Doctor Who: Harvest of Time

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘Not particularly.’

  ‘I got my hand caught in a power-operated winch. On the deck of an oil rig. Took them off at the knuckle. I heard them go pop, pop as they came off. I was lucky I only lost the two, you know? Watched them go into the winch, too. That’s not something you want to see every day.’

  ‘Your point being, McCrimmon?’ Still with his shoe on her hand, Lovelace knelt down and picked up the automatic. His nose was still bleeding, red dots spattering the floor.

  ‘I got careless. I was messing around with something I didn’t understand properly. And it came back and bit me.’

  ‘I see. And you think this little parable has some relevance to …’

  ‘You’re in over your head, Lovelace. Whatever you think that box of tricks of yours was meant to do, it’s not doing it. Or it’s doing something else, as well.’ She studied him carefully, still refusing to show the pain he was inflicting. ‘That friend of yours … the Master. How well do you really know him?’

  Lovelace relinquished the pressure on her hand. He pulled away quickly, closing the door before she had a chance to do anything. McCrimmon heard the sound of a metal latch being slid into place.

  There was no lock on the inside. Not that she had expected one.

  ‘Why does he want this thing moved around anyway?’ The UNIT lorry driver looked suspiciously at the battered blue police box he had been asked to relocate. It was sitting on a wooden pallet, the pallet and its load currently straining the lifting capabilities of a green-painted forklift lorry, which was in turn under the temporary control of the UNIT driver himself. ‘Come to think of it, what’s it doing here in the first place? Why do we need a police public call box – haven’t we enough blinking telephones as it is?’

  ‘Orders from the Brig, mate. That’s all I know.’ The UNIT soldier in charge of operations handed the lorry driver a slip of paper with directions on it. ‘That’s your rendezvous – about five miles from Durlston Heath power station.’

  The lorry driver turned the piece of paper the right way up. ‘Miles away – who do they think I am, Fangio?’

  ‘Roads shouldn’t be too bad.’ The soldier paused, allowing a military jet to pass overhead, the sound of its engine like fingernails scratching the sky. ‘Bit of a flap on, so the Brig wants it there fast. You’ll get a couple of cars as escorts, and the fuzz have been told to make sure you get through in one piece. Once you’ve delivered the box, you can get back here sharpish.’

  ‘Delivered the box,’ the driver repeated. ‘So there’ll be a crane or forklift at the other end, will there? This thing weighs a ton!’

  ‘Not sure. But the Brig said not to worry about that bit. Apparently it’s all taken care of.’

  ‘What does he expect it to do? Sprout wings and flap its way off?’

  But this was a rhetorical question, not one that the driver really expected answering. Still muttering under his breath, shaking his head at the utter stupidity of his superiors, he loaded the telephone box onto the back of the lorry. After that it was a simple matter of tying it down, then screening the load with the tarpaulin cover. He set off cautiously, taking bends carefully. It was just a blue telephone box but it felt like the thing was stuffed full of lead ingots. He had considered opening the door to have a shufti inside, but the box was locked.

  Never mind. If the driver had learned one thing in his military career, it was that there were some things you just weren’t meant to ask too many questions about.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Brigadier’s helicopter scudded rapidly over the flat fields and marshes of the coastal home counties, on its way back to UNIT headquarters. In this winter light it was a landscape of browns and greys, variations on a theme of drab. Even the trees stood skeletal and forbidding, as if they aspired to grow into electricity pylons when they were taller. The Brigadier was not one for the countryside, it was true. Its chief function, as far as he was concerned, was to contain things that could be hunted and shot during the appropriate seasons. It was also quite good for military exercises, provided you could find enough of it to blow up or strafe.

  But, as always, a new and looming threat to the Earth sharpened his appreciation of things. It wasn’t much to look at, this colourless tapestry, but damn it all if some aliens were going to try to take it off him. That wasn’t on at all. That was anything but cricket.

