by Doctor Who
‘Of what?’ Nathan ventured.
‘The cure-all.’
‘Three against one. That’s hardly fair, is it?’ The Doctor kept his hands up, trying to look harmless.
‘Nope,’ agreed one of the brothers. ‘But then, life ain’t fair neither.’
He pressed on. ‘I’m sure we could work out a less violent solution to this, uh, situation. Perhaps I could speak to the town sheriff?’
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The taller Lyle smirked. ‘Why, sure thing. You just wait five minutes.
Then we’ll be sure to put you on the pile with him and all t’other deaders who perished from the smallpox. Y’all can have a nice long chat there.’
The Doctor stopped backing away and drew himself up. ‘All right then,’ he replied, steel in his voice. ‘If that’s the way it’s got to be. You boys want to throw down?’ He adjusted his hat and gave them a level stare. ‘I’m willing to oblige you.’
His sudden change in manner brought the Lyle brothers up short.
They weren’t used to facing people who stood up to them, that was clear. The Doctor took a quick glance left and right, making sure that there were no bystanders around who might get caught in the crossfire. He allowed a slow smile to cross his lips.
‘Why, this fella’s itching to buck out.’ The taller brother returned a cold grin. ‘ Draw!’
There was a flash of motion and three guns cleared leather, fast as striking snakes.
Alvin was swinging into the saddle of the horse he had stolen from the hitching post behind the Pioneer when the sounds of gunshots rippled through the air. He grinned wolfishly, and dug his heels into the animal’s flanks, urging it on and out of Ironhill in a headlong gallop.
He didn’t look back.
‘My name is Walking Crow,’ said the man. ‘I have been travelling with Godlove for two years now.’
‘Why?’ asked Nathan. ‘You’re Pawnee, ain’t you? Why aren’t you with your tribe?’
‘I am disgraced,’ came the dour reply. ‘I would be dead now, if not for Godlove. He won my life in a game of chance, and I have been with him ever since.’
‘You’re his slave?’ Martha was disgusted.
Walking Crow began to shake his head, but suddenly the sharp report of gunfire cut through the air.
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Nathan started. ‘Remington .44s!’ He gasped. ‘I’d know the sound of ’em anywhere.’
Martha’s blood ran cold. ‘Doctor?’
The Lyle brothers were quick on the draw, and they put a fan of bullets into the air before them; but they could only be as fast as human beings.
The Doctor was a Time Lord, and he moved between the ticks of the clock. His hand blurred towards the holster on his hip, grabbing the slender wand there and thumbing the activation switch. The sonic screwdriver droned loudly, and the air between the gunslingers and the Doctor shimmered like heat-haze off the desert. Three speeding dots of lead stopped dead and flattened against an invisible wall of sound, before falling harmlessly to the dirt.
‘What th-?’ The eldest Lyle gawked. His aim had been true; the talkative stranger in the brown coat should have been laid out and croaking his last.
‘I warned you,’ growled the Doctor. He adjusted the gain on the sonic and it buzzed, a wasp-storm sound that hammered at the ears of the brothers.
All three of them looked down at the guns in their hands as the weapons began to vibrate and tremble, rattling furiously. The Doctor kept the sonic trained on them and, with a sudden clatter of metal, each brother’s revolver came to pieces in his grip. Screws and bolts, barrel and bullets, the components of the pistols fell apart leaving them unarmed and most certainly shocked into silence.
The Doctor raised an eyebrow and switched off the vibration pulse, raising the screwdriver’s tip to his lips. He blew imaginary smoke from the end and eyed the Lyles. ‘Don’t let me see you three rattlesnakes in this town again, you hear?’
They turned and fled, as Martha and Nathan emerged from a side street with a Pawnee brave following behind them.
‘Doctor!’ she called, ‘We heard shots, are you OK?’
He twirled the sonic and holstered it. ‘I’m all-a-settlin’, as they say around here. Intact and undamaged, thank you.’
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Nathan nudged at the broken pieces of gun with his boot. ‘How’d you manage this, Doc?’
