Dr. Who - BBC New Series 28

by Beautiful Chaos # Gary Russell

  ‘Monday,’ he smiled, ‘and this planet is Madam Delphi’s.’

  Caitlin nodded. ‘At last. Revenge is hers.’

  They took each other’s hands and held on tightly, and looked to the computer screens, which appeared to be

  humming a tune, ever so slightly, causing waveforms on one of the screens to pulsate fractionally in time.

  ‘Welcome back,’ they said to her, together.

  *

  Donna stood at the end of Brookside Road and took a deep breath. It hadn’t been that long since she’d been here last (indeed, for her mum, it was probably slightly less time), but every time she ‘came home’ there were awkward moments. ‘Where have you been?’ and ‘Are you still hanging around with that awful Doctor person?’ and ‘Why don’t you call?’ and ‘Have you got a job yet?’

  Of course, Granddad Wilf knew where she was, she’d told him everything right from the off. But her mum, well, she wasn’t someone who’d understand. Wasn’t someone who’d think saving Oods, stopping generational wars or ensuring Charlemagne met the Pope actually equated with a ‘good’ job typing up notes or placing stationery orders.

  Taking a deep breath, she walked towards the house that hadn’t actually been her home for too long.

  After her disastrous wedding and slightly less disastrous trip to Egypt, her parents had moved from their terraced house where Donna had grown up into this new semi. It had been an upheaval, compounded as it was by Donna not having a job and Wilf originally being cross because he thought he’d have to leave his astronomer buddies behind. As it turned out, of course, the allotments were easier to get to from the new house, so he was happy after all.

  But Donna’s dad hadn’t been well for a long time, and in many ways the move had been his idea, his desire to find somewhere new to be, to give him a bit of challenge.

  He’d got bored in the old house. He’d built all the cupboards, shelved all the walls, painted all the ceilings he was ever able to do, and he needed something new to keep him active since his illness had made him take early retirement. Doing up the new place to Mum’s quite stringent specifications would be exactly the right challenge.

  They had been there three months before Dad passed.

  Donna and Wilf had taken on the mantle of doing all those odd jobs Dad had been going to do, but they were never quite right, they were never ‘how your dad would have done it’. Which wasn’t altogether surprising – Wilf was twenty-odd years older, and Donna had never lifted a paintbrush or hammer in her life before.

  God. How shallow was Donna Noble before she met the Doctor again? Before she learned not just to stand on her own two feet but realise that she could. Her family life was a real chicken and egg situation. Had she been useless at home because her parents had always let her be, or did her mum think she was useless because she was?

  And talking about it, talking about anything, with Sylvia Noble was rarely a positive experience. Donna would love to say that her mum’s bitterness and resentment was because of Dad’s death, but the truth was Sylvia had always been disappointed in her daughter. She rarely hid it. And Donna never understood why. Had she wanted a son? Had she wanted a high-flying lawyer or

  company executive daughter who would be rich enough to send her parents off to live in the country in a little sixteenth-century cottage where they could keep goats?

  Had it got worse since Dad had died? Would it have been better if she had got married to Lance? Should she have told Mum the truth about that day? Like she had Granddad recently? Probably not, because Sylvia didn’t like people being open and honest. ‘Those bleeding hearts who wear their hearts on their sleeves’ was an analogy she’d tortured once, and it summed up her opinion of people actually being honest.

  Donna remembered reading a magazine article once about how parents could never truly hope to understand teenaged offspring and their best bet for harmonious living was just to tolerate those three or four nightmare years. But was there a manual for sons and daughters on how to deal with negative parents? It was impossible to actually argue with a mother – they had an inbuilt ‘guilt trip’ button to press that forbade you saying all the things you wanted to say to them, whatever they threw at you.

  Donna loved her mum, no two ways about that. And she had no doubt that Sylvia Noble loved her daughter.

  She just wasn’t entirely sure they actually liked each other that much.

  ‘Hullo, Donna,’ called Mrs Baldrey from opposite.

  ‘Had a nice trip?’

  ‘Yes thanks,’ Donna smiled back. ‘How’s Seymour?’

