One of the Eyeless brushed against a power line, which sparked and froze it rigid, forcing another one to step aside, into the path of another power line. Another spark.
The third was trapped between them.
The three of them would recover in minutes. The remaining eighty-five knew that the Doctor was no longer in the weapon chamber. He couldn’t be far.
One of the Eyeless, towards the middle of the pack, was shoved aside, toppled over the edge. Two of its comrades managed to grab it before it was lost for ever.
The one nearest those two swiped out to grab the Doctor, who must have been responsible for the initial shove.
Instead, it grabbed one of the rescuers, unbalanced it. All four tipped over, off into the darkness.
Sharing this sensation, all the Eyeless reeled, moved to brace for when they landed.
Eighty-one flares of blue light; eighty-one electronic squeals; eighty-one Doctors, holding eighty-one sonic screwdrivers aloft, eighty-one ultimate weapons tucked under eighty-one arms. The Eyeless lurched in eighty-one different directions to grab him.
The Eyeless reeled, assimilated the experience. There was only one Doctor, but all of them had seen him then sent the information to the others.
Simultaneously, they felt the rush of air from above.
There was a grinding crash, followed by a series of creaks. The ranks of the Eyeless had been diminished, bisected.
Sixteen Eyeless leapt out the way, finding either air
under their feet, or the side of a comrade, bumping them until they were over the edge of the walkway. The Eyeless felt the air whistling past them, felt the impacts. Most were able to swing an arm out, connect with some cable or other walkway.
Nineteen other Eyeless had just vanished.
The wave of realisation broke over the survivors – the blue light hadn’t just been to disorientate them, it had loosened a large section of pipeline that had been hanging overhead.
That pipe was now a curved wall dividing the Eyeless into two small groups – one of seventeen individuals and one of twenty-nine.
There was a creak and the wall moved.
‘Ah…’ the Doctor’s voice called out, from just above all forty-six of the Eyeless.
Another creak.
‘Look,’ the voice continued. ‘Um… you have lights in your hands, remember? Might be an idea to use them.’
They remembered. Three of them raised their hands and activated them. Three soft golden lanterns in the darkness.
The Doctor was standing on top of a cross-section of fallen pipe that had landed square in the middle of the walkway. It was about the same height as the Eyeless.
The Doctor silently surveyed the scene, then started running backwards on the spot, and the pipe started rolling towards the exit.
The twenty-nine Eyeless on that side started running ahead of it – rather that than leaping off or being crushed.
None of them had time to note the gleeful glint in the Doctor’s eye. He had only got the pipe a little way, though, before the Eyeless behind him worked out that they could shove at it, trying to steer it.
All this activity meant that the lanterns went out again.
The sound of the pipe creaking and rolling along filled the darkness.
After a few moments, there was a great clang as the pipe crashed into the outer wall of the vault. It was wedged in place.
The Eyeless in front of the pipe were blocked out of the inner vault, for the moment at least. The Doctor was also boxed in, though.
The Eyeless prepared to go in for the kill, three climbing up onto the top of the pipe with the help of the others.
The Doctor wasn’t there.
Moments after the lanterns had gone out, the Doctor had grabbed a dangling piece of cable and clambered up it.
The Eyeless had been too busy pushing the pipe to notice, and the racket that it had made covered his tracks.
He’d climbed up a couple of levels and found a narrow gantry, all of this in the dark, every handhold and escape route found by blindly flailing an arm.
He was three or four levels higher, now. He flopped down on the solid platform, needing to get his breath back. He tried not to make any noise.
The weapon was still in the bag, weighing on his mind.
He felt exhilarated, full of possibilities. He could hear the
Eyeless clattering around below him, caught glimpses of them moving, arms aloft and glowing, hurrying along the tops of gantries and the thickest pipelines like palace guards. They were all many levels below him. The search pattern wasn’t as systematic and ordered as he’d expected from them. He had them rattled.
The Eyeless were still angry and agitated, like they had been infected. They’d been changed by their experiences here. Ideas, attitudes, beliefs, emotions… they could rapidly spread through any society. Jokes or pop tunes or new slang or catchphrases could appear one day and everyone in a country would know them within a week or two. The Doctor had met hiveminded races before. They all had a slightly different mechanism for spreading the word, but their great strength was that they could share information instantly and totally efficiently.
These Eyeless were addicted to anger now, took pleasure from it. If they got into contact with the rest of their kind, the anger would spread, across the galaxy. An advanced race with a massive space navy, an urge to steal, fuelled by anger. They’d swarm across the cosmos.
It wasn’t as though the universe was short of monsters already. He’d have to nip them in the bud.
The Doctor glanced down at Alsa’s bag.
There was an easy way to do this. A surgical strike. Use the weapon. Just once.
Exterminate.
The Doctor shivered, physically pulled himself back from the bag.
Destroying the Eyeless because of what they might
become? All so easy, using the weapon.
The simplest thing was just to destroy it. Here and now.
He stood, stiffly, but also a little wobbly on his feet.
Not a brilliant combination when the way around here was across narrow gantries and on top of pipelines.
