Shada

by Douglas Adams

  ‘Then it was too late,’ Akrotiri groaned. ‘Too late!’ He reached out and his long yellow fingernails clutched at the lapel of the Doctor’s coat. ‘Too late!’

  The Doctor looked over anxiously at Chris. He was agitated too, his head twisting and turning under the inputs.

  ‘Too late!’ Chris called in an agonised voice. ‘He stole our minds!’

  ‘It’s never too late,’ said the Doctor soothingly. ‘I’ve come to help, remember?’

  Chris slumped back against the headrest of his alcove, becalmed.

  ‘Why would you help us?’ asked Akrotiri.

  The Doctor coughed. ‘Well, wouldn’t anybody?’

  The Kraag almost seemed to be laughing.

  It turned its back on K-9 and started pounding for the exit door from the command deck.

  ‘Master! Master!’ cried K-9. He snapped off the laser beam and shot forward at top speed. The power cable clicked from the socket on his side.

  The Ship watched as K-9 followed the burning red-hot Kraag from the command deck. ‘All very confusing behaviour,’ she said.

  Without the distractions on her command deck, the Ship decided to get on with some serious thinking.

  ‘Now that’s odd,’ she said to herself as the sounds of K-9’s engine and the roaring of the Kraag receded up the companionway. ‘I’m dead, so it should be impossible for me to think.’ She hemmed and hawed, electronics chirruping. ‘Why didn’t I think of that before?’

  The Doctor looked deep into the eyes of Akrotiri. ‘I’m going to take you all with me, there’s plenty of room.’

  The structure of the station creaked once more.

  ‘Sooner the better. Skagra obviously built this place to last only until his great experiment was concluded. Now it’s falling to bits.’

  ‘Aren’t we all?’ said Akrotiri.

  The Doctor patted him on the shoulder. ‘Don’t you worry. I can get help for you when all of this has blown over, get your brain back.’

  Akrotiri smiled. ‘You are a good man, Doctor.’

  The Doctor smiled back. ‘No, I’m not. In fact I’m flippant, boastful and terribly disorganised.’

  Suddenly Chris emitted a deep, terrible groan.

  The Doctor licked his lips and turned urgently to Akrotiri. ‘Listen. I’m terribly sorry but I’m going to have to disconnect you again. I may not be able to speak to you again for some time.’

  Akrotiri nodded.

  ‘Now please, concentrate,’ the Doctor went on. ‘Did Skagra ever mention his place of origin? Anywhere he might use as a base, anywhere he was trying to get to?’

  ‘Never,’ said Akrotiri.

  Chris let out a cry. His head rocked back and forth in the alcove.

  ‘Anything – please?’ urged the Doctor. ‘I mean, doesn’t the wretched man have a home to go to?’

  Akrotiri struggled to answer. ‘Perhaps…’

  ‘What?’ spluttered the Doctor. ‘Go on, quickly.’

  ‘Once, I saw him…’ Akrotiri began. The words were swallowed up in another agonising cry from Chris.

  The Doctor got closer. ‘Saw him what? Please!’

  Akrotiri shuddered. ‘He was… checking coordinates – on a palm unit…’

  The Doctor’s eyes lit up. ‘What were the coordinates?’ prompted the Doctor. ‘Please, Mr Akrotiri!’

  Chris cried out once again.

  The Doctor reached out instinctively to pull the connection between the two men free.

  And then Akrotiri said, ‘Galactic north 9… 6… 5… 5…’

  ‘Yes?’ called the Doctor, the wire in his hand.

  Chris writhed in agony.

  ‘Galactic north 9…’

  ‘Yes, I got that bit, 9655! What’s the rest? By what?’

  Akrotiri’s dry lips forced out, ‘By… by… galactic east vector 9… 1… 3…’

  Suddenly there was a mighty roar and an explosion of heat and noise.

  The Doctor was knocked to the floor by the heatwave.

  He lifted his head and saw the Kraag, glowing red hot, stomping towards him. Sparks crackled around it, and smoke poured from the floor-plates at its stumpy feet.

  The structure of the space station groaned.

  There was an almighty crack and one wall of computer banks smashed down.

  ‘Now listen,’ said the Doctor, calling to the Kraag. ‘I don’t know if you can understand me, but this is a very unstable environment and you are about the worst person to come crashing in here!’

