Heart of Tardis

by Dave Stone

  And to his great surprise, Chief Tilson found himself doing just that.

  Chapter Eight

  Partial Definitions of Disorder

  ‘Millennia ago,’ proclaimed the splendidly berobed if largely insubstantial member of the Gallifreyan High Council, ‘when Rassilon wrestled with the Great Beast, and struck off its head from which to take the branching golden tree of its metathalmus, wherein did lay the First Secret of Chrononambulatory Egress...’

  ‘Yes, we all know the Legends from the Dawn of Time Travel,’

  said the Doctor ‘and very poetical and edifying they are to be sure, if needlessly messianic and containing about as much relation to the truth as a toboggan does to a small tub of weasel cheese. We also know for a fact that Rassilon came upon the great and glorious secrets of Time by way of pinching one of the translation belts of that species who attacked us in the Time Wars, in retaliation for the things we did to them before we’d even heard of them in the first place...’

  ‘The Time Wars,’ thundered the High Councilman, ‘did not happen.’

  The Doctor glared at him. ‘Now, by “did not happen” do you mean that Gallifrey is doing a spot of cultural revision and would prefer to forget all about such things?’ he said. ‘Or do you mean that you’ve been doing some actual revising of the time lines?’ His face clouded. ‘If so, you’ll have a difficult time doing it. I was there as an eyewitness, I seem to recall, and I think you’ll have a hard job trying to paint me out.’

  ‘The Time Wars did not happen,’ repeated the High Councilman.

  ‘Ah, well, yes,’ said the Doctor. ‘That clears things up immediately.’

  Romana, meanwhile, had been peering closely at the High Councilman. ‘I remember you, don’t I? You’re one of that new traditionalist faction that was skulking around just before I went away. Done well for yourself while I’ve been gone, have you? Isn’t your name Wblk?’

  ‘Wblk?’ said the Doctor, interested despite himself. ‘Bit of a short name for a Time Lord.’

  ‘And what of it?’ sniffed Wblk the High Councilman, trying for a lofty hauteur but failing to disguise the fact that this remark had cut him deeply.

  ‘They’re the ones to watch out for, I’ve learnt.’ said Romana.

  ‘They always seem to try and overcompensate.’

  ‘Well, if the convention still holds that a Time Lord’s name grows in length by his stature, reputation and deeds of note,’

  said the Doctor, cheerfully, ‘all that means is our friend Wblk’s acts of greatness are before him.’ He turned back to the Councilman’s apparition. ‘Why don’t you tell us all about it, Wblk? Sticking to the facts if possible.’

  The High Councilman seemed a little deflated by the Doctor and Romana’s derision. He fussed with his splendid semi-transparent robes, and continued in slightly less portentous tones...

  * * *

  In the UNIT barracks, Katharine Delbane found herself going through one of those dizzying moments where the very nature of the world around you changes, and changes again, and then changes yet again as your recognition lags behind the actual events. She’d thought the weight barrelling into her had been one of the shadowy and half-glimpsed invading enemy forces, and made ready to kick and scratch in a desperate fight for her life -

  and then looked at the earnest, sweating face on the stumbling form and realised it was familiar. It was Sergeant Benton.

  Her next thought was that he had been shot, that the hand clutched to his stomach was attempting to prevent his guts spilling out on the gravel... and then she realised that there was no blood, no obvious injury other than his lurching weakness.

  Delbane sat herself up as he keeled the rest of the way over on to his hands and knees, both of them approaching the same general height but from different directions. Benton was shaking, his face pale and his jaws clenched in the manner of one fighting against unconsciousness.

  ‘Been shot...’ he slurred. ‘Anaesthetic spray Think it was supposed to knock me out but didn’t work right. Year back I was exposed to... to...’

  He looked at her owlishly and Delbane just knew he was trying to come up with something like the attempts at misdirection she’d been given before, like a drunkard trying to come up with excuses.

