by Gary Russell
‘Stop calling me “Boss”. Why did you tell Globb I was your team’s leader?’
Bernice indicated Globb with her head. ‘He’s apparently some great conman, recently in prison; the turquoise lady is a Spyro weaponista called Kik the Assassin. Yes, that’s really her name, not a description. She’s also rather taken with my son. Hence us getting a bit more information before we all got zapped back here.’
‘I repeat, why did you tell him—’
‘Because,’ Bernice interrupted, ‘I want him to think we’re all on the same side.’ She suddenly adopted a very bad London accent. ‘Doin’ a grift, mate, innit? Know wot I mean, guv?’
The Doctor just stared at her, closed his eyes, took a deep breath, opened them again and looked at her without smiling. ‘I liked you in the twenty-seventh century,’ he said. ‘I feel safe with you in the twenty-seventh century. I don’t go to the twenty-seventh century any more.’
Bernice just beeped his nose. ‘You miss me. Now, tell me how this pyramid is going to blow up the universe.’
‘Oh that’s simple,’ he said, carefully wiping the end of his nose where Bernice had beeped him. ‘The Ancients of the Universe manipulated all of time and space for their own ends, then vanished, leaving their famous Pyramid Eternia to be stayed away from. The youngest time tot on Gallifrey learnt that. Because what you are referring to as a lodestone, what others call the Glamour, or the Stone of Destiny, is an incredibly powerful key. And what do keys do?’
‘Lock things up? Leaving them safe?’
‘Or?’
‘Unlock things. Leaving them unsafe.’
‘Especially if you remove the key. So imagine that, by taking that key away, inch by inch or rather microsecond by microsecond, what you were opening was a portal to all of space and time. When it comes crashing through, it reverberates throughout all of space and time.’
‘And?’
‘And, Professor, as each bit of space and time touches another piece of space and time it wasn’t supposed to touch, they annihilate one another. And in the space of about three heartbeats, past, present and future are nullified. The Big Bang never happened, and yet at the same time it happens in every microsecond like a chain reaction. The universe is, what’s the phrase I was looking for? Oh yes, gone.’
‘Then we need to stop Globb or Jaanson or whoever getting into the pyramid and stealing your key…’ Bernice realised. ‘Which of course we already did, but it wasn’t the real key, it was a temporal echo, and the real key is here and the Pyramid Eternia has come back looking for the key and we need to place the real key in the place of the echo key and stop the universe going bang.’
‘Spot on.’
‘Why here? Why now? I mean what’s so special about the key in 2015?’
The Doctor shrugged. ‘Haven’t the foggiest.’
‘Well then you’re a fat lot of good,’ Bernice said. ‘We need to find someone who does know.’ She looked at Professor Horace Jaanson.
‘If he knew,’ the Doctor said, ‘he’d already have it in his hands. But what Horace Jaanson actually knows about anything can be written on the back of a postage stamp. We need access to the repository of all knowledge.’
‘The Matrix on Gallifrey?’
The Doctor opened his mouth to speak, but didn’t.
Bernice reached out, took his hand. ‘I’m sorry. What did I say?’
‘Gallifrey is…’ The Doctor tried to find the right word. ‘Missing.’
Bernice clearly wanted to ask a thousand questions about that statement but let it go, just squeezed his hand a bit tighter, unsure if she was comforting him or herself at that moment. Bernice was immediately focused, all banter aside as she started making a plan.
‘We need to find out why the Pyramid Eternia has drawn us all here, then. I would assume because the Glamour, key, whatever, is here somewhere and for some reason isn’t here later than this era. I mean, I don’t know how exact pyramids are when traveling through space and time, but my guess would be that it isn’t so much today that’s important as this general period.’
The Doctor nodded. ‘If time is in a state of flux, getting the key back inside the pyramid is urgent but doesn’t have to be done in the next five minutes. That said…every minute we do delay might be doing terrible things to the Web of Time.’
‘The joy being, if it can be said to be a joy, that the universe, and us, won’t be aware of it until the fireworks start. Teeny tiny tweaks and changes the fabric of the universe can deal with.’
