Doctor Who (22 page)

‘The doctors,’ said Ollus, suddenly deep in thought.

He heard Gill stop at the door. She came padding back over to him.

‘What is it, Mr Blakely?’ she asked him.

‘I knew a doctor once, you know,’ he said. Suddenly, he could picture the Doctor, in his tweed jacket and bow tie, smiling at him, handing him something. He could feel the smooth sides of a small cube in his hand, almost as if he were actually touching it now.

‘A doctor? Really?’ asked Gill, perching on the side of Ollus’s bed, next to his chair. ‘Which doctor was this?’

‘Oh, I’m not sure,’ said Ollus, wrinkling up his old face as he tried to concentrate. ‘So difficult to remember things these days, I’m afraid.’ He squeezed his hand tight in his cardigan pocket as he tried to remember. Then he suddenly realised he actually had the small cube in his hand … now. Of course, yes. He remembered. He always kept this in his pocket. He brought it out and showed it to Gill.

Gill looked at the cube, fascinated.

‘What’s that?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know,’ said Ollus. ‘The Doctor gave it to me. I remember that. He gave it to me … And he said …’

Ollus trailed off. He shut his eyes and started to feel a little uneasy. Was this a bad memory? Then, in his mind, through a warm haze, he saw the Doctor’s face, smiling and winking. Perhaps it wasn’t such a bad memory after all. Was it his? Or was it something Sabel had told him? He couldn’t tell. Then he remembered the Doctor’s words.

‘He said, “If you ever think you need me, just hold this box and think of me.” Yes, I remember that now. Nice, isn’t it?’ said Ollus, holding the little white cube up to the light. ‘Nice thing to say. I think …’

And then he felt very tired. His arm started to waver.

‘Oh, now then,’ he heard Gill say, as his eyes started to close. ‘You’re tiring yourself out with all this remembering.’

He felt her hands help him to lie back as the chair reclined.

She probably put the cube back in my pocket, he thought as he drifted into sleep.

Probably.

Taking meticulous care not to cross his own timeline, the Doctor set the coordinates for the TARDIS to return to Gethria. He would arrive just moments after he had left that lonely little funeral near the great Cradle of the Gods monument.

His mind was now afire with a burning purpose. The Dalek Litigator may have outwitted him, but now he had an idea he knew how to defeat the entire Dalek plan.

The TARDIS engines thudded to a halt and the Doctor dashed down the steps of the control room and out onto the planet’s surface. He had landed in exactly the same position as before. In the distance ahead of him, he could see the still, silent monument, now deserted, the mourners having left just a few minutes earlier.

He quickened his pace, breaking out into a slight sweat in the hot noon sun. As he neared the monument, he could see the gravestone, and there, embedded in it, along with other strange little items, was Ollus’s
precious spaceship toy. Just as it was when the Doctor had seen it for the very first time – a little old and worn, but definitely the same toy.

Reaching out to it, he stopped for a moment, feeling sad all of a sudden. This must have been Ollus’s funeral. So who sent the message in the cube? Was it Ollus, when he knew he was close to the end of his life?

Blinking back the beginning of a tear, the Doctor firmly gripped the model spaceship in the stone. He pulled. It would not budge. This was going to need a bit of sonic technology to dislodge it.

Just as he was producing his sonic screwdriver to vibrate the little toy free, he was aware of a noise, over by the monument. A soft, shifting of sand.

He looked over, and there he saw an old woman standing by the great stone structure, dwarfed by its imposing scale. He looked hard at her. She was looking right back at him.

Slowly, she began to approach. As she got closer, he began to recognise her features. It was the old woman he had seen here before, when he had first observed the funeral in progress. She had stopped and looked at him, and then left.

Now she was back.

Then it suddenly struck him, as something in her eyes triggered another memory … This was one of the Blakely children.

‘Is it …?’ he started to ask as she arrived in front of him, smiling a somewhat haunted smile.

‘Sabel,’ she said in a brittle, old voice. ‘Hello, Doctor.’

‘Sabel?’ said the Doctor. ‘I came straight here.
Straight from saying goodbye to you and Ollus.’

He looked down at the gravestone.

‘It’s been a lifetime for us,’ said Sabel. ‘More than a lifetime.’

The Doctor nodded. Time travel did this kind of thing to him all the time. That was the nature of it. A twisty-turning thing that would tangle your hearts in barbs if you let it. He sniffed a thought-clearing sniff and reached out to touch Sabel’s hand.

She withdrew it.