The Doctor could have used Alsa’s torch, but the Eyeless would be on him like… he was going to say like moths to a flame, but moths tended to lose that battle.
He’d be safe in the dark for a little while.
There was a light forming in front of him.
This was really bad timing, he thought, tucking himself out of sight.
The ghost of a very, very old woman, looking around, perplexed. She didn’t see the Doctor. Lit from within, the lines and wrinkles of her face were stark, spidery.
The Doctor looked down. He could see Eyeless looking up, calculating a route to the ghost. Then, like a dying ember, the ghost just faded away.
The Fortress was without power, now. The ghosts weren’t a defence system, after all. That nagged at the Doctor. So what were they?
They weren’t a coincidence.
It would be almost comforting to think that they were the restless souls of the 200 million killed here in Arcopolis, that the injustice of their deaths had scarred the very atoms and molecules. Nature had laws, but no justice. If there was a ghost for every untimely death, there would be few places in the universe that weren’t haunted.
The weapon had done this. It was a logic puzzle, but
the answer wasn’t in the programming of the Fortress, it was somewhere in the laws of physics. When a ghost touched someone, they both vanished – that was part of the puzzle, too.
He had to get out of the Fortress to somewhere safer, somewhere away from the glass men and the ghosts themselves.
The Doctor lowered himself down a level, scurried on his hands and knees through a narrow crawlspace. Fifty metres of that, and he found an access hatch that he slid open. He climbed out onto what the acoustics told him was a wide platform, dusted himself off, slung the bag over his shoulder, turned and almost walked straight into a ghost.
This was a ghost he’d already met. Behind it, other ghosts, dozens of them and more all the time. They cast light and shadows over the platform.
Last time, they’d communicated via Alsa’s comm, which was gone now. The Doctor remembered the idea he’d had for talking to the Eyeless. He slipped a slim leather wallet from his pocket, and opened up the psychic paper.
‘You can hear me,’ he whispered. ‘I can’t hear you.
Here, let’s try this.’
The ghost nodded, relieved, and tiny, neat copperplate handwriting appeared on the paper.
I am Gyll.
‘Yes, I… recognise you. Don’t you recognise me?’ The Doctor found himself wondering if this was how Gyll’s handwriting had always looked. With all their computers and robots, would the people of Arcopolis have even bothered learning to use pens?
I’m not sure. Something is different.
‘Yes.’
The Doctor opened the bag, let the ghost see inside it.
‘This is the weapon that killed you,’ the Doctor said.
‘This is what murdered you all. Don’t touch it.’
The ghost drifted towards it, head turning to get a better look. And, as it looked down, and he saw it alongside the weapon for the first time, it came to the Doctor what the ghosts were.
So small a thing.
‘Yes,’ he said quietly.
Now you have it.
‘I’ve promised to destroy it, the very first moment I can.’
Yes, I know you mean to do that.
‘I have to break another promise. I can’t save you.’
The ghost stared at him, blankly.
‘I can’t save you, because I know what you are, now,’
the Doctor said. ‘You’re not Gyll, not really.’
I am Gyll.
‘No. The weapon killed Gyll. Killed everyone. But you can’t destroy matter and energy so utterly. It’s impossible.
There’s always something left behind. Even if you drop a nuclear bomb, you burn shadows into the concrete and tarmac. Blast shadows, they’re called.’
The Doctor paused, took the time to breathe in.
‘Gyll was ripped from the universe, but the imprint remained. You’re a blast shadow. A complicated one, because Gyll was killed by this very, very complicated weapon. But you’re only the echo of the ghost of consciousness. Here.’
He let the equations flow from his mind and across the psychic paper, a model of eleven-dimensional time and space. Beautiful, beautiful mathematics.
I don’t understand that.
‘You don’t have to. All that you need to know is that I do understand it. You’re a shadow, and the person that cast it is long gone.’
I am Gyll.
‘No,’ the Doctor said simply.
I know I am.
‘No. You ghosts aren’t real, you’re holes in reality.
Anyone you touch falls right out of the universe.’
Something was agitating the ghosts behind the Doctor, making them flit over and around him. They couldn’t have overheard what he’d said. Were they moving to block his escape?
They weren’t… They were looking at something ahead of him. The sea of ghosts parted just long enough for the Doctor to see a small army of glass men walking slowly towards him.
At their head was the one with Jall’s eyes. It had a charred pit the size of a fist in its chest. A dozen paces from the Doctor, though, it came to a halt, as did all the Eyeless behind it.
What is happening?
‘You’re holding them in place,’ the Doctor reasoned.
‘They are powerful psychics. So many ghosts, all those
memories, all that pain and anguish. It’s paralysing them.
Like a deafening sound would stop a person in their tracks.’
The one in front tries to communicate. It is so angry.
‘What is it saying?’
That you want the weapon for yourself, that they are the Eyeless & want only to study it. That they had nothing to do with the death of Arcopolis.
‘It calls itself an Eyeless, but it has eyes,’ the Doctor noted.
The ghost moved forward, as did a number of the others. They all peered into the glass head, saw the two eyeballs mounted there. The Eyeless squirmed under the scrutiny, but couldn’t retreat. It was like its feet had been glued to the metal floor. The ghosts looked around at each other, puzzled, then all but one of them fell back.
