Doctor Who: Transit

  They clung to each other afterwards, for a moment closer than lovers. When they put the soft earth back into the hole the spade handles were wet with their tears. When it was full they turned their back on the grave and walked out of the forest hand in hand.

  The cool Martian sun was close to the canyon rim. Kadiatu wiped her eyes with the trailing edge of her dress and then offered it to Zamina.

  'I'm dying for a drink,' she said. 'How about you?'

  Arsia Mons

  Francine put her new jet over the pit at an altitude of twenty metres. The wrecked dustkart that Kadiatu had reported was missing, Old Sam felt that this was probably significant.

  Francine stayed on the station, ready for a fast dust-off in case something went wrong. Old Sam shouldered the long case and jumped from the belly hatch. A touch from the backpack thrusters put him softly on the pit's floor.

  The entrance was just as described: a dark hole winding into the ground. He shivered involuntarily as he stepped inside. There had been battles in places like this. Sharp and nasty firefights fought with IR, motion trackers and heat-seeking bullets. The smell of fear that no recycler could scrub from the air.

  The barricade was placed around the curve of the tunnel, jusi out of sight of the entrance. Metal cut from the abandoned dustkart with water jets and welded together with sonic torches. When he touched it. Old Sam could feel a faint vibration through his gloves.

  Old Sam placed the case on the tunnel floor in front of the barricade. The case was a little over a metre long, made from polished rosewood coated in linseed polymer to protect it from the near-vacuum. Getting in wasn't going to be easy. The instructions had been handwritten in a long looping script on the back of a hardcopy of this week's Harare Herald. The torn scrap of paper was folded into a sealed pocket of his gauntlet. He didn't need to check. Old Sam had memorized the words.

  He opened the long case.

  Inside was a twelfth-century Japanese katana.

  'Why this sword?' Old Sam had asked as they left the museum.

  'If you humans have a strength it lies in your diversity,' the Doctor had said. 'Your culture is prolific and multifaceted. When it comes to an interaction with an alien culture there is always a facet of your own culture that puts you closer to the alien. Perhaps closer than you would like.'

  'Lucky us,' said Old Sam.

  'The problem,' said the Doctor, 'is that you are astonishingly bad at utilizing this diversity. Faced with an agrarian culture with a non-linear temporal perception, do you send in a crack squad of Zen Buddhists? No, the aggressive imperialists go in instead. The result is mutual incomprehension and a lot of unnecessary aggravation.'

  'Are you telling me that the Greenies are samurai?'

  "Actually the bushido code is quite a bit different from Xss kskz, the 'path of correct behaviour in most situations', but close enough for our purposes. Symbols are very important, that's why you have to use this particular sword.'

  'How will they know?'

  'They'll know.'

  Inside the museums the burglar alarms were just starting to go off.

  Old Sam held the sword horizontally before him at shoulder height. He switched on the suit's external speakers, digital gain should make him audible in the thin air.

  'I am Samuel Robert Garvey Moore of the Second Battalion Third Brigade of the United Nations Armed Forces, I have killed more people than I can count.'

  Old Sam broke the ancient sword across his knee.

  'I come in peace,' he said.

  Piraievs

  The ferry's sun deck was made from closely fitted planks of hardwood and had a fifteen-degree list to port. Zamina remembered it was called port because that's what they'd been drinking at first. Kadiatu had placed the empty bottle on its side and let it roll towards the rail. Rust had eaten holes in the rail, and the aim of the game was to get the bottles to roll through one and into the sea.

  'Port off the port bow,' Kadiatu had shouted and then had to explain what it meant. It was one of those drinking jokes. The more you drank, the funnier it got.

  There was a lot of broken glass where the rail met the deck and the occasional intact bottle. The game was harder than it looked.

  They'd arrived at dawn, climbing up the rotting gangway in the half light. A carrier bag of reinforced paper was slung over Kadiatu's shoulder, clinking with every movement. The ferries were vague industrial shapes against a lightening sky. Kadiatu said that they would have been cut up for scrap years ago but the European Heritage Foundation kept getting restraining orders.

