slap from his fist sent Romana rocking back in her chair. Head ringing, eyes watering, she allowed herself a small smile. She was being tortured by someone with a short fuse. Good. She could use that.
‘I’ll take that as a no,’ she said, shuffling her chair back. ‘Shall we get on with it?’
‘Is that your final answer?’ sneered Grayce. ‘I should hate to see your pretty face ruined.’
‘So would I,’ Romana replied. ‘I’d have to get another one.’
Grayce dragged himself to the table, ostentatiously laid out with instruments of torture.
‘Those are all remarkably shiny,’ Romana commended him. ‘Do you polish them yourself or do you get someone in?’ When Grayce didn’t answer, she pressed on. ‘I hope you do it yourself. Shows pride in your work. One thing …’
‘Yes?’
‘Do you have any tips for getting bloodstains out of wool? I’ve a friend with a scarf and he is so careless.’
Grayce drummed his enormous fingertips on the surface of the table. ‘Prisoner, I’m going to tell you how this will be. I know the truth. You will tell me what you know. If it accords with my truth, then you will experience no further pain. If your answers are not my truth, then I shall cause you pain until they are.’
‘From a philosophical point of view, that’s fascinatingly solipsistic.’ Romana beamed up at him brightly. ‘I can see now why Krikkit doesn’t have a god. He’s probably frightened of thumbscrews.’
Grayce picked up a hammer and smashed it down against the table. The sound echoed through the chamber, for a moment almost blotting out the Doctor’s distant screams.
‘Are we clear about what truth is?’
‘As a Greek philosopher.’ Romana’s smile widened. ‘Shall we get on? Once this is over, I’ll need to see your Parliament. Try and avoid the face if you can. I’ll want to look my best.’
‘You’ll see no one ever again,’ Grayce remarked, his fingers wrapping around some of his sharpest implements.
‘What a relief.’ Romana whispered conspiratorially: ‘To tell you the truth, I’m much more of a quiet-night-in-with-a-cup-of-cocoa girl.’
The drumming of Grayce’s fingers reminded Romana of rain on a corrugated tin roof.
‘These implements,’ he told her with a malignant wheeze, ‘are the most expensive, thorough instruments of their kind.’
‘You sound as though you expect me to be grateful,’ Romana told him. ‘Are you going to send me a bill? I tell you now, I won’t pay it. Your sort invites people to their birthday party and then tells them to cough up for it.’
Grayce stared hard at the wall, then picked up a helmet, the underside of which was studded with spikes.
‘We’ll start with this,’ he exhaled happily. The helmet was beginning to glow and crackle with nasty energy. ‘Fairly soon you’ll be telling me precisely what I want to know.’
‘That?’ Romana gasped. ‘Please don’t bring that anywhere near me!’
‘Ah, you begin to feel fear.’
‘No, embarrassment,’ Romana huffed. ‘It’s a mind probe. Torture me with that and I’d just die of shame. I know you lot have been locked away for two million years, but that’s no excuse. Don’t you have catalogues?’
Grayce slammed the mind probe onto Romana’s head and she went still, her face wrapped in a veil of sizzling energy.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CAUGHT IN A REALLY BIG LIE
The sinister veil of sizzling energy died. It died sputtering.
Romana licked her lips. ‘Have you ever tried gumdrops? I’m getting gumdrops and elderflower. Not the real elderflower but the cordial variety. Syrupy, if you know what I mean.’
Grayce stared at her before he even realised he was staring at her. Making full, horrid eye contact with a being from Beyond. From Outside. From the Disgusting Void. He shuddered and tried to look away, but Romana carried on looking back at him.
‘Soooo,’ she said. ‘I was wondering, and I hope this isn’t rude, but could I make a few suggestions?’
Grayce found himself unable to move.
