by Doctor Who
The young soldier looked nervously up and down the corridor, then nodded reluctantly and let her past.
The Doctor was beckoning.
'Slowly... Slowly... Whoa! Stop!'
The four soldiers who had pushed the TARDIS out of one of Hyperville's few functioning lifts for him nodded, and stomped off, grumbling amongst themselves. The Doctor smiled in satisfaction, patting the battered blue paintwork of the police box.
'Am I interrupting something?' said a familiar voice.
The Doctor looked up the length of the wrecked mall.
Kate Maguire was there, looking immaculate again, arms folded and smiling impishly.
'Oh! Kate. Hello!'
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AUTONOMY
'Wondering where you'd got to.'
'Oh... well... I was just going to...' The Doctor gestured vaguely. 'You know. Slip off. This place is going to be taken apart by UNIT now. They tend to ask all sorts of dull questions, and want reports and things.' He bobbed his head as if weighing it up. 'Not really my scene,' he admitted.
'You won't get out,' said Kate, amused. 'That UNIT
woman - what's she called, Magambo? - she's got all the entrances cordoned off. Nobody leaves without a debriefing, she said to Sir Gerry.'
'Rrrright. Well, I don't do that kind of thing... Oh! Reece and Chantelle! Are they OK?'
'Fine,' said Kate with a smile. They found their mum.
She'd done a runner when the alarms went off. Didn't want to leave, but got swept up in the crowd. Was going spare that she couldn't find them.' Kate frowned. 'Doctor... What about Shaneeqi? Do you think.
The Doctor came to stand over her and looked down as if he knew what she was going to say. 'Do I think what?'
'Do you think there are any more? Or were she and Kendrick the only ones?'
Time will tell,' said the Doctor. 'Not a lot we can do about it. Anyway, with the Nestene Consciousness itself destroyed, there's no central neural pathway to its influence any more. So if there is anyone else... perhaps their autonomy is finally complete.'
'So they might never know.'
'No.'
'Imagine that, though. I mean, your life...you know it's real, don't you? You've lived it. How can it be faked? All those memories. Smells, tastes, things that bring back your
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childhood.' She looked up at him. 'Do you remember your childhood?'
The Doctor looked embarrassed, rubbed his nose. 'Some of it,' he said awkwardly. 'Ah! Now, then. Something to do.'
He fished in his pocket and waggled the HyperCard at her.
'I've got to get this back to your 16-year-old self, so that you can give it to me a few hours ago. If you see what I mean!'
He opened the police box door and popped inside. 'Won't be a minute," he said.
Kate wrinkled her nose. 'But isn't that a—'
The door slammed shut.
A second later there was a great rushing wind, ruffling Kate's clothes and making her take a step backwards. The debris all around rustled and skittered - and with a terrible noise, like the shearing of metal mixed in with the trumpeting of a hundred elephants, the blue box became transparent and faded from view.
Kate blinked.
She rubbed her eyes.
She shrugged, and turned to walk away.
Then, at the edge of her hearing, there was the noise again, as if reaching back through immeasurable distances.
Kate looked back over her shoulder. The rubbish and the fragments of plaster and tattered clothes were whipped up into a whirlpool again. And there, in the mall, just a few metres from where it had disappeared, the police box returned in a bright whirlpool of blue light.
The lamp on the top stopped flashing and the door opened. The Doctor sauntered out, hands in pockets, looking satisfied.
'—time paradox, yes, very probably,' he said, finishing 238
AUTONOMY
Kate's sentence for her. He shrugged. 'I wouldn't worry.
They all sort themselves out in the end."
'Right,' she said. 'Urn... gosh. OK.'
'You're lost for words. I like that. You're not often lost for words. Good to have new experiences, I always think. Well, apart from chilli-and-chocolate crisps. I mean, what were they all about?'
She didn't answer.
'No. OK. Well.' The Doctor cleared his throat awkwardly.
'Anyway, look, I appreciated all your help.'
Kate shrugged, smiled. That's OK. I'm... looking forward to working with you again.'
'Aaah, well...' He nodded towards the open door of his police box. 'I'd normally, um, offer to give you a little trip somewhere. As a kind of thank you. But at the moment, I'm... sort of experimenting with... travelling alone.' He scratched his ear awkwardly, swivelled on one heel and looked at a point just beyond her head. 'Seeing how it works out.' He swallowed uncomfortably. 'You know. Easy come, easy go, and all that.'
Kate nodded. 'Oh, yes, OK. My friend Oliver's doing that.
He's backpacking through Eastern Europe.'
'Rrrrright. I tend to go a bit further afield than that.
Although the Berlin Wall coming down was fun. I did that twice.'
Twice?'
'Yeah, I... um...' He scratched his ear and looked abashed. 'I went back again. So I could be sure I missed David Hasselhoff singing. Anyway. Look. Maybe we'll see each other again.'
Kate shrugged. 'Maybe,' she said with a smile.
'You'll be busy. No doubt. Got plenty of ideas up your sleeve.'
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DOCTOR WHO
She smiled. 'Plenty.'
'Right, well, I'll be off, then.' He stood in the doorway and waved. 'Going. Disappearing.'
And this time, he really did.
The blue door shut behind him and the sound began again. Like some engine from beyond reality, it shuddered and juddered. Its unearthly, trumpeting howl echoed up into the scarred atrium of Hyperville, long after the box itself had vanished.
Kate took her hands away from her ears. Then she sat and waited, perched on a bench, eating an apple.
She waited for an hour, but he didn't come back.
Eventually, a soldier, one of the clean-up team, put a hand on her arm and asked politely if she wouldn't mind moving. As if breaking out of a deep reverie, she nodded.
Kate Maguire straightened herself up, buttoned her jacket and turned and walked away.
Into the future.
On Hyperion Boulevard, they were finishing clearing up.
Soldiers rushed to and fro, their gloved hands picking up debris and putting it into sealed containers for analysis.
The malls rang with shouted instructions, with the clattering of booted feet.
An Auton lay abandoned, its fashionable clothing in rags, its head misshapen. Its arms were splayed out, with the semi-solid plastic stuck to the floor like stringy cheese fondue.
Slowly, weakly, as if using its last residue of power, the Auton's twisted hands began to clench and unclench. Its head lifted up from the floor, stretchy flesh unsticking from the marble floor with a plasticky ripping sound. And then, as if
240
AUTONOMY
the effort was too much, its head flopped back down on to the floor, and its body went limp.
But its eyes still glowed with the dimmest of pink light, like a dying sunset.
241
Acknowledgements
For all the children who have ever watched Doctor Who with me - especially Elinor, Samuel, Laura, Xander, Miranda and Emma.
Thanks to the people who helped to get me into gear and get this book written: Justin Richards, Gary Russell, all at BBC Books, and my agent Caroline Montgomery. Also to Martin Day for sensible words when they were needed, and David Llewellyn for biting humour. As always, many thanks to Rachel for her love and patience.
A respectful nod to the late Robert Holmes, the Auton-Meister -I hope I have done them justice.
And of course, this boo
k could not exist without the imagination and resourcefulness of Russell T Davies, David Tennant and the team who, over the last five years, have brought Doctor Who to a whole new generation.
Allons-y.
243
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