  ‘Oh fine. Still complaining about his prostate,’ the neighbour groaned.

  Donna thought that conversation had gone as far as she

  wanted it to go, frankly, and speeded up her pace towards home.

  A cat sat by a lamppost, warily watching Donna approach, not quite sure if she was friend or foe. Donna made squeaky noises to attract its attention.

  It bolted.

  Ah well.

  Mum’s car was outside on the road (you have a drive, Mum, use it) and Donna touched the bonnet as she passed.

  Cold. Mum hadn’t been out today then. Funny how she’d picked up these little things from travelling with the Doctor to find things out. Like whether a car had been driven. The old Donna would never have thought about that. The old Donna wouldn’t have cared.

  The old Donna was gone.

  Thank God – her life was a trillion times better these days.

  If only she could involve her mum in it, though. That last little piece of the puzzle, that last bit of acceptance from each of them.

  ‘Oh there you are, Lady,’ said a familiar voice from behind her. ‘I wondered if we’d see you today.’

  Donna didn’t bother turning around. ‘Hello, Mum,’ she said.

  ‘Oh yes, “Hello, Mum” – because that’s enough isn’t it.

  One minute the air’s choking with exhaust fumes, the next the sky’s on fire, and that’s it. No idea where my only daughter is. No calls, no texts, not even a message sent to your granddad, so he can shut me up. Nothing.’

  Donna stopped in the street and turned to face her

  mother, automatically tugging two of the four shopping bags from her hand to help.

  The old Donna wouldn’t have considered that either.

  ‘Nice to see you, too,’ Donna said. ‘Granddad got the kettle on? I could do with a cuppa, loads to tell you.’

  Sylvia Noble shrugged and stomped off ahead of her daughter. ‘You know what today is, don’t you,’ she called back.

  And Donna stopped dead.

  Of course she knew what today was. Why the hell did she think she was there? How dare she even ask that question?

  The front door opened and Sylvia pushed passed Granddad Wilf and went wordlessly into the kitchen.

  ‘Do you know what she just asked me?’ Donna hissed at him after kissing his cheek.

  Wilf raised his eyes to heaven. ‘It’s gonna be one of them days, isn’t it?’

  Donna opened her mouth to reply, then stopped.

  The old Donna would have gone off on one, there and then. The old Donna would’ve started a row with her mum, throwing around words like ‘attitude’ and ‘whatever’ and ‘selfish’.

  New Donna didn’t.

  Because new Donna, frustrating as it was, understood that what Sylvia Noble probably wanted and needed today was a good cry.

  But being Sylvia ‘I don’t wear my heart on my sleeve’

  Noble meant she’d never do that.

  And sadly it was going to be new Donna’s job today to

  ensure she did, before bottling it up caused her mum more damage than it already had.

  The Doctor was striding down Chiswick High Road, glancing into various shops where people were staring at the new laptop demonstrations. ‘It’s just a computer,’ he muttered. ‘Why so much interest?’

  ‘They’re already out of date,’ said a young voice beside him. ‘The M-TEK �
�� that’s the future.’

  The Doctor looked over, then down. The speaker barely reached knee height. It was a little boy. The Doctor had seen him before somewhere – then running towards him, he saw Lukas Carnes, and realised this was the little brother he’d been carrying.

  ‘Joe!’ yelled Lukas. ‘How’d you get away from me so fast?’

  ‘I’m not your prisoner,’ Joe yelled back, and the Doctor gave the arrived-but-out-of-breath Lukas a look that said ‘Oh, that told you, mate’.

  Lukas pulled Joe back from the Doctor. ‘Leave him alone,’ Lukas snapped at him. ‘Touch him and I’ll have the police here.’ As if to underline this, Lukas had his mobile out and ready.

  The Doctor didn’t bother pointing out that Joe had found him. Nor did he point out that Lukas was clearly only being aggressive because of what the Doctor had said in the other shop.

  He had to remember that people didn’t always like getting hints about their future. Always tripped him up, that one.

  Spoilers, someone once said.

  ‘How do you mean you are going to save my life?’

  The Doctor shrugged. ‘Done it.’

  ‘Done what?’

