Doctor Who_ Peacemaker - James Swallow [58]
‘Martha. . . Martha. . . Martha!’ The Doctor choked on her name, for a brief moment his voice returning to normal. ‘Martha, you have to run! You and Nathan have to go, find a way out! I can’t keep control for long. . . ’
‘But –’
Nathan’s hand clamped around her wrist. ‘He’s right!’ said the teenager. ‘We gotta kite outta here while we still can. That thing takes him over and we’ll never see daylight again!’
‘ Go!’ shouted the Doctor, and she could see his control slipping by the second. ‘Don’t look back!’ Fresh tears blurring her vision, Martha let Nathan lead her away into the lantern-lit tunnels.
∗ ∗ ∗
141
You belong to us, Doctor. The thought-scream hammered into his mind.
Don’t fight us. If you fight the transfer, it will only hurt all the more.
He was in two places at once. Somewhere, very distant from where his thoughts tumbled and turned, the physical body of the being who called himself the Doctor stood stiff and rigid in the dimness of a disused iron mine.
Somewhere else, in a place that only existed in dreams and sensations, the Doctor’s mind struggled to pull itself free from a forest of probing, questing tentacles. He drew into himself, holding his inner strength as the Clade struck at him from all sides.
Let go, Doctor, let go. You made a promise to us. You said you would give us your flesh.
‘Uh, change of mind. Deal’s off. Sorry.’
Change of mind is right! The Godlove-Clade voice giggled. You’re out, Time Lord. There’s gonna be a new tenant inside your thick skull. . .
Dark laughter echoed through the thought-space. The Clades have never had a Time Lord to play with before. We can’t wait to see what treasures you have locked in your memories.
‘Didn’t you hear?’ the Doctor shouted back across the void. ‘Mem-ory Lane is closed, due to a traffic jam!’
Did you think we were fools, Doctor? Did you really think we didn’t know you would try to double-cross us? We are the livin’ instruments of war! And all war is about lies!
It would have been easy to use violence against the Clade, but that was what they wanted. The intelligent weapon flooded the Doctor’s mind with horrific images of battles long past, merging them with the faces of his friends. It forced him to see Rose and Mickey and K-9
deep in ashen wastelands as fusion bombs turned the ground to glass; it put Martha and Sarah Jane and Captain Jack in the combat arenas of the Isop Galaxy; and a hundred other combinations, false images of companions and friends from everyone of his lives dying over and over again.
It was so very hard to resist the urge to strike back at them. Even in a Time Lord, the primitive animal urge to fight was still there, and the Clade pulled at it, trying to tug it into the light.
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Take the gun! Use it! Feel the power! The power of life or death! Just like you did before. . . in the Time War.
‘No,’ He felt a stab of fear as the memories were dragged up from the dark place where he had hidden them. ‘No. I had no choice then.
I had no choice!’
Dear Doctor, mocked the Godlove-Clade. So brave. So sad. But so willin’ to do the terrible deed, to destroy so much in order to defeat your greatest enemy. The laughter came again. You call us killers and murderers, Doctor? But the scale of your war crime is so much worse!
The sounds of the past thundered in his ears. The roaring of a million Battle TARDISes. The screeching of a sky full of Dalek saucers.
The resounding drum of his own twin heartbeats as he made that most terrible of choices.
You tried to exterminate the Daleks, but you failed! If only you had been one with us then, we could have made their total destruction a reality. . .
Regret weighed him down. ‘I did. . . what I had to.’
So do it again. . . The voice was seductive, silky. Merge with the Clades. And together we’ll find the last of your enemies and erase them from existence. Isn’t that worth it? To be the hand of destiny all over again? To do it right this time?
In the depths