by Doctor Who
‘Justicia is not run by monsters, Doctor,’ said Flowers. ‘If anything, the monsters are kept inside. Murderers, rapists, pushers. . . ’
20
The Doctor looked right into her eyes. ‘If anything happens to my friend, Flowers. . . ’ He shook his head a fraction. ‘Then I’ll show you a monster.’
Rose turned, back pressed flat up against the door, glared in defiance at the girls as they advanced murderously.
Then the door whooshed open behind her and she fell backwards into whoever was waiting on the other side. It was a boy. He gasped as he caught her, then set her back on her feet.
‘All right, pack it in, Kazta,’ he said. ‘If New Girl shows up in hospital instead of the blockhouse for check-in, it’s me who’ll get it in the neck.’
‘We can arrange that right now, Block-walker,’ said Kazta, cupping her ear and wincing. The girl behind her was still holding her sharpened piece of steel.
‘Oh, shut it, can’t you? I’m supposed to be the one with the testos-terone.’ Supposed was right, thought Rose – macho was not the word for him. He was about her age, gangly, with a beaky nose. His ash-blond hair flopped down to his eyebrows, as if someone had put a basin on his head and cut around it. ‘Just call it a night and get back to your cells.’
‘Blanc said it was OK, Dennel,’ one of the girls whined. ‘She wanted the new girl roughed up.’
‘I don’t care, Maggi,’ he said. ‘Blanc or no Blanc, ‘Just clear out now and I’ll keep quiet. No demerits.’
Kazta sneered at him. ‘Can be a dangerous job, block-walking,’ she said. ‘On patrol, on your own. . . ’
Dennel wasn’t impressed. ‘You’re getting fat, Kazta. Jog back to your cell, yeah? Be good for you.’
Rose breathed out shakily as the girls walked past him and out. But the second they’d gone, Blanc and Norris appeared in the mouth of the plastic tunnel.
‘Fake it,’ Dennel hissed.
Immediately, Rose leaned on him heavily, lowered her head so her mussed-up hair hid her face.
21
‘Found our new arrival here, Warder Blanc,’ Dennel reported stiffly.
‘She’s been beat up pretty bad.’
‘You’re designated block-walker, Dennel,’ said Blanc. ‘It’s your job to stop stuff like this happening. You’re getting ten demerits for this. Ten more and you can kiss your little suck-up job goodbye and go back to sharing a cell all night.’
Norris smiled. ‘And when a block-walker gets bumped back down to regular stir, he finds he don’t got too many friends.’
‘I’m sorry, warders. Thank you.’
‘Just remember, I can get you bunked up with anyone I choose,’ said Blanc. ‘And I can turn extremely deaf and blind when I need to.’
‘Must be a good thing if you have to work with Norris,’ Rose murmured.
‘What’s that?’ said Norris sharply.
Rose produced a piteous groan from the back of her throat.
‘Just remember, girl,’ said Blanc, ‘this kind of thing can happen to you at any time. You want to be very nice to me, Rose.’
Rose nodded, her face still hidden by her curtain of hair.
‘Get her out of my sight.’
Dennel helped steer Rose through the door and hurried her along a bland corridor painted in putrid pastel shades. Their shoes kicked up a shabby echo on the tiled floor.
‘All right,’ he whispered. ‘they’re not following.’
Rose straightened her back and shook her hair out of her face.
‘Thanks for turning up when you did.’
He grinned at her, showing crooked teeth. ‘I had to – I’m a block-walker, supposed to keep an eye on stuff. Saw Kazta’s cell door was ajar, and I know Blanc likes springing these little welcome parties when we get someone new. Knocks any fight out of them from the start.’
‘Charming,’ said Rose.
They came up against a heavy metal door. Dennel waved a wristband at it and it ground slowly open – to reveal an identical corridor beyond.
22
You’re in prison, she told herself, with an uneasy feeling of fear and shame. Mum always said it would be Mickey who’d end up inside, not me. It didn’t seem real, somehow. And the dowdy surroundings certainly didn’t seem to fit with the high-tech spaceships and laser guns she’d seen.
‘This’ll sound weird, Dennel. . . but what year is this?’
