Doctor Who_ Father Time Part 38

Five minutes after he'd led the mission specialist aboard, the Doctor came out and told Debbie the astronauts were all safely strapped in up on the flight deck, and the trapdoor hatch to the lower deck had been closed and locked down.

Debbie attached a gizmo the Doctor had built over breakfast to the elevator control. The Doctor recovered the sonic suitcase and the travel bag from where they had concealed them.

'What if someone finds that cupboard in the visitors' centre where we locked the real pad technicians?'

'Then they'll abort the launch and we'll be found and arrested,' he said cheerfully. 'Here we go,' the Doctor said.

He bowed, sweeping his arm around like the owner of a fairground ride. 'Step aboard.'

Debbie did as she was told.

The hatch looked a bit like the door on Concorde. Past it was cramped, functional what she was expecting, really. Again, it looked like an airliner's galley. It looked a bit old-fas.h.i.+oned, to be honest a bit seventies seventies. Everything was battened down for launch. And everything was at a ninety-degree angle, of course, as the orbiter had its nose pointed up at the sky. The s.h.i.+p was designed for zero gravity, so there wasn't the rigid distinction between up and down that there was in every other aircraft ever built. They pulled themselves in using the handrails attached to every surface. The Doctor, with some difficulty, managed to shut the hatch and used the sonic suitcase to lock it, a task impossible from the inside without the device.

Debbie clambered towards the spare seats. On other missions, the mission specialists and scientists would sit here, strapped in for launch. This was only a four-man mission, and all the crew were upstairs. The ladder to the flight deck was dead ahead, reminding her she couldn't make too much noise. The astronauts wouldn't get out of their seats now, not unless there was an emergency, but they were in radio contact with mission control, and could easily call security.

'The external hatch is sealed,' the Doctor told his radio.

'Roger that. Exit White Room, pad team.'

The Doctor wiggled his eyebrows to prompt Debbie. She squeezed the remote control. Outside, she could hear the elevator start its descent.

The Doctor checked his pocket watch, eventually reporting that they were clear of the gantry.

'Roger that.' The woman at Mission Control sounded a little confused she hadn't seen them come out of the tower, but the instruments were telling her the hatch was dosed, and they couldn't have locked themselves in.

The Doctor and Debbie grinned at each other. It wasn't over yet, but they were aboard, and, so far, no one had stopped them. The Doctor strapped Debbie into one of the spare seats. Underneath her technician's one-piece suit was another one a simple pressure suit, like those that fighter pilots wore, bought by the Doctor over the phone at Heathrow, and waiting for them in t.i.tusville. They wouldn't have helmets. If there was an emergency after launch, a loss of cabin pressure, anything like that, then they would be in serious trouble. There were, the Doctor claimed, ways to evacuate if necessary but he didn't elaborate.

The Doctor strapped himself in, looking confident.

'How can you be so calm?' she whispered.

He just grinned and held his finger up to shush her.

All they could do now was wait.

For nearly two and a half hours.

A long time to wait as, above them, they could hear the astronauts making pre-flight checks. All around was the creaking and clanking of gantries being retracted, fuel being loaded. It wasn't long before Debbie wished she'd brought a book. After about an hour Debbie realised she'd nodded off for a moment. She admonished herself for not being as nervous or excited as she should be, but this was a bit like wearing a seat belt while being stuck in the waiting room at Stockport station.

The Doctor looked serene, which was astonis.h.i.+ng in itself. Usually he was a fidgety, awkward pa.s.senger.

After a very long time there were some very final-sounding clanks from outside.

'Here we go,' the Doctor whispered.

The astronauts were talking again; little warning bleeps were going off all over the place up there. It was warm, a little dark. It was noisy, too fans and pumps, like on an aircraft, but with no concession to the comfort of civilian pa.s.sengers.

Debbie thought she heard someone upstairs say, 'T minus four.'

'That's the fuel purge,' the Doctor said under his breath. 'They've not found any malfunctions. Step by step, control of the shuttle is switching over to us instead of the ground.'

He was a little more tense now.

Then there was a bang, a long way away.

Debbie turned to the Doctor, who shook his head. 'Nothing to worry about,' he said. 'Just the opposite, in fact.'

The cabin was shuddering, just ever so slightly.

Activity upstairs, astronauts with raised voices.

Ignition.

Debbie felt the exact moment.

Then a sense of power, a sense of movement. She was pushed back into her seat, but not violently. They were moving. The shuttle was launching.

The cabin was starting to shake.

The noise.

It filled the room like choking smog. It prevented thoughts from forming, it...

She closed her eyes, lost in the moment. There was nothing else. To die like this... it didn't seem wrong. She felt safe, more safe than most of her time on Earth.

It sounded like bits of gravel or something were cascading down the outside of the shuttle. But that was nothing compared with the sound of the engines. The roar roar of the engines. of the engines.

She was suddenly anxious again.

The Doctor was counting under his breath.

'Eight,' he said.

Eight? Eight seconds? Was that all all? It felt like she had been here as long as she'd been married to Barry.

The whole shuttle lurched and rolled, like the Corkscrew at Alton Towers.

The Doctor was still calmly counting, 'Twelve.'

They were upside down.

They cruised for long seconds, hanging in their chairs as if they'd been strung up.

'Just about to break the sound barrier,' said the Doctor. Somewhere, possibly, there was a sonic boom.

