by Dave Stone
‘Oh dear,’ he said, not exactly worried, but in a tone that had uneasiness as a distinct possibility in its near future. ‘Oh dear. That can’t be right, can it?’
In their totem suits Haasterman and Sohn prowled the concrete blockhouses that had once housed the Golgotha Project and had been subsequently - and extremely hurriedly
- converted into a skeleton-staffed observation and early warning station. In addition to the portable life-support and radio systems in their suits, there were snag-free graphite-coated air lines and cables for communications and power.
These linked them umbilically to the crash team’s encampment over two miles away, via heavy-duty booster pumps, transformers and land lines established outside the installation itself by advance-party support technicians. This was purely belt-and-braces procedure, but it put Haasterman in mind of Theseus and the Minotaur - had him wondering as to what, precisely, might still be living in the installation maze.
As it turned out, nothing was. Definitively so. The skeleton staff seemed to be making a profound effort to live up to their name, but the dry and effectively sterile air had mummified them to a certain extent. Intestinal tracts had bloated, eyes had fallen in and tissues had desiccated, but they had not as yet started to rot.
‘Looks like the wave front killed them instantly,’
Haasterman said, inclining his suit-bulked body from the hips so that his faceplate and the camera bolted to his helmet could take in the view of a body slumped over a desk. The residue of the coffee it had spilt by tipping over a cup fanned out irregularly across a collection of report sheets. ‘Dropped them in their tracks. Is there anything we can learn from the bodies?’
‘I doubt it, very much,’ said Sohn. ‘The fact of temporal-fracturing means that by our very nature we are living in the universe the fracture creates. Any number of things could be different and we simply wouldn’t notice.’ She paused, looking at another body that had collapsed while apparently on the way to the women’s rest room off to one side of the main control chamber. It was impossible to guess what Sohn was thinking, through the layers of her suit. ‘Then again we might get something,’ she said at last. ‘From the hair and fingernails, from the post-mortem anabolism. They died in a state of quantum flux, broadly speaking, before their physical processes could adapt. We might be able to gather some data as to the basic nature of the transitions.’
‘Conclusive?’ Haasterman asked.
‘Inferential.’ said Sohn, ‘at best.’
Haasterman nodded, equally opaquely, to the world outside his helmet. ‘So let’s see if we can gather something direct.’
The installation generators were EMP-blown and the on-site power was out. The basic nature of the Golgotha Project meant that this did not affect the processes of Containment, but it did mean that the servomechanisms that controlled the blast shutters over the lead crystal observation windows were inoperative. Haasterman pulled a bitless electric drill from the tool kit on his belt, plugged it into his suit’s outlet and applied it to the socket bearing of the manual override.
The shutters opened up with a groan, like the slats of a massive armour-plated Venetian blind. Beyond them, Haasterman and Sohn caught their first sight of the crater, the five-mile half-globe scooped out of the bedrock with such clean precision that its inside shone like a mirror. On a clear day, from the installation, it would have been possible to see clear across to its burnished other side. At least it would have been, had it not been for the shifting glow of the thing that hung in its centre.
Haasterman had been in the process of bringing up the optical enhancement systems of his suit, designed to translate subatomic phenomena into models that the eye could see.
Now he stopped.
‘Oh dear God,’ he said. ‘You can see it. You can see it with the naked eye.’
‘This is not good,’ said Dr Sohn, her voice very carefully neutral in the manner of one who does not trust the quality it might have if it were otherwise. ‘Not good at all. I hope you have contingency plans, Colonel, because I somehow think that a Hercules and three tanker trucks are not going to be enough.’
Chapter Six
Meanwhile Back At...
Outside the UNIT barracks a big, articulated tanker truck rumbled its ponderous way along a street which had been widened some years before to accommodate military transports - and had, incidentally, cost the Ministry of Defence a community centre and a water flume for the local swimming baths to squeak planning permission past the Greater London Council. After several years of Tory government the community centre was long shut down and the swimming baths were bone dry and squatted by an anarchist performance-art collective.
The tanker truck was misfiring, roadworn and plastered with Long Vehicle and Hazchem signs, but the one thing it didn’t look was suspiciously sleek, black and menacing. It churned to a gear-stripping halt and the driver, a perfectly nondescript little man in unkempt greasy overalls, swung himself down from the cab and wandered over to the guardhouse clutching a clipboard and an impressive sheaf of dockets.
It is a sad fact that, due to the influence of a certain kind of Hollywood movie, any patently innocent vehicle or man approaching a secure location is quite obviously up to no good. The patently innocent driver will bumble around asking for directions, mutter something about the regular driver being off sick, opine that there must have been some mix-up with the paperwork and then pull out a gun and shoot the guards before they can move to check up on it.
This being reality, or some reasonable approximation thereof, the nondescript little man simply pulled out his gun and shot the guardsmen without preamble.
Crash-hatches in the side of the tanker truck racked themselves down, and a collection of what, on first sight, appeared to be men in full combat body armour swarmed through the barracks gate.
