Doctor Who (4 page)

Terrin Blakely’s ship was functional and unimpressive. All its control surfaces were well worn and the furnishings looked a bit tired. The metal deck was scuffed with what looked like decades of footsteps. This was an old workhorse of a ship, probably hired out to anyone and everyone – no careful owners.

‘You chartered this old bucket of bolts, Terrin,’ muttered the Doctor to himself as he flipped a few controls. There was a gentle, unhealthy sizzling sound emitting from the panels.

‘Terrin!’ called the Doctor. ‘Terrin, are you here?’

The Doctor’s words echoed a truncated echo into the dull, greenish walls. Fishing his sonic screwdriver from his pocket, he took various readings as he made a quick dash around the length and breadth of the ship. It took him just a few minutes. There was a main, central corridor, off which fanned a number of cabins with bunks in. At the head of the corridor was this oval-shaped control room, at the rear was a rectangular
engine section, where the display panels were also sizzling and smoking.

The readings in the control room showed that the ship had indeed been attacked. Attempts at generating a defensive energy field around the ship had failed, and there were a few fresh scorch marks here and there, some still wet with foam, where fires had broken out and been extinguished. The Doctor’s nostrils twitched with the still-present sting of burnt plastic and scorched metal.

‘So, where are you?’ asked the Doctor of the empty spaces he imagined that Terrin had once occupied. ‘What happened to you, Terrin, old chap? And that lady? Was it your wife? Hmm. I wonder …’

The Doctor’s eyes darted over the controls. There was still some power. With some careful re-routing, things would still work.

‘Aha!’

He located something he knew might help.

It was the log recorder … That should answer a few questions, he thought as he approached a small screen with a camera lens fitted above it.

After a few false starts, the Doctor found the correct way to get this recorder to display the contents of its electronic memory. He punched a sequence of buttons and the screen spluttered into life, almost spitting out static with sharp needles of distorted sound.

And the tragedy unfolded before his eyes …

The moment the gigantic ship had arrived in front of them, blocking their course, Terrin had been prepared. He activated the log recorder and was ready to send a
distress call as soon as the alien aggressors made their first demand.

Alyst had seen a look in his eyes that she had never seen before in all their seventeen years of marriage, and it scared her. Ever since they had agreed to set out on this voyage, she had had the distinct feeling that their work had taken them a step too far towards something forbidden and dangerous. And now she knew it was true.

Terrin was violently hammering a release control for the ship’s escape pod. Alyst had never seen him do anything remotely violent before, but now he was attacking this control with an unrestrained, almost animalistic brute force. The control still did not respond.

‘It’s not going to work,’ Terrin said. ‘This damn ship! Nothing on it works properly! No self-destruct and now no escape pod!’

Alyst realised what would have to happen.

The communications speaker crackled into life again. It was that Dalek again, making its blunt demand.

‘You will surrender the formula immediately!’

Alyst saw Terrin’s fear fire his anger as he hit the response button.

‘I’ve already told you! We don’t know what you are talking about,’ he said, desperately, clearly not believing his own words.

‘We know you are lying,’ the Dalek stated. ‘We know you have been in correspondence with Hogoosta on Gethria. We know you have the formula! You will surrender it immediately. We will now board your ship.’

‘You won’t find the formula here!’ shouted Terrin.

‘You are lying,’ the Dalek responded. ‘Prepare to be boarded.’

‘I’m not lying!’ screamed Terrin back to the crackling speaker.

Alyst felt herself compelled to move to her husband. She gripped his arm, as if their being together might make all this go away.

‘It’s in here, you see!’ shouted Terrin, pointing to his head. ‘Nowhere else! It’s all in here! And I won’t be here when you board.’

He cut off the communications and tried to pull away from Alyst. She thought of saying ‘no’, but she knew there was no point. Even though she had never seen her husband so distressed, so terrified, she knew that he was a man of great purpose and determination. But she still couldn’t find it in herself to let go of his arm.

He pulled away from her again and headed towards the airlock.

‘Terrin …’ she began to say.

‘No,’ he said simply, not even turning. ‘I won’t talk about it. You know I love you. You know I have to do this.’

‘I’m coming with—’ she started.

‘No!’ And she saw the angry pain on his face as he turned. ‘You don’t know the formula!’

