The Well-Mannered War Part 18

Seskwa turned to Jafrid. 'General. This human is lying. His presence here is a deliberate ploy, an attempt to distract and confuse us. The humans mean to take us off our guard.'

The Doctor grimaced. 'For the hundredth time I'm not human. Not even remotely. In fact, biologically speaking I probably have more in common with you than with them.'

'General,' urged Seskwa. 'You must not listen to his lies.'

The silence dragged on, Jafrid looking the Doctor up and down. Then he said, 'Step closer.' The Doctor obeyed. 'I do not know if I should believe your wild theory. But you strike me as a man of courage and integrity.'

The Doctor shrugged. 'I don't know where to look. I think I'll just stare at my shoes.'

'I have a mission for you. Will you accept it?'

'Is it a small mission or a big mission? I don't do big missions.'

Jafrid leant in close. 'Will you go to Dolne? And tell him what you have told me?'

The Doctor hesitated a second. Then he said, 'That's a reasonably sized mission. Yes, of course I'll do it. Just point me in the right direction.'

'You must not let him escape, General,' grumbled Seskwa, but n.o.body was listening.

'You shall be a neutral envoy,' Jafrid went on. 'We must face the future together. I cannot believe our friends among the enemy would want to destroy us.'

The Doctor felt a rush of admiration for old Jafrid. 'That's very charitable of you.'

But the General smirked back. 'Hardly. They wouldn't dare pick a sc.r.a.p, Doctor. Dolne knows he could not possibly win, and he is without guile.

Now, we must prepare a vehicle.'

'General,' called a technician. 'The enemy is trying to hail us.'

'How convenient,' said Seskwa. 'At the very moment their spy gains our confidence.'

Jafrid hurried to his position at the centre of the room and clambered into the golden strands of his webbing. 'Link us up, right away.'

The Darkness was perturbed by the Doctor. His unusual face puzzled them. It possessed a quality they had not seen before in a human, and the distortion of the Glute-screen lent it an especially unpleasant quality. His large blue eyes stared hard, as if he could see through the eyes of the source and into the Darkness itself.

The Darkness reasoned with itself All is well. The next battle will destroy all All is well. The next battle will destroy all trust between them. trust between them.

But what of this Doctor? it asked itself it asked itself He is cleverer than the others. He He is cleverer than the others. He sees too much. sees too much.

It answered itself quickly. No matter. He will be dead very soon. No matter. He will be dead very soon.

Nourishment for the first Great Hatching.

The command post was silent, all activity brought to a halt as Jafrid's fearsome face appeared on the big screen of the Strat Room. Dolne felt the relief of his team, a reaction that matched his own. Surely, if they were still talking, they could sort out their situation? 'Jaffers,' he said. 'Thanks for the letter. I'm as perplexed as you are. I really did wonder if you'd gone barmy.'

Jafrid looked uncomfortable. 'I cannot speak to you informally over this channel, Admiral. The envoy will now speak.'

Dolne frowned, 'Envoy? What envoy?' Abruptly, the image from the Chelonian base changed, and a humanoid face appeared. A wild-looking fellow with a shock of curly hair. For a moment Dolne was puzzled, then he clicked. 'Ah, h.e.l.lo. You'll be the Doctor, won't you?'

'You've met my friends?' he said eagerly. 'How are they?'

'Safe and well,' said Dolne. He felt an intuitive empathy wiili the newcomer, as he had with Romana. Logically, he should have been wary of strangers, but they just seemed so agreeable. 'Romana's a splendid young girl, I must say.' He giggled. 'How do you chaps do it? I wonder sometimes.'

'Do what?' The Doctor held up a finger. 'Now, listen, Dolne, I've no time to gossip. The Chelonians are prepared to disconnect their battle computers as a gesture of goodwill. That way n.o.body can tamper with them. Will you do the same?'

Viddeas sprang up from his desk as if activated by the pressing of a b.u.t.ton.

'Sir, no! Who is this man? A traitor, by the look of him!'

'Shut up, Viddeas,' said Dolne wearily. He turned back to the screen.

'Doctor, hold on. This isn't worth its salt really, is it, unless we all switch off at the same time? Which, incidentally, I'm prepared to do. It sounds a jolly sensible idea.'

'That's the spirit. So I'll be coming over with an escort to agree the fine details. 'I should reach you in about an hour. Now, could I s.n.a.t.c.h a quick chat with Romana and K9?'

'Certainly.' Dolne signalled to Cadinot. 'Patch him through.' He waved to the Doctor. 'See you soon.'

Then the picture faded. Dolne clapped his hands together and turned to address his team. 'At last. What a day. I knew it would blow over. Shall we all get back to doing, er, whatever it is we do here?'

There was a ripple of good humour from the Strat Team, and somebody started clapping. Before long, everyone had joined in, leaving Dolne feeling both exhilarated and embarra.s.sed. Because, truth be told, he hadn't actually done anything to put things back on keel. The applause was nice, though.

Only Viddeas didn't join in.

Chapter Five - New Dog, New Danger.