* * *
Romana peered through the dilated viewing port with a kind of disdainful unease - the sort of emotions she might feel when looking at some pathetic human attempt to build a crude atomic bomb: the feeling that she was looking at something ludicrously inept and simple-minded on any number of levels, but with an awareness that one of those levels would be able to obliterate anyone in the vicinity if it went off. Beyond the viewing port, the complex polyfractal swirls of the Vortex had been replaced by a static crystalline structure that had never moved, would never change, for the simple reason that there was no accessible dimension for it to move or change within. In a certain sense, the very world around us is linked with the consciousness of its observer - with what that observer, on the quantum level, is physically capable of conceiving. The world outside the viewing port had been conceived by someone who had never heard of fractionated dimensions and was fundamentally incapable of conceiving of an integer greater than three.
The Doctor was worriedly pecking at a set of buttons on the console. A readout illuminated itself briefly and then faded with a discouraging little gravmetronic blurp.
‘The TARDIS exists in her own temporal bubble,’ he said,
‘so we can move around inside her. Outside, we’re trapped.
Trapped like a -’
‘Braxellian fly in oogli-tree amber,’ said Romana. ‘I gathered.’
‘I was going to say like a toad in a treehouse,’ said the Doctor, in a slightly hurt tone of voice. ‘Or do I mean in a hole? Ah well...’ he shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter. The fact remains that we’re completely and utterly stuck. Again.’
Romana looked out again at the fixed and motionless metastructure of the world, at the half-resolved images fixed within, caught between one living breath and heartbeat and the next. ‘You know I wouldn’t mind,’ she said, ‘if it didn’t happen every other day of the week. It’s not as if they haven’t already given us enough to worry about with the Key to Time. How long do you think they’ll leave us here?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said the Doctor. ‘They’re getting a bit better about it lately, I think. Could just be a couple of hours.’
He pulled something from a pocket and waggled it meaningfully. ‘Quick game of cards while we wait?’
Romana considered. The Doctor tended to play with an ancient deck of tarot cards blessed by several magi who had been adept in the physical manipulations of reality that human beings knew in a corrupt form as Magic. In locations like the TARDIS, where the fundamental nature of reality was different from what it was commonly held to be, this could lead to unexpected and sometimes quite remarkably unfortunate results. Even a game of Happy Families could end in tragedy, depending upon which particular family it invoked.
‘Better not,’ she said.
‘Suit yourself.’ The Doctor pocketed the deck. ‘I just thought it might help to pass the -’
‘Time has no meaning, here, Doctor,’ said a scratchy and slightly cracked-sounding voice, as though the speaker’s vocal cords were desiccated from years, and possibly centuries, of disuse. ‘Space itself has no meaning, here, in any proper meaning of the term, for you have been taken...’ The voice paused dramatically. ‘...Out of Time!’
‘Well, yes, fine,’ said the Doctor a little irritably, uncharacteristically, as the ordinarily broad and cheerful patience of his current incarnation began to wear a little thin.
‘We’ve already worked that out. Through constant practice, I might add. Why have you done it this time?’
A vaguely humanoid shape was forming by the console, or rather partially inside it due to a small miscalculation of positioning. An insubstantial, hologrammatic figure in flowing, metallic-grey robes. It resolved itself into a bald and elderly man, with deep wrinkles around his mouth and a jutting, beak-like nose. The tiny, almost imperceptible signs that distinguish a particular type of face from any other allowed the Doctor and Romana to recognise this man as Gallifreyan and a high-caste Time Lord, nearing the end of his second or possibly third regeneration.
‘The very fabric of space/time is in danger!’ the Time Lord pronounced, still in his dry and scratchy voice. ‘The universe itself is on the very brink of being catastrophically torn apart!’
‘Once again,’ said the Doctor, ‘this is hardly a surprise. That’s the only reason you people in the High Council ever seem to want to talk to us these days, and I really wish a subjective fortnight would go by when you don’t.’ He scowled bad-temperedly. ‘What have you gone and done to the basic underlying fabric of space/time now?’
* * *
The black-clad, combat-armoured figures swarmed through the UNIT barracks, shooting everyone and anyone they could find. They hammered open every door they came to, using a compression-wrench that pulled the locks from the frames on those that were locked, checking that the rooms behind them were clear while more of their fellows advanced, spreading through the barracks in an unstoppable leapfrogging tide. The UNIT troops themselves were able to offer little or no resistance, not through any lack of skill or training, but from the sheer reaction-time factors of responding to such a swift, decisive and wholly unexpected incursion. An advance party hammered open the tactical operations computer room. There was no one there, no sound or motion save for a chattering golfball-printout from a terminal slaved to the UNIT mainframe, which occupied several chambers underground and was actually less powerful than the newly acquired Apples.
Katharine Delbane was in a completely different wing of the barracks. One of the great joys of knowing something about the new developments in computer technology is that those who don’t tend to completely overestimate the time a task will take - if things go well and the damn things don’t crash three times out of five. Delbane had completed the transfer of files into the database a week before, learning quite a lot from t hem in the process as she became familiar with the resources at the UNIT
organisation’s command. Names on the active and inactive lists, names and contact procedures for suppliers of items ranging from industrial lasers to live marmosets, archaeological tools to rocketry components, Watusi tribal masks to dedicated time on US college-campus particle accelerators...
