Doctor Who: A Big Hand For The Doctor: First Doctor - 50th Anniversary (Doctor Who Digital)

by Colfer, Eoin

  Or plainly put: play dead until they come close.

  The second pirate dropped his hose and checked a computer console with big coloured buttons.

  ‘Ship say beep, Gomb,’ he said, puzzled. ‘What beep mean?’

  What beep mean? Obviously the pirates kept the slower members of their crew on the lower decks. In the case of Igby, probably below decks.

  Gomb clipped the hose nozzle on to a special hook on his belt and hurried to check the screen.

  ‘Special beep!’ he exclaimed. ‘We got Time Lords. Computer say Time Lords. Brains worth many money pieces. Big blobby brains.’

  Even buried under a mound of bodies in an abattoir, the Doctor found a moment to take offence.

  Blobby brain, indeed.

  Gomb squinted at the heaped pile of sleeping bodies. ‘Which one?’

  ‘Lay them out,’ ordered his companion. ‘I tell Cap’n face to face and maybe get grog bottle for we two. You find Time Lords.’

  The Doctor tried to pull his limbs from their entanglement so he would have some chance in a physical struggle, but he was stuck fast, pinned at the bottom of a body pile, his face a metre from Susan’s. Her eyes were open now, and he could see her consciousness return.

  She is frightened, he thought. I cannot allow her to die here.

  But Susan was not dead yet and neither was the Doctor.

  ‘Grandfather,’ she whispered. ‘What can we do?’

  ‘Shhhh,’ said the Doctor gently, wishing he could give her some encouragement, but if anything there was worse to come before things got better, which they probably would not. ‘Dream a while.’

  Pirate Gomb jumped down into the pit, his boots striking the deck with a clang. He sauntered across the closed space doors to where valuable Time Lords were waiting with blobby brains. Gomb sang in a surprisingly pure tenor as he walked, which was about as unexpected as hearing a quantum physics lecture from the mouth of a lemming.

  ‘Grog, grog,

  Swallow it down,

  She cures constipation

  She up-turns yer frown.’

  The Doctor thought that maybe Gomb had composed this classic himself.

  Up-turns?

  Gomb reached the body pile and hauled off two sleeping children, laying them out side by side and straightening their clothes.

  ‘Yer going to meet Cap’n,’ he said. ‘Look yer best for Cap’n and maybe he just drain yer soul ’stead of slicing you up for parts.’

  The pirate returned to the pile and bent towards Susan.

  This was as far as he got because the Doctor had reached up and yanked the release switch on the hose on Gomb’s belt. This was not as precise a plan as the Doctor would have liked, but if he had estimated the hose’s pressure correctly, and providing the pirate’s belt did not break, the result should be advantageous for the prisoners.

  Advantageous was one way of putting it: Gomb had barely a moment to register what was happening when the hose bucked as water pressure ran along it, then lifted Gomb bodily into the air, wrapped its coils around him and sent him spinning down a corridor, out of sight.

  The Doctor knew that he had seconds before their escape attempt was known to everyone on the ship. They were probably under video surveillance right now.

  He crawled out from underneath the sleeping humans and turned to Susan.

  ‘My dear,’ he said, wiping her eyes, ‘are you hurt?’

  ‘No,’ she said, but she was terrified. The Doctor could see it dawn on her what happened here as she stared raptly at the meat hooks swaying from the ceiling.

  ‘Susan, listen to me,’ said the Doctor, taking her face in his hands – well, one hand and a claw. ‘I will get us out, but you need to help me. Do you understand?’

  Susan nodded. ‘Of course, Grandfather. I can help.’

  ‘That’s my girl. Drag the others into the centre of the space gates. Inside the circle.’

  ‘Inside the circle.’

  ‘As quick as you can, Susan. We have mere moments before reinforcements arrive.’

  Susan began her task of pulling the other captives inside the circle. They slid across the slick deck easily enough, even the adult, who was clad in a soldier’s uniform.

  The Doctor’s sodden greatcoat made him feel as though he was wearing a bear, so he shrugged it off and hurried up the steps to the console. The controls were set to Rygerian, which the Doctor could understand well enough, but he switched the language to Earth English and locked the preferences, which might give them another second or two when they needed it.

  The Doctor had always been a finger-and-thumb typist so working with a claw didn’t hinder him too much. He ran a search of the vessel for captives and found none besides his own group. Yesterday’s abductees had already been disposed of, which made the Doctor feel a lot better about the action he had decided to take.

  He circumvented the pirate craft’s basic security codes and quickly reset the anti-grav beam parameters and door controls. Once the computer had accepted his overriding commands, the Doctor set such a complicated password that it would take either ten years or a miracle to get this computer to perform any task more complicated than playing solitaire.

  The pirates did not have ten years, and the universe certainly did not owe them a miracle.

  Susan had managed to gather the prisoners on the circle in the centre of the bay doors. The soldier was attempting to stand and the smallest child, a boy, was being violently ill on his own shoes. The Doctor swept him up in his arms, ignoring the squeals of protest.

