Dr. Who - BBC New Series 29

by The Eyeless # Lance Parkin

  And they did.

  ‘You need to take control of your physical responses,’ the Eyeless advised Alsa.

  She was sobbing.

  ‘You are more than a child, now,’ the Eyeless assured her.

  The five Eyeless had taken up their positions, facing the first metal gantry, standing two by two, with Alsa in the middle row. They had been sifting through her memories, acquiring her acrobatic skills, earned over years of making her way around the collapsed city. They already had similar abilities, learned from creatures called ‘monkeys’ they’d encountered on another planet, and they gave Alsa those to augment her own talents.

  She could see the weapon chamber. One of the automatic gun turrets was there, not quite facing them.

  ‘If we went really slowly…’ she started to say. That had worked the first evening with the Doctor. The guns were, what had he called it?

  ‘Motion sensitive,’ came the voice in her head. ‘That was before, when the Fortress was merely on standby.’

  Weren’t there other Eyeless? Why did she have to do

  this?

  ‘They are on the way, but we need to act now, before the Doctor acquires the weapon.’

  This was all the Doctor’s fault, Alsa thought. All of it.

  The Eyeless at her side was the one with green eyes.

  ‘I’m scared,’ Alsa admittedly quietly.

  ‘Yes. Your fear is exhilarating. Inspiring. I believe I actually feel it, rather than experiencing it second hand, as is usually the case.’

  The Eyeless were poised to go.

  ‘Assemble your last thoughts,’ the Eyeless said. ‘If you do not survive, at least those thoughts will.’

  They were waiting for the prompt. This was it… she was going to be dead in just a few minutes.

  ‘No,’ Alsa said.

  The Eyeless turned its head. ‘Explain.’

  ‘It means no.’

  ‘Our impression was that you wanted to be part of our project. That you only wanted to be more like us.’

  She thought about it. She wasn’t like them. Couldn’t be.

  ‘We have the ability to psychograft you permanently to a body like this one.’ It raised a hand to its glass chest.

  ‘No,’ Alsa said.

  She turned, could literally see the Eyeless thinking about grabbing her.

  ‘No,’ she repeated. ‘This isn’t right. It isn’t human.

  This isn’t how things should be. I thought you aliens would have the answers. But you don’t, do you? Not you, not the Doctor.’

  ‘With only five of us, acquiring the weapon is not assured,’ the Eyeless told her.

  ‘That’s your problem,’ Alsa called back, already almost back around the corner.

  The Eyeless watched her go. The others were babbling at it, demanding to know whether they were going to abort the mission. The Eyeless felt another surge of anger, this time coming entirely from within itself.

  ‘Charge,’ it told them.

  Defending against the alien assault on the weapon chamber was complicated by the loss of a number of perimeter turrets. Although there were only five aliens, their attack was cleverly choreographed, involving a sequence of precisely timed leaps down walkway levels.

  The Fortress alighted on the same sums the Eyeless had, and realised that as things stood there was a good chance one of this group was going to survive.

  The surviving gun covering that section was already powered up. Now it fired, picking off an attacker. It was a test shot. The strategy computer had been concerned the refractive material the Eyeless were made of could be resistant to attack from energy weapons. It wasn’t, and the Eyeless burst into fragments when the bolt hit it. One subsystem counted and tracked all the pieces, just in case, but they were inert, apart from a little psychic residue.

  A subroutine warned the Fortress to pay attention to the Doctor. He was a long way from the action, but had made it to the base of the central pillar and destroyed two missiles. The column was a sheer surface, with no handholds. The Doctor was many minutes away from the weapon chamber.

  The gun guarding the weapon chamber fired again, another alien fell. That situation was under control.

  There was still a strong possibility at least one of the Eyeless would survive.

  The Fortress was programmed to anticipate any possibility.

  A subsystem warned the strategy computer that it had lost track of the Doctor.

  This wasn’t possible.