  The Kraag roared and raised one arm towards him.

  ‘You fire that weapon,’ called the Doctor, ‘and this whole place will be destroyed!’

  Part Five

  Gallifrey’s Most Wanted

  Chapter 52

  THE DOCTOR WAS never to know if the raging Kraag had understood his words of warning, or if it had even heard them. A red mist had come down in front of the Kraag’s eyes – quite literally – and the Doctor, who had made a career of shouting ‘Wait!’ at people or things that were preparing to shoot him, but could sense the rare occasions when that just wasn’t going to work, did the only sensible thing, and ducked.

  A bolt of red-hot plasma energy blasted from the Kraag’s outstretched claw and smashed a gaping hole in the facing wall. Rivulets of molten metal spattered across the room.

  And, true to the Doctor’s prediction, the station that housed the Foundation for Advanced Scientific Studies began to creak and groan ever more perilously. The survivors, huddled in their corner, began to moan and scream in uncomprehending terror, hooting and howling like wild beasts.

  The Doctor found he still held the connecting wire in his hand. Chris and Akrotiri were still linked together. But there was no chance of getting the final coordinates now, no chance of finding Romana or stopping Skagra. The Kraag was already stomping after him, claw outstretched to blast him to atoms.

  The Doctor yanked the wire free.

  Chris screamed and leapt from the alcove, straight into the Doctor’s arms.

  Through the haze and the mist they heard a faint, tinny voice. ‘Master! Master!’

  ‘K-9!’ shouted the Doctor.

  The Kraag was almost on top of them.

  Suddenly Akrotiri leapt from his alcove into the line of fire. Summoning all his energies, the tattered figure screamed wildly, ‘Six-one-ZERO!’

  At the last word, his frail, ancient body took the full force of the Kraag’s energy bolt. For one terrible moment his skeleton was visible as the flesh boiled away. Then even his bones turned to ash, disintegrating in a wave of heat that threw the Doctor and Chris heavily to the floor.

  Now the Kraag towered over them.

  Suddenly the gridded metal floor-plates beneath its feet turned to slurry. With a roar almost of surprise, the Kraag slid down through the hole in the floor, jerkily, vanishing section by section. First its legs, then its torso, and finally its head with the glowing red eyes disappeared through the smoking gap.

  Chris tried to gather his senses. All around was confusion, heat, smoke, the noise of the rumbling, roaring Kraag down below and the rending metal of the station.

  ‘I told you we should have dealt with it before!’ he found himself shouting in the general direction of the Doctor.

  ‘Don’t worry!’ the Doctor shouted back. ‘I’ve thought of something.’ He called out into the black smoke. ‘K-9! Are you there?’

  ‘Master,’ came the faint reply. ‘Advise immediate evacuation!’

  ‘Well, yes, that would be nice,’ the Doctor called back. ‘But we can’t see in all this! Activate a homing beacon, lead us out of here, back to Skagra’s ship!’

  ‘Master,’ said K-9 obediently.

  A moment later Chris heard a steady and ear-splittingly loud beep. It repeated every other second.

  The Doctor clapped Chris on the shoulder and shoved him away from the smouldering hole in the floor and in the general direction of the beep.

  Chris kept his head down, remembering first-aid-cl
ass advice on how to avoid smoke inhalation. Faintly he saw the bright red rectangle of K-9’s eye-screen retreating down from the control area.

  It took Chris another second to realise that the Doctor was not following him.

  He stared back into the haze and confusion and called desperately, ‘Doctor! Where are you? Doctor!’

  ‘Carry on, Bristol!’ came the reply.

  Chris squinted. He could just make out the figure of the Doctor, on one side of the hole formed by the falling Kraag. On the far side cowered the other four survivors, pressing their bodies together in a pitiful huddle.

  The Doctor was reaching out over the widening chasm, trying to encourage them to jump across and join him.

  ‘Doctor, leave it!’ cried Chris.

  ‘I promised!’ shouted the Doctor.

  Suddenly the station shook as some vital part disintegrated. The centre of gravity shifted, knocking the Doctor back to the floor.

  With a chorus of ghastly wails, all four survivors tumbled into the pit.

  Chris yelled and lunged towards K-9, flinging himself on to the metallic body of the little robot. Thankfully, K-9 seemed to have some kind of internal traction system of his own. He held firm, and Chris held firm to him.

