Doctor Who - Downtime Part 26

'Only one incoming call in the past week, sir. I've the report here.' He presented Crichton with a file and pointed out the caller details. 'It's the school secretary again.'

'Hmm.'

The Captain glanced round the office, apparently checking that they were alone. 'Is there a problem, sir?'

Crichton nodded coldly. 'I've just been contacted by a Miss Sarah Jane Smith. She used to be attached to UNIT in the early days. She says she's been talking to Lethbridge-Stewart.

She also says he's in London.'

Cavendish, decided Crichton, was a supreme example of UNIT training. Faced with this accusation, he managed to look convincingly surprised. 'That's impossible, sir. Why hasn't Grieve alerted us? Unless it's this computer business.'

'Miss Smith also said she spoke to you here at HQ.'

Cavendish gave a little laugh. 'Hardly, sir.'

It was too much. He was so infuriatingly smooth. 'What's going on, Cavendish? And what do you know about New World University?'

There was a knock. Crichton glowered. 'Come!'

Sergeant Beagles appeared in the doorway. He was carrying a battered cardboard file. 'Excuse me, sir, but I found this in the security vault. It's a full MoD report on the London Event of Sixty-eight.'

He reached in front of Cavendish and placed it on the desk.

'Like I said sir, it's pre-UNIT, so I doubt it exists except on hard copy.' A twinkle came into his eye. 'And there's a lot here about Yeti, too, sir.'

It was the first time Brigadier Crichton had smiled that day.

'Well done, Sergeant. Perhaps this'll throw a bit of light on proceedings. Get every man we have on standby.'

Sergeant Beagles returned the security key, saluted and left.

Brigadier Crichton was about to turn back to Cavendish when he noticed Corporal Ishani still hovering in the doorway.

'Sorry, sir, but the courier's still waiting.'

'Tell him I'm on manoeuvres, Corporal.' He picked up the Home Office letter and walked to a filing cabinet. He filed it under I for Interfering Politicians. 'Tell him anything you like, but tell him I'm not here.'

Ishani collided with Corporal White in the door. 'Sir?'

'What is it, Corporal? I'm busy.'

'There's two people to see you, sir.'

'Now what?'

'There's a Miss Smith. Says she spoke to you earlier.'

'Aha. The redoubtable Sarah Jane Smith. And who's the other?'

'It's Desmond Pennington, sir. The Education Secretary.'

'Good G.o.d, not together?'

'No, sir.'

Crichton turned to face his desk. It was a moment before he realized that the room was empty. Cavendish had gone, and so had the file on the London Event.

24.

The Boat omewhere something was chugging gently. The Brigadier Sseemed to be floating, a cradled drifting motion that was so comfortable and pleasing that he wanted to stay asleep. He opened his eyes and saw Kate bending over him.

'h.e.l.lo, Dad.' She smiled with an affection that he had forgotten could go with families. He realized that she had been holding his hand. It was another dream. Behind her, a shoal of coloured fish hovered in the air, flas.h.i.+ng and flickering.

'Where am I?' he mouthed. He felt woozy. He could see a low ceiling and a window that ran parallel above the side of the bed where he was lying. Lights darted back and forth across the surfaces.

'You're on the boat,' Kate said gently.

'Ah.' That brought everything into focus. He saw that the fish were part of a hanging mobile that was turning in the afternoon suns.h.i.+ne. It was reflecting lozenges of light around the cabin.

Kate squeezed his hand again. 'We had to bring you here.

How do you feel now?'

'We?' he asked and tried to sit up. He winced. Something had just hit him on the inside of his head.

She pushed him firmly back into the pillow. 'No, Dad. You stay there. You were mugged by some Chillys. Danny ran after me and fetched me back.'

'Danny who?'

Another figure slid into his field of vision. A young man with gelled hair and gla.s.ses. He was holding a mug of tea and had a terribly familiar look to him.

'Daniel Hinton, Brigadier. School House '91.' The boy had the sort of nervous smile that usually meant he couldn't hand in last night's prep.

Lethbridge-Stewart smiled. 'I remember.' Everywhere today it was memories. He was drowning in them. He hoped it wasn't his life flas.h.i.+ng before him.

He took the tea. The mug had a fierce picture of rampant nurses waving banners and was marked 'Save the NHS'. One of Kate's, no doubt. He eyed the boy again. It was difficult to think of him as anything other than a pupil, even if he had forcibly departed Brendon three years before. 'We've met again quite recently. Am I right? On something called the astral plane.'

Danny beamed with satisfaction. 'It wasn't entirely wasted then.'

'Extraordinary,' declared the Brigadier and sipped his tea.

The chugging sound altered in pitch and the cabin dipped for a second. The fish mobile swung freely from the drawing-pin that held it up.

'h.e.l.lo,' the Brigadier said. 'We're moving.'

He ignored Kate's protest and pulled himself off the bed.

