Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [32]
Today, they seemed to want to know something specific. He wondered if he’d be able to survive long enough to find out what. Or, indeed, to remember the answers to any of their questions.
* * *
Sarah was driving the car back to the console room when she felt the ship land. It was the subtlest feeling there was, the sense of everything around you becoming suddenly attached. You noticed it only after you’d spent a while on board, but it was there, no question. She’d finally found somewhere to dump the soldiers, having discovered, in her travels, such diverse wonders as a room decked out as an Italian restaurant and a grand hall in which several thousand volumes of the TARDIS instruction manual were kept. Sarah seemed to remember the Doctor having a much smaller version, one big hardbacked book, but presumably that had just been the Time Lord equivalent of one of those ‘read this booklet first’ manuals you got at the top of the box when you bought a new computer.
The Doctor had always hated being around computers, back in the old days. It had taken Sarah ages to figure out why. It was for the same reason that she hated being around monkeys.
Monkeys always made her feel icky. They were too much like people. Too much of a reminder, maybe, that there were only two or three short genetic hops between the humans and the baboons. And the TARDIS? Not just a computer, not just a ship, but the Doctor’s best friend. It must have made him squirm, to have to deal with an Earth-made machine. With something that still relied on piggy-back boards and memory wafers. No wonder he’d made his pet robot look like a dog, thought Sarah. Anything to hide the wiring.
When she finally got back to the console room, Kode was standing over the control panels, looking dazed and bewildered. Lost Boy hovered nearby – if a word as graceful as ‘hovered’ could be applied to anything an Ogron did – keeping a close eye on him. The scanner had been activated, and outside the ship Sarah could see what looked like a prison cell. In the middle of the image stood several uniformed men, their clothes rumpled and covered in sweat. They were gathered around something on the floor, occasionally poking it with long black batons and swearing at it in the native dialect.
It took Sarah a depressingly long time to figure out what was going on.
‘The Doctor!’ she shouted. ‘They’re killing him!’
Kode stared at her stupidly. Lost Boy looked embarrassed.
‘Why aren’t you helping him?’ Sarah demanded.
‘Wait for you,’ Lost Boy explained.
‘Um,’ said Kode.
The boy’s eyes were cloudy, not focused. Sarah looked down at the stem of the console, where he’d opened up a service panel and wired his receiver into the workings. Of course. Without the receiver, he wasn’t picking up the TARDIS signals properly. Right now, he wasn’t even sure whose side he was on.
Sarah’s eyes settled on one of the soldiers’ guns, which Lost Boy had rested on the edge of the console. She picked it up, weighed it in her hand.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Do these things have some kind of stun setting? Only I’d quite like to score a moral victory.’
* * *
On… what had that planet been called? Ha’olam. On Ha’olam, the implant had predicted that he’d go mad, eventually. He’d heard it whispering to him in the night, telling him that if he didn’t find a way out – and there was no way out – he’d end up losing control. But he’d been in that prison for three years, and he’d kept hold of his sanity right up until the very last day. Sort of.
Ten days he’d been in Saudi Arabia. A week spent in processing, being pushed from one military base to the next. Three days here in the cell. Three days, and he’d already fallen further than he had on Ha’olam. This, he reminded himself, was the hard edge of history, not part of anybody’s equation. You couldn’t get away from it, not without help from the other world. From the TARDIS world.
Except that the TARDIS world didn’t make sense. That was what Badar had said, and the Doctor had agreed with him, in the end.
So, as the guards