  There was a sudden silence, and then a grinding, splintering crack that chilled Chris to his very heart. The station was finally breaking up.

  Nobody will know, Chris thought crazily. He was going to die. In fact he was going to die in the most bizarre and extraordinary circumstances, blown to bits aboard an alien space station thanks to a creature made of living rock, in the company of a Gallifreyan Time Lord and a robot dog. But it wouldn’t even make the Cambridge Evening News or Anglia Tonight. They had trouble covering events as far afield as Ipswich, let alone deep space. He felt quite affronted, and then quite surprised at being quite affronted. But then, might people think he had disappeared mysteriously and gone to reinvent himself in some dramatic and romantic way? He sighed inwardly. No, they’d just assume he’d hit a loose cobble, come off his bike and fallen in the river.

  Suddenly he felt himself lifted up by the scruff of the neck, like a kitten being gummed by its mother. The next moment he was being hurried down the crazily shifting outer corridor of the station after the beeping, retreating K-9.

  A loop of multicoloured scarf was flung over Chris’s reddened, stinging eyes and burning mouth.

  And then, just when he was feeling better, Chris fainted.

  The Doctor careered onto the command deck of Skagra’s ship, carrying Chris carefully in his arms as if he were taking a sleepy child up to bed. K-9 came trundling in behind them, still bleeping and blinking.

  ‘Emergency, emergency!’ the Ship was crying, ringing all its alarms. ‘My sensors tell me that there’s shortly going to be an absolutely enormous explosion in our near vicinity!’

  The Doctor tried to clear his throat and dumped Chris into the command chair. ‘I know!’ he shouted. ‘Don’t you think you ought to do something about it?’

  ‘Emergency escape procedures will be implemented,’ said the Ship. ‘That silly Kraag has gone and ignited the zison energy source of the station!’

  ‘Zison energy! Then stop nattering and get on with it!’ yelled the Doctor.

  ‘Though why I’m implementing these procedures, I can’t personally fathom,’ the Ship nattered on. ‘Do you know, Doctor, I have combed my databanks for legends of the afterlife from over thirteen thousand cultures across this galaxy alone, and I can’t find a single one that suggests that things carry on after death rather suspiciously exactly as they did before. Hmm.’

  ‘Just get us out of here!’ cried the Doctor. He aimed a big angry kick at one of the control panels. ‘And don’t you talk to me about life and death! Come on! Don’t you realise this is a matter of life and death!’

  ‘No need for violence,’ sniffed the Ship. ‘That hurt!’

  ‘Do it!’

  The Ship rumbled as it disengaged its locking clamps. ‘Preparing to reverse docking procedure,’ said the Ship. ‘Engaging engines.’

  ‘Not that way!’ cried the Doctor, almost despairing. On the screen he could see a boiling red aura from the station, building up to a cataclysmic end for the Think Tank that would easily take them along with it. ‘I told you how to do it! Dematerialise!’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said the Ship. ‘So you did, Doctor, so you did. And frankly I don’t mind if I do.’ She coughed and turned off her alarms.

  The familiar wheezing groan of a relative dimensional stabiliser soothed the Doctor’s ears.

  ‘Ooh,’ said the Ship. ‘Ooh!’

  The forward screen view of the burning station dissolved into the comparatively relaxing vista of the endless spinning space-time vortex.

  *

  Chris regained consciousness to find the Doctor staring out at those same patterns, his hands buried deep in his pockets.

  ‘We made it!’ said Chris exultantly. The Doctor showed no sign of having heard him, and continued his brooding.

  Chris was astonished to discover a golden trolley laden with exotic delicacies next to the command chair. ‘Is this for me?’

  It was the Ship who answered. ‘I thought you might need refreshment, dear boy, after such a terrifying experience.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Chris leant over and grabbed something that looked almost like an apple. He bit into it. The flavour was unfamiliar but sweet enough. ‘What happened? I guess I must have blacked out.’

  ‘The space station was destroyed,’ said the Ship.

  ‘But did we discover anything? About Skagra?’

  The Doctor turned at last. ‘Thanks to Dr Akrotiri, yes. He gave his life to save ours, shouted out those final coordinates after his brain was disconnected from yours.’