She stopped and looked at the Doctor and suddenly they both laughed. ‘This is just like old times, Benny. You and I, facing impossible odds and coming up with more metaphors and synonyms than actual solutions.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I missed it. I missed you. Even this you,’ she said waving her hand towards the man whose mind she knew but whose face was still a stranger.
‘I need to make a phone call,’ the Doctor said. ‘Care to walk with me?’
Bernice leaned back towards her son. ‘Peter, we’ll be back in a few minutes. Don’t let Globb and co out of our sight for a second.’
Peter nodded. ‘I’m all eyes and ears.’
She squeezed his arm. ‘Love you.’
‘Go,’ he said. ‘Now. Or I’ll scream that a strange old woman is professing her weird affection for me.’
Shaking her head, Bernice slipped away after the Doctor. He was tapping his smartphone.
‘Who are you calling?’
The Doctor held up a finger to shush her as he waited for a connection and a beat later, he spoke.
‘It’s me.’ Beat. ‘Well who do you think “me” is?’ Beat. ‘The person who gave you the phone so he could call you and not get messed around.’ Beat. ‘Then he sighed. ‘Putting you on speakerphone.’
He looked at the fascia of the phone, his finger hovering, looking for something to tap. After a ridiculous amount of time and an equally ridiculous lack of movement, Bernice snatched the phone and with two taps, had the speakerphone activated.
She could immediately hear badly piped music and a lot of yelling. That sounded like…the White Rabbit. On Legion. Her home. Well, obviously the bar wasn’t her home but she certainly spent a lot of time in it, mainly because it was run by her good friend Irv—
Then a voice broke her line of thought.
‘Have you done it yet, you ridiculous man? Can I speak yet, yeah?’
Bernice stared open-mouthed, shot the Doctor a look then stared at the phone.
‘Keri? Ker’a’nol? What the hell are you doing on Legion?’
‘Who the hell is – oh. Oh, Benny, is that you, yeah?’
‘Of course it’s me, who else is stupid enough to get stuck on primitive Earth with him?’
‘Was it you? The postcards? All that stuff that dragged me here? To this dead-end part of the universe?’
‘Yeah. Well no. Well, sort of. It was future-me.’
‘Well, next time you see future-you, slap her for me. In the meantime, when I next see you-you, I’m slapping you in case I don’t get a chance to slap future-you.’
‘Why. Are. You. There?’
‘I. Don’t. Know. You dragged me here.’
‘Why did I do that? Rather, why will I do that?’
‘I. Don’t. Know! How many times do I have to say that? Where’s the Doctor?’
‘I’m here.’ The Doctor leaned towards the phone, trying to take it from Bernice’s hand, but she kept moving away, because she wasn’t going to let go.
‘And how is he calling you in the twenty-seventh century from here in the twenty-first?’
‘Is that where you are? Oh, how exciting.’
‘It’s not exciting, it’s alarming.’
‘I thought you liked the twenty-first century,’ the Doctor said.
Bernice shot him a look. ‘I love it. Just not when it and the whole universe is in danger of becoming part of the Big Bang generation, permanently!’
‘I thought you loved it, too,
’ Keri said. ‘So what are you calling me for, Benny? Other than to apologise for all this, I hope.’
Bernice wasn’t sure whether to throw the phone away. Instead she opted to pass it back to him, muttering, ‘So, Keri gets one of your universal roaming phones. I travelled with you in the TARDIS for ages. I introduced you to Keri. I made sure your friends stopped wanting to shoot you. Do I get a phone?’
‘No,’ Keri interrupted, ‘I got it instead.’
‘He has more than one phone,’ Bernice snapped. ‘And lots of people he gives them to. Except me, it seems.’
‘Moving on,’ the Doctor said, finally able to prise the phone from Bernice’s hand, ‘Keri, I need you to spring into action.’
‘What do you need?’
‘Everything you can find out about the world known as Aztec Moon and a man called Horace Jaanson who I recall being an expert on the Pyramid Eternia – which was the photo I sent you, by the way.’
‘Narrow the field, Doctor, those are very big fields.’
‘The key, then. Try, Glamour. Rock of Ages. Stone of Destiny. Lodestone. Anything.’