'This is the dangerous bit,' the Doctor said matter-offactly. 'They're going for throttle up.'

Now even he was looking pale.

She was pushed back in her seat as there was another burst of speed. Just as she thought they couldn't go any faster, the speed increased again, incrementally.

There was a moment where she thought they'd died. Just for a second, as the Doctor's countdown, or countup, was somewhere in the one hundred and twenties, the rockets seemed to have died.

Then there was a crump crump, and the ride became much smoother.

'There go the SRBs,' the Doctor said, visibly relaxing. 'Mach four.'

Debbie tried to picture what had happened. The two 'little' side rockets (forty-five metres long, four metres in diameter) had been jettisoned. The big rocket was still there, powering them up into s.p.a.ce.

It was a smooth climb. There was still a roar, but even that was dying away a little (as the air outside thinned? she wondered). She felt relaxed now. Not in control of the situation, not by any means, but she knew now that Florida policemen couldn't drag them away, that the engines weren't going to explode.

And she was in outer s.p.a.ce.

Commander Fairchild ran through the procedures, not even having to think about them.

'OMS cut out, we are in orbit.'

A moment of elation and relief.

'What does OMS stand for?' an English woman's voice asked him. 'Orbital Manoeuvring Syst'

Fairchild tried to jerk his head around. There were two of them, right behind Sawyer. A woman with short black hair and a man with light brown hair and blue eyes.

'What the You're the technicians. How did '

The man was staring out of the pilot's window at the Earth above them. The soft blue light suffused the cabin. The weather over the equator was good for the time of year, but you could see the remnants of hurricanes, see the sea glittering in the evening light.

'Beautiful,' the man said.

'Who?' Beale asked helplessly.

'I'm the Doctor, this is Debbie.'

'h.e.l.lo,' the woman said, holding on to the engineer's seat for dear life.

'We need a lift,' the Doctor said. 'Is that OK?'

'A lift?'

'A ride,' the Doctor clarified. 'What is it with you Americans and the word "lift"? We need a ride.'

Debbie looked out of the window.

All the cliches were true: from this height, there were no national boundaries, the grey of the cities merged into the landscape. There were signs of human endeavour electric lights of the large cities, neat, square cultivated areas and ca.n.a.ls breaking up the ground. Everything that had happened to the human race had happened down there, apart from the efforts of the astronauts.

And there was something unnatural about being up here, even the basics went against all her instincts. Moving in zero gravity was a bit like swimming, but without the purchase water gave you, or the resistance. If you pushed away from the side, you kept going until you hit something else you had to grab on to the rails and pull yourself around.

The other astronauts managed it. The Doctor, of course, seemed perfectly at home.

'It's so strange, isn't it?'

The Doctor shook his head. 'No.'

Debbie should have known.

The Doctor wasn't smiling. Now they were up here, now they stood a real chance of finding Miranda, some of the pent-up anger and frustration was starting to surface.

Debbie decided to leave him alone for a moment or two and turned her attention to the front of the cabin, where the commander and pilot were in negotiations with Houston. Their presence was a fait accompli fait accompli. Debbie and the Doctor had submitted to a search, the astronauts had checked the cabin. They'd found the sonic suitcase, but not the guns and Semtex they'd expected to find. The Doctor had explained why he was here, and with all the fervour (and persuasiveness) of a man recently rereleased into the community, had shown them his tiny collection of broken alien artefacts.

NASA and the shuttle crew seemed to have agreed that the Doctor and Debbie weren't dangerous they didn't represent an immediate physical threat to Atlantis Atlantis, and they weren't on a suicide mission.

Mather and Sawyer were watching over them. The crew were keeping them on the flight deck, where they could see them. Strapped in their seats, but not tied up. Kim Sawyer was blonde, Mather was a black man, the oldest man on board, and had a bearing and a discipline about him that went above and beyond even his colleagues. A military man, Debbie guessed.

'They're taking a long time,' Debbie whispered.

'This is an unusual situation for them,' the Doctor told her. 'It's going to take them a while to work out what they have to do. NASA mission planners go through every scenario. I wouldn't be surprised if there's some protocol about stowaways.'

'What if that's to turn around and go straight home?'

The Doctor considered that. 'It's possible. They have an AOA option Abort Once Around. One orbit of the Earth, then back home. But this mission's been planned for years; it's cost a fortune. They won't throw that away unless they have to.'

'You two: quiet.'

'No need to raise your voice, Commander Fairchild,' the Doctor said sweetly.

'You're in serious trouble. I don't know who you are or '

The radio crackled. 'Atlantis. This Doctor's a British businessman. He's mentioned in Time Time magazine this month. Well... more than that, he's one of their Top Fifty People of the Decade. Deborah Gordon is his girlfriend. Stand by.' magazine this month. Well... more than that, he's one of their Top Fifty People of the Decade. Deborah Gordon is his girlfriend. Stand by.'

Debbie giggled. 'Don't believe everything you read in the papers,' she advised.

'This some sort of stunt?' the commander asked. 'A publicity gimmick?'

'No,' the Doctor said, deadly serious. He checked his pocket watch. 'Look at that even works in zero gravity. Superb craftsmans.h.i.+p.'

Debbie knew what was coming next. She peered out of the window, checked the horizon.

They all saw it at the same time.

'What is it?' the pilot asked.

'A s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p,' Debbie told them.