He grinned again. ‘How long were you on that transit shuttle exactly? Time crawls on Justicia, but. . . ’
‘Please?’
‘I know it looks, like, medieval in here, but it’s all part of the experiment.’
‘Experiment?’
‘We may be banged up like it’s 1985. . . but it’s 2501.’
Five hundred years out of time, she thought miserably.
‘They’re seeing if the old-fashioned ways are worth going back to.
You know, just locking people up, no implants or limiters. . . ’ He smiled. ‘You’re looking at me like I’m crazy. What you got, amne-sia? I mean, I hear some funny stuff walking the blocks, but you –’
‘Wait a sec.’ She looked at him uncertainly. ‘Is a block-walker, like,
“prison warder lite”? Does that make you some kind of a collaborator, in with the authorities?’
She said it hopefully, thinking he might have some influence where it mattered – but clearly he thought she was accusing him.
‘You saw the way Blanc laid into me,’ he protested. ‘I’m no screw.
Block-walker’s a new post, part of the Governor’s centenary shake-up.
I’m meant to wander round, making sure everything’s quiet, no one’s doing stuff they shouldn’t. But I find I’m sort of like a Samaritan, to the younger kids especially. If they can’t sleep, if they got problems, they can talk to me through their doors.’
Rose smiled back. ‘Well, you really played Samaritan for me. Sorry you got into trouble for it.’
He shrugged. ‘Next time Blanc busts my butt, you can help me, right? Now we’d better get you a uniform.’ He pulled at his grey coveralls without enthusiasm. ‘It’ll help you blend in.’
23
Rose looked down at the handprint on her sleeve with a twinge of anxiety. ‘I’m not planning on sticking round long enough to blend in, Dennel,’ she said. ‘I’m only here by mistake, and I’ve got to get back to someone. I need to see the Governor, as soon as possible, and sort this mess out. Can you help me?’
‘Governor always gives new arrivals an interview,’ said Dennel cautiously. ‘Ahead of Inquiry and Appeals getting round to you. That’s when he tells you how long you’ve got to serve.’
‘He decides? He wasn’t even there!’
‘Most penalties are fixed around here. Automatic.’ He looked un-happy. ‘I guess I should tell you, Rose. Everyone who comes here, they all of them say they ain’t sticking round. You know, they got friends, they got appeals coming through. . . I was just the same. Juvenile, special circumstances, sob story. . . Thought I’d walk it.’
‘And how long have you been here?’
‘Since I was thirteen,’ he said. ‘Seven years.’
She stared at him. ‘They locked you up all that time? Why?’
‘Minor charge.’ It was all he would say.
‘Well, how long till you get out?’
‘I’m doing good now, see? I’m a block-walker. Responsible.’ He chewed his lip. ‘So, maybe another ten years.’
Rose couldn’t believe it. ‘Ten years,’ she murmured.
‘It’s Justicia, Rose,’ he said, as if this explained everything. ‘Reckon you’ve got a lot to learn.’ They came to another heavy door, and he did the business with the wristband again. ‘But don’t worry. I know the way it works round here, don’t I?’ He looked at her shyly. ‘I can help you out.’
Rose winced as the door slammed shut behind them. If Dennel had got seventeen years for a minor charge. . .
‘I hope to God someone can,’
she said.
24
Rose wondered if the night would ever end. Dennel stayed with her as long as he dared. Then he left her in a holding room to be ‘processed’. She’d waited for hours, too scared to sleep in case Kazta or her cronies crept in to scalp her or worse. For comfort she’d thought about Mum, and the Doctor. About the adventures they’d shared. They’d come through worse than this and still walked away smiling.
And he’d promised he’d get to her. Promised.
Finally a bored, officious woman had come in. Rose found herself stripped, searched, showered and called every name under the sun.
Then her clothes and belongings were taken away – earrings, lippy, everything – and she was given the promised saggy grey uniform to wear. It was made of some disgusting fake fabric and felt icky against her skin. She’d stared at herself in a grimy mirror, wet-haired and blotchy-eyed. She looked like death.