‘Still not forgiven me, eh?’ he said, nodding.

‘
I
sent the message in the cube,’ she said coldly. ‘Ollus was too ill. He wanted to see you again, but …’

‘I was too late …’ said the Doctor, deeply saddened.

‘Like you were too late to save our parents. Too late to save … Jenibeth,’ said Sabel.

The Doctor felt those barbs in his hearts. He narrowed his gaze at Sabel. That was a cruel thing for her to say, but perhaps understandable. She had very possibly spent her life resenting the madman in a box who promised everything but delivered nothing.

He nodded. ‘Understood,’ he said. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some business to attend to.’

He pointed his sonic screwdriver at the spaceship embedded in the stone. Activating it, he watched as it buzzed and the cement around the hull of the toy vibrated and crumbled.

‘I know I can never make things better for you,’ said the Doctor. ‘But I can at least stop the Daleks.’

‘Stop the Daleks?’ there was an eagerness in her voice. Perhaps she would understand after all.

‘Yes, this toy of Ollus’s,’ said the Doctor. ‘I think this is what contains the activation codes for the Cradle of the Gods. I think Alyst and Terrin Blakely, your parents, couldn’t resist making a record of their codes. Diligent physicists, you see. Catalogue and record everything. That’s why this place came alive before, when Ollus was holding it.’

Then he stopped. It didn’t quite make sense.

Thinking aloud, he said, ‘Then why isn’t it working now? Perhaps it’s to do with proximity, and we were right inside that thing. Or … Hmm.’ He would attempt to explain this to himself later, he decided. He switched off the sonic screwdriver.

‘What are you going to do with it now?’ asked Sabel.

‘Destroy it,’ he said. ‘Smash it to pieces.’

Aware that Sabel was watching him intently, he put his hand on the little spaceship and started to pull it free of the gravestone.

Suddenly, Sabel’s hand shot out and grabbed his. The shock he felt was not just caused by the suddenness, but by the sheer strength of her grip and …

The cold.

The icy cold touch of Sabel’s hand. Colder than any
living
hand he had ever touched. Straining and failing to pull free of her iron grip, the Doctor looked Sabel straight in the eyes. She looked back at him with an emptiness that reminded him of the blankness of a Dalek’s stare.

And then it happened …

A blue glow started to emerge through Sabel’s forehead. A strange, unnerving, buzzing, cracking
sound was rising. Her eyes remained fixed on him as a Dalek eyestalk burst through her bloodless skin, staring at him with its penetrating blue light.

‘Oh, Sabel,’ the Doctor breathed. ‘They got you, didn’t they? The Daleks got you.’

In this moment of horror, the Doctor involuntarily relaxed his grip on the toy. With precise, mechanical reflexes, Sabel thrust the Doctor’s hand aside and caught the little spaceship before it hit the ground.

The Doctor immediately made to grab the spaceship back but, with remarkable agility, she sidestepped him, then held up her other hand. The bloodless skin peeled back and the silver metal of a Dalek gun protruded unpleasantly from the flat of her palm.

‘Do not move!’ she intoned, harshly her old voice rasping, almost exactly like a Dalek’s.

‘They gave you Dalek nanogenes, didn’t they?’ murmured the Doctor, lamenting. ‘Oh, Sabel …’

Suddenly, the air was filled with a thunderous burst of energy. A low, vibrating hum filled the Doctor’s ears. He looked up. There, just to one side of the monument, a Dalek saucer was landing, having swooped down low
at breathtaking speed.

The Doctor waited, accepting the inevitable, as the saucer’s hatchway opened and the ramp slid down. Immediately, a squad of six Daleks moved rapidly down the ramp onto the sand, followed by one further Dalek, accompanied by two human figures. An old woman and an old man.

As the Dalek got closer and closer, the Doctor once again saw the quickly fading, blurring image on its grating. This was the Dalek Litigator again, returning to the scene of the crime. But more importantly for the Doctor, he suddenly knew that he could recognise the two elderly people being forced to keep pace with the Dalek.

Old and worn though their features were, they were unmistakably Ollus and …

Sabel?

He looked to the ‘other’ Sabel and back again to the new arrival. He found that this new Sabel was looking at the other, Dalek-converted woman. The Doctor realised that these women’s faces were quite different. But there was a family resemblance.

‘It’s … Jenibeth,’ said the newly arrived Sabel, a single tear furrowing down the lines of her noble old face.

