It was just a human being with a stick and a dumb refusal to get out the way.
Naran leapt at him, six-centimetre claws springing from his fingers. The blond man swung his stick, knocking away Naran's first swing, jumping back to avoid the second.
'Get on with it, Naran,' shouted Mariko, 'We haven't got all day.'
Naran stepped in under the man's reach and smashed the stick from his hands. His left hand swung in to rip the man's face off but the man managed to grab the wrist.
'He's good material,' said Mariko. 'See if you can salvage.'
Naran's prehensile tongue struck out at the man's face, fingertips snapping. The man had to fend it off with his remaining free hand, leaving his torso exposed. Naran stiffened his fingers and plunged his hand into the man's chest. It sank through armour and flesh, all the way up to the wrist.
Blondie heard himself scream as the hand sank into his chest.
Automatically he brought up his own hands to tear at the wrist; he could feel the seam at the site of the penetration. There was no pain but the sensation of violation threatened to overwhelm his mind. He looked up and found himself looking into a pair of sad brown eyes.
He tried to ask the creature why he was doing this but his voice was no longer his own. There was still no pain, even as he felt fingers wrap around his beating heart, only a sensation of warmth that began to spread from his chest.
The world began to fade around Blondie; his vision faded until nothing was left except those eyes, so deep and full of an ancient sadness. The warmth spreading through his body made him drowsy. He began to think that dying wasn't so bad, it was more like drifting off to sleep. His hands fell back to hang loosely by his sides.
The eyes expanded until all the world was a rich brown shot through with silver. Sound faded, the gunfire rushing away to become as insignificant as fireworks.
Come with us, said the silver streaks. Put down your troubles and we will fill you up with certainty.
He let the warmth engulf him.
A rose bloomed amongst the rich brown fields, its petals as black as midnight, its thorns the colour of African gold, as sharp as razors.
The taste of gunpowder on his lips.
The petals opened to reveal Kadiatu standing in the heart of the rose as if she had grown from the same stem. Sunlight flowed across her naked body, making swirls of amber on her skin. He saw her breath colour through parted lips.
The streaks of silver became angry and formed into sharp steel needles. The brown fields twisted until they became a cone shaped vortex, the colour changing to the sickly pink of diseased gums. The needles spun in the vortex until they became grey blurs and contracted around the rose. Blondie saw that they would rip Kadiatu to pieces.
'No,' he screamed.
The real world snapped back.
Blondie's heart beat weakly against the imprisoning fingers, once, twice. The cake monster's brown eyes blinked at him in sad astonishment. His heart beat twice more and stopped.
Blondie felt the darkness enfold him, as soft and as silent as a fall of rose petals.
Mariko watched the body fall to the ground as Naran withdrew. He stared at his hand for a moment and then looked over at Mariko. Then with an angry snort he picked up the body and threw it away. Mariko could understand his anger: like her Naran was a bit of a perfectionist.
She put a comforting hand on his shoulder and together they walked to the gateway. They took up a defensive position beside the control equipment and waited.
Benny walked in from the galleria through a cone of violence. Around her the canteen razvedka fought short bloody combats to buy her passage. The KGB assault team had been concentrating on getting into the station, they hadn't expected an attack from the rear. The smoke boiled to either side, lurid flashes of colour as the fighting continued.
The floor of the station proper was littered with wreckage, bodies and bits of bodies. Both sides were using explosive rounds and their remains were difficult to tell apart.
Mariko and Naran were waiting for her by the gateway. Close up to its spinning surface Benny could almost fee! reality tearing as the power poured in. Mariko had prepared the controls for her, Benny had only to tap in a single command sequence to initiate the tunnel. And then?
The future past that moment stretched away into darkness.
She punched in the sequence and the gateway began to open.
Mariko and Naran moved before she did, reacting to the gust of wind that swept through the station. She thought it was the Stunnel initiation but the wind was at her back, parting the smoke like a curtain.
Naran ran forward, both gun barrels pushing out of his palms. He came flying backwards, the metre-long ramming spike of a razvedka tunnel board protruding from his back. The board's momentum slammed him into the gateway. There was a flash of bright pink light as the torque forces ripped him limb from limb.
Through the smoking air flew a figure, arms spread as if crucified. Benny realized that the board's passenger had jumped off when it emerged from the Central Line gateway at two hundred kilometres per hour. The arms were spread to maximize wind resistance in a vain attempt to slow him down as he described a flat parabolic arc along the two hundred metre length of the station. It was an insane suicidal manoeuvre. The man was going to die for sure.
At the last moment the man snapped in his limbs and became a human cannonball tumbling as it hit the ground. For a moment Benny thought that the impact had literally exploded the man. that limbs and torso were being ripped apart. Then she saw that he was still intact, his body describing a convoluted series of twists in the air.
As she watched him twist through the air, Benny wondered whether the Doctor had any limitations at all.
The Doctor knew that the landing was crucial, you could lose a lot of points for a sloppy landing. You had to come down with your feet together and absorb the impact with your knees. It was a question of maintaining the correct line. Of course you weren't supposed to be travelling quite as fast as he was and the provision of a soft landing mat would have been nice.