‘But I know enough,’ she said. She could see that he knew she was right. ‘I know too much.’

Without another word, she moved to his side and they both walked towards the airlock, their hands linking tightly.

*

The Doctor turned away from the playback as he heard the sound of the airlock discharging Terrin and Alyst into space. He felt a hollowness somewhere inside him. The same feeling he always had when the Daleks crossed his path. Their capacity to surprise and outrage him with their repetitive acts of inhumanity filled him with a rage that he always hoped against hope would diminish over time. But here he was again, starting to learn of yet another Dalek plan for conquest or destruction or invasion or whatever mad, bad idea they had in mind … And he was gritting his teeth in silent fury.

The Dalek capacity to cause suffering and death seemed boundless to the Doctor. He had witnessed their birth in the fires of war, fought them across eternity, tasted their cruelty at first hand so many times. He might have expected his feelings to be blunted to their effect. Yet, witnessing two people who clearly loved each other sacrifice their lives rather than fall captive to the Daleks made the Doctor’s anger and despair as keen as ever it had been.

A tear started to form in his left eye, but he blinked it away. They would not have that from him. He would shed no more tears over the horrors the Daleks could inflict. He would not give them the satisfaction.

‘Formula, formula, formula,’ the Doctor muttered to himself, feverishly. Already his mind was focusing on the problem in hand. No laments for the dead. He mustn’t waste time on anger. He must simply defeat them.

‘What was this formula, eh, Terrin?’ he mused, moving to the airlock. He looked through the inner
door window. The outer door was still open to the freezing blackness of space. He hammered home the door control, closing it and re-pressurising the airlock with a gushing hiss of oxygen. ‘What was so important about it that you opted to end your lives out there?’

He gazed into space. No sign of their bodies. No sign of the Dalek ship. All was quiet. Whatever had hit the TARDIS had pushed him some way off course. Why?

‘And why didn’t the Daleks board your ship, even after you’d gone?’ he asked himself. ‘Just to make sure. Not like the Daleks
not
to make sure. Why aren’t they still here?’

The words froze on his lips, as cold as space, as a distinct sound punctured the stale air. The hairs on the back of the Doctor’s neck were all standing on end. For a split second, he dared not turn round.

And there was the noise again. It was a shifting, groaning sound, some way off. It was coming from the rear of the ship. The engine room? Was there a Dalek in the engine room?

It struck the Doctor as faintly ridiculous that he was now starting to tiptoe, given that, a few moments ago, he had been shouting and thundering around the ship as fast as his lanky legs could carry him in such a confined space – but his instincts had taken over. He approached the rear of the ship as quietly as he could.

The noise came again. Shifting again, like something … 
slithering
across metal. Then a bump echoed through the hull. Bumping, slithering, shifting? Not the sort of sounds he readily associated with Daleks. He stopped and dared to take a reading with his sonic
screwdriver. It buzzed gently to itself and the Doctor glanced down to interpret its findings. There was nothing in them that indicated the presence of a Dalek.

‘Hello!’ the Doctor dared to call out. ‘Who’s there?’

After a few moments of silence, in which the low hum of the ship’s faltering power and the worrying sizzling seemed to get unpleasantly louder, there was a different sound. Muted and indistinct, it was definitely vocal and followed by a ‘ssssh’ noise.

Someone was ‘sssshing’ someone! Someone was
hiding
. And more than one someone, at that. For someone to be ‘sssshing’, there had to be someone else making the noise to be ‘sssshed’ in the first place …

Boldly, the Doctor strode forward to the engine room door, pulled it open, paying no heed to its screeching, rusty hinges, and stepped in. He looked around the small, rectangular room, aware that he had clearly missed something when he had looked in here earlier. Then he spotted it, obscured by the rising fumes and dim lighting. A wide panel with steps leading up to it and handles either side. Across the middle of the panel were stencilled faded, fragmented words:

It was the pod that, on the log recording, Terrin had said was not working; and yet now, there was clearly someone in it.

‘Terrin?’ called the Doctor, his face close to the door panel. ‘Are you in there?’

There was no response. If it was Terrin and his wife in
there, the Doctor reasoned, they would surely answer. They had called for help, after all. So, why would there be people in an escape pod who wouldn’t answer to someone who had responded to their distress call?

