An accidental moat. The Doctor hadn’t thought to bring a canoe with him. He stood quietly on the shore, looking for a route across.
About halfway across the water, a glass man stood. The figure was small and transparent, difficult to see. Ghostly.
The Doctor thought it might be a statue – an Antony Gormley, not a Michelangelo. Some instinct, though, told him it was alive.
He spent a second or two trying to work out if it had its
feet on a ruin, or simply on the surface of the lake. It was facing away from him, best as he could tell.
This ghost didn’t look anything like the other one.
‘Two types of ghost?’ he whispered. Then, waving his arms, he called, ‘Hey! You there! Hello! I’m the Doctor!’
A bolt of blue energy streaked low across the water, right at him.
This sort of thing had happened plenty of times to the Doctor before in his travels around time and space. One of the reasons he had lasted as long as 900 years was that he was always half-expecting something to start shooting at him. He was back behind cover before the ray was hitting the concrete and making a very credible attempt at shattering it.
The Doctor knelt with his back to the wall, which was warm now and still ringing from the impact. Had the glass man fired at him, or had something from the Fortress fired at the glass man and missed?
There was screaming and shouting from back the way he’d come. Children screaming. Alsa and Gar.
The Doctor extricated himself, darting back through the archway, along the riverbank. He almost collided with Gar and, by dodging him, managed to slam right into Alsa. For a moment both he and she tottered on the edge of the river, but they managed to pull back from the brink.
‘Ghosts!’ Gar shouted. He was powering off, under the arch, his friend already almost overtaking him. ‘Don’t let a ghost touch you!’
Even now, the Doctor noted admiringly, the boy still had his hands in his pockets.
Behind them, three ghosts were floating towards the Doctor. The first type of ghost. Children, this time, who didn’t look much older than Gar or Alsa. All girls, with long white hair twisted in elaborate dreadlocks. Their faces were blue-grey, their whole forms translucent. They looked surprised, more than anything. Shaken. One was holding up her hand, apparently bemused she could see through it. She had five fingers.
The Doctor was about to reach out to her when he remembered not to. He remembered something else, too.
He whirled on his heel, pounded after Alsa and Gar.
‘Stop!’ he shouted.
Gar did; Alsa either hadn’t heard or pretended she hadn’t. As she reached the other side of the archway and entered the clearing, the Doctor leapt, wrapped both of his arms above her knees and pushed her and himself over, in a rough approximation of a rugby tackle.
Alsa’s arms flailed out, her hands actually splashing into the water.
‘Gerroff…’ she spat, trying to kick free.
A bolt of blue energy sailed less than a metre over their heads, silencing Alsa’s protest. The Doctor let go and they crawled behind a low brick wall half-submerged on the edge of the water.
Gar was safe in the archway, and the Doctor called over to him to stay where he was.
‘Were the ghosts following you?’ the boy asked, his voice trembling.
‘No,’ the Doctor said, hoping he wasn’t lying.
He poked his head over the wall, brought it down again
very rapidly indeed, and another blue ray slammed past.
Alsa was wide-eyed, out of breath. ‘No one survives this. We shouldn’t be here. Right from the start we’re told that. No one comes here and lives.’
The Doctor looked right at her. She looked so much younger than before.
‘How old are you, Alsa?’ he asked. Get her to think about something else.
‘Thirteen.’ She was defensive again, her old self. Good.
She was so young. Too young to be part of this.
‘Don’t worry,’ the Doctor said, looking her straight in the eye. ‘You can trust me.’
‘You stole my comm.’
The Doctor couldn’t meet her eye for a moment.
‘True,’he noted. He fished into his pocket and handed it back.
‘You better not have broken it.’
‘The opposite actually.’ The Doctor was toying with the idea of poking his head up again.
Alsa examined the comm, then looked up at him, suspicious.
‘It’s got a full battery. That’s… you can’t do that.’