In the seconds before his feet touched the ground, he heard the conductor tap his baton on the lectern three times. The sound echoed through the orchestra pit of his mind. There was the poised hush from the musicians as they gripped their instruments.
The fugue started the moment he hit the floor, apassionato - with passion and this time without the mix-up with the printers. The themes were all there but this time they worked in harmony. The flute solo that had spoken of patterns in energy was now backed by the strings, loud and grand. It had the slightly stilted artificial envelope of a synthesizer. The sampled percussion backbeat that the Doctor realized represented the cake monsters was faltering, their place in the score fading.
As he faced Benny the Doctor could hear the slow oboe wail of betrayal, but whose?
'You're too late. Doctor,' said Benny.
The Doctor ignored her for the moment and turned instead to the cake monster that stood at her side. 'Don't I know you from somewhere?'
The cake monster shrugged.
'You can't stop us,' said Benny.
The Doctor continued to ignore her. The violinists were reaching a climax, bows smoking across the strings of their instruments. He wasn't going to talk to Benny right now. He was waiting for her boss.
The colour of the gateway was changing: swirls of intense copper began to radiate from the hub. The Doctor watched with interest. He'd never seen anything like this before.
The actual egress was barely visible; the copper colour briefly covered the whole disc and then subsided. Only Benny really changed and not physically either. Instead the Doctor got the impression that she was filled up to the brim with another intelligence. He half expected her skin to crack and leak light.
The Doctor gave it a few moments to integrate its personality.
'How do you do?' he said. 'I'm the Doctor, I believe you already know my friend Bernice.'
'Intimately,' sa
id the thing inside Benny.
'And who are you?'
'The concept of personal pronoun is not applicable in these circumstances.'
'Fine,' said the Doctor, 'm that case I'll call you Fred.'
Lowell Depot
The survey crews had been sent off on an early and extended tea break. Achmed didn't want them around when whatever happened, happened. Primarily because whatever was going to happen it probably wasn't covered by the company's workplace insurance.
Deirdre had a minicam trained on the weird assembly by the crash barrier. Others were placed to get a good view of the whole station and she had remotes covering the cavern at the far end of the structural collapse.
'What for?' he'd asked.
Deirdre thought they might tape something worth selling to The Bad News Show. 'Don't worry. Boss,' she'd said. 'I'll cut you in for a percentage.'
The drone lay on its side by the assembly. As soon as its work had finished it had drifted off slightly and just fallen out of the air. Whoever had been operating it obviously didn't need it anymore. Achmed wondered if it was salvageable; technically it was within his contract area and fair game. He decided to check his legal database afterwards.
Afterwards was the problem. The assembly looked like a huge holographic projector pointing down the station at the Central Line gateway. Except you didn't need gigawatt cabling for a projector, no matter how big it was.
Achmed looked over at Deirdre who had produced an apple from somewhere and was polishing it casually on her dungarees. 'Are you sure we should be standing so . . .'
There was a click and a huge subsonic hum like the biggest amplifier ever made being switched on. Achmed turned back to the assembly just in time to be blinded by the light.
It burst out of the projector in a single pulse of brilliant silver energy shot through with sickly green streaks. It raced down the station and into the gateway. The subsonic hum clicked off and the whole projector assembly collapsed, bursting into flames.
'Did you see that?' shouted Deirdre.
Achmed blinked rapidly but all he could see was one massive purple after-image. He hoped to God that he hadn't blinded himself permanently. Eyeballs were bloody expensive these days.
'I don't know where that was going,' said Deirdre, 'but I wouldn't want to be standing in front of it.
Acturus Terminal (Stunnel Terminus)
A single sustained note from a trumpet, high and sweet, suspended above the rough chords of the main orchestra.
Duke Ellington, thought the Doctor. And about time too.
Kadiatu was coming, he could smell the violence.
He looked down to check that he was standing on the cross of gaffa tape. X marks the spot. He shouldn't have long to wait now.
'What do you want?' asked the Doctor. Stalling.
'That depends,' said Benny/Fred. 'What do you want?'
The cake monster with Japanese eyes was tensing up, ready to attack.
'I want my friend back,' said the Doctor.
Jazz, thought the Doctor, is all about improvisation around a central theme. The musician creates spiral riffs within the framework of the rhythm. In the early days when the white musicians caught on to jazz the black musicians responded by escalating the complexity of the riffs. Trying to stay one step ahead of their white contemporaries. Every jam session became a declaration of war.
The virus, and, by extension, Fred, constantly improvised to achieve its objectives. The Doctor understood this, he operating in an identical manner. The question was: of him and Fred, who was better?
The next ten seconds, he thought, should decide that.
The cake monster started its jump.
The Doctor forced himself to stay in place.
A single burst of coherent light drilled through its skull. It was a magnificent shot considering that Kadiatu was sprinting at the time. She was by his side before the body hit the ground.
'Is that the real Benny?' she asked.
'Sort of,' said the Doctor.
Kadiatu raised her pistol. 'Time to die,' she said.
