The Story of Martha Page 14

  One such converter had been partially dismantled in the Koban plant, and then activated under laboratory conditions. It had opened the Relativistic Segue. It had torn a hole in time and space, a doorway through which the Drast could escape.

  It wasn’t that simple, of course.

  Martha watched from the platform as armed guards in hazmat suits led one of volunteers into the Segue chamber. It was Ono. The boy looked scared. He had a harness buckled to him, from which ran a safety line. The guards walked Ono towards the Segue plinth, the line playing out behind him.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Martha, with mounting concern.

  ‘The Segue must be calibrated until transit is safe,’ said one of the Drast.

  ‘The Segue could lead anywhere,’ said another. ‘Into the heart of a sun, into empty space, into a toxic world. It must be tested. If the test result is deemed unfavourable, the Segue is recalibrated to a new location and another test is made.’

  ‘Tested?’ Martha breathed. ‘By… by sending someone through it?’

  ‘This is the most effective way of testing.’

  ‘But you can’t!’ she cried. ‘This is what the volunteers are for? You just can’t!’

  ‘But we can.’

  ‘And we have.’

  ‘And we are.’

  Martha looked on in horror as Ono nervously approached the incandescent split of the Segue. He took one last glance behind him and stepped into the light.

  He vanished. The safety line slowly began to drag into the Segue at waist height.

  ‘How many times have you done this?’ Martha asked.

  ‘Ninety-eight times,’ said the Drast.

  ‘And how many times has it been… unfavourable?’

  ‘Ninety-eight times,’ said the Drast.

  ‘So ninety-eight volunteers have been killed?’

  ‘It is impossible to determine. Few have been retrieved. None has been retrieved intact.’

  The safety line suddenly went slack and dropped to the ground. The guards hauled on it, pulling it back out of the Segue. Ono was no longer attached to it. The end of the line was fused and smouldering.

  ‘Test ninety-nine complete,’ announced one of the Drast.

  ‘Result deemed unfavourable.’

  ‘Begin recalibration of the Segue.’

  ‘Prepare another test subject.’

  * * *

  ‘They’re going to send us through a hole in space one by one until one of us comes back alive?’ asked Griffin.

  ‘That’s the idea,’ Martha replied. She had been returned to the volunteer group in the holding room.

  Griffin shook his head. ‘Just when I thought the world couldn’t get any crazier,’ he said.

  ‘What did they want with you, Martha?’ asked Hito.

  ‘They wanted to find out what I knew about the Master. They’re afraid of him. I think they assume that, because of my connection to the Doctor, I must know of secret weaknesses they can exploit. They wouldn’t be the first to think that.’

  ‘What did you tell them?’ asked Tokami anxiously.

  ‘Nothing,’ Martha replied. ‘When I saw what they did to Ono, I wasn’t in the mood to answer questions. I expect I’ll be summoned again later. They’re busy recalibrating the Segue.’

  ‘What will you tell them then?’ asked Griffin.

  ‘Nothing,’ Martha snapped.

  ‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ said Griffin. ‘We’ve got to find a way out. Fight our way out, if necessary.’

  ‘Fight?’ echoed Martha. She looked around the group of scared volunteers. ‘I think you’re the only fighter here, Griffin.’

  He shook his head. ‘Everyone’s a fighter if they have to be,’ he told her. ‘I say we rush the guards next time they come for one of us.’

  ‘No,’ said Martha.

  ‘It could work,’ said Griffin. ‘They’re probably used to people being too cowed and freaked out by this place to offer any resistance. We rush them and—’

  ‘No,’ said Martha.

  Griffin scowled at her. ‘So we just sit and wait for them to walk us to our deaths, one by one?’ he asked.

  She hesitated. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m going to talk to them. I’m going to tell them something.’

  ‘What?’ asked Griffin.

  ‘A story,’ she said.

  ‘I would like you to listen to me,’ said Martha. ‘I know you’re afraid of the Master. You have every right to be, but you are advanced beings. You have amazing technology at your disposal. Your technology has already proved capable of fooling the Master.’