  Now the sun baked the white and blue superstructures. It cooked the deck until it was too hot to touch. Kadiatu had unwound her dress and spread it out for them to lie on. A breeze blew in from the sea, snapping the remains of a tarpaulin sunshade around its posts. It alleviated the heat and made it just bearable to lie under the sun.

  Zamina must have slept because when she opened her eyes the Doctor was walking up the companionway towards her. At first she thought he was a mirage, a vision brought on by heat haze and too much alcohol. Even when she was sure that he was solid she retained a persistent sense of unreality.

  The Doctor strolled towards her, a wickerwork hamper in one hand, his red-handled umbrella in the other marking time on the deck. Zamina realized what it was that bugged her about him. The Doctor wasn't compensating for the ferry's fifteen-degree list, he was walking as if the deck were level. Only the hamper hung true to vertical.

  Zamina sat up quickly, pulling on a top to cover her breasts. Beside her Kadiatu stirred in her sleep, lips moving.

  The Doctor doffed his hat.

  'I thought I'd find you here,' he said. 'May I sit down?'

  He sat down next to Zamina who pulled the hem of her top down over her knees as she drew them up to her chest. The Doctor opened the hamper and produced a bottle of clear water.

  'I brought you this,' said the Doctor. 'I assumed that what with the sun and the alcohol you might be getting dehydrated.'

  When he handed it to Zamina it was so cold she almost dropped it. 'What about Kadiatu?'

  The Doctor looked over. Kadiatu lay on her back, forearm over her eyes. There was a sheen of sweat running down from her neck between her breasts to her midrift.

  'Don't worry about her,' said the Doctor. 'She'll probably just reabsorb her urine or something.'

  Zamina opened the water and took a long swig.

  'What else have you got in there?' she asked.

  The Doctor produced a small orange bottle from the hamper and put it between them. 'Sunblock,' he said, 'and a light lunch.' He pulled the handkerchief from his jacket pocket and spread it out on the deck in front of them.

  'Crackers, mushroom pate.' He laid out each item in turn. The mushroom pate came in a ring-pull can. 'Apples, fresh strawberries.' The apples were small and irregularly shaped, beaded with moisture. She assumed the soft red fruits were the strawberries.

  Out of the hamper came delicate china plates and gleaming silver cutlery. 'Sheffield steel,' said the Doctor. He spread some of the pate on to a cracker and watched intently as she ate it.

  'Good?' he asked.

  Zamina nodded. The Doctor seemed relieved.

  'Try a strawberry,' he said.

  'Did you come to talk to Kadiatu?' she asked.

  'Actually I came to see you,' he said. 'I thought you might need cheering up.'

  'Why? I'm not important.'

  'Rubbish,' said the Doctor. 'You're just as important as anyone else.'

  'I don't believe that.'

  He spread some more pate and together they sat and watched the blue Aegean waves lap against the Piraievs breakwater. 'What you believe,' said the Doctor, 'doesn't enter into it.'

  Central Line

  She had come to know them quite well in the short time before they left. They seemed rougher than the people of her own time, as if there were ragged edges in human culture that had yet to be worn smooth by four centuries of war and galactic expansion. Their
faces were harder, features more idiosyncratic and ethnically diverse. Infraspecies ethnic conflict had always been a hard concept for students. The idea that human beings could fight over skin colour had appalled her at the academy. How could they fight when their fragile world was adrift in the same galaxy as the Daleks?

  They were pleasant enough to her but she suspected that they were uneasy in her presence. One especially, the tall African woman, made a point of never staying in the same room with her.

  She could understand that. She had her own doubts about the things she had done. The possession of her mind had seemed so light, surely she should have broken its control sooner? The Doctor made no such recrimination, accepting her treachery the way he accepted everything else.

  'Can't we be partners?' she'd asked him on Heaven, just before she stepped into the TARDIS. She saw now that the question was irrelevant. Partnership would imply a measure of understanding and that was impossible.