‘Easy,’ he sniffed. ‘Focused molecular frequency wave. Brilliant for taking things to bits in a jiffy.’ He glanced at the Pawnee. ‘I know you.
You were watching us when we rode into town.’
‘Doctor, this is Walking Crow,’ said Martha. ‘Alvin’s, uh, assistant.’
He walked forward and made a ritual sign. Walking Crow covered a look of surprise and returned the gesture. ‘You know my Nation?’
he asked.
‘I do. I’m proud to say I’m a friend to all tribes. Some of them call me Rides In Night.’
The Pawnee let out a gasp. ‘The Brother of Coyote? The man who defeated the Bad Wolf? But he’s just a legend. A story for the young braves. . . ’
‘Every legend has a seed of truth in it.’ The Doctor gave him a steady look. ‘We need your help, Walking Crow. Darkness is moving over the land and Alvin Godlove may be the cause of it.’
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As they followed Walking Crow back to Godlove’s wagon, Martha leaned closer to the Doctor and lowered her voice. ‘Do you think we can trust this guy?’
He didn’t look at her. ‘You tell me.’
Martha chewed her lip. ‘He had a knife on Nathan. I dunno. I’m not ready to be best friends with him just yet. Although. . . ’
‘Although what?’ the Doctor prompted.
‘He didn’t seem like he meant it. To be honest, the whole threatening thing was a bit unenthusiastic and he put the knife away pretty quickly.’ She smiled. ‘I got the impression that his heart wasn’t really in it.’
‘The Pawnee are an honest enough bunch,’ the Doctor offered.
‘What you see is pretty much what you get with their tribe. He’s not a happy lad, is he? Less a Walking Crow, more of a Moping Crow.’
‘I don’t think I’d be any better, having to trail around after Godlove and be his stooge.’
They halted by the broad box of the wagon and the Doctor ran his hands over the sides. ‘A proper travelling medicine show,’ he said.
Martha put her hands on her hips. ‘Why were they called “snake-oil” shows, then? I can’t think why anyone would need to oil a snake.’
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Her face changed as a thought occurred to her. ‘Oh, gross. They didn’t actually make oil from snakes, did they? Ugh.’
Her line of reasoning was broken as Nathan approached at a swift jog, panting. ‘Doc,’ he called out. ‘Looks like that trail rat Alvin got himself a horse and kited outta here. Girls in the saloon say he went out the back way when those Lyle boys tried to throw down with you.’
‘A distraction, then,’ said the Doctor. ‘He pegged it and left you holding the bag, my old son.’ He gave Walking Crow a level look.
‘Not a very sensible thing to do. I wonder where he’s heading.’ The Pawnee said nothing, his expression impassive.
‘He must have been well scared of the Doctor, then,’ Martha opined.
‘Scared enough to leave his strongboxes behind.’
Walking Crow shifted uncomfortably. ‘Godlove knew you had come for him, Marshal.’
‘Marshal?’ repeated the Doctor. ‘Oh, now I get it. Is it the coat? Or the hat?’ He grinned briefly. ‘I can see how he might have thought I was the law. I suppose I do look a bit Clint Eastwood in this, don’t I?’
Martha couldn’t resist poking his ego. ‘More like the Milky Bar Kid.’
His grin snapped into a frown. ‘Oh, thank you.’ The Doctor hopped up into the wagon. ‘Let’s see these boxes, then.’
Inside, the Doctor found the metal containers just as Martha had described. The first, the unlocked one, had cash a
nd coins enough to show that Godlove had probably worked his ‘miracle cure’ at a dozen other townships aside from Redwater and lronhill. In an age before centralised medical care, there were many illnesses rife on the frontier and many people who would pay dearly if they believed they would be rid of them.
He put the cash box aside; the moment he laid his hand on the second box, the locked one, he knew he’d found something interesting.
The sonic screwdriver made short work of the fat padlock holding the latch closed and the Doctor flipped open the lid.
‘What’s in there?’ asked Martha warily, peering in through the door flap.
‘Fragments,’ said the Doctor, tipping the strongbox up so he could 88
get a better look inside. He picked out the largest piece and turned it over in his fingers. About the size of a compact disc, it was a thick, curved section of silver-grey metal, dull and lined with shallow tracks.
