Deep Time

by Trevor Baxendale

  ‘Hey! We’ve found somethin’!’

  Mitch Keller’s voice overrode the private channel, and everybody heard the cry at once and quickened their pace to catch up.

  Hobbo was on one knee, studying the lights flashing on her suit’s wrist panel. ‘It’s definitely the captain’s suit,’ she said. ‘Transponder signal’s the clearest yet. We’re right on top of him.’

  Jem got down and started to dig into the snow with shaking hands. Tibby joined her, and soon Mitch and Clara were helping as well. They worked feverishly, scraping away at the snow until they had cleared a ditch half a metre deep. The further down they went the more compact the snow became. Clara began to feel the intense cold through her gloves at last.

  But there was no sign of Dan Laker.

  Exhausted, Tibby and Clara sat back, panting and dejected. ‘He’s buried too deep,’ said Clara.

  ‘Oh, this is stupid and pointless!’ cried Marco angrily. He turned and kicked at the snow, sending lumps of it exploding through the air. ‘We’re all going to die here and—’

  ‘Wait,’ said Jem. She was the only one still digging, scraping away at the bottom of the ditch like a dog looking for a bone. ‘He’s here.’

  Jem cleared away a patch of snow to reveal a flash of blue. She worked until there was more blue visible, the clear metallic blue of the Alexandria spacesuits and the helmet tag which said ‘LAKER’, and then they all fell to their knees and worked with Jem until they had dug the body free of its deep white grave.

  Clara had worried that Laker might have been crushed in the wreckage of the ship but the suit had done its job well and survived intact. The little beacon on the wrist panel gently pulsed, the slow and steady heartbeat of death.

  ‘The suit’s still sealed,’ reported Hobbo, checking the display. ‘No loss of integrity.’

  Jem’s voice was small but clear in everyone’s helmet: ‘Could he still be…?’

  Laker’s own helmet was masked with a layer of frost. Mitch Keller leaned forward and scraped at the curved surface, scratching through the crystallised glaze until the clear transparency of the chain glass was revealed. Seconds later they could see into Laker’s helmet, and Jem’s hand flew to her mouth.

  Brittle strands of hair clung to shrivelled skin. The eyes were dry and sunken, with a ragged hole beneath them where the nose should have been and dark, crumbling teeth exposed between withered lips.

  It was the face of a thousand-year-old corpse.

  Chapter

  12

  Clara was reminded of an Egyptian mummy she had once seen on a museum visit. Laker had the same stiff, papery look, but this was worse because she had known this man as a living person and she could still see a grim likeness in the desiccated features that remained. The sight also brought back discomforting memories of a trip on the Orient Express, and a different kind of mummy that was anything but dead.

  Jem remained kneeling, completely silent, unable to tear her gaze away from the corpse.

  Mitch Keller climbed slowly to his feet, weighed down with sadness. Hobbo stood up as well, and turned away. Tibby Vent looked as though she wanted to be sick; her face was nearly as pale as Jem’s.

  ‘What’s happened to him?’ asked Clara.

  ‘He must have been caught on the very edge of the time flux,’ said the Doctor. ‘It looks as though his suit might have been all right but the organic contents have been aged to death – and beyond.’

  Clara felt a sudden flash of irritation. ‘Organic contents?’

  ‘That was a human being,’ said Tanya Flexx quietly. ‘A person.’

  ‘And as such he was made of organic matter,’ the Doctor said. ‘The result is the same.’

  Tanya simply turned and walked away. Clara felt tears stinging in her eyes. She fiddled with the controls on her wrist and selected the private channel to speak to the Doctor. ‘I thought maybe…’ she started to say, but then choked a little. ‘I hoped that somehow…’

  ‘He was dead the moment he went over the cliff, Clara,’ the Doctor said softly.

  She sniffed. ‘Why are you being so cold? I know you’re not human, but…’

  ‘We’re running out of time, Clara. Our oxygen levels are getting dangerously low. We need to get to the TARDIS, and this is just slowing us down.’

  Clara turned to look at him, but his face was a cold mask, his eyes hard and distant. He could be like that, sometimes. ‘They’re grieving,’ she said.

  ‘Are you grieving?’

