So Vile a Sin (39 page)

They turned as one to gesture at the Nexus.
This way, the
human race will have been telepathic from the beginning. We are
the lens that focuses the signal. You will help us modulate the
signal, control the change. The liberation will occur. The aeons
of silence will be ended.

Chris looked at the Nexus. Something was moving in there. It made his brain itch to look at it.

We need your help, Doctor.

The Doctor took a breath and said, ‘Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.’

‘If they threaten me or anything,’ said Chris, ‘don’t help them.’

He would not,
said the Grandmaster.
We know this is too
important a change for Time’s Champion to allow. Even to save
the life of his steward.

The light from the Nexus was making it hard to think. He was sure he could see something inside it, something that
struggled
. ‘I don’t understand,’ said Chris.

Ripples of laughter moved through the Grandmaster. Giggles coming from interconnected throats in some hidden geometric pattern.

It’s always been about you, Doctor.

‘Why? Why has it been about me?’

294

When the N-form attacked Earth, a millennium ago, it changed
the Brotherhood for ever. We might all have been destroyed by
that horror, from full psis to those with single recessive genes.

And we knew that we would face you, as we had faced you, again
and again and again.

‘I just stumbled across you,’ said the Doctor. ‘It wasn’t intentional.’

We could not merely be a meeting place for the Gifted. We
must gain power, protect ourselves. And later, the mission came.

The liberation.

‘GRUMPY was part of that process, wasn’t he?’ said the Doctor. ‘You were trying to learn how to make people telepathic.

Make them like you. Make them just like you.’

A good example of your interference in our plans.

‘Look at it from my point of view,’ said the Doctor. ‘You’re paranoid – you think I’ve been chasing you. Trying to expose you. But our paths have crossed at random. I’ve never sought you out.’ His shoulders fell. ‘We didn’t have to be enemies.’

And now?

‘Now I’ll do whatever I can to stop this insane plan of yours.’

Join us,
they told him.

Chris felt the Doctor tense. ‘If you do have a plan, Doctor,’ he whispered, ‘now would be a good time.’

The Grandmaster fixed their eyes on the Time Lord.

Who are you, Doctor?
they asked.

The Doctor cried out. Chris caught him as he lost his balance, arms thrown up in front of his face.

You’ve always been the one to change whatever needed
changing. Join us.

‘I can’t block them!’ shouted the Doctor.

You’ve always been lonely. So lonely. Join us.

‘They’re getting in! Stop, I can’t stop it!’

Chris held him. Maybe he could do something once they’d sucked him into the gestalt. Maybe he’d think of something at the last minute.

He looked at the Nexus. It was shining brighter and brighter, as though sensing what was going on around it.

295

‘This can’t be it,’ shrieked the Doctor. ‘This can’t be how the story ended!’

Saturn orbit, 28 August 2982

Vincenzi came out of deep sleep an hour before their objective.

He’d set the timer for eight hours and a gentle wake-up. Instead, someone had snapped off the current. It was like being woken up with a faceful of nettles.

Vincenzi kept his eyes closed for a moment, making up his mind how to kill the soldier who’d just interrupted his rest.

When he opened them, there was a colonel looking down at him with an evil smile.

Vincenzi swallowed a rude word and leapt out of the sleeper in his singlet and shorts. ‘Ma’am!’ He saluted.

‘At ease, Lieutenant,’ she said, amused. She looked up and down the row of sleeping soldiers, resting as fast as they could after the engagements on Mars. ‘Get your togs on. I want a briefing.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Vincenzi, reaching for his uniform. ‘Erm, weren’t you one of the prisoners we picked up in the Agamemnon system?’

‘Secret mission, Lieutenant.’

‘Of course, ma’am. With all due respect, ma’am,’ he said, tugging on his uniform, ‘where the hell did you come from?’

‘I rendezvoused with the
Victoria
twenty minutes ago,’ she said. The patch on her chest said FORRESTER. Vincenzi had an awful feeling that meant as in
the
Forrester, as in the Lady herself, as in the Boss.

‘I’m your new commanding officer,’ she said.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Vincenzi.

