Doctor Who_ Set Piece - Doctor Who_ Set Piece Part 21
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Doctor Who_ Set Piece Part 21

She was too tired even to smile.

'Do you need medical attention? I'm a doctor.'

128.

'I know that,' and now she did smile, with irony. Her face was much older than it should have been, and there was a strength in her eyes that flashed in the candlelight. 'I am not seriously hurt. But I am ashamed.'

The Doctor shook his head. 'Sometimes you can't help it. Sometimes, no matter how hard you resist, they can still do things to you.'

'It is not that. Je reve, Je reve, ' she said, in a low voice. 'I imagine terrible things.' ' she said, in a low voice. 'I imagine terrible things.'

His eyes were pulling the explanation from her, but she looked away, became silent again. The Doctor said, 'Killing your husband?' A tiny, bird-like nod of the head. 'Why do you stay?'

'Because,' sighed Mme Thierry, 'he would kill me if I left. He has told me, many times. And even if he did not, where would I go? I would starve, or be blown apart by a shell. There is no sanctuary, he is doing nothing unlawful, nothing wrong.'

But the Doctor was shaking his head from side to side, agitatedly. 'You should leave, you should go, just go and keep going '

She stretched out a bony hand, touched him lightly on the wrist. He looked into her eyes. 'You have been tortured. Haven't you?'

'Dozens of times,' said the Doctor dismissively. 'Captured hundreds of time, escaped hundreds of times. It's like saying the same word over and over; it stops meaning anything after a while.'

Mme Thierry nodded, nodded with understanding. 'Perhaps one day he will hit me until I lose my mind,' she said grimly. 'And then all my dreams may come true.' She raised a finger. 'You must not drink any of the wine he gives you.'

'I know that too,' smiled the Doctor.

Mme Thierry hesitated, then reached under the bed and drew out a strong-box. She pushed it across to him, and he picked the lock with a bit of wire.

The box was full of gold. He pulled out a bracelet that had to have come from Mesopotamia, pieces of eight, a cheap gold watch from the twentieth century. The Ants had plundered history to pay their servant. Given their power, Thierry was thinking very, very small.

'What about you?' said Mme Thierry. 'Why don't you leave?'

'Sometimes you have to do nothing.' He slammed the lid down until the box locked, pushed it back under the bed. 'That can be very, very difficult to do.'

'When he hits me,' said Mme Thierry, closing her eyes, 'I try to stay still and to make no sound. It gives him no excuse to hurt me further. And after a while, he stops.'

They sat in silence for a little while.

'Tell me three things,' said the Doctor.

' Oui. Oui. ' '

129.

'The child. Is he yours?'

Mme Thierry shook her head. 'Francois brought him home one evening and told me we were to adopt the boy. I do not even know his name,' she added.

'He is such a strange, cold child. I have never heard him speak a word.'

'Are there any weapons in the house?'

'There is a pistol kept loaded in the drawer in the upstairs bedroom,' she said steadily. 'What is your third question?'

'What's your name?'

'Madame Thierry.'

'No. Your name.'

It was a few moments before she answered, as though she were trying to remember. 'It is Genevieve.'

Ace went into her bedroom with a big flannel towel wrapped around her. The dust of the desert was gone from her skin and her mouth, and a little of the Sisterhood's salve had gone a long way towards soothing her burned skin. Her hair was untangled, hanging down around her shoulders in a smooth wave.

She sat down on the bed. The room seemed so empty. Most of her stuff, what little of it there was, was tucked away in a foot locker underneath the bed. But someone had changed the sheets, and turned the covers down neatly.

A pair of jeans and a denim shirt were tidily laid out on the bed, along with clean socks and knickers and a small felt bag.

A quarter of an hour later she walked into the console room, stretched, hovered at the controls. She raised her hands.

She could go anywhere. Anywhere. It was just Ace now, Ace and the TARDIS. The machine was humming to her, as it had often hummed to her, the first mind it had touched as it uncurled from its long hibernation. They were like sisters now, ready to have their own new adventures.

Slowly, she let her hands fall back to her sides.

A moment later, she was typing instructions into the visualizer. Scanner data coruscated on a flat screen beneath her chin, forming patterns and diagrams, sending spirals of colour over her face.

After a while, she smiled.

Kadiatu had expected at least a guard. But her house was unwatched, empty.

