Heart of Tardis

by Dave Stone

  Her supposedly unresponsive body had been dumped, along with those of Slater and McCrae, in the belly of the ’copter.

  The interior had been fitted with luxurious and roomy seats obviously designed for the transportation of passengers, and passengers of some importance at that. By sheer coincidence, Romana had been left with her head against one of the portholes, so she could see out. This might have been of some actual use had she the first notion of the geography of this planetary landmass.

  As it was, she saw the grubby concrete and redbrick sprawl of the conurbation devolve into a green and gold patchwork of crop fields, bounded by hedgerows and scattered with woodland and small settlements, linked by a meandering system of paved roads. We are all of us - human, Time Lady or flesh-eating slime-marmoset from Squaxis Beta - bound by the circumstances of our upbringing. Those circumstances fix for us the basis of normality no matter how much we realise, in later life, that they aren’t particularly normal. Accustomed to self-enclosed, hermetically controlled citadels and synthetic methods of food production, Romana thought this aerial view of an idyllic country scene was unconscionably sloppy and wasteful.

  Now they seemed to be coming upon an installation of some kind, an airfield by the look of it - Romana was vaguely aware that stratospheric transport on Earth commonly involved the taking off from, and landing on, long, space-wasting ‘runways’.

  As the ’copter descended towards the hangar buildings of the installation proper, she saw a haphazard collection of tents and shelters bivouacked outside protective fences. Camp followers? The provisioners, armourers, common-law wives and prostitutes who trailed along with the military in their various campaigns? She assumed so; the time frame was about right.

  The ’copter grounded by the hangars and Romana closed her eyes. She heard the sounds of what, presumably, were black-clad men hauling out the unconscious bodies of Slater and McCrae. Hands took hold of her and she let herself go limp, noting with some slight degree of amusement that her relatively dense Gallifreyan dead weight was causing a degree of consternation, and the eventual necessity for three pairs of hands to convolutely heave her from her seat and lift her up.

  She was carried, with bellicose grunts of exertion from her porters, out into the open air and then inside again. Some time later she was unceremoniously dumped on a padded surface and felt the sting of a needle in the side of her neck. Her finely tuned senses felt the foreign compound enter her bloodstream and she realised it was a stimulant, no doubt intended to counteract the effects of the anaesthetic. It would probably have no effect on her in any case, but she diverted it away from her paracerebellum and directly into waste-processing organs that were the equivalent of kidneys, just to be on the safe side.

  The men left, shutting and locking what sounded like a heavy steel door behind them. Romana opened her eyes and sat up. She was on a bunk in a cell which was of similar dimensions to the one in which she had been held in the UNIT

  barracks. Its construction seemed subtly different, however, as though minds of a completely different set had determined its construction: bare and solid breeze-block walls as opposed to painted brick. There was no window, barred or otherwise, but harsh fluorescent lighting and chilly, recycled-smelling air blasting from a grille. A pristine stainless-steel object was bolted to the concrete floor in a corner and plumbed in, possibly intended for the disposal of bodily waste, but Romana, on the whole, decided that she’d rather exert bodily control.

  The cell was also occupied. A middle-aged man in shirtsleeves and a pair of trousers that appeared to reach no further than his calves, where they were tucked into thick woollen socks, had left the bunk he had obviously been occupying against the far wall and was hovering over her uncertainly, unsure whether or not it might be needlessly forward to offer some physical assistance.

  ‘Are you all right, my dear?’ he asked.

  Romana would be hard-pressed to think of herself as anybody’s ‘dear’, but one of the advantages of being better travelled than most, and highly intelligent to boot, is the ability to extract true meanings and motivations from words.

  The man was simply and genuinely trying to help a fellow creature in distress.

  I’m fine,’ Romana told him, rubbing a finger over the puncture wound in her neck. It was healing faster than it would with a human biology and starting to itch. ‘What is this place? Where are we?’

  ‘It’s American, I think,’ the man said. ‘Other than those combat-armoured johnnies, I’ve seen a couple of USAF

  uniforms, and the man who... questioned me had an American accent. Baltimore, I think, though I can’t be sure.’

  The acronym meant nothing to Romana. She noticed that, though he seemed physically intact and in reasonably good health, there was bruising around the man’s face. Somebody or something had hit him solidly, two or three times.

  ‘As for where we are,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t tell you. I remember being in my office and feeling rather tired, and the next thing I knew I was waking up here. I assume they knocked me out with gas or the like. And the uniforms and accents might be purely for the purposes of misinformation, after all...’ He paused and looked at Romana thoughtfully. ‘Please don’t think me rude, my dear, but there’s the possibility that you might have been placed here as a part of the interrogation process. Opening up to a friendly face, and all that. I hope you’ll forgive me if I restrict my conversation to subjects of a nonsensitive nature? I don’t mean name, rank and serial number and suchlike nonsense, but...’

  ‘I understand,’ Romana said, and she did. There was a sense of forthright decency about this man, a basic inability to automatically think the worst of someone even under the circumstances of possible interrogation, that she found herself responding to, and warming towards, despite their short acquaintance. She wondered how his decency, and he, had ever managed to survive. ‘We won’t talk about, ah...’ She groped around in her depressingly thin knowledge of this place and time. ‘Invasion plans and rocket bombs. I’m the Lady Romana.’

