Doctor Who_ Father Time Part 37

'Storeys. Floors.'

Miranda gulped. Finding the hangar, or wherever it was you keep a flying saucer would be virtually impossible, especially with a legion of soldiers looking for her and blocking her way.

Not without recruiting some help.

'Where are you from?' Miranda asked.

Cate lowered her head.

'Don't you have parents? A family?'

'No,' she said, simply.

'You and Ferran are lovers?'

Cate's lip curled. 'After a fas.h.i.+on,' she said.

Miranda decided to change the subject.

'What's it like where we are going?'

Cate looked up. She seemed to be asking herself whether she should answer. She was glancing up, as though she might be overheard. Was the room bugged? Miranda wondered, kicking herself for not even considering the possibility.

'I'm going there anyway,' Miranda reminded her.

'Ruins,' the Deputy said quickly, so quickly it took Miranda a second or two to be sure what she had said. 'The palace is all that's left. That and a few shelters. For generations, that is all there has been.'

'Because of the war?'

Cate nodded. 'It's the same everywhere. Everything is rationed, reused, but everything breaks down. There's no law. Only people doing what they want and imposing their will on others. Without the Empire there would be anarchy.'

'Do you know who I am?' Miranda asked.

Cate nodded. 'I know who you are. Everyone knows who you are. You are the Last One.'

Miranda put her hand on Cate's shoulder. 'I don't remember anything. I was a baby. I only know what Ferran told me. I know my family did terrible things, but I never knew them. What does Ferran want from me?'

Cate shook her head. She wasn't going to answer.

'He wants me alive. Why? What does he want?'

'What do you you want?' the Deputy asked. want?' the Deputy asked.

Miranda sighed. 'That's a very good question. I really don't know.'

Florida was hot and humid, even in November.

The Doctor had mislaid the sonic suitcase, and they'd spent an hour trying to find it. Debbie suspected someone had s.n.a.t.c.hed it while he'd been buying local guidebooks at the airport Waldenbooks and she'd been buying them doughnuts and coffee. The Doctor's faith in human nature meant he couldn't accept that explanation.

'I feel like I've just lost an old friend,' he had told her. Then, as they were about to give up looking, they'd found it just where the Doctor had left it in the bookstore.

They hired a car and drove down to Cape Canaveral, making three stops on the way, and booked themselves with a fair amount of difficulty, since shuttle launches always attracted the crowds into a motel room in t.i.tusville. To Debbie it looked like every motel room in every American movie she'd ever watched.

They could see the shuttle through the window, sitting on the horizon, the size of a skysc.r.a.per, in an otherwise perfectly flat landscape. According to the s.p.a.ce-shuttle book the Doctor had bought Debbie on one of their stops, it was fifteen storeys high. They sat together at the window, just looking at it.

And playing chess. Debbie had beaten the Doctor on the flight over, for the first time in months. Characteristically, he'd blamed the travel chess set, and the tiny pieces, which he claimed all looked the same but after sulking for a couple of minutes, he'd congratulated her.

'No clouds,' the Doctor said. 'The launch should go ahead tomorrow as planned.'

'Why would clouds make any difference?' Debbie asked. 'It's not as if the shuttle couldn't fly through them.'

'Clouds carry an electric charge. The shuttle could be hit by lightning as it pa.s.ses through them, it could damage electrical equipment aboard. They discovered that during the Apollo missions.'

'The... shuttle is safe now, isn't it? I mean, one blew up.'

'There's a one-ina-hundred chance of a major problem,' the Doctor said. 'NASA official figures. Of course before Challenger Challenger, they said one in a hundred thousand thousand, but that's neither here nor there. If it launches, it'll be safe. The last thing NASA want is another disaster. We have to hope they don't err on the side of caution and postpone the launch. If it goes ahead then there's a ninety-second window at launch when it's really dangerous. After that we'll have got away with it.'

'Why ninety seconds?' Debbie asked, wondering whether she really wanted to know.

