Doctor Who_ Set Piece - Kate Orman [80]
‘Language,’ chided Bernice. ‘I brought the Doctor’s TARDIS.’
‘What happened to my ship?’
‘Rather a lot has happened in your absence. The Doctor will explain everything. Mmm. Actually, that’s pretty unlikely.’
‘Where’s my ship?’
‘It’s gone.’
‘What!’
‘I’m afraid it blew down.’
‘It blew up?’
‘No, it imploded. I’m afraid M Thierry was caught in the implosion.’
‘Killed?’
Benny nodded. ‘He was working for the Ants, you know.’
Kadiatu shook her head, slowly. ‘You have wrecked everything. I don’t believe it. You have mucked it all up.’
Benny waved the port at Kadiatu, but the tall woman just shook her head. ‘I don’t get drunk,’ she said. ‘If you’d just let the Ants take my ship, they’d have been destroyed. That was what I planned.’
‘That’d be a bit of a surprise,’ said Benny, ‘given that you’re working for them too.’
Kadiatu’s hand went to the back of her neck. ‘When’d he work that out?’
‘Good question. You get used to it after a while, you know.’
∗ ∗ ∗
156
‘I’d stay where you are if I were you,’ said the Doctor, without turning around.
Ace hovered on the cellar steps.
He was back in his white clothes, bent over a table they’d dragged down from the living room. A couple of muon lamps from the TARDIS were fixed to the table.
Ace sat down with her back to the wall, hugged her knees. They’d talked for hours in the kitchen, but she still didn’t feel as though she were up to speed.
And she hadn’t told the Doctor or Benny about her nightmare. ‘I want to ask you about the rifts,’ she said.
The Doctor kept on doing what he was doing. She noticed he was wearing latex gloves, had a box of them on the table, like a box of tissues. ‘Ask away,’
he said.
‘Is the rift you came through in 1871 the same rift that Bernice came through in 1789?’
‘Rift’s not quite the right word. The rift per se is a fracture running through a four-dimensional area of space-time. The exit point keeps changing its temporal coordinate.’
‘It’s drifting back and forth in time.’
‘That’s right. It sounds as though the exit point you encountered in Egypt was doing the same thing. Other rift exits will be moving through space but not through time – they will seem to appear in more than one place at once.
And still others may be moving through both space and time.’
‘But they appear relative to the same place on the Earth’s surface. How’s that possible?’
‘They’ve been anchored. It’s child’s play, one of the basics of time corridor technology. But time corridors are temporary – they collapse when you cut their power. These holes will never seal up. Anything could come through them and threaten the Earth, future or past. And they put a constant strain on the space-time they pass through.’
‘So it hurts space and time when the rifts move around like that?’
‘Have you ever seen the magic trick where you slice a banana without peeling it first?’ A scalpel flashed in the Doctor’s hand, briefly.
‘Tell me how it’s done.’
‘It’s very simple. You use a needle and thread, moving the thread in a zigzag pattern through the banana skin, slicing up the soft fruit inside. Then, when you peel the banana . . . Gaps appear in the walls of the rifts, like holes in a tunnel, and the Ants can pop out into random areas of space-time to do a spot of piracy.’
‘So how’re we going to stop them?’
‘It’s not really a them. It’s an it. Ship is a computer with a program that’s 157
gone haywire. How would you stop a computer?’
Ace thought for a moment. ‘Unplug it,’ she said. ‘Is Ship drawing power from the Vortex?’
‘Very good.’
‘Oh, thanks,’ said Ace sarcastically. ‘Then you have to change its programming. Find the right command to stop it. Or introduce a virus.’
‘Very, very good. The only trouble is, organic computers are experts at dealing with viruses. They have to be.’
‘I’ve used puters with organic components – protein wafers and whatever –
but a whole spaceship made out of living matter?’
‘An organic computer is a big advantage when trying to negotiate the Vortex,’ said the Doctor. ‘Like a living mind, the TARDIS can handle mathematics that would distort