  There was no time for this.

  ‘You were exposed to something at some point that’s counteracting it, right?’ she said.

  Benton nodded gratefully. ‘I can keep it off. For a while.’ He glared around blearily at the fallen soldiers who were still visible. ‘They came in and went right through us. I think they’re after...’

  For a moment his features went slack, as though every muscle in his face had been cut, and then reanimated; it was like watching some science-fiction movie with a robot whose power is cut and then restored. ‘We have to get to the Brigadier,’ he said. ‘The things he knows... we can’t let him...’

  Then his features went slack, again, and for the final time.

  He relaxed into complete unconsciousness and his face smacked Into the gravel.

  Delbane considered her options. If this were a movie, the first thing to do would be to acquire a weapon and fade into the scenery, becoming an unanticipated loose cannon and picking off the invading forces one by one. This being reality, she decided that the first thing to do was locate a phone and call for help. The Provisional Department had its own dedicated Special Branch armed-response unit for such times when an armed response was necessary and, failing that, if the worst came to the worst, she could always just dial 999.

  The phone lines to the barracks, though, had probably be cut

  - and getting out on the street to use a public call box simply wasn’t a possibility. The enemy would be watching the gates and the paling fence was unscalable. Delbane’s mind worked frantically on a solution... and threw up a recently seen image: a battered field telephone hooked to bulky an. unfamiliar-looking storage cells and what was supposedly a transmitter aerial, reminiscent of a Jackson Pollock painting fabricated from wire.

  The field telephone was currently residing on a bench in John Smith’s abandoned workroom. It was worth a shot, Trying to make as little sound as possible on the gravel path Delbane climbed to her feet and set off, watchfully, in direction from which she had come.

  * * *

  It must be noted here that High Councilman Wblk’s explanation of the matters currently affecting the entire universe was literally untranslatable: even word-for-word those words would lapse into long strings of vocal and tertiary-sensual gibberish as they dealt with concepts with which the non-paratemporally existing human mind is not equipped to cope. The idea, for example, that an incident in ancient Babylon and the first Mars landing are in a certain sense happening simultaneously, are components of the same discrete paratemporal Event, can only catch the faintest breath of notions and perceptions that a Time Lord would understand in the bone. In such drastically reduced terms, however, the situation Wblk described was more or less this: The first Gallifreyan attempts at time travel, millennia before what the non-paratemporally existing mind would think of as now, had not been a spectacular success. Rassilon himself, though having an innate sympathy for the basic physical processes, was at heart a tinkerer - the Embodiment of the Will of an entire planetary population, but a tinkerer nonetheless.

  (Wblk, at this point, gave a contemptuous little sniff at such a thoughtlessly cavalier attitude to the mysteries of time and space.)

  As a result of this, the thrust towards temporal break-out was characterised not so much by a noble race elevating its thoughts in universal serenity, as by the entire population of a planet hitting things with spanners, skinning their knuckles on some intransigently bolted-together contrivance and cursing.

  The Gallifreyan chronosphere was littered with failed attempts by the time, as it were, the Scientific Elders hit upon what was subsequently and retroactively called the Type-one TARDIS design. Some of these prototypes were merely ill-conceived and dangerous, some of them w
ere ridiculous to boot... and some of them had minds of their own. Some of them escaped, breaking free of Gallifrey’s temporal pull to slingshot through the space/time continuum at any number of seconds per second...

  And, occasionally, space and time being rather smaller in practical terms than people tend to imagine, they hit things.

  ‘A prototype mechanism impacted upon a hitherto stable singularity,’ Wblk concluded, ‘trapping itself within the physical and temporal atmosphere of a planet and knocking it out of dimensional alignment. This basic incompatibility is, effectively, causing the singularity to destabilise, collapse into discontinuous state.’

  ‘A discontinuity within a planetary atmosphere?’ The Doctor frowned. ‘The Brownian effect of air convection on it would alone be a recipe for disaster. What are the effects at this objective point?’