None of it, however, was any direct use - the nature of logistics being that they detail the possible courses of an action without describing that action’s ultimate purpose. It was all very well to know that UNIT had access to, and the use of, any number of people and things, but that didn’t help with discovering what they were being used, precisely, for.
Delbane remembered her briefing before coining here. She could hardly do otherwise; it was etched on to her mind like her childhood name and address - rather more so, in fact. In her work for the department she’d adopted a number of new names and addresses.
The department (or more properly, Divisional Department of Special Tactical Operations, open brackets, Provisional, close brackets, with Regard to Insurgent and Subversive Activity -
commonly and more colloquially known as ‘the Provisionals’) was ostensibly an arm of Special Branch with direct funding from the Treasury. Its duties, though, were slightly more abstruse and indefinable than that. The Provisional Department reported directly to the Prime Minister, was in a sense her personal hand in any number of covertly operational areas.
A department operative might find him-or herself infiltrating an NUM ballot-meeting for surveillance purposes, taking a job as a teacher to blow the whistle on some headmaster’s Marxist leanings or being positioned on the bridge of a Royal Navy battleship, purely so that he or she could fire off a round of shells at some boat travelling in a completely innocent direction and then go, ‘Whoops.’ The department existed, quite simply, for the application of a precise force of influence to counter the forces of subversion, as and when it might be needed.
Although the head of the department, Crowley, had daily contact with the Prime Minister, the briefing had been Delbane’s first meeting with her face to face, in her private dressing chambers in the House of Commons. The experience had been more intense than somewhat, to say the least. The Prime Minister had looked down at her over her nose, with the kind of flat contempt that certain senior army officers had reserved for her as a chit of a girl getting above her station.
Delbane had seen all the obvious images in the media, and heard the jokes by ‘alternative’ comedians about how the PM was the only real man in the Cabinet, but in this first direct contact she realised that this wasn’t precisely true. The Prime Minister contained within herself a bludgeoning and utter force of will that is often only achieved by men. Looking into those cold, hard, slightly deranged eyes Delbane had understood that she was there, so far as the Prime Minister was concerned, to perform a function, a function that did not require sympathy even on the level of patronisation, and that outside the limits of that function the Prime Minister could not care one iota if she, Katharine Delbane, lived or died.
‘You have experience as a military officer?’ the PM had said, shortly
‘Well, yes, I...’ Delbane began, meaning to say how she had tried to follow in the footsteps of her father, how she had enlisted and trained and then realised that the only opportunities of promotion for a woman were in the precise areas for which she had no aptitude whatsoever. She had wanted to explain how an instinct for computer programming I had put her on the fast track to being a jumped-up typing-pool secretary instead of resulting in her programming the weapons of the future, but the Prime Minister had abruptly cut her short:
‘Then I suppose you’ll have to do. I’d rather have a man, quite frankly. Men know how to follow orders, take command when they have to and do what has to be done, without all that confused emotion that women tend to exhibit. But we need an army officer with training in this “new technology”...’
You could hear the distasteful quotation marks with which she wrapped the words, as though the only proper avenue for the scientific mind involved the chemical manipulation of a new flavour of ice cream, ‘...and you’re the only one available who fits the bill.’
Delbane found she was reminding herself that this forthrightness of opinion was precisely why she herself had voted for the
Prime Minister in the first place. If you can’t take it when it’s directed at you, she told herself sternly, then you’re indulging in hypocrisy of the worst kind.
The Prime Minister had gone on to explain the basics of the situation. The United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, so far as Its British arm was concerned, was a disruptive internationalist holdover from the bad old days of Labour governments and the soft Conservatism of Heath. Its abstruse means of funding gave it a degree of autonomy from governmental control and even market forces (a term which the Prime Minister pronounced in the same tones that an apostate might mouth one of the names of God), and this was quite unconscionable. It had used its entirely unearned status, time and time again, to block and countermand the processes of the nation’s central government - its most recent and blatant act being to requisition fully a third of the gold reserves from the Bank of England without explanation. The failure to replace those reserves had led more or less directly to the chaos that ensued after a catastrophic stock-market crash, the true magnitude of which had necessarily been hushed up. Indeed, it had only been Scottish oil revenues, and the funds received from the US in return for allowing the establishment of several bases on this sceptred isle (the Prime Minister had actually used the words ‘sceptred isle’) that had allowed the government to stay in power by knocking half a penny off the basic rate of income tax.
This state of affairs could not be allowed to continue.
Simply by existing, any organised body in the world had secrets that could be used to hang it out to dry, and Delbane’s job as a DISTO(P)IA agent would be to root out UNIT’s secrets.
Thus far, however, Delbane had met with little luck. There was some big secret here, she was sure of it, but it had the general flavour of the punch line to a joke - blindingly obvious if you guess what’s coming, but totally unknown if you don’t. All allusions to it had been carefully, if sometimes hastily, deflected, like Benton’s recent mention of ‘Sicilians.’