‘I can, you know,’ the Doctor said, glad of an excuse to stay put for a moment. ‘It’s rechargeable. The problem you have is you’ve got nowhere to recharge it. Arcopolis got past all the primitive power sources, like coal and oil and nuclear and solar. Cosmic energy collected by satellites and beamed down. That’s what those aerials on top of all the buildings were for. No pollution, plenty for everyone. Well, cut a long story short, the satellites have gone.’
Alsa was staring up at him. This was the Doctor’s first opportunity to study her strange outfit up close. Post-apocalyptic societies were meant to go all Mad Max, with studded leather straps holding up rags and animal skins. It was the rules. Alsa had roughly cut hair, like her mate had done it, but it was almost too clean and moussed. She was wearing perfume. Too much, and he could make out at least three different types. Not only that, she was also modelling a pinstripe trouser suit – not unlike his own, although baggier, crisper and fancier. Then she’d ruined the effect by sewing patches on it, attached ribbons, poked through badges and other adornments. Her mum must have gone spare. Alsa was wearing the sort of trainers you only get for Christmas. Nothing really fitted her all that well – she was wearing half a dozen pairs of socks so that her feet filled out the shoes. It didn’t add up.
Or did it? The Doctor beamed as another piece fell into place. ‘Oh, oh – yes! I see. You stole what you’re wearing.
Well, not stole – took from the shops.’
He thought about the vast city. All those shops with shelves full of… well, everything. They’d be full of stuff.
Lots of things would fade or rot or perish – how quickly would depend on what they were made of, what they were packaged in, how much sunlight hit them, whether the roof leaked. Some things would last a lifetime. One of Alsa’s gang had had that fancy knife. All of them had clothes and bags and stuff like that. Loads of loot.
‘The parents disapprove,’ Alsa said defiantly.
‘Well, not to be critical, but you do overdo the
perfume.’
‘They say the city is dangerous.’
‘On balance, I tend to agree.’
‘They say we should learn to make things ourselves.
They’re stupid – there’s plenty of everything in the city.’
The Doctor nodded. ‘It must be very difficult for them.
You and Gar and the other kids, you’ve never known a different life. They did. It must haunt them. Losing everything.’
There was a flash as bright as the sun for the merest moment, annihilation so profound it stretched deep into the past and far into the future. Then Gallifrey was gone.
‘They don’t like to talk about what happened before,’
Alsa was saying, a sneer in her voice. ‘They always change the subject.’
‘Well, they must have lost loved ones. I know how they… well, talking of which: how are you getting on over there, Gar?’
‘I’m all right.’
The Doctor could see him, and gave him the thumbs up. That made Gar smile, and copy the gesture.
‘Got your hands out of those pockets. Excellent. Right,’
said the Doctor. ‘Gar. Alsa. The Fortress is able to defend itself. No one’s alive in there. It’s all automatic. It was a place built for war, designed to function even after a massive assault. The… lightning… that’s just a common or garden directed energy ray. Motion sensitive, unfortunately for us. It fires at anything th
at moves. There will be other guns like that, at intervals, along the walls.
The ghosts are another defence mechanism. You’re not
going to want to go anywhere haunted, are you? So the Fortress projects scary images to frighten you away. Kills you if you stay too long. That’s all the ghosts – both types… um, I think – are: holograms like your comm makes. And, if you remember, “holograms” were on my list of rational explanations for ghosts. I was right.’
‘So… you do this all the time?’ Alsa asked.
‘Oh yes. Fight monsters, right wrongs, boldly go where no one has gone before.’
‘Like every day?’ Gar wondered.
‘Most days,’ the Doctor sighed. ‘Too many adventures to tell in just one place. I forget half of them myself.’
‘Tell us a secret one.’
‘One no one else knows about? Um… yes.’ The Doctor thought about that for a moment. ‘All right, here’s a good one: a couple of days ago, I was in a city called London.
You won’t have heard of it. It’s on one of my favourite planets. You won’t have heard of the Steggosians, either.
Luckily, they haven’t heard of you. A particularly nasty race of fascist dinosaur people.’
