Doctor Who_ St. Anthony's Fire - Mark Gatiss [12]
Since her return to the TARDIS after three years in Spacefleet, Ace had developed a precision and cleanliness which rather affronted the Doctor’s bohemian sensibilities. The coverlet of her bed would invariably be turned neatly down and her collection of stout boots arranged in order of size by the door. She had managed to make a spartan white room seem positively austere.
But today something was different. The bed was a mass of unmade sheets, stray boots dotted about in the whiteness like chunks of coal in a melted snowman. The floor was stained with chemicals and, in a crumpled heap in the corner, resembling nothing so much as a sloughed‐off crab‐shell, lay Ace’s body armour.
She had been wearing it less and less, the Doctor had been pleased to note, but to see what she had once regarded as her ‘second skin’ treated with such carelessness gave the Doctor pause.
He sniffed and ducked back into the corridor, closing the door behind him with a soft click.
Although the Doctor had wondered before, though never aloud, what exactly he’d been letting himself in for the day he took Ace aboard the TARDIS, things had recently gone swimmingly. The bright but somewhat disturbed teenager who had given way to a mature but somehow unreadable adult, seemed to have finally settled down. The three of them made rather a good team, in his considered opinion.
However, if the Doctor knew Ace, and he thought that by now he possibly did, then he had a pretty fair idea of where she might be.
There were fifteen doors in this particular corridor and he ran his fingers over each as he passed. The light was faintly blueish as though he were passing through some huge, translucent artery. The roundel‐studded walls were thick with dust, and dust, the Doctor recalled, was ninety per cent shed skin.
A disconcerting thought fluttered through his mind. Was there, perhaps, someone else living inside the ship? With infinite size it was always so difficult to tell.
* * *
Grek stood in silence, his shoulders sagging. Then he started as Priss marched into his quarters, carrying a pair of boots in one claw and a curious brass and wood instrument in the other.
‘At last,’ cried Grek with what he hoped was the semblance of confident bluster.
He leant over his bunk and connected the instrument to a series of wires which hung slackly from the dug‐out wall.
The speecher was in two halves and Grek placed the larger half – a round brass disc – to his small ear whilst rapidly turning a handle inset in the wooden casing.
Priss squatted on the floor and began to force the stiff new boots onto his commander’s feet.
‘Couldn’t you get a better speecher than this old junk?’ hissed Grek as a blast of whirring and static assaulted his ears. Priss had succeeded in getting one of the boots on.
‘Most of them were destroyed in that big Cutch raid, sir.’
Grek nodded distractedly. There was a voice at the end of the line. Grek winced at another blast of static. ‘Conference? Get me Portrone Liso.’
* * *
The TARDIS never ceased to amaze Ace. She had once spent several fruitless days attempting to map out the network of rooms and corridors which surrounded the console room but had given up in despair.
It wasn’t just the corkscrew geography of the place. Sometimes, she swore, places she knew well simply weren’t there when she looked for them. Asking the Doctor how he found his way around, he had simply winked and told her he had a nose for such things.
One day, though, whilst working her way back from a tiny, shuttered room mostly crammed with unwound clocks, she had found the Eighth Door. Found it, opened it, and felt her jaw literally dropping open in surprise.
It was a perfectly ordinary door and inside, the jamb connected to a perfectly ordinary dove‐grey wall. Or, rather, the suggestion of a wall. For the wall simply faded away, its roundels bleeding into a lovely, rosy, sunrise sky, like an infinity of crescent moons vanishing into the dawn. And leading away from this mirage‐like entrance was a wide