Doctor Who_ Last Man Running - Chris Boucher [80]
‘You mean Belay and his firster friends?’ Monly said.
‘Forget about it, The. Their time is over. He and all his kind are going to be... disadvantaged, shall we say?’
‘What are his kind?’ Leela asked loudly. She was standing now and glaring at Monly.
‘Firsters,’ he said coldly.
‘And disadvantaged?’ she demanded. ‘Does that mean killed?’
‘If necessary,’ he said. ‘We need to simplify things. What we need is a war. Wars simplify everything.’
‘That’s why you were sent here?’ the Doctor said. ‘To start a war?’
‘To provide the weapons for a like-minded group of patriots.’
Leela toyed with her knife. She looked ready to leap at his throat. ‘You mean there are others as mad as you are?’
‘You’d be surprised how many.’
‘Would I?’ she said and threw the knife at him.
The move was so sudden and so blurringly quick that Monly had no time to react to it. Only the force field that surrounded Leela prevented the throw from killing him. When the knife struck it there was a vivid spark, which was immediately swallowed up in a black flash like a thunder storm recorded in negative. Static shimmered and sparkled over the knife as it lay at Leela’s feet, and she made no attempt to pick it up again or to move from the spot where she was standing.
When Monly recovered from the shock he was furious at being made to feel vulnerable. ‘Time for you to get back to my experiment, I think,’ he raged.
The Doctor stood between him and the alcove. ‘It was a fighter’s natural response,’ he said reasonably, holding up his hands in a placatory gesture. He did not want to take a chance on overpowering Monly without finding out what he had done to Kley and the others, and what little surprises he might have managed to embed in these systems. He could have rigged remote activation, fail-safes, booby traps, all kinds of nastiness. Monly was the type who would derive immense satisfaction from devising a hideous aftermath to his own defeat and capture. The Doctor had faced warped individuals like him so many times before, creatures lost in their fantasies of death and destruction.
‘Get out of my way,’ Monly said with enough casual confidence to convince the Doctor that he had indeed got unrevealed resources at his disposal.
The Doctor stood his ground. ‘What satisfaction will you get?’ he argued. If it came to it, in the end, he would have no choice but to risk stopping him physically. He could not let Leela be pushed back into the darkness.
‘I shall expand the sum of all knowledge,’ Monly said without a trace of irony.
It struck the Doctor that it was not just Leela’s sense of reality that had been under severe pressure. How often had Monly visited this alien nightmare? If he was not mad to begin with but just slightly unbalanced, this installation would build a feedback loop in his brain chemistry to intensify whatever it could find that was destructive in him. ‘Do you have time for that?’ the Doctor asked.
‘I will have when you give me the secret of the device that protects your blue box.’ Monly stepped very close to him and stared into his face. ‘A face-to-fact deal, isn’t that what you said?’
The Doctor returned his stare. ‘Why is it so important to you?’ he asked softly.
‘Do you still deny it’s your ship?’
There was an edge about the voice, a poorly disguised boredom. The Doctor realised Monly was asking a question to which he already knew the answer. Leela must have told the copy Doctor. ‘I thought I’d already admitted it.’
‘No.’
‘Yes.’
‘You didn’t mean it.’
‘Of course I meant it. The TARDIS is a vehicle.’
‘TARDIS? Strange name. An acronym, perhaps, for –’ he spoke the words with a flourish – ‘“Time And Relative –”’
‘You knew,’ the Doctor said.
‘Of course I knew. I know everything about you. You have no secrets from me, Thedoctor. Which laboratory developed it, exactly?’
From the centre of the chamber Leela laughed mockingly.
‘You are an ignorant fool. You know nothing about the Doctor and me.
‘Shut her