Doctor Who_ Return of the Living Dad - Kate Orman [39]
‘There was a virus,’ said the Doctor. ‘Killed everything with DNA. They were going to have a war...’
‘No, we weren’t,’ said Indigo. ‘We were trying to stop one. But the rebels couldn’t understand that. They left us without any defences!’
Roze gave a little sigh. Indigo always had to bring politics into everything. He picked up his own bag, checking the vitamin supplements in their little brown bottle for the third time that day. There was still only a week’s worth left. Will you stop fidgeting?’ said Indigo. Roze grimaced and put the pills away.
‘The virus was no defence,’ the Doctor was muttering.
‘One mistake and you...’
Indigo put a finger across the little man’s mouth, silencing him. ‘We had a mandate to create and deploy the virus,’ he said. ‘Who did you think you were, coming from outside and interfering in our democratic decisions?’
The little man looked shaken, even through the haze of the drug. Roze ventured, ‘Indigo, you’d better get on with it.’
Indigo pulled a piece of paper out of his rucksack. He peered at it for a few seconds. ‘True or false,’ he said. ‘You were on Earth in nineteen seventy-three.’
The Doctor frowned. ‘True.’
‘You were involved with UNIT at that time.’
‘I —’
‘True or false.’
‘True.’
‘You had access to top secret information about nuclear weaponry during that time.’
‘True,’ said the Doctor sleepily.
‘All right,’ said Indigo. ‘This is your chance to make up for what you did to our planet.’
‘I didn’t save it,’ murmured the Doctor. His eyes were closed now. ‘I didn’t save your planet.’
‘No. You just messed around in our internal politics. A lot of people died in that rebellion. Roze and I just barely escaped. Look at him, Doctor.’ The Time Lord rolled his head loosely to the side, frowned up at Roze. ‘Look at him. He was just a junior clerk, but they would have torn him limb from limb.’
‘I didn’t save you,’ muttered the Doctor. Roze was hooked on his eyes.
‘And the rebels just deployed the viral weapons anyway.
How can you sleep at night?’
‘Don’t,’ said the Doctor. ‘I don’t sleep.’
‘What do you mean, you don’t sleep?’
‘I try not to sleep... two years from now one of the viral caches is triggered by the government.’
‘What?’ said Roze.
‘Two years from now,’ repeated the Doctor. ‘Another rebellion. The virus gets out and chews up everything living.’
‘This won’t work,’ said Indigo. ‘You can’t lie to me.’
‘I can’t lie,’ said the Doctor. ‘I’m full of truth serum, remember?’
Roze breathed, ‘How do you know?’
‘I’ve been back to Lalande,’ said the little man. ‘But by then it was too late. History was locked in place. It had taken another five years for the virus to spread across the entire planet.’
‘But the emergency evacuations,’ said Roze. He realized he was standing up, hands pressed to his mouth. ‘But they planned... they have the evacuations planned.’
‘Everyone was infected,’ said the Doctor. ‘Everything was infected.’ His pupils were so dilated, they looked like two dark holes in his face, holes into nothing. ‘The virus chewed through the ships the way it was designed to.’
‘But why didn’t you just come up with a cure or something?’ Roze breathed. ‘Why didn’t you just go back in time and warn them?’
‘It was too late,’ said the Doctor. ‘It had happened.’
‘Two years from now?’
‘That’s the truth.’
Roze looked at Indigo, his glittering eyes filling up with tears. He felt himself stumbling away, finding the door handle. Behind him, Indigo was shouting something, but he didn’t care.
Alekto
One picosecond from now
You can’t go through SOLID stuff. Where my fingers brush on the cinnamon bricks, they (the bricks) get older and younger, a few seconds, that’s all. Maybe you could see my fingerprints in those sluggish atoms, if you looked close enough. But who’s going to look?
So I have to go up, up, into the air, stepping on the spinning molecules. I can walk right around in a big SPIRRRRALLLLL, see? My arms move through the nothingness between the liquid dancing of the particles, lifted, drifting, faint peppermint.
The glass is a liquid too, you