  ‘Quickly,’ he said. ‘All together now. You must lay your hands on me.’

  He may as well have been talking to monkeys. These humans were in the middle of a transition from paradise to hell. If they were fortunate, it was possible that their minds would heal, but at the moment it was all they could do to breathe.

  Only Susan had her wits about her. She hugged the Doctor with one arm, the soldier with another and gathered a boy and a girl who might have been twins between her knees.

  ‘Good girl,’ said the Doctor, hoisting the ill boy on to his shoulders. ‘That’s my girl.’ They were all connected now: a circuit.

  ‘Whatever happens, we do not break the circuit!’

  Susan nodded, hugging her grandfather fiercely. ‘I won’t let go.’

  ‘I know you won’t,’ said the Doctor.

  Seconds passed and the Doctor began to fret that he had allowed too long on the timer. The pirates would be upon them at any moment. In fact the approaching ruckus echoing down the corridor suggested that this moment had arrived.

  A dozen or more pirates fell over each other to access the cargo bay, training their weapons on the Doctor and his fellow captives. But they did not fire. Why would they? These prisoners represented a night’s work. By the looks of it they had managed to surprise Gomb, but a jack-in-the-box could surprise Gomb, he was so stupid. And what could the prisoners do now? Outnumbered, surrounded and unarmed? There was nothing for them to do but accept their fate.

  The Captain elbowed his way to the front of the pack. He was a fearsome specimen. Three metres tall with a flat, grey-scaled face, deep-set glittering eyes and a long scar vertically bisecting his face.

  ‘The Time Lord,’ he bellowed, and it sounded as though someone had taught a rhinoceros to talk. ‘Where is the Time Lord?’

  ‘I am here,’ said the Doctor, checking by touch and sight that the band of Earthlings was still connected.

  The Captain’s laugh was uncharacteristically high-pitched for such a large person.

  ‘It is you, Doctor,’ he said, touching the scar on his face. ‘You should not have come back.’

  The Doctor noticed that the Captain wore a shrunken hand on a cord around his neck.

  That is my hand, the fiend!

  ‘I had unfinished business,’ said the Doctor, counting down from five in his head.

  ‘We both have unfinished business,’ said the Captain.

  Generally the Doctor was
not in favour of rejoinders or snappy one-liners but this captain was a vile specimen and so he treated himself to the last word.

  ‘Our business is now finished,’ the Doctor said, and the space doors opened beneath them, dropping the Doctor and his group into the black of night, three thousand metres above the glowing gas-lights of London.

  The Captain was disappointed that he would not get to personally enjoy harvesting the Doctor’s organs, but the fact that the Time Lord would be dead in a matter of seconds cheered him somewhat. There was one little thing that niggled at him, though: if the Doctor had set the space doors to open, what other computer settings could he have fiddled with?

  He barged to the nearest screen and was greeted by complicated unfamiliar text running in ever-decreasing circles.

  ‘Doctor!’ he bellowed. ‘What have you done?’

  As if to answer his question, the anti-grav cannon fired off one short fat squib through the closing space doors. Just one burst that grazed the doors on its way out before they clanged shut.

  Lucky for me, thought the Captain. He did not think lucky for us, as he was a selfish and tyrannical captain who would sell his entire crew to a body farm to buy himself an extra minute of life.

  Because if the anti-grav cannon was ever fired when the space doors were closed it would be the end of the entire ship.

  Again it seemed as though the computer could read his mind as it diverted every spark of energy into the cannon and unloaded it directly at the sealed space doors.

  The Doctor and his party plummeted to Earth, although it felt as though London was rushing upwards to meet them. There was no room in their lives for thought now. Life had been reduced to the most basic of urges: survival. And if they did survive tonight, any of them, then their lives would never be the same. They would have been to the brink, peered into the abyss and lived to speak of it. Only the Doctor maintained something of his faculties, as near-death experiences were more or less his speciality.

  They fell in a ragged bunch, held together by death grips and tangled limbs. Somehow in the middle of the jumbled chaos, the Doctor and Susan came face to face. The Doctor tried to smile, but air rushed between his lips and ballooned his cheeks.

  I cannot even smile for my beautiful granddaughter.

  He saw it coming from the corner of one eye, an orange bloom in the sky above them.

  Physics, don’t fail me now, he thought. Then: Physics cannot fail, but my calculations could be flawed.

  The bloom blossomed and became a bolt, which shot towards them with unerring accuracy, leaving a wake of fairy sparks behind it.

  The Doctor pulled everyone tight, hugging them to him.

  Live or die. This moment decides.

  The anti-grav pulse enveloped the small band, and slowed their descent in a series of jarring hops and sputters. The Doctor found himself floating on his back watching the pirate ship list from the side of a large cloud bank. Eight storeys of wounded metal.

  They deserve this, he told himself. I am saving the lives of children and avenging many more.

