Doctor Who (7 page)

Within seconds, the Doctor found himself blinded again, this time by a pulsing, tingling light accompanied by a deep, electronic throbbing noise, almost like a heartbeat. As this sensory onslaught continued, he managed to pick out the shapes of the seated children next to him. They were undergoing the same process.

Decontamination, he thought. He wanted to say it aloud to reassure the children, but the sound was so loud, and there was something in this strange, pulsing beam that was stopping the muscles in his face from working.

Just when it seemed as though there would be no end to this browbeating, everything went silent. He realised he was exhausted, overheated, as if he had been running for his life. His eyelids weighing down over his eyes, he managed another glance at the children. They were now unconscious.

Then, a blast of freezing air shot out at them from all sides and above, billowing like frosty steam. Just as he began to shiver, the already dim light dialled down to total darkness and time seemed suspended.

*

With a gasp, the Doctor was awake again. Blazing lights
again
. This is getting tiresome, he thought. Bright, dark, hot, cold … what next?

‘Are you aware that at 08.54 Carthedian standard time yesterday, a report was received from Captain J. L. Gafeska of the cargo ship
Axious
that the occupants of charter ship KS55NZ/4 were found dead aboard said charter ship?’

Ah, questions. They always came next. The voice was hard, efficient, trained to be emotionless, but it was definitely human. As the glare of the lights faded a little, the Doctor realised he was sitting opposite a uniformed woman, seated at a desk, tapping a small tablet-style computer. She glanced up at him, clearly impatient for an answer.

‘I’ve got a question for you,’ said the Doctor, not really able to manage a smile. ‘Where are Sabel, Ollus and Jenibeth?’

‘Answer the question, please,’ said the woman, with an empty, insincere politeness.

‘No,’ said the Doctor.

‘No, you won’t answer the question?’ she asked.

‘No as in “no” is the answer to your question. Anyway, it’s a stupid question, because obviously the children are alive. Whoever this Captain Gafeska is, he obviously didn’t check very thoroughly, did he? Now, where are the children?’

The woman clearly had no intention of answering the Doctor’s questions. For a moment, he thought he saw a trace of amusement twitch at her mouth, as if the very notion of her answering someone else’s questions
was ludicrous. She glanced back at her computer tablet and drew breath.

‘Oh, next question,’ interrupted the Doctor. The woman looked faintly annoyed. ‘I wonder what that might be, hmm? How did I get aboard the ship? What’s that funny blue crate thing? Who am I? Where do I come from? How come we don’t have any records of you in our database? Am I getting close?’

The woman let her computer tablet fall to the desk with a clatter. She looked the Doctor straight in the eyes. The Doctor nodded. He knew this was a ‘Look, I’m just doing my job’ moment, and he was clearly not making it easy for her. She raised her eyebrows, almost, he thought, as if she were reading his mind.

‘All right, all right,’ he sighed. ‘I’ll try to be a bit more helpful. My name’s the Doctor. The blue crate is my ship and yes, I know that’s odd. I come from a long way away. I was just passing and picked up a distress call. I didn’t get there in time, but the ship had been attacked by Daleks—’

‘By Daleks?’ the woman seemed genuinely shocked.

‘Oh yes, of course,’ said the Doctor. ‘You think the Daleks are nice. Sabel told me. Well, you couldn’t be more—’

‘Nice?’ interrupted the woman. ‘The Dalek Foundation is responsible for—’

‘The Sunlight Worlds, whatever they are, yeah, I know, Sabel told me that too. She’s a bright kid. In fact, they’re all bright kids. Very bright. What have you done to them? Are they all right?’

‘They …’ the woman stopped, realising, thought
the Doctor, that she had been tricked into answering someone else’s question. She sighed. ‘They’re fine,’ she said, smiling genuinely.

‘Fine? I doubt that,’ said the Doctor. ‘They’ve just lost their parents.’

‘Yes. Do you know how?’

‘Haven’t you looked at the flight log?’ asked the Doctor.

The woman slowly shook her head. ‘The datastore was blank.’

‘Not when I saw it, it wasn’t,’ said the Doctor. ‘Are you sure?’

The woman consulted her tablet. She shook her head again, then returned her gaze to the Doctor, leaning towards him a fraction. ‘You’re saying you saw something on the flight log?’