Up on the bridge, Captain Sokolovsky was frozen in his chair, pink eyes fixed on the monitors. ‘As you were,’ Colonel Forrester told the bridge as she led Vincenzi in.

The colonel displaced a TechOp from their console and sat down, bringing up a schematic of their objective. The Emperor’s personal palace on Callisto.

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‘You’re going to have to talk me through this, Lieutenant,’ she said. ‘I’ll be coming with you.’

Vincenzi found a spare chair and sat down next to her. He could see the resemblance to their glorious leader, although this woman looked older – not so much older, just more worn, he thought. A good kind of worn, like she’d done a hell of a lot of work. ‘Can I ask what military experience the colonel has had?’

he asked, without a trace of irony.

‘I was an Adjudicator for twenty-three years,’ she said. ‘Mostly hand-to-hand stuff, some small-scale engagements. I’ve been in a few battles since then.’

‘Merc?’

‘Freelance. Under all sorts of circumstances. I can handle small arms as well as any grunt.’

‘That might not be so bad,’ said Vincenzi. ‘That’s pretty much what’s required. No heroic tendencies?’

‘None whatsoever,’ said the colonel, with another smile. ‘OK, what’re we going to do about Walid?’

‘His last known location was inside the palace on Callisto,’

said Vincenzi. ‘There was an official message to the Empire at oh eight hundred IST today, although it might have been recorded.’

His fingers moved over the touchscreen, bringing up graphics of the surface. ‘The entire crater of Valhalla is under a huge dome, six hundred klicks wide. Most of the defences will be just outside the dome, on the crater rim.’

‘So we have to get through them,’ she said. ‘If we want to take the palace, and not simply destroy it.’

‘There’s a civilian population.’ Vincenzi nodded. ‘Twenty thousand. A lot of skilled people. Any serious damage to the dome, and they’re all dead.’

‘So there’s no way around it,’ said the colonel. ‘We have to fight our way up there.’

‘And without the benefit of covering mortar fire,’ said Vincenzi. ‘One badly aimed shell, and we’ll puncture the dome.’

Colonel Forrester sat back in her seat, thinking. ‘Our advantage is going to be numbers,’ she said.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Vincenzi. ‘They can’t kill all of us.’

297

‘I don’t want you or anyone else thinking of this as a suicide mission,’ she said firmly. ‘It’s a particularly difficult job that needs doing.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Vincenzi, and he meant it.

‘Sokolovsky,’ said the colonel. ‘Report.’

The captain looked over to them. ‘Trouble,' he said. 'Walid’s panicking, I think. He’s pulled the
T’ai Tsung
out of the action at Phobos, and they’re heading back to Callisto.’

‘That’s crazy,’ said Vincenzi. ‘He doesn’t need two ships to defend that little moon.’

Sokolovsky shook his head. ‘He’s panicking,’ he said again.

‘He’s abandoned Mars altogether.’

‘This is it, then,’ said Forrester. The last objective.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Vincenzi.

She blew out a breath. ‘Nearly missed the damn war,’ she said.

Mimas

The Nexus flared. The light filled the room for a moment, leaving a searing afterimage on Chris’s eyeballs..

‘Look,’ he told the Doctor.

Something was trying to get out of the Nexus. The shimmering light stretched and grew as whatever it was fought to get loose.

As one, the Grandmaster turned to look at it.

The Doctor pulled loose from Chris and ran forward, through them.

A hand reached out of the tear in the air. Another hand appeared, battling loose of the light.

The Doctor reached out and caught them and
pulled
. It was
him
, emerging head and shoulders from the Nexus. The Doctor on the outside roared and pulled the other one free.

The Nexus burst open like an overripe melon.

Callisto

Two of the DropShips died on the way to Callisto’s surface.

Roz could still see the afterimage of the explosions as she climbed out of the vehicle, safely wrapped in her lightweight combat suit.

298

She’d wondered why the others were all staring at the floor, instead of out of the windows. She’d assumed it was to avoid nausea, though it wasn’t bothering her. It wasn’t until she’d seen one of the other ships burst apart in a hail of fire that she’d got the idea.

‘Get clear of the vehicles!’ Vincenzi was shouting. ‘Well clear, well clear! Do not assemble!’