  The Brigadier had already used the helicopter’s radio to call ahead to headquarters and coordinate transportation of the Doctor’s TARDIS. The convoy would be at the rendezvous point within half an hour, if all went according to plan. Ideally, they would just drive in and extract the … chap, the man they were after, without incident. If difficulties did arise, then Yates had an armed detachment under his command. And if force proved insufficient to get the job done, the Doctor ought to be able to get inside via the TARDIS. Doors and walls were no obstruction to a machine that could slip in and out of time. That was what the blasted thing was designed to do.

  But the Brigadier would not have reached his very considerable rank without having learned the value of foresight. There was a truism that no military plan survived first contact with the enemy. In his many encounters with terrestrial and extraterrestrial foes, Lethbridge-Stewart had learned the grim wisdom of that aphorism. A good soldier learned not just to think one step ahead, but to think three or four in advance. Assume not only that Plan A will fail, but that so will Plans B and C. It always paid to have a Plan D in hand, no matter how desperate it might be. In his long career, the Brigadier had fallen back on Plan D more times than he cared to admit. Sometimes the necessary action was obvious. Sometimes it was anything but.

  Today, as the helicopter headed home, the Brigadier had no difficulty grasping the shape of Plan D. It was awful in its clarity. The objective, as far as the Doctor was concerned, was to get the chap out of that prison, before the Sild got to him. But in truth that was only the most desirable outcome. If all else failed, then it would merely be necessary to prevent the chap falling into Sild control. That was what you did.

  But the fellow … the chap … The Brigadier concentrated hard, yes, him, the Master, him, that one … the one they were supposed to not keep forgetting … he was inside multiple layers of reinforced concrete, specifically designed to guard against any conceivable accident or terrorist attack.

  If no conventional forces could reach him, then something decidedly unconventional would need to be considered. The kind of weapon that every commanding officer hoped they would never have cause to deploy.

  The Brigadier tapped the pilot, requesting use of the radio. ‘Get me Geneva.’

  He was going to have to go to the very top for this one.

  ‘Local yokels!’ Yates said, braking the Land Rover so abruptly that the Doctor had to brace himself against the dashboard. ‘Can’t they take more care of their gates?’

  They had come across the obstruction as they approached the agreed rendezvous point five miles from Durlston Heath. Their convoy consisted of three vehicles: two Land Rovers, the Doctor and Yates in the first, and a truck bringing up the rear, with Benton behind the wheel. At first glance, the thing before them appeared to be a kind of abstract roadblock: a misshapen mass of black and white barriers, like large painted sandbags on white stilts, squashed into a haphazard barricade. But the sandbags were moving, jostling each other and shifting position, and they had heads and eyes and mouths, and udders.

  ‘I don’t think,’ the Doctor said, ‘that the “local yokels”, as you so colourfully put it, are entirely to blame.’

  ‘Someone let those cows loose,’ Yates said. ‘If it wasn’t the country bumpkins, then …’

  ‘They’re under Sild control,’ the Doctor said sharply.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look closely.’ The Doctor pointed at one of the nearest cows – it was looking right at them, its pink-lined mouth hanging open in extreme bovine stupefaction, as if it had never seen anything quite so strange as a Land Rover. ‘On its n
eck.’

  A Sild ambulator was clamped onto the back of the Friesian, at the base of the neck. The tiny silver crab was almost lost against the massive animal, submerged in hair and folds of fat.

  ‘Three … four …’ Yates counted, with mounting horror.

  ‘Enough for their purposes. They only need to control a few cows; the herding instinct will do the rest.’

  ‘They can’t do this,’ Yates said. ‘It’s just … wrong.’

  The Doctor looked at him tolerantly. ‘Worse than controlling human hosts, Mike? To the Sild it makes absolutely no difference.’

  Yates unclipped a radio handset from the dashboard and spoke to headquarters, shaking his head as he clipped the radio back into place. ‘Our rendezvous point is on the other side of these cows, and there’s no way for us to get there without a long detour.’

  ‘What about the other lorry, the one carrying the TARDIS?’ asked the Doctor.