  ‘Saved your life.’

  ‘How? When and why?’

  The Doctor drew his psychic paper out of his inner jacket pocket and showed it to Lukas. It had the right date on it, the name of the shop and the message SAVE

  LUKAS SAMUEL CARNES’S LIFE BY STOPPING

  HIS BROTHER BUYING AN M-TEK.

  ‘Dunno who wrote it,’ the Doctor said, ‘cos I don’t recognise the handwriting. But it appeared on the paper about twenty minutes after I arrived in Chiswick. Bad form to ignore messages, I always think. So, you’ve been saved, my job is done, all I need to do now is find out whether Loretta’s is a laundrette, a florist or a coffee shop in this time period. It’s one of those in 2009 but I’m not sure which.’

  ‘Laundrette,’ said Joe.

  Lukas pulled Joe behind him. ‘Don’t talk to that man,’

  he scolded his kid brother.

  ‘But you’re talking to him,’ Joe protested, not unreasonably.

  ‘That’s different,’ Lukas said, realising with horror that this was exactly what his mum used to say when she’d said something he considered hypocritical or unfair.

  The Doctor turned away. ‘Nice to meet you, boys, but I thought I might wander off to a lovely restaurant in Brentford, down by the canal there, to pass the time before I meet up with my friend.’

  ‘What?’ said Lukas, mentally kicking himself for caring. Just let the weirdo go, he urged himself. But his mouth wouldn’t stop asking questions. ‘What would’ve happened if Joe had got an M-TEK?’

  And the Doctor looked at him. ‘No idea. I don’t know what an M-TEK is. I assumed it was that laptop you were thinking of buying. I did a search, but I couldn’t find any reference to it. Then I saw you watching the demo, like everyone else appears to be, so I guess that’s the M-TEK.’

  ‘No,’ said Joe, pushing forwards. ‘That’s the new Psiryn Book Plus. It’s rubbish. I wanted an M-TEK.’

  ‘But I wasn’t planning to buy one,’ Lukas added. ‘For Joe or me.’

  ‘So what’s an M-TEK then?’ the Doctor frowned.

  Lukas sighed. ‘How can you save me from it, if you don’t know what it is?’

  ‘If I knew everything I was saving people from before I tried saving them, I’d save very few people cos I’d be spending all day researching what I was saving them from, wouldn’t I?’

  Lukas and Joe glanced at each other.

  ‘You’re funny,’ said Joe.

  ‘Thank you,’ the Doctor said.

  Lukas shook his head. ‘Home,’ he said to Joe. ‘Come on.’ He all but dragged his little brother away.

  ‘Bye, Doctor,’ Joe called back.

  The Doctor waved as the two boys vanished into a side street. Then he started to wander towards the lower end of Chiswick, and the M4 flyover, towards Brentford. And that nice Italian in the square. Luna Piena. He hadn’t had a

  decent Italian meal in years. Centuries perhaps.

  SINCE 1492 was written on the psychic paper.

  Which was weird, because the psychic paper didn’t work like that. At least, it hadn’t in the past. It was bad enough that people were using it more and more to send him messages these days, but when it started answering him unbidden, it was time perhaps to give it a two-thousand leaf service.

  He shoved the leather wallet with the paper in it back inside his jacket pocket and tried to forget all about it.

  At the back of his mind, though, he still had a nagging worry, an echo of Lukas Samuel Carnes’s not unreasonable question: what was an M-TEK and how had he saved Lukas from it?

  To which the answer was obvious.

  He hadn’t.

  So Lukas was still in danger (if the psychic paper was to be trusted), and he had to save him.

  Oh, and another question needed an answer.

  How had Lukas’s little brother Joe known to call him ‘Doctor’?

  So… Luna Piena or getting embroiled?

  It wasn’t much of a decision was it? Food was nice, but a mystery, that was far better.

  He wondered how Donna was getting on and whether he should stop by and tell her he might be busy for a couple of days.

  Nah, she was probably best left alone to do family stuff.

  And so he turned around and headed up the side street

  after the two boys.