  ‘But you told me that was impossible,’ said Chris, ‘after his mind was stolen.’

  ‘It was,’ said the Doctor, nodding. ‘Quite, quite impossible. But he did it.’

  Chris didn’t quite know how to deal with the Doctor in this mood. ‘Then we can get after Skagra, and save Romana. Isn’t that a good thing?’

  K-9 piped up. ‘This ship is already in transit to the stated coordinates.’

  ‘Good,’ said Chris.

  The Doctor harrumphed. ‘I just saw the best minds of this generation destroyed by the madness of a rampaging Kraag. And I couldn’t lift a finger to help them.’

  ‘Then we’ve got to make sure we don’t waste what Akrotiri gave us,’ said Chris. ‘It’s impossible things like that that show us we have to keep going.’ He reflected how odd it was that it was he, who had never before experienced action, adventure and sudden death outside a cinema, that was taking this better than the Doctor.

  But incredibly his simple and, he thought, rather clichéd words had a galvanising effect on the Doctor. He burst into a spectacularly wide and toothy grin and pointed straight at Chris. ‘I like you,’ he said.

  ‘Sorry to interrupt this moving moment,’ said the Ship, who sounded more left-out than sorry. ‘But I think I ought to inform you gents that we’ll be arriving at our destination in ten minutes of relative time.’

  ‘Excellent, Ship,’ said the Doctor. ‘I like you too.’

  ‘Thank you, Doctor,’ said the Ship, sounding appeased.

  Chris coughed, caught the Doctor’s eye and nodded over to K-9, whose tail antenna was cast down.

  ‘And of course I positively adore you, K-9,’ said the Doctor quickly.

  ‘This unit does not require adoration, Master,’ said K-9, but nevertheless his tail perked up.

  ‘Doctor,’ said the Ship. ‘I feel I should tell you that despite the warmth of our relationship, and all that you have done for me, much of my deceased circuitry feels uneasy about continuing to accept instructions from a dead man.’

  ‘Well, just tell it not to worry,’ said the Doctor breezily. ‘I’m sure your great lord Skagra will be very anxious to pay his last respects to me.’

  ‘Hmm, would he now?’ said t
he Ship, who sounded to Chris like she was raising an eyebrow.

  ‘And to you, of course,’ the Doctor added hurriedly.

  Chapter 53

  FOLLOWING HIS DIRE and somewhat cryptic warning to Clare about a person she could never possibly have heard of being released from somewhere she could never possibly have heard of by another person she could never possibly have heard of, the Professor had slipped off into what she supposed must have been his bedroom and returned very shortly afterwards fully dressed in a dusty tweed suit. He then proceeded to tinker with the brass control panel, tweaking, adjusting and even removing some of the components and passing them to her for her opinion. ‘I suppose we could always risk de-phasing the chronostatic field tracker,’ was his latest observation. He peered over the rims of his spectacles and blinked as if he honestly desired her thoughts on the subject.

  ‘Look, I don’t know what any of this means,’ Clare protested. ‘I’m not an engineer and even if I was I’m not sure I could help you do whatever you’re trying to do.’ It was amazing, really, she thought, how calmly she was taking all of this. Something about the Professor made her heart go out to him, a little like she had felt before with the Doctor. He seemed such a nice old man, and she just wanted to help him.

  The Professor tapped the brass panel meaningfully. ‘Oh dear, did I not explain?’

  ‘Not this particular bit, no,’ said Clare.

  ‘Sorry, thought it was obvious,’ said the Professor. He seemed to be drifting again. ‘Oh dear, that came out rather more pompously than I intended, I do hope you’ll forgive me, young lady.’

  ‘I’ll forgive you anything,’ said Clare, ‘if you just tell me what you want me to do.’

  The Professor tapped the panel meaningfully again, quite clearly forgetting he had just done so. ‘You and I, my dear, we must get this old perambulator of mine moving again.’

  ‘It certainly moved when I touched it before,’ said Clare.

  ‘A spasm, a mere spasm of the emergency mechanism,’ sighed the Professor. ‘I only hope it wasn’t a dying spasm. Nobody likes a dying spasm. Nobody likes spasms much at all, I suppose.’

  Clare gestured to the bewildering view through the curtained windows. ‘You mean we’re stuck? In this space-time vortex?’