Doctor Who: Transit (14 page)

The man looked relieved. 'No,' he said, 'nothing like that.'

'Do you mind if we look around?'

'Be my guest.'

They walked up towards the blank end of the station.

'He couldn't wait to get rid of us,' said Kadiatu.

'Kings Cross station,' said the Doctor. 'I asked what was at the end of the tunnel and you said Pluto, yes?'

'Yes.'

'So it should be here.'

'What should be here?' asked Kadiatu and then she remembered. A blue box, two and a half metres tall, blue light on top. Right in the middle of the platform - she'd run right into it.

The wind had been filled with knives and the stink of ozone.

'Next time I'm going to find a better place to park.'

'Well,' she said, 'it could have been diverted but the default signalling position would take it straight through to here.'

'Then it should be here.'

'How fragile is it?' Whatever came through Kings Cross had eaten through armour, muscle and bone.

'It's indestructible.'

Since the Central Line terminated at Lowell Depot the friction field stopped three metres before the end wall. A concrete apron extended the platform into an L-shape. A physical buffer constructed from layers of collapsible steel and permafoam stood at the end of the track. Last chance of a stop before the wall. The Doctor bent over to examine it.

'I wonder,' said the Doctor, 'does this buffer look brand new to you?'

Kadiatu looked. The paintwork did look suspiciously fresh. She didn't know though, maybe they were routinely replaced.

The Doctor straightened up and looked at the end wall. A rectangular sheet of plywood three metres high had been fixed to the wall opposite the buffers and then painted over to match the wall. The Doctor walked over and rapped his knuckles on the wood. It was hollow.

He handed Kadiatu a French fisherman's knife. A wickedly sharp blade hinged out of the wooden handle and locked in place with a metal ring. She jammed the blade under the plywood, ripping down until there was enough room for them both to get a handhold. The sheet came away easily, probably held to the wall only by the adhesiveness of the paint.

'I bet you always wondered,' said the Doctor, 'what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object.'

There was a hole in the wall with razor-sharp sides. It started about ten centimetres above platform level, creating a step. It was about one and a half metres wide and two and half metres tall. The ceiling had a stepped cross-section like a ziggurat.

The hole continued straight ahead into darkness.

'Well,' said the Doctor, peering inside, 'shall we dance?'

5: Hereditary Diseases

The Ice Maiden

The rumours about Francine's eyes were wrong; she did not see in the far ultraviolet or deep infrared. She did not see at all. Instead, darkness rushed behind her eyes, non-glimpses of ridges or canyon walk in the random silver imagination of her damaged nerves. 'So sorry,' said the Doctors and their machines, 'an interaction between your brain and the devices that were put inside.'

So Francine took her disability pension and forged a cocoon for herself under the sea. A flesh place, a sex-driven life-support machine to suck in the capital to finance her real interests. Expanding her influence among the artificial ganglia of humanity's brand-new nervous system, m the hectic years after the war even the military had no idea how to protect itself. They had numerous theories and academic studies but nobody knew - until Francine taught them.

Francine, pirate of the wide-open silicon sea, blind eyes illuminated by the folded neon structures of the datascape, pillaging the fortresses of the corporations and government agencies. Within three weeks she had captured an estimated 35 per cent of the world's secrets—

The establishment learnt fast. The technology wasn't new and they too had their veterans and bum-out cases. People strange enough to risk the direct interface with the machines. They sailed out from I/O ports in vessels knitted together from operating instructions to hunt down Francine.

But the twisted DNA of human history replicated itself once again. The company privateers took up their own careers, raiding other corporations for fun and profit. Smaller corporations, those on the cutting edge of the new technology, saw an opportunity to wrong-foot the big industrial zaibatsu. They gave spurious licence to the privateers who became the gaudy property of the media gestalt. Life-and-death drama on the primetime infotainment shows.

The corporations screamed all the way up to the Global Congress but political consensus took too long when battles lasted seconds. Privateers dying jacked in at their terminals, brains gently fired by lethal for/next loops.

Under the corporate mantle macro-economics ground relentlessly on. The world government was pushing the transit system all the way to Pluto. The economy went into overdrive, mainlining raw materials from the new worlds. Plate tectonics pushed up new mountain ranges in the economy and laid waste to the old conglomerates. Sony went down as did IBM and Matsui. Consumers got used to new household names from Brazil, China and Africa: Imbani, Mtchali, Tung-Po. Japan suffered social collapse and mass emigration, Australia starved.

The new consensus finally emerged alongside the pictures of emaciated potbellied children. It was unthinkable that humanity could once again allow economics to kill children. The media gestalt demanded a scapegoat: they were given the pirates. Their high profile, their mystery and amorality made them perfect targets. The only problem was how to stop them.