‘Terrin and Alyst Blakely walked straight out of the airlock of that ship and killed themselves,’ he said, bluntly.

‘You actually saw that?’ she asked.

The Doctor suddenly had an uncomfortable feeling that he knew where all this was going to end up. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But I heard it and the flight log had a record of the airlock having been operated.’

‘But—’ the woman started.

‘The datastore of the flight log is blank,’ finished the Doctor. ‘Yeah. So you probably think I’m lying. What do you think, then? I killed Terrin and Alyst and then … what? Brought their children home? I can’t see that that makes much sense.’

The woman stared at him for a long time. The Doctor
could see she really did want to know the truth. Then she looked down at her tablet again. She was checking something.

‘What’s your name?’ asked the Doctor.

Without looking up, she said, ‘I’m not allowed to tell you my name.’

‘Not very friendly,’ said the Doctor, giving her his best boyish, charming smile. She did not look up to see it.

‘I’m not your friend,’ she said. His smile faded. And then she looked at him again.

He could see the very beginnings of a smile in her eyes, that twitch at the side of her mouth again; but once again, she suppressed it.

‘What about my blue crate?’ he asked.

‘You can go now,’ she said, simply.

Unceremoniously marched down a brightly lit corridor by another soldier in full face mask, the Doctor soon found himself reunited with the children. They were sitting on some rather battered-looking comfy chairs in a sort of waiting area. When the Doctor entered, they looked round in anticipation. It struck him that perhaps Ollus and Jenibeth were hoping against hope that, somehow, their parents had returned. For a split second, they looked as if they were about to launch themselves towards him in delight, but then they deflated, their eyes taking on a rather dull, haunted look.

Sabel just stared at the Doctor. He felt as if she was looking right into his thoughts; but then he realised that what he was thinking must have been fairly obvious
from his expression. What in the world was he going to do with these children? Why was he being reunited with them anyway?

‘We told them the truth,’ Sabel said, simply.

The Doctor shrugged, trying to be cheerful. ‘Always the best policy! So, how are we all, then?’

They didn’t answer. It was, the Doctor realised, a bit of a stupid question.

‘They thought you might have killed our parents,’ continued Sabel. ‘But we told them it was the Daleks.’

‘And they didn’t believe us, they didn’t,’ said Ollus.

‘No,’ said the Doctor. ‘No, they didn’t believe me either … Not enough evidence to prove anything. But we’ve got to find a way to
make
them believe us.’

‘Why?’ asked Jenibeth. ‘What’s the point?’

‘Because … Well, because the Daleks are always up to no good,’ said the Doctor. ‘So these people here need to be warned, especially if they think the Daleks are …’ he screwed his face up, ‘… nice.’

‘How will you make everyone believe?’ asked Ollus.

‘I don’t know,’ admitted the Doctor. ‘And what’s more, I don’t even know how I’m going to get the TARDIS back.’

At that moment, the door opened and the woman who had interrogated the Doctor breezed through, clearly not expecting to see them there.

‘Oh,’ she said, stopping.

‘The girl with no name,’ said the Doctor, smiling.

‘What are you still doing here?’ she asked, a little blankly.

‘Um … Where are we supposed to go?’ asked the
Doctor, gesturing around the room.

‘The exit is through this door and down the corridor,’ the woman explained.

‘And that’s it, is it?’ asked the Doctor. ‘I just leave here with three children and … where do we go? What do we do?’

‘That’s not our problem,’ said the woman. ‘There’ll be a full examination of the ship. An investigation. If you’re needed, we’ll find you.’

‘Oh, will you?’ the Doctor smiled, intrigued.

‘You’ve been implanted with a data-chip,’ she said, as if he should have known.

‘Oh. Nice. Thanks,’ said the Doctor. ‘Isn’t that an infringement of my inalienable rights or something?’

‘No,’ she said, moving off towards another door on the other side of the room.

‘That’s it, then?’ said the Doctor, starting to hurry after her.

She turned and looked at him, a little alarmed, he thought, as if she was considering calling for security or something.

‘Yes, that’s it,’ she said, turning and exiting through the other door.

