So Vile a Sin (14 page)

‘Just routine,’ muttered Iaomnet. ‘Keep an eye on some academics. Just routine.’

The Doctor was beginning to get heavy, even with Iphigenia’s 0.09 gravity. She wished she could remember 104

how far they had walked on the way in. Were they even in the same corridor? And if they made it to the surface – what then?

The suit recycling packs were good for another sixty hours – at a pinch it could utilize everything from her sweat to her urine to keep her breathing. But it was going to get damned uncomfortable.

If Chris and the Hopper were gone then the only option would be the emergency stasis button and the screamer beacon that said,

‘I’m dead, come rescue me.’ Given that Agamemnon was a rim system and a war zone, that gave a statistical survival probability of sixteen per cent.

Her instructors at Loki had been big on statistics.

And mission priorities. Whatever it was that resided in the central chamber, it was truly alien and powerful in a way that she couldn’t understand. And if Martinique was right, there were thousands just like it, scattered throughout the Empire and beyond.

Which made getting the Doctor back a mission priority. Never mind that the Doctor wasn’t making a whole lot of sense.

‘Balderdash, my dear Professor Blinovitch,’ said the Doctor.

‘I’ve met myself dozens of times and I haven’t exploded yet.’

Walk for two hours, thought Iaomnet, then rest for ten minutes, then walk for another two hours. It was important to get into a routine early, that way, with any luck, your body might keep going when anoxia started closing down your brain cells.

‘Beware the memories of the compassionate tent,’ said the Doctor. ‘I’ll have your eyes for that.’

A little over an hour later they reached the first intersection, a hemispheric chamber with the same featureless corridors leading off in six directions.

‘Is it time already?’ said the Doctor. ‘No, go back to sleep – it’s nowhere near time yet.’

Iaomnet dropped him and slumped down against the wall. It didn’t make much difference in the low gravity but it made her feel as if she was resting.

‘Just because you’re paranoid,’ said the Doctor, ‘doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.’

Now that made sense. ‘Doctor?’

105

‘Aspidistra baby!’

She put her faceplate close to his and snapped her head back, when she realized his eyes were focused on hers. ‘Are you feeling better?’

‘Better is a relative term,’ said the Doctor. ‘Better than what?’

‘Better than you were?’

‘How was I?’

‘You were unconscious, talking nonsense, rambling.’

‘Of course I was rambling,’ said the Doctor testily. ‘It’s not easy putting your mind back together after it’s been systematically scrambled by a probability intercession. I’d like to see you do it.’ The Doctor looked around, his movements comically exaggerated by the bulk of his HE suit. ‘Where’s Chris?’

‘We left him on the Hopper – remember?’

‘Of course I remember,’ said the Doctor. ‘I also distinctly remember his being torn to bits by an N-form in Northern England.’ He paused. ‘Or was that me? Got any dice? I need to test my luck.’ The Doctor got to his feet, too fast for the low gravity, and put his gloved hand on Iaomnet’s shoulder to steady himself. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I need you to do something for me.’

‘What?’

‘I need you to pretend that you’re my friend. That we have a history together.’

‘Doctor, you’re not making any sense,’ said Iaomnet. ‘What the hell is going on?’

He beamed at her. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘You’re getting the hang of it already. You see, I need someone linear to keep it all together.

It’s very important. The whole thing could collapse.’

‘What whole thing?’

‘The universe, or at least the important bits.’

‘The important bits?’

‘The bit we’re in, for example.’

‘Stop it.’

‘Didn’t we have fun at Bernice’s wedding? I thought Da Vinci’s cake was the high point of the reception, didn’t you? At least try to agree with me, it’s terribly important. If you can’t answer, nod your head.’

106

Iaomnet nodded her head.

‘Trust me,’ said the Doctor. ‘There’s madness in my method.

And now we have to get going.’ He pointed down one of the corridors. ‘This way I think.’

Iaomnet blinked. They had stopped.

‘How long have I just been standing here?’ she asked the Doctor.

‘About five minutes,’ he said. He was leaning against the wall of the chamber, a six-sided room. There were bits of scored metal embedded in the dark stuff of the floor, as though some kind of machinery had been ripped free, long ago. ‘You’re all right, it’s just that your brain switched off and let your legs get on with it.

Einstein said you only needed the spine for marching.’