The Doctor tapped a sheaf of papers marked ASCENT P PKT C CHECKLIST. 'Once they light the engines, they can't turn them off, they have to use up all their fuel. Solid rocket fuel is dangerous stuff. Looks like putty, but, of course, it's highly explosive wouldn't be much use if it wasn't. If there's a problem with one of the solid rocket boosters then the mechanical stresses would almost certainly just pull everything apart. You can't eject them; a detached orbiter wouldn't be able to outrun them.'

'We'd have a crash-landing.'

'Oh no,' the Doctor said wickedly, 'Mission Control would self-destruct us you wouldn't want us cras.h.i.+ng in an inhabited area. So, the solid fuel burns out after two minutes, and then those two tanks detach. The liquid fuel in the middle tank's burning at about three thousand three hundred degrees, of course, but most of it's burned off by then. That's when we hit Mach fifteen. Ninety seconds.'

Debbie must have looked very pale, because the Doctor leaned over her. 'You don't have to come if you don't want to.'

'I'm coming with you,' she insisted.

'Good.' He handed her a security badge with her name on it. 'l used some of my business connections,' he explained vaguely.

'How can this work?' Debbie asked him.

'A shuttle launch runs to a timetable. A totally predictable and controlled sequence of events,' the Doctor said. 'If you know the process, it's easy to exploit that knowledge.'

'They must have security.'

'They do and I know the precise location of each guard, fence and camera. They don't even know we're here, let alone what we're planning to do. Even if they did, I doubt they'd believe we could achieve it.' He smiled. 'We have the advantage here. I almost feel sorry for them.'

Miranda was getting the guided tour, but Ferran was keeping the details vague.

Miranda was starting to piece things together, though. The s.h.i.+p was cylindrical, or something like that, with the living quarters and control rooms and recreation areas at one end, the hangars and things in the middle and the engines at the rear.

A s.h.i.+p this vast was a community, not just a wars.h.i.+p. The corridors had soldiers blond and blonde; servants in the drab robes; but other people too. Guessing from the costumes, there were entertainers, technicians, minor n.o.blemen, chefs... and many other types besides.

There were search parties, fanning their way through the s.h.i.+p, taking pictures, drawing up maps and technical diagrams.

They were all Ferran's people. There were no robots, no monsters, no mutants. No black faces, either, or Chinese ones, only a few female soldiers. Racial purity. She shuddered.

Studying Ferran and Cate together worried her, too. He showed concern about her, appreciation but only the concern a man might have for a sports car, or a particularly stylish music centre. She was property.

The flight deck was a short lift journey from her own quarters.

Miranda stepped in behind Ferran. Cate followed.

The room was hexagonal, with a high vaulted ceiling. They came out on to a raised walkway. The lighting was soft, throwing shadows everywhere. The walls were dark glossy black metal and gold trim. There were a number of ramps down towards the centre itself, where six high seats all faced towards the centre of the room, each with computer panels set into the armrests.

In the centre of the vaulted ceiling, hanging down like a chandelier, was a pyramid full of swirling lights.

Her bedchamber had been an exercise in steel and plastic minimalism. This was more ornate, and as architecturally striking as it was functional.

Each seat had one of Ferran's men in it. All wore smart green uniforms, all were blond, a variety of ages, but otherwise with little to distinguish them from one another.

'What is our status?' Ferran asked.

The reply came from all around: a woman's voice with a slight electronic distortion.

's.h.i.+p is in cla.s.s-three orbit above planet Earth, all s.h.i.+p systems are operating at full capacity, with the exception of the time engine, which is repairing in line with previous estimates.'

Miranda pointed up at the pyramid. 'That was speaking?'

'That's Computer,' Ferran told her. 'It controls the s.h.i.+p. And I control it.'

'Where did you find the s.h.i.+p?' Miranda asked.

Ferran turned, looked at Cate carefully. 'How did you know?'

Cate's face gave nothing away.

Miranda had no intention of betraying a confidence or losing a valuable source of information. 'If you had built this s.h.i.+p, it wouldn't look like this. You'd have your own chair, for a start, and it would be in the middle of the room.'

