So Vile a Sin (29 page)

the girl anything he shouldn’t. Let him enjoy himself for the time being.

The Doctor sat next to Roz, drinking tea and eating fairy bread.

‘You know,’ said Roz, ‘we haven’t had a chance to talk in weeks.’

‘You’re right. It was exhausting, keeping one eye on Iaomnet… and the other on me.’

Roz shook her head. ‘We were totally taken in by Zatopek. I don’t understand how he could have impersonated you so completely.’

‘At first,’ said the Doctor, ‘he was me. He must have gradually regained control, with time, and distance from Iphigenia.’

‘OK,’ said Roz, ‘he was you. What was inside that moon, a Doctor-making machine?’

‘Now, there’s a frightening thought.’ He smiled. ‘Once upon a time… that’s a good way to start the story. Once upon a time, there were unicorns and bread-and-butterflies, planets like giant apples and suns like red balloons. But since no sentient life had yet evolved, there was no one to notice they were impossible, so no one minded. And then along came the Time Lords.’

‘The Time Lords were the first sentient beings?’

‘The first to evolve in this universe, yes,’ said the Doctor. He finished his tea and poured another cup. ‘Back then we were the Shadow people, caught between the warm dark of magick and the cold light of science. Magick predominated for a long, long time.

And then Rassilon made his decision.’

Roz had forgotten her tomato soup, listening. Don’t think of it like a sitrep, she thought, think of it as a fairy story.

‘The world solidified around us, like water turning to ice.

Squeezing out the magick. But, like an ice cube, there were little cracks and bubbles. Psi was the last magick to survive, perhaps because it was the least impossible, the closest to science. The residue of psi became a network of ley lines, stretching through the universe in improbable directions.

‘It’s still there.’

Roz said, ‘And Iphigenia is… on one of the ley lines?’

The Doctor nodded. ‘The Time Lords were aware of the ley lines before the Wars began. We’d chosen to make the universe 217

rational. Its irrational citizens objected. So we turned the psi lines into weapons. A Distant Early Warning line that stretched through the galaxy, studded with receivers the size of mountains or even small moons, parabolic dishes disguised as craters.

Listening for eruptions of psi power beyond Gallifrey.’

‘Iphigenia,’ said Roz.

‘Yes. A quarter of the moon is jammed with Time Lord technology, riddled with access tunnels. They just built a fake crater over the top, so the Vampires wouldn’t notice, and left it there.’

‘They must have realized someone would notice. There must have been hundreds of Martiniques through the millennia.’

‘Remember,’ said the Doctor, ‘back then there were no other intelligent races. None that mattered, anyway, as far as we were concerned. Just the Time Lords, and our enemies. The residual horrors of the universe before this one, and the Great Vampires, sucking dry every planet they could reach.’

‘So the expedition came into contact with the ley line,’ said Roz.

‘A primary source of unimaginable psi power. A well of magick,’ said the Doctor. ‘Where everything that’s possible is boiling under the surface of the universe. Zatopek is working for the Brotherhood.’

‘Ah.’

‘When I realized what we were faced with, I insisted we leave right away. Zatopek and Iaomnet were very, very insistent. I warned them about the fate of the previous expedition. Close contact with the Nexus simply drove most of them mad, left one of them sliding through different realities, and left an N-gram burning inside Mei Feng’s brain. They already knew what had happened. I should really have just let them wave their guns about and make threats, but I was curious… I should never have got so close to the thing.’

‘Chris’s dream aboard the Hopper,’ said Roz. ‘He said it was as though a great wave of psi power washed out from the centre of the planet.’

‘When I came into contact with the Nexus, it released every potential possibility of my existence. Well, almost all of them. If 218

I dust off some of the mathematical manuals in the TARDIS

library, I can probably do the calculations. In any case, all those probabilities were thrown loose, spraying loose into the galaxy.

Some of them found places to settle. Zatopek was very close. As I recall, he was holding a needier to my ear at the time.’

‘So he turned into you,’ said Roz.

‘Not quite,’ said the Doctor. ‘Me, with some tiny difference.

Some decision I didn’t make, some road I didn’t travel… maybe that Doctor just had something else for breakfast for that morning. In any case, Zatopek’s own psi talents allowed him to gradually emerge.’

