by Dave Stone
There was a blaze of light off to one side as a huge, flat plane lit up with perfect and dazzling whiteness. Angular black shapes stuttered and jerked across it, flashing with a disturbing frequency that set the mind jerking along with them, made the body tremble as though with some form of telegraphic Saint Vitus’s dance.
Then the shapes on the plane resolved themselves, darkening slightly. Colour burst across across it: a sky of such a deep and vivid blue as to seem entirely unnatural. A silvery disc hung against the sky, spinning slightly lopsidedly on a thin piece of wire. ‘There was a ululating whine, which rose and fell like a theremin on a life raft, and the scratchy sound of martial music. Letters appeared on the screen, overlaying the sky and the silver disc:
IT CAME FROM THE HELL PLANET BEYOND TIME! A Ronaldo P Dementi Production.
The hands of one of her automaton-like guards heaved Victoria roughly to her feet. To one side, she saw, another was doing the same to Jamie and two more were lifting the insensible Doctor. From this slightly higher vantage point, in the light from the screen, she could now see the open, slightly inclined space of the Lychburg Drive-o-Rama.
And from the direction of the city of Lychburg itself, she saw and heard the first signs and sounds of vehicles and running feet approaching in their thousands.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The Doctrine of Opposites, and What It Really
Means to You
The thing inside Katharine Delbane seemed to be growing; it was an almost physical sensation and not just in her mind, as though her skin were some kind of costume, inert and sloughing loose, with something greasy and tensile moving around inside. She felt remote, not simply dazed, as if her sense-receptors were disconnecting from the world.
(It’s nothing. You have nothing to fear.)
Delbane felt a cold chill of fear. She constantly bolstered herself and identity by constant internal reassurance, but that particular internal, reassuring voice had nothing to do with her.
She had simply stood there in the hangar, watching and listening as Crowley and the US colonel talked complete and utter insanity to the Doctor. Unlike before, it wasn’t so much Crowley’s debilitating influence as simple bewilderment: insanity or not, she had no frame of reference for dealing with the matters being discussed, not the first idea of how to react.
Now she watched the figures that were being led in by a rather nervous-looking lieutenant major and a squad of armed servicemen.
She recognised them at once. The Lady Romana’s velvet dress was looking decidedly crushed and rumpled, but she herself seemed physically unhurt, glancing around with vague interest as though she were out for nothing more potentially perilous than a country walk. The Brigadier seemed slightly more knocked around, but his bearing was dignified and military; whatever had been done to him, it had not even come close to breaking his spirit.
Behind them came Danny Slater and Jim McCrae. The two Provisionals seemed to have lost a bit of weight, the small amount some people lose when they have a nasty shock. They were looking around the hangar and at its complement of armed and obviously highly dangerous men with outright fear.
Whatever they had signed on for in a life with the Provisionals, it certainly hadn’t been this.
‘Slater and McCrae?’ Crowley was musing to himself. He turned to the colonel. ‘I’d rather assumed that you’d simply had them killed, Haasterman, I confess.’
‘That’s not how things are done under my command,’ said Haasterman shortly.
‘Of course,’ said Crowley. ‘On the other hand, the more the merrier.’ He turned to gesture towards Delbane. ‘Have one of your people take her over to join them, will you? We might as well get some use out of her, untrustworthy though she has proved to be.’
Colonel Haasterman seemed to be going through a small crisis with his conscience. ‘I don’t like this part of things.’ he muttered, whether to Crowley or to himself it was impossible to say with any great degree of alacrity.
‘As neither do I, Colonel,’ said Crowley, easily. ‘However. We are on a certain course, now. Certain things simply have to be done.’
A black-hooded man grabbed hold of Delbane and hauled her over to the other detainees. In her detached state, by the time she’d decided that she was damned well going to make a fight of it, it was too late. The Lady Romana looked at her and gave her a slight smile that, strangely enough, seemed more friendly than otherwise.
‘Can’t say I think much of your planet,’ she said. ‘Some of the locals are perfectly frightful. However have you stood it?’
‘What...?’ Delbane began.
Romana became distant again. ‘I wasn’t talking to you.’
The hooded men had taken charge of the captives now, covering them with their weapons, and the servicemen who had brought them in were just hanging uncertainly about.
‘Thank you, Derricks,’ Colonel Haasterman said to their commander, dismissively ‘That’s all we need you for right now.’
The commander, a big, rather unpleasant-looking man, looked as if he was going to make something of the colonel’s tone on general principles, then snapped out irritable orders to his men and they headed for the door. Delbane got the impression of a bully who had quite recently suffered some kind of blow to his confidence and found himself demoted in the universal pecking order.
As this Derricks and his men left, the hooded troops moved in and one of them shoved Delbane to her knees. Standard execution posture.
She felt the cold muzzle of a gun touching the back of her neck with such a purity of sensation that she honestly couldn’t work out if it was actually happening or if her imagination was anticipating the event. She stared at the floor, trying to think about absolutely nothing, noting from the corners of her eyes that the process was being repeated on the other detainees.
