Pirate Loop, The (14 page)

'But if you do?' asked Martha, her eyes wide in horror. She didn't know quite how a transmat worked but imagined him scrambled like the eggy material that still blocked the doorway.

'Oh, I'll pull together,' he said lightly. Before she could stop him he'd opened the door of the transmat, was inside and at the controls. 'Play nicely while I'm gone,' he said.

'But Doctor,' she said, tugging on the door which refused to open. 'I don't even know what you're going to do!'

'You know what?' said the Doctor. 'Neither do I.' He grinned. 'Ah well. Sure I'll think of something.' And with a pop he vanished from the booth.

It didn't hurt quite as much as he'd expected. Yes, it hurt a lot. And yes, a human being would never have survived. A transmat machine takes you apart and puts you back together again, but the whole thing is over so quickly you shouldn't even notice. This one had taken its time. The Doctor had felt himself being slowly reassembled, an agonising torture where there was not enough of him to scream. But as he emerged from the transmat booth into the dark, noisy engine rooms, he felt pretty much OK.

His legs buckled underneath him, and he fell face first onto the floor.

He struggled to get up again and found his limbs weren't quite responding. His arms and legs tingled with pins and needles, like they did when he regenerated. Perhaps that's what he'd done, his body responding automatically to being pulled apart. He struggled to reach a hand up to his face. His fingers prodded familiar skin, tight over prominent bones. He had the same thick hair and long, furry sideburns and, though his mouth tasted all peculiar, his teeth seemed to be the same shape they'd been before. So, he was still the same man for the moment. But it said a lot about what he'd just been through that he'd not been sure.

As feeling came back to him, he heard hesitant, shuffling footsteps. It took effort to sit up, but going slowly he managed it. A group of mouthless men in leather aprons and Bermuda shorts huddled a short distance from him, in the narrow alleyway between the huge, dark machines. One mouthless man gestured and pointed to the far end of the engine rooms. The Doctor looked, squinting to make sense of what he saw. A tall, skinny man in a fetching pinstriped suit was stepping into a wall of scrambled egg.

'Huh thuh,' said the Doctor, watching him vanish. He had meant to say, 'Is that really what my hair looks like from the back?'

He sat there, recovering and, after a while, the mouthless men brought him a mug of tea with a picture of a sheep on it. His hands shook as he held the mug, but with each sip he felt better and better. The engines around him filled his head with noise and his skin felt itchy with grime. Yet the dark and solid machinery seemed immaculate, the air rich with the stink of detergent; he just imagined the dirt.

'Thank you,' he said as the mouthless men helped him up on his feet. They let him walk unaided but kept close in case he fell. The Doctor made his way to the wall-mounted controls for the experimental drive. A small porthole let him look into the machine itself, and he gazed in on the eerie light. The light was just the same as that inside the TARDIS's central column. It swirled and murmured, restless and alive.

'OK,' said the Doctor, checking over the engine controls. He made a mental note of the readings and how they differed from those upstairs on the bridge. The trick was then to get the TARDIS to make up for the difference. That would, he hoped, break them from the loop. Adjusting dials and switching levers, he felt the old speed and dexterity returning to his fingers. His thoughts were starting to speed up, too.

He spun on his heel, surprising the mouthless men, and hurried down the alleyway between the large machines to where the TARDIS waited. It took a moment to find the key and then he was inside. As always, stepping over the threshold filled him with sudden ease. His head felt clearer, his body less sore.

The console still sparked and smoked from where the ship had crashed into the
Brilliant.
The Doctor hurried over, swatting away the smoke and working the various controls. Yes, he could see it clearly now. They'd crashed because the
Brilliant
sat just outside space and time. Like jumping onto a moving bus, only it turned out to be rushing towards you.

The gravitic anomaliser protested as he wound it round to eight. He keyed in the values of the
Brilliant's
two different Kodicek readings, and fired up the TARDIS's temporal shields. The idea was that he could give the
Brilliant
a nudge at the right angle and the starship's own systems would do the rest. He wouldn't even need to use the TARDIS's own reality-warping talents.

And then a thought struck him. A brilliant one.

He hurried round the console, pulling up the floor grating to expose the thick black cables coiling underneath. A bit of sonic screwdriver action, and he'd separated one of the connections. Bits of what might have been scrambled egg dripped from the open ends of cable.

He hurried back out of the TARDIS, bringing the cable so that it spooled out behind him, still connected at one end to the machinery of the TARDIS. It took a bit of negotiating the cable through the alleyway between the
Brilliant's
huge and noisy engines, like getting the flex from a vacuum cleaner to fit round chairs and tables. But he reached the controls of the experimental drives, and then just had to find something that he might connect the cable to. The control desk of the experimental drive had input ports, but none quite fitted.

'Ah,' said the Doctor. 'Should have thought of that.'

He looked quickly all around for something that might help, but he knew there was little he could do. And then one of the mouthless men came forward with what looked like a squeezy bottle of ketchup. The Doctor tried plugging the TARDIS cable into each of the different ports, and once he'd identified the best fit the mouthless man sealed it in with the jelly-like sealant that oozed from the squeezy bottle. It was the same fast-acting, impossibly strong stuff that had sealed the hole in the side of the ship when Archibald's capsule had torn through it.

'Well done you,' said the Doctor to the mouthless man as he tested the join was secure. In fact, the join was stronger than the cable was itself. The Doctor hurried back to the TARDIS.

A group of mouthless men huddled at the doorway, peering into the huge interior but not daring to venture any further.

