Doctor Who_ Set Piece - Doctor Who_ Set Piece Part 24
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Doctor Who_ Set Piece Part 24

Why not?

The Doctor probably had a good idea.

He was part of her family's stories. Her great-great-grandmother had written a book about him well, about UNIT, but the two were difficult to separate. She had heard all about him as a child, read all about him as an adult.

But she'd never expected to run into him on King's Cross Station.

Just imagine. If the transit system hadn't decided to get the two of them together, she wouldn't be sitting here eating this horse.

She put the hunk of meat down, closed her eyes. It had been Aunt Francine who'd made her realize who the little man was, Aunt Francine and her X-ray eyes, seeing past the human facade into his alien physiology the physiology she had read about in the Stone Mountain archives, using a borrowed ice-breaker to access the classified files stored from the first grandfather's time.

And there had been more.

A second Time Lord had been on Earth in those days, but he wasn't stranded the way they were stranded without her prototype vessel. He was coming and going freely, just to spite his old rival. UNIT's priority A1 order had been to watch for him.

She had read the surviving parts of her ancestor's diary entries, snaffled by the Official Secrets Act over the protests of his widow. A lot of it was lost or destroyed, but she'd even found yellowing, two-dimensional photographs, 151 and tried to imagine the people moving and speaking, as though she were the projector that turned them into holograms.

It had been in the empty gym, with all the soldiers down in the mess for a drink, their voices echoing across a rainy concrete courtyard. In those days the Doctor had been very different-looking, taller, with a taste for impractical fashion and terrible army tea.

'Just in case we run into him again,' the Doctor had said, 'there's something I want to show you.'

He had caught hold of the Brigadier's hand Kadiatu imagined the man being a little taken aback by the unfamiliar touch and had run the Brigadier's fingers along his left collarbone. 'There's a nerve cluster here,' he said. 'If you're going to hit him, hit him there. It should render him unconscious with a minimum of fuss.'

The Brigadier must have nodded, seriously. 'I take it you want me to keep that piece of information to myself.'

'I'd prefer it weren't generally known.'

And Alistair had kept it a secret, and so had his descendants. Until his great-grand-daughter broke into his records.

But she wasn't his descendant at all. Was she?

Someone had to look after Earth, to match the Doctor's ability to drop in whenever he pleased. That was what Project Butterfly Wing had been all about. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The Doctor had poked and prodded the human race until it had hit back. With her.

It was possible that in the patchwork of her genes was something of her adoptive father's. He'd been a Thousand Days' War supersoldier, body and mind edited to fight the Martians. It was from the augmented soldiers that her DNA had come. If one of Brigadier Yembe's chromosomes was present in the mix, it would be the only information he had left her, keeping her in the dark for so long. Her parents had kept her away from doctors, which hadn't been hard she never got sick never needed a vaccination. Never got into a fight with other kids, never ran a race.

If it hadn't been for the Doctor, she might never have known what she was.

She could give it up, tell him everything, let him sort it out. But then, he was probably the one who had mucked it up.

She had dismissed her gens de maison gens de maison. Better that they didn't get caught in any extraterrestrial cross-fire. And yet, without her salary, were they going to be worse off? It was so hard to know what to do.

Kadiatu picked up the horse's leg and sank her teeth into it. 'Time for Plan B,' she said.

152.

After a while she realized she was lying on something warm.

Ace blinked and stretched. A proper bed, with proper bedclothes. Light was leaking in through a curtained window, soft, summery morning light. She felt warm.

She was lying next to the Doctor; actually, she was lying half on top of him, one arm thrown across his chest. She could feel her hand rising and falling with his sleeping breath. She was only wearing her bra and knickers.

'I hope Bernice doesn't catch us like this,' she murmured. The Doctor did not stir.

Yesterday started to filter into her mind, backwards.

She remembered Bernice and Mme Thierry fussing over her and the Doctor.

Benny had made her get into the bed with him. He was in his shirtsleeves now. Classic hypothermia treatment.

She remembered shooting the boy in the face. The axe-and-cabbage sound, the she folded up the image and packed it away in her mind, where she could deal with it later. She could handle it.

They were buried in a huge pile of blankets. She sat up and pulled on her shirt.

She remembered hitting the Doctor, trying to stop him from shooting the child. There was a long, purple line under his left eye. Had she done that?

No, she had seen it before, on the ship There was a great purple bruise on his left cheekbone, the impact of a human fist, the skin split open with the force of the blow. fist, the skin split open with the force of the blow.

Which meant which meant he hadn't died, he was still alive, he Ace's hands went to her mouth. Her vision blurred. She forced it down, she could handle it, she could The Doctor's soft blue eyes were open, looking up at her. He gave his head a tiny shake. 'Let it out,' he told her.

Ace sobbed into his shoulder, her hands clutching the fabric of his shirt, her arms and chest jerking violently as she cried. A little awkwardly, he put his arms around her. He held her, held her, even after the sobs and the movement had diminished into silence.

'Are you alright?' she mumbled.

'Of course I'm alright. I'm always alright.'

'The boy,' she said, 'the little boy. You wouldn't really '

'He wasn't a little boy. He was a machine. I doubt he could think much beyond calculating coordinates.'

'But if you had to '

'I'm not like that.'

'You are,' she said. 'You would if it was important.'

'How do you know?'

