Doctor Who - Nuclear Time (7 page)

'Teer ees no teemm! Oorrri, Eeemi, tem leeiiv.'

'I don't understand! What are you trying to tell me, what's wrong?' The Doctor could sense the urgency in his double's voice. 'What's happened to me?'

'Teer eees no teemm!' the man repeated.

The Doctor suddenly understood. 'No time? Time for what?'

'Ooorrri, Eeemi, leeiivv tem.'

'Rory and Amy? Why? What's going to happen?' Now that his head had cleared, the Doctor could see the sweat glistening on the other Doctor's brow, the untidy chaos of his hair. Something had
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happened, something was going to happen. To him.

The other Doctor's sleeve seemed to pull itself back over the watch of its own accord as he extended his hand higher and pointed to the sky.

'Seethe boomb.'

There was no mistaking that final word. The Doctor followed the man's finger and looked at the sky before letting out a yell of anguish. The dark shape of the plane was visible now as it circled overhead, a black vulture above the village, preparing for one final decent. The drone of its engines was louder now than it had ever been before.

'He's - I'm right, there's no time to go back before they drop the bomb.' He flexed his hands in frustration.

'But, I can't leave them! They'll die!'

The other Doctor shouted something that the Doctor couldn't comprehend, an unnatural warble of sound that ended with 'Taaaaarrdiz.'

'The TARDIS?'

'Cann zzdopp eet. Weel Zavay teeem.'

'What? How?' The Doctor's frustration was mounting. He was painfully aware of each relentless second that was ticking by whilst his double tried to communicate.

The other Doctor said nothing in response, instead feeling for his inside jacket pocket, the
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other hand smoothing his hair over his face.

Eventually, the other Doctor found what he was looking for, flourishing open the psychic paper and holding it out for his opposite to view.

The Doctor stepped forward once more, wincing as the haze returned; he squinted through the suddenly heady glow of the sunlight, desperately trying to make out the faint diagrams that had imprinted themselves on the white slip. Eventually he stepped back, and his eyes met the other Doctor's.

'You're right,' he said finally. 'That could work. But the TARDIS has never done anything like that before. There's no telling the effect on the infrastructure - it could completely destabilise her!'

But the other Doctor seemed to have finished, holding up his hand to silence the Doctor. They looked at each other one last time, before the other Doctor shrugged his jacket off and into his hand before slinging it awkwardly over his shoulder.

'Wait, you can't go!' the Doctor called after him. 'What are you? My future? I would remember being you if you weren't, but if that's the case...' He swallowed uncomfortably and trailed off. 'What am I about to do?'

But the other Doctor had gone, shuffling backwards around a corner and looking about
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himself as if searching for someone else. Then the Doctor was alone in the alleyway once more. He rubbed his eyes as though waking from a deep sleep and walked forwards into the cool shade of the warehouse between the brutal shafts of light that glared from between the houses. Then the noise of the engines above invaded his mind and jolted him into action.

The Doctor's hefty boots pounded the sandy ground as the TARDIS came into view, the deep blue of its wooden frame an oasis amid the desert brown that surrounded it. He didn't slow as he covered the last few metres to the doors, key gripped in his hand, aimed at the lock.

Just in time, the double doors swung gently inwards, and the Doctor cannoned into the control room, his lungs shocked for a second by the sudden

encounter

with

the

TARDIS's

air-

conditioned environment.

He took the stairs by leaps and bounds, stumbling to the central console and splaying his hands across the panels as he reached for fourteen buttons and levers at once. The scanner snapped on in the wall behind him, a detailed three-dimensional model of the surroundings, searching and scanning for the plane above the town. It found it, and the model immediately split into a

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shower of possible trajectories and velocities, one strand highlighted in red, as the digital image of an atom bomb began to descend.

But the TARDIS was already in flight. The Doctor whirled around the console, seemingly propelling himself from lever to lever simply with the force of each movement. 'Come on, come on, right spot, right time, we can do it you sexy, sexy thing!'

He brought a fist down on a control panel hard, and the howl of the engines exploded into a scream.

Yanking the smaller view-screen around with him, the Doctor suddenly swapped sides and paused, eyes transfixed on the readouts that swam across his vision faster than anyone human could have comprehended.

His fingers tapped feverishly on the side of the monitor as he muttered under his breath. 'Seven, six, five, four, three, two, one...' Pause. 'Now!' The last word was punctuated by a brutal kick to the underside of the console.

It clanged loudly, the reverberations echoing around the towering control room for seconds after the impact, and when the Doctor had stopped nursing his injured foot he realised that the engines had ceased.

Gingerly he rested his foot back onto the glass floor and, painfully slowly, lifted his eyes to the ceiling.

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Hanging barely a foot from the Doctor's head was the bomb. A large, ugly heap of metal engulfed in a static ball of energy, white hot fire frozen abruptly at its highest velocity, halted only a few centimetres from his upturned face. Behind the bubble, its reflection in the metal ripples that arced away from the central column cast a thousand tiny suns around the control room.

He stared in wonderment at the object for a moment, then a slow grin spread across his face. 'I did it,' he said to himself. 'I only went and did it!'

Hesitantly, he raised his hand up to the object, transfixed by its violent beauty.

Suddenly, the calm hue of the control room switched to a dark crimson as an urgent alarm blared loudly out of the gramophone speaker on the console.

He snatched his hand away. 'All right, all right, I get the point.' He scowled, reaching out to press a key.

'It's not often one gets to see an atomic explosion at the point of detonation.' But his sulk was swiftly replaced by a worried frown as the siren continued.

He looked back at the ball of energy, opening his mouth in horror as, agonisingly slowly, the flames of light began to swirl within the confines of the force bubble.

