Dr. Who - BBC New Series 28 (2 page)

Terry was sensible enough to know when to party and when to really knuckle down and get the job done, though, and he and Johnnie had come back to England, certified to work on installing these new fibre optics, which made them both popular with their boss and earned them a bit of a bonus.

They’d been promised another bonus if they got this job done and, frankly, it was money in the bank the way they were going. The cabling was easy, it was the removal of the old copper stuff that was taking the time.

Johnnie was a couple of floors above him, closer to the demonstration suite. They’d flipped a coin to see who hung around with the bigwigs and had the chance to nick a cup of tea off the secretaries and PAs and who got the back stairways and service corridors. Terry had lost, of course. No tea for him.

He pulled a screwdriver out of his tool belt and started

to open the last junction box, whistling something he’d heard on the radio on the drive over. Anything to pass the time.

If he’d glanced back over the work he’d just done, he might’ve been surprised to notice that the fibre-optic cables he’d wired into the previous junction boxes were glowing strangely.

Cables that weren’t actually connected to power sources rarely glowed. Never, to be frank. It just didn’t happen. Why would it? How could it?

But it was happening: tiny purple pulses of energy, briefly flickering up and down the cabling. Almost like blood pumping through the veins of a huge electronic creature.

Terry didn’t notice it because he was looking forwards, looking to see where he was going next, not where he had been.

Which was unfortunate. Not just for Terry Lockworth, whose spaghetti bolognese would indeed go uneaten that night, but also for pretty much the whole human race.

Terry laced the last bit of fibre-optic cabling into the final junction box and screwed it shut for the final time, smiling to himself. Upstairs, Johnnie ought to be receiving proof that the cabling was finished, and his monitors would be telling him that everything was good to go.

As Terry finished tightening up the last screw, a massive bolt of purple alien energy rushed through his screwdriver, his hand, his whole body. It moved so fast that, by the time the miniscule charred flakes that were all that remained of Terry fell to the ground, the screwdriver

was only starting to fall away from the screw head.

Of course, Terry was lucky. By dying so suddenly and violently and efficiently, he was spared what was to come in the next few days.

But he probably wouldn’t have seen it quite like that.

Upstairs, in the penthouse suite, Johnnie Bates was linking all the computers into the main admin server of the Oracle Hotel, shining beacon of the architectural brilliance that was the Western Business District Development, commonly known as the Golden Mile, just on the left-hand side of the M4 motorway out of London.

But to the man who owned the hotel, Johnnie was just a little man in grey overalls doing something with wires.

Dara Morgan had, according to the biographies he carefully maintained on his company websites, made his first million in Derry when he was just 26, by creating a popular music torrent site that enabled cheap downloads at six times traditional speeds and with four times traditional MP3 quality.

The music industry loved him. The punters loved him.

The government loved him. His mum loved him (well, he assumed she did; they didn’t talk so much these days, what with her being kept in a silver urn on the mantelpiece next to his dad).

And the business world loved him. Four years later, and MorganTech was the funding behind the new WBDD, bringing work and development to Hounslow, Osterley and all those other areas of London between Brentford and Heathrow Airport that he’d never heard of prior to buying up the land.

With a personal portfolio of around £65m, he was one step away from being a megastar, already wining and dining with the Trumps, Gateses, de Rothschilds, Gettys and half a dozen more movers and shakers with unpronounceable names from around the world. Actually, the names weren’t unpronounceable, but Dara Morgan couldn’t be bothered to remember them. They just didn’t matter to him enough.

What mattered to him right now was getting the suites of his new hotel ready for the demonstration of his new handheld computer. And the little man in the grimy grey overalls was not going quite fast enough.

‘Cait?’ He clicked his fingers and a power-dressed redhead with thin metal specs and insanely high heels sauntered over.

‘Mr Morgan, sir?’

Dara Morgan pointed towards the grey overalls man.

‘How much longer?’ he asked, his soft Northern Irish accent unusually snappy.

