Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [119]
There it was. The TARDIS. Hovering in the air, just a tendril’s length away from the monstrosity. Even now, even after all these centuries, Kreiner could feel the pull of the thing. He could feel the early 1960s scratching at the back of his skull, the corrupted memories of his first steps into the TARDIS console room. He didn’t remember the last time he’d actually seen the TARDIS, but he remembered it coming and going in his nightmares, as if the Doctor had wanted to look in on the insides of his head over the years. He remembered all those months spent on Ordifica, and then Anathema, waiting and praying for the ship to come and take him home. He even remembered the exact moment, the precise second, when he’d realised that he didn’t care about home any more.
It was only then that he saw it. The monstrosity in front of him was spreading itself thin now, stretching so far into the sky that Kreiner could see right through its skin, all the way to the space at its heart.
There, at the dead centre of the square, was a second TARDIS. A second blue box. And the light on the roof was flashing, telling the world it was getting ready for lift-off.
Kreiner felt himself stumbling towards it, the machine parts in his legs struggling to go on despite the dirt and the leaking fluid inside his armour. His body felt numb from the drugs in his system, and he had the terrible sensation that he was going to trip up at any moment. That he wouldn’t make it in time, that the TARDIS was going to leave without him.
Because that had to be his TARDIS, didn’t it? The Eighth Doctor’s TARDIS, the one he’d first stepped into, all those years ago. It was the only thing that made sense. Somehow the Eighth Doctor had worked out what was happening, and come to tie up the loose ends, to meddle in his third self’s affairs. Kreiner didn’t know why he was running to it like this, or what he thought he was going to do or say once he got through the doors. He wasn’t sure whether he’d feel compelled to kill the Eighth Doctor, or whether he’d be able to ask the Time Lord to take him away from here and leave it at that. All he knew was that he could feel the armour crunching and squeaking against his skin, getting ready to be shed.
This was it. His one chance at a way out. The thing he’d been waiting for all these years, even when he’d told himself he’d given up. He suspected that this state of mind was something to do with the drugs, although it hardly seemed to matter. Kreiner knew he was walking right into the body of the monstrosity, but even Number Thirteen couldn’t touch him now. He cut his way through its flesh, felt the energy slide off his shiny black skin, let the armour use up the last of its power holding off the thing’s advances. For these last few seconds, he was indestructible.
The TARDIS in the square was vanishing. The ship was leaving. Father Kreiner was still a metre away, maybe a metre and a half. He felt one final burst of power in the machine systems of his legs, pushing his muscles to snapping point, launching his body towards the shape of the police box. He reached out with gauntlets that had been built for handling raw time, trying to sink his fingers into the side of the ship, to grasp the solid blue of the surface and cling to the machine as it took itself out of space-time.
Seeing that the gauntlets had been designed by Faction Paradox, it was entirely possible that this might have worked. Unfortunately, the individual who had once been called Fitz Kreiner was roughly half a second too late.
* * *
The show, wrapped up in the blue box shape it had copied from the TARDIS, pulled itself away from normal space and let the currents of time drag it off to its destination. The destination in question had been programmed into the TARDIS by the Doctor, who’d been given the coordinates by I.M. Foreman himself. The showman hadn’t been able to give the Doctor the exact details of the landing site, but he’d doubted it was important, as long as the time