From the window, he could see the water and a bank of green foliage sliding past. Still uncertain of his legs, he made his way, hand over hand, to the steps that led up on deck.

The little man with wild hair and a huge scruffy coat who was working the tiller came to attention as soon as he saw the Brigadier emerge.

'Sir. Glad to see you're all right, sir.'

Lethbridge-Stewart squinted in the sunlight at their unlikely pilot. Behind him, Kate was saying, 'Harrods saved you from the Chillys, Dad.'

The little man nodded. 'Bunch of hooligans, sir. The lad reckoned we were best off well away from them.'

'Thank you er... Harrods?'

'Sir,' he barked.

The Brigadier surveyed the ca.n.a.l banks. They were a ma.s.s of overgrown vegetation. The narrow boat was chugging west, away from the city. It occurred to him that after today's fiasco on the roads, this was the most reliable way to travel. It had been a sensible move to get away from trouble, even if he wasn't quite sure exactly where they were going.

The narrow boat looked in good shape, colourfully painted with troughs of daffodils set along the roof. But then that sort of orderliness was just what he would have expected from Kate. He liked to think she took after him in that respect.

Gardening was something he had never had time for as a soldier, but he'd kept a spruce patch in his quarters at Brendon, and once he'd retired, he was going to have a place with a large plot to indulge himself in. Above anything, he had always wanted an apple tree.

He glanced at Harrods again. The little tramp was still standing to attention. 'Army, aren't you?' the Brigadier observed. 'On your uppers?'

'RAF, sir. Flight Sergeant Haroldson. Squadron got disbanded, sir.'

That was a familiar enough story. The Brigadier could only sympathize. 'Like losing your family.' He noticed Kate's affectionate smile again and returned it with interest.

'Get called Harrods, sir, 'cos I'm fussy where I kip down.'

He had standards too. The Brigadier would far rather lead one man like Harrods than a hundred of the self-satisfied types that Cavendish represented. 'Thank you, Flight Sergeant.

Carry on.'

'Sir.'

With a look of approval, the Brigadier ducked back under the door. 'The company you keep's a real eye-opener, Kate.'

'I thought they were with you,' she said.

Danny snapped shut the lid of a metal trunk, but not before the Brigadier saw a jumble of coloured bricks and train tracks inside.

'We can't stay here, Brigadier,' the boy said urgently. 'The Intelligence is hunting us.'

'Both of us?' The Brigadier sat down on the bed again.

Under Danny's coat he glimpsed a green and yellow sweats.h.i.+rt. 'Aren't you one of these Chilly characters too?'

Danny was in earnest. 'New World's a front to bring the Intelligence back through. It's an evil spirit that got bound to the Earth.'

This was the sort of hok.u.m that the Doctor usually came out with, and he was usually right. Of course, the Doctor had never had to write an official report after the event. Over the years, Lethbridge-Stewart had become a dab hand at glossing down the sometimes unbelievable evidence of his own eyes for the upper echelons to read. This sort of talk took him right back to what they they now termed 'The Blunder Days'. He had learned to be a lot more open-minded during that era. Frankly, now termed 'The Blunder Days'. He had learned to be a lot more open-minded during that era. Frankly, they they didn't know what didn't know what they'd they'd missed. missed.

Daniel Hinton had certainly been a misguided nuisance when he was at school, but he had never been a liar. There was a distinct possibility that the boy was right. The Brigadier could remember some garbled explanation that the Doctor had given about trying to reverse the power on the Intelligence.

The blasted thing was defeated, not destroyed. But he and the Doctor were barely acquainted in those days and he'd never really understood the implications. As it was, he was working on his own now.

'Trust no one. Isn't that right, Danny? Not even my people at UNIT.'

Kate had been watching the two of them with a look of growing perplexedness. 'Just listen to you. Who do I call first?

Police, exorcist or psychiatrist?'

Danny ignored her. 'The whole city's fouled up. The computer Internet's virally infested.'

At last, the pieces were forming up together. The Brigadier looked to his pupil for confirmation. 'And that's the Intelligence's new body?'

Danny frowned almost apologetically. 'It won't stop there.'

This was not what the Brigadier wanted to hear. His daughter had been threatened and he refused to believe that some shapeless ma.s.s of malevolent thoughts that didn't even feasibly exist was carrying out a personal vendetta against him. No one had so much as seen any Yeti, even he had only imagined one. He was determined to find some other acceptable explanation. If he could, he would put it down to bad dreams after a toasted cheese supper, or too much nutmeg on one of Celia's rice puddings. The rest was just coincidence.

He looked at Danny's Chilly sweats.h.i.+rt and knew that he was fooling himself. That really annoyed him. Out of sheer perversity, he suddenly snapped, 'Nonsense. The Intelligence was driven out! I was there!'

'No!' exploded Danny. 'It's trapped. It can't break its link until all its old icons of power are destroyed. One icon still remains. The final Locus.'

'How do you know?' said Kate.