Caitlin nodded her understanding and strode over to ask the man for information.

Dara Morgan smiled inwardly, watching Caitlin move.

He appreciated her on so many levels, but her beauty was pretty high on the list.

Everyone in his organisation was from Derry or surrounding districts of Northern Ireland. More importantly, they were all people he’d grown up with. All hearing stories from parents and older siblings about the strife, the killings, the honour. The marches, the troops, the recriminations and punishment beatings.

It was history to Dara Morgan, something from another age, almost. His generation had no time to care about the Struggles, any more than they cared about supposed potato famines or Oliver Cromwell. That was ancient history. Dara Morgan and MorganTech were the future. In so many ways.

He ran a hand through his shoulder-length hair and then took out his mobile, pausing to smell the scent of shampoo on his fingers.

It was so important to be clean. To look nice and smell better.

At school, they’d diagnosed it as a form of OCD, as if an obsessive compulsion to wash his hands any time he came into contact with another person was something bad!

People carried germs and, while he didn’t think for one moment he was going to be struck down with malaria just by shaking hands with a stranger, it wasn’t unreasonable to groom oneself every so often.

School never understood him, he recalled vaguely. It was too small, probably too focused on curriculums and timetables and sports.

He couldn’t wait to leave, and had done so the moment he’d finished his exams. No sixth form, college or university for him. Straight into business, straight into IT, the future of the world, straight into creating an MP3

system for the troglodytes who thought
Big Brother
and The X-Factor
were the be all and end all of television culture. He’d needed them, of course, because they’d helped him reach his potential – they’d been the first rungs on the ladder to success. To ruling the world,

through business. He had no desire to actually rule the world, it was full of too many thick people fighting over oil and territory and God to be a sensible plan to run it.

But he could dominate in technology, see off the current so-called giants and buy access into the homes and workplaces of everyone on the planet.

That was enough.

And at tomorrow’s press demonstration, that plan would be taking its first step.

Caitlin returned and said the man was waiting on a call from another man in some service area on the mezzanine floor and he’d be done.

Dara Morgan glanced over – the overalled man was trying to call.

‘Tell your friend,’ Dara Morgan said to Caitlin, ‘that he won’t get through to his colleague. The service areas are blocked to cellular signals. Tell him to use a terminal. If the fibre optics are connected, it’ll link straight to his associate’s mobile.’

Caitlin nodded and passed the message on.

Dara Morgan watched as the overalled man inserted the fibre-optic connection into the back of his laptop and dialled via that.

There was a flash of purple and, where the workman had been kneeling, there was now just a pile of ashes. A burnt, acrid smell wafted over, and Dara Morgan wrinkled his nose in distaste. Burned flesh, melted fabric and sweat.

Vile.

‘Well,’ said Caitlin, ‘that bodes well, sir.’

Dara Morgan clapped his hands loudly, and everyone

else in the room, all of whom had ignored the death of Johnnie Bates, turned to face him.

‘People, it would appear the hotel is wired. Or “fibred”, I should say.’

There was a polite ripple of laughter.

‘Tomorrow, we take over the world.’

‘Oi!’

A word/phrase/guttural noise, spluttered with a splash of indignation, a twist of sarcasm and a great gulp of volume.

No matter how hard he tried, the Doctor couldn’t help but sigh every time he heard it. Usually because the indignation, sarcasm and especially the volume were all aimed in his direction.

He sighed and turned back to face Donna Noble, Queen of the ‘Oi’s.

And she wasn’t there.

Just the TARDIS, parked between two council dumpsters. Quite neatly, if he said so himself.

Oh.

Ah.

Right.

‘Sorry,’ he said to the TARDIS door, then walked back and unlocked it, revealing Donna stood on the threshold.

‘I assumed you were already outside.’

‘Which bit of “I’m right behind you” didn’t quite make sense, then?’ Donna asked oh-so-politely, with a characteristic head wobble that actually meant she wasn’t feeling all that polite at all. ‘Which bit of “wait for me”

bypassed your hearing? Which section of “I’m just putting

on something nice” vanished into the ether?’