Francine had long since vanished from the silicon sea. Instead she traded information for influence, influence for power, and made herself the undisputed mistress of the underworld.

Then she waited for the powers-that-be to pick up the phone.

The campaign against the pirates lasted seven days. Black neon frigates ran them down on the silicon sea. I/O ports were traced, doors kicked in, heads broken, arrests made. There were even a few trials, but not many. Caught in the glare of the cameras the pirates were too often revealed as sad individuals beset by personality defects. Not glamorous enough, said the media gestalt, and produced fictions instead. Moody stories with corrupted heroes leading double lives and dying in a blaze of static. It became a separate genre in itself:
silicon noir.

The government paid her off in favours and turning a blind eye to certain real-estate deals she had going on the moons of Jupiter. More influence, more money, more power. The Ange! Francine lay back and waited to become 'old money'.

Eight years passed.

Francine hardly noticed the empire she had built. After all, she had created it out of a kind of defensive reflex. A soldier's instinct to dig in and fortify her position. It ran on automatic from an anonymous glass tower in Trieste. Sometimes she wondered if they still killed people, but it was an idle thought. She didn't care. She lay beneath the sea with her memories and the silver terrain of Mars behind her eyes.

Her long repose was broken by news of the Flying Dutchman. There were still people operating within the datascape, that was unavoidable. They rode in using the new hardware decks that allowed second-hand contact with the computer network. It made them harder to kill, but their reactions operated in slow biological time not quick enough to hack the real secrets. This new generation of pirates were furtive, devoid of elan or class: anonymous.

The Flying Dutchman was different.

One of her faceless executives came to see her. It was a strange experience for Francine, like listening to a talking dog. She was a bit surprised to find that one other companies was a contracted arm of the state, the Data Protection Agency. The executive explained the position and fled, suitably terrified by Francine's presence, leaving behind a bonded EPROM cartridge.

She saw echoes of herself in the Flying Dutchman. He cruised the datascape with impunity. His targets were a random scattering of commercial and governmental databases. Security never saw him, his trail was only visible in the files he misplaced.

So Francine broke her exile from the silicon sea and went hunting. She sailed out brain-naked with just enough software to navigate. The datascape had changed in eight years, the translucent towers had been replaced by squat bunkers black with lethal countermeasures. Scrambled data was shunted in secure buses like silver bullets. Francine ghosted across the sea, a random search to catch a random pirate.

She caught sight of the Flying Dutchman only once.

It was out on the margins by the Ministry of Education. A backwater region where shoals of whales swam, grazing quietly through the history files - students running search programs. A fine haze of translation flags hung over the still surface of the data. A flock of updates wheeled overhead. Occasionally one would dive into the files and vanish, rising up moments later with an error squirming in its beak.

The three-masted galleon was beautiful, image resolution so high that it looked like a physical object. She ran swiftly, heeling over as she beam reached into an imaginary wind, sails puffed out like sheets in a wind tunnel. A flag flew from the top of the mainmast, a white skull and crossbones on a black background. As the ship bore down on her, Francine began to make out details, gilded scrollwork on the forecastle, the neat stitching around a patch on the forestay sail. Only the figurehead was indistinct. The underlying figure was female but the features were constantly shifting.

The galleon swept past her like a tilted wall of clinkered timber. Francine could see a crew swarming over the rigging, cartoon skeletons in striped jerseys and navy-blue bellbottoms. There was a sensation of falling, and sudden confusion in Francine's inner ear. The file surface was in motion, rippling in the galleon's wash-white pixel spray flying up around its bow. She realized that the image of the galleon was so
intense
that it was distorting the fabric of the datascape, dragging everything into its own reality.

A man appeared at the galleon's rail, wearing a felt hat and an afghan coat. He looked down at Francine and said something. It was a strange thing to do in the perpetual silence of the silicon sea. The man seemed to realize this, and held up his hand -
just a moment
- and produced a megaphone. Nothing technological, just a metal cone with a mouthpiece at one end.

'Ahoy there, software off the starboard rail!' he shouted and with his voice the silence broke. Sound rushed in, the creak of the galleon's rigging, the slap of water against its hull, the raucous cries of the circling updates and the long slow white noise of the sea itself. There was the feel of wind against her face and salt spray in her nostrils. Canvas cracked above her head and suddenly she rode a ship, a white schooner that cut through the swelling waves of data, keeping a parallel track with the galleon.

'Good, isn't it?' shouted the man at the rail.

'How's it done?' There was brilliant sunshine now; she could feel the warmth of it on her skin.

'That would be telling,' said the man. 'Are you the Angel Francine?'

'Yes.'

'Good, I have a message for you.' The man tossed a bottle down to her. The glass sparkled in the sunlight. There was a roll of parchment stuffed inside.

