Doctor Who_ Beltempest Part 18

After several hours she realised she was bored. Bored of the pain. Bored of the fact that she was scared.

She grinned, felt her smile crack and be repaired almost as quickly.

She got up. Walked to the nearest wall, broke off a shard of ice and drove it deep into her throat.

Her scream brought a momentary silence to the prayer of the Endless.

The scream bubbled away into silence.

She did not die.

She dropped the shard.

Sat down.

Stood up.

She did not die.

Blinked eyelids blackened with frostbite, felt the bruises evolve through her flesh.

Grinned again.

She could not die.

But what could she do?

I don't want to spend eternity here in this bell of ice. I want to spend it in a nice place. Warm. Where the cars are red and fit like gloves, where petrol is free, where girls don't die, and all choices work out; where there are nice carpets and ice lollies are cool and TV doesn't have any adverts. And food! Fooooooood! That would be sooooooo nice.

Sam turned to the congregation, aware the blood had stopped flowing from her throat. Her voice was the screech of rusted metal as she said,'Listen. To.Me.We. Have. To.Get.Off.This.Place. Eternity. Doesn't. Have to... hurt. I can help you... Do you see? I can get you food - even ham. Green eggs and ham for everyone. You can have them with foxes in boxes, or fishes on dishes. All we have to do is make the s.h.i.+p work. Then we can leave here. Do you see?'

The congregation gazed blankly at her, then, one by one, resumed their hymn of pain.

All except one.

Denadi rose to his feet, his face twisted, his body arched within his sealed starsuit.

Denadi who would not take communion and who would now die for the privilege when his air ran out.

Sam stumbled across to him.

His lips moved. Shaped her name. Silent whisper. Sam...

'I am Sam,' she said. 'Sam I -' She stopped. Bit her lip. Bit it even harder as it began immediately to heal.

Denadi's face inside the helmet was the face of a tortured angel. Death held no peace for him. She caught him as he fell, felt his body jerk as life left it.

Saketh's voice moved restlessly among the blue ice.'Endless. He is Endless now. But he is wrong. His way is wrong.'

Sam laid Denadi on the ground.

Brain (ham) death - - how long did it take (to cook) for all higher functions to end?

Sam struggled to keep it clear in her mind. The taste of ham between her teeth was a fantasy, a mustard-coated slice of heaven. Denadi was a dead weight in her arms. No. She'd laid him on the - no she had - no she was - - taking off his helmet.

'Eat of my ham - my flesh .' She said. 'Drink of my blood.'

He did not hear her.

He did not move.

'I can help you. I can help you! Father, don't die now! Oh G.o.d, don't leave me alone here! '

But she couldn't.

It was too late.

The choice was yours all the time . She seemed to hear the words in his voice, but it might have just been the wind.

She felt a presence beside her. Saketh. Unmistakably him. She did not turn.

'Brain death takes several minutes.You can bring him back.Was it what he wanted?'

Sam did not hesitate.'Yes! He told me just before he... as I was holding him... his last words were... he wanted to take communion with us. He wanted to convert. He told me!'

Not for one moment did Sam understand how d.a.m.ning the lie that would save the life of Denadi was to be.

Sunrise came to the new world in a kaleidoscopic iteration of life.

Things that might have been birds or fish flapped or swam through the air. They made a sound that was indescribable. It might have been laughter or machine noise. No one could tell. More life crawled and flapped across the surface. Again, no one could tell if this life was vegetable or animal - motile seeds seeking fertile ground or animals seeking to evade a vegetable predator. The world was a circus mirror of a real world, one in which the reflecting surface was constantly evolving, unbending, flattening with time, before a.s.suming some new, evolutionary kink.

The rain stopped, then started again. The clouds changed colour as volcanic gases emerged to mingle with the sunlight. Yellow blotches of sulphur appeared on the ground. Some of them had legs and fled from the approaching heavy tread of the medics' starsuits.

Mud steamed and popped diligently.

The Doctor was like a child in Santa's grotto. He capered gleefully among the often near-lethal volcanic upheavals, the clogging vegetation, the s.h.i.+fting geology. His hands clutched a small device which he waved around himself every so often, as if to capture elements of the scenery for later observation.

Aellini questioned him on this. 'Is that some kind of tracker youVe got there?'

'No, no! No, bless me, no!' The Doctor laughed out loud, his words an excited torrent, tumbling over themselves in their eagerness to escape. 'Polaroid camera! Never seen a world being born before! Wanted a few snaps for the alb.u.m!' He leaned closer to Aellini's helmet and said in a confidential stage whisper, 'You never know what the parents might pay for a shot like this...'

Aellini felt anger build.'Lives are at stake here.'

'Never doubted it!' the Doctor mumbled cheerfully. He held his breath as a cloud of sulphurous steam clogged the air for several minutes, then blew out his cheeks. His face, hair and coat were bright yellow. He shook his head and the sulphur flew off. Aellini sc.r.a.ped more of it from his faceplate, studying the Doctor as he did so. The man was at home here - almost as if he had been born here. He could cope with every change of air, every poisonous belch with no effort at all. Chemical combinations that even the starsuits had a hard time dealing with slipped from his clothes and skin like so much colourful confetti. Major Smoot was right to have been suspicious. Aellini was getting a very strange feeling about the Doctor. As if he were... somehow... luring them somewhere. If it weren't for the fact that he always seemed to know exactly where their own tracking devices indicated they should go a moment or two before the devices actually surrendered that information - no: as a matter of fact, the fact that he knew their direction before they did actually made the Doctor's actions and behaviour even more suspicious.

Aellini waited for a moment alone to check the magazine on his sidearm. Fully charged. Good. Aellini had never yet met an enemy who could deal with that .