‘Well,’ said the Doctor, turning back to the children, his arms wide in one of his larger shrugs. Before he could say anything else, they had assembled in front of him in their customary formation again. He knew he was going to have to take all this one moment at a time.

As they headed down the corridor to the building’s exit, the Doctor was trying to fathom how he was going to get back to the TARDIS, how he was going to convince
the people of this world that the Daleks were a force for evil and, perhaps most importantly, how exactly he was going to look after three orphaned children without anywhere to live and with no money in his pocket.

When they passed through the main doors, the Doctor immediately saw a potential solution to one of those problems.

It was now night, but in the brightly illuminated street in front of them, there was a crowd of around a hundred people. Perhaps not as impressive as the thousands they had seen earlier, but, thought the Doctor, this gathering would do … especially since they had a very particular air about them.

Immediately, the crowd seemed to move almost as one, dashing towards the Doctor, Sabel, Ollus and Jenibeth. Dazzling lights from hand-held holo-cameras bobbed and swayed closer and closer. A gabble of overlapping questions started firing at them. These, the Doctor realised, were journalists.

‘How did you find the ship? What happened to their parents? Who are you? What do you think of the reports that everyone on board had been killed? Did you know about the strength of public reaction back home?’

More and more questions piled on top of other questions and the more the Doctor and the children did not answer, the more versions of the same questions came firing at them in an increasingly grotesque symphony of intrusive craving. So far, the Doctor reflected, shutting off his mind from the dazzling lights and the incessant questioning, he had encountered two unpleasant aspects of human social behaviour on
Carthedia: uncaring officiousness and a rampantly insensitive press. Not rating as one of his favourite planets, that was for sure.

As he held up his hands in an attempt to stop the flood of questions, the Doctor realised that Sabel, Ollus and Jenibeth were all hiding inside his jacket. Ollus had actually fastened one of the buttons, so from just below the waist up, the Doctor now looked like a sort of bulging, tweed tent with a head.

‘Please! Please! Please!’ the Doctor shouted at the top of his voice. ‘There are children here!’

But the journalists either simply did not care or did not hear.

The Doctor fished inside his jacket and pulled out his sonic screwdriver. He held it aloft, portentously. Some of the journalists looked up for a moment, but still their questions and grappling for position continued.

Flicking the sonic controls to a high oscillation, the Doctor activated the device and about twenty or so of the nearest street lamps exploded in a shower of dancing sparks. A nearby, oval-ish tram-like vehicle, very probably on its last night-time journey back to the depot, also bore the brunt of this sonic assault, as the metal pick-up arm on its roof sizzled furiously on the overhead cables, causing the whole tram to skitter off its tracks and into some parked, domed car-like vehicles.

Fortunately, the impacts were fairly minor, and no one was hurt.

All this commotion, however, was, thankfully, enough to stop the journalists long enough for the Doctor to get a word in. Realising that this might be his
only chance, the Doctor knew he had to go for the big story first.

‘The Daleks are evil!’ he cried at the top of his voice. It had the desired effect. The journalists all looked at him. ‘Well,’ said the Doctor. ‘That’s better. You all look pretty gobsmacked. So, now then,
there’s
a story for you, right there! I don’t know how long you’ve been thinking the Daleks were your friends, but I’m here to tell you that you can be sure that they are up to something. I’m not sure what it is, but it has something to do with the planet Gethria. Some secret so terrible that the parents of these children were prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice to keep it from them. But let me tell you …’

For a moment he trailed off, noticing that the journalists were starting to peel away, shaking their heads. He heard words like ‘nutter’ and ‘lunatic’ and worse drift towards him. They were simply finding his story completely unacceptable.

The Doctor reached out and grabbed the arm of one of the retreating hacks, an older, grey haired, balding man in a heavy, dark coat.

‘Wait a minute!’ the Doctor pleaded. ‘Why’s all this so difficult for you to believe? I mean, you’re journalists, aren’t you? Don’t you love a juicy bit of scandal? This could be a great story.’

‘A great story?’ the journalist sneered. He fixed the Doctor with a look. The Doctor looked straight back into his eyes. This was a veteran of the news trade, the Doctor could see that. A hardened man who felt he had seen it all. He had waited out here in the dark for several hours to get hold of a great story, and instead, all he had
got was something totally crazy from a madman.