  ‘Coming in on the coast road. Hasn’t reported any difficulties yet, so this may be the only obstruction they’ve managed to organise. But I’m afraid we’ll have to get through it if you’re to get to your TARDIS.’ Yates took the radio, selected a different channel and said: ‘Benton – we’re going to attempt to push through. We’ll try our Land Rover first. Advance slowly behind us, but be ready to reverse.’

  He slipped the Land Rover back into gear, and began to approach the animal roadblock at a little above walking pace.

  The Doctor, sensing what was to come, braced a hand against the dash. ‘Here they come,’ he said.

  The road remained obstructed, but the cows were now moving to meet the convoy. Only a few of them were under direct Sild influence, but the herd instinct was so strong that the others may as well have been. The Sild cows broke into a heavy, shambling trot, and then the trot became a stampede. The ground was wet and muddy, so some of the cows slipped and fell under the hooves of those following. But still the mass advanced: less a group of animals, more a single shifting wall of concentrated meat and muscle, an organism as wide as a road. The mass of cows bellowed and snorted, their heads lowered like battering rams.

  Yates’s hands were tight on the steering wheel, his jaw set as he leaned forward, the Land Rover whining as he held it in first gear. The Doctor willed him to keep accelerating, but at the last moment Yates’s resolve seemed to fail him.

  It was a mistake to steer. The Land Rover had begun to turn to the right when the first wave of cows collided with it, and the off-centre impact was enough to tilt the vehicle onto two wheels. The Doctor redoubled his brace and waited for the worst. The vehicle crunched onto its side, the engine racing and then cutting out, and then all the Doctor could see through the windshield was a press of cows, like black and white dough expanding to squeeze against the glass. The Land Rover jerked sideways, the road crunching past through the broken side window.

  Yates had the driver’s side door open. He heaved himself out, straddled the open doorway and reached down to help the Doctor. ‘Quickly!’ he called.

  The Doctor extracted himself, judging that now was perhaps not the ideal time to point out that they would have been far better meeting the cows head-on. Precariously, the two of them stood on the side of the tipped-over car. The Land Rover was fast becoming an island in a sea of cows. Seeing his moment, the Doctor jerked down in time to rip a Sild ambulator from the neck of one of the animals. It came free with a slurp of embedded tendrils, their silver metal now pinkened with blood. The spider legs thrashed the air, the tentacles trying to whip around the Doctor’s wrist. The cow the Sild had been operating dropped as if it had been shot with a captive bolt.

  ‘We’re surrounded!’ Yates called.

  The other Land Rover, still upright, was powering back in reverse. But the sea of cows reached almost to its bonnet. ‘Now, Mike!’ the Doctor shouted, and sprang off the toppled Land Rover onto the spine of the nearest cow, hopscotching his way from animal to animal until, in a few deft bounds, he had reached the sanctuary of the other vehicle. Still clutching the ambulator by its glassy cylinder, the tentacles constricting the circulation into his hand, trying to force him to relinquish his grip, he looked back and beckoned Yates to follow him. Yates, surveying the prospect confronting him, looked about as enthusiastic as a man instructed to swim a shark-infested lagoon. ‘Hurry!’ the Doctor shouted, as the Land Rover he was standing on backed slowly away and the sea of cows increased in number and width. ‘It’s now or never, Mike!’

  Grasping the truth in this, Yates followed the Doctor across the shifting landscape of ridged backs. Months of training on assault courses could not possibly have prepared him for this scenario, but to his credit Yates managed to keep his balance until the last moment, then he slipped and seemed on the point of falling into the yawning crevasse between two cows. But the Doctor leaned over and grabbed Yates’s sleeve with his free hand, and then the two men were safe, for the moment.

  The Land Rover backed away at higher speed, until it had cleared enough space to execute a turn. Yates and the Doctor hopped off and jogged to the lorry. The cows were still advancing, and the Sild ambulator was doing its best to disengage itself from the Doctor’s grip, constricting and probing at the same time. It was like an iron tourniquet.

  ‘That thing!’ Yates said.

  ‘I’d rather hoped … this …’ The Doctor paused to smash the ambulator against the side of the lorry, ‘wouldn’t be necessary.’