  ‘Localised contamination of the time lines.’ said Wblk.

  ‘Secondary resonance from the focal point is infecting the planet itself with parareality - the perceived world is being overwritten with discrete contextual event-packets of a higher order. The local population is adapting, of course...’

  ‘Are you saying that this planet is populated?’ said the Doctor incredulously.

  ‘Lower-order sentients.’ said Wblk dismissively. They’re hardly aware that anything’s going on. Even those in direct contact with the singularity have no idea what it truly means.

  The planet and its population are neither here nor there.’

  ‘What a remarkably admirable sense of detachment you do have.’ said the Doctor. ‘What’s the problem so far as you’re concerned?’

  There was a bleeping from the TARDIS console. A small red light began to flash insistently.

  ‘The

  transdimensional

  stresses

  are

  increasing

  exponentially.’ said Wblk, his tone rather pointedly oblivious to the Doctor’s sarcasm. ‘If left unchecked they could split the space/time continuum apart and open up a conduit to...’ At this point Wblk’s apparition pointed a finger in a dimensionally complex direction that, to a human observer, would appear to be receding no matter where it was seen from. ‘...To over there.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said the Doctor, worriedly, his eyes boggling a little with concern. ‘Oh dear me. That puts a more serious complexion on things, indeed.’

  ‘Precisely,’ said Wblk with a slight resurgence of pompous confidence. ‘The only proper way to deal with this is to...’ He belatedly realised that the Doctor’s worried reaction had nothing to do with the matters of which he was speaking.

  ‘What are you doing? Get those out of me!’

  The Doctor had walked over to the console and was activating a display. Because of its position, this had necessitated plunging his hands directly through Wblk’s apparition.

  ‘What’s happening?’ asked Romana, joining him.

  ‘A friend of mine,’ the Doctor said, working the display controls with rapid urgency. ‘An old friend I knew... several times. I gave him the means to contact me, should he ever need my services and now... it looks as though he’s in trouble...’

  ‘Pardon me?’ said Wblk the High Councilman, affronted at finding himself suddenly ignored. ‘I am talking about an unstable space/time discontinuity set to tear reality apart like a rotten walrus, you know.’

  ‘Yes, well.’ said the Doctor. ‘There’s always one of those to deal with, and this one can damned well sort itself out for a change. ‘This is far more important.’

  Delbane slammed the handset of the field telephone down in its cradle with a terse but entirely heartfelt expletive. The phone had appeared to work and the battery cells seemed to have retained their charge - at least, the lights had come on when she had flipped the power switch - but the earpiece had relayed nothing but dead air.

  On the off chance, she had cranked the archaic-looking mechanical handle with its little tin-plate label saying FOR

  EMERGENCY USE ONLY, and the result had been a randomly oscillating whine layered over static, from which occasionally broke crackling wails of foreign-sounding music and strings of distorted gabbling that might or might not have been words.

  Either the field telephone was malfunctioning, or whatever had been set up to receive and return its transmissions was long gone. Either way, it was useless. Delbane had shouted into the handset that she was at the UNIT barracks and needed assistance, purely for the sake of the one in several million chance that there was anybody to pick up her voice.

  Now she set about formulating other plans. Either the workroom had not figured in the enemy forces’ plan of attack, or they had simply not got around to searching it yet. If the latter, then they must be getting around to it any second now. In any event, Delbane thought, action was better than inaction: it was time to leave. This decision was helped by her memory of Benton, a mental re-examination of her image of the fallen UNIT troops and her recollection of the lack of spilled blood. When resolving to walk into a possible shooting it does wonders to know that one is more likely to be shot with anaesthetic than bullets.