Time hiccupped, and the bubble's diameter expanded by a millimetre as the TARDIS groaned under the strain of containment. The Doctor found
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himself thrown against the railings of the console by an incredible shockwave.

'Stasis leak.' He struggled to breathe as his arms flailed across the hard metal floor that strobed beneath him in the red light. 'I have to get out of here.'

His

body

twisted

and

convulsed

as

the

atmosphere began to boil, suffocating him as he pawed his way along the floor towards the doors. His arms trembled and shook with the effort required to pull his body even an inch, and by the time his fingers were scrabbling at the edge of the wooden panelling his face was drenched with sweat. Tears of exertion ran down his cheeks as he prised open the latch and the door inched slowly open. It took his last ounce of strength to fling his body over the threshold and onto the stony desert ground beyond.

'We've lost the Doctor!' Amy shouted as she tried to catch her breath. 'What is he doing?'

It doesn't matter. We know the route; we can meet him at the TARDIS.' Rory looked over his shoulder.

'That is, if we manage to keep all our limbs until we get there.'

The citizens of Appletown were swarming along the street towards them, spilling over into the gardens Rory and Amy had passed through
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NUCLEAR TIME

only seconds before. No longer attempting to appear human, the androids clambered over fences and through hedges with an almost insect-like movement of limbs that contrasted grotesquely with

their pastel

fashion sense. Amy nearly retched as she watched one woman, sporting a fetching mini dress that she would have killed for, get caught awkwardly in one of the fences as it collapsed beneath her, only to free herself through a 360-degree rotation of her forearms that twisted the rubber skin around her elbows until it ripped to expose the steel skeleton beneath.

She turned and headed straight for the garden gate, leaping into the road to dodge a pair of grasping hands and rolling back onto her feet, nearly losing her balance as she pushed forward to try and outrun her pursuers. She could hear Rory panting behind her as they rounded the street corner and the large Appletown sign loomed up in front of them.

She picked up the pace for one last sprint to the TARDIS as Rory drew alongside, the final few houses hurtling past as they pelted down the street.

Three, two, one, the last buildings fell away and they entered the open desert, sand and rocks stretching for miles in every direction, the horizon a haze that blurred into the pale blue sky, and that was all there was.

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'But...' Amy panted as her lungs burned and she slowed in bewilderment.

'It was there. It was right there!' Rory said.

But it wasn't any longer, and Amy rushed to the shallow dent in the ground that was the only indication the TARDIS had ever been there at all. She stood in the centre of the square and flung her arms up in frustration.

'Doctor!' she shouted. 'Come back!'

They stood in silence for a moment, their ears straining for the familiar sound of the engines, but there was nothing but the wind and the faint drone of the plane as it passed over the village.

Rory scanned the sky for the aircraft in puzzlement. 'I thought the Doctor was implying that we were about to be nuked,' he said. 'But the plane is leaving and we're still alive.'

'Well, thank heavens for small mercies,' Amy snapped. 'In the meantime we're stuck in the desert with nothing for miles but a town full of homicidal robots for company.'

Rory looked over his shoulder nervously, expecting a hoard of villagers to emerge from the buildings any second.

'I think we should get as far away from here as possible,' he suggested, but Amy shook her head solemnly.

'The Doctor wouldn't leave us behind. He'll
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NUCLEAR TIME

come back - and when he does we need to be here.'

Rory shuffled uncomfortably. 'But there's got to be some sort of human outpost somewhere, some sort of observation tower for the testing.'

'I'm sure there is, but it'll be miles out of range of an atomic blast and we have no idea what direction it's in,' Amy retorted. 'We could just be walking deeper into the desert, how long do you think we'll be able to survive out in the open in this heat? And that's not even considering the fact that we'd be sitting ducks to Isley and her friends out in the open.'

'OK, OK, you've made your point.'

Amy sniffed, and silence descended once more.

'I guess we should try and find somewhere to hide then.' Rory suggested eventually. 'If we stay out of their way long enough, maybe the citizens will reset.'

'Considering what's happened so far, I wouldn't bet on it being so easy,' Amy said as she strode past him.

'Come on,' she said, 'we'll circle around and enter from the east.'

Rory looked around. 'Which way is east?'

'I don't know, it just sounded better than "a different direction to the one we came in by", that's all.'

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Rory undid another button on his shirt and reluctantly began to follow her, glancing over his shoulder with every step. He couldn't shake the feeling that they were being watched.

74

Utah Military Research Base, 27 May 1977

'Coffee?'

'What? Oh yeah, sure. Put it by the limbs.'

Albert didn't bother to look up as Geoff entered the workshop that the majority of the base had nicknamed 'the magician's palace'. It certainly looked the part, with great swathes of coloured polythene, clothes and sheets of plastic flesh hung from wires all around the central workspace. The tamer items stood near the doorway: wooden crates filled with robotic limbs, polished arms and hands complete with bolted aluminium fingers hanging limply over the edge of the boxes, independent generators whirring gently

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and making the hands twitch in a scarily lifelike manner every few minutes.

Further inside were rows of shelves containing a large number of human-like heads — metal skulls coated in the cutting edge of plastic technology. Rubber eyelids lay carefully over gel eyeballs and the only hint of the microchip technology that stood in for a brain was the open hatch above the right ear on every model and the soft blue glow pulsating from within.

The back wall displayed the various readouts, charts and graphs that were being fed out from the small, handheld device in Albert's palm. Only fifteen centimetres square, the box contained the entire processing power and coding that had, four years ago now, once taken up the entire computer lab at Michigan University, and which in turn was connected by a spray of wires to the centrepiece of the whole operation: The android.

The flickering readouts rippled across the metal skeleton, catching its steel bolts and reflecting tiny points of light around the room. This one was a woman, a baggy T-shirt slung over the unskinned torso protected her inner workings, but her head was almost human.