No-one had bothered to wash away the blood on the road outside.

She hadn't left any of the soldiers alive to report in; it was entirely possible that the looters had gotten to the bodies before the Garde. Or perhaps corpses were so common that four more just didn't make a difference.

She stood in the lounge for a while, making a mental note of the things which looters had already taken furniture, mostly, bulky wooden items 130 which would make good firewood. There were splinters all over the carpet where the chaise longue and the piano had been broken up on the spot, the easier to transport. The stealing didn't bother her, it was natural for unat-tended stuff to go missing. They'd left the grandfather clock, still slowly counting out the seconds.

Would they really have not cared about the people she'd killed? She hadn't been paying much attention, had a hazy, generic image of war built up from TV news and warvids. Her parents and their friends used to pop over for a drink and the worst rental tape they could find, and laugh themselves stupid.

Kadiatu spent those parties trying to trick people into giving her sips of beer.

She remembered when her brother was first shown in public, six days after his birth, her father handing out gifts to the midwives at the party. They'd taken the umbilical cord, wrapped in plastic sheeting in a wooden box, and buried it somewhere where evil spirits wouldn't find it.

She'd reached over the edge of her brother's cot, the wooden bars coming up to her armpits, and his tiny hand had closed around one of her fingers. She asked her mother whether there'd been a party when she was born too, and her mother said of course there was, she had just been too young to remember it.

The cellar door was still intact, humming very quietly to itself. Kadiatu used a sonic key to switch off the electric fence she'd wired across the door, the tiny conductive threads invisible in the dim light. The small device squealed a series of notes, killing the humming, and she tucked it back into her sleeve.

She'd dropped the pieces of Ant through the hole. The head was dented, half-hidden by the wooden stairs where it had rolled. Its eyes hung loosely on their stalks, regarding her mournfully.

She picked up the severed leg and examined it with an engineer's eye. These things were big, but they weren't particularly well-constructed lightweight instead of armoured, not meant to take a shot. Overconfidence? No, they really were just designed to fetch and carry, weren't meant for combat.

She sat on the bottom step, tugging uncomfortably at her dress, and stared up at her nameless ship. Beached on the shores of time. She wished she could just get in, press a few buttons, zap herself back to Makeni for some proper food and a pair of jeans. Or Lunarversity. Anywhere familiar. She wanted to explore familiarity, now, take in the tiny details she had missed, taking it all for granted.

And the Doctor wasn't going to get her back, that was becoming more and more obvious. Her parents had had to explain to her about some of their friends, not to make loud noises around them. The bursts of anger, the memory loss, that sudden, instinctive curl into foetal position. This time she was on her own.

131.

There was a sudden sizzling in the air, an ozone smell. Kadiatu was half-way to her feet when the ship vanished.

It just disappeared, like a television picture that had been switched off. Her mouth hung open.

'Shit!' she said, at length.

Thierry's desk was covered in paper: receipts, orders, business letters. A fountain pen stood in its stand, a glass shape with a coral in it held down a mass of unpaid bills. There was a case of butterflies on the wall, dusty and forgotten, pinned bodies dried and shrivelled behind the glass.

The littleboy watched with pale eyes as the Doctor quietly slid open a drawer. The pistol had not been used for years. The Time Lord spent a few moments examining it, making sure it would still work. He rummaged in the back of the drawer for ammunition.

The littleboy watched and watched. The Time Lord could feel those pallid eyes burning into his back, as though the child's vision somehow cooked a corridor through the air, as though the room itself bent around him in some way.

'I believe it was Anton Chekhov,' said the Doctor at length, 'who said that if you plan to fire a gun in the third act, you have to load it in the first.'

He turned to face the littleboy. The child's face held no emotion. The skin was perfect, unworn; he had never smiled, never frowned, never tripped and fallen in the dirt.

He was still holding the red ball. 'There aren't any other toys in the house,'

said the Doctor. 'That's just for show, isn't it? You wouldn't know what to do with a toy. That's not what you're for.'

He put the pistol into the pocket of his coat. 'See you in the third act,' he said, and went out of the room.

The guard snored and stirred, hands laced over his fat belly. Benny stepped right over him, her shoes in one hand, moving silently across the desert sand.