  ‘I’m upset. He was a good man, a decent man, and he didn’t deserve this. Nor did Jem.’

  ‘And yet it still happened. The universe has no respect for people or relationships, Clara. You of all people should know that.’

  ‘It doesn’t mean we have to stop caring. Or is that what you’ve done now? Stopped caring?’

  The Doctor’s eyes focused on Clara’s. There was a dark, timeless fatigue in them sometimes that she only glimpsed occasionally. For most of the time he kept it hidden, but now she could see it all: two thousand years of lost friends and loved ones. ‘No, I’ve not stopped caring. I never stop caring. But right now I have to care for the living, Clara. We have to carry on without Laker if we’re not going to end up joining him.’

  Mitch walked around the body and put a hand on Jem’s shoulder. ‘We’ll bury him.’

  ‘What about the suit?’ asked Hobbo. ‘It’s still functional.’

  ‘It’s what kept him like he is,’ the Doctor said. ‘Without it he would probably turn to dust.’

  They all thought about this for a moment but no one offered any further suggestions.

  ‘Jem?’ said Mitch eventually.

  ‘I can’t leave him like this,’ Jem replied. ‘It’s just…horrible.’

  ‘Whatever you do, it must be soon,’ said the Doctor. ‘We’re getting low on oxygen, and we don’t know how much longer it will take to find the TARDIS. There’s also the possibility of another time flux. It could happen again at any moment.’

  Mitch shook his head. ‘I don’t care. I ain’t leavin’ Dan like this. We have to bury him.’

  ‘Switch off the suit first.’ This was from Jem. She still hadn’t moved, she still had one hand resting on Laker’s space helmet.

  After a pause, Mitch asked, ‘Who’s gonna do that?’

  ‘I will,’ said Marco Spritt. It was the first time he’d spoken since they had discovered Laker’s body, and he said it with such conviction that it was clear he was impatient to move on.

  Mitch looked fiercely at Marco and balled his fists, but Jem shook her head. ‘No. It should be me.’

  She leaned over Laker’s body, touching the spacesuit and helmet lovingly. It was as close to him as she could get now. She bent low and whispered her farewells. ‘My pilot, my captain. I love you.’

  In silence, she felt for the suit’s control panel and slowly, deliberately went through the sequence that would deactivate the life-support system. Alarm indicators flashed brilliantly but she ignored them. Clara had to look away. The suit slowly powered down and the lights blinked off one by one. Eventually the illumination in the helmet faded.

  ‘I thought you said he’d turn to dust,’ Clara said on her private channel to the Doctor.

  ‘Not immediately. But switching off the life support will speed up the process.’

  They buried Laker’s body in the snow. In some ways it felt like they were just putting him back where they’d found him, but this time they had all – Jem especially – been able to say a proper goodbye.

  ‘It probably falls to me to say a few words now,’ said Balfour. He took a deep breath. ‘The truth is, I don’t know what to say. This started out as an adventure…only now it feels more like a nightmare. Dan Laker was a good man, maybe even the best of us. He’s been taken too soon – not just from us, and Jem, but from the universe. May his soul rest in peace.’

  They stood in a circle around the icy grave for a few more minutes before they each agreed it was time to move on.
A brisk wind had come up from across the wastes, the cold breath of the approaching storm, bringing the first squalls of the blizzard with it. Soon the place where Dan Laker had been buried would be invisible again.

  —

  ‘I think I’ve got a signal from the TARDIS,’ said the Doctor. He’d raised his voice because the wind was howling now, but Clara could hear him clearly over the radio link. The sky above them was dark with cloud and the blizzard was building up. She wiped her helmet visor for the umpteenth time so that she could see the Doctor properly. He was holding his sonic screwdriver up in front of his face, peering at it closely, tilting it this way and that. The light pulsed green, and Clara could hear the faint bleeping noise through her audio pick-up. ‘It’s weak, but it’s definitely there,’ the Doctor added. He couldn’t keep the excitement out of his voice and he quickened his pace through the snow. ‘It’s the TARDIS!’