  ‘What is the purpose of this dialogue?’ asked the Drast.

  ‘I’m saying to you that you could help,’ she said. ‘You could help me, you could help the Doctor, and you could help the human race. If we work together we could overthrow the Master.’

  ‘This outcome is unfavourable,’ one of them replied.

  ‘I’m not saying it will be easy,’ said Martha. ‘I’m asking you to help the human race in its darkest hour.’

  ‘This outcome is unfavourable,’ said another.

  ‘If we stand together, we could make a difference,’ she said. ‘It’s what the Doctor would do…’

  Star–Crossed

  There were six of them – no, seven, Martha realised. She was just able to make out the seventh man, in the gloom behind the others. The passage was too narrow for them to stand more than three abreast and the lighting strips set into the low ceiling were only putting out a weak, flickering luminescence.

  The men were armed with an assortment of crude weapons: metal bars, strips of metal sharpened into ragged-looking knives. One of them, Martha noticed, was brandishing a large spanner, as if he had raided a toolbox before joining the others.

  ‘Let her go,’ one of them said. He was tall and powerfully built, his hair cropped short. He wore a plain grey coverall that had been patched in a couple of places.

  From what Martha could make out in the poor light, the others in the group were equally well built and wore similar coveralls, each bearing their own pattern of stains and repairs.

  The man behind Martha said nothing, but took a step back. The painful way he held Martha’s arms twisted up into the middle of her back meant that she had no choice but to take a step back, too.

  On the floor between Martha and the armed men, the Doctor eased himself up off his knees. As he straightened, he gingerly pressed his hand against the base of his skull.

  ‘Well, now that was unexpected,’ he said.

  He had been standing with his back to Martha, facing the armed men who had come pounding along the corridor, shouting for someone called ‘Breed’ not to move.

  The only other person in the corridor was the lone, unarmed figure who had half-run, half-stumbled into them a moment or two earlier; this, Martha assumed, must be Breed.

  Seeing the weapons in their hands, the Doctor had stepped forward, smiling. He’d spread his arms and his long coat formed a curtain between the armed group and their quarry.

  ‘Hello! I’m the Doctor. Maybe I could—’

  That was when Breed had hit him – a single punch, hard, at the base of his skull. Martha didn’t need her medical training to know that punch could cause some serious damage. The Doctor had dropped like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

  The next thing Martha knew was that someone was behind her and had hold of her arms and, if she tried to move them, they hurt. A lot.

  ‘You think that’s going to stop us?’ The leader of the armed group spoke again.

  The grip on Martha’s arms shifted, eased for a moment, then tightened, just as an arm slid across her throat. It suddenly became much less comfortable to take a breath.

  ‘OK, that’s enough. Hold it right there!’ the Doctor said. He was on his feet and his voice had taken on a harder edge. ‘Before anyone gets hurt and I have to do something I might regret.’

  Everything seemed to happen at once. The armed men lunged forward as i
f they were a single animal, teeth bared, weapons poised to strike. Martha felt the arm clamp more tightly across her throat. She choked, struggling for breath as she was dragged backwards, away from the Doctor and the armed men who now seemed to be having trouble getting past him. The Doctor seemed to have tripped and stumbled into the path of the armed men and, however much they shouted at him and whichever way they tried to get around him, they just couldn’t get past. As she was hauled along the corridor, now moving so quickly that she was running backwards on tip-toe, held up by the same arm that was choking her, the scene receded into the gloom.

  Grey mist edged her vision. For a heartbeat she felt as if she was floating, held up by the bubble of her last breath. Then the bubble burst and she was falling.

  ‘Oops. So sorry. Clumsy old me.’ The Doctor lurched suddenly across the corridor. The armed gang tried to push past him, but somehow he was always in their way, arms out, pushing them back as he righted himself, only to lose his footing yet again and flounder back into their path.

  The gang’s leader swore and jabbed his makeshift blade at the Doctor but found himself clutching air. The weapon had vanished.

