The Well-Mannered War Part 38

'That's not surprising,' said Romana. 'I felt the same. We shouldn't be here, after all, strictly speaking.'

'No, we shouldn't,' he said emphatically. 'We were blown here by a strange, unpredictable accident. The erosion of the TARDIS systems circuitry combined with an impulse from the Randomizer sent us cartwheeling wildly off course. We should have left right away. But we didn't.'

'We had to pop out "just so we could say we'd been",' Romana reminded him.

He snapped his fingers. 'Exactly. A chance to c.o.c.k a minor snook at the Time Lords. Just what would I have done. Walked out, got myself involved, started to tinker. began the logical, forseeable chain of decisions that have brought me to this point.' He raised a finger and pointed through the mist ahead. 'There.'

Romana squinted. The tall blue shape of the TARDIS was just visible on the horizon. 'You're taking a very egocentric view. Plenty of other people made decisions along the way. Me and K9 for a start. Galatea, Harmock, Jafrid, St-'

The Doctor cut her off: 'Yes, they did, didn't they? All of them people who shouldn't be here.'

Romana was getting exasperated. 'What do you mean?'

'The artificiality of it all,' the Doctor replied, 'that I mentioned to you earlier.'

'These discrepancies were connected to the Femdroids' deception of the Hive, Master,' K9 said patiently.

The Doctor shook his head. 'I think the Femdroids were part of an even bigger game.' He turned to Romana. 'The level of coincidence is too high.

Our arrival. The Chelonians just wandering into this system at the very moment Galatea needed to start a war to fox the Hive. The similarity in technology between K9 and the Femdroids.'

'That wasn't a coincidence,' said Romana.

The Doctor stared blankly at her. 'What?'

'The Femdroids' creators used K9 as a blueprint using information from Stokes's mind,' she explained.

The Doctor put a hand to his temple. 'Who? Stokes? Not that artist fellow?'

'Yes, I forgot to tell you, in all the rush,' Romana admitted.

'But how did he get here?' The Doctor's face now took on a haunted expression. As Romana opened her mouth to reply he held up a hand to silence her. 'No, never mind that. Where is he now?'

'He sloped off somewhere,' said Romana. 'Actually, I thought he'd be waiting for us at the TARDIS, if he managed to find it.'

K9 nodded his agreement. 'That is his most likely course of action.'

The Doctor stared at the TARDIS and then broke into a frantic run, without a word of explanation. Romana followed on, baffled, with K9 in her arms.

Galatea stared out at the empty city. Soon the fountains would flow again, the tramways would be filled with their silent, pollutant-free traffic, and the citizens would work and play in total harmony. Her vision had been accomplished.

One of the dome workers had helped her to rig up a communicator using materials from the smashed computer room. A picture relayed from one of the orbital satellites showed a rough ring of the survivors on Barclow, including General Jafrid, Harmock and that man Fritchoff she'd had sent away a few years ago. He and a few others in the dome were strong-willed enough to break through the conditioning. Before they could she'd implanted a suitable fantasy in their minds and expelled them. Now, she thought with a smile, everyone could come home. Metralubit was coming home.

'Now, you've been a very naughty girl, all told, keeping things from us,'

Harmock was saying. 'There'll be no need for any of this nastiness and secrecy in future, will there?'

'Absolutely not,' said Galatea with a glad heart. 'I shall be pleased to serve my organic masters in a more direct way.'

'Still,' Harmock went on, 'I have to say I admire your nerve. Doing this all on your own. Well done.'

Galatea nodded. 'Thank you, Premier. I like to think I've always done my best.'

Just for a second she heard a voice, deep and granite hard, somewhere deep inside her head. The bargain is over, it told her, our business is done.

Galatea thanked the voice. It had given her exactly what it had promised: the total destruction of the Hive and the safety of her people, thanks to the provision of Stokes's great knowledge. And she, of course, had fulfilled her side of the bargain. She had invented the concept of const.i.tutional privilege, conditioned the humans to believe it, and encouraged Romana and K9 to come to Metralubit. It had been easy enough.

But she was happy she would never hear the voice again.

General Jafrid slunk away from the screen, feeling a bit left out from all this joy and excitement. One of the young humans - Cadinot, wasn't it? - came across and asked kindly, 'Are you all right there, General?'

Jafrid winked at him, remembering his old friend Admiral Dolne. 'I'm fine,'

he said. 'Just fine'

And then, just for a second, he heard the voice again for the first time in over a hundred years. The deal is done, the voice said, and our business is over.

Jafrid thanked it inwardly. The voice had delivered what it had promised: a lengthy, untroubled early retirement, thanks to a convenient time storm that had whipped him and his men here from their rightful place thousands of years before, liberating them from the warrior lifestyle. And his side of the bargain could not have been easier. All the voice had asked him to do was sit put on Barclow for a hundred and twenty-five years, and pretend to really want it.

Now the voice was gone, and he could spend the rest of his retirement in luxury down on Metralubit, with its plentiful green s.p.a.ces and large arable areas. It would be a pleasure indeed to graze there.

The Doctor burst into the TARDIS to find the console room empty. He peered beneath the console and in all the comers; he even looked behind the hatstand and among the items he had been sorting out before they had entered the Time Spiral.

Romana almost fell through the doors, exhausted by the run and from carrying K9. She was glad of the warmth and comparative comfort of the TARDIS, and immediately reached for the lever that closed the big double doors. Barclow's low moaning wind and biting cold were finally shut out.