Romana winked. ‘It’s just that – oh never mind.’ She slipped an arm free of her bonds and took the mind probe gently from him. She tapped the top of it. ‘You see this?’ Her hand reached over and picked up an implement that had proved handy with fingernails. She levered open a flap on the mind probe and waggled the device carefully around inside. ‘What you need to do – and I am sorry if I’m teaching you to suck eggs here – but you should have a look at the neuron stimulator – this thing.’ She gave it a theatrical little tap. ‘It’s supposed to be hyper-pulsating the basal ganglia, but it’s just hopelessly saturating the subcortical nucleii. Tickles. Oh.’ She made a moue of gentle disappointment. ‘Am I going too quickly for you?’ She tapped the circuits again. ‘See? If I turn this up another notch and reduce the gain on this, then it should work. No guarantees, mind.’ She gave him a friendly smile. ‘You have to remember that the Doctor’s still never forgiven me for my repairs to the dishwasher. After I melted his YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE MAD TO WORK HERE BUT IT HELPS mug, he didn’t speak to me for a day.’ She pasted the flap back down and popped the mind probe on Grayce’s head at a suitably jaunty angle.
Grayce felt finally able to break eye contact with her when something strange happened to his head and his brain had to run away. He toppled to the floor.
‘See?’ said Romana. ‘Much better.’ She sniffed. ‘Definite smell of gumdrops.’
Some time later, the Doctor was being wheeled down a corridor.
Which was funny, because being wheeled past him in the opposite direction was Romana.
‘Hello!’ He waggled his hands around the manacles. ‘It’s half time and no oranges!’
‘I know,’ said Romana, looking up from her gurney. ‘How’s it going?’
‘Oh not too bad. Mustn’t grumble. They’ve being using Boolean Nerve Janglers.’
‘Oh dear,’ tutted Romana.
‘I know.’ The Doctor sighed up at the Krikkit robot wheeling him. ‘I did try saying.’
‘You put on quite a performance.’
‘I know. Well, it seemed unfair not to. Did you get any of it?’
‘Oh, it all came through loud and clear.’
The Krikkitmen wheeling the Doctor and Romana stopped. They’d clearly missed something.
The Doctor looked up at his robot. ‘So, the screaming? Ah. It’s the Sussurians of the Planet Cesper, you see. It’s so terribly windy there that the only way they can communicate with each other is by a series of modulated shrieks. What you thought were my agonised cries were merely my way of keeping Romana abreast of the situation. Once spent a merry weekend translating Wuthering Heights for them. Went down a storm. Sorry to disappoint.’
Romana surveyed the thin, sour red light inside her Krikkitman’s helmet. It was having trouble swallowing it.
‘How’s your torturer?’ she asked.
‘Having a bit of a lie-down,’ the Doctor admitted. ‘I think I may have deafened him. Yours?’
‘Brain seizure.’
‘Good, good,’ the Doctor chuckled.
The Krikkitmen began to wheel them away, but the Doctor held up an imperious hand, his manacles dangling from it. ‘Wait!’ he cried.
The robots stopped.
‘So,’ he called back to Romana. ‘We’re now inside the seat of power.’
‘Shall we get back to work?’ she asked.
The Doctor slid off his gurney, at the same time slipping two small nerve prods inside the casing of his Krikkitman. Romana, likewise was already fusing the cortex of her robot with the thumbnail scraper she’d earlier slid up her sleeve.
Both robots howled in lethal fury as their bodies were wreathed in sparks.
The Doctor and Romana stood side by side, backing gently away as the Krikkitmen lurched towards them.
‘I’m trying to overcome my innate terror of them,’ the Doctor confided.
‘How are you doing that?’ asked Romana.
‘By finding as many ways of destroying them as possible.’ He ducked as a sharp fist smashed into the concrete behind him.
Romana shoved her trolley against the other Krikkitman, watching as it smashed it into splinters. ‘That’s quite hard, isn’t it?’
‘Sadly, yes.’ The Doctor slid across the floor, dodging blast after blast from the Krikkitman’s visor. ‘I’ve done something terribly clever. The problem is –’ he ducked behind a statue, which burst into fragments of burning concrete – ‘that it’s not working yet.’
‘Pity,’ tutted Romana. She was backed behind another statue. She did some quick calculations. ‘Doctor, would you mind grabbing my ankle in 2.3 seconds please?’
‘Beg pardon?’
Romana leapt out from behind the statue, flinging herself in a graceful arc towards the Doctor, and bringing herself exactly between the two robots. Both took aim and fired.
Romana was snatched abruptly out of the air, and the volley of devastation sailed over her head and into the Krikkitmen, who obligingly blew up.
Romana was lying on the ground, looking up at the ceiling.
‘You were 0.2 seconds late,’ she remarked.
Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen Page 22