Part 34 (1/2)

What would her father do?

Which one? The Doctor? John Dawkins? Whatever alien warlord it was that had butchered this man's people?

Her father... the Doctor... he'd try to talk the Deputy out of it. He'd use reason. Show him the error of his ways, do the unexpected. But the Deputy was a fanatic he'd travelled all this way, endured so much, simply to see her dead.

So she hesitated just for a moment, and the Deputy broke free, pushed her out of the way and levelled the gun at her.

The Doctor had been edging towards them. Now he stopped abruptly, the gravel of the driveway skittering.

'Too a.n.a.lytical,' she said quietly. 'Too much thinking.'

She was still doing it. Wondering what the bullet would feel like. It would kill her the Deputy would see to that but would It hurt? The bullet would be hot, she thought, a piece of metal travelling that fast would generate friction. That had never occurred to her when she'd seen bullets fired on The A-Team The A-Team. Would she be dead before her body hit the ground?

The Deputy smiled, knowing it was over.

The unexpected. It was her way out of this.

She screamed, the same scream she'd made when he'd bitten her. She leapt straight at him.

For an instant, the gun wasn't where he needed it to be. She shoved into his shoulder. She'd always been stronger than she looked. She had the advantage, but she knew she could lose it in a fraction of a second.

She grabbed his hand, squeezed it against the gun he was holding in it until she heard bones crack, but didn't let go, even when the gun was on the floor and the Deputy was crying out.

She put a leg on the ground between his legs and tripped him over, bent down for the pistol, brought it level with his head.

The Deputy's eyes were wide.

'Do it!' he spat.

'Don't do it, Miranda,' the Doctor shouted. 'He's beaten. Can you hear that? Sirens. The police are here.'

She could hear them. The new sirens, the American-style ones, not the old-fas.h.i.+oned waa-waa sirens. Her father was coming over.

'I'm not a killer,' she told the Deputy.

Her father was behind her, now. Debbie Castle was staying back.

'The Doctor has taught you well he's kept you from your nature. You're a monster. Your kind laid waste to the universe. You destroy worlds, you drain the life from whole galaxies. You can't escape who you are. Kill me. Kill me, or I'll kill you it's the only way this can end. Let me live and I'll hunt you down.'

She shot him, twice, in the chest.

The Doctor couldn't believe it. He tried to work out what had really happened. Miranda's hand had slipped, or the gun had gone off by itself.

But he knew.

'I had to do it,' she told him. 'He was right: this was the only way to end it.'

Not a hint of doubt in her voice. The same cruelty and cowardice that he'd heard from Zevron, Ferran and Sallak.

They could hear the police cars screeching to a halt. Shots had been fired, so the police would keep back for a minute or so while they a.s.sessed the situation. The Doctor had no idea where the nearest armed unit would be there almost certainly weren't any locally.

'Hand me the gun,' he told her, 'then go.'

'I'm willing to take the consequences,' his daughter told him.

'You won't have to,' he told her.

She handed him the gun. 'You lied to me. All this time, and you were lying to me.'

The gun was warm in the Doctor's hand. Miranda showed no remorse. She'd just killed someone, but didn't seem even slightly disturbed by that. 'The police haven't had time to get round to the back of the house. They'll be there in a minute, maybe less,' he said. 'Find your own destiny.'

She looked at him, fixed him with those blue eyes of hers. 'I love you,' she told him. 'You know that, don't you?'

He couldn't reply.

He watched her hurry away, through the house, stopping only to grab her coat from its hook in the hall.

'Police!' a megaphone voice shouted. 'Drop your weapon!'

The Doctor held his arms out, then tossed the gun over on to the lawn.

The Deputy was staring at him, defiant even in death.

'Let them in, would you, Debbie?' he asked.

Part Three

'Defenders of the Earth'

The Late 1980s

Chapter Twenty-one.

All Around the World.

A clear November night, a little cold, but the crowds out on the streets didn't care.

There were fireworks, now. Western camera crews at every vantage point. Men in bright jackets and designer jeans helping their countrymen up on to the Wall, or even through the gaps that had begun to emerge in it. They looked like lifeguards, pulling s.h.i.+pwrecked survivors out of the sea. There were men and women swarming across the abandoned checkpoints. The border guards and their guns had just melted away.

You could feel history changing around you, the Doctor thought. The Cold War that had defined history and humanity for half of even his lifetime was over. But the details were what made this special the people who had clearly dressed quickly to be here, the smiles, the fact that no one could quite believe what was happening and needed to be here to make sure it was true.