Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles - Lance Parkin [4]
Behind the Doctor were his companions.
‘Hi, I’m Fitz, this is Trix. Glad we caught you.’
Fitz was a scruffy, tall man in his thirties and Trix was a little younger, slim and elegant. They had grabbed Crallan, and were leading him back into the room.
The Doctor held up a small silver device, some sort of tool. It emitted a whirr so faint it could barely be heard.
‘No. . . ’ Mondova managed, before gravity caught up with him. The armour crumpled to the floor, the man inside sagging with it.
‘Too heavy,’ he wheezed.
The metal plates that cocooned him had been kept weightless by the generators. But now the mechanisms he had designed and built were broken, fused. The armour was just ordinary scrap metal. The Doctor was pulling it off him, piece by piece. Mondova looked down at his own bare arms and chest as the armour came clear of them, surprised to see how slight and pale he had allowed his body to become.
Finally, the Doctor tugged off the helmet. He held it up for a moment, looked into its empty eye slits. Then he tossed it over the edge of the terrace, to the city below.
The Doctor looked down at the naked old man at his feet.
Then he held out his hand, to help him up.
‘It’s over,’ he told him. This time, Mondova believed it.
An hour and a half later and very far away, a police box that wasn’t a police box sped through a place where there was no time and no space.
As with a book, you couldn’t judge the TARDIS from what it looked like on the outside. It appeared to be an old wooden police-telephone box with peeling blue paint, but (again like a book) inside it was far larger, more grand and complicated. And, as with the best novels, you couldn’t always tell where it was going. The TARDIS was a machine capable of travelling to any point in space and time. That alone would be enough to make it special, but what really made it unique was that it was the place the Doctor called home.
As with his ship, there was more to the Doctor than met the eye. He was an adventurer, a bookworm, a champion, a detective, an explorer, a father and grandfather, a historian, an iconoclast, a jackanapes, a know-it-all, a lord, 11
a meddler, a nuisance; he was old, a physician and a quack, a renegade, a scientist, a traveller, a utopian, a violinist, a widower, a xoanon; he was youthful and he was a zealot.
One thing he wasn’t, though, was human. Two hearts beat in his chest.
He’d lived for centuries, at the very least. The Doctor didn’t think much about his past; he rarely talked about it, even with his friends. He lived in the now, the only time that meant anything to someone who could spend yesterday in the far future and tomorrow in the olden days.
Now he stood at the central console, right in the middle of the cavernous control room, the very first room you’d come to if you’d just stepped inside the TARDIS. The console was hexagonal, the size of a large desk. Thrusting out from the centre right up to the ceiling was a powerful piston, encased in a glass tube. It rose and fell, pulsing with blue light as it did so. The Doctor watched it, almost hypnotised. He was still wearing his frock coat. He would occasionally break away to start operating controls, check readouts and generally fuss about. He wasn’t steering the ship, though, so much as trying to decide where it was heading.
The Doctor was smiling to himself. A tyrant toppled was always a good day’s work. The planet Mondova had taken control of had been a beautiful world of orchards, sculpture and music. Now it could be all those things again. That would be for the people there to decide.
In another part of the TARDIS the Doctor’s two companions, Fitz and Trix, were smiling too. They had also been celebrating the fall of Mondova and his regime. Unlike the Doctor, they had done this by going to Fitz’s room, by downing a couple of bottles of wine they’d liberated from the monocrat’s wine cellar,