  Benton’s words implied that the Brigadier was in danger, and that made sense. If the attack had been intended for some terrorist or military objective, merely rendering the opposing troops unconscious rather defeated the issue. The enemy was obviously after something, or someone, and the Brigadier fitted the If she headed for his office there was at least some chance that she’d learn more of what was going on, and whether she was able to do anything about it. Delbane fingered the flap on the holster of her service revolver and: You do not need a pistol to defeat these Minions. You simply need your Word of Power.

  Now where the hell had that thought come from?

  It had popped into her head, fully formed, with seemingly no connection to even her subconscious mind. It didn’t so much as sound like her, or like anyone else who had mastered the art of the common apostrophe in everyday use.

  Delbane recalled a conversation she’d had once, nothing important, just the sort of general rambling discussion one has with a friend. She had wondered aloud why paranoid schizophrenics, whose malfunctioning brains should throw up utterly random delusions, like thinking gerbils were cheese and so forth, shared the remarkably common delusion that the government, or whoever, was beaming control signals into their heads. Her friend had pointed out that this ‘delusion’ was in fact the sane part of their minds, desperately trying to come up with relatively sane and logical explanations for thoughts they could not possibly have had.

  The memory was vaguely disquieting and of no use whatsoever. Delbane set it aside, drew her service revolver and headed purposefully for the workroom door.

  Which swung back to reveal a black-clad figure.

  Even at this first direct sight of an enemy representative, Delbane saw that there was something very wrong about the shape of it. The sort of pattern-recognition processes that allow one to pull a familiar face from a crowd saw tiny variances of posture, of movement when it moved, that set it very slightly but entirely definitively outside the range of the human form.

  Consciously, as the figure lunged towards her bringing up a weapon obviously designed to deliver a gas discharge or liquid spray rather than a live round, her only thought was that the man looked wrong.

  Later, when she tried to think about it, Delbane could find no explanation for what she did next. It was as though something - possibly the same something that had so recently put an alien thought into her head - had taken over her body and was operating it by remote control. It was as though she were possessed.

  As the black-clad figure flung itself towards her she felt her hand drop the revolver it was carrying - throw it to the ground on purpose - and then reach up with a calm and easy motion to pluck the concealing hood from its head.

  The scream she tried to give at the misshapen form that was revealed seemed to have been short-circuited. Instead, as the thing hit her with its anaesthetic spray and she felt her legs falli
ng from under her, she felt her lips attempting to mouth words, form sounds of their own accord. ‘ Amarathma ne da somon rakthra moli damon su la tomanakath...’

  Chapter Nine

  Sins of the Various Flesh

  A mind was abroad in Lychburg - or more properly, a Mind. A disembodied intelligence that could not, in all justice, be termed as greater or lesser than human. It was different, it was Other; on levels which the human mind, being for the most part singular in nature rather than multiple and cumulative, cannot properly conceive.

  The Mind flicked Its attention at random through sleeping heads, through the heads of small boys dreaming of egging the cars of their elementary school principal, through the head of that same principal dreaming of finally being rid of his aged mother; through the heads of cops dreaming of doughnuts, factory workers dreaming of beer, spinsters dreaming of husbands, housewives dreaming of detergent, teenagers dreaming of panty raids, lackeys dreaming of plutocrats, plutocrats dreaming of wealth undreamt of convenience-store clerks dreaming of their registers, priests dreaming of their God...

  and all the while, as It flicked Its attention back and forth through the world that It had formed around Itself and defined, the Mind was aware that something was very, very wrong.

  Something new had appeared in the world, something that was causing the carefully established order around It to fragment.

  The effects, at this point, were minor; in the same way that the first activated cells of a cancer are minor - but the Mind could see that this disruption, if left unchecked, might hurt It, hurt It badly. Possibly even kill It.

  The disruption seemed to be centred upon the three tiny, individual minds who had come from the new thing when it first appeared. The Mind had tried to get inside them directly, tried to destroy them out of hand, but Its influence had glanced off them without their so much as noticing. They were protected, it seemed, by some Power almost matching that of the Mind’s own. It would have to find some new method of attack.