Doctor Who_ Father Time Part 34

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.

Everything had changed tonight.

'Here, here,' Dieter Steinmann was telling him, urging the Doctor to take a sledgehammer.

The Doctor held up his hands. 'This is your moment,' he told the young man.

'But you '

'My contribution was nothing,' the Doctor insisted. 'And whatever I achieved here, it wasn't really what I came to Berlin for.'

Dieter lowered the sledgehammer. 'Miranda. She is not here. I am sorry. You have helped us, but we have not been able to help you find your daughter.'

The Doctor nodded sadly. 'I have to get back to England. There may have been other leads.'

He walked away, through the Brandenburg Gate, against the flow of the crowd.

An hour after dawn, the day was already hot, and smelled of spice and dried flowers. Miranda's companion was fast asleep beside her, worn out from the night before. He smelled of pot and cheap beer. It wasn't too difficult to extricate herself from him.

Miranda stood and stretched, smiling with the body-memory of the night before.

She saw his rucksack at the foot of the bed. Perhaps if she searched it, she'd find some ID. He'd told her his name at the beginning of the evening, but she had been distracted by the TV. He was West German. No, news update: last night he'd been West German, but this morning he'd wake up a.s.suming he did ever wake up a German. They'd watched satellite TV in the hotel bar, seen crowds surging through Checkpoint Charlie, scaling the Wall, attacking it with sledgehammers. Unable to speak Hindi, he'd relied on Miranda's running commentary. Neither of them could believe it was happening. It had been a full hour before they'd been sure it wasn't some sort of science-fiction film.

And they'd drunk although only he had got drunk and he'd smoked which hadn't appealed at all and they'd gone up to her room and spent the night celebrating. She'd laughed when he'd asked if it was her first time, and she'd surprised him, and then they'd made sure they were safe, then they hadn't needed to speak any more.

She found her Batman T-s.h.i.+rt in her bag and put it on, before opening up the shutters and stepping out on to the balcony.

So hot and so light! So colourful!

Below, in the courtyard, the crowds were swarming. There were so many people here. People to carry your bags, people to open the doors, people to serve your drinks, people to bring bring you the drinks. That was the division between East and West, she decided here the cheapest part of any process was the cost of labour. Here perfectly ordinary houses had half a dozen servants, or staff, or whatever you wanted to call them. you the drinks. That was the division between East and West, she decided here the cheapest part of any process was the cost of labour. Here perfectly ordinary houses had half a dozen servants, or staff, or whatever you wanted to call them.

Miranda hadn't yet discovered the history of the hotel, but it had plainly been a palace once, and no doubt its staff had been even more numerous than the army currently working here. It was a vast building, with blue minarets and a vast golden dome. It didn't seem to belong on the same planet as the filthy, congested, thrown-together streets that surrounded it.

There were vultures circling overhead. When she'd first arrived in the country, that had seemed ominous. When she realised they nested in the eaves of the hotel, as doves would have done in England, it had seemed absurd, Pythonesque. A month on, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world.

So why had the crowds stopped to stare up at them?

For a moment, Miranda thought they were looking at her. A few years ago, she'd have been absurdly self-conscious in just a T-s.h.i.+rt, but now she quite enjoyed the idea of standing on a balcony while a crowd below hung on her every move.

Then she looked up, back over her shoulder.

A silver disc, hanging above the hotel like a couple of extra storeys.

It was the size of a house. For a moment, it didn't strike Miranda as odd: there were things she'd seen in India that were far more alien.

Then she realised what it was, that it didn't belong belong and that it had come for her. and that it had come for her.

But by then she couldn't move. She was surrounded by a blue haze, and the world around her evaporated.

Her eyes were the same.

Her face was a latex mask. Her skin looked as if it had been bathed in something corrosive, something that had scored lines into it while also loosening it from her skull and making it melt a little. Her hair was white, now, and wispy, contrasting with the dark Terylene of her nightdress.

She looked into his eyes, and didn't say anything. It wasn't difficult to know what she was thinking: that he barely looked a day older than the last time she'd seen him, that he'd looked the same since they'd first met. Now she was in an old people's home, her life nearly spent.

'Betty,' the Doctor said.

She smiled, the effort almost visibly draining her. She seemed to draw strength from the beautiful roses in their vases and the flickering light of the television screen playing on her face.

'Have you found her?' she asked.

He shook his head. 'I thought she was in Berlin. I went there, but no one had seen her. I've just come from there.'

'I didn't see you on the telly. They had a newsflash during the break on Coronation Street Coronation Street. Show me the photo again.'

The Doctor took the photo of Miranda he kept in his coat pocket, apologised that it was a couple of years out of date. She would be nineteen now.

'I love her,' the Doctor said.

'Of course you do, she's your daughter. She's very pretty,' Betty said. 'I can see the resemblance.'

The Doctor nodded. 'Everyone said that. We weren't related I adopted her.'

'You never could do things the easy way, could you?' She chuckled, admiring the photo. The Doctor looked at the picture frames lined up on Betty's shelf children, grandchildren, even a great-grandchild now. All that history, all those connections. Betty belonged here: her life, her history, her genes, all weaving and interweaving across more than a century. Now the century was about to enter its final decade, and his friends had started dying, one by one: Salvador, Irving, Larry and Graham just this year. They'd left so much behind; they'd contributed to the planet they'd found themselves on. In that same time, what had he done? He'd known he was different, but had always thought that meant he should lie low keep himself out of the history books. If he went tomorrow, what would he leave behind? He could have made a difference, in this of all centuries. He could have made things better.

'Do you want a handkerchief?' Betty asked, handing the picture back.

He shook his head. Then he looked at the photograph in his hand and he knew. Wherever Miranda was, whatever she thought of him, he knew that he'd achieved at least one thing.

'She's a good girl,' the Doctor said quietly. 'I'm so proud of her.'

'Nineteen?' Betty said. She hadn't heard the last thing he'd said. The Doctor realised with a start that Betty was going a little deaf. 'I wasn't that much younger when we first met. Things have changed, though. Kids grow up so much faster. I've got grandchildren Miranda's age, and... oh, the things they get up to.'

'You were engaged at Miranda's age,' the Doctor reminded her.

'We didn't have teenagers when I was a teenager,' Betty chortled. 'You never really grew up, did you? You're like Peter Pan. You don't change.'

'The world's changed around me,' the Doctor said. 'Remember when I talked about the future? Well, it's starting to happen. Things have changed, and usually for the better. There's ma.s.s production, but mankind isn't the slave of machines. We treat the mentally ill like people now, we don't just lock them away. Computers are everywhere. And now, now the Cold War's over. The world's a better place than it could have been. But a lot of things have changed since I first went to Middletown.'

'You always were ahead of your time,' Betty said, laughing.