Doctor Who_ Relative Dementias - Mark Michalowski [116]
By the time the Doctor turned round, she was back in place, trying desperately to work out how far back in time her button-pressing would send her: it was either 20 hours or two days – she hadn’t had time to check, properly. The thought occurred to her that she could equally well be sending herself back two years or 200. The sound of the TARDIS’s materialisation filled the air.
‘I’ll see you in a few minutes,’ he said, glancing towards the barricaded door.
Ace could tell he was making an effort at levity, as if he’d realised that his discomfort at the situation wasn’t her fault and was trying to make up for his snippiness.
Sorry, she thought ruefully, would have been a lot easier. But considering what she’d just done, she had no right to whinge.
With a thump, the TARDIS materialised and the Doctor opened the door for her.
‘Ace,’ he said gently as she made to leave. ‘Being a Time Lord isn’t all jam and scones.’
She grinned awkwardly and stepped out – feeling even more guilty than she’d been when she’d reprogrammed the TARDIS.
The heather was soft beneath her feet, the air fresh and cool –
even if her knee did feel like it had been hammered with a steak tenderiser.
She stared down at Muirbridgc and didn’t look back as the TARDIS and the Doctor and Ace vanished. Deja vu? Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. Now, if she’d worked it out right, she’d better get her head down quickly. There’d be another TARDIS
along in a minute.
Inside the TARDIS, the Doctor crossed to the interior doors and dislodged the chair. Ace stormed in.
‘So?’
‘Ace, please, there really isn’t time for this.’
‘You’ve got time to land the TARDIS, let some stranger in, have a secret little heart-to-heart and then drop him off somewhere, and you haven’t got time to tell me what’s going on?’ ‘It’s not that I don’t want to tell you. I can’t.’ His face looked genuinely pained, but Ace was too angry to take any notice of his distress.
‘Are you being threatened? Is that it?’ She looked around the room, as if expecting to find someone crouched behind the control console, pointing a gun at him. But there was no one there. She looked at him carefully, wondering whether he’d been possessed by some alien force, or replaced with a bodysnatcher-type replica. But he was the same little man that she’d just returned from the future with.
Like a waiter trying to find the right way to take the order from an arguing couple, Michael hovered around the periphery of Ace and the Doctor’s sullen silence. He looked tired and drained, she just looked well pissed-off. He caught her eye and she sighed heavily and folded her arms. In the background, Connie and Jessie were fussing around the Doctor, the events of the last half hour apparently forgotten by them as they offered to make him yet another cup of tea. Connie’s sudden sharpness was unnerving and she was taking charge of Jessie with, Michael suspected, more than an element of overcompensation.
‘I’m not going to say it,’ Michael ventured, turning to Ace.
She glowered at him. ‘Well don’t, then.’
He patted his pockets and found a crumpled pack of fags with one bent, torn, sorry specimen inside. He ripped off the filter, stuck the cigarette in his mouth and lit it as Ace flicked a contemptuous glance back at the Doctor. ‘Were you being straight yesterday when you told me you’d come back in time a couple of days?’
Ace rubbed her eyes tiredly. ‘The Doctor’s not the only one who can go mucking about with time, you know. While I’ve been rescuing the Doctor, getting shot at by the Tulks, getting locked up and rescued, I’ve also been up in the Orkneys, running from a psychopathic care assistant, duplicate tweedies and another of those.’ She gestured at the pan on the floor under which the Landine seemed to have gone to sleep now that its masters were