The tracks were inlaid with something that looked organic. He tapped his nail on it and it rang slightly. ‘Bone elements in a metal matrix,’ he announced, bringing the piece to his eye. ‘Very light, but dense too.’
‘And this is the part where you tell me that it’s Not of This Earth, right?’
The Doctor nodded slowly, and ran the soft blue glow of the sonic over the edges of the fragment. ‘Go to the top of the class, Martha Jones,’ he said carefully. ‘This is very interesting stuff. It shows signs of hyperspatial vortex fractures. And forced gravitational alignment in the molecular structure.’ With a burst of motion, he tossed it back into the box and grabbed at a handful of chemical bottles with peeling paper labels. He poured measures from each into a ceramic dish and selected a small bit of the metal, then tossed it into the fluid.
Martha blinked as a puff of purple flame coughed out of the dish.
‘What did that tell you?’
‘Nothing,’ quipped the Doctor, ‘I just did that for fun.’ He poked at the residue and went back to the boxes of fragments. ‘OK. A picture is forming. Would you like to know what it is a picture of?’
‘Something nice?’ Martha said lamely.
The Doctor gave a dry chuckle. ‘With our track record, do you really think so? ’Course not!’ He gestured with two pieces of the grey metal.
‘This is very definitely an artificially manufactured material, probably spun from an atomic lattice loom in a zero-gravity environment –’
Behind Martha, Nathan and Walking Crow listened to him speak, clearly nonplussed.
The Doctor went on, without pausing for breath: ‘– and there’s a bio-organic component, cultured metastatic cellular membranes for electro-chemical data transfer and energy flux regulation. I’ve seen a similar kind of structure on Gagrant Necro-Harvesters and Earth Empire bio-colony transporters.’ He blew out his cheeks. ‘The thing is, I think I’ve seen this exact fractal construction before. I just can’t place it.’
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‘You’re talking about spaceships,’ said Martha. ‘That metal’s from a spaceship?’
‘Another gold star,’ he nodded. ‘A-plus-plus-plus, like they say on eBay.’ He rapped his knuckles on the metal. ‘This is, without a doubt, part of the hull plating from a vessel capable of transgalactic hyperspace travel. A bit of an anachronism on a planet where people have only just started using steam engines.’ The Doctor scrambled forward and leapt out of the wagon to land next to the Pawnee.
Walking Crow backed off a step, a flicker of nervousness in his eyes.
‘I tell you, this planet, there’s enough non-terrestrial junk scattered around on its surface that you could start your own alien scrap yard.’
The Doctor advanced on the man. ‘Dalek pods in Utah, saucers under the Arctic, the mess left over from that UFO fender-bender in Roswell. . . Some species are like lazy picnickers, leaving their rubbish instead of taking it home with them.’ He halted and held up the fragment. ‘And this. I wonder where it came from.’ Walking Crow wilted under his hard gaze. ‘Care to tell us?’
At first, Walking Crow wouldn’t speak of it. The Doctor pressed and cajoled, finally dispatching Martha and the boy Nathan on an errand to find them some food. The Doctor seemed to understand his reticence. What he had encountered, what he had witnessed out there all those months ago. . . it was not something he could simply talk about openly, even now.
They had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time; or, as Godlove had later retorted, in the right place at the right time.
Their luck was waning, and after several poorly paying attempts to make money off the settlements along the line of the Smoky Hill Trail from Kansas, Godlove had first argued with the Pawnee, and then blamed him for their predicament. Godlove then decided that they should strike out for new territories and fresh opportunities, perhaps heading toward Dakota and the Black Hills, or else down south where the weather was more balmy.
They were low on food and water, and game was sparse. Matters were made worse when the dappled mare pulling the wagon put 90
a foot in a gopher hole and took an injury. The wagon tipped and righted itself, but not before Godlove was tossed from the driver’s seat and thrown into the dirt. He landed on his hand and Walking Crow heard the twig-like snap as he broke a pair of fingers. The man howled for a while, his hand swelling up like a balloon as he tried to bandage it, but Alvin Godlove knew little of real care for the sick and injured.