‘All right, all right,’ snapped Keri. ‘God, Benny, this one’s more impatient than any of the others, yeah?’
‘And grumpier.’
‘I noticed that,’ Keri agreed.
‘The universe is about to end, and you’re nattering rather than researching,’ the Doctor said. ‘I’m entitled to be grumpy.’
‘Yeah but don’t take it out on us,’ Keri said. ‘Benny has got her work cut out trying to stop you annoying and insulting people.’
‘Yeah,’ Benny echoed. ‘And Keri has her work cut out trying to do this research while you’re nagging at her.’
The Doctor sighed. ‘One minute you’re at one another’s throats…’
‘OK,’ Keri said. ‘So all that I can find here is that at some point in the future – this phone’s GalWiki search function is truly multidimensional, that’s cool. Can I keep it, Doctor, yeah?’
‘Focus.’
‘Oh right, yeah. So in the future, as far as I can tell, somewhere around 5064, the world called Aztec Moon explodes for unknown reasons. The Pyramid Eternia is assumed lost for ever, but some kind of causal nexus opens up and huge shards of the planet vanish into it and no one knows where they went because even by then, the average schmuck doesn’t have access to space-time vortexes. End of.’
‘OK,’ Bernice said. ‘So that ties into what we already guessed. So let’s make an assumption here, because that’s pretty much all we have time for. This causal nexus thing shoots rocks at Earth, including the Glamour, its lodestone. It lands here somewhere, in 2015 and that’s why the Pyramid Eternia is here – it wasn’t destroyed on Aztec Moon, it came here.’
‘All good,’ Keri said, ‘except there are absolutely no reports of anything as major as that hitting Earth in 2015.’
‘I could have told you that,’ the Doctor said. ‘We’d know about it historically. Truth is, 2015 is a pretty uninteresting year, universally speaking.’
Bernice nodded. ‘OK, so it didn’t arrive here, it arrived in the past.’
‘Or the future, yeah?’ Keri suggested.
‘If it was in the future, the Pyramid Eternia would have dragged us to there. I reckon it has to be in the past.’
The Doctor thought about this. ‘Earth isn’t exactly free from meteor showers over its history – most go unrecorded.’
Bernice nodded. ‘Can’t be Tunguska – you and I both know what that was about.’
‘Possibly Qingyang,’ the Doctor said. He clicked his fingers. ‘Murchison, that was in Australia!’
‘Too recent,’ Keri reported over the phone. ‘We know what came from that, it’s well reported. Oh, hang on, yeah.’
‘Well?’
‘Patience. Grumpy and impatient. I liked the other one with a Scots accent far better,’ Keri said.
‘I still do,’ said Bernice. ‘In fact, just the other week I said to h—’ And she stopped. ‘No, never mind.’
The Doctor took another one of those deep breaths he was taking a lot of recently and tried to get everyone back on topic.
‘You said it’s known as the Glamour, right?’ asked Keri.
‘Yeah,’ said Bernice, before getting a stern look from the Doctor.
‘Why?’ he asked.
‘Explorer in Australia, about a hundred years back, found something he referred to as the Glamour.’
‘We could go back in time and grab it before he does,’ Bernice suggested, but the Doctor shook his head.
‘No, that’ll just cause another temporal echo. We have to know where to find it here.’
‘We don’t actually know what we’re looking for,’ Bernice reminded him. ‘I mean I have a chip of it and saw it in a blurry time eddy kind of thing, but put me in a room of moon rocks and I can’t guarantee I could pick it out.’
‘There’s another problem,’ Keri said quietly. ‘The reference just vanished from GalWiki.’
‘What does that mean?’ Bernice asked.
‘It means,’ the Doctor said seriously, ‘that time has already started changing.’ He leaned in closer to the hone. ‘Keri, I need you to tell me whatever you can find about this explorer, who he was and what connections he has to 2015. Benny and I will have to nip back and make sure he does what history needs him to, if you can recall what GalWiki said before it changed.’
‘And if we don’t?’
The Doctor grimaced. ‘Then the destruction of the universe will take a massive step closer to now because time is already unravelling. That Pyramid is going to take the universe out like you blowing out a candle. Very, very soon.’
