Doctor Who_ The Blue Angel Part 6

'Instinct,' grunted the captain. 'When you've been on as many missions as I have, you learn to listen to your gut feelings. And right now my guts are gurgling pretty insistently that this is the one.'

The cave mouth glittered with ice, drawing them in. 'Quite,' said the Doctor. 'I bow down to your greater um... instincts and experience.'

'Huh,' said Blandish, and scowled at the Time Lord, who was now egging everyone up the gla.s.sy slope.

'Captain!' Belinda was panting a little with effort and irritated by the fake fur of her snorkel hood. 'Captain, communications with the s.h.i.+p are breaking up. Once we're inside the cave we won't be able to speak with them at all.'

'We're being jammed,' the captain growled.

'Indeed,' said Garrett, who was peering into the pale cavern.

Timon brought up the rear, blaster drawn, looking somewhat nervous.

The Doctor led the way. Blandish let him. Let him handle the danger. If anything leapt out at them, let the Doctor get it first. It would be no loss.

As they pushed along, their sheepskin boots started to fill with melt.w.a.ter. It was becoming wetter as it grew darker, and yet there was a definite sense of walking up into the Gla.s.s City of Valcea. Perhaps they were succeeding after all, in creeping up on the inhabitants unsuspected.

Captain Blandish was quietly excited. He tried not to give his feelings away as they inched up the sheeny tunnel, but his mind ran with images of what they might come across in the city above. It was his explorer's instinct taking the helm. This was the reason he was Captain, after all.

Garrett made them pause while he felt around in his backpack. Then heapproval at this, drowning out entirely whatever view their betters might have on this matter. Marn grinned wolfishly.

'I have your agreement, madam?' he asked Meisha.

'We must consult our Queen Belinda.'

Belinda was staring at them blankly. 'Hmm?'

Marn glared at her. 'Tell them, Belinda. Tell them we have to go back to Valcea.'

She wrinkled her nose. 'Oh, not there again.'

Marn couldn't believe it. 'It's your only chance of seeing your s.h.i.+p again, your people!'

She shrugged. 'It was a rubbish job anyway.'

Marn's voice went steely. 'Belinda...'

'Oh, very well, then,' she conceded, giving a surprisingly effective regal wave.

The Ghillighast shouted their approval again and Meisha cried, 'Fetch the dogs and the sleds! We prepare for action immediately, on this the very cusp of our brilliant new age!' She swung round on Marn. 'And you can find this Corridor that you say will deliver us to Valcea?'

'I can indeed, ma'am.'

Meisha was exhilarated at the idea of at last bringing the age-old antagonisms straight to the home of the Valceans. She was less forgetful of the past than she was outwardly feigning. 'Then we embark within the hour!'

She hurried off to make arrangements for the dogs and sleds.

'Well, thanks a lot, Marn,' grunted Belinda. She hefted the flagon of br.i.m.m.i.n.g liquor. 'I might as well finish this off if we're going out in that b.l.o.o.d.y cold again.'

Marn said, 'You want to see Timon again, don't you?'

'Timon!' sighed Belinda. She had almost forgotten her lover. Her eyes grew misty and she nodded and gradually sank into a doze as the preparations went on around her.

When Belinda woke, she and Marn and all of the Ghillighast were in transit, across s.h.i.+ning, luminous fields of ice, on robust wooden sleds pulled by huskies.

As the small boat glided directly under the bridge he reached up and clasped the stone and tried to heave himself up on to it. He wasn't terribly successful and depended on Compa.s.sion grasping his hands as his own grappled for purchase. 'Thanks.'

He grinned and steadied himself.

Compa.s.sion stared coolly at the dishevelled Time Lord. She slipped her gun away.

The Doctor tried to start again. Compa.s.sion's appraising silences could be disconcerting and he found himself covering them up with bl.u.s.ter. She wasn't the most sociable of companions. He thought she may be rather shy.

'Well, I'm certainly glad to see you,' he said. 'And the trusty old bus! The number twenty-two to Putney Common! When did you meet up with Iris, then? She's a card, isn't she?' He faltered. 'Where is is Iris by the way?' Iris by the way?'

'She's dead,' said Compa.s.sion. 'She was taken off screaming by some giant owls. The same thing happened to Fitz. They were probably eaten.'