‘And now, Doctor,’ the voice of Crowley was saying off somewhere in the middle distance. ‘We know you take great stock in the lives of your friends, and in life in general. If you do not give us what we want, if you still refuse to turn your technology over to us, I shall have - that is to say, Colonel Haasterman here shall have - his men terminate the lives of your friends, one after the other...’
‘And if that doesn’t work?’ said the voice of the Doctor. He sounded worried. ‘I ask, ah, purely for the purposes of information, you understand.’
‘Then we shall have to become more extreme.’ said the voice of Crowley
‘There’s no need for any of this.’
This new voice, coming from beside her, was so unexpected that Delbane found herself turning to look at its source in surprise, regardless of the putative gun on the back of her neck.
The Lady Romana had climbed to her feet and turned to push the rifle of a hooded man away from her, in much the same manner that an adult might push away an unappetisingly half-sucked stick of barley sugar proffered by a particularly grubby child. She turned back to Crowley and Haasterman with a sardonic and perfectly calm little smile.
‘You don’t need the Doctor to give you access to the TARDIS,’ she said brightly. ‘I can do that, and I can show you everything you need to know about its operation.’
* * *
They were now inside what Romana had described as the console room of the TARDIS, together with Haasterman and Crowley and a large contingent of black-hooded troops. The Brigadier, Delbane and the two Provisional Department operatives, Slater and McCrae, had been brought along, too - as hostages, possibly, or simply to avoid them getting troublesome if left on their own. ‘Oh, Romana,’ the Doctor said dramatically, clapping the back of a hand to his forehead, ‘how could you betray me like this?’ It was hard to see how he could possibly think he could get away with such a bit of blatant overacting.
‘Simple,’ said Romana. ‘Back in the Academy of Time, I remember, one of my tutors told me I had an uncommonly sensible head on my shoulders, and I’d rather like to keep it there, thank you very much.’
The thing inside Delbane seem
ed to be doing most of her thinking for her. It was noting with a kind of cool interest the various reactions of the people here to this physically impossible space, the walls of which had unobtrusively shuffled back to accommodate them. But this wasn’t true, the shred of identity that was still Katharine Delbane thought. The walls hadn’t moved, the room had always been this size - it had just, in a sense, only always been this size since comparatively recently.
The Doctor and the Lady Romana, of course, were completely unaffected, and the Brigadier only marginally more so
- no more than anybody would normally be on walking into the space of someone other than themselves. Crowley and the hooded troops seemed merely oblivious to it.
Haasterman, however, looked wild-eyed and frightened, and Slater and McCrae seemed utterly terrified.
‘And besides,’ Romana was saying as she tinkered with the complicated array of levers, switches and dials on the central console, ‘I think I’ve had more than a sufficiency of your attitude of late - sending me off on fools’ errands simply to pander to your entirely affected concern for these people. Let them get on with it and wipe themselves out, I say. I couldn’t, quite frankly, care less.’
She turned to Haasterman and Crowley and smiled sweetly.
‘Now as you can see, the basic principles are quite simple.
The sublaminar processes are modulated by a stepped series of quantum-depolarised frabjastanic couplings, the resulting gravmetric packets being filtered through a reciprocating Brantis-Wankel ambulator to convert their subneutronic spin from anticlockwise to inside out, providing the basic template for the mesonic collapse of the interstitial mesh into what is rather colourfully, I’m afraid, called the Walrus Mode. With the pranantic waveform properly antifrated, it’s just a matter of setting up the proper Boolean constraints to regulate the Planck-collapse whilst avoiding complete polyhelical overload on the macrotransablative level, and there you are. Of course, that’s putting it in layman’s terms. It’s ultimately far more complicated than that.’
There was a moment’s silence while Crowley and Haasterman looked at each other.
‘I think,’ said Crowley at last, a little uncertainly, ‘a rather more practical demonstration might be in order.’
‘Happy to oblige,’ said Romana, and pulled a big red lever.
‘There was a blinding explosion of light from the central column. The floor heaved with a gargantuan shock, knocking the occupants of the console room off their feet and flinging them against the walls. Delbane found that the Doctor - who had somehow managed to retain his footing - was instantly beside her, pulling her up off the floor. She blinked at him through yellow and purple spots detonating in front of her eyes.
‘Brigadier!’ the Doctor was shouting, off to one side where the Lady Romana was helping the soldier to his feet, ‘help us get those two young chaps out of here.’ He pointed with his free hand, the one not supporting the groggy Delbane, to the collapsed and now actively gibbering Slater and McCrae. ‘I don’t think it would be safe for them if we left them.’
He looked about wildly and spotted a doorway that had opened up in the wall when the shock wave hit.
‘Come on,’ he said cheerfully to Delbane, ‘let’s get you to safety.’ And with that he dragged her to the door at a bounding run.
Haasterman groaned as his senses returned just in time for him to see the Doctor and the other detainees vanish through the door, which instantly shut behind him. It was as though the wall itself had healed up, becoming just a flat white surface indented with bulls-eye mouldings. A brightly coloured scrap of the Doctor’s scarf, snipped off by the closing panel, fluttered to the floor.