The trail led to a chasm carved in a gigantic cliff face. The Doctor turned to Aellini and cheerfully asked if he had any rope.

Aellini sighed, grabbed the Doctor and activated his starsuit's jets. He hoped they would not need to go too far. The suit jets were designed for short bursts in zero-gravity conditions. Planet hopping was not only dangerous but frighteningly expensive on fuel.

The Doctor's eyes opened wide with excitement as they dropped over the lip of the chasm.

He peered around himself as they dropped.

'Interesting,' he said as he pulled his opera gla.s.ses once again from a pocket and examined the cliff face through them.'No fossil record that I can see.'

'So? Maybe it was all destroyed by geological activity.'

'Nonsense. Every planet has a geological record. Unless...' He peered thoughtfully through the gla.s.ses.

'Unless what?' Aellini muttered in irritation.

'Unless it's not a planet, of course.'

Aellini found he didn't have anything to say to that.

Almost immediately he found that he did. But he didn't say it. He thought it though: If it's not a planet what is it? A s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p? A hostile invasion spearhead? It could hold billions of aliens. What kind of aggressor used an entire species as its a.s.sault force?

He looked back up the chasm, was not quite comforted by the fighter escort's triple contrail poking through the rain clouds.

The cavern closed overhead as the interior of the planet -s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p? - wrapped itself around them in intimate folds.

The cavern system was deep, a three dimensional labyrinth in which the only due to direction was gravity, and even that a feeble one.

The Doctor's nose - and Aellini's computer information - led the medical party to a small grotto about half a kilometre deep in the crust. The rock here was spongy, almost springy. It had a sense of newness about it. Aellini wondered whether the hull of this world-s.h.i.+p was organic in nature, grown to meet the s.h.i.+fting extremes of temperature it must find on its journey through s.p.a.ce.

The survivors - twelve in all - were in the cavern. They were comatose, their faces twitching with REM sleep.

Aellini wondered what they were dreaming about.

The Doctor carefully peered into the faceplate of each starsuit.

Conaway was not among them.

Aellini began issuing instructions.'I want Fighter Escort One to stand by at the mouth of the cavern. I want the drone carrier brought here on remote so we can load these people aboard the moment we hit the surface. Now let's snap to it. The mission's not over until we bring these people home.'

The Doctor placed a hand on the shoulder of Aellini's starsuit. 'The mission's not over until we find Surgeon Major Conaway.'

Aellini sighed angrily.'Face it,Doctor, she's dead. It's bad, I know. But we have to get these people out. They are our priority now.'

"The Chinese on Earth have a proverb.' In the rocky gallery, the Doctor's voice sounded slightly more dangerous than an earthquake. 'Save someone's life and become responsible for it.'

'You can't save her if she's not here.'

The Doctor's expression was unreadable. 'Oh, I'm not talking about Major Conaway. I've saved more than a hundred billion people in the last few days. It's them I'm being responsible to. Major Conaway is the icing on the cake, so to speak. But I have a much bigger responsibility than to the life of one person, no matter how precious. An older me would have sacrificed the one for the other; an even older me might not have acknowledged that the one existed. I'm different now. I'm younger, more mature. Somehow I have to be responsible for both the individual and the whole. Do you see?' 'Frankly, I think you're raving mad.'

'Nero was mad. Genghis Khan was mad. Hitler was mildly paranoid. I, on the other hand, am merely very, very concerned.

About a great many things, Mr Aellini,' he added, antic.i.p.ating the pilot's question. 'A very great many things indeed.'

And with that he turned and followed his nose from the gallery, in search of his friend, the other doctor.

He found her twenty minutes later, at the nexus of what seemed to be a ma.s.s of vegetable fibre, trapped in a maze of growth that held her as fast as any straitjacket.

Her eyes were open but unseeing, focused instead on some inner world of nightmarish revelation.

The Doctor reached for her automatically, his intention to pull her clear. Instead, he found himself gripped by hands curled like talons, his body and mind caught as she was herself, arching fearfully as a lifetime of memories smashed home into his mind. A lifetime whose heartbeats were measured by the lives of stars.

With it came madness.

No one wanted to help her. They all just stayed in the grotto, content to wait for Saketh's leaders.h.i.+p. Content to endure the pain that was their personal eternity, content to allow themselves no choice in being saved. To Sam they were a girl lying comatose in a hospital A&E, waiting to die while her father let it happen.

Sam shrugged. It was their choice. She had work to do.

Lots of work.

How many were there left in the solar system who had not been touched by the breath of immortality?

Millions?

Billions?

She could help them all.

She would start with the Hoth. It at least was close. But how should she get to it? How to cross s.p.a.ce from this moon to the atmosphere of Belannia XII?

The s.h.i.+p that brought her here was the answer: empty, power-drained, fuel all but exhausted in its fight against the freezing ocean in which it lay; it was an answer of sorts.

Sam worked inside it now, the freezing swim down through the icy currents forgotten as her body healed quickly, the pain fading slightly as her lungs responded to the minimal air in the circulation system, the minimal heat remaining in the environment-control systems.

Sam worked to reduce even that, diverting power steadily through shunts and busses never designed to take the load, from any peripheral system she could find, all into the main drive units.

At last the s.h.i.+p was ready. There was no heat or air - Sam did not need any. The pain began to creep back again, steadily building as she surveyed the wreckage of the bridge stations that was her work.

There was light, minimal, enough so that she could see to work - and she begrudged even that. But it was little enough, this one illumination. There was power enough to do what she had to do.

Footsteps clanged as she ran the power up to full. She turned as the s.h.i.+p quivered into life, turned to face another on the bridge.

Denadi.