‘What’s a dinosaur?’ asked Gar.
‘What’s a fascist?’ asked Alsa.
‘Well… imagine something as wide as I am tall, with scaly skin and a flat head. Big plates running down its back, spiky tail.’ The Doctor did a helpful mime.
‘And that’s a fascist?’
‘This particular one, yes. What matters is that the universe won’t miss them. Twenty years ago, relatively speaking, the Steggosian home quadrant was hit by a terrible plague that destroyed their immune systems and left no survivors. The one I met had been the captain of a starship out on deep-space patrol when it happened. It drove him mad. They’d caught the plague from rats, and the captain decided to rid the universe of all mammals.’
‘What’s a mammal?’ the children both asked.
‘You are,’ the Doctor assured them. ‘The rest of his crew perished over the years. He ended up inside a clock tower, planning to release poison that was so lethal a single drop would have killed everyone in the country. A clock tower is—’
‘We know what a clock tower is,’ Alsa complained.
‘There’s one in the Car Factory,’ Gar added.
‘There’s also a famous one in London.’ The Doctor smiled. ‘St Stephen’s Tower, or the Clock Tower, but most people call it Big Ben. They’d only just finished rebuilding it, so I wasn’t about to let anyone smash it up again.’
‘What did you do to him?’ Alsa asked.
‘I tried talking to him,’ the Doctor said quietly. ‘He wasn’t keen on the idea. We fought. He ended up losing his balance, falling sixty metres. Hit the pavement.’
‘Splat!’ Alsa squealed.
The Doctor’s expression flickered. ‘He had a very tough hide. But, yes, he died.’
Gar looked away, Alsa was thinking it through.
‘Did you keep the poison?’
‘No.’ It was time to risk it. Very slowly, the Doctor stood up.
‘Doctor!’ Alsa shouted, grabbing at his sleeve.
‘It’s fine,’ the Doctor reassured her. ‘There’s a trick to
it. Move slowly. Motion sensitive, like I said, following a set of instructions. It’s programmed to fire at things only if they move above a certain speed.’
‘How fast?’ said Alsa, standing up so slowly she’d have been shoved out the way by an impatient glacier.
‘Faster than that,’ the Doctor chided. He was literally inching backwards to the archway. ‘Although I’m not sure how much faster. It’s trial and error, really. Think of it as a game.’
‘If we lose the game?’
‘We’ll be, er, blasted to pieces.’
The good thing about moving so slowly was that the Doctor had a chance to look back over the lake, see if he could spot the glass man again. He couldn’t, but it was getting dark, and it had been hard enough to spot him before. He might be inching across the water towards the Fortress, not away from it. The thought was disturbing.
Now the Doctor was getting a good view of the Fortress, he could see the gun turret. It was a tube mounted low on a buttress, only a metre or so over the water. It was still pointing in their direction, twitching from time to time, impatiently. No ivy dared grow up the walls of the Fortress, he noted.
‘Don’t give in to the temptation to run the last bit,’ the Doctor warned, as much for his own benefit as Alsa’s.
The ground squelched beneath his left foot, sank away suddenly, and the Doctor almost – almost – fell over. He righted himself, sighed with relief, and with his next step was behind the concrete wall with Gar.
Alsa’s wide shoulders were high, tense. She was like a
cat with an arched back. She’d been facing away from the Fortress the whole time. Since the Doctor had nearly slipped, she’d become so cautious with her feet she was in danger of tripping over them.
‘Relax a little, Alsa. Nearly there.’
Three more steps and she was safe, and as soon as she was safe her legs gave way and she sat down on the wet ground. The Doctor double-checked the other direction for ghosts. Alsa and Gar were talking amongst themselves, glancing his way from time to time.
‘You’re coming with us,’ the girl announced as she got up.
‘Where are we going?’ Gar asked, before the Doctor could.
‘Back to the parents.’
The Doctor bit his lip. ‘I really have to get into that Fortress,’ he said finally.