  It ruled out the Doctor’s disintegration. It scanned all the places the Doctor could be, given the topography of the Fortress and that he was a humanoid pedestrian. It ruled out every teleportation and stealth technique in its databanks, even the hypothetical ones.

  When all that failed to explain where the Doctor was, the strategy computer allocated more computing power to the problem, performed a more thorough crosscheck of its records, opened every database.

  A couple of subsystems warned the strategy computer that the Doctor was falling towards the weapon chamber.

  The Doctor had been on the ground level, the weapon chamber was in the mathematical centre of the chamber, many hundred of storeys above that. Things fell down, not up, so the strategy computer ignored them. When the subsystems insisted, it shut them down for repair.

  There was a finite number of places the Doctor could be, given the laws of physics.

  He wasn’t in any of them.

  The strategy computer kept looking.

  The Eyeless with green eyes stood on the walkway.

  Shards and splinters of clear glass littered the ground. The air sizzled where the energy bolts had just sliced through it.

  This Eyeless was the only survivor. It looked down.

  There was a narrow crack on one side where its collarbone would have been if it had had one. It didn’t hurt. There was no sign of the Doctor. There was nothing between it and the open door leading to the weapon chamber. It was three steps from the doorway, safe.

  It could sense the weapon in there, a strange and terrible taste.

  A brown, flapping shape swept up from under the walkway at great speed, grabbed the Eyeless, lifted it three metres into the air. It was the Doctor, falling upwards, using the weight of the Eyeless to slow his ascent. But he had too much momentum, and now both of them were dropping up.

  The Doctor was fiddling with something he was holding, and they both drifted back down to the walkway.

  The Eyeless landed on its feet, the Doctor on his side, rolling a little way towards the door before coming to a halt.

  The Eyeless was between the Doctor and the door, but

  it didn’t want to turn its back on him.

  The Doctor was on his knees, pulling himself to his feet. Once he was standing, the Doctor held out his hand.

  A small metal cube was hovering in his palm.

  ‘Antigravity generator,’ he explained. The Eyeless could not read his mind or feelings, but the Doctor’s body language and manner of speech indicated tiredness.

  Unlike an Eyeless, humanoid bodies grew weary. ‘Used it to fall all the way from the ground. Was part of a missile that I—’

  The Eyeless shoved into him, tried to push him off the walkway.

  ‘Hey,’ the Doctor said, twisting around, trying to maintain a foothold.

  The Eyeless slammed into him again, but this time the Doctor was ready, and sidestepped. The Eyeless was able to right itself before its momentum could carry it over the edge or into the field of fire of any of the turrets.

  Without any hesitation, the Eyeless swung for the Doctor again. The Doctor made only a half-hearted attempt to block the arm, but managed to deflect the blow.

  The Eyeless adjusted its fighting style to a more informal one, elbowed the Doctor in the face, gave him a kick in the stomach and quick left-right punches to the head. A head butt after that, and the Doctor sank to his knees.

  ‘Turns out I’m the one with a glass jaw,’ the Doctor coughed.

  The Eyele
ss moved in for the kill.

  ‘Wait,’ the Doctor said, holding a splayed hand up,

  almost losing his balance. ‘Hang on. Don’t.’

  The Doctor pulled himself upright, using the Eyeless for balance.

  The Eyeless recognised the expression on the Doctor’s face as it drew level with its own. Alsa wore that expression. Defiance. Eyes wide with a sense of victory.

  This was incompatible with the Eyeless’ understanding of the situation. The Doctor had clearly made a move.

  As the Doctor stepped away, the Eyeless became aware that there was a new object embedded in it. The Doctor had pushed the cube he’d been carrying into the flaw in the Eyeless’ collar.

  The Eyeless looked at his opponent, and saw the Doctor had his sonic screwdriver in his hand.

  There was a flare of blue light, an ultrasonic squeal, and the antigravity cube activated. The Doctor, the walkway and the weapon chamber fell away from the Eyeless’ feet. As it plunged skywards, it could just make out the Doctor stepping through the door into the weapon chamber.