‘Human eyes,’ the Doctor confirmed. ‘Ask it to explain.’
The ghost just swept over to the Eyeless, who writhed, tried to escape, but couldn’t. The ghost calmly took its memories. The ghost floated in front of the Eyeless for a few seconds, like an attentive listener.
‘Those are Jall’s eyes it’s wearing,’ the Doctor said quietly. ‘Ask it who Jall is.’
The ghost turned back, stared into the bright green eyeballs, looked back at the Doctor, shocked. It was remembering it all, taking the thoughts and memories from the Eyeless. Seeing what the Doctor couldn’t – the moment of Jall’s death, the drinking in of her last, terrified thoughts, the taking of the eyes.
Finally, words appeared on the psychic paper.
Dela had a daughter?
‘Yes.’
We only talked about children.
The ghost didn’t seem to know if it had heard good news or not. It had no memories of the last fifteen years, just a snapshot of Gyll’s mind at the moment of death.
‘Things are different now. Everything has changed.
Dela has many children. The only way for the people of Arcopolis to survive. Jall was the eldest.’
& now Dela’s firstborn is dead.
‘Dela is alive,’ the Doctor told the ghost. ‘She should be safe, but thanks to this creature I can’t be sure of that. I made a promise to Dela. You can help me keep it. But…
there’s a cost.’
The ghost held out a finger, almost touched the Doctor’s lips. There was no need to say more.
Then it fell onto the Eyeless, hands thrust out like talons, thrusting its elbows deep into the glass chest. The ghost was silently screaming, swirling through the body and mind of the Eyeless. The other glass men were powerless to move, let alone defend their colleague. The one with Jall’s eyes managed to lift one foot, at last, but it lost its balance, had to send its hand to the edge of the platform to keep itself from falling over the edge.
Its glass was losing its brilliance and looked almost charred. The Eyeless raised its right hand, trying to use the weapon embedded there, but couldn’t summon any light.
A second ghost hurtled past the Doctor and through another of the Eyeless. Then another, then another, then
another. All of them, throwing themselves into the Eyeless ranks, tearing the strength of the glass men out with their bare hands.
The Eyeless swatted at them, not connecting with anything. The ghosts were dashed to pieces as they hit the Eyeless, vanishing when they touched anyone, as they had before, but they eroded their opponents in turn. This was an entirely silent process and as each ghost dissipated, their light faded, and the interior of the Fortress grew a little darker.
‘An eye for an eye,’ the Doctor said, so softly the words were almost drowned out by the sound of shattering glass.
He had seen enough death, and gained no satisfaction from the thought of more. Wearily, he watched, waited until the inevitable moment when the last light faded.
Kill you.
The words crashed through the Doctor’s mental defences.
The ghosts had gone, but one Eyeless was still there, the sheen of its skin faded, pitted. Damaged by contact with the ghosts, but surviving through sheer force of will.
The glass man rose to its knees, watery, broken light seeping from its damaged right hand. Of course it was the one with Jall’s eyes. The last of the Eyeless.
Its face was level with the Doctor’s. They were inches apart, at most.
Kill you.
It was the Docto
r’s own voice. He was the bringer of darkness, the oncoming storm, the murderer of whole
worlds.
The Doctor couldn’t tell if he was thinking that or the Eyeless was thinking it for him. He found he wasn’t resisting as the Eyeless’ hands closed around his neck, as he began sinking to his knees. The fight had gone from him. This was his death, and there was no one in this universe who would mourn him, and the Eyeless would take the weapon.
Unless.
‘I have something for you,’ he managed to croak out.
The Eyeless stood motionless.
‘You can’t have the weapon,’ the Doctor said, getting to his feet. He held out a small metal shape on a loop of chain. ‘You like trading? You always want something new? How about this key?’
The Eyeless looked warily at it.
‘The key to my TARDIS,’ the Doctor said. ‘You were right. That blue box is a time machine. But you’ve not been able to get inside, have you? I… will do you a deal.’
The Doctor looked down at the pieces of glass scattered on the gantry.
‘You ran the numbers,’ he said quietly. ‘Well… run these numbers: if you let me live and let me destroy the weapon, you can have my TARDIS.’
The Eyeless took a step forward, reached out, but the Doctor snatched the key away.
‘The most important thing is destroying the weapon,’
the Doctor said quietly, almost to himself. ‘No one should have it. Not me, not you, no one. I will pay any price to see that weapon broken in half.’
The key dangled tantalisingly out of the reach of the Eyeless.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ the Doctor said. ‘You could kill me, take the key, take the weapon.’
The Eyeless was careful not to betray its reaction.
‘The TARDIS won’t let you in unless I tell it to. After that, it’s simple enough. The flight computer is, well, let’s just say it’s fairly intuitive. This isn’t a trick… well, I would say that. Honest, it’s not a trick. Trust me, I’m a doctor. But this is the deal: you watch me destroy the weapon, I give you the key. I’ll just stay here, with the villagers. Live out my life. Look after them, if they’ll have me.’
The Doctor paused, sagged a little.
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