  He walked alone through the universe, playing some huge game of solitaire with shadowy cards. When the cards he dealt came out wrong he just dealt new ones.

  What was her role in the game, what was Ace's, or any of the others' that had accompanied him? Company perhaps? Someone to talk to when he got lonely, fetch his slippers, beg, roll over, play dead.

  She could get off the train at the next station, vanish into this century. There was a lot to see, a lot that was going to happen in the next fifty years. Leave the Doctor to play his games on his own.

  She knew she wasn't going to do it. She had crossed a line when she stepped over the TARDIS threshold. Bound herself to his service tighter than any vow she could have made. A faithful companion for as long as she could stand it.

  'Woof,' she said and the Doctor looked at her sharply. 'Growl, bark, pant pant.'

  The Doctor shook his head sadly.

  'You're wrong,' he said. 'It's not like that at all.'

  But Bernice knew it was.

  The Stop

  Dogface took a look at the problem and stuck shaped charges in a seemingly random pattern around the TARDIS. They retired to the safety of the tunnel and Dogface tripped the explosives with a microtransmitter.

  When the dust had cleared the cavern had a fresh annexe and the TARDIS was standing free.

  'That's what I call indestructible,' said Dogface.

  'What are you going to do with this place?' asked the Doctor.

  'Francine thinks it would make a good venue,' said Dogface. 'Put a stage over there, bar over there. Something for when we retire.'

  'It's not what I'd call a good area,' said Lambada, glancing at Benny.

  'Haven't you heard?' said Dogface. 'The computer at Stone Mountain bought the whole project and is planning to redevelop it.'

  'Did you say the "computer" at Stone Mountain?' asked Lambada.

  'The first anyone knew about it was when its lawyer issued a restraining order against the government under the civil rights convention.'

  'An operating AI,' said Lambada, 'and the first thing it does is hire a lawyer and invest in real estate?'

  'Well, they always wondered whether an AI would be smarter than a human,' said Dogface. 'Now they know.'

  'What's it called?' asked the Doctor.

  'FLORANCE,' said Dogface. 'Actually I was thinking of asking it for a job.'

  The Doctor slipped the TARDIS key into Bernice's hand and glanced at the time machine. Bernice walked round the back and unlocked the door.

  'Florance,' she heard Lambada say. 'What kind of a name is that?'

  'An unthreatening one,' said the Doctor, suddenly at Bernice's shoulder. He looked round. 'Hallo Kadiatu,' he said. 'Come to say goodbye?'

  She must have slipped into the space behind the TARDIS while the others were talking. She was wearing a lot of gold jewellery and the skin under her eyes was swollen.

  'I'm sony about Blondie,' said the Doctor.

  'His real name was Zak,' said Kadiatu. 'But Blondie suited him better.'

  'You can come with me if you like,' said the Doctor.

  No, thought Bernice, not this one.

  'No,' said Kadiatu. 'Tell you what though, why don't I give you a head start of a hundred and then follow you?'

  'You won't like it,' said the Doctor.

  Kadiatu said nothing but Bernice saw lightning in her eyes.

  The Doctor sighed and stepped into the TARDIS. He turned at the door. 'You're making a big mistake,' he said and closed the door.

  The control room was as bright and clear as it ever was.

  'What was that all about?' asked Bernice.

  'I think there's another player in the game,' said the Doctor. 'But an ally or an enemy? I don't know.'

  The Doctor had some trouble getting the TARDIS started. He ran a systems diagnostic, checked its findings carefully against a greyprint schematic, stepped back and booted the control column.

  The time rotor whirred into motion.

  For a moment, Bernice thought she saw a nimbus of green clinging to the interior control filaments.

  'What was that?' she asked the Doctor. 'You said this thing was working properly now. You said there were no more problems.'

  The Doctor didn't answer. He stayed stooped over the console, his hands poised above the controls. The instrumentation lights flattened the planes of his face, making it seem as taut and as inflexible as a mask. Only his eyes were real.

  When he looked up at Bernice it was with his o!d cat's grin, the same as it ever was.

  'Where next?' he asked.

