Doctor Who_ Father Time - Lance Parkin [88]
‘There are two of you,’ Ferdy said. ‘Two of you on this entire planet. You and the Doctor.’
‘Oh, there can’t be’ She laughed. ‘What would be the odds of that? It’s rare, I know it’s rare, but –’
‘Two of you,’ Ferdy insisted.
‘You can’t possibly know that,’ she told him, still not angry with him. ‘You’ve been round and checked, have you?’
‘I know because I know that you are not of this world, you are not of this time.’
Miranda frowned.
‘You are not human. You and the Doctor are two of a kind: time-travellers. You have a unique destiny.’
Miranda looked around, wondering why she wasn’t getting the joke. ‘You don’t read Teen Titans comics by any chance?’
‘Miranda, you are the last of your race,’ Ferdy continued, ‘and you alone –’
‘Wait a minute.’ She laughed, a little nervously. ‘You said Dad was one, too. And he’s not even my real dad – my parents didn’t have two hearts. What are you on?’ She didn’t understand why Ferdy was doing this. She waited for the punchline. She wanted him to get whatever it was off his chest, so they could get back to –
‘Those weren’t your real parents.’
‘They were.’ She stood up, annoyed now. ‘Ferdy, where are you getting this from?’
‘The Librarinth. It’s a place where all the records are stored, along with art treasures, blueprints, genetic codes. Most of it is still out of bounds, but my family have limited access.’
‘I think you ought to go.’ She didn’t know what he was doing this for, and it was beginning to scare her. She’d invited a maniac into her house. Into her bed. She started heading towards the door.
Ferdy grabbed her arm. ‘I have travelled more than a million years into the past to avenge the death of my brother,’ he told her. ‘I came here to kill you.’
And then he pulled a long, curved knife from his jacket pocket.
* * *
Chapter Twenty
Don’t Leave Me This Way
Miranda listened as Ferdy told her. The knife stayed in his hand the whole time.
He told her about the far future. He told her that in the future the universe had been devastated, drained of energy, with whole galaxies uninhabited and uninhabitable. Somehow – no one was quite sure how – this was the fault of her people, the last remnants of which imposed their rule on the other survivors.
Ferdy – Ferran – was the ruler of one of these other groups. From his description, his civilisation sounded like a fascist dictatorship, although he seemed proud of that. There were many other groups, including – from what Miranda could put together – a group of goblin shapeshifters and a race of robot gangsters. These huddled on their shattered planets, eking out what they could with whatever resources were left. They had advanced science, but precious few resources to apply that science in a practical form.
For a thousand years, the tyrant Emperor had controlled all time and space travels, and operated a secret police force that ruthlessly crushed all dissent before it had even happened, using arcane technologies.
Ferdy’s mother, then later his elder brother, had led a revolution. They had stormed the Emperor’s palace, butchered most of his family, scattered the rest. Ferdy’s brother had tracked the Imperial Family down through time and space, killed them where he found them.
Miranda had pieced together the next part. She was the Last One. She was the daughter and heir of the Emperor, and the last survivor of her entire race. Her stepfather, the Doctor, was one too, but one from an earlier period. He was a war criminal, a man who’d destroyed whole planets.
He didn’t need to show her the strange (alien) bracelet he wore on his left wrist. He said it was a time machine, with just enough power for a recall signal. Somehow, just looking at it, she knew he was telling her the truth. It was the same feeling she’d had just before she’d fainted a week ago. ‘Time sensitivity