Doctor Who_ Relative Dementias - Mark Michalowski [41]
And then she heard a muffled woman’s voice give a cry of surprise and a dull, metal clang, like someone banging their head on a saucepan.
Panic took hold, and Ace sprinted across the room, back towards the stairway.
In mid-stride, halfway to the stairs, she vanished.
Chapter Six
Whereas Ace had entered Graystairs through a side window, the Doctor just marched straight up to the front door, fiddled with the handle and he was in. He stood in silence for a moment, sniffing the air. Strange how things smelled so different at night -
dark and predatory, full of anticipation, full of menace. His favourite time.
‘We’re not in Kansas now, Tom,’ Ace whispered to herself.
The air was damp and heavy, and she felt a cold, unwelcome clamminess pressing at her skin, even through her clothes. She was in a dark, church-like space, full of unfamiliar creaks and drips. Her first thought was that she was on a submarine – the floor beneath her feet was a coarse metal grating, the wall to her side curved away overhead like a hi-tech buttress. Its surface was cold, moist metal, a sheen of condensation running down her fingers into the cuff of her jacket as she brushed her fingers on it. Puddles of curdled water lay at her feet, scummed over, green.
Where the hell was she? And how the hell had she got there?
She glanced back but all she saw was a dark corridor, curving away from her. Pale bulbs of light, set high in the arching walls, cast a cadaverous glow. Out of the frying pan...
She must have come through some sort of transmat from Graystairs, she realised. Checking the walls nearby, she saw two thicker strips of metal, like slightly bent railway sleepers, that seemed to have been bolted onto the walls, just at the point where she’d appeared. Presumably, the transmat generators. She smiled to herself: a beaker of poison, Doctor? Huh! Let me tell you about the transmat and the secret base!
She hitched her rucksack onto her back and, feeling more Scooby Doo than James Bond, started exploring.
Like an ancient, steel cathedral, it felt abandoned – but still inhabited by the spirits of the dead. It creaked and groaned and pinged around her, and she found herself splashing through countless puddles of stagnant water. The air smelled of rust and algae, and it was only when she found a few control panels that she began to wonder where this place actually was. And the more she looked around, the more she felt certain: this wasn’t just some secret hideaway this was a spaceship. Moments later, she stepped into a much brighter chamber – one that hummed and fizzed and beeped with all the sounds you might expect from a spaceship: hoo, Doctor! Just you wait!
Arrayed round the room on sloping couches, their feet pointing towards the centre of the chamber, were at least a dozen people.
There was a progression in the equations around her. Her realization of it was more instinctive than informed. Joyce still felt that same sense of bewondered detachment as each new piece of the puzzle slotted itself into the whole, and then fell away, like huge icebergs of data detaching themselves, drifting off on new adventures. It was all to do with frequencies, she realized. Familiar equations formed around her as she made the connection, curious butterflies around a particularly attractive new flower. Wasps around a honey pot. She could see Bessel functions and... weren’t those Cantor sets? She reached out a finger she didn’t possess and touched a set of numbers. They blossomed into others, fractal sequences, and she pulled her hand back, worried that she’d damaged them somehow. But the Eigenvalues of the matrix remained constant. She scanned the rows and columns. Something