Doctor Who_ Set Piece - Doctor Who_ Set Piece Part 32
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Doctor Who_ Set Piece Part 32

'I suppose my combat suit is here somewhere,' said Ace.

'Storage,' said the Doctor. 'No time.'

'Forget it.'

The Doctor was doing things to the controls. 'Enough power . . . ? Hope . . . '

he coughed.

He turned suddenly. Ace's head snapped around a moment later. 'Is it ?'

'It's Kadiatu,' said Ace steadily. 'She's holding a blaster.'

The Doctor reached out to Kadiatu with a trembling hand. 'We need your help.'

Kadiatu's face contorted, jerkily, as though two different puppeters had hold of her strings. 'Get!' She tried to speak, but it was cut off. Her arm jumped up.

191.

'Ship's got her,' said Ace.

'Fight it,' breathed the Doctor. 'It's falling into death, you can fight it.'

Kadiatu's hand moved wildly, trying to keep the weapon trained on them, trying to shoot the controls, the walls, anything.

Ace flinched as a ball of plasma pumped out of the gun. But the space was suddenly full of roaring light, glaring sound. There was a gaping melted hole in the transparent shield that held in the rift.

Ace stepped away from the Doctor. Give her a moving target. 'Come on, you bitch!' She shouted, waving her arm. Hot pain rippled up her side. 'Whose side are you on? Come on!'

Kadiatu's green eye moved wildly in her head, following Ace's movements.

Ace risked a sideways glance at the Doctor. He was still doing things to the control panel.

Kadiatu came towards Ace. Her face was contorted in horror and fury.

'Come on!' Ace shouted again, edging towards the rift. 'Come and get me!'

'Between!' gasped Kadiatu.

Ace understood.

She stepped between Kadiatu and the rift.

With an inhuman roar, Kadiatu ran at her.

Ace flung herself aside at the last moment, and Kadiatu, turning her run into a jump, leapt through the hole and vanished into the light.

Ace tried to pick herself up, crawled to the wall, scrabbled at the rough surface until she made it to her feet.

'She's gone,' said Ace. 'She jumped.'

'Not stabilized,' said the Doctor. '. . . might . . . anywhere! I hope she has a soft landing. Sorry we couldn't . . . ' He coughed sharply.

'It's okay,' she said. 'We can't save everybody.'

'Never . . . ' His voice broke. 'Thanks for . . . '

'Let's get the hell out of here.'

There was a sudden wash of energy. Benny leapt to her feet as the basement filled with it and was suddenly empty, echoing. She blinked spots out of her eyes.

The Doctor and Ace stumbled to a halt. They were clutching one another in an awkward A-frame hug. Both of them were covered in blood, mostly the Doctor's, deep orange-red. Benny put her hand to her mouth at the sight of the flower growing from his shoulder.

He turned eyes on her which were horribly green. 'Benny,' he wheezed, 'Ace is hurt.'

Abruptly, he collapsed, Ace snatching at him as his knees gave way. She fell with him, unable to support his weight any longer.

192.

Bernice was beside them in a second, catching the Doctor and gently lowering him to the stone floor. He gripped her hand with bloody fingers. Ace, on her knees, took his other hand.

' Adieu, Adieu, ' He coughed. ' ' He coughed. ' "Adieu," dit le mourant au miroir qu' on lui tend, "nous "Adieu," dit le mourant au miroir qu' on lui tend, "nous ne nous verrons plus . . . " ne nous verrons plus . . . " ' '

Then he stopped breathing.

Benny's agonized eyes met Ace's for a moment. She bent with pain, her fringe hanging down over her face, pressing his limp hand to her heart.

Ace just sat there, cross-legged, looking at the flower. It spasmed, started to wilt, suddenly turned completely grey. She reached down and plucked the dead thing from his shoulder. Its roots came away easily, limp and slick with blood.

Almost immediately, he coughed and took a deep breath. 'Thought so,' said Ace weakly.

The Doctor's eyes fluttered open. They were already changing back to their natural blue. 'That feels so much better,' he sighed.

Ship's mind was made of bric-a-brac, bits and pieces from thousands of stolen minds. As piece after piece of the living vessel died, its collection of junk began to shake loose.

There was Sedjet's memory of the view from the top of the Great Pyramid, unravelled from the knot of Ship's group mind.

There was Ms Cohen's terror of hyperspace, a sharp sliver of emotion split away from the gestalt.

The junk tumbled from Ship's closet, faster and faster. There were memories of childhood and battle and sex, someone's talent for the harp, someone's taste for chocolate, someone's faith in their god and someone else's faith in the scientific method. A sunny day, a teddy bear, a hospital ceiling, a Draconian marriage, a school play, the Shi'wod dancing ritual, onion soup. Distilled moments of humanity and a hundred other species, blowing away into the Vortex like streamers of light.