153.

'Cos I would.'

The Doctor sat up. Ace snuggled up to him, and he put a gentle arm around her. 'I met another one at the other end. A man. He could talk, and think . . .

He must have been the deluxe model.'

'To Ship, we're all machines. Humans, Ants, everyone.'

'God, it's good to see you.'

The Doctor didn't say anything, just held her a little more tightly.

She reached up and tickled him under the arm.

He jumped as though something had stung him. 'What are you doing?' he said, wriggling under the blankets.

'A-ha, the all-powerful Time Lord can dish it out, but can he take it?' Ace pounced and started to mercilessly tickle her victim. He yelped and nearly fell out of the bed, but the sheets were tangled up around him, so that he ended up suspended over the side.

'You're giggling!'

'I do not giggle!' The Doctor, grinning all over his face, reached up and grabbed Ace's arm. They both tumbled onto the floor, shouting with laughter.

At this point Benny walked in the door. 'What on Earth is going on in here?'

'Benny!' they both shouted.

'What a memory!'

Ace said, 'Tickle machine is out of control!'

'Right,' said Benny. She snatched a pillow off the bed and boofed Ace in the head with it.

Ace reached out and grabbed Benny's ankle, tripping her up so that she fell onto the bed.

The Doctor scrambled out of the way as Ace started throwing cushions at Benny, who deflected them with her pillow. 'Stop this at once!' he protested.

Ace chucked a cushion at him. Benny took the opportunity to thump her again with the pillow.

'This has gone on long enough.' The Doctor picked up the other pillow and beat them mercilessly about the head and shoulders.

Ace grabbed hold of his arms, and Benny pulled away the pillow, laughing, but Ace's giggling was turning into sobbing, great gasping sobs. 'Shit.'

The Doctor cradled her while she cried, properly this time, hanging onto her as though she were a life preserver on a very wide and cold ocean. Benny, looking embarrassed, sat down on the floor and tried to stuff some of the feathers back into the misshapen pillow.

'I'm sorry,' said Ace, 'I'm sorry, I just, they were hu-hurting you and I co-couldn't make it stop, I couldn't make it stop!'

'Shh.' He rocked her back and forth, gently. 'That's all over with now.'

'I couldn't do anything, I couldn't do anything, I couldn't stand it!'

154.

'Shh. It's over.'

Benny gave him a look that said, Is it?

He reached out a hand to her, and she joined in the hug. 'I had a plan,' he said. 'It didn't exactly work.'

'Oh, that's a first.'

'Time for plan B.'

'Run?'

'Where to? Eventually, Ship will succeed in stabilizing one of the rifts. Then it will be able to duplicate that rift, over and over in different places and times, an infinite self-similar set and the universe will disintegrate around it.'

'I was joking,' protested Bernice, sitting back down on the floor.

'Are you alright?'

She crammed a fistful of down into the pillow. 'I thought you were dead.

No, I knew you were dead. Both of you.' She pulled the Doctor's fedora off and plonked it down on his head. 'This is going to take some getting used to.'

Ace blew her nose on the Doctor's hanky. 'I feel like such an idiot,' she said.

'What about you?' Benny asked. 'Did you know we were alive?'

The Doctor said, 'The TARDIS knew. She kept track of us, kept us linked, at least subconsciously.'

Ace wiped her eyes. 'Yeah. Alright. Now what?'

The Doctor stood up. 'Conference,' he said.

Benny wanted to be alone.

Funny, that. Now they were back together again, she just wanted some time to herself. She fished around inside her head, looking for the reason, the way she fished for half-remembered facts, or the reason she had gone into a room.

They'd talked in the kitchen, trading stories, comparing notes. Afterwards she'd gone out to the TARDIS and put on banged-up jeans and a blue Glomesh shirt she'd pulled out from under her bed. She'd cut her hair down to the dark roots, a couple of inches long. Bugger the anachronism, she just needed to be herself for a while.

Right now she was sitting on a chair on Thierry's lawn, drinking port and listening to the distant sound of guns.

She hadn't told Ace or the Doctor about her nightmare.

She wondered what Vivant had made of her disappearance. He hadn't got a proper goodbye. Without Denon, she would have starved, but now she felt slightly embarrassed by how much she had had to rely on him. It reminded her of how reliant she was on the Doctor. Powerful friends.

She snatched up a mental fish. The memory glimmered, silver flashing in the sunlight. The silver badge on her father's hat, glittering as he promised 155 he'd be back. She hadn't had a proper goodbye either, he had gone away and he hadn't told her whether he was alive or dead. It wasn't fair!

She wondered for the hundredth time whether the Ants had taken him.

The sound of hoofbeats brought her out of her reverie. She tilted the hat back. A horse and cart were clopping up the long driveway to the mansion. A portly young man was driving it. As the cart drew up, a woman sat up in the back and pulled the tarp off.

'Hi,' said Benny. 'Remember me?'

Kadiatu uncoiled from the cart and was pelting across the ground towards her, lithe and single-minded as a leopard. Benny caught her breath and stayed where she was. Where was she going to run from that?

Kadiatu stopped short of Benny's chair, perfectly still. She gazed at the white woman, as though trying to see through her skin and, make sure the right soul was inside. She was dressed in French clothes, men's clothes, her muscles showing through the cloth. She looked older and her hair was shorter.