All at once, a string of ideas hit the Doctor. It would be people who had been
told
to keep quiet, no matter what. People who, despite being told to keep quiet, might fidget and ‘ssssh’ each other. A particular kind of ‘people’ …

The Doctor grasped the handles and wrenched the panel open.

‘Children!’ he announced, as he stared down at three cowering figures, blinking and cringing in the meagre, flickering light of the engine room. And these children had been cramped together in the dark for …

‘How long have you been here?’ asked the Doctor.

All three of them looked scared to death. The Doctor smiled at them, reassuringly, but they seemed impervious to reassurance. So he stepped back and waited for a while, until they stopped squinting and blinking. He realised that he must have initially just looked like an enormous, blurred silhouette to them.

Hoping they could now see him a bit more clearly, he smiled again and straightened his bow tie. The smaller child in the middle, a boy, shifted a little and nuzzled into the other two, both girls, almost certainly a bit older, definitely a bit bigger.

‘Er, I’m not very good at children’s ages,’ said the Doctor, consciously making his face a picture of innocence. He pointed to the boy. ‘You’d be about … oooh, 32 years old, am I right?’

The little boy immediately giggled. The girl on his left, with blonde curly hair, squeezed a protective arm around him. She frowned an angry frown.

‘Older than that?’ asked the Doctor, trying to provoke another giggle. The girl on the left squeezed the boy tighter and the other girl, on the right, with dark, straight hair, put a protective arm around him too, now.

‘I did a wee in my pants,’ said the boy in the tiniest of voices. The girls instantly ‘sssshed’ him together.

‘Oh. Well, I’m not surprised,’ said the Doctor, conversationally. ‘I expect you’ve been in there quite a long time. I expect if I’d been in there all that time, I would have done a wee in my pants too.’

The Doctor flicked the braces on his trousers and pulled at the waist, miming being uncomfortable and making an ‘Urrrrgh’ noise.

‘Where’s Mummy and Daddy?’ asked the blonde girl. It sounded more like an accusation.

The Doctor felt sick inside. He didn’t know what to say. And looking at the children’s eyes didn’t help him. He could see that the eldest girl, the blonde one, suspected that something terrible had happened. The dark-haired girl seemed more confused. The boy appeared to be mostly concerned about his own discomfort. He wriggled, screwing up his face, and the eldest girl gave him a tiny slap.

‘No hitting,’ the little boy said.

‘They’re dead, aren’t they?’ said the blonde girl directly at the Doctor.

All the Doctor could do was nod, slowly. The blonde girl’s eyes seemed at once afire with anger, filling with
tears. She just stared at the Doctor, almost unblinking as the tears dribbled silently down her face. The other, dark-haired girl was watching her, unsure.

‘Sabel?’ she asked of the blonde girl. ‘Sabel, where are they?’

‘They’re dead, Jeni,’ said Sabel, coldly. She tried to say it again, but her voice faltered into a whisper, trailing off. ‘They’re …’ and she swallowed, uncomfortably, not taking her eyes off the Doctor for one instant.

The little boy wriggled again. ‘I need to change my pants,’ he said.

‘I’m …’ the Doctor started. He wanted to say he was very sorry, but it sounded so pointless. Then, he said it anyway. ‘I’m very sorry.’

The one Sabel had called Jeni turned to the Doctor now, looking angry too. ‘Did you kill them?’

‘No,’ said the Doctor, calmly. ‘No, I didn’t.’

‘It was the Daleks, wasn’t it?’ said Sabel. ‘The Daleks wanted the formula and Daddy wouldn’t give it to them.’

‘What formula?’ asked the Doctor.

‘I really need to change my pants!’ the boy suddenly blurted out loudly.

‘Why don’t you take him to his room and help him change his pants?’ the Doctor asked the girls. He stepped forward to offer them a hand out of the pod.

‘Keep back,’ said Sabel, sharply. ‘We don’t need your help. We can manage.’

The Doctor backed away, then thought it best if he left them alone for a while. He turned and walked back to the control room. He could hear their footsteps behind him, as they clambered out of the pod and walked along
the corridor. He turned and saw them disappear into one of the small cabins.