  On the penthouse suite floor of the Oracle Hotel, Dara Morgan and Caitlin were staring at a bank of flat-screen monitors, connected to the computer, by the fibre-optic cables which Terry Lockworth and Johnnie Bates had died setting up earlier.

  On most of the screens was a sine wave, pulsating rhythmically, as if the computer were breathing. Which it was. Sort of.

  But on the largest, central screen was an image, a photo, taken from CCTV cameras that had been automatically hacked into and enhanced to almost perfect resolution, according to the parameters the computer had been set to.

  ‘Madam Delphi,’ Dara Morgan asked. ‘What is this?’

  His finger traced the outline. It was a tall blue box standing in a Chiswick alleyway between two dumpsters.

  ‘The TARDIS,’ replied a strong, feminine voice, echoing across the room, the sine waves on the other screens pulsating and changing as it spoke.

  ‘He is here,’ Caitlin said. ‘Already.’

  Dara Morgan nodded enthusiastically. ‘Five hundred years, as the legends foretold. The Chaos Bringer.’

  ‘Five hundred and seventeen years, one month, four days,’ corrected Madam Delphi. ‘We did not allow for cosmic shift five hundred years ago. That was a tad…

  unfortunate.’

  Caitlin addressed the computer. ‘But Madam Delphi, there have been other attempts…’

  ‘And because of that cosmic shift, because the universe

  breathes shallow breaths as well as deep ones, the alignments have never been perfect.’

  ‘But on Monday all will be perfect.’ Dara Morgan stroked Madam Delphi’s surfaces. ‘And you will have your revenge.’

  ‘On the Doctor. On mankind. On the entire universe,’

  Caitlin said excitedly.

  ‘Oh sure,’ Madam Delphi pulsed her sine waves.

  ‘Absolutely. Love the revenge thing, my darlings. But especially on the Doctor.’

  It was 5pm in the UK. So, in sunny New York, the Big Apple shadows stretched as the midday sun beamed down, covering the city in an unusually humid blanket.

  This was not good news for the inhabitants of the MorganTech office block on 52nd and Seventh. The air conditioning had failed a few hours earlier, and the automatic drinking fountains had ceased pumping cool water into the water coolers. The main reason for this was that all the power in the block was off. The main doors had failed first, followed by the phones, IT equipment, air-con and so on.

  It had taken Melissa Carson on reception a few m
inutes to twig that everything had gone wrong. She tried calling maintenance. Obviously, as everything maintenance maintained had failed, there was no way to get maintenance to maintain anything. This had annoyed Melissa, so she had committed the corporate crime of leaving her desk to find someone.

  Instead, what she found – other than stalled elevators probably containing rapidly dehydrating passengers, and

  internally locked electronic doors – was a pile of dust on the floor by a junction box in the basement. Presumably maintenance had been doing something to the wiring and had fused the systems. It didn’t occur to Melissa (and why should it?) that the ashes she was wiping casually off her Dolce & Gabbana heels had once been a guy she’d waved to earlier that day called Milo. But she did wonder where Milo and the guys were.

  Casually, as she stomped back to her desk in frustration, she flicked the open junction box shut.

  At once, the newly installed fibre optics came to life, pulsing purple light throughout their network. The occupants of the building, already whingeing about stuck lifts, no air-con and crashed computers, had all of ten seconds to register their PCs flicker back into life. As office workers do, everyone reached forward and touched their keyboards.

  A massive arc of purple light pulsated throughout the building, touching everyone, not just those using the PCs.

  Not a person, a roach or a moth in the basement was spared the purple pulse of energy.

  Forty-two seconds after Melissa Carson had shut that junction box, all one hundred and seven humans, eighteen rats, two thousand creatures of various sizes and shapes but with six legs or more and three pigeons on the roof were all dead.

  ‘We have a slight problem, guys,’ Madam Delphi pulsed at Dara Morgan and Caitlin. ‘The MorganTech building in Manhattan is offline. The terminals are terminal.’ There was a noise like an electronic laugh, and

  the sine waves pulsed accordingly.

  Dara Morgan frowned, tapping at another part of Madam Delphi’s array of monitors and keyboards.

  ‘I’m not wrong,’ the computer reported.