Doctor Who_ Set Piece - Kate Orman [31]
‘Except for you.’
‘I was curious.’
‘So you solved the problem of initial conditions. Your school science project worked.’ He dunked the roll in his soup. ‘A train that travels in time instead of down tunnels. You could solve the problem of late-running passenger services forever. What did you use for a power source?’
‘A thermonuclear explosion.’
‘Hmm, batteries not included.’
‘I carried four spare nukes.’ The Doctor looked alarmed. ‘I haven’t irradiated Paris. I didn’t even irradiate Arizona, though the explosion destroyed all my research. I’ll explain how it works later.’
The Doctor nodded slowly, wiping up the last of his soup with the remains of his roll. Two months unconscious with only drips for lunch, and he wasn’t even particularly hungry. He seemed a little weary, but that wasn’t surprising.
She wondered what it would take to kill him.
‘What day is this?’ he asked.
‘May 3rd,’ she said. ‘You arrived the day they proclaimed the Commune.’
‘The glorious harbinger of a new society,’ said the Doctor, ‘or was that the other Commune? All these revolutions tend to blur together. Paris was one of my earliest tastes of Earth, you know. What do you think of space-time?’
‘Big,’ said Kadiatu, waving a hand, ‘long. I’m glad I brought some books.’
‘I told you you wouldn’t like it.’ One of the maids dipped in and took his bowl away.
‘I could make the shuttle go,’ explained Kadiatu, ‘but I couldn’t make it go where I wanted.’
‘Ah,’ said the Doctor. ‘A not unfamiliar problem.’
‘And it’s so hard to compensate for the solar system. It’s like rattling around inside an enormous watch. Each time I jumped I’d end up days out from Earth.
At least I could calculate my temporal displacement from the movement of the planets.’
‘You must have compensated. Otherwise you might have ended up billions of kilometres outside the solar system.’
‘Once I arrived above the surface of Mars, falling at an angle through the atmosphere like a meteor. I had to jump a second time to stop myself from 59
crashing.’
‘I’m sure the locals appreciated that.’
‘I checked the external camera record later. There was no sign of habitation.
I had no chance to check which epoch it was.’
‘A wasted experiment.’
‘The very first jump took me to the twenty-fifth century.’
‘And what did you make of it?’
‘Not much. I filled up a lot of videotapes. I had to leave when they started to ask too many questions.’
‘Steal anything?’
‘Not much. Information.’
‘Planning to go home?’
‘I don’t care where I end up,’ said Kadiatu, ‘as long as it’s not here. If I hadn’t packed all that gold, I’d be nothing here. Money talks. A historical constant.’
‘I expect Karl would agree.’
‘I’m thinking of writing a paper about it. Where did you come from? And what happened to Bernice?’
‘And what about Ace?’
‘It was just you. You turned up in the same place I crashlanded. There was an explosion in the night and Thierry found you in his orchard.’
‘You knew that Ace was female,’ he said, catching her eyes. ‘You said “she”.’
‘I read my grandmother’s history of UNIT. And there was more in Stone Mountain. Dorothy McShane was still listed in a pan-European database of missing persons in 2006.’
The Doctor nodded. It was a good answer. ‘How do you imagine I got here?’
‘I was rather,’ said Kadiatu, drumming her fingers on the tabletop, ‘hoping you’d tell me that.’
He held his wine glass between his palms, rolling it back and forth. ‘I came through a transdimensional rift. A linear breakage in the continuum. A crack in the ice cube of time.’
Kadiatu knocked over her wine glass.
‘Someone has carelessly punched a series of holes through the universe,’ he continued. ‘Those tracks form unpredictable connections between separate pieces of space and time. The holes can drift in unexpected ways, and the rifts can open up at weak points anywhere along their five-dimensional length. A really quite astonishing amount of damage to reality can result.’
‘So you’re here as Mr Fixit?’ she asked, breathlessly, getting up, getting away from his eyes. The Doctor picked up her wine-glass.