  ‘Delighted to meet you,’ said the man. ‘Lethbridge-Stewart, Brigadier, with a serial number that’s neither here nor there for all the good it does anybody these days. I’ve always wondered why you seem to be expected to give it...’

  ‘Brigadier?’ said Romana. ‘So you’re the Doctor’s friend.’

  ‘The Doctor?’ Instantly the Brigadier’s face and manner were transformed. It was as though a switch, somewhere, had been thrown and a light had come on inside him. ‘The Doctor is here?’ he said, forgetting in his enthusiasm that he was intending to keep a rein on his mouth.

  ‘Well, not so much here, exactly,’ said Romana, ‘as around, generally.’

  ‘I never so much as dared hope that he might be. What brought him back, here and now?’

  ‘I thought you’d contacted him.’ Romana was slightly puzzled. said you had a way of contacting him.’

  ‘I did,’ said the Brigadier, ‘but I never got the chance. I wonder how he knew?’

  Romana, for her part, was wondering the precise same thing. If the Brigadier hadn’t contacted the TARDIS to bring them to Earth in the first place, then who or what had? She had little time to consider this, however, because at that point she heard the sounds of the cell door being unlocked. She motioned the Brigadier away from her and lay back on her bunk, where she began stirring and blinking dazedly in the manner of one slowly surfacing from a healthy dose of anaesthetic.

  The door opened and a man came through wearing a greenish, slightly sloppy uniform, possibly one of the USAF

  uniforms of which the Brigadier had spoken.

  He was unshaven and muscular, and Romana disliked him on sight. There was a certain set to his eyes which looked innately hurt and angry, with the kind of anger that wants to take itself out on the world. He was naturally, constantly sweaty and there was an air about him of a man constantly keeping himself in check.

  A pair of similarly uniformed, though neater and less decorated, men
appeared at the doorway behind him, one levelling his automatic projectile weapon at the Brigadier, the other levelling his at Romana, just in case either of them tried anything. It seemed that this behaviour was going to be the defining characteristic of almost everybody she met on this planet and Romana, for one, was getting diploid-heartily sick of it.

  ‘You,’ the first man said, taking hold of Romana by the shoulder to shake her. ‘You should be awake by now. We need to question you. We want to know what you know.’

  ‘Oh, you’d be surprised at what I know,’ Crowley said, back in the UNIT barracks, aiming his gun directly at the Doctor. ‘For one thing, I know that you have two hearts - which is why I chose a weapon quite capable of blowing both of them out of your chest in an instant. Armour-piercing rounds, which I suspect would break through even such a notoriously thick skin as yours.’

  The Doctor held up his hands in the generally accepted manner for the circumstances. ‘If you know so much,’ he said, waggling his fingers, ‘then why bother with this charade? I gather from what people are saying...’ he nodded his head towards the suddenly dumbfounded Delbane... that the young lady here was sent in specifically to root out the things it seems you already know.’

  ‘Miss Delbane had her uses,’ Crowley said airily. ‘She provided me with what we might call supplementary information. Every little helps. Her primary function, of course, was merely to provide the excuse for my personal interest in UNIT. So far as the powers that be were concerned, one of my operatives was in danger so of course my department had to step in and deal with things. My people, the people I ultimately work for, have been aware of you and your activities for years. It’s simply that we’ve never felt the need to acquire your... services until now.’

  His aim still unwavering, Crowley held up the glittering cube in his other hand. It’s a pretty little thing, isn’t it? We’ve been aware of its existence for a long time. It was a simple matter, in the end, to disable Lethbridge-Stewart and appropriate it for our own ends...’

  ‘So it was you who contacted me?’ The Doctor nodded to himself, as though certain things that had been opaque had now become clear. ‘I have to admit, there was something slightly wrong about the particularity of it, but it was so vague, at that point, that I couldn’t quite pin it down at the time.’ He frowned, and then actively scowled at Crowley. ‘You know, if you

  - or the people you ultimately work for - wanted my help with something, you’d only have to ask. I’m quite easy to find at any time and place one might need to find me, after all.’

  ‘This is too important to leave to chance,’ said Crowley. ‘Or to your noted intransigence. The situation is such, Doctor, that time is of the very...’

  Delbane, meanwhile, had been taking all this in with the sense that her very world was falling apart around her ears.

  Identity, in the end, is a fragile thing; you build your life around the idea that who you are and what you do is important and will make a difference to the world, and it’s a blow to realise that the world, quite simply, does not care if you live or die. For all the moral ambiguity of her work, which in a certain sense devolved to nothing more than lying and sneaking around, Katharine Delbane had thought of herself as performing it in what was ultimately the public interest. Over the past few hours her mental picture of her role had been devalued, and now Crowley had devalued it again: player to disposable pawn in three easy steps.

  ‘You’re not doing this with government sanction?’ she asked him angrily. ‘The Prime Minister herself sent me here...’