The jagged, ragged remains of Ship rolled, convulsed, burst like a balloon, and were carried away on the wind into oblivion.

193.

Chapter 17.

Exit the Warrior

Heroing is one of the shortest-lived professions there is.

(Will Rogers, 1925) Benny spent the night on the roof, watching Paris ripping itself apart. Someone, she thought, ought to stay on guard.

She wished she knew the names of the buildings. Huge palaces, museums, libraries set ablaze, one after the other, great columns of smoke rising and spreading to blot out the brilliant stars.

At about one in the morning, the entire dome of a building was blown off, with a crump! even louder than the cannons and shells. Nicolas's house seemed far from the action, thank goodness, but the fighting was spreading slowly to engulf the entire city.

They'd have to leave soon. The Doctor said Ace couldn't be moved, not while the shot of nanites he'd given her were doing their job. Nicolas had long ago dragged his bed downstairs into a storeroom. The TARDIS had materialized next to it, drawn to Ace by the same impulse that had made it chase her to Ancient Egypt.

They'd gotten the first aid kit out of the TARDIS, and Benny had bandaged the Doctor's shoulder, tightly binding his left arm to his side. The bruise on his face was starting to fade. He had been in surprisingly good condition, given the jagged tear over his collarbone. Ace was in much worse shape.

'The nanites can regenerate a lost limb,' he had said, carefully pressing a hypospray to Ace's wrist. 'They use the patient's own DNA as a template to regrow damaged tissue, to break down foreign material or organisms in a wound.'

'Will it hurt her?' Benny had said, gently pulling the covers over the young woman's unconscious form.

'As little as possible,' he said, putting the spray away. 'Time Lords aren't very good at pain, they never have to feel it. It is risky, because it's so rapid, but it's her best chance.'

'Kill or cure.'

'If you like.'

'That was a really stupid plan.'

195.

He looked at her over the bed, agitatedly passing the hypospray from hand to hand. 'She wasn't supposed to follow me.

'No. I meant it was stupid in the first place.'

'Kadiatu thought to kill Ship with a virus. I'd already tried that, Ship was far too strong, or it would never have survived falling into the rift. I had to have access to its central nervous system. And for that to happen, it had to have access to mine.'

'Was that why Kadiatu took you back to Ship?'

He nodded. 'She was told to, but she knew I had something up my sleeve.

She was right out of her depth. She should have left it to me.'

'You would have died if Ace hadn't been there.'

'I know. It wouldn't be the first time.' His hands clasped the hypospray, hard. 'Kadiatu got what she wanted. She can travel anywhere, anywhen. I hope we meet again, I want the chance to talk to her properly.'

'You were too busy trying to outplot one another.'

The Doctor shook his head. 'Ship was always listening.'

'You should have worked together.'

'Maybe next time. The problem with the easy way out is that it has already been mined.'

'Who told you that?'

He reached out, brushed a strand of hair from Ace's forehead. 'She did.'

Dying.

You don't have to do anything when you're dying.

Ace was finding the whole death thing a lot easier to handle than she had imagined. For one thing, she was so tired that it was a pleasure to just lie still.

For another, she was pumped so full of military endorphins she could have flown to the top of Everest.

She was dimly aware that her body was in terrible pain. There was a patch of heat all down her right side, and little nagging places here and there.

Tranked as she was she had no way of telling whether they were minor bruises or crater wounds.

Not that it made much difference. They had put on all the derms and skin grafts and stuff, given her a shot to boost the little machines running about in her blood, but it wasn't going to be enough. So she just lay there, letting the delirium throw up whatever images it chose.

One of her very earliest memories was picking up a black kitten out of a litter of kittens, joking that it was sleeping too much and putting it on its feet.

The soft thump as it fell over. Running screaming to her father.

Her father had died too. Obviously it was hereditary.

196.

She had been too short to see the bed properly, but she remembered the hospital smell, the colour of the afternoon light, the soft sounds as he struggled for breath. The sudden silence. Running screaming to her mother in the waiting room, screaming to fill up the silence.

She remembered lying in bed with a cold, listening to her own heartbeat, knowing that it could stop just like her father's heartbeat had stopped. Mum made her stay in bed, and now Mum was downstairs having a fight with somebody. There were pieces of jigsaw scattered all over the floor.

'Daddy,' little Dorothy sobbed. 'Daddy.'

'I'm here,' said a voice, and a hand took her hand, another brushed the sweat-soaked hair out of her face. A coolness entered her body, a sweet emptiness as the pain went away.

'Daddy,' she said again.

'I'm here.'

Little Dorothy found the missing piece of jigsaw, plugged it into place.

Happy picture, happy family. She snuggled down to sleep under her eider-down, gripping her father's hand.