Doctor Who_ Enlightenment - Barbara Clegg [35]
Outside the ‘Danger’ door, Wrack was setting the force field control, Turlough at her elbow. She stepped back.
‘Now. Open it,’ she ordered. Turlough’s palms were sweating and his hands shook as he moved the lever and pushed the heavy door open. Wrack went on into the empty grid room, and after a second’s hesitation, he followed her.
The Doctor was talking fast and frantically. He was not sure how much Striker and the First Mate believed him, but he had to convince them.
‘I tell you that’s how Wrack was positioned when the Greek ship exploded,’ he said desperately. ‘She was lying level! And when Davey’s was destroyed! She was practically alongside him! Don’t you remember?’
Neither seemed to be paying any attention. Striker went on shouting for more sail. But Marriner suddenly turned away from the speaking-tube. ‘That’s everything we’ve got,’
he said in quiet desperation, and looked to the Doctor, as though asking him for something.
‘We can’t pull away from her,’ the Time Lord responded grimly. ‘She’s got us where she wants us!’ But a second later he lifted his head, and the old fighting light was back in his eyes. ‘The Focus!’ he said, with sudden inspiration.
‘We must find the Focus.’
Tegan and Marriner looked at him in bewilderment.
‘She must have managed it!’ he said to them irritably, as though they were half-wits. ‘She must have got it aboard somehow!’ And then as Tegan looked at him blankly, he almost shook her. ‘Did she give you anything?’ he asked frantically. ‘When we were aboard her ship? Anything at all? Think!’
‘No!’ the girl exclaimed defensively, tears pricking behind her eyelids. But it was not anger that was making the Doctor shout, it was sheer frustration. ‘It’s here somewhere! It has to be!’ he said, letting her go. and looking wildly round the room. Tegan began to think he was having some sort of brainstorm. ‘ What has to be here?’
she asked.
‘The point of Focus!’ the Doctor’s voice was long-suffering. ‘Without it, the power she channels is useless!’
Marriner decided to take a hand. ‘What power?’ he asked, only half-believing.
But there was something in the Time Lord’s voice that convinced him, as he answered softly, ‘The power of darkness’.
Wrack picked her way, sure-footed, to the centre of the grid. Turlough watched her from the doorway with a thumping heart. Wrack stood motionless for a second, and then slowly raised her arms and looked upwards. As she stared into the eye-shaped opening above her, the crystal that was its pupil slowly seemed to darken. From where Turlough stood, it was as if a beam, not of light, but of blackness, enveloped her. All that he could see was her pale face, floating as though disembodied. And the whole room grew dimmer.
‘What would this Focus look like?’ Tegan felt desperate. ‘It could be anything!’ the Doctor said irritably. But he stopped flinging himself around the wheel-house and peering into corners and examining nautical instruments, and he looked at her again as though she had a reasonable degree of intelligence.
‘Probably a crystal of some sort,’ he went on. ‘So big, perhaps,’ he held up his fingers in measurement. ‘Could be part of a jewel. A clasp – the hilt of a sword –’ The expression on Tegan’s face stopped him. ‘Part of a jewel?’
she said, in an odd voice.
The grid room was darker still. Wrack called to some strange invisible power, and as she intoned, her voice became more distant and echoing, until finally it died away. In the silence that followed, her face seemed to change. It contorted until it was almost unrecognisable.
Then the lips moved again, mouthing silently at first, until a voice filled the room. ‘I am here.’ It was not Wrack’s voice, but a man’s, speaking through her mouth. With a gulp of terror, Turlough knew that he had been right. It was the voice of the Black Guardian.
The Doctor hurried ahead, Tegan and Marriner in his wake. Tegan