‘You can get inside?’
‘Yes.’
‘Tell me what you’re going to do.’
‘There is a weapon in there, a terrible weapon. Not that ray gun, but something that’s – and here comes a word that is overused, but not by me – infinitely more powerful.
That weapon was used once, fifteen years ago. Do you understand what I mean?’
Alsa thought about it, but only for a second or two. ‘It’s what killed everyone.’
The Doctor nodded. He glanced at the sky and then looked back over at the Fortress.
‘Go home to your parents, show them you’re safe. Get
some sleep, and tomorrow morning, I promise, the Fortress will no longer be a danger to anyone. I am going in there, I’m going to get past all the traps and I’m going to destroy that weapon once and for all. Then I’ll go. Like I’d never been here.’
Night had fallen. The Fortress stood there, black against a too-black night’s sky. It was a dark mountain, and seemed almost as large as the city it had imposed itself upon.
He could defeat it.
There was the faint whiff of perfume.
The Doctor turned, a smile on his face – just in time to see Alsa, arms aloft, bringing half a concrete block down on the side of his head. His knees buckled, he raised a useless hand, opened his mouth and splashed down into the muddy ground, the one-syllable question he was about to ask still on his lips.
‘No,’ said Alsa.
The Doctor’s eyes snapped open, and the sudden light made his very sore head even more sore. His hand explored his temple, discovered it was tightly bandaged.
‘He’s up,’ a girl’s voice – too young to be Alsa’s –called out.
He was lying on something like a camp bed, wearing loose pyjama bottoms. Without moving, he established he was in a large room with walls made of translucent plastic, like a marquee. The light was sunlight, so he’d been unconscious all night. Risking a turn of the head, he couldn’t be sure if this was a hospital ward, a machine shop or a laboratory.
The room seemed equally unclear on that point. There were cabinets along the walls, full of glass and plastic bottles, as well as various tools and scientific instruments.
There were four other beds, all empty. Two large metal workbenches were packed with hand-lathes, drills, saws and so on. There were large packing crates
dotted around the floor, stuffed with what looked like rolled-up posters or scrolls.
There were six girls in the room, all 7 or 8 years old, all in smart little lab coats. They were occupied cleaning bottles, writing up notes and other menial scientific tasks.
The Doctor swung his legs round, planted his feet on the rough stone floor.
‘Professor Jeffip will want to know,’ one girl said, to general agreement from the others. She slid open a door made of plastic sheeting and stepped through it.
From the quality of the light, they were going deeper into the building, not leaving it. The corridors the Doctor was led through reminded him of a traditional Japanese house, but while those were built in harmony with nature using local materials, the people here had made do with pieces of metal scaffolding instead of wood, and sheets of polythene instead of paper.
The girl who was leading him was so young and so self-consciously prim that the Doctor was unsure if she was playing or not.
‘In here.’
The girl stepped aside and closed the door after the Doctor. It was a smaller room. A man in a mostly blue patchwork toga was hunched over a great wooden desk.
The Doctor’s coat, suit, shirt and tie were all hanging up on a rail beside the desk. The contents of his many and
various pockets had been collected in a plastic tray. The man at the workbench had clamped the sonic screwdriver into a small vice, prised the case open and was peering at it.
‘Be careful,’ the Doctor said, intensely annoyed. ‘You don’t know what—’
‘It’s a sonic tool… a screwdriver,’ the man told him airily, without looking up. ‘I was just examining its acoustic accelerators.’
The man turned, belatedly removing the jeweller’s eyeglass he’d had fixed into his eye. He looked like he was in his late sixties, with an aquiline noise and a high forehead. His hair was a mane that started as a quiff, ran halfway down his back and had grey streaks so dramatic they were practically stripes. His irises were different colours, one was a pale blue dot, the other a vivid red.
Cinnabar, the colour of mercury oxide, thought the Doctor.
The man was toying idly with the piece of casing he’d taken off. ‘We had devices like this,’ he said as he did so.
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