  But still he turned away when the anti-grav ray he’d instructed the computer to fire began to eat the ship from the inside, changing the very atomic structure of the craft until its molecules disbanded and became at one with the air.

  Susan hugged him tight and cried on his shoulder.

  They would survive.

  They would all be fine.

  5

  Aldridge was mildly surprised.

  ‘The Doctor defeated a whole crew of Soul Pirates? Single-handed, if you’ll pardon the expression?’

  Susan flicked her nail against something on Aldridge’s work bench that looked very much like a miniature TARDIS.

  ‘Yes, my grandfather took care of them. He coded the ship’s anti-grav beam to his own DNA so the blast from the beam locked on to him and therefore us. Genius, really.’

  Aldridge moved the tiny TARDIS away from Susan’s fingers. ‘There is a giant octo-shark in there and I don’t think he’d be impressed with you flicking his box.’

  ‘An octo-shark, really?’

  ‘For all you know. Please stop touching things.’

  Susan was filling Aldridge in on their adventure while they waited for the Doctor to wake after his operation.

  ‘So we put the children back in their house and left the soldier on guard outside the door. With any luck they will think the whole episode was a dream.’

  ‘The curse is broken,’ said Aldridge. ‘I don’t know why that family didn’t just move. There’s not exactly a shortage of houses in London town, especially for rich folk.’

  Susan began putting rings from a tray on each finger, eventually managing to fit thirty rings on her hands. ‘Tell me, Mr Aldridge. How do you do that trick with your beard bristles?’

  Aldridge bristled, as he usually did when bristle comments were passed.

  ‘The beard trick is a discipline. All you need to do is practise and drink a very diluted glass of poison every night. Now will you please put those rings back on the tray? I’m running a business, you know, not a toy shop.’

  Moaning drifted from the back room followed by a long bout of coughing.

  ‘Where is she?’ said the Doctor’s voice. ‘Susan?’

  Susan quickly stripped off the rings and dumped them in the tray.

  ‘It’s Grandfather. He’s awake.’

  She hurried behind the screen to find the Doctor already sitting up on a soldier’s cot, surrounded by an array of highly sophisticated equipment, which had been disguised as everyday Victorian objects.

  Someone once tried to use what he thought was a commode, Aldridge had told Susan in an attempt to stop her touching things. And had the two sides of his bottom sutured together.

  ‘Here I am, Grandfather,’ said Susan. ‘Everything is fine.’

  The Doctor’s panic disappeared as though blown away by a gust of wind.

  ‘Good, child. Good. I had such dreams under the anaesthetic. Such nightmares. Now I wake to find you beside me and I can hardly remember what those nightmares were.’

  Aldridge appeared around the screen. ‘Such poetry, such effusiveness. It’s enough to make an old surgeon shed a tear.’

  The Doctor scowled. ‘I presume the transplant was a success, Aldridge?’

  ‘That hand will last longer than you, provided you don’t let some pirate slice it off,’ said Aldridge.

  The Doctor held up his left hand, examining it closely. The only sign of surgery was a thick pink line around the wrist.

  ‘It was touch and go there for a while,’ said Aldridge. ‘You nearly regenerated twice.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ said the Doctor, and then: ‘Hmmmmmm.’

  Aldridge elbowed Susan. ‘He does the whole hmmmm routine when he’s looking for faults, but can’t find any.’

  The Doctor sat up, then stood, holding the hand out to Susan for inspection.

  ‘Tell me, Granddaughter. What do you think?’

  Susan pinched his palm and pulled on the fingers one by one.

  ‘Honestly, Grandfather,’ she said. ‘It looks a little big to me.’

  Epilogue

  On that bitter night when the Doctor battled Igby on the rooftop overlooking Hyde Park, a man sat alone on a bench in Kensington Gardens. He was sombre-faced with a high forehead and large kind eyes.

  An author by trade, he’d found some little success in the theatre, but had not yet found the spark of a magical idea that could elevate him to the status of his friend Arthur Conan Doyle.

  The young writer tugged on his moustache, a nervous habit, and looked to the stars for inspiration. What he saw there lasted for the merest blink of an eye and he would often wonder if it had indeed happened or if his imagination had brewed it up to set him on the road to literary immortality.

  What he thought he saw was this:

  Children surrounded by stardust flying into the night.

  Two people fighting on a rooftop.

  One was perhaps a p
irate and the other seemed to have a hook for a hand.

  The writer sat stunned for perhaps half an hour until the cold seeped through the seat of his trousers, then he pulled some scraps of paper from his pocket, chewed the top of his pencil stub, and began to write.

  To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who, eleven ebook short stories will be available to download and collect throughout 2013.

  ELEVEN DOCTORS.

  ELEVEN MONTHS.

  ELEVEN AUTHORS.

  ELEVEN STORIES.

  FIFTY SPECTACULAR YEARS.

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published by Puffin Books 2013

  Text copyright © Artemis Fowl Ltd and BBC Worldwide Limited, 2013

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