Doctor Who_ The King of Terror - Keith Topping [43]
He had screamed and struggled against the straps. Then he had begged for mercy and, when he received no reply, had begun a tirade of abuse against his unseen captor.
Now the stinging in his eyes had subsided, though he still couldn’t clearly make out what was going on around him. The metal clamps on his eyes retracted and Turlough felt sheer bliss at being able to close them for the first time in what seemed like days. He was aware that a vague shape was moving around him, but he really wasn’t interested so long as he/she/they didn’t hurt him any more.
He cried out in agony when a hot, snake-like anal probe entered him and a thin river of blood seeped down his leg. He screamed even louder when a syringe broke the skin on his neck and extracted more of his blood. But now, as he opened his eyes, he realised that he’d been merely saving the biggest scream of all for what was about to happen.
Above him, whirring at several thousands of revolutions a second, was a bright, diamond-sharp drill bit. And it was being lowered towards his face.
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Part Two
King for a Day
‘ The Exiles shall, with righteous anger, spread internal strife, and make a great conspiracy against the King. ’
An extremely bad translation of ‘Century I.13’ from The True Prophecies or Prognostications of Michael Nostradamus first translated by Theophilus de Garencieres (1672).
Chapter Nine
A Man Out of Time
Mr Joyce, the InterCom guide, had been perfectly charming thought the Doctor as he, Tegan and Milligan were shown into yet another of the seemingly never-ending underground laboratories in the research and development facility. Of course, that meant nothing. Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich had been delightful company when the Doctor had pursued the Master across Berlin during the night of the long knives. That didn’t stop the Doctor from (occasionally) wishing that he had taken the gun that one of the SS men had offered him for his own protection, and shot the pair of them in the head with it.
But, in all honesty, that wouldn’t have been his style.
And, anyway, time looks after itself. The Doctor, of all people, was acutely aware of that.
‘The computer and its applications have allowed us to change the way in which we perceive the world. In the 1960s they envisioned a global village. One world containing a people united by one common language. They thought that the language would be television. But with the Internet such a dream is now an absolute reality.’
‘A wonderfully Marxist attitude,’ noted the Doctor as he toyed idly with a computer mouse. ‘One that I hardly expected to see manifested in the heart of a multinational conglomerate.’ He emphasised the last word as if searching for some indication that it had unnerved Joyce. There was no reaction, except for a continuation of the sales pitch.
‘Marx? What a romantic fool he was. No, Dr Smith, I think you’ll find that InterCom celebrates the anarchy of Marxism without subscribing to its methods. We regard capitalism as most people regard poetry. As a thing of beauty.’ Joyce smiled. ‘Once, the study of computers was the province of idealists. We merely see idealism as the first step of an achievable goal.’
‘Turning rebellion into money?’ asked Milligan sarcastically.
‘Yes,’ said the Doctor, brightly. ‘How delightfully American.’ He turned to Tegan, power-dressed in a severe two-piece royal blue business suit and wearing the sternest fake spectacles that Private Wooldridge could find in the UNIT costume stores. ‘Anything to add Miss Jones?’
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Tegan gave the Doctor an ice-cold stare that threatened to freeze him to the floor. ‘Mr Joyce, your company has a large monopoly in some areas of global telecommunications,’ she said at last, looking up from her copious notes. ‘You told us earlier that over half the communications satellites currently in orbit arc owned or co-owned by InterCom.’
‘That’s approximately accurate,’ replied Joyce. There was a withering disdain in his voice for this annoying woman who seemed to have spent the last hour