Part 37 (1/2)

Bernice watched through the window in the otherwise bare sentry room as the Skel'Ske Skel'Ske hung for a moment, stationary in mid-air. Its harlequin colours 234 hung for a moment, stationary in mid-air. Its harlequin colours 234and spiky, organic texture were out of place against the wet, grey surface of the towers. Her heart missed a beat as she thought that it might never drop, that Powerless Friendless had changed his mind and turned the engines on.

Finally, as if it had committed itself to a difficult decision, it dropped: slowly at first, but gathering an unstoppable speed, and she breathed again.

Bernice winced as the s.h.i.+p smashed straight through a section of walkway with two people on it. They didn't even seem to notice.

Behind her, Forrester and Cwej were browbeating the INITEC security guards. Beltempest was lending his considerable weight. The guards were trying to refer back to their superiors, but there seemed to be a vacancy at the top. n.o.body seemed to know what to do.

Bernice knew how they felt.

The s.h.i.+p started to tumble as its irregular vanes and spines caught the air.

It fell away like a leaf falling in the breeze. The rain-clouds swallowed it up within a few moments, and then it was as if nothing had happened. The towers and the slice of rose-tinted sky above were the same as they had always been.

The explosion, when it came, was distant and quiet. Quieter than Powerless Friendless And Scattered Through s.p.a.ce deserved. He should have had fireworks, symphonies and a vast cosmic thunderclap.

Bernice closed her eyes and leaned against the window. The surface was cool against her forehead. What was it about her that meant that her friends and acquaintances had to die? Homeless Forsaken and Powerless Friendless were only the most recent. Behind them, the queue stretched so far that she couldn't see its beginning.

On the other side of the window, the sky glowed with the distant fires.

Sixty seconds.

He pelted along the white, roundel-lined corridor that led away from the console room, ignoring the screams of pain from every limb, every muscle, skidding at the next junction and heading left past the boot cupboard, the rose garden and the swimming pool.

Fifty seconds.

A right and a sudden left led him through the library, past rows and rows of dust-covered tomes and a very surprised tabby cat.

Forty seconds.

To save time when he came to the spiral staircase in the centre of the library he slid down the bannister, hopping off two floors lower and limping as fast as he could across the echoing vault of the wine cellar.

Thirty seconds.

235.A broad white avenue led past paintings and statues from myriad worlds, myriad centuries, and terminated in a roundelled white wall which the Doctor flung himself against, panting, frantically searching for a small white b.u.t.ton.

Twenty seconds.

The wall slid open, and five steps took the Doctor across the TARDIS airlock a large room lined with hooks upon which quilted s.p.a.cesuits with clear helmets hung to the TARDIS's back door.

Ten seconds.

Emerging from behind the TARDIS, in the small gap between it and the wall of Vaughn's office, the Doctor discovered the butlerbot desperately attempting to collect the tea crockery with its plasma blade still lit.

Zero.

The room was shaking. Bernice had obviously come up with the goods, and the Doctor had to do the same. He used every last iota of his strength to wrench the arm holding the blade from its socket. The bot tried to resist, but he pushed it out of the way. It fell onto Vaughn's desk in a shower of broken crockery, cracking the translucent surface. Holding its arm like a spear in one hand, its blade of pure energy pointing straight ahead, the Doctor shoved his key into the TARDIS lock for the second time in five minutes and kicked the door open.

Tobias Vaughn stood at the console, his hand closed around the k.n.o.b of the door control. His head snapped around as the TARDIS doors opened.

'Make the most of that dramatic entrance, Doctor,' he said, 'because it will be your last. This machine is childishly simple to operate.'

The Doctor took three steps into the centre of the console room and swung the butlerbot's arm like an axe, turning the plasma blade into an arc of eye-numbing white that sliced through the air and Tobias Vaughn's neck with equal ease. Coolant fluid sprayed into the air as his head tumbled from his shoulders, trailing wires and jagged blue sparks. In the few seconds before it hit the floor, the expression on it changed from triumph to surprise, and then to utter fury. It bounced twice, then came to rest lying on one ear. Bereft of a power source, the metal muscles surrounding the mouth and eyes drooped.

Vaughn's body stood for a moment by the console, its hand still clutching at the door lever. Without Vaughn's mind to control it, sub-systems and failsafes came into effect. The stocky metal body carefully sat, cross-legged, on the floor of the TARDIS and placed its hands, palms up, on its knees.

The Doctor moved slowly across to the console. He felt old. Old and tired.

His hands moved to the twin nubs of the telepathic circuits. As they tingled beneath his palms he reached out with his mind, seeking the heart of the TARDIS.

236.There! She surged up to greet him, glad, as always, of his company but reproachful that he had not communed with her for so long. He soothed, he apologized, he explained. She understood, and gladly lent him her energy.

The lights in the console room dimmed as the pure artron energy flowed into the Doctor's body. He straightened up, feeling his pain, his tiredness and the dregs of despair that he had not been able to admit to having washed away.

'You were taking a bit of a risk, weren't you, Doctor?' he murmured to himself. 'a.s.suming that Vaughn kept his mind somewhere in his head. The logical place would have been in his chest, where he could protect it better.

Still: once a Cyberman, always a Cyberman, I suppose.' He bent down and picked Vaughn's head up. Striking a pose, he proclaimed, 'Alas, poor Tobias.

I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite . . . ' He grimaced sadly. 'A fellow of infinite arrogance, in point of fact.' He patted the console. 'Don't worry, old girl, I wouldn't have let him have you.'

The Doctor paused, as if listening.

'I don't know,' he admitted. 'I should dispose of him completely, I suppose, but . . . '

Another pause. The Doctor smiled and shook his head.

'No, I can't do that. I . . . I owe it to the memory of a man named Zebulon Pryce to keep Vaughn alive.'

He turned the head over and delved around inside the neck. His hand came away covered in coolant and lubricant fluid, but clutching a small crystal.

'Delight becomes death-longing if all longing else be vain,' he quoted softly, then slipped the crystal into his pocket, threw Vaughn's head away and walked towards the doors.

'Let's see how Bernice is getting on with that Hith s.h.i.+p,' he said, then paused in the doorway. 'And you'd better prepare two guest rooms,' he added. 'We may be playing host to a few more pa.s.sengers.'

The TARDIS seemed to make a soft, contented sound.

'Yes,' he agreed. 'It will be just like the old days.'

Bernice was still staring out of the window into the red darkness when she-realized that the Doctor was standing beside her. Behind him, Cwej and Forrester seemed to be arresting security guards wholesale.

'It's all falling apart,' she said dully.

The Doctor nodded. 'Entropy gets to us all, in the end,' he said. 'People and computers and empires. Nothing survives. Nothing goes on for ever.'

'Except for death and injustice,' she said without looking at him.

'But,' he added, 'we can rage against the dying of the light.'

She nodded towards the scarlet sky and the scattered fires outside.