  All around the Eyeless, turrets and gun barrels twitched and took aim as it plummeted up to the apex of the inner vault, far above.

  The Doctor stepped into a room that was a tiny hollow pyramid, its interior virtually featureless. There was barely room for him, let alone anyone else. Not enough room to swing an Eyeless.

  He was worn out, but he had work to do and he’d already got his glasses on. He knelt in the centre of the

  room, concentrating on the weapon. It was suspended in a web of power lines. To human eyes, it must have looked rather plain. It was a cylinder, about a metre long, ten centimetres wide. It was burnished metal. No obvious controls or trigger, no letters or numbers or symbols. More interesting things were going on in the higher, lower and sideways dimensions, obviously.

  ‘Infinite menace and a slight hum,’ said the Doctor out loud, quoting Douglas Adams.

  It was activated by touch, so he couldn’t use bare hands. The Doctor fished around in Alsa’s bag and found a pair of woolly gloves. He slipped one on.

  He could have reached out already, plucked the weapon from its cradle. There wasn’t anything stopping him.

  There wasn’t a booby trap on the weapon – that would risk damaging it. The Doctor’s hand was at his side.

  Why hadn’t he destroyed it already?

  He knew he was holding back. He wasn’t sure why. He looked around, sheepishly.

  The weapon continued to hang there.

  Go on, he willed himself.

  It would be so easy to imagine that his hesitation was the result of some last line of defence, that it was the weapon itself staying his hand with some sort of hypnotic command. That wasn’t what was happening.

  The Doctor hadn’t moved for over a minute, now.

  He could feel the energy crackling inside the cylinder, like a trapped, perpetual lightning bolt, but perfectly black. So dark it would blind anyone who looked straight at it.

  Why hadn’t he destroyed it?

  ‘We’re both the last of our kind,’ he concluded, quietly.

  It was complex, uniquely so, but there was no mind in there, no consciousness, no life, nothing that could answer back.

  Destroy it. The Eyeless could be here any minute.

  Destroy it.

  ‘If the Eyeless got hold of you, then… well, that would be terrible. Worse.’

  He wasn’t like the Eyeless. Not at all. He travelled the universe like them, true. Flitted from planet to planet.

  Revelled in new experiences. Didn’t put down roots. They were irresponsible, though. Not that he was the most responsible person in the universe, but his hearts were in the right places. He didn’t kill people.

  The Eyeless he’d just sent plummeting up to its doom might have been the last one.

  The memory of a reptile hand clawing at soot-stained limestone. The Doctor’s thoughts had returned to the battle with the dinosaur man in the clock tower of the Houses of Parliament, the Steggosian he’d told Gar and Alsa about. The Doctor could recall the creature’s rank, not his name. There was no one left now who could remind him. The Doctor had let the Steggosian Captain fall to his death, knowing he was the last of his kind.

  He remembered the last of the Racnoss, consumed in flames. He remembered the death throes of the Pyroviles.

  He remembered an army of Daleks sucked into the howling Void. He remembered Richard Lazarus, dying in a blitzkrieg of sound courtesy of a cathedral organ and the sonic screwdriver.

  They weren’t victims. They had been poised to kill, springing traps they’d set themselves. The best word to describe them was monsters, and the best thing to do with monsters was fight them.

  The people of Arcopolis, they were victims.

  What if the weapon could be used for good?

  The Doctor hadn’t taken his eyes off it.

  ‘There’s no such thing as evil science,’ he said finally.

  ‘Anything can be turned into a weapon. Anything. If you worried about what wicked men might do, you’d never invent anything. You’d never light a fire or pick up a rock.

  You can kill people with medicine, drown them in a bucket of spring water, burn them up in sunshine.’

  The opposite was true, too: any sword could be beaten into a ploughshare, every spear into a pruning hook. It was sometimes difficult to see how. He, alone in all the universe, had the knowledge to do it with this weapon. No one else understood the science like he did. More than that, he knew it was at least possible, because he’d seen the ghosts. The weapon wasn’t meant to leave traces, but the ghosts were traces.