The Doctor's face fell. 'What happened? I mean...' He took a hesitant step. 'They can't be dead! Iris couldn't... How did you escape?'

'I hid on the bus. They overlooked me.'

The Doctor became businesslike. 'We're going after these owl things. We're going to find out what's happened.'

'I wouldn't bother,' said Compa.s.sion.

'You certainly don't don't seem very bothered.' seem very bothered.'

'There isn't any point,' said Compa.s.sion. 'As far as I can see, what we should do is find our own TARDIS again. Iris had taken us off after some women and a boy, looking for these civilians who had gone off and lost themselves in the Corridors. It was a very foolhardy plan. We should find the TARDIS and leave.'

The Doctor was depressed by her att.i.tude. 'Where did you leave the TARDIS?' And then he interrupted himself with, 'And how did you operate her?'

'I don't know.'

And what's more, he thought, how did you even find me here?

Wasn't it a tad convenient that she should just swan out of the ether in a red double-decker? He found he was staring at her earpiece again, which glinted in the blue twilight of the Corridor. He knew that thing put her in touch with all sorts of unfathomable frequencies. But then perhaps the TARDIS had alerted her, tuning itself to the Doctor's biorhythms in the Corridors, good and trusty, ever-vigilant companion that it was?

Even if not, he decided perhaps he should tinker with that contraption of hers, so it was the TARDIS's own signals that had dominance over any others she might he quietly picking up. A kind of friendly filter. If she was to travel with him, he wanted to be sure she was on his side. And with the TARDIS's help, he was sure she could become an all-round better person and happier in herself.

Compa.s.sion was bold before his scrutiny. She turned and led the way back on board Iris's bus.

It seemed that everyone was converging on Valcea.

Or what remained of Valcea. The crust of land that was only, really, part of a world, that ringed the ruined City of Gla.s.s.

A new night was coming down on the Valcean remains and with it came the promise of war.

The Nepotist Nepotist charged its engines and its weaponry, preparing to engage with the Sahmbekart fleet that bristled and shone with malevolence all around it in the murky atmosphere of the Enclave. charged its engines and its weaponry, preparing to engage with the Sahmbekart fleet that bristled and shone with malevolence all around it in the murky atmosphere of the Enclave.

In the Corridors, stretching and warping and radiating out from the City of Gla.s.s, where ten thousand sparking forms lay dead and dying, forces were gathering to converge on this final battleground, from which would spring conflict that Daedalus was sure would spread throughout galaxies that even in their outermost quadrants dwarfed the confines of the Enclave.

Daedalus sat in his wrecked and shattered stateroom and concentrated on his further plans. With only a few surviving favourite Valceans surrounding him, he drew tighter the web that would urge the denouement on.

He sent Corridors deeper, deeper into the galaxy foreign to him, las.h.i.+ng them like tripwires, like grappling hooks, into the paths of unwary races on the other side, knowing how intrigued, how curious they would grow.

And how, slowly but surety, they would find themselves drawn into his web.

He sent them out, unfolding them across s.p.a.ce like invitations; through time, too, to the locations he had memorised from the journals and diaries of a traveller he had once known.

Corridors extended to far-flung worlds with names like Telosa, Skaro, Wertherkind, Sonturak. And it was Daedalus, not the Nepotist Nepotist, who alerted the Federation to the possibility of war on their doorstep.

Fitz found his admiration for this woman growing, even in the midst of their flight from the heart of the volcano and the ransacking owls.

With the shrieks of the ragged primitives as they were seized up and eaten ringing in his ears, he kept his mind on pursuing Iris and her horse up the perilous track to the lip of the volcano.

It took every ounce of his energy to get his own mount to follow in the right direction. He watched Iris's back and her golden hair bouncing on her shoulders and tried not to think of the carnage back in the dusty arena they had left.

But what a woman. What a fantastic bird.

He wondered, when all of this was over, what she'd say if he... well, not made a move exactly... but suggested that he... well, not swap allegiances exactly... but asked if he could join her on her bus... off into whatever startling adventure she was off to next. And then, as time went by, she might think more fondly of him... who knows? She might already think he was s.e.xy. He caught himself thinking such lecherous things, and grinned to himself even as he felt himself choke up. Perhaps the TARDIS hadn't done such a bad job of putting him back together.

