Doctor Who_ Battlefield - Marc Platt [36]
Shou Yuing parked her 2CV in front of the Gore Crow.
Her morning had consisted of arguments with her parents for not having rung home the night before. In the end, she had walked out again and come back to find Ace and the Doctor. If they had left the hotel, she had agreed to follow them to the dig.
The army officer running up the drive towards her didn’t look as if he should be running at all. Too old, like a General from the Old Guard of the People’s Republican Government.
‘I’m commandeering your car,’ he said.
‘Excuse me?’ said Shou Yuing.
He held out a hand. ‘Give me the keys.’
‘What?’
The keys!’
She was too astonished to argue.
‘Thank you.’ he said and climbed into the 2CV.
Shou Yuing ran around the car and got into the passenger seat. ‘Just a second, this is my car!’
‘And I’m on urgent business, young lady. I’ll ensure you are completely reimbursed for petrol and inconvenience.’
He jammed the gears into reverse and backed his way out.
She looked at his cap badge. ‘You’re with UNIT, right?’
‘What do you know about that, miss...erm?’
‘Li Shou Yuing. I met Brigadier Bambera.’
‘Oh. really.’ He turned the car on to the main road.
‘Yes,’ she said. She thought he would be impressed, but he kept driving.
‘How did you get past the roadblock?’ he said.
‘Easy. They hadn’t closed off the back lanes.’
He smiled and nodded. ‘This Brigadier Bambera. I don’t suppose she mentioned someone called the Doctor?’
The stone eyes of the fish gargoyle returned the Doctor and Ace’s gaze. Its grotesque demon head blocked the entire end of the tunnel. Nostils flared in its painted snout, above a cavernous maw that teemed with steel teeth like swords. It was the medieval depiction of the gates of hell.
‘Just a portal.’ said the Doctor. ‘Clearly designed to frighten superstitious people off.’
‘It gives me the creeps,’ complained Ace.
‘It is a little overtheatrical.’
He started to feel round the edge of the mouth. ‘No coded pattern,’ he muttered.
‘No hidden switch?’ she said.
He shook his head. ‘Much too complicated.’
‘Then how are we going to get inside?’
He turned, smiled knowingly and tapped the side of his nose. Then he straightened up, cleared his throat as if he was about to begin a recital, and said, ‘It’s me. Open up!’
With a grating clash, the steel teeth separated and slid up and downwards into the fish’s jaws.
‘I refuse to ask how you did that,’ she said, staring into the dark throat beyond. ‘How did you do that?’
He looked rather self-satisfied. ‘It occurred to me that this tunnel was built to Merlin’s designs.’
‘But everyone thinks you’re Merlin.’
‘Exactly. The portal’s keyed to my voice pattern. Just the sort of thing I’d do.’ He stepped through the jaws into the darkness.
‘Are you Merlin?’ she called.
He reappeared and said, ‘No,’ and then added mysteriously, ‘But I could be, in the future. My personal future, that is. Which could be the past.’
He vanished again.
Ace stood for a moment, grabbing at the loose ends he always left dangling for her to pick up. ‘Right,’ she said doubtfully and clambered through after him.
The darkness she had seen through the gate was a deep ocean half-light: green and cool. The place hummed gently and rythmically like something asleep.
The Doctor was silhouetted against a softer watery glow from the far end of a passage. He was running his hand across the glistening walls. The ribbed contours were solid and covered in organic patterns. Patches of light emanated at random along the walls and floor like the glow of deep-sea fish.
‘Is this a submarine?’ she said as she reached him. ‘Or a spaceship?’
‘More than that, this is a craft for travelling between dimensions.’
‘It’s more like being inside some huge animal,’ she said.
He nodded and poked the wall with the tip of his umbrella. It quivered slightly and gurgled.
Ace stepped back in alarm. ‘Who built it?’
‘It wasn’t built, it was grown.’
‘Who grows spaceships?’
‘Very advanced bioengineers.