Now it was the Doctor's turn to express his outrage and astonishment at K9's news. In all their travels together Romana had never before seen the combination of alarm, amus.e.m.e.nt and anger that spread across his face as she told him of recent developments. His own announcements - that the war situation appeared to have been resolved, at least temporarily had merited his most casual of manners. 'He's what? what? ' '

'Put himself up for election,' she repeated.

'Well, he can put himself back down straight away.' His eyes roved about the room until he saw his dog. 'K9, is there fluff in your circuits?'

'Negative, Master. My fluff defences are fully functional.'

'To be fair, he was acting out of concern for you,' said Romana.

K9 swivelled himself to face her, turning his back pointedly on the screen.

'Negative, Mistress. I have no concern for the Doctor Master and was merely following programming.'

The Doctor rolled his eyes. 'All right, all right, K9. There's no need to take umbrage. I'm touched.' K9 gave a gracious beep of forgiveness. 'But you're still going to have to withdraw. You can't go around getting yourself involved in other people's business wherever we land.'

K9 refrained from making the obvious reply. 'Not possible, Master.

Withdrawal from const.i.tutional privilege before voting day is cla.s.sified as a criminal offence, punishable by a hefty fine and a period of imprisonment not less than forty days.'

'Nonsense,' said the Doctor. 'I'm going to put my foot down about this one, K9, and you know I don't often do that.'

K9 gave another beep, this time of confusion. 'When in perambulatory mode you put a foot down three times per second, Master.'

Romana held up the data disk containing the planet's history, which she had been skimming through before the Doctor's call. 'He's right, Doctor.

We'll have to go ahead. They're preparing a shuttle to take us to Metralubit.'

She tried to keep the note of enthusiasm from her voice. Her initial doubts about K9's plan had been replaced by a sense of antic.i.p.ation. At the Academy she had studied socio-psychology of underdeveloped societies as one of her core subjects, and it would be fun to see the wheels of such a system turning for real. It might even make a good topic for her postgraduate thesis. She dismissed the thought, as she dismissed all thoughts of returning home nowadays, aware that the Doctor had put on the face that suggested to the outside world he was having a magnificent idea. 'Doctor?'

'Do you know, I can see how we could turn this to our advantage,' he said.

'Yes?' Romana prompted.

The Doctor hunched forward and put a finger to his lips (as if, thought Romana, this would make any difference on an open radio channel).

'I've noticed some very odd things about this war, or whatever it is,' he said.

'And some even odder things about the people fighting it.'

Romana nodded. 'The technological discrepancies.'

'The what?' He scratched his head. 'Oh yes, those. But what I'm more curious about is the Chelonian presence. One, why should they take such interest in what is, after all, not much more than a big mud pie?' He paused, seemingly lost in thought.

'Two?'

'How's your intergalactic history?'

'Better than yours,' said Romana. 'But it doesn't stretch this far. n.o.body's does. Study of the later Humanian era was forbidden by the Academy.

We're outside the Gallifreyan noosphere.' She referred to the statutes laid down by the Time Lords that decreed that n.o.body should have too much knowledge - or any knowledge at all, if possible - of conditions beyond the vortex's boundary parameters. The reasons for this decree had been lost over the thousands of years of Gallifreyan civilization, and, like most things there, went unquestioned.

The Doctor nodded. 'Fair enough. But it's not what I expected to find out here. Chelonians and humans, and those only very little altered from those that were hanging about Mutter's Spiral ages, and I do mean ages, ago.'

'There's always Clarik's Theorem,' pointed out Romana.

'Stuff Clarik's Theorem,' said the Doctor. 'No. There's something strange going on here, Romana. And you'll be in a good position to find out what.

Do a little digging around on Metralubit, while the dog's busy losing his deposit.'

'No deposit is required in this electoral system, Master,' said K9.

The Doctor looked off-screen as somebody, a Chelonian by the sound of him, called his name. 'I'm going to have to go. I'm on someone else's communicator.' He raised a finger, and suddenly his expression became more serious. 'Keep your wits about you, both of you.' The screen fizzled and his image faded.

As it did, a thought struck Romana. 'd.a.m.n. I forgot to tell him about Stokes.'

A crackle came from the post's internal communication system, and Cadinot's voice came from a speaker by the door. 'Will Mr K9 and Miss Romana please make their way to the shuttle bay immediately.'

'That's our call.' Romana smiled at K9, who motored forward with indecent eagerness, obviously desperate to make his mark. Something itched at her cheek and she reached up instinctively to brush it away, catching a glimpse of a small black shape buzzing away. 'We must remember to bring some fly killer back with us.'

'Insects are harmless, Mistress,' said K9 as he shot out of the door.

Romana dabbed at her cheek, and her finger picked up a tiny spot, no more than a pinp.r.i.c.k of blood. She rubbed it away between her fingers and followed K9, thinking no more about it.

Gallifrey!

The word echoed through the Darkness, repeated over and over by its many compartments. The shock and excitement caused several of the incubating units to crack open prematurely, spewing jelly-meal in all directions. Efficient as ever, a row of elongated prostheses, tubes of dried blood, swung out and sucked up the waste for reuse.

An atavistic chill skittered through the Onemind, and another self-conversation began. But Gallifrey is gone But Gallifrey is gone, said one part. As they say, it is As they say, it is forbidden. forbidden.

They spoke of time travel, said another.