She set K9 down and turned with a despairing sigh to the Doctor, who was scattering objects from his useful pile all over the floor. 'I hardly think you're going to find Stokes in there,' she said, still unable to fathom the reasons for his distress. 'Besides, he can't just have walked in.'

'Doors are an irrelevance to some people,' the Doctor snapped back. He peered through the inner door and grunted; a set of muddy bootprints trailed away down the corridor. 'Just as I thought. He's probably gone to find a bed.'

For the first time Romana caught a little of his anxiety. 'But how did he pa.s.s through our security?' She s.h.i.+vered. Theoretically, the TARDIS was impenetrable.

The Doctor hunched over the console. 'We can worry about that later. First, let's minimize the risks and get out of here.' He started to fiddle with the controls of the dematerialization sequence.

K9 trundled over urgently. 'Master, the Hive.'

'Yes, I know, K9. Don't tell your grandmother how to suck eggs,' the Doctor snapped back.

For once K9, who was perhaps learning about Earth idioms, and perhaps sensing the seriousness of the situation, refrained from comment.

Romana leant over the Doctor's shoulder. He was calibrating a set of dials at the base of the dematerialization circuit array. 'There,' he said. A steady pinging note filled the console room. 'There's the Hive's energy signature.

I've locked it on to our own engines. We'll pull it along behind us like a caravan and dump it somewhere apposite. I know a couple of good black holes in the Cosplodge system.'

'The linkage is secure, I hope,' said Romana.

'Of course it is. Even a vintage model like the TARDIS has a good strong secondary attachment.' He looked up ruefully as he started the dematerialization sequence. 'We'll just slip into the vortex for the time being. I want to get away from here as soon as possible and take stock.'

Romana stood back as he threw the last few switches. The central column began its steady rise and fall.

The blue beacon on the rooftop of the TARDIS started to flash. A few seconds later, to the accompaniment of an unearthly trumpeting noise, its police-box sh.e.l.l faded away completely from the rocky terrain of Barclow.

There was a thunderclap and a peal of mocking laughter.

The TARDIS tipped, throwing the Doctor, Romana and K9 across the console room and back again. The central column glowed incredibly brightly, turning fiery red and crackling with electric sparkles.

'The Time Spiral again,' Romana shouted, trying desperately to find the edge of the console and lever herself up.

'Negative, Mistress,' called K9.

The Doctor, who was a dab hand at being thrown around the console room, used the momentum of a vicious spin to gain the support of the console's navigation panel. When he saw the display on the screen he uttered a very old and seldom-used word in Old High Gallifreyan. 'Somebody's already put in a course,' he cried. 'There's a lock in the coordinates.'

Romana was appalled. Only a skilled operator could input coordinates, and to lock them in - to wire in an extra code so that travel to that destination, no matter how far distant, took very little relative time at all and could not be altered - took an expert with a lot of patience. 'Who?'

'Stokes!' the Doctor called back.

'That's impossible!' Romana called. At last she managed to grab hold of the console.

'Unless he was helped,' the Doctor said. Then he leant over and started to throw switches on the panel manically.

An observer watched the insane pitch and yaw of the TARDIS as it sped through the howling maelstrom of the s.p.a.ce-time vortex.

Now the Doctor would cancel the coordinates program by using the coordinate override.

And the choice could be made.

Stokes was woken when his large bald head was smacked against one of the softly humming walls of the TARDIS corridor. He had no memory of anything after he'd looked himself up in the data bank. Perhaps he'd walked here in his sleep.

He picked himself up and regained his balance as the TARDIS steadied.

He hadn't gone far into its innards; through the door at the end of the corridor be could hear the Doctor's rich, booming voice. Cautiously he crept closer, and turned his ear to catch the Doctor's words. 'Do you know what this is, Romana?'

'I've never seen anything like it,' came the girl's voice.

'Yes you have,' countered the Doctor.

Stokes poked his head around the door. The Doctor, who was looking very dishevelled, his wet, stained coat torn in several places, was holding something out to Romana. It was, Stokes realized with a jolt, his own crystal. It must have fallen from his pocket when he'd walked in.

He heard Romana's gasp as she took it from the Doctor. 'The Key to Time.

The same substance.'

'Exactly,' said the Doctor. 'A material that exists in ways even old Ra.s.silon could never have speculated. You might say it borders on magic.'

K9 trundled into view. 'Magic refuted, Master. Substance cannot be a.n.a.lysed as it exists, er, simultaneously at every point in time. This does not const.i.tute magic, only a level of scientific conceptualism we cannot comprehend.'

The Doctor ignored him. 'Now,' he told Romana, 'with this, Stokes could get in here and set those coordinates quite easily. So how did it get into his possession? And how did he get himself shanghaied halfway across the universe and halfway across the span of time?'

'The White Guardian?' Romana suggested hopefully.

'Or the other fellow,' said the Doctor. 'A web of choices. That's how the Guardians, both of them, operate. Jafrid, Galatea and Stokes were all p.a.w.ns in the game, arranged for someone else's benefit.'

Romana leant in close. 'And who might this other person be?'

The Doctor leant even closer to her. 'I have this terrible suspicion it might be me.'

K9 piped up. 'Master, Mistress,' he called. 'Mr Stokes.'

Stokes put up his hands and tried to ignore the accusation in their gaze.