Benny felt herself drifting off into sleep. Her salary was good, her belly was full and she had managed to become part of the very invention of archaeology.
She could not have asked for a softer landing.
The Vortex had flung the three of them in entirely random directions. They could have exited anywhere, in empty space, in the far future or the distant past. The Doctor had been beyond help, she told herself for the thousandth time; it didn't matter where he landed. But Ace Benny had a pretty good idea of where Ace had ended up.
She dipped into her mind again, dredging up the jarring memory. An Academy classroom, a lecturer's soft drone, a hologram of the Amarna cliffs.
Vivant popped his head under the canvas. She could read him like a book; the nobly restrained interest. 'We should arrive later this afternoon,' he said.
'And then we can begin the business of locating this Egyptian mystery of yours.'
Benny nodded. 'There's such a huge area to search. But I'm guessing that some of the locals will know exactly what we're after.'
'A three thousand year old sentence written in English?' laughed Vivant. 'I would imagine someone would have noticed by now!'
Benny frowned again. The Amarna Graffito was a famous archaeological puzzle, still much-discussed in her century. The thing was, there was something strange about that classroom memory. As though she had dreamed it.
Or as though it hadn't been there before.
Kadiatu got through four courses and a bottle of red wine while the Doctor slowly ate a bowl of vichyssoise. Her gens de maison gens de maison hovered anxiously. hovered anxiously.
The maids were country girls, healthy and muscled, who stamped across the waxed floors in and out of the dining room. As much as they resented being in the service of a Noire Noire, they were grateful for a mild employer even one who decided to have diner diner in the middle of the night. But the Doctor's abrupt resurrection had unnerved them. in the middle of the night. But the Doctor's abrupt resurrection had unnerved them.
Kadiatu had dressed for dinner, which took half an hour, even with her chambermaid's assistance. One of the servants brought the Doctor a jumble of clothes frock coats, hats, laced boots and fashionable French shirts. He had long since lost his taste for frills. He ended up in a slightly oversized shirt and trousers, a long black coat and a white scarf, reminding the servant girls of practical relatives on Bourbonnaise farms.
58.'You could've just erased it all,' she said, watching him spread butter on a white bread roll. 'You erased everything in the Stone Mountain archives, which was where I got my information in the first place. You had the chance to destroy my work as well.'
'I was curious.'
'Curious,' snorted Kadiatu. 'I destroyed it myself on my way out. The human race wasn't ready for time travel yet.'
'Except for you.'
'I was curious.'
'So you solved the problem of initial conditions. Your school science project worked.' He dunked the roll in his soup. 'A train that travels in time instead of down tunnels. You could solve the problem of late-running passenger services forever. What did you use for a power source?'
'A thermonuclear explosion.'
'Hmm, batteries not included.'
'I carried four spare nukes.' The Doctor looked alarmed. 'I haven't irradiated Paris. I didn't even irradiate Arizona, though the explosion destroyed all my research. I'll explain how it works later.'
The Doctor nodded slowly, wiping up the last of his soup with the remains of his roll. Two months unconscious with only drips for lunch, and he wasn't even particularly hungry. He seemed a little weary, but that wasn't surprising.
She wondered what it would take to kill him.
'What day is this?' he asked.
'May 3rd,' she said. 'You arrived the day they proclaimed the Commune.'
'The glorious harbinger of a new society,' said the Doctor, 'or was that the other Commune? All these revolutions tend to blur together. Paris was one of my earliest tastes of Earth, you know. What do you think of space-time?'
'Big,' said Kadiatu, waving a hand, 'long. I'm glad I brought some books.'
'I told you you wouldn't like it.' One of the maids dipped in and took his bowl away.
'I could make the shuttle go,' explained Kadiatu, 'but I couldn't make it go where I wanted.'
'Ah,' said the Doctor. 'A not unfamiliar problem.'
'And it's so hard to compensate for the solar system. It's like rattling around inside an enormous watch. Each time I jumped I'd end up days out from Earth.