A warder – not Blanc or Norris, thank God – had taken her to a cell. Someone else was already there, a girl, half buried under musty blankets, muttering about being disturbed. Warily, Rose had stood there in the middle of the little room, looking around by the warder’s 25
torchlight – a narrow bed, a cracked sink with a dripping tap, a cabinet with no doors and precious little inside. Then the warder left and she had to find her way to this strange bed in the dark.
Still dressed in her nasty new uniform, she lay there on the lumpy mattress, fingers bunching up the threadbare blankets, straining to hear any sound in the darkness, afraid that her unknown roommate might try something to harm her.
Half hoping and half afraid that sleep would finally end all this hurt for a while.
The Doctor walked out with Flowers into what seemed to be a massive underground tunnel. It was wide as a motorway and tall as a church.
Large steel pillars lined the walls, pinning up the long black shadow of the roof high above them.
Flowers saw him staring around. ‘We have a few biggies staying here. When they’re queuing up for the canteen we need plenty of room.’
‘You make it sound like a jolly little space camp.’ He went on looking all around him, hoping to spot some clue to a means of getting out of here.
‘If you can think of it that way, time will go a lot faster, believe me.’
‘You’re not a typical warder, I’ll give you that.’
‘I just don’t think things should be needlessly painful,’ said Flowers.
‘Life’s too. . . ’ She paused, pushed her pink glasses back up her nose and smiled as if to force a brighter mood into the space between them.
‘Look, we’re very well equipped here.’
‘Good. I need a shovel, a bucket and a vaulting horse, so I can hide mud and rock and stuff.’ He grinned, leaned in confidentially. ‘You know, for my tunnel.’
‘I’ve told you, Doctor, no one escapes.’
‘What’s to stop me legging it right now?’
‘We’re a long way from Justicia’s suns, Doctor. The planet’s surface is uninhabitable, and the SCAT-house is buried deep underground.
It’s hard enough for the staff to get in and out, believe me.’ Flowers sighed softly. ‘Incredibly hard.’
26
‘You could be lying. We could be inside one of those pyramids I saw being built. My ship could be just outside, a hop, skip and a jump away.’
‘Your ship, yes. . . ’ Flowers consulted her clipboard again. ‘Can’t be entered. Can’t be moved.’
‘Local gravity disturbance. Dragged us down. I put the handbrake on so we wouldn’t go anywhere else in a hurry.’ He smiled. ‘You want to see inside? Fine. Take me there.’
‘If you are inside a pyramid, it could be just outside,’ said Flowers casually. ‘Why not find out?’
‘What, try to escape?’ The Doctor rubbed his hands together and started back up the corridor. ‘OK, well, this door looks interesting. . . ’
Even as he made for it, from out of the shadows of the high tunnel roof there swooped a flock of grey globules. Each was about the size of a football. They stuck all over him like enormous sticky buds. He found he couldn’t move.
‘Most areas are out of bounds,’ Flowers called to him. ‘The globs keep a careful watch. If you’ve taken a wrong turning, you’ll soon know about it.’
The Doctor glared at the globs, which up close looked like enormous wads of chewing gum, flexing in and out of shape as if invisible mouths were chewing on them still. Slowly, one by one, the globs floated away like bizarre balloons, vanishing into the blackness.
‘They’re quick,’ said the Doctor. ‘Fast as thought. Are they using my implant?’
She nodded, setting off down the corridor again. ‘The same thing will happen if you display antisocial behaviour to anyone in the SCAT-house.’
‘What if someone has a pop at me? Same story?’
‘Exactly. Means we’re not overrun with warders, I don’t have to play the heavy the whole time and we can all just get on and use our time wisely. Speaking of which. . . ’
He puffed out his cheeks. ‘Go on then. What’re you doing here?
What are you going to make my life’s work?’
27
‘There’s a choice,’ she said brightly. ‘For one thing, we’re close to a breakthrough on a device that can suppress and confine solar flares.’
‘What for?’
‘So worlds close to stars can be terraformed. So space traffic can pass far closer to suns.’
He pulled a face. ‘Not really me. I don’t tan well.’
‘OK,’ sighed Flowers. ‘What about hydroponics – growing and developing plants without soil?’