  Clara stomped through the blizzard after him. If she let him get too far ahead, she wouldn’t be able to see him at all. Her boots were covered in thick clumps of snow and she was getting tired. Her mouth was parched. She checked her oxygen level every few minutes. It was bad enough measuring out your remaining life as a matter of hours; worse still when you had an actual countdown on your wrist.

  ‘I can’t see anything,’ she said. Her voice came out in a ragged pant.

  ‘I’ve extended the screwdriver’s scanning capability to beyond spatial coordinates,’ the Doctor said.

  ‘Do I really want to know what that means?’

  ‘It means the TARDIS could well be around here somewhere,’ the Doctor said, turning in a circle as he walked, ‘but in another time period.’

  ‘Awkward, then.’

  The Doctor came to a halt, checked the screwdriver again, and then stood with his legs apart and his hands on his hips. The snow flurried around him. ‘Well, here we are.’

  The rest of the party caught up after a minute or two. Jem, Tibby and Balfour, with Mitch, Hobbo, Tanya and Marco bringing up the rear. None of them had talked much since Laker’s funeral, and it wasn’t simply out of respect. The fact was they were all tired and thirsty. Jem and Mitch were suffering particularly, and they sat down slowly in the snow.

  ‘I don’t know how much longer I can keep this pace up,’ Jem confessed.

  ‘You just need a rest, sweetheart,’ Tanya told her. ‘We all do.’

  ‘I need about minus thirty years,’ grumbled Mitch.

  Raymond Balfour trudged through the snow to join the Doctor and Clara. ‘How much further, Doctor?’

  ‘Not much further.’ The Doctor seemed more interested in his sonic screwdriver, clicking through a number of different settings and testing the result.

  Clara tapped the Doctor on the shoulder. ‘You said, “Here we are.” Where’s the TARDIS?’

  ‘It’s here,’ the Doctor replied, busily adjusting the screwdriver. ‘Just not at the moment.’

  ‘Which moment will it be here, then? I’m hoping for “in the next few”.’

  More fiddling with the sonic screwdriver. ‘Impossible to say, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I thought you said the TARDIS was our only hope?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Are you aware of the same flaw in your plan as I am?’

  ‘And what flaw would that be?’

  ‘That if we’re in the right place for the TARDIS, but not the right time, then it’s as good as not here at all.’

  ‘That’s not a flaw. It’s an inconvenience.’ The Doctor continued to fiddle with the screwdriver.

  Clara sighed and walked away, astonished by how disappointed she felt. Not so much disappointed in the situation, but disappointed with the Doctor. He usually solved problems like this. He might be brusque, even rude, and infuriatingly unpredictable, but he always found a way. Clara felt as if she had no more tears to cry, and her heart burned with frustration.

  The snow was drifting up in a slope ahead of her. She carried on regardless, taking long, exaggerated steps. Her legs sank almost up to her knees with every stride. Eventually she reached the top of the rise and looked to see what lay beyond it. A part of her mind thought she might catch a glimpse of blue in the swirling blizzard, the faint square shape of an old police box, half buried by the snowstorm, waiting for them, but just hidden from view.

  But the TARDIS wasn’t there.

  What was there was a great, black crack in the snow which swallowed up the dancing flakes like a vast, hungry mouth.

  ‘Come and look at this!’ she called. The radio link carried her voice perfectly well, so there was no need to shout, but she couldn’t help it.

  Mitch, Hobbo and the Doctor clambered up the slope after her.

  ‘Another cliff?’ said Hobbo miserably.

  ‘It’s the edge of the glacier,’ said the Doctor.

  They looked down into the vast grey chasm. They couldn’t see the bottom; it was lost in the white squall. But the edges of the crack were sheer, translucent ice, streaked with dark sediment.

  ‘You’d need specialist equipment to get down there,’ said Mitch.

  ‘Which we don’t have,’ said Hobbo.

  ‘No.’

  It wasn’t like the cliff. That had been a rough, rugged tear in the rocky landscape with plenty of handholds and footholds and ledges and narrow, zigzagging paths. This was nothing but sheer ice. It would take a team of experienced mountaineers equipped with ropes, ice-picks and crampons to even consider a climb.

  ‘Is the TARDIS down there?’ Clara asked, her voice shaking. ‘Please tell me it isn’t.’

