Doctor Who_ Set Piece - Kate Orman [99]
They’d have to leave soon. The Doctor said Ace couldn’t be moved, not while the shot of nanites he’d given her were doing their job. Nicolas had long ago dragged his bed downstairs into a storeroom. The TARDIS had materialized next to it, drawn to Ace by the same impulse that had made it chase her to Ancient Egypt.
They’d gotten the first aid kit out of the TARDIS, and Benny had bandaged the Doctor’s shoulder, tightly binding his left arm to his side. The bruise on his face was starting to fade. He had been in surprisingly good condition, given the jagged tear over his collarbone. Ace was in much worse shape.
‘The nanites can regenerate a lost limb,’ he had said, carefully pressing a hypospray to Ace’s wrist. ‘They use the patient’s own DNA as a template to regrow damaged tissue, to break down foreign material or organisms in a wound.’
‘Will it hurt her?’ Benny had said, gently pulling the covers over the young woman’s unconscious form.
‘As little as possible,’ he said, putting the spray away. ‘Time Lords aren’t very good at pain, they never have to feel it. It is risky, because it’s so rapid, but it’s her best chance.’
‘Kill or cure.’
‘If you like.’
‘That was a really stupid plan.’
195
He looked at her over the bed, agitatedly passing the hypospray from hand to hand. ‘She wasn’t supposed to follow me.
‘No. I meant it was stupid in the first place.’
‘Kadiatu thought to kill Ship with a virus. I’d already tried that, Ship was far too strong, or it would never have survived falling into the rift. I had to have access to its central nervous system. And for that to happen, it had to have access to mine.’
‘Was that why Kadiatu took you back to Ship?’
He nodded. ‘She was told to, but she knew I had something up my sleeve.
She was right out of her depth. She should have left it to me.’
‘You would have died if Ace hadn’t been there.’
‘I know. It wouldn’t be the first time.’ His hands clasped the hypospray, hard. ‘Kadiatu got what she wanted. She can travel anywhere, anywhen. I hope we meet again, I want the chance to talk to her properly.’
‘You were too busy trying to outplot one another.’
The Doctor shook his head. ‘Ship was always listening.’
‘You should have worked together.’
‘Maybe next time. The problem with the easy way out is that it has already been mined.’
‘Who told you that?’
He reached out, brushed a strand of hair from Ace’s forehead. ‘She did.’
Dying.
You don’t have to do anything when you’re dying.
Ace was finding the whole death thing a lot easier to handle than she had imagined. For one thing, she was so tired that it was a pleasure to just lie still.
For another, she was pumped so full of military endorphins she could have flown to the top of Everest.
She was dimly aware that her body was in terrible pain. There was a patch of heat all down her right side, and little nagging places here and there.
Tranked as she was she had no way of telling whether they were minor bruises or crater wounds.
Not that it made much difference. They had put on all the derms and skin grafts and stuff, given her a shot to boost the little machines running about in her blood, but it wasn’t going to be enough. So she just lay there, letting the delirium throw up whatever images it chose.
One of her very earliest memories was picking up a black kitten out of a litter of kittens, joking that it was sleeping too much and putting it on its feet.
The soft thump as it fell over. Running screaming to her father.
Her father had died too. Obviously it was hereditary.
196
She had been too short to see the bed properly, but she remembered the hospital smell, the colour of the afternoon light, the soft sounds as he struggled for breath. The sudden silence. Running screaming to her mother in the waiting room, screaming to fill up the silence.
She remembered lying in bed with a cold, listening to her own heartbeat, knowing that it could stop just like her father’s heartbeat had stopped. Mum made her stay in bed, and now Mum was downstairs