Up they came to the very lip of the volcano, the apex of the dead mountain and they could see the sterile landscape stretched out before them for hundreds of craggy miles around. Geysers blew and glaciers crept in the crotches of mountain ranges in every direction.

The pathway led back down the sheer side of the mountain and Fitz felt his bile rise and his head whirl at the sight of the gradient they now had to deal with.

'Depressing, isn't it?' beamed Iris cheerfully. For a second he was sure she was giving him the glad eye.

'I don't think I'll make it,' he said.

'Yes you will, my s.e.xy little fella. Come on!'

Iris plunged her horse down into the hazardous decline.

Fitz's heart jumped several beats at her epithet and then he persuaded himself, just as swiftly, that she talked to him like that only to get him to do exactly what she wanted.

Now they were on the other side, they could hear nothing of the owls or the pathetic remnants of human beings they had left behind. Fitz was glad to block them out of his thoughts and stop himself from feeling guilty.

They thundered down the blackened mountainside and his brains were becoming addled, he was sure; they were turning into mincemeat, into scrambled eggs, by the jogging and thudding and the pounding of hooves on diamond-hard magma.

Could he leave the Doctor's company for this woman?

What would the Doctor say?

He couldn't imagine never seeing the Doctor again. There was so much they hadn't said and done, and since Sam left...

He'd never said goodbye to her, either.

If he left the Doctor now... And who was to say he hadn't already? He felt a nasty pang, somewhere in his gut, and suddenly he could see the Doctor's face before him and he remembered how he had laughed when Sam told the story of her erstwhile infatuation with the Time Lord.

But Fitz could see how it might work. All that power and intelligence, that charming intensity... Even if he was raving mad.

Fitz swallowed hard. He was the one who was raving mad. He was in the midst of the most ridiculous danger, horse-riding down a mountainside, probably about to die and, in the final few minutes of his life, what was pa.s.sing through his mind? Not the greatest, most fulfilling moments in this life but a consideration of his chances of getting laid by Iris... and even of getting laid by the Doctor. What was it about Time Lords? What had really happened to his poor old head?

He tried to keep his mind on the horse-riding.

Iris shouted back at him, hair streaming in the smoky air: 'There's some kind of rock formation coming up. Look! The ground flattens out, but we'll be in a kind of...'

Maze. The word was maze.

As soon as they got themselves, breathless but safe, to a less steep incline they were wedged into walls of filthy, sooty rock, a narrow pa.s.sageway that only just let them and their horses through.

It was a labyrinth of petrified lava and they were rattling quite blithely into it, losing themselves in its obscurity.

And then there was something worse to add to Fitz's growing list of grievances.

They hadn't left the owls behind after all.

Their shrieking cries heralded them as they flew straight over the mouth of the volcano, and came whistling down out of nowhere, to pick the fugitives out of their maze.

'Iris!' yelled Fitz. 'They're coming after us!'

Iris just spurred on her horse ever harder and led the way left, right, left, left, right again, plunging ever deeper into the heart of the maze.

And Fitz just had to follow, watching the froth on the lips of his exhausted horse fleck pink with exertion.

The Nepotist Nepotist, it turned out, had actually used most of its power reserves in the demolition job it had unleashed on the City of Gla.s.s. So when it came to dealing with the Sahmbekarts the best it could do was muster a force-s.h.i.+eld and sit waiting for the worst.

Tai-Nur, the s.h.i.+p's engineer, shouted out through the intercom, above the horrendous noise of the engines, that he was giving the best power he could. He couldn't give the captain any better.

Blandish threw himself back into his command chair and rapidly weighed up his options. He glared irritably at Garrett, who seemed fairly unperturbed, as ever, by their predicament. But this was worse than anything they had faced in any of their missions. Five years exploring the furthermost reaches of the galaxy and several subsequent years policing the dangerous barriers between empires none of it compared to this.

The Nepotist Nepotist was a sitting duck and there was little they could do to defend themselves. was a sitting duck and there was little they could do to defend themselves.

Where was the Federation backup? They hadn't even made contact yet. They couldn't be that far away, could they?