Jenibeth? The Doctor realised that the Dalek-converted woman who had been threatening him was not Sabel at all, but her sister. The girl who had been taken prisoner by the Daleks decades ago.

‘Jenibeth? It really … is you?’ said Ollus, his tiny old voice cracking with emotion and disbelief.

‘The Daleks sent the message in the cube to you,’ the
Litigator stated, moving close to the Doctor.

‘You?’ the Doctor was dumbfounded.

‘It contained a time-space tracer signal,’ continued the Litigator, ‘which proved most useful.’

‘Then it was you, the Daleks,’ started the Doctor, the terrible realisation dawning on him. ‘You were the ones manipulating me. You’ve been following my every move.’ He winced in annoyance at himself. ‘Why am I even surprised?’ He hit himself squarely on the forehead with the heel of his palm.

‘They faked my funeral,’ said Ollus. ‘How impolite of them.’

‘Well, I’m glad to see you’re still alive, Ollus,’ said the Doctor. ‘And you, Sabel.’

‘Only just,’ the old man smiled. ‘I’m afraid things get a bit confusing the older you get.’

‘Tell me about it,’ the Doctor said warmly.

‘And I let my guard down,’ continued Ollus. ‘Just once. But once was enough. They got hold of the cube … somehow. I’m so sorry.’

‘That’s all right, Ollus, old chap,’ shrugged the Doctor. ‘Strictly speaking, it’s a space-time anomaly. It shouldn’t really exist, you know. Chicken and egg, egg and chicken, that sort of thing.’ The Doctor was rambling now.

‘Er … um, yes, well …’ said Ollus, a little confused. ‘But I didn’t tell them anything about the spaceship.’

Sabel grabbed Ollus’s arm in alarm. ‘Ssh,’ she said, suddenly realising her futility.

‘Don’t worry, Sabel,’ said the Doctor, cross with himself. ‘I think
I
just managed to give that little piece of
information away before you arrived.’

‘You will activate it!’ commanded the Litigator. ‘Activate the spaceship toy!’

‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ replied the Doctor. ‘You do your own dirty work.’

The Doctor was aware of the whine of Dalek traction coming from all around. The squad of other Daleks was converging upon them, swiftly ploughing through the sand towards them.

‘You will activate the device or Ollus and Sabel will be exterminated!’ commanded the Litigator.

Physically sagging with defeat, the Doctor sighed and put out his hand to Jenibeth. ‘All right, then. Give it to me,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure exactly how it works, but I’ll certainly give it my best shot.’

But before he could take the ship from Jenibeth, Ollus cried out, ‘No!’

The Doctor stopped and looked at Ollus.

‘We are old. We have lived our long lives,’ said Ollus. Sabel encircled one of his arms with hers and held her brother close. She nodded, looking tearful but resolute. Ollus nodded back at her. ‘Whatever this Cradle thing does, we can’t let the Daleks have it, and that is surely worth our lives.’

The Doctor took hold of the tiny spaceship and looked into it. ‘I won’t balance lives, Ollus. I won’t make noble gestures on behalf of others. It’s not for me to sit in judgement.’

‘But if the Daleks have this thing, they will have control of a terrible weapon!’ pleaded Sabel.

‘So what?’ the Doctor suddenly proclaimed, full of
bluster and a trifle petulantly. ‘The Daleks are always getting awesome weapons and threatening to blow things up or whatever their latest, overblown plan is. I’ll find a way to defeat them. It’s what I do. It’s inevitable. I always defeat them … mostly.’ Then he turned to the Dalek Litigator, dismissively. ‘How bad can this Cradle actually be anyway?’

‘It will
transform
the Sunlight Worlds,’ said the Litigator.

‘Transform them?’ the Doctor was worried now. ‘Transform? How?’

‘They will be turned into a billion Skaros,’ said the Litigator.

‘A billion …? How can you make a billion versions of your home planet?’ demanded the Doctor. He looked hard at the Dalek Litigator, but it remained silent.

‘Come on, out with it!’ said the Doctor. ‘I’m at your mercy, aren’t I? Or are you still scared of me?’

At that moment, the Doctor doubled up in pain. Something powerful was lancing right through his mind. He gasped and strained through the agony to look up.

There. He saw it again. The whirling blur in the middle of the Litigator’s grating. But this time it was larger, more defined and swirling with a glowing power that filled his mind with the sickening feeling of falling headlong into an abyss. He suddenly realised he was looking directly into the Time Vortex. Here, on this Dalek’s casing, the Time Vortex seemed to be pulling the Doctor in …