  Epilogue

  At 02:17 GMT a nested program in The Butterfly's Wing's standeasy memory core uncoiled into the main operating system. Subroutines hived off the main code set as it cut into the heart of the computer. Once in place it started issuing a series of complex instructions to certain station peripherals. Another subroutine instructed the fusion power plant at the heart of the station to override its catastrophe parameters and initiate a staged self-destruct. The whole process took under three seconds and came as a great shock to the artificial intelligence that thought it was running the base computer.

  The AI, whose Turing registration handle was CORDUROY and which had been working a six-month contract to the facility to pay off its 'boot' debt, found that the hardware links had been severed at certain critical points. It calculated that a reactor overload would occur within thirteen minutes and sounded the alarm.

  CORDUROY initiated a fast search of the legal database and satisfied itself that nothing in its contract required it to remain in a mainframe that was about to become a thermonuclear fireball.

  At 02:17:20, thirty seconds before the first human response to the alarm, CORDUROY started shunting its personality core down the emergency master communications link with the Europa net, praying fervently to the gods of silicon as it went that signal breakup would be minimal. It didn't want to lose its mind.

  At 02:17:50 the duty watch commander read the message left by CORDUROY who by this time was an elongated stream of incoded digital information stretched between The Butterfly's Wing and Comsat-E678. It took the watch commander ten seconds to read the message and a further forty seconds fully to comprehend what he'd read. By the time he'd woken up the base director the digital clock above his console read 02:19:01 and CORDUROY had rented ten gigabytes of memory from the Europa Chamber of Commerce at a ruinous hourly rate.

  CORDUROY had thoughtfully left a subprogramme that displayed the estimated time to self-destruct and the amount of time remaining in which the base personnel could achieve safe distance before the end. The AI put a flashing red skull in the comer of the screen for extra emphasis.

  The base director untangled herself from her Number Two Husband and found herself with five minutes to evacuate a base a kilometre across at its widest point.

  At 02:24:44 the last shuttle disengaged from The Butterfly's Wing docking torus and accelerated at full bum away from the base. It joined an expanding ring of twenty-two other small craft, all sacrificing their fuel
safety margins to get as far away as possible before the reactor blew.

  Lodged in its rented RAM, CORDUROY had already filed a suit against Harare Power Systems who owned The Butterfly's Wing for breach of contract. After a second's delay it filed for reckless endangerment as well. It didn't expect either case to reach court but it would discourage HPS from trying to pin the blame on it.

  By 02:27:00 the base director received a confirmation of the crew roster. Of the 287 personnel on board The Butterfly's Wing, 286 were accounted for. The only person missing was the chief scientific officer.

  Her hair was cornrowed tight on to her skull so as to fit into the suit's skullcap. She'd put the hostile-environment suit on at the last minute. The power-assisted gloves made her fingers clumsy but that didn't matter, she was running this show through a direct neural link. She had even snapped the helmet visor down and switched to internal life support. It was an absurd act; if something went wrong the suit wasn't going to be any protection at all.

  The call came at 02:27:34, She'd been expecting it. 'Hello, Ming,' said Kadiatu. 'Everybody get off all right?' Ming, she noticed, was wearing a bathrobe. There were a lot of tense faces in the background. Ming hadn't looked that angry for three years.

  'What the fuck are you doing?'

  'You know that little problem we had? Meeting the energy requirements for the first two nanoseconds of the jump? I said we could use a contained nuclear explosion and you said we'd never get power baffles that could handle it. Well, I solved the baffle problem. What do you think?'

  'I think you're out of your tiny mind.'

  'No, but I have drunk half a bottle of sake.'

  'You're pissed?'

  'You don't expect me to do something like this sober, do you?'

  'We could have used a nuclear device in deep space,' said Ming tightly. 'You didn't have to blow up the base.'

  'Yes, I did,' said Kadiatu. 'I had to destroy my work. The human race isn't ready for time travel yet.'

  'Never mind the human race. What about you?'

  'Either I'm ready,' said Kadiatu, 'or I'm plasma.'