Doctor Who_ Cat's Cradle_ Times Crucible - Marc Platt [91]
"Seal it up," demanded Vael. "Don't let it out again!"
Inside the attic, the Process was groaning balefully.
Ace looked at Vael with contempt. "What do you want?"
"You took your time," said the Doctor. "Is it a change of hearts, or has a fair-weather friendship taken a turn for the worse?"
Vael leant on the wall with both arms and gasped his breath back.
"He's been kicked out," said Ace. "He's out on his ear because he didn't make the complete bastard stakes."
"I don't apologize for my friend," said the Doctor, "she's had a fraught time lately. Much of it due to you." He crouched and smoothed his hand over the fractures in the wall. As he suspected, they were slowly healing.
"Let's get out of here," said Ace. "We've got to get Shonnzi and the others back."
Vael looked up. His eyes were red from weeping. "Impossible," he said.
"Only if you know it's impossible," the Doctor declared. "So be quiet."
"The Phazels are gone," Vael insisted. "The younger Process wanted new guards."
"Why? Can't it manage without you?" sneered Ace.
"It's driven out the older Process. It thinks it's creating a new world. Starting again. It still has slaves on the first Phase of the City."
Ace's eyes blazed. "But it'll be using the older Phazels to control their younger selves. The same people. What about Shonnzi? And Chesperl with the baby?"
"How many Phases of the City are there?" said the Doctor.
"Three," she said, but she looked sick.
"Young, older and eldest. I think you'll find it's always been the same here, Ace. Always oppression and slavery in a horrible paradox."
Ace released an expletive that she had only known on Earth. "What happened to the oldest ones?"
The Doctor concentrated and threw a grim thought out to Vael. "You can tell me, Vael, but my friend is very young."
Vael nodded slightly. "Retired," he said aloud. He thought, "It ate them."
The Doctor closed his eyes. "Of course." "And your future self?"
"There's no future . . ."
"Wilby!" The Process's iced iron voice came from a still healing gap in the wall.
"I'm here," called the Doctor.
"The Future, it was stolen by you."
"If you say so."
"Now it is crushed."
"The Doctor's ship was stolen," shouted Ace.
The Doctor shushed her into silence. "There's a Gallifreyan present," he muttered with a sidelong glance at Vael. "Keep the anachronisms down."
"You're a walking anachronism yourself," she said.
"The Younger Process, it changes the City. Now changes to a new Now."
The Doctor put his head to the slowly closing gap. He felt an embarrassingly pleasurable glow of cruelty smoulder in his twin hearts. "Looks like curtains for you too then, doesn't it?" he said. He had devoted his lives to solving other people's problems, surely he was allowed to take this attack, of all attacks, personally?
The older Process snarled in its prison. "The world, it will all be renewed! All be changed. The Beginning, it will be rebegun. A new Creation. A new Future!"
"'How easily pleased are the foolish'," quoted the Doctor. "Pelatov. Folio three, canto sixteen, verse eighty-one."
There was a roar from inside the attic. The monster began to hurl itself against the wall again. The structure shuddered but held.
"Yeah," said Ace. "Well chuffed."
The Doctor tutted and looked at the sky. As he had feared, the stars were appreciably dimmer. Something had been set in motion. Some infernal new scheme was drawing off any residual power left in his ship. It could not endure much longer.
"Miserable creature! What have you done now?" he shouted in anger, but his voice was drowned by the commotion from inside.
"Doctor, we should get away from here," urged Vael.
Ace was tugging at the cable trapped under the wall. "This thing controls the TARDIS decorating, right? So if I dig it out, can you call up the lab?"
"No, Ace," the Doctor said sharply. "No explosions inside my TARDIS."
"It's only nitro," she protested. "Not enriched