He waggled his fingers at her. ‘Do these look green to you?’
‘Never mind. Consul Issabel’s shut down those experiments for the time being, anyway.’
‘Who’s she? The big cheese?’
‘She controls the SCAT-house, yes. Now, what about gravity acceleration? Know much about that?’
‘Not masses,’ he said. They turned a corner into an area marked DORM BLOCK. ‘What’s the point in speeding up gravity, anyway?’
‘With super-accelerated gravity, we hope to be able to bend time and space, distort distance so that journeys into deepspace become possible.’ This was clearly her thing; she had become suddenly animated. ‘My team have experienced many setbacks, but I’m sure we’re close to a breakthrough. Then humans can finally make the next leap beyond, crossing to other galaxies.’
He shook his head, grimaced. ‘I dunno. I usually save planets, rescue millions of people, that sort of thing. I’d be wasted in a workshop.’
‘If you opt out, then you’ll sit in the communal drop-out chamber and sulk till you rot – with no privileges.’ She sighed. ‘Still, it’s only your first day. You’ve got over 9,000 to go. I’m sure I’ll tempt you with something in time.’
Flowers stopped outside a metal door built into the wall, and slotted a white card into an entry coder. The Doctor recoiled as the door slid open and released a waft of horrid air. It was like a giant with rotten teeth exhaling in his face.
He recognised the smell and looked sharply at Flowers. ‘What’s this?’
‘Temporary accommodation.’
28
‘What’s going on?’ came a guttural alien voice from through the doorway. ‘I just started my rest shift! How about a little peace?’
The Doctor blinked as a towering creature almost three metres tall lumbered into view. It was naked, with sagging, waxy skin the colour of stuff that gets stuck in plugholes. The creature’s long arms ended in giant three-fingered claws that almost scraped the floor. Its face was that of a bloated baby, smooth and curious with big round eyes the colour of jet and a slavering hole for a mouth.
The Doctor had met creatures like this before. He had fought them to the death.
They called themselves Slitheen.
Flowers smiled up at the towering creature. ‘Hello, Dram Fel Fotch.
So
rry for the lack of notice, but this is your new cellmate.’
‘Cellmate?’ The Doctor smiled tightly at the massive creature looming over him, then turned back to Flowers. ‘I’m not normally fussy where I doss, but. . . ’
‘Cells are made to order here,’ she told him. ‘When we have a full house, we have to tunnel out further into the rock.’
‘This is an imposition,’ said the creature wearily.
‘You’re telling me.’ The Doctor stared up at it. ‘You’re from the planet Raxacoricofallapatorius, right?’
Dram Fel Fotch shook his head. ‘My ancestors were born there. But I have never seen my homeworld.’
‘Nor have I.’ The Doctor shrugged. ‘Just heard of it. I’ve met some of your people before. Long time ago, as the crow flies. Family by the name of Slitheen.’
‘Slitheen?’ The creature’s head bobbed forwards and it sniffed the Doctor as if he was a suspect puddle in a room ‘Just vacated by a dog.
‘ Slitheen?’
‘ We are Slitheen,’ came a deeper, rumbling voice behind the Doctor.
Another of the creatures was looming over him, the twisted fingers of its great claws clacking together over the Doctor’s shoulders. ‘I am Ecktosca Fel Fotch Heppen-Bar Slitheen. Dram Fel Fotch is my brother.’
29
‘Is that right?’ The Doctor took and shook one of the claws. ‘Well, good to meet you.’
‘Looks like you guys practically know each other already,’ Flowers declared.
‘Oh, I don’t know. Are you lot ruthless, lying killers like your ancestors?’
Ecktosca and Dram narrowed their eyes at him.
‘You’re perfectly safe, Doctor,’ said Flowers awkwardly. ‘The globs restrain any and all antisocial behaviour, remember? Now, I’ll arrange for a bed to be placed in here. Shouldn’t be for long. Make him feel at home, boys.’
Flowers walked away, and the Doctor was left alone in the huge, misshapen shadows of the Slitheen. Their soggy, sticky faces pushed up close to his.
‘So,’ said the Doctor brightly. ‘Who wants top bunk?’
30
