Doctor Who_ Set Piece - Kate Orman [32]
‘They can’t be fixed,’ he said. ‘They’re quite permanent.’
With a sudden snap of his wrist, he threw the glass at the wall. One of the maids shouted.
60
Kadiatu stood stock still. ‘You might have mentioned something about it.
My equations didn’t show any –’
‘Your equations are the scrawling of a little girl,’ said the Doctor. His arms were folded, holding onto himself. He was very different to the man she remembered. ‘They are precocious, crayoned nonsense. And if I’d had any sense I’d have taken away your matches before you could burn yourself – or anyone else.’
‘Fine. What are you going to do about it?’
‘There’s nothing we can do about the temporal fractures. I have to stop –
you must tell me everything, everything that might be important. Everything you know.’
‘I’ll show you the ship,’ she said.
‘Good.’
‘Not now. In the morning.’
The basement was much larger than it should have been. There were rough lines across the ceiling and floor, where internal walls and floors had been knocked down and ripped up to make room for Kadiatu’s equipment. The resulting space was two stories high and several metres across. Everything was covered in dust, and brickbats and rubbish filled the corners; the domestiques didn’t come down here. The Doctor kept catching cobwebs in his candle flame.
Kadiatu’s time vessel took up most of the basement. It was a cargo shuttle, three-quarters storage space and one-quarter life-support. The surface, painted a drab military green, was marked with streaks of mind-jarring colours, silver and heliotrope and cerulean; iridescent go faster stripes formed where the vortex had licked the paintwork. The hull was pocked with microm-eteoroid strikes. The phrase WHOSE IDEA WAS THIS???? was spraypainted in dripping red across its nose.
The life-support section was a flattened bulb at the bottom of the ship, with room for one suited occupant. The Doctor leaned in and flipped a switch, and a panel obligingly opened in the side of the cargo portion of the vehicle, exposing the hold.
There was a thick, square patch of something sticky next to the cargo hold door, just above eye level. He scratched at it with a fingernail. Something organic, dried in wet blobs on the spaceship’s hull. Vegetable, not animal.
The surface shrugged, shrinking away from his touch.
He leaned into the cockpit, brought the computer online, read the flight program most recently entered into it. Read it again. A bit drastic for an anti-theft measure. Or was it?
61
There was a radiation gauge above the cargo bay door; the Doctor flicked his eyes across it. The interior of the ship was a little hotter than the background, but not enough to stop him. He popped his head inside for a look.
The hold was mostly equipment, machinery stitched together into a jury-rigged time-space engine. The main section of it was a modified field regulator from a subspace train, the public transport system of an Earth twenty minutes into Ace’s future.
Ace. Covered in frost, lying on the floor an inch from his nose like an enormous fish finger. Watching him bleed to death while Bernice struggled to save them both.
A dreadful urgency rose up in him, and he didn’t really care how Kadiatu’s toy TARDIS worked, he just needed to get to Ace. Benny must have dragged them both into the rift. She and Ace could have ended up anywhere that the fractures led. Including several hundred miles above the surface of Mars. His left collarbone suddenly erupted with pain, and he sat down hard against one curving wall of the shuttle, little flashes going off in his field of vision.
He blinked hard and pressed his fingers against his chest above the left heart.
There was no scar there, no bruise, nothing to indicate an injury. If the welt on his face hadn’t healed, what might be broken on the inside?
Ace could take care of herself, and so could Bernice. He pushed the panic down along with the pain and forced himself to concentrate on the machinery.
The big gold-coloured things were power baffles, designed to soak up huge amounts of energy. Such as a hydrogen