  ‘Is this yours?’ the Doctor asked innocently as he offered the knife to another member of the group – who hardly had time to shake his head before he was holding the knife and the metal bar he had been carrying found its way into the hand of one of his companions.

  ‘If you hold this and I give this to you, then I can take that and give it to you to look after….’ Words cascaded from the Doctor as the men’s weapons moved from hand to fist – at one point, a particularly thin and wicked-looking blade seemed to be plucked from behind its erstwhile owner’s ear – apparently under some mysterious power of their own. Like the captive audience of an insanely gifted illusionist, they were unable to keep a firm grasp on their weapons until Breed was…

  Gone. The Doctor glanced down the now-empty corridor and stopped, back on exactly the spot he had been standing when the men first lunged forward.

  ‘So,’ he said, hands now jammed in his pockets. ‘Which one of you’s going to take me to your leader?’

  The coffins were racked in tiers around the walls, linked by thick skeins of wiring and flexible tubing. The dim lighting threw deep shadows across the cramped space. Glasses on, the Doctor was peering at the readouts displayed on a bank of screens at one end of the racks. He jabbed at a screen, tapped another and watched columns of figures scroll down them. Martha watched him, nagged by the intense feeling that she had been here before.

  ‘What’s this – some kind of outer-space freezer aisle?’ she asked, her sense of dislocation intensifying. She had said that the last time she was here.

  ‘Very good!’ The Doctor laughed as he clambered up a clanging metal ladder and raced along the first walkway. His head bobbed as he glanced at the smaller screens bolted to the foot of each coffin. ‘These caskets are cryogenic units. Built to last, too.’ He kicked the nearest coffin, producing a deep, hollow tone.

  ‘Cryogenic,’ repeated Martha, who was beginning to feel she as if she was reciting a rehearsed script. ‘So we’re talking suspended animation then?’

  ‘Exactly!’ The Doctor had reached the end of the walkway. He slid down the ladder and bounced over to Martha. ‘Whoever lay down in one of these caskets wouldn’t have expected to wake up for a long time. Decades. Centuries even.’ He whipped off his glasses and waved them in the air as he paced back and forth. ‘I’d bet my shirt that this is a generation ship. But I wouldn’t bet my shirt because it’s a very nice shirt and I wouldn’t want to lose it. Only I wouldn’t – lose my shirt, I mean – because I’m right. I mean, how often have you known me to be wrong?’

  ‘Rewind a second, will you?’ Martha said, even though she knew what the Doctor’s answer would be, before she asked the question. ‘Generation ship?’

  ‘A tin can full of frozen colonists. Whole families fired at the world they’re going to colonise and more or less forgotten. Until they reach their target world, when the cargo’s thawed out and woken up so they’re able to get on with being explorers and colonists instead of frozen meat products.’ The Doctor looked around the dimly lit racks of empty caskets.

  ‘The caskets aren’t drawing any power but, judging by these readouts, I’d say power’s running low all over the ship. It’s still a long way from its target. And the cargo should still be asleep.’

  The Doctor should have spun on his heel and marched out the door, but he leaned in close and stared deep into her eyes. The intensity of his gaze made her gasp and catch her breath. He was so close, she could reach out and—

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked. There was something wrong with his face. It was bloating, losing shape – no, changing shape. She opened her mouth to warn him… and discovered that she could not breath.

  ‘Are you all right?’ the Doctor repeated. Mouth gaping like a landed fish, Martha thought it must be pretty obvious that she wasn’t all right. But the Doctor continued to stare at her, and his face continued to change shape, skin running like hot wax, one eye ballooning while the other changed colour.

  ‘Are you all right?’ It wasn’t the Doctor’s voice now. Female. Coming from a lipless mouth in a face without form. Martha’s struggle for breath became a struggle to scream.

  ‘Are you all right?’ the monstrosity repeated. ‘Please tell me you’re all right!’

  Martha coughed and took a deep gulping breath. The face above her snapped into shape and focus: a young woman.

  ‘Are you all right?’ the woman asked. ‘Please tell me you’re all right.’