  ‘Oh, it’s easy to manipulate a rabid old trout like the Prime Minister,’ said Crowley, absently, still watching the Doctor like a hawk. ‘Play on her clinical paranoia in the right way and you could have her going after GCHQ. This is the woman who started a small war over a couple of Argentinian scrap-metal merchants.’

  ‘But we’re a government department,’ Delbane said. In her own mind, she knew exactly what she meant. She believed, fundamentally, that the government was the democratically elected representative of the people. She really did believe in her oath to serve them; she really and wholeheartedly believed that she was fighting for the principles of truth and democracy, and was willing to sacrifice and debase herself to those ends. It was starting to dawn on her that not everybody thought that way.

  ‘You stupid girl,’ Crowley said to her. ‘Do you really think the government of this tinpot little island has any real say in anything?’

  It was the ‘stupid girl’ that got to her, in the end. You spend an entire life building yourself up, and being good, and doing the right thing, and a single piece of rudeness and contempt can make you realise it was all for nothing; it can knock you down with the force of a physical assault. In her conflicted state, Delbane found herself in the grip of a mindless, white-hot rage that had her wanting nothing more than to pull out her service revolver and shoot Crowley stone-cold dead.

  What we really want deep inside being seldom what we get, she pulled it out in that smooth way that telegraphs no threat and aimed it squarely at her departmental superior. Crowley’s focus of attention and gun were on the Doctor, and he simply didn’t notice until it was too late.

  ‘Give up the gun,’ Delbane told him. ‘I’m technically an officer in the Provisional Department of Special Branch, and well within my rights to arrest you. We can sort out the charges and make the deals later. For now, you just give it up.’ Crowley turned his head to look at her. ‘I don’t think I want to do that.’

  Something ignited in his eyes. They blazed with a shifting, pulsing light.

  Delbane’s arms dropped loosely as though every tendon had been cut. The revolver clattered to the floor. The second time this afternoon, she thought, dimly. She looked into Crowley’s burning eyes and felt the will draining out of her as though it were an actual, tangible substance, like a liquid. She had once, a year and a half ago, on some other and not strictly relevant case, passed out through loss of blood. This felt similar, the sense of something slipping away, but she remained bright and alert and in control of herself, waiting for someone to tell that self what to do...

  ‘Go and stand over there,’ Crowley told her.

  Delbane went and stood over there.

  ‘I think we’ll take you along with us,’ Crowley said musingly. It would be a crime to leave you here in this state, and we could always do with an extra pair of willing hands. And now, Doctor...’

  He jerked the barrel of his gun towards the police box in the comer of the workroom. ‘I think we’ve had quite enough of these irrelevancies. We have your friend the Brigadier. We have your young assistant, by now. And for what it’s worth, I have an additional hostage in Delbane here. I can tell her heart to stop, and I don’t think you’d like that. It’s time we left.’

  ‘And where are we actually leaving for?’ asked the Doctor, who had turned to look at Delbane with some degree of concern.

  ‘I’ll show you,’ said Crowley. ‘never fear. And when we arrive, the masks shall come off and all shall stand at last revealed in Glory.’

  ‘It would make a change,’ said the Doctor, shortly. ‘And tell me, have you ever thought of seeing a specialist about that needlessly self-important and messianic tone?’

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Spirit of Free Enterprise

  Victoria leaned over the chrome-steel rail of the balcony and tried to spot the Doctor or Jamie in the crowd below. There was no sign of them. Losing them hadn’t been her fault, she told herself; it had merely been a question of the fact that in a series of adventures through space and time involving, in some peripheral part, the use of elevators, ramps and levitating platforms, she had never happened to encounter a moving staircase.

  On her travels with the Doctor she had learnt to her cost that it was essentially small and inconsequential things like this that sometimes caught you on the wrong foot - an electrical device rather than a towel to dry your hair, fluoridated toothpaste and a little brush rather than as
tringent and a finger -

  and one had to consciously learn to recognise them and use them for the first time. she had been two floors up (this being a moving staircase that traversed three floors at a time in the interests, she supposed, of efficiency for those patrons who knew how many floors they wanted to go) before she had shaken off the startlement of a mind that insisted that a flight of stairs that moved was flatly impossible. Victoria had told her mind, sternly, that if it could cope with time-travelling boxes being bigger on the inside than out, metal men who walked and people living in crystal bubbles beneath the sea, then it could da-it could very well deal with something as simple as that.

  It occurred to her that separated like this from the Doctor and Jamie, she would be easy pickings for any monster with a mind to commit horrible and beastly murder. On the other hand, this was a public place, a place of commerce. Victoria found it hard to conceive, unless the world had gone completely mad, of anyone or anything walking into a place like this and killing people. She was safe enough for the moment.

  This floor seemed to be the domain of a number of haberdashers. There was the entrance to an establishment by the name of Bloomingdales nearby leading into a store which, looking through the window front, appeared to comprise several floors of the entire precinct. The gowns and trouser suits on display in the window looked quite stylish, but then Victoria caught sight of a number of photographic representations of women wearing them and realised that all the women were old enough to be her mother. She walked on along the shiny marble floor of the balcony to a store in which the images depicted young men and ladies more her own age. It was called, for some obscure reason, GAP.