Doctor Who_ Trading Futures - Lance Parkin [45]
Jaxa pressed her gun against the side of the cabinet and fired. The cabinet gently fell apart, the four sides unpeeling like a banana skin.
‘Light bulbs,’ she told him.
The Doctor went over, checked the machine. She was right – there was nothing here but lightbulbs and LEDs, the only electronics were there to make the lights flash.
‘The time machine has been removed,’ the Doctor said. ‘Look, there’s room there for something the size of a suitcase. Baskerville took the working parts with him.’
Roja was still studying his wristband. ‘There is no sign of a temp trace.’
Jaxa was reaching for a silver tube at her belt. ‘Doctor, you must be removed from this continuum and taken –’
‘Wait a moment,’ the Doctor interrupted. ‘Make up your mind. If you’re right and this isn’t a time machine, then what, exactly, am I guilty of? Supplying light bulbs?’
Roja was looking confused. ‘He’s right, Jaxa. If this isn’t a time machine, then no crime has been committed.’
‘But the Doctor himself claims that it is a time machine.’
The Doctor smiled smugly. ‘If you’re going to put me on trial, you’ll need better evidence than that. It’ll be my word against mine.’
Jaxa was having none of it. ‘You’ll be taken to a place where your actions can be assessed and punished.’
As she unclipped the tube, Malady made her move – she swept down with her hand, chopping Jaxa’s gun out of her hand. She then swung round, kicking Roja hard in the face. He fell down, grabbing at his nose.
Malady grabbed the Doctor’s sleeve. ‘Time to go,’ she told him.
The Doctor looked back over his shoulder. ‘Who are they?’
* * *
Jaxa’s Story
Let me tell you how they did it (how they did it back in history, I mean).
Before it was done to me, I was an historian, so I ought to have known. I did know. On the threat of war, the Admiralty issued press warrants to their officers. Gangs of marines were sent out, led by some old, worn-out lieutenant, and all the merchant ships were prevented from leaving port.
Everyone’s heard of the press gangs. The common image is that they roamed the streets, grabbed drunks from the benches of the taverns and dragged them back to their ship. That happened, but not as often as you’ve been led to believe from old films. It didn’t have to.
The press gangs did most of their work in the harbours, going on board the ships. The crew of an English ship in an English port didn’t get shore leave – if they did, the captain would never see half of them again. Trusted men were granted it, in small groups, but you could spend ten years on your ship and never set foot on dry land. The mountain came to Mohammed – every ship arriving in port was boarded by travelling salesmen, tobacconists, minstrels, barrels of beer, and women, of course. Plenty of women. More often than not, there were more ‘Blue Sallys’ on board a ship in port than there were crewmen.
And that’s where the press gangs went first – the lower decks of the big merchant ships. They gave you a choice about it, too, contrary to what you might have heard. They told you if you volunteered, you got paid a bounty. If you didn’t volunteer, of course, you were pressed into service anyway.
It’s no coincidence that the phrase catch-22 was coined about a war. Every time there’s a war, people make claims about the first casualty, and it’s always an abstract – truth, freedom, reason. No one ever talks about the first recruit, but that’s an abstract, too – logic. The Admiralty became a bastion of inescapable logic, the sort that confused Alice and kept Kafka up at night.
But there was something attractive about it, too. Suddenly, everything became maths, a straightforward proposition, the world became much easier to understand. You’re either with us or against us. Everyone’s in uniform, everyone knows their place. There are regulations, rules of engagement, there are orders. What was happening might not make much sense – fighting for peace was always, at best, a problematic concept – but why it was happening is perfectly straightforward. Everyone knew how they would