At least I could calculate my temporal displacement from the movement of the planets.'
'You must have compensated. Otherwise you might have ended up billions of kilometres outside the solar system.'
'Once I arrived above the surface of Mars, falling at an angle through the atmosphere like a meteor. I had to jump a second time to stop myself from 59 crashing.'
'I'm sure the locals appreciated that.'
'I checked the external camera record later. There was no sign of habitation.
I had no chance to check which epoch it was.'
'A wasted experiment.'
'The very first jump took me to the twenty-fifth century.'
'And what did you make of it?'
'Not much. I filled up a lot of videotapes. I had to leave when they started to ask too many questions.'
'Steal anything?'
'Not much. Information.'
'Planning to go home?'
'I don't care where I end up,' said Kadiatu, 'as long as it's not here. If I hadn't packed all that gold, I'd be nothing here. Money talks. A historical constant.'
'I expect Karl would agree.'
'I'm thinking of writing a paper about it. Where did you come from? And what happened to Bernice?'
'And what about Ace?'
'It was just you. You turned up in the same place I crashlanded. There was an explosion in the night and Thierry found you in his orchard.'
'You knew that Ace was female,' he said, catching her eyes. 'You said "she".'
'I read my grandmother's history of UNIT. And there was more in Stone Mountain. Dorothy McShane was still listed in a pan-European database of missing persons in 2006.'
The Doctor nodded. It was a good answer. 'How do you imagine I got here?'
'I was rather,' said Kadiatu, drumming her fingers on the tabletop, 'hoping you'd tell me that.'
He held his wine glass between his palms, rolling it back and forth. 'I came through a transdimensional rift. A linear breakage in the continuum. A crack in the ice cube of time.'
Kadiatu knocked over her wine glass.
'Someone has carelessly punched a series of holes through the universe,' he continued. 'Those tracks form unpredictable connections between separate pieces of space and time. The holes can drift in unexpected ways, and the rifts can open up at weak points anywhere along their five-dimensional length. A really quite astonishing amount of damage to reality can result.'
'So you're here as Mr Fixit?' she asked, breathlessly, getting up, getting away from his eyes. The Doctor picked up her wine-glass.
'They can't be fixed,' he said. 'They're quite permanent.'
With a sudden snap of his wrist, he threw the glass at the wall. One of the maids shouted.
60.Kadiatu stood stock still. 'You might have mentioned something about it.
My equations didn't show any '
'Your equations are the scrawling of a little girl,' said the Doctor. His arms were folded, holding onto himself. He was very different to the man she remembered. 'They are precocious, crayoned nonsense. And if I'd had any sense I'd have taken away your matches before you could burn yourself or anyone else.'
'Fine. What are you going to do about it?'
'There's nothing we can do about the temporal fractures. I have to stop you must tell me everything, everything that might be important. Everything you know.'
'I'll show you the ship,' she said.
'Good.'
'Not now. In the morning.'
The basement was much larger than it should have been. There were rough lines across the ceiling and floor, where internal walls and floors had been knocked down and ripped up to make room for Kadiatu's equipment. The resulting space was two stories high and several metres across. Everything was covered in dust, and brickbats and rubbish filled the corners; the domestiques domestiques didn't come down here. The Doctor kept catching cobwebs in his candle flame. didn't come down here. The Doctor kept catching cobwebs in his candle flame.
Kadiatu's time vessel took up most of the basement. It was a cargo shuttle, three-quarters storage space and one-quarter life-support. The surface, painted a drab military green, was marked with streaks of mind-jarring colours, silver and heliotrope and cerulean; iridescent go faster stripes formed where the vortex had licked the paintwork. The hull was pocked with microm-eteoroid strikes. The phrase WHOSE IDEA WAS THIS???? was spraypainted in dripping red across its nose.
