Doctor Who_ Original Sin - Andy Lane [139]
On the other side of the window, the sky glowed with the distant fires.
Sixty seconds.
He pelted along the white, roundel-lined corridor that led away from the console room, ignoring the screams of pain from every limb, every muscle, skidding at the next junction and heading left past the boot cupboard, the rose garden and the swimming pool.
Fifty seconds.
A right and a sudden left led him through the library, past rows and rows of dust-covered tomes and a very surprised tabby cat.
Forty seconds.
To save time when he came to the spiral staircase in the centre of the library he slid down the bannister, hopping off two floors lower and limping as fast as he could across the echoing vault of the wine cellar.
Thirty seconds.
235
A broad white avenue led past paintings and statues from myriad worlds, myriad centuries, and terminated in a roundelled white wall which the Doctor flung himself against, panting, frantically searching for a small white button.
Twenty seconds.
The wall slid open, and five steps took the Doctor across the TARDIS airlock – a large room lined with hooks upon which quilted spacesuits with clear helmets hung – to the TARDIS’s back door.
Ten seconds.
Emerging from behind the TARDIS, in the small gap between it and the wall of Vaughn’s office, the Doctor discovered the butlerbot desperately attempting to collect the tea crockery with its plasma blade still lit.
Zero.
The room was shaking. Bernice had obviously come up with the goods, and the Doctor had to do the same. He used every last iota of his strength to wrench the arm holding the blade from its socket. The bot tried to resist, but he pushed it out of the way. It fell onto Vaughn’s desk in a shower of broken crockery, cracking the translucent surface. Holding its arm like a spear in one hand, its blade of pure energy pointing straight ahead, the Doctor shoved his key into the TARDIS lock for the second time in five minutes and kicked the door open.
Tobias Vaughn stood at the console, his hand closed around the knob of the door control. His head snapped around as the TARDIS doors opened.
‘Make the most of that dramatic entrance, Doctor,’ he said, ‘because it will be your last. This machine is childishly simple to operate.’
The Doctor took three steps into the centre of the console room and swung the butlerbot’s arm like an axe, turning the plasma blade into an arc of eye-numbing white that sliced through the air and Tobias Vaughn’s neck with equal ease. Coolant fluid sprayed into the air as his head tumbled from his shoulders, trailing wires and jagged blue sparks. In the few seconds before it hit the floor, the expression on it changed from triumph to surprise, and then to utter fury. It bounced twice, then came to rest lying on one ear. Bereft of a power source, the metal muscles surrounding the mouth and eyes drooped.
Vaughn’s body stood for a moment by the console, its hand still clutching at the door lever. Without Vaughn’s mind to control it, sub-systems and failsafes came into effect. The stocky metal body carefully sat, cross-legged, on the floor of the TARDIS and placed its hands, palms up, on its knees.
The Doctor moved slowly across to the console. He felt old. Old and tired.
His hands moved to the twin nubs of the telepathic circuits. As they tingled beneath his palms he reached out with his mind, seeking the heart of the TARDIS.
236
There! She surged up to greet him, glad, as always, of his company but reproachful that he had not communed with her for so long. He soothed, he apologized, he explained. She understood, and gladly lent him her energy.
The lights in the console room dimmed as the pure artron energy flowed into the Doctor’s body. He straightened up, feeling his pain, his tiredness and the dregs of despair that he had not been able to admit to having washed away.
‘You were taking a bit of a risk, weren’t you, Doctor?’ he murmured to himself. ‘Assuming that Vaughn kept his mind somewhere in his head.