'Well?' said the Doctor. 'Aren't you going to say how it's bigger on the inside?' The mouthless men turned to look at him. 'No, I guess not,' he said. 'Look, you can ride with me but it's going to be bumpy. Or you can stay here, which will probably be the same. Your choice.'

It was a little disappointing, but none of the mouthless men would come with him. He shrugged, ducked between them into the TARDIS and dashed over to the controls. The mouthless men watched him from the open doorway, the thick black cable snaking between their legs back to the controls of the experimental drive. He could see them wanting to ask him what he had just done. 'I've bolted your ship to mine,' he said. 'And now I can run your systems from here. But my ship can also compensate for some of the loopy stuff happening. So I might even be able to control aspects of the loop itself. And then we're laughing. Ha ha!'

The mouthless men nodded, though not as keenly as he'd have liked. Still, there was little he could do about that now.

'You probably want to stand back a bit,' he told them. They retreated in fear as he worked the controls in front of him. It had been a while since he'd last tried to take off with the doors still open, he thought. Probably because it was such a dangerous thing to do. Dangerous and reckless. Dangerous and reckless and irresponsible. Just his thing, really.

He released the TARDIS handbrake.

With the familiar low rasping, grating from deep within its own strange engines, the TARDIS began to warp the material of space-time around it. The Doctor stood resolute at the controls as what might have been a tornado tore through the open doors and sent papers, sweets and his 1966 Martin Rowlands trimphone whirling all around him. Where before the open TARDIS doors had looked out into the engine rooms, the way was now blocked by a wall of pulsing, straining scrambled egg. The tornado whirled ever faster round and round him, howling and shrieking in time to the noise of the TARDIS's engines.

And then it was suddenly over, the sweets and paper and designer telephone crashing to the floor.

'Said it was easy,' said the Doctor, though only to himself. And he bounded through the open, eggless TARDIS doors and back into the Brilliant's engine rooms. 'Oh,' he said, stopping suddenly. 'I don't think that's quite right.'

Outside, the engine rooms lay silent. The huge machinery stood perfectly still. There was no one about.

'Hello?' called the Doctor. No one responded. 'I know you can't speak,' he called out. 'But maybe you could hit something, make some kind of noise.'

Again there was nothing but silence.

Moving slowly, warily, the Doctor followed the thick black cable from the TARDIS as it wended along the alleyway between the still machines. The cut-off end of the cable lay on the floor in front of where the controls for the experimental drive had been. It had been cut off with a knife.

'Ah,' said the Doctor. 'That shouldn't have happened.'

He examined the empty space, and it was clear the experimental drive had been torn from the housing in which it had been secured. For a moment, he wondered if perhaps realigning the
Brilliant
had made the drive implode, which would be quite a neat solution to everything. But in his hearts he knew that that couldn't have been what had happened.

The walls of the engine room were a mishmash of car-sized patches of red-jelly sealant. The Doctor could see that at least six or seven pirate capsules had torn their way aboard the ship and then torn their way off again. Any of the mouthless men who'd been in the engine rooms when the pirate ships tore through the hull would have been quickly sucked out into space.

'Ah,' said the Doctor. 'I must be running late again.'

Desperate to find out what had happened to Martha, he grabbed the cut-off end of the cable, and quickly gathered it back up into the TARDIS. He'd repair the link later, when he knew Martha was OK. Locking the door of the TARDIS, he made for the transmat booth. With the ship realigned it should be working properly once again.

He keyed the controls and nothing happened. Annoyed, he checked over the transmat systems. The booth he was in seemed to be in good working order, but it couldn't reach the booth upstairs.

A chill ran through the Doctor.

He dashed down the alleyway between the huge machines, to the door that he'd only ever seen before blocked by scrambled egg. There was no egg now, and he ran out into the plush-carpeted passageway. The wood-panelled walls were patched with more car-sized holes where pirate capsules had punched through.

He ran left, left again and then right, and took the stairs three at a time. Halfway up the staircase to the ballroom, he saw the first dead body.

A blue Balumin man lay sprawled at the top of the stairs, a terrible, blank expression on his face. Further into the ballroom lay two more blackened bodies.

The Doctor made his way into the cocktail lounge, expecting to see more dead. But the cocktail lounge was empty, the whole bay window that looked out onto the Ogidi Galaxy now a great long patch of jelly sealant. Most of the Balumin would have died in space, the pirates had shot the rest.

Upstairs, the walls were likewise patched with red jelly sealant. The Doctor made his way along the crew's small quarters and through to the door to the bridge. There was no wall of scrambled egg blocking his way, and he stepped through quickly. The horseshoe of computers had been smashed apart. And in the gap lay the dead body of Captain Georgina Wet-Eleven of the Second Mid Dynasty.

There were a few other corpses around, but there was nothing to be done for them now. Instead, the Doctor moved quickly past them to examine the sparking remains of the computers, but they could tell him nothing. He had no idea how long it had been since the loop had come apart, nor where the pirate ship had got to now. He had lost Martha to them again. But, as he'd promised himself before, he would do whatever it took to find her.

He rummaged in the pockets of his suit jacket for a bit of paper and a pen, and almost cut himself on the dagger he'd confiscated from the unconscious Dashiel all that time ago. When they'd still been enemies and people couldn't die.

'Doctor?'

He spun round on the heel of his trainer. The egg-shaped, orange and tentacled Mrs Wingsworth stood in the doorway of the bridge. She no longer had any of her extravagant jewellery and her flimsy dress had been spattered with muck and blood.

'Hi,' said the Doctor.