It was all starting to make sense, in a nonsensical way. ‘That explains the you that contacted me on Fury,’ said Roz.

The Doctor nodded. ‘The distribution of probabilities is chaotic, but broadly, the further you get away from the Nexus, the more bizarre they become.’

‘One thing I don’t get – why blow up Cassandra, but not Iphigenia?’

‘All TARDISes have a self-destruct device,’ said the Doctor,

‘but the cosmic ley lines don’t have such a convenient facility.

Blowing up the planet would leave the Nexus quite unharmed.’

‘And the N-forms?’ prompted Roz.

‘Mines,’ said the Doctor. ‘They didn’t just detect psi. They actively attacked it. Anything that wasn’t Gallifreyan. But the Time Lords didn’t pick up their toys when they were finished with them. There are still a small number of N-forms, usually damaged and insane, left lying about the galaxy. The ones which didn’t want to stop killing were the hardest to find.’ He stirred his tea aggressively. ‘Typical Time Lord blunder. Create something ludicrously powerful and then forget all about it. Decide you’re going to be entirely rational, and then have a psychic war which lasts for millennia and decimates half the galaxy.’

Roz shook her head. ‘I can see why you don’t go home at Christmas.’

‘I’d chew their ear off, for one thing. Each time I go back,’ he said, lowering his voice, ‘I don’t expect to be allowed to leave again. So far I’ve been lucky.’

She nodded. ‘Leabie’s been asking me why I never visit.’

219

They gave one another a what-can-you-do look. Roz said,

‘Maybe you could have done more good by staying home.

Sorting them out. They sound like they need sorting out.’

‘Ten million years of tradition is a heavy weight to shift,’ said the Doctor. ‘They’re so content with watching, occasionally messing around a little bit in other people’s affairs, and ignoring everything they could be doing…’

‘Everything you’re trying to do.’

‘It’s a long shopping list,’ admitted the Doctor.

Roz looked across at Leabie, deep in conversation with Walid.

‘I can’t help but wonder…’

‘What things might have been like if you’d stayed home?’

She nodded. ‘Something’s going on here. Leabie’s not telling me about it, but you can see the web of power forming and reforming… Doctor, there’s going to be war.’

‘And you think you could have prevented that.’

‘Possibly,’ said Roz. ‘On the other hand, maybe I’d be the one running it.’

‘You’ve accomplished a lot since leaving,’ said the Doctor.

‘First as an Adjudicator, then with me. None of that work would have been done if you’d stayed here and tried to –’

‘– shift the weight?’

He nodded.

‘We’re getting old, Doctor,’ said Roz, with a wry smile. She waved at a waiter. ‘Two extremely large and strong drinks, please.’

Midnight.

There was movement in the palace. More than the nocturnal activities of the servants, answering late-night calls, performing maintenance. Movement in the shadows where the lights were blinking off, one by one, and the cameras were dying.

A dozen murders happened in the space of ten minutes. The security systems quietly crashed. A servant brought an initial report to Leabie in her boardroom, where she was still in conversation with the Duke. Chris snored. The Doctor and Roz were sitting in his room, talking politics, when the lights suddenly went out.

220

Thandiwe screamed as the door to her bedroom shattered into pieces. A man stood in the doorway, peering inside with a weird bobbing movement of his head that made her think of the sims of vultures in her moving picture books. Her throat seemed to lock right up as the head swayed from side to side and then fixed in her direction.

The man came forward, his eyes locking on her. Thandiwe realized she couldn’t make a sound. This was really happening.

A monster chewed through the roof of Somezi’s bedroom and ripped him open before he even woke up.

Another smashed down the door of Leabie’s boardroom.

‘Again!’ shouted Walid, pumping fifty rapid rounds from his personal plasma thrower into it.

Mantsebo tried to ward off the creature that had killed her bodyguard, snatching up the man’s laser weapon, but her aim was wide.

Security responded within minutes to contain the threat. But within minutes, a dozen Forresters had died.

Ostensibly Thandiwe’s Fat Monster Eater™ was the same mid-range cybernetic comforter – recommended ages one to four years – as twenty-three per cent of the Empire’s human population had owned as children.