Without taking his eyes off Benny/Fred the Doctor reached out and shoved Kadiatu off her feet. Killing Benny wouldn't even slow Fred down.
The entire artron energy reserve of the TARDIS hit him right between the shoulder blades. The Doctor let the power fill him up. In front of him he saw Benny/Fred struggle to react, but Fred was unused to the physical limitations of a human body. The Doctor had been counting on that.
Just when he thought he was about to burst he let the power go.
Kadiatu picked herself up just in time to see the Doctor, Benny and the gateway vanish in a brilliant wash of white light. When it subsided the Doctor was standing alone.
'Benny?' said the Doctor.
'What the fuck was that?' said a voice. Kadiatu looked over and saw Lambada climbing out from a tangle of debris. She pushed away the body of a cake monster as she got up. Credit Card followed her out. Kadiatu looked around but couldn't see Blondie anywhere. She was going to ask Lambada when the Doctor called her over.
'Kadiatu, listen,' said the Doctor. 'I'm going in after Benny. If I don't come back I want you to destroy all records of me. The history files, the opera, the lot.'
'Why?'
'If I'm killed,' he said, 'it's better that I never existed at all.'
'I don't think going in there's a good idea,' said Kadiatu.
'She's my friend,' said the Doctor. 'Wish me luck.'
The Doctor ran towards the gateway and jumped. He passed through the interface and vanished.
'Damn,' said Kadiatu.
'He shouldn't have done that,' said Lambada.
'Don't tell me that,' said Kadiatu.
'No,' said Lambada, 'I mean the whole tunnel is going to collapse.'
'How long?'
'Thirty-two seconds,' said Credit Card.
Kadiatu stared at the Stunnel gateway.
'Shit,' she said and threw herself in after the Doctor.
9: Chain Gang Song
Node One
There was no sensory input but there was a sensation of movement. The Doctor felt himself marooned in space of infinite complexity. He realised instantly that he was in danger of disassociating, flying apart down all the logical pathways of probability.
I am what I am what I am, he thought fiercely and felt a part of himself detach and go spinning down an alternative pathway. He got a glimpse of himself as he went, he had outsized forearms with anchor tattoos and a pipe.
Stop, thought the Doctor and the sensation of movement ceased.
What he needed was a frame of reference, a hook to hang his hat on. It took a while but soon he had constructed a sphere around himself which he called Node One. The inside of the sphere was dotted with recessed roundels, scaled-up duplicates of the ones in the TARDIS. Each one represented a possible pathway that led from the Node. He colour-coded the roundels: black for those pathways he'd already traversed, blue for Popeye the Sailor's route, red for the rest.
He spun a web across the roundel he'd come through; it would transfer his frame of reference to anybody following after him.
Fred was somewhere in the system ahead. An intelligence operating within its own environment, it wasn't going to be easy to defeat.
First he had to find it.
He could hear the Popeye subset of himself in the distance, his little ditty echoing through the pathways. By concentrating he could trace the subset's path through the system. The Doctor created a map in the air to make it easier to visualize. The trace created a meandering pattern to what the Doctor decided to call the west. He called the direction he had come from the south, he didn't have to, but he liked to keep things simple.
The Popeye subset suddenly ceased to exist.
Was that Fred, wondered the Doctor, or did the system contain predators of its own?
Find Bernice.
The Doctor reached into his mind and pulled out Bernice's memories. He sifted through them, looking for s
omething strong and emotional. There, it was a simple child's doll but it practically stank of guilt. He looked into his own memories for something that could track her but rejected the Cheetah people. The Doctor suspected that his memory was too accurate for the Cheetah people to be reliable. Instead he came up with a lugubrious-looking bloodhound.
Fusing the bloodhound with the doll created an inelegant mess but it would probably get the job done. He created a baker's dozen and sent them bounding out through random pathways.
He watched them fan out on the map, ricocheting from node to node. The ones going roughly east and west spread out into the distance, their traces getting fainter the further out they went. The ones going north seemed to have locked on to something but kept bouncing off an invisible wall. Their repeated attempts to cross this wall built up a picture on the map. A semi-circular line that divided off most of the north.
The Doctor chose a north-facing roundel and floated through. As he crossed the threshold he felt a strange sense of separation as if he had left something intangible behind. A quick mental inventory found nothing missing.
The Doctor pressed on. He didn't have time for introspection.
Node One
There was an unpleasant sensation like a ghostly caress, as if she had walked through a spider web. Then she floated free inside the first node, There was a laminated card in her hand, identical to the instructions that had come with the pressure suit on Mars. The letters at the top of the card blurred briefly and became her name.
Dear Kadiatu, she read. You are now entering a world of sensory illusion. In practical terms you have just become a very complex piece of software that happens to think it's a person called, the blurring effect again, Kadiatu. Don't ask me what happened to your physical body. I haven't got the faintest idea. I have provided a frame of reference with which I hope you will feel comfortable. Think of it as a front-end interface, it should allow you to move around. Try not to get attenuated and be careful, this is the most dangerous place you have ever been.