Godlove was beside himself with rage. He wavered between putting a bullet in the animal’s head, putting the poor beast out of its misery, and the realisation that without the injured animal there was no way they would be able to get the wagon to the next frontier township.
Godlove and Walking Crow argued again, and as night fell the issue had still to be resolved to Godlove’s satisfaction. That was when the burning stars came.
From out of the East, streaking across the sky leaving fingers of smoky orange behind them, a cluster of glowing white droplets screamed over their campsite and fell to the earth a few miles away.
They struck the ground with a rumble of thunder and left a bright glow hazing through the trees.
At first, Godlove was afraid of what the strange sky-fall could represent; but, minute by minute, he talked to himself, almost as if his curiosity and his greed were two other voices living inside the man’s head. In short order, he convinced himself that only a weak man would not wish to venture closer, and that riches and bounty from heaven could be waiting for them both.
Walking Crow did not believe that the Great Spirit would throw treasures at them like a petulant child tossing stones at a dog, but as always his counsel was ignored. The two of them ventured out at daybreak to see what remained of the burning stars.
They found, among a ring of trees that had fallen in a perfect, outward-facing circle, a curious pit in the earth that was blackened and burned, steeped with a strange smell that recalled the hot metal worked in a blacksmith’s, but also the stale blood of a battlefield.
The strange pieces of iron that was not iron were everywhere, and Godlove set Walking Crow to gathering them up, perhaps thinking 91
that they could make some small coin off their scrap value in the next town.
But it was at the very core of the burned landscape that they found the most peculiar thing. At best, Walking Crow could only describe what he saw as similar to the nest of a wasp hatchling, but made from threads of glass and not fibres of wood. It was broken open and a thick oil the colour of bile drooled out from it into the earth, making the ground wet and boggy.
And inside, a carving that looked like bone or perhaps metal, depending on how the light struck it. The shape was odd and strangely proportioned, and yet at first sight both men knew exactly what it was. The potential for lethality seemed to leak into the air around it, a potent aura of sleepy, ready menace.
Although Walking Crow had never seen anything like it in his life, he knew that it was a gun. He stroked it, ever so gingerly, brushing a finger over the whorled surface of the weapon. That t
ouch brought a bitter cold to his marrow, a chill of such power that it felt like every winter the Pawnee had lived through all made into one. He recoiled.
Godlove, predictably, snatched it out of the cracked vessel and gripped it in his injured hand, the wound forgotten. He grinned and brandished it about like a child with a toy. Grinned and laughed and grinned, all until his scream broke through.
Walking Crow saw him fall. Alvin went to his knees on the mud and clutched the strange gun to his chest. That was when the weapon cooed and glowed a firefly green, casting a colour about Godlove’s ruined fingers.
When he gathered his wits and got back up, Walking Crow saw that Godlove’s broken digits were whole and set again, as new. Later, back at the wagon, he repeated the miraculous process to take away the horse’s lacerations. Godlove smiled a smile then, a look of such unadulterated greed that the Pawnee was silenced to see it.
And that was how it had begun.
His arms folded, the Doctor drummed his fingers on his elbows, thinking. ‘A cargo capsule, then,’ he reasoned. ‘Maybe a malfunction of the 92
hyperdrive, a photon shadow crossing the void conduit path at the wrong moment after a solar flare?’
The Pawnee’s brow furrowed. ‘Please do not speak in that manner.
It causes a pain in my head.’
‘Sorry,’ said the Doctor, ‘rambling. Occupational hazard.’ He stalked away, walking around in a small circle. ‘Thing is,’ he continued. ‘I’m flying blind here unless I can come up with some clue as to what this gizmo is that Godlove has. Or indeed, where it came from and who it belongs to. . . ’ The sallow faces of Tangleleg and Kutter crossed his thoughts. ‘And who wants it back. . . ’
He vaulted back onto the wagon. ‘Think, Doctor! Think!’ He tapped himself on his forehead. ‘Stratified matrix construct. Bio-energy engrams. Healing fields. Weapons. Adaptive technology. Put it together, man. Think, think, thinky- think!’