Doctor Who_ So Vile a Sin - Ben Aaronovitch [55]
His crew were staring at him as Vincenzi’s troops led them from the bridge. Sokolovsky shook his head, suddenly glad that someone else was in his chair.
‘Sir?’ called a trooper. Vincenzi looked up. ‘What about these ones?’
The soldier had hold of the Doctor’s arm. The little man looked relatively undamaged. His yellow-haired friend looked slightly worse off, the Ogrons helping him to his feet while Vincenzi’s soldiers kept them covered.
‘What destroyed Cassandra, Doctor?’
‘I wish I knew.’
‘You must know,’ said Sokolovsky. ‘One moment you’re insisting I let you take a shuttle down there, the next the planet’s an expanding cloud of vapour and rubble. It’s just possible, you know, that there’s a connection.’
129
‘I honestly don’t know what happened, Captain.’ The Doctor glanced at the screen, where the frigate hung at an awkward angle against a backdrop of glittering fragments. ‘I wish I did.’
Vincenzi got up from the captain’s chair. After a moment, Sokolovsky realized the man was waiting for him to sit down.
‘What was it you were planning to do down there, anyway?’
said Sokolovsky, taking his position.
‘Blow up the planet, of course,’ said the Doctor. ‘And someone’s gone and done it first.’
One of Vincenzi’s troopers handed Sokolovsky a clipboard as the captain strode towards the meeting room. The Doctor trailed along behind them, scowling and still looking puzzled. The ship still had a noticeable tilt; Sokolovsky steadied himself with a hand against the wall as he walked on, reading. The sooner they got the internal gravity sorted out, the better.
‘It’s a status report, sir,’ said the trooper, unnecessarily. ‘The most important problem is that the warp drive is down. It’s not the drive itself, but all the control connections that have been damaged. We could start it up, but we’d have no way to tell the thing what to do.’
Sokolovsky could see all of that from the report. But the trooper was just trying to be helpful.
Besides, thought the captain, if he wanted trained staff he could always let someone out of the brig.
The ship lurched as the repair team tried once again to get the stabilizers to work properly. Now the floor was sloping in the other direction. Sokolovsky sighed and went into the meeting room.
There was a podium at the front, neatly arranged rows of chairs, enough to accommodate the entire off-duty crew if necessary. The chairs had been dragged into a circle, as though this was a big friendly community meeting, instead of a what’s-going-on, what-the-hell-do-we-do-now meeting.
Everyone from the Hopper and the Wilfred Owen was there, guarded by a couple of Vincenzi’s troopers. Cwej and the two Ogrons; an academic and his student, both looking bewildered; an aristocratic-looking woman; and –
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Sokolovsky turned to look at the Doctor, who had somehow appropriated his clipboard. ‘Very nasty, this. If you switched on the warp drive now, the uncontrolled gravitic curve would probably catapult you straight into the nearest massive object.’
He looked up. ‘Oh,’ he said.
A second Doctor was sitting in one of the chairs, gravely eyeing his counterpart. Now everyone was looking back and forth between them. Same man, identical clothes, identical grim expression.
‘It’s the result of tampering with… what’s on Iphigenia,’ said the Doctor from the Wilfred Owen. ‘Nonsense like this is probably happening over half the galaxy.’
The Doctor standing next to Sokolovsky nodded. ‘One of us is a copy.’
‘Which one?’ said the aristo.
‘Me,’ said the Doctor standing next to Sokolovsky.
The Captain realized he’d just taken a step back from the little man. ‘What the hell is this?’ he said.
‘Now you begin to see why I said history hung in the balance,’
said the copy Doctor. ‘Reality itself is being affected by these events.’ He looked at his counterpart. ‘At least now I know who destroyed Cassandra.’
‘Just what I would have done,’ deadpanned the