  Blinking, eyes adjusting to the dim light, Martha saw a second face, looking down at her: Breed.

  ‘I know you,’ she croaked. She pushed herself backwards across the rough metal floor, panic rising.

  Martha’s back hit something and she froze. Looking back and up, she saw a face. Breed’s face.

  Barely suppressing a scream, Martha recoiled, scuttled round on the floor and somehow got her feet under her. Springing upright – and fighting to keep her balance as her head swam and her stomach lurched – she desperately scanned the dimly lit space for an escape route.

  Smaller than the cryogenic chamber, it was crammed with storage tanks, connected by a maze of ductwork and cables to a series of caskets racked against one wall. The caskets’ full-length hatches hung open and Martha became aware of a damp, mouldy odour that came from their direction.

  But most of her attention was focused on Breed, who stood a short way in front of her, when he should have been behind her. And on the group of ten or so other figures, fanning out around the cramped space, surrounding her.

  They all wore Breed’s face.

  The nutrient troughs had been roughly welded together from metal sheets scavenged, the Doctor assumed, from all over the ship. They ran the length of the empty hold and the pale, grey-veined foliage of the hydroponically reared crops hung limply over their sides.

  ‘Human beings,’ the Doctor said with a grin. ‘You really are brilliant! A situation might look hopeless, but that doesn’t stop you trying to do something about it.’ He shaded his eyes and looked up at the light-strips that hung over the troughs.

  ‘That doesn’t answer my question,’ said the man who had introduced himself as Treve, Chief Planetary Surveyor and ad hoc head of the Steering Council. Laine, the leader of the armed group that had been pursuing Breed, stood beside Treve, having reported the events in the tunnel. Two of Laine’s group now flanked the Doctor. Treve noticed they looked nervous, kept shooting sideways glances at the prisoner, as if they expected – feared, almost – he might make some sudden move.

  ‘Eh?’ The Doctor stopped staring up at the light strips and returned his attention to Treve. ‘Oh. Right. Your question… Which was…?’

  ‘Who are you and where’s the Breed designated Theta-Nine?’

  ‘That’s two questions and I’ve already answered one of them. I’m the Doctor. I told your man there �
�� you called him Laine when he frogmarched me in here – when we met in the corridor, but he seemed more interested in putting my friend’s life in danger.’

  ‘You’re the one who got in our way,’ Laine said. ‘For all I know the Breed grabbing her was some kind of bluff to get us to hold back.’

  ‘And he’d already clobbered me for what – a bit of a laugh?’ The Doctor’s tone was mocking. ‘I just have this thing about bullies. You know, the type who gang up on someone and go after them like a pack of dogs. Don’t like them. Don’t like them at all.’ He paused, before going on: ‘Still, I imagine it must have come as a shock, waking up and finding that you were still light years from your new home.’

  Treve blinked, as surprised by the sudden shift in the prisoner’s tone from menacing to breezy as by his apparent knowledge of the onboard situation. ‘How…?’

  ‘Oh, the empty cryo-caskets, the energy readings – you’re still in deep space, so there’s nothing for the solar arrays to collect – and your DIY hydroponics. Raided the seed store, the stuff intended to cultivate the new world? Like I said before: drop human beings in a tight spot and they’ll improvise like mad to get out of it. Give you lot lemons and before you know it, you’re passing round the lemonade!’ The Doctor went back to squinting at the lights.

  ‘Exactly how hard did Theta-Nine hit him?’ Treve asked.

  ‘Harder than we thought, from the sound of things,’ Laine replied.

  ‘So tell me.’ The Doctor was brisk. ‘How long since you came out of cryo-sleep?’

  ‘A little over two years,’ said Treve. ‘Luckily, the cryo-system malfunctioned during a scheduled maintenance cycle. Artificials had been decanted and were performing their programmed tasks. They re-tasked to revive as many of us as possible.’

  ‘As many as possible?’

  ‘About half,’ Laine answered. ‘Funny how that evened out the numbers nicely.’ There was an edge of bitterness to his voice.