‘Where are we? Do you – do you know where we’re going?’

‘We’re somewhere close to the surface. Don’t give up hope.’

‘They’ve gone. They’ve left us here. They think we’re dead, and even if they didn’t, after that, after that happened, who’d stay here? You’d leave as fast as you could.’

Iaomnet sat down on the floor, cross-legged. After a moment, the Doctor came up and stood over her.

‘What did you see?’ he said.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Come on, Iaomnet. You’re an operative, a trained observer.

You must have seen something.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Never mind that. Tell me what you saw in there.’

‘Zatopek had a gun,’ she said. ‘And he said we were going on no matter what you said, and…’ Iaomnet shook her head. She had a weird urge to curl up in a ball, a bulky, awkward ball with fat arms and legs and a head shaped like an, er, ball. ‘Oh God,’

she said. ‘I’m not making sense.’

The Doctor put his faceplate close to hers. His eyebrows were drawn together in a worried frown. ‘Never mind,’ he said.

‘Are we going to get out of here?’ she said.

The Doctor paused. ‘Do you feel that?’ he said.

Iaomnet said, ‘No.’ The Doctor knelt, took her gloved hand, and pressed it, palm down, against the floor.

107

She felt the distant vibration. ‘What is it?’ she said. Almost.

Almost but not quite remembering. Remembering the machinery in the central chamber, the way it. Moved. ‘Oh God.’ She snatched her hand away from the floor.

‘It’s our rescue ship landing,’ said the Doctor. ‘Unless I’m very much mistaken.’ She looked up at him. ‘Are you ready for one last stint of walking?’

‘Yes!’ She bounced to her feet. ‘They’ll go without us. We have to move –
now
!’

Roz was already pulling on her suit as the ISN
Wilfred Owen
, Sassoon Class, touched down on the ugly surface of Iphigenia. It was a state-of-the-art All Hostile Environments Garment, skin-tight, elastic and light as a feather, the helmet made of the same stuff as the bodysuit but turned hard and transparent. It was more comfortable than her street clothes.

She felt the big engines shut down, the tremble in the walls quietening, a feeling of weight as the rock gave slightly beneath the shuttle. The two troopers with her, wearing their own AHEGs, waited patiently.

A few moments later, Captain Sekeris’s voice came through the suit radio. ‘All right, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Go ahead when you’re ready.’ The poor man had been acting like a servant ever since she’d managed to convince him she was on a secret mission for the Empress. A real Forrester, right there on his ship, probably working for one of the intelligence agencies to boot. He was young for a captain, eager to do the right thing.

The troopers followed her out of the airlock, a ramp unfolding to take them down to the rocky surface. Each of them carried heavy sensor equipment, the output appearing on a palmtop Roz carried on a strap over her shoulder. ‘Still nothing on the ship’s sensors, ma’am,’ Sekeris told her.

‘Stand by,’ she said. ‘We’ll spread out and search the area between the ship and the mountain.’

‘What if they went… inside, ma’am?’

‘I want to avoid entering the mountain if at all possible. We don’t know how deep those structures go. All right, let’s go.’

108

The troopers started walking, one to the right, one to the left.

Roz blew out a sigh and headed for the mountain.

She seriously did not want to go inside. They’d seen the structures half buried in the mountain on their approach, and she had no doubt that it was the real goal of Martinique’s expedition.

But whatever was in there had screwed up reality to the point where there were Goddess knew how many extra Doctors walking about, appearing like sad ghosts in a Chinese fairy tale.

Another one had appeared to her in her cabin en route, furiously scribbling coordinates on the wall with a stick of crayon. A short guy in an oversized dark suit. ‘Don’t tell the Time Lords I was here,’ he insisted. ‘I keep to myself, one step ahead of them. But only one step.’ Then he’d vanished.

At least out here it was just rocks and empty space. You knew where you were with rocks and empty space.

The scream nearly burst her eardrum. ‘– sake, wait! Don’t leave without us! Don’t go! Can you hear us?’

‘Shut the cruk
up
!’ Roz yelled into her suit mike. ‘Turn your bloody gain down!’

‘Roz, can you hear me?’

‘Doctor!’ She tried not to sound as delighted as she was. And damn, he’d used her name. Now they knew he knew her. ‘What’s the sitrep?’

‘What are you doing here?’ he said.