Ferran narrowed his eyes, but broke into a grin. 'It crashed near the Librarinth, a very long time ago. One of my teams there recovered it.'

'Who are the original owners? My people?'

He shook his head. 'People who have long since gone. Nothing to do with you. This is a relic of an earlier time. A time that may not even have happened.'

She looked down at the activity. The people looked out of place here, like schoolboys allowed to drive their dad's company Merc.

'It's impressive.'

'Supremacy is beyond the state of the art. Its weapons, its defences, its time travel. It's the advantage I need to win the war.' is beyond the state of the art. Its weapons, its defences, its time travel. It's the advantage I need to win the war.'

'The war?'

Ferran turned to her. 'The Factions and Houses are at open war with each other, now. No one is strong enough to take it too far. The whole system is on the brink of collapse everything from the economy, the military, communications, transport... But during my long years at the Archive I discovered far more than how you spent your teenage years. I've found maps, histories, secrets. Enough to unite the Factions under me, and the force to impose my will.'

Miranda looked him in the eye. 'All the things you called "atrocities" when my family did them to you.'

Ferran gave a cruel smile. 'But then, my dear, the Imperial Family had the biggest guns. Now I do. That's all there is: power. Have that, and ethics and morality bend to your will.'

' "Might makes right",' Miranda said, disgusted.

'That's all there is. Justice will be my justice, law will be my law. When I've uncovered all the secrets of this s.h.i.+p I'll build a fleet of them. Nothing will stand against me.' He paused, enjoying the theatricality of it all. 'And you have your part to play.'

Miranda laughed out loud. 'If you think I will do anything to help your '

'You will,' Ferran said with absolute certainty. 'You will, because I have all this, and you have nothing except that which I grant you.'

Chapter Twenty-three.

Escape Velocity A pair of white-suited technicians, the pad team, checked Commander Fairchild, and one led him inside. The other crewmen remained waiting in the White Room, the area hundreds of metres up the launch gantry that was level with the entry hatch on the side of Atlantis Atlantis.

It was a laborious process. Each astronaut in turn would be taken to their seat, manoeuvred into it, facing up, then packed and strapped into place. Fairchild, the commander, went in first. He'd be followed by Beale, who'd be sitting to the commander's right and would act as pilot. Then Kim Sawyer, the flight engineer, who'd go in behind the commander. Then, set back a little, Mather, the mission specialist, would go in last.

All following procedure, laid down years ago, with little significant variation. There were no short cuts here. Before every launch, every single component was checked and rechecked. The shuttle was taken apart and rebuilt making a mockery of the claim that it was reusable, of course. Below them, at Mission Control, hundreds of techies and scientists were running diagnostics, monitoring everything to the slightest degree.

And despite all that, seventy-three seconds after take-off, on 28 January 1986, a shuttle had exploded. That thought was all around them. No one ever quite admitted it, but the loss of Challenger Challenger informed everything that was said and done, even for Mather, a military man only seconded to NASA. informed everything that was said and done, even for Mather, a military man only seconded to NASA.

It was clearly uppermost on the mind of the female technician who stayed in the White Room with the crew. Mather didn't recognise her. She was in her mid-thirties, white, with the first hints of grey in her black hair.

'You look more nervous that I do,' Mather joked. 'Anyone would think it was you going into s.p.a.ce.'

'Anything goes wrong,' she said, in a British accent, 'and it's me that gets in trouble.'

'I've been training two years for this,' he said. 'This is my big moment.'

'Two years?'

'Sure, that's just the standard training period.'

The other member of the pad team, a man with long light-brown hair poking out of his cap, emerged and ushered the pilot and flight engineer aboard.

All around them were clanking, whoos.h.i.+ng noises. The liquid-hydrogen fuel being pumped into the fuel tanks.

A couple of minutes later, the man re-emerged. 'Last but not least,' he said, leading Mather inside.

'Everyone around here's British,' Mather noted.