  The Doctor pointed the sonic screwdriver into the frozen maw and took a reading. ‘No, it isn’t,’ he said.

  ‘You’re lying, aren’t you?’

  The Doctor sighed and closed the screwdriver with a decisive click. ‘Yes. I’m lying. It’s down there.’

  —

  They waded back down the slope. Clara could feel her heart pounding with the exertion now and wondered how much oxygen she was using up. Mitch Keller looked exhausted; he wasn’t a young man by any means, but he still wasn’t making as much fuss as Marco Spritt, who was less than half his age.

  ‘This is madness,’ Marco said. ‘We’re walking to nowhere. We’re all going to die!’

  ‘That’s enough of that, Marco,’ warned Tanya.

  ‘No one wants to hear your opinion,’ added Jem. ‘Can’t you see we’re all trying to deal with this as well? Not just you?’ She was close to tears.

  Tanya put an arm around her shoulders and said, ‘Take it easy, sweetheart. He’s not worth it.’

  ‘Pah,’ Marco said, kicking at the snow.

  Jem sank to her knees, holding her helmet. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just that my head hurts so much…’

  ‘You’ve been under a lot of strain,’ Tanya said.

  ‘No, it’s not that. This is something different. This is like in the wormhole. Movements in the dark matter…voices calling for me.’

  ‘What is it?’ asked the Doctor.

  ‘There’s someone coming. Or something. Look!’ Jem pointed into the swirling snow, but it was impossible make out anything other than a white haze.

  ‘She’s starting to hallucinate,’ said Tanya. ‘She’s weak. Upset. She’s seeing things.’

  ‘No,’ Clara said. ‘She isn’t. Look.’

  In the mist of snow, Clara could see shapes moving towards them. Tall, dark shapes rendered almost invisible by the blizzard. Instinctively, the group drew closer together.

  The snow seemed to move around them, churning and throwing up a white fog which was caught by the wind and swirled around them like sheets. The dark figures loomed through the whiteout, ghostly and silent. A coruscating blue glow surrounded them like a gas flame.

  ‘What are they?’

  Suddenly Clara was sliding downwards, as if a hole had opened up in the snowdrift and she was falling into it. She put her hand out to balance and saw that the others were all toppling over as well, as the snow beneath their feet began
to fall away like sand in an egg timer. She looked up at the approaching ghosts, saw a glimpse of long, dark faces beneath deep hoods, and then lost sight of everything as the snow rose up around her.

  She heard her helmet radio crackle and the Doctor’s voice: ‘Temporal flux! It’s happening again!’

  And then the world dissolved around her in a grey maelstrom, streaked with sudden bands of colour and light, flickering faster and faster until she could see nothing but a blur of movement. She reached out again, and to her great surprise caught hold of someone else’s outstretched hand. She pulled them closer, clung on to them, and they grabbed hold of Clara in return. Together they fell without even moving, until eventually the dazzling sense of movement became too great and Clara had to close her eyes.

  Chapter

  13

  After the blank whiteness of the ice age, the sudden green of the jungle was almost overwhelming.

  It was dark and verdant, an insane tangle of branches in every direction. Clara felt trapped; the vegetation was oppressively close, almost impenetrable. Creepers festooned with tendrils of long, parasitic weed dangled from a dense canopy of branches stretching up as far as she could see. A dim light filtered down through layers of tangled leaves and knotted vines.

  Violently coloured blooms – they were all deep purple and blood red – sprouted aggressive-looking stamen barbed with sharp yellow seeds. Insects the size of rodents crawled everywhere, bristling with legs and wings and wavering antennae.

  There was no sign of any other human being. Clara couldn’t even see the forest floor; she was sprawled across thick, intertwined boughs covered in moss. More twisting branches, wreathed with a tangle of growth that could have been the beginnings of roots or just more branches, lay below.

  ‘Hello?’ she called. She checked that her helmet communicator was switched to the shared channel and called again. ‘Doctor? Tibby? Mitch…? Anyone at all?’

  There was no reply. She listened carefully, switched her receiver to external audio. She could hear all the sounds of jungle life – a constant rustling, clicking, chirping, hooting…but no human signs at all.