They’d rehearsed this, but he wasn’t giving anyone the chance to screw up. She ran, following him, taking long, loping strides in the low gravity, trying hard not to stumble. The Ogrons were having a hard time, clumsy, but determined. The long-legged soldier making graceful, easy leaps must be a Lacaillan.

The surface was rough, pockmarked with thousands of craters, huge and small. Even without the dome, Valhalla Crater would have been unmissable, the only feature from horizon to horizon.

They’d run a klick across the flat, rough plain when the first of the DropShips exploded. ‘Hit the deck!’ screamed Vincenzi. His voice echoed inside her helmet and right through her skull. She was hugging rock with everyone else before she had time to think about it.

She rolled over on the dark ice, looked up at the sky. The
Victoria
and the
T’ai Tsung
looked as big as her hand. She could see the fire they were exchanging, cutters buzzing back and forth like fireflies, flaring and dying. The
Ojibwa
was even lower in the sky, ignoring the
Victoria
. It was much more interested in them.

Shrapnel spun over head in lazy patterns. Vincenzi waited for the big pieces to settle and yelled, ‘Move on! Move on!’

They leapt up and ran like hell. There was an hour’s worth of running to do before they got to the rim. Sixty minutes, any of them could see you dead. The dome was like Paradise beyond it, you could see the blue sky and the greenery inside it.

The first strafing run came twenty minutes later. ‘Eat dirt!’ she screamed as the proximity detector on her back came on, even before Vincenzi could yell out the order.

A cutter flew in low, its targets tiny specks among the rocks. It waved X-ray lasers over them in random patterns. Roz heard 299

screams as the beam crossed legs and arms, unprotected outside the laser-reflective tunics and helmets.

She tongued a radio control and shouted at Vincenzi,

‘Shouldn’t we run?’

‘Its computer targets movement,’ he hissed back. ‘We’d all be dead if we were moving. Hold on.’

There was a sudden pressure and heat on her back. She rolled into the shadow of a tilted rock, instinctively, her arms coming up to protect her face.

The cutter was gone, pieces of the ship raining down maybe a klick ahead of them. She saw one of their ships pulling into a steep climb.

‘Up! Up!’ Vincenzi was screaming. ‘Leave the wounded – the cutter will come back and pick them up. Who’ve we lost?’

‘Me, sir,’ came the voices, weak. One just screamed and screamed.

‘That’s six,’ Vincenzi told Roz, as they kept running.

‘Is that bad?’

‘We were lucky,’ he said. ‘If our cutters can stay in position, we won’t have to worry about any more of theirs. All we’ll have to worry about are the Rim defences.’

‘Oh great,’ said Roz.

Mimas

In a human life, there are an enormous number of possibilities that didn’t happen, paths not taken. Theoretically, that number is infinite. Practically, the number is finite, though enormous. Some possibilities, such as spontaneously turning into a fish, are so unlikely as to have a negligible probability.

Take that number, and multiply it by seven lives and an uncountable number of times and places.

Chris didn’t bother to try to protect himself. He let the lives strike him, slide over him, fly away.

One of the – the other Doctors had picked up the glass he needed for his reticular vector gauge at a market on Heaven, and had never visited Androzani. One had ruled the Earth with a tyrant’s hand for centuries, posters of his face everywhere. One 300

was worshipped as a god on Lalande 21185, and had to settle there to stop the incessant religious wars.

The dead ones were the worst. They sought out the Grandmaster like Valkyries. One had stuck to his principles and had his throat cut by a hungry alien. One had had his brain fried by a computer, substituting for a dead synch-op. One had been beheaded by an Ice Warrior, a hideous moment of blood and bone before it vanished, embracing a small dark woman. A champagne glass dropped out of her hand and broke apart on the floor.

Chris concentrated on the sound.

Twenty deaths out of thousands.

Crack clink crack.

Hundreds of happy endings.

One had gone home to Gallifrey and was organizing the first bloodless revolution in Time Lord history. One lived in another dimension and visited Earth from time to time, sparking rumours that King Arthur was about to return. One had been stranded in the Eocene era and was happily tinkering in an Earth Reptile laboratory. One was alive and well and living in San Francisco with his wife.