'Who are you?' shouted Francine but the man had vanished from the rail. There was a crash as the bottle smashed on the deck of the schooner, glass fragments shattering the unreal light.

Francine found herself back in the darkness of her room. The Braille printer beside her was chuntering hard copy on to the floor. There was a salty wetness on her cheeks.

She snatched up the first page of the hard copy and ran her finger along the top. There was a raised pattern in the centre, the printer's best guess at a company logo. There was a Braille translation underneath: 'IMOGEN - Wholly Confidential -Ubersoldaten - generation two.'

Twenty-one years before.

The Stop

'The light at the end of a tunnel,' said the Doctor, 'is often that of an oncoming train.'

They had penetrated perhaps six hundred metres into the tunnel and the ambient light from the station behind them had long become a tiny point in the distance. The Doctor had produced a small torch from his pocket. They needed it. Shafts bisected the tunnel at random intervals. The Doctor almost fell into the first one.

'What do you think it is?' he asked. Kadiatu didn't answer; she was trying to keep her grip on the Doctor's forearm. The fingertips of her right hand had found a shallow depression in the tunnel wall and she was trying to exploit it for leverage. Her kneecaps hurt from their impact on the floor and she was sure that the twisted position of her back wasn't doing her spine any good. Light flickered below her as the Doctor played his torch over the sides of the shaft.

'I think it's a maintenance conduit of some kind,' said the Doctor. 'I can see pipes and cables, that sort of thing. I can't see the bottom though. Hold on, I'll drop something.'

Kadiatu fought the slow progression of her fingertips out of their hold. If they slipped she'd pitch forward and she'd go head first down the shaft. There was a small sound from a long way below; metal hitting concrete.

'Were you counting?' asked the Doctor. 'I made it a hundred and thirty-two metres.'

A drop of sweat rolled off the bridge of Kadiatu's nose and into her left eye.

'You can pull me up now,' said the Doctor. 'I've finished down here.'

It wasn't easy, Kadiatu wasn't sure it was possible, but she found the strength from somewhere and hauled him up. It would have been simpler if the Doctor had used his free hand to help but he didn't want to let go of his umbrella.

'How do we get across?' asked Kadiatu.

'We jump,' said the Doctor. 'The exercise will do you good.'

They walked a few metres away from the edge.

'You go first,' said Kadiatu.

'As you like,' said the Doctor.

Kadiatu was sudddenly alone in the darkness. The torch bobbed along at waist level as the Doctor ran back towards the shaft. The soft slap of his shoes on concrete stopped, the torch flew through the air and then there was a scrape as the Doctor landed.

'Your turn,' he said.

Kadiatu figured the shaft couldn't be more than two metres across. She should be able to jump that. 'Right,' she said. 'I can do this.'

The Doctor pointed the torch at the edge of the shaft. 'Jump there,' he said.

Kadiatu took a couple more steps away from the edge, then a couple more.

'That's enough of a run-up,' said the Doctor.

The shaft was a square of darkness behind the patch of light thrown by the torch. The Doctor's eyes glittered in the scant reflected light. Two metres, easy.

The torch went out.

'Oh dear,' said the Doctor.

'What happened?'

'I'm fairly certain that it's the batteries.'

'What do we do now?'

'Have you moved since the lights went out?'

'No.'

'Then it's simple. When I say "run" you start running. I'll tell you when to jump.'

'What!'

'Ready when you are.'

'Can you see in the dark?'

'No.'

'So how are you going to know?'

'I have an excellent sense of spacial awareness.'

'Bollocks.'

'Did you say something?'

'No.'

'I'm going to count to three, all right?'

'No.'

'Run!'

The body started without her, took off through the darkness towards the Doctor's voice, her rope-soled Bajan pumps, three seventy-five from a stall in the plaza, getting good traction on the gritty concrete floor. Her eyes hurt from being held wide open for too long, useless in the total blackness. Her mind caught up with her body, snapped back into a total awareness of her physicality.

The Doctor must have shouted 'jump' because she sailed through the air and fell over on the other side. She rested on her hands and knees for a moment before standing up, the whole event fading nightmare-fast from her mind.

There was light again. The torch lit up the Doctor's face and threw his huge shadow across the wall behind.

'Perhaps it wasn't the batteries after all,' he said.

Kadiatu said nothing. She didn't want to talk about it, she didn't even want to think about it. When the Doctor started down the tunnel again, she followed him, silently.

There were four more shafts. One of them was off-centre, leaving a shelf wide enough for them to cross. They had to jump the other three. Kadiatu insisted on going fust each time.

Six hundred metres in they saw the light at the end of the tunnel. It wasn't an oncoming train; instead they stepped out into a large open space.