  The transparent container shattered, exposing the Sild occupant, and for an instant the Doctor hesitated, his deepest convictions tested. But the tendrils were cutting his skin now, seeking a path into his peripheral nervous system, and if he did not do something the Sild would either kill him or have him under its agonising control. Again he smashed his hand against the side of the lorry, sickened by his own actions but knowing he had no choice. Only then did the ambulator fall limp, tendrils loosening. The Doctor dropped it to the floor. The blood rushed back into his hand.

  Yates was staring at the mess left by the Sild. ‘That … was one of them?’

  ‘Nastiness comes in all sizes,’ the Doctor said. ‘The mile-long city slugs of Esquenal are among the gentlest, kindliest of souls in the galaxy. Their slime-trail poetry …’

  ‘Point made, Doctor.’

  The Doctor signalled to the lorry driver to back up over the smashed ambulator, just to be sure that it couldn’t be used by another Sild. The lorry reversed, crunched over the empty machine, halted, and then UNIT soldiers began to spill out of the covered rear compartment. Benton emerged from the front and then joined Yates, the two of them directing the UNIT forces to coordinate small arms, semi-automatic, machine gun and anti-tank fire on the cows.

  ‘Is this really necessary?’ the Doctor wondered out loud. But deep inside, he knew the answer.

  It was a terrible thing to witness. The UNIT forces did their best to target the Sild-controlled cows to begin with, but in the chaos of moving animals, and with the Sild able to move from host to host, it was all but impossible. The Doctor, already appalled by his own actions, could barely watch.

  But there came a point where the guns fell silent. There were no cows left by then, and the Sild ambulators – those that had survived the slaughter – had by then scuttled for cover.

  ‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ said Benton, surveying the resultant carnage. ‘That’s put me right off my dinner.’

  ‘There won’t be dinner for any of us unless we get through,’ Yates replied.

  Having lost his Land Rover, Yates assumed control of the lorry, the Doctor and Benton taking up the passenger seats to his left. In low gear, the lorry navigated a slick red passage over the barricade of carcasses, wheel-slipping its way up and over the vile, squelching mass. The remaining Land Rover could not get through at all, and so was abandoned.

  After that, although the road was strewn with abandoned vehicles, they encountered no significant resistance before they reached the rendezvous, the other lorry waiting about a mile further
down the road by a T-junction with its lights on and engine still running. The driver gave them a funny look as they pulled past, doubtless taking in the quantities of blood and gore still adhering to the other vehicle. The two lorries continued in close formation, until at last the blocky structures of the power station began to jut above the treeline.

  ‘Smoke,’ the Doctor said. ‘And it looks to be coming from within the perimeter.’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Edwina McCrimmon did not give up knocking and shouting until her knuckles were bruised and her throat raw. It had been a valiant try, but it was obvious from the lack of response that she was on her own. She was not simply locked in the storeroom, as objectionable as that would have been. The storeroom itself was screened off from the normal comings and goings of the rig, with access to this whole area controlled by the automatic security door. The door was airtight and soundproofed. She had heard Lovelace walking away, but once he was on the other side of the door she had not even been able to hear him tapping the code back into the keyed-entry device. Not that she had any doubts that he had done so.

  So no one was going to hear her, and no one was going to just stumble on her by accident. There would have to be an organised search of the platform, and that would not happen until she was established as definitely missing. Hours, maybe.

  You want something done, Big Cal had drilled into her often enough, do it yourself.

  McCrimmon scooped up the fire extinguisher. It felt as solid and heavy in her hands as when she’d used it against Lovelace. Pity she hadn’t put a bit more swing into it, with hindsight. But at least she’d left Lovelace with something to remember her by.

  She grasped the extinguisher double-handed and used it as a battering ram against the door, targeting the area corresponding to the padlocked latch on the other side. The first blow did nothing except jar her painfully. But on the second she felt something crunch in the door’s frame, a giving of its integrity. It was wood and metal, after all. Callow and Lovelace had not installed any additional security measures since they had expected their main door would be sufficient.