Doctor Who_ Original Sin - Andy Lane [132]
She sighed, pleased with herself. She hated loose ends. Now she was safe, and the mysterious man who paid her wages – her other wages – would be grateful.
Perhaps she would even get a bonus.
Something warm trickled down the Doctor’s cheek. He didn’t know whether it was perspiration or blood. He’d lost a lot of both in the past ten minutes.
Ten minutes? It felt more like half a lifetime. The years he had spent on Pella Satyrnis during his fifth incarnation seemed like a snap of the fingers compared with the time he had spent held down in Tobias Vaughn’s chair while the metal claws of the butlerbot went to work on him. Pain had a way of stretching time like warm toffee, until every second was a year and every year a millennium.
If the something that he had been waiting for didn’t happen soon, it was going to be too late.
Red light flooded in from the window, making the office look like an anteroom of hell. How very apt, the Doctor thought. He shifted slightly in the chair, and suppressed a cry as he tried to find some part of his body that was untouched, a few square inches of flesh upon which he could rest, but the butlerbot had done its work well. Under Vaughn’s expert tutelage it had in-flicted so much pain upon him, abused his nerve endings to such an extent, that he had felt the dark shadow of his eighth incarnation hovering over him, 224
awaiting the signal to take over. Not that it would have done him much good.
Vaughn would quite happily have tortured his way through the Doctor’s remaining bodies, one by one, in his obsessive and so far fruitless quest for the secret of temporal control.
Concentrating on each part of his body in turn, the Doctor tried to assess the damage. Sad to say, there wasn’t very much: some bruising and painful but superficial lacerations, a little internal bleeding, a snapped ligament or two. After all the agony, he felt strangely cheated. The least Vaughn could have done was to break a couple of bones. How was he ever going to get any sympathy from Bernice if there wasn’t a mark on him?
Assuming, of course, that he was going to see Bernice again. Numerous times during the questioning session he had noticed Vaughn break off and look away, staring through another set of eyes at events occurring elsewhere, issuing orders perhaps, or just monitoring the actions of his bots. He was doing it again now. Unfortunately, the Doctor hadn’t been able to take advantage of the man’s distraction. The bot’s claws had dug just as deeply, held him just as tightly, in the temporary absence of any controlling authority.
And yet . . .
Something was biting at the back of the Doctor’s mind – something that Vaughn had said earlier. He flicked back through the memories of the last twenty minutes, picking over the words that Vaughn had spoken, trying to spot meanings or implications that he had missed at the time.
‘Well, Doctor?’ Vaughn said, coming back to life, ‘are you ready to cooperate yet?’ His metal face was so close to the Doctor that the Time Lord could see every detail: the fake pores, the metal jowls, the artificial bristle that would never need shaving.
‘Give me a moment to catch my breath,’ the Doctor whispered, still trying to rediscover the words that he thought might be important. His mind was like a lumber room, full of odd memories, cross-linked in the strangest ways.
He would have to have a clear-out at some time.
‘Doctor,’ Vaughn said in his silk-soft tone, the one that meant he was at his most dangerous. ‘Doctor, I’m impatient.’
There! He could see Vaughn’s lips moving. What was he saying? ‘I am every bot built by INITEC.’ That was fairly unambiguous; Vaughn could operate every single robot built by the company that International Electromatics had become. And yet, a few seconds later: ‘I was in the bot who waved to you when you first arrived in your time machine . . . Every few minutes I would send my attention skipping from one bot to another, all over the Earth