Essentially it was a big floppy sphere slightly over a metre in diameter covered in short dirt-resistant fur. Its mouth had been designed using the latest kinderpsyche profiling to be large dough to give small children just the right frisson of fear when it opened all the way without scaring them witless.

Inside, the Fat Monster Eater was filled with a foam comprising billions of tiny bubbles a few millimetres across, each one containing its own heating element, actuator and pinbrain.

The actuators moved the bubbles around in concert to create facial expressions and interesting and playful lumps on its body; the heating elements varied the temperature within the bubbles to allow the Fat Monster Eater to achieve buoyancy at average room temperature and float around a child’s bedroom in an amusing fashion.

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Right now the Fat Monster Eater was not amusing. Right now its big saggy mouth was wrapped around the head and shoulders of the monster that had come to kill Thandiwe.

She was screaming and screaming, a tiny, shrill sound, scrunched up on her bed while she hit the emergency button over and over.

The distorted creature was struggling for its life, one arm caught inside the Fat Monster Eater’s maw, the other raking at its bulk with metallic claws. It turned from side to side, trying to shake the toy loose or smash it against a wall. But the Eater had no single brain, no organs to damage. It clung on to its victim like a factory-standard Fat Monster Eater oughtn’t to, slowly sucking more and more of the creature’s body inside its own.

Security had taken over a minute to respond, almost overwhelmed by the distorted creatures in the corridor outside.

They saw Thandiwe on her bed, still screaming. They saw the Fat Monster Eater engulf its victim to the knees, its body stretched as far as it would go, foam pouring from its wounds, its baggy shape slowly slackening.

Everyone around her had simply gone to pieces. Roz forced her feelings down into a tiny corner of her being and concentrated on what needed to be done.

There was nothing to do. Security was tight, the threat was over, there was a pile of monster corpses in the central compound. There was nothing to do but pick up the pieces, the pieces everyone had gone to. Stay cool, you’re needed.

She stood in the boardroom, where the surviving heads of security had gathered. They’d already rounded up every member of staff with a psi rating – six were left alive – and sent them home. Rumour had it they’d been shot, but Roz had watched them board a shuttle, bewildered and terrified.

Roz shifted her position slightly. She was holding Leabie, who was weeping uncontrollably, babbling in !Xhosa and tearing at Roz’s clothes.

Chris was in another room, bouncing Thandiwe on his knee, telling her silly jokes. No one had told her clearly what had happened yet, why her mummy was so upset or why a monster 222

had come into her room. She wanted another Fat Monster Eater.

Everyone promised her one. Chris had been pale as the proverbial ghost, somehow managing to smile at the little girl.

Gugwani had been completely out of control with grief and terror. Both of her bodyguards had been killed by a man with four arms ending in mouths. Reinforcements had arrived a moment before the biting started.

And the Doctor sat on the bench at the window of Leabie’s boardroom, head propped up in his hand, staring out at the surface of the moon. Completely still. Ignoring anyone who spoke to him. Of all of them, he was the one who worried Roz the most.

Duke Walid was standing nearby, looking as though he was desperate for something to do, someone to shoot. His clothes were torn, his dark hair in disarray, and Leabie’s personal physician was fussing over a deep gash in his arm. Security’s counterstrike had almost been a few seconds late for him. He’d saved Leabie’s life.

‘Who’s behind this?’ said the Duke, bewildered. ‘Who has the power to create these monsters out of innocent people?’

Roz looked at him pleadingly, and he walked up to her, taking Leabie from her grasp.
Thank you,
she mouthed.

‘I’ll see she’s put to bed safely,’ said the Duke. ‘Come along, Leabie. There’s nothing more we can do tonight.’ He gestured to the physician, and they helped the devastated woman out of the room.

Roz watched her go. It was as though the grief had reduced her to nothing, just a wailing woman like anyone in a crowd, anyone in a news sim.

Roz sat down next to the Doctor. He didn’t look at her. After a minute she realized he wasn’t blinking, his eyes fixed on the landscape. She didn’t know if he was even aware she was there.

It pissed her off. What the hell did he have to be shaken up about? He hadn’t known Somezi and Mantsebo as babies. It wasn’t his home the horror had invaded, his sister having hysterics in the next room.