The life-support section was a flattened bulb at the bottom of the ship, with room for one suited occupant. The Doctor leaned in and flipped a switch, and a panel obligingly opened in the side of the cargo portion of the vehicle, exposing the hold.
There was a thick, square patch of something sticky next to the cargo hold door, just above eye level. He scratched at it with a fingernail. Something organic, dried in wet blobs on the spaceship's hull. Vegetable, not animal.
The surface shrugged, shrinking away from his touch.
He leaned into the cockpit, brought the computer online, read the flight program most recently entered into it. Read it again. A bit drastic for an anti-theft measure. Or was it?
61.There was a radiation gauge above the cargo bay door; the Doctor flicked his eyes across it. The interior of the ship was a little hotter than the background, but not enough to stop him. He popped his head inside for a look.
The hold was mostly equipment, machinery stitched together into a jury-rigged time-space engine. The main section of it was a modified field regulator from a subspace train, the public transport system of an Earth twenty minutes into Ace's future.
Ace. Covered in frost, lying on the floor an inch from his nose like an enormous fish finger. Watching him bleed to death while Bernice struggled to save them both.
A dreadful urgency rose up in him, and he didn't really care how Kadiatu's toy TARDIS worked, he just needed to get to Ace. Benny must have dragged them both into the rift. She and Ace could have ended up anywhere that the fractures led. Including several hundred miles above the surface of Mars. His left collarbone suddenly erupted with pain, and he sat down hard against one curving wall of the shuttle, little flashes going off in his field of vision.
He blinked hard and pressed his fingers against his chest above the left heart.
There was no scar there, no bruise, nothing to indicate an injury. If the welt on his face hadn't healed, what might be broken on the inside?
Ace could take care of herself, and so could Bernice. He pushed the panic down along with the pain and forced himself to concentrate on the machinery.
The big gold-coloured things were power baffles, designed to soak up huge amounts of energy. Such as a hydrogen bomb going off in the immediate vicinity.
The design was rough and ready everything was covered in welding lines but it had a functional elegance. The train engine wrapped the capsule in a self-generating, dimension-warping field. That field protected the physical vehicle from the thermonuclear explosion, shunting the power instantly to the baffles, which sucked it up and pushed it back into the field in a huge positive feedback loop. When the field strength got above a certain level, the whole thing was booted unceremoniously into another part of space and time.
No wonder she couldn't control its flight; it would be like trying to steer a car that ran on dynamite. And it was just as damaging to the road. Kadiatu had managed to invent a whole new form of pollution.
Every remaining inch of the hold had been stuffed with useful things: medical supplies, weapons, food preserved in various inedible ways. He flipped open one box and discovered neatly stacked bars of gold. The only empty space had been left by her spare bombs.
'What'd they do to you?'
The Doctor jumped, banging his head on the curve of the wall. Kadiatu was a flickering silhouette in the cargo hold doorway, her nightdress hanging 62 heavily around her. Her eyes were empty hollows in the feeble light of her candle. 'I am presuming you didn't beat yourself up.'
The Doctor got his breathing back under control. He rolled his shoulder back and forth a couple of times. It seemed to be alright again. 'If you make a hole, something will probably decide to live in it.'
'Like weeds growing in cracks in the road.'
'Even a non-Euclidean theoretical construct is a habitat, if you look at it the right way. Something's living in the fractures.'
'What's it up to?'
'Travelling around. Hunting and gathering. Flexing its muscles, making a bit of noise, seeing if anyone notices.'
'And you noticed.'
'Yes. And they noticed I noticed.'
'Who are they? What was their technology like? Advanced? Did you understand it?'
'I don't I don't remember it very I don't remember . . . ' He frowned, as though he'd forgotten where he'd left something. 'I . . . '
Kadiatu hunched back, uncomfortable. 'One thing I can tell you,' he said, looking her in the face, 'they don't treat the people who work for them very well.'
'Do you know how I can get out of here?'
'Oh, that's easy. Dive your shuttle into the sun.'
'What?'