‘Oh, thanks. I came to rescue you.’

‘But I thought you were living in Hampstead.’

‘What?’

‘With George.’

Roz felt something cold worm its way down her back. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ she said.

‘We’ve just this moment got out of the mountain complex. It’s just me and Iaomnet Wszola – we think the others left us for dead. We’re tired, but unhurt.’

‘Oh yeah, you sound just fine.’

‘Oh Jesus, oh Jesus, oh Jesus,’ Iaomnet was whispering.

‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’

‘I’m afraid Iaomnet is understandably upset.’

‘Stay put. We’ll come up and get you.’

109

‘Roz –’

‘Captain Sekeris, are you getting all of this?’ said Roz quickly.

‘Yes, ma’am. We’ve got the medical team on standby for your return.’

‘We’ll talk soon,’ said Roz. Will we ever? ‘Save your strength for now.’

The medical team took one look at Iaomnet and tranquillized her. It was mostly exhaustion, the nurses said, as much from fear as from the marathon walk to escape the mountain. They put her to bed in sickbay, over her feeble protests.

The Doctor took one look at the medical team and they left him the hell alone. He looked distinctly unsteady to Roz, sitting on a bed in sickbay with his head tipped back against the wall. He looked thinner, not as though he’d lost weight, more as though he’d somehow lost
substance
.

She went into the sickbay, and he snapped back in an instant.

‘Roz,’ he said. ‘We have to get to Cassandra.’

‘Is that where Chris is heading?’ asked Roz.

‘Yes,’ said the Doctor. ‘Possibly, it doesn’t matter – we have to go there.’

‘No problem. Sekeris is waiting for my instructions. But we’ll be flying through a war zone without authorization. I’ll have to come up with a good story.’ He didn’t answer, his head tilted and his eyes half closed, as though he was listening to something far away. ‘A
very
good story, Doctor.’

‘Tell him civilization as we know it is in danger.’

‘Is that true?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Tell him whatever you like.’

‘Doctor,’ she said, ‘what was that about my being married to George Reed? Because if it was a joke it wasn’t bloody funny.’

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m still remembering a lot of timelines. It’s hard to sort them out. I wasn’t expecting you. I thought I’d left you behind in 1941. Or that you were killed by yourself in Woodwicke. Or that you were the head of the Order of Adjudicators.’

‘How many timelines do you remember?’

110

He thought about it. ‘About fifty,’ he said. ‘That’s not so bad. I started with two thousand and three.’

‘Hold it right there.’

They both looked up. Iaomnet stood in the doorway, wielding a hypospray filled with something unpleasant and purple.

‘I don’t know what you two are up to,’ she said, slowly and carefully around the sedative, ‘but it’s going to stop right now.

I’m taking you both into custody. So don’t mess with me.’

‘I wouldn’t do that if I was you,’ said Roz. ‘I told the crew that you were under suspicion of being a subversive oggielover, possibly even a terrorist. Now, you could run to them and tell them who you really are. But who knows how they’d react?’

‘Cassandra,’ said the Doctor in a voice that startled both of them. ‘Now!’

The
Wilfred Owen
tore through the Agamemnon system as fast as its little engines would carry it. Sekeris stayed on the shuttle’s bridge through three consecutive watches, almost scowling with seriousness. Civilization as he knew it was at stake.

Roz caught a few hours’ sleep and ate most of a rations pack.

The Doctor stayed in one of the scanner rooms, displacing a series of rostered techies, who hovered nervously outside the door. Roz gave the latest one a salute as she squeezed into the room behind the Doctor’s seat. He was watching six screens, apparently simultaneously.

‘How’s our Imperial Intelligence Agent?’ he said.

‘Sulking in her room.’ In the end Roz had taken the hypospray away, and had Iaomnet confined to quarters. ‘I think she’s a spent force.’ The double-eye had that ‘I’ve Seen Too Much, Gibber Gibber’ look that people around the Doctor sometimes got. Roz suspected she’d had that look herself, once or twice. ‘How are your timelines?’

‘Down to seven that I can clearly remember. You’re alive and with me in four of them. The rest are all blurry, like afterimages.

Look,’ said the Doctor.

‘Where?’

He tapped one of the screens. Roz looked where he was pointing, a computer-enhanced sphere labelled Orestes. One of 111