There was no way for the Doctor to worm out of that one. So he just shrugged. ‘I said I was sorry.’

‘“Sorry”?’

‘Yeah, “sorry”. What else do you want?’

‘Are you “sorry” that you didn’t hear me? “Sorry” that you locked me inside your alien spaceship? Or “sorry”

that you hadn’t even noticed I wasn’t with you?’

Each time, Donna pinged the word ‘sorry’ so it sounded like the least apologetic word in the English language and took on a whole new meaning that linguists could argue over the exact implication of for the next twelve centuries.

‘No way I can win this,’ the Doctor said, ‘so I’m just gonna let it go, all right?’

Donna opened her mouth to speak again, but the Doctor reached forward and put a finger on her lips.

‘Hush,’ he said.

Donna hushed.

And winked.

‘I win!’

And then she gave him that fantastic, amazing grin that she always did when she was teasing him – and he gave her that sigh that admitted he’d been caught out yet again.

It was a game. A game that two friends who’d gone through so much together played instinctively with one another.

Familiarity, friendship and fun. The three Fs that summed up the time shared by these two adventurers.

She slipped an arm around his and pulled him close.

‘So, what’s the skinny, Skinny?’

The Doctor nodded towards Chiswick High Road and the hustle and bustle of the traffic, and quickly dragged her out onto the main street, ready to get lost in the crowds.

Except there weren’t any. Indeed, there weren’t really very many people around at all, just a couple of kids on a skateboard on the opposite pavement and an old man walking his dog.

The Doctor raised his other hand. ‘Not raining,’ he said.

‘Well spotted, Sherlock,’ said Donna. ‘Sunday?’

‘You wanted Friday the fifteenth of May 2009, Donna.

That’s what I set the TARDIS for.’

Donna laughed. ‘In which case it’s probably a Sunday in August 1972.’

The Doctor poked his head into a newsagents, smiling at the man behind the counter, who was listening to his MP3 player and ignoring his potential customer completely.

The Doctor looked at the nearest newspaper. ‘Friday 15th May 2009,’ he confirmed to Donna.

‘So where is everyone?’

‘Maybe it’s lunchtime,’ the Doctor suggested. ‘Or maybe Chiswick’s no longer the hub of society it was a month ago. Shall we walk to your place?’

‘You’re coming?’

The Doctor looked as though the thought of not going with Donna hadn’t crossed his mind. ‘Oh. Umm. Well, I was going to.’

‘Doctor, why are we here?’

‘It’s the first anniversary of your father’s death.’

‘And, grateful as I’m sure she is for you saving the world from the Sontarans, I’m not quite sure my mum’s gonna be overjoyed to see you, today of all days.’

‘Your granddad will.’

‘Yeah? Good, take him out for a pint tonight in the Shepherd’s Hut, but to start with I want to see them on my own.’ Donna was still holding his hand, and she squeezed it gently. ‘You understand, don’t you?’

He smiled. ‘Course I do. Wasn’t thinking. Sorry.’

‘Let’s not start that up again, yeah?’ Donna let go of his hand. ‘I’m gonna get some flowers and walk home. Why don’t I meet you back here, this time, tomorrow?’

‘Here. Tomorrow. Sold.’ The Doctor winked at her and started walking off. ‘Nice flower shop on the corner thataway,’ he called out. ‘Ask for Loretta and say I sent you.’

He turned a corner and was gone.

Donna took a breath and walked in the direction he’d pointed.

A year ago. Today.

Adipose. Pyroviles. Oods with brains in their hands.

Even Sontaran probic vents, Hath and talking skeletons all seemed simple in comparison to what was going to happen this afternoon.

Because this afternoon Donna had to go back and be there for her mum and probably relive not just last year, but the days and weeks that had followed, funerals, telling people, memorials, notices in papers, sorting out the