—
Peter Summerfield was looking for his mother, trying not to draw Jaanson or Globb’s attention whilst he did so, hoping that they were still swept up by the sight of the Pyramid Eternia standing exactly where it shouldn’t be. There was also the possibility they were taken in a bit by just how nice Sydney looked in the sunshine. He was, and wished he could get his hoodie off, but suspected the humans of 2015 weren’t quite ready for his appearance.
‘Where is she?’
Peter swung around.
Kik the Assassin was standing there, ignoring the looks of the locals who really weren’t that used to turquoise humans. Maybe they thought she was part of whatever exhibition / film premiere most people were putting this event down to.
‘Who? Ruth – probably inside, trying to stop Jack accidentally breaking things. He does that a lot.’
‘Your mother, puplet. Where is she and her leader, Doc?’
Resisting the urge to point out how much his mum would not have appreciated that delineation, he just shrugged. ‘She was here a second ago. Maybe they went to the back of the building for a better look?’
Kik the Assassin smiled. ‘You are a good liar, Peter. A good soldier, too. In another life, we could be coupled, mate and have amazing offspring. We should do that when this is over.’
Peter smiled. ‘You’re not my type, lady – and I think I’d be pretty disappointing as a result.’
Kik the Assassin nodded. ‘How parochial and typically human.’ She turned and walked away.
Which troubled Peter. Why was she no longer wondering where his mum and the Doctor had got to? It meant either she was playing some other game, or she already knew. And that meant Kik the Assassin knew more than Peter did, which was more troubling.
One of the advantages that Peter had over other teenagers was that his Killoran heritage meant that, like most canine species, his hearing was very good, way better than an average human’s. So when the TARDIS dematerialisation sound occurred, he heard it.
He sighed. More covering up to do while the Doctor took his mum to God knows where…
8
All She Wants Is
It was 22 December 1934, and Tomas G. Schneidter was not having a great day. Truth was, he wasn’t even having a good one.
For a start, it was raining. All the t
ime he had spent aboard the ship that had brought him here, all he heard from the British and Americans aboard was ‘Oh, you’re gonna love Australia, it’s sunshine all the way’ and ‘I say, Australia’s a jolly marvellous place, awfully warm and green. One can never understand why, when Captain Cook arrived, he didn’t just send the convicts back to small, dirty, cold Britain and move the upper classes to Australia instead, what?’ But no one had pointed out that when it rains in New South Wales, it really rains. And in the famous Blue Mountains, the rain runs down into all the gullies and valleys, turning everything into quite a mess of mud and sludge with very little cover. The trees seemed to have evolved leaves that, rather than keeping the rain off you, actually bent down at an angle guaranteed to ensure the water poured down the back of your collar.
The other reason his day wasn’t turning out the way he had anticipated was the presence of his wife. He loved his wife. Absolutely. No, really, he did. After all, she was charming, attractive, witty, elegant and above all incredibly rich. Which was great for parties, fundraising events and getting into the best restaurants in Dachau and Munich.
She was also demanding, spoiled, and utterly useless on a fact-finding expedition into untamed terrain. If she talked about complaining to her father just once more, Tomas knew he’d snap and send her packing back to him. Probably in a crate. Nailed down. With a note to have it stored in the deepest archives of the Pinakothek as an example of Aboriginal artwork, not to be opened until he returned. Which, if he had any sense, wouldn’t be for another few years.
Rain or nagging?
Poverty or Papi’s money?
Tomas wasn’t proud of this, but the old Graf Feldner’s money went a long way, so Roderika had to be tolerated.
Her didn’t love her that much, after all. And he was pretty certain the (lack of) feeling was reciprocated.
Certainly today they were.
She had moaned at two of their workers for not covering her hair, and shouted at their long-suffering Diener for not supplying her with sensible footwear (the poor man had actually tried that morning but she had been adamant that going out in flat soles was unbecoming of a lady). Now she had a broken heel, her feet were caked in dirt and her hair was no longer fashionably up, but hanging damply down her shoulders and covering one eye. In any other situation, Tomas might have found this funny, but he had learned not to laugh at his wife’s misfortunes.