The Setites' camp was a small circle of tents Benny counted three, plus a fourth shelter cobbled together from tarpaulins and branches. A single palm tree stood overhead with a dozen horses and camels tethered to it. The wind sang eerily through the huge leaves.

They'd spent a week on camels tracking the Setites, skirmishing with bandits and pockets of resistance fighters. Benny's shoulder had healed more quickly than she had expected, which made her wonder what else might have been in the antibiotics.

She moved closer to the improvized shelter. Surely no one would be sleeping in there, not with all those gaps and holes and the uneven shape which 132 meant that was probably where they stored stuff.

She gestured to Vivant. He was half-hidden behind a boulder at the edge of the camp, watching nervously as she tiptoed towards the tent. He worried about her so much, the sweet thing. If she really were stuck here accept it, Summerfield, why can't you just accept it she could think of far worse people to be stuck to.

She raised her hands above her head and brought them down sharply. He nodded and moved towards the animals.

Bernice peeked into the tent. No-one home. She slipped inside, amongst pots and pans, blankets and boxes, and drew herself into a small shape that wouldn't be visible from outside.

It wasn't long before an irritated whinny broke through the night air, and then suddenly three shots, crisp as ice.

The camp erupted into shouting, scrambling life. Through a frayed rip Benny watched the Egyptians running to catch up with their bolting animals.

A few more shots Vivant encouraging them on their way?

Benny saw men, young boys, but no women. She wondered if the Setites were like the Thuggee, passing the religion on from father to son.

No-one thought to check the supplies tent. She heard more shots and held her breath, hoping that Vivant and his men were alright. It wouldn't do for Denon to survive the Terror and then get shot at random in Egypt. If nothing else it'd put archaeology back a century or so. God, how did the Doctor handle this kind of responsibility?

She slipped out her flashlight, turned the beam down low, shone it around the tent. There were a few boxes, none of them locked. Her diary wasn't anywhere to be found.

She slipped out of the tent. The camp was empty. Not too bright, these Set worshippers falling for such an obvious distraction. Even the snoring guard had woken up and joined in the chase.

She nipped over to the largest of the six tents. It had to be the tall man's.

God knew what he'd made of her diary. Hopefully he just thought she was insane.

She pulled out her pistol and went inside. There was a low table, a cot bed, a rug on the floor, a couple of scimitars a table.

Benny threw back the tablecloth. It was a chest. She shot the lock off and pulled it open.

Her diary was inside, sitting on top of a pile of neatly folded silk. Probably stolen goods. She reached for the book.

'Stand up slowly,' said a voice behind her, 'and drop your gun.'

Benny stood up slowly and dropped her gun. 'Do you want me to put my hands above my head?'

133.

'Why not? Turn around.'

Benny turned around, lacing her fingers on top of her head. The tall man looked her up and down. He had a large, rather unstable looking pistol in his hand.

'You are a most interesting woman,' he said. 'A woman from the future, looking for the treasures of the past.'

'Oh dear,' said Benny. 'You didn't actually believe all of that, did you?'

'Why else would you write about it in such detail, if it weren't true?'

'Would you believe I'm trying to beat Shelley to the invention of science fiction?' The tall man looked at her blankly. 'No?'

'The sacred writings contain different passages regarding the way in which Sutekh will return,' said her captor. 'One passage speaks of a hole in the air, through which a man might step into the time of the ancients, or forwards into the unseen centuries to come.' He gestured with his weapon. 'I want you to show me where that hole is. Or better still, show me the ship of time.'

'You must be joking,' said Benny. 'I'm not letting a loon like you loose in history. It was bad enough with the three of us running around.'

'Then this time I'll make sure I don't miss.' He pointed the pistol at her heart.

Benny dropped to her knees. 'Oh please, please don't shoot me!' she begged, her voice turning into a terrified squeak. The tall man looked down at her, bemused. 'I'll do whatever you want, just please don't '

She reached down and jerked the rug out from under his feet. He fell backwards with a curse. Benny had already snatched up a scimitar and swung desperately at his hand, cutting into his palm and knocking the gun away.

The tall man tried to punch her, managed to hit her in the injured shoulder.

She yelped and fell onto the cot bed, trying to regain her balance. The tall man grabbed another sword, slashed down, trying to cut her in half as she twisted frantically aside. His sword tore a great vertical slit in the tent wall.

Benny elbowed him in the face and jumped out through the tear.