  There’s more to this weapon than I thought.

  The Doctor tapped his teeth with his fingers, then rapped his forehead with his knuckles. This was a change of plan, no doubt about it. He could study the weapon, learn a bit more about it. It might not be possible. There was a chance, though.

  If I destroyed the weapon now, I would lose that chance for ever.

  ‘Good point,’ the Doctor noted.

  He peered up at the weapon over the top of his glasses.

  He might be able to use it to create, not destroy. Reverse its polarity, or whatever.

  Every instinct was telling him to destroy it.

  He took a step back, thought for a moment. Was it possible to use this for the good?

  No one else possibly could. You might.

  The Doctor decided not to destroy the weapon.

  Some superstitious urge made the thought of touching it uncomfortable, even through a glove. He slipped Alsa’s bag off his shoulder, turned it inside out and put his hands in, like it was a giant oven mitten, then reached into the web of power lines and began plucking the weapon from it. The cylinder was solid, surprisingly heavy. It was warm, even through the artificial fibre of the bag. The detached cables still buzzed, still had enough energy in them to bite.

  The Doctor was cradling the weapon now, needed both hands to lift it.

  One last power line to detach, then the weapon would be free, and he would turn the bag back outside in and hide it out of sight and out of mind. As the Doctor tugged it loose, there was a clattering noise from outside the chamber. He glanced through the door.

  The very last thing he saw before the whole Fortress went dark was an army of Eyeless charging down the walkway towards him, arms raised like clubs.

  There was a theory that the way to defeat an enemy was to turn their own strength against them.

  ‘Well,’ the Doctor sniffed, ‘at least I have plenty to work with.’

  The Fortress strategy computer recognised that it was about to be deactivated, knew it had no options remaining.

  It drew all its strength from the weapon, and the Doctor was well on the way to disconnecting it.

  A thousand subroutines had warned it not to underestimate the Doctor from the moment he’d been identified, yet it had done just that.

  It had just been overrun. Eighty-eight of the aliens inside it, all
exploiting the safe route to the weapon chamber, all heading for the Doctor. The guns in that section had all been disabled, and the power would be shut off within moments.

  The Doctor would destroy the aliens, of course. The strategy he would adopt was straightforward. The computer felt no regret or anger. It cycled through its complete list of strategies one last time, not knowing anything else to do.

  And then the machine stopped.

  When the lights had gone out, the Eyeless leading the charge had been within seconds of reaching the weapon chamber.

  Now it was pitch black but, as if to compensate, the air was saturated with sound. The noise was made up of almost a couple of hundred heavy glass footfalls on metal, echoing off the walls.

  Instantly the command went out, and the Eyeless came

  to a halt. Had a squad of human soldiers tried to do the same, the line would have concertinaed and slipped up; maybe a couple of people would even have been pushed or tripped over the edge of the narrow walkway. Their telepathy allowed the Eyeless to coordinate the move.

  The immediate situation was easy enough to comprehend, and broke like a wave over the Eyeless: the Doctor was in the weapon chamber, dead ahead of them.

  Through the one doorway leading into the chamber, they’d seen the Doctor with the weapon in his hand. With the power offline, that meant there were no active defence systems.

  They had to get to the weapon, and quickly.

  As the echoes died down, they shared their memories and impressions of the inside of the Fortress, swiftly overlaying them all, self-correcting the discrepancies, until they had built up a mental map of the structure. This was a rare process for them, to so totally give up their individuality. They elided their memories and perceptions, effortlessly becoming, to all practical purposes, a single creature, a beast with 88 heads, 176 legs, 1,056 fingers, one mind and one objective: Kill the Doctor.

  He couldn’t disguise the sounds of his feet scuffing the floor, his breathing, his double heartbeat. Eighty-eight of them heard him at the doorway.

  As one, they charged at him.

  The foremost reached the doorway and the Doctor wasn’t there. Three of them felt their way into the chamber. They held their hands out, thirty-six fingers twitching like antennae.