Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles - Lance Parkin [80]
Fitz understood the situation too. He started to take a step towards the Vore.
‘What are you doing?’ she screamed at him.
‘Saving your life. Trix, you have to run!’ he shouted.
‘Stay back from it!’ she yelled at him.
If she took one step away, she solved the insects’ dilemma for them and they’d pounce on Fitz. One step towards them and they would take her, but he would be safe. . . for the moment, at least. Her foot lifted from the ground.
‘No!’ Fitz shouted.
‘What do we do?’ Trix asked.
The drivers of the emergency vehicles had seen the monsters and they were staying back. No help was coming. There was an aeroplane primed to explode behind Fitz. Backing away wasn’t going to be an option.
‘I love you!’ Fitz shouted.
‘Fitz. . . not like this. We can make it.’
‘One of us can. You.’
‘There’s another way. There’s time to –’
‘You know there isn’t. Trix. . . tell me your real name.’
She told him.
Even from this distance, she could see him smile. ‘It suits you.’
Fitz took a single step forwards.
One of the monsters decided: half-walking, half-hopping, it loomed up in front of Fitz. The others decided too, all following it.
‘Cigarette?’ Fitz asked, holding the packet towards the Vore for a moment.
There was an edge of nervousness in his voice. He took one for himself.
‘It’s my last one, I promise.’
Fitz lit the cigarette, took a drag.
‘I’ve always used humour as a defence mechanism,’ Fitz told the monsters.
‘Right now, I’d prefer body armour, but there you go.’
One of the creatures edged forwards, jaws mashing. It seemed curious about the ciggie. They’d churned up the grass as they’d come over.
Fitz took a puff.
‘The thing is, the joke’s on you. I beat you. The woman I love is going to get away. I saved her. For once in my life I’m the bloody hero. So I’m going out on top, yeah? I win.’
Fitz flicked the cigarette away.
The monster raised a claw. Another had shuffled into place behind him. A third was to his left, a fourth to his right. A fifth, a sixth, a seventh, an eighth, 165
a ninth. . . Well, after the first few it didn’t matter any more. All of them were facing him.
‘Are you lot waiting for my last words? Yeah? OK, let’s have a think.’
Fitz made a show of scratching his chin.
‘Got it. Here they are. The last words of Fitzgerald Kreiner, space hero.’ Fitz jabbed two fingers up at the nearest Vore, right in front of its face.
Then, as one, the creatures leant forward, opened their maws, expelled rasps of white vapour and Trix saw Fitz die. She didn’t hear him fall, he didn’t cry out or make any other sound. One moment he was alive, the next he wasn’t.
He’d fought an enemy that couldn’t comprehend his heroism.
He’d died saving her.
She had to get away, for it to mean anything. Trix turned and ran, faster than she’d ever run. Behind her one of the aeroplane’s engines exploded, then another, then another, then the last one. The fireball obliterated the Vore, and threw Trix off her feet.
She barely noticed.
Fitz was dead.
166
It was in these times that the visions came of the great Black Eye. It began to be scryed in the visions of the people, watching balefully over them. Not in the past, or the future, but in overtime. Written over past, present, future, in dreams and in waking, an alternity drawn across their history of now forever. All they could do was dismiss, push the thoughts back. Their presumption was that this vision, of another kind of themselves, was a pure symbol, a representation of the actual. That such a vision, themselves erased with only five ghosts to wander lost, could become true, that under the Black Eye their primate shadows would rule the spaces between moments, was literally unthinkable.
The quest came to consume those that followed it. The fascination, in both the ancient and modern senses of the word. For a race concerned with observations and acquiring knowledge this, the all-seeing void, was the ultimate negation. Yet it empowered them, made them gods. Do nothing, they cautioned, do nothing and all will be well in heaven.