Haasterman clambered to his feet and cast around trying to get a handle on the situation. The hooded troops were recovering, picking themselves up from the floor smoothly and with none of the shakiness or shock that Haasterman felt. It was like - it occurred to him only now - they were automata or sci-fi androids: they moved or fell and stood up like humans, but without the barely noticeable little muscular ticks and nuances of humans when they moved or fell and stood. Nothing about them gave off the impression of something actually living inside.
They were all of them, every single one, turning their hooded faces towards Crowley, who stood there, by the console in the centre of the room, with his face in his hands.
Haasterman wondered momentarily if Crowley had been blinded by the flash of light - but on closer inspection it seemed as if the man was in the throes of some mental breakdown. His body was shaking violently and the nails of his fingers were digging into the skin of his face hard enough to draw blood.
‘Are you OK, Crowley?’ Haasterman was concerned. They had never been friends as such, but they had worked together for years and seeing such a familiar human being in this state had an effect that even the deaths of any number of strangers, who are after all just mobile scenery in life, could not approach. ‘Are you hurt?’
‘No,’ said Crowley. It was unclear whether he was responding to the first question or the second. There was suddenly was a quality to his voice that Haasterman found chilling. It was as if something, some entity, had taken control of Crowley’s lungs and vocal cords by remote control and was forcing them to speak.
‘This cannot happen,’ Crowley said, in that remote, dead voice. ‘This cannot be. We have waited too long to reclaim what is Ours...’
Light burst from between his fingers. He took his hands away from his face and Haasterman reeled back at the sight of the slack and unnaturally relaxed features. Threads of blood trickled down Crowley’s forehead from the deep gouges left by his fingernails, hit the light blazing from his eyes and vaporised with a sound like spit on a hot stove.
‘We shall not allow it,’ Crowley’s lungs and vocal cords decided, not loudly but with a rasp of lacerating tissue - and Haasterman realised that what he had thought of as deadness was in fact a kind of physical overload. In the same way that too strong a signal from an amplifier can blow out a speaker, the Voice now speaking through Crowley was simply too big for the human biology it was using, and was destroying it while it spoke. ‘No, we won’t.’
Crowley’s feet left the floor. His body hung limply in mid-air, as though an invisible hand had clamped itself around his spinal column and hefted him up. His head, seemingly independent of his body, the neck tethering the one to the other rather than supporting it, tracked about the room turning its lambent gaze upon the assembled troops, whose own hooded faces tracked in unison to follow it.
‘Tracuna macoides,’ croaked the disintegrating voice of Crowley, ‘ trecorum satus dei!’
The troopers lurched and contorted, the pop and snap of cracking bone and tearing flesh slightly muffled by their body armour - a mitigation that was utterly counteracted by the fact of their number. Their bodies twisted and transformed, becoming hulking and monstrous as their organs and musculature shifted and reconnected in new, inhuman ways.
Several knotted hoods split open under the strain - and Haasterman, seeing the slippery and convoluted forms within, the Marks that branded them, gave an involuntary yelp of fear.
Crowley’s head turned to regard him. So did the permutating faces of the transmogrifying troops.
‘Ah yes,’ said the voice of Crowley. ‘We’d forgotten about you, for the moment, Colonel.’ A chuckle issued from the ruined throat, conveying that this would have been the best thing Haasterman could have hoped for.
Sweat was springing up on Haasterman’s brow; he could feel the sting and the salinity of it. He swallowed with a dry, clicking sensation that felt like somebody had driven a jagged shard of ice into his sternum. He found himself noting, in a detached kind of way, that these were almost the precise physical sensations he had felt during combat, years back in the war, and knew that he had gone insane with fear, frightened out of his mind.
He forced himself to face the transfigured Crowley. ‘Stop this now,’ he said, while yet another part of his mind wondered how he could hav
e possibly said something so inappropriately banal. ‘As your commanding officer, I’m ordering you to...’
‘Oh, it pleased Us to make use of you,’ said the voice of Crowley. It amused Us to allow you the semblance of control, but you could never Bind and Command such as Us. And now, We feel - do We? Yes, We do - that your usefulness to Us is at an end. Never fear, though, Colonel, you won’t go to waste.’
Crowley’s hand gestured to take in the monstrous ex-troops who were now furtively edging towards Haasterman and snuffling. ‘The procedure of conversion uses quite a large amount of energy,’ Crowley’s voice said. ‘Our minions are hungry.’
While the minions ate Haasterman and fought over the scraps, Crowley’s body turned its attention to the wall through which the Doctor had made his escape. The lights from his eyes increased in their intensity. There was a sourceless scream, part organic, part mechanical and part a state of being literally inconceivable to the human mind, and the wall split open, charred and smoking at the edges.
The minions halted in their mastication. The body of Crowley walked to the opening and bent, a little stiffly, to pick up a brightly coloured scrap of knitted cloth. It seemed to twitch a little in his hands, as though imbued with some measure of a fading life of its own. He waved the scrap at the millions, who turned their faces to it and sniffed the air.
‘You have the scent?’ said the voice of Crowley, now deteriorated into a clotted, only barely intelligible rattle. ‘Then go.’
