Divided Loyalties

by Gary Russell

  ‘I feel very tired,’ Nyssa announced.

  ‘I imagine so,’ said the Doctor. ‘The food and drink were drugged after all.’

  Oakwood tried to comprehend this, but was clearly feeling the effects of whatever the Observer had given them.

  ‘You knew?’ asked Dieter.

  ‘I suspected.’

  ‘But why didn’t you say something?’

  The Doctor leant back against the wall. ‘Because we all need some rest and relaxation and this ensures we get it. If the Observer meant us harm he could have killed us in the shuttle, or trapped us in the freezing outside once he’d got Tegan inside the pyramid.’

  He smiled at Dieter but she, like nearly everyone else, was already comatose. ‘Besides which, we’d all eaten enough for the drugs to have an effect before I began to susp... sus...’ He tried to swallow, to clear his throat. With a slight cough, he did so.

  Only Braune was awake, arms crossed, by the doorway.

  ‘You didn’t have anything, did you, Mr Braune. I’m glad... I feel better having someone reliable to watch over us while we sleep.’

  Braune stared at the Doctor. ‘Why did you go on eating, then?’

  The Doctor raised his eyebrows in surprise. ‘How nice to hear you speak, Mr Braune. I went on eating because I want to sleep. Because whatever is going on here works on a different plane of reality to ours. And maybe a good night’s sleep will clear the passageways in my mind so I can see what’s happening more clearly.’

  ‘You said you thought this was a trap. Set for you. Who by?’

  The Doctor shrugged - but it took an effort. The drugs were finally having an effect on him, and his eyes began to feel heavy. ‘I’m not entirely sure. Someone I know, I can feel it.

  But I can’t quite... put my... finger on...’

  Darkness.

  The Doctor was standing in a large dark room. A harsh spotlight was directly above him, its beam just wide enough to envelop him in a column of light.

  ‘Doctor.’ A soft voice, young and desperate. Tiny tendrils of familiarity scratched at his memory, but still nothing was clearer.

  He turned, trying to work out where the voice was coming from.

  ‘Doctor... please help me! No matter what happens in the real world, you must help me.’

  ‘Doctor!’ A second voice, equally pleading, but far older, richer and deeper. ‘Doctor... please help me! No matter what happens in the real -’

  ‘Yes, I get the drift,’ the Doctor interrupted. Each voice was coming from a different side of the darkness. ‘Show me yourselves. I want to help, but I can’t unless I know whom I’m helping’

  ‘You brought us together.’ This was the young voice. ‘You must take us apart,’ finished the older one.

  ‘Please, Doctor, finish what you started!’ they both said simultaneously.

  Then a shaft of light splashed down from the ceiling, illuminating a figure to his right - where the older voice had come from.

  And the Doctor nodded to himself. Huddled on the floor, knees tucked under his chin, almost hidden under his mandarin robes, was the Celestial Toymaker. He turned his head towards the Doctor and, even in the dim light, the Doctor could see he had no face - just a blank space at the front of his head - a gateway leading to a vista of stars and planets, as if the whole of the universe was within his skull.

  A second light appeared, to the left, where the young voice had been.

  The figure that stood there was upright, arms clasped behind his back. He wore the recognisable robes of the Prydon Academy, where the Doctor had studied as a young man on his home planet of Gallifrey.

  The Doctor started - this he had not been expecting, but suddenly the claws scratching at his mind tugged away the veil over his memory.

  ‘You left me to die here, Doctor!’ spat the young man, no longer soft or lost. His face, like that of the Toymaker, was non-existent, replaced by the same galactic panorama.

  ‘Help me,’ pleaded the Toymaker. ‘Help us’

  ‘Repair the damage you did, Doctor,’ said the young Time Lord.

  ‘Make us whole... please’ The Toymaker seemed to hug himself closer, as if terrified of the faceless Time Lord.

  ‘Or this time,’ the Time Lord threatened, ‘this time, you won’t get away with it. You left me, Doctor. Abandoned me.

  Betrayed me.’

  The Doctor suddenly went very cold. And he understood.

  ‘No... it wasn’t like that...’

  ‘You left me to die!’ The Time Lord suddenly screamed and the Doctor stepped back, out of his beam of light, plunging the whole room into darkness. He stepped forward again, hoping to illuminate the other two, if not himself, but to no avail.

  ‘You left me to die.’ The Time Lord was at his side, hissing savagely in the Doctor’s ear.

  ‘Rallon, no, I... I...’

  ‘I hope you remember everything, Doctor. Because I haven’t forgotten. You gave me to him!’

  Then the Toymaker was also at the Doctor’s side, but not weakened as he had been seconds earlier.

  ‘Yes, Doctor,’ he said. His voice echoed, bringing memories flooding back into the Doctor’s mind’s eye. ‘You created all this.

  And now you need to put it right. Think back, Doctor. Search your memory for a clue as to how to help us. How to undo the damage you wrought upon us.’

  The Time Lord took up the baiting again. ‘Think back to home, Doctor. Think of Gallifrey.’

  Gallifrey...

  Gallifrey...

  The blackness finally engulfed the Doctor’s mind. The last things he saw were the two faceless figures leaning over him and millions upon millions of stars and galaxies swirling before his eyes.

  Gallifrey...

  Round Two

  Dreaming

  1

  Dream of Me

  Gallifrey. Home. Apparently.

  ‘I’m not convinced, you know,’ said Koschei. ‘I don’t think it would be the wisest course of action’

  The Doctor shrugged at Koschei’s pessimism. ‘It hardly matters, eh? They’ll never let us go.’

  Above them, the dark orange blanket that was Gallifrey’s night sky was punctured by occasional bright lights.

  Artificial satellites. Or time ships breaking through the transduction barrier before activating their time rotors and dematerialising, preparing to traverse the space-time vortex, taking their occupants to who knew where or when. ‘They have no sense of adventure,’ he finished, putting his hands into the looped sleeves of his burgundy Prydonian robes. ‘Unlike us.’

  He looked around at the Deca, as they called themselves.

  Rallon. Koschei. Drax. Mortimus. Magnus. Ushas. Jelpax.

  Vansell. Millennia. And himself. The pinnacle of their class - the pride and joy of teachers such as Sendok, Borusa and Franilla. And, by association, the enemies of just about all the other freshmen in that semester’s influx of students.

  He looked beyond the group, back towards the Academy itself: proud glass turrets and covered walkways linking them, dormitories and lecture halls. TARDIS bays and scaphe ports.

  Gymnasiums and eateries. A self-contained city annexed to the infamous Capitol, it sprawled over twenty-eight square miles of Gallifrey’s surface, surrounded on all sides by the horizon -

  stretched desert plains where the Outsiders lived, rejecting the conformity of Gallifreyan society. Or rather, Time Lord society, administered by those lucky few who were honoured with the ability to live forever - barring accidents. Well, thirteen lives seemed like forever to him. All but three of the Deca were on their first regenerations and were forbidden to regenerate, should the whim take them, until after their five-hundredth birthdays.

  If Gallifreyans could be said to have birthdays.

  Vansell, Ushas and Rallon had already become junior Time Lords and were now in their final semesters, whereas the rest still had two to go before they received the Rassilon Imprimature - the genetic coding that gave them their regenerative po
wers, the ability to withstand time travel, the telepathic connection to TARDISes, time rings and all the other transtemporal feats of Gallifreyan engineering.

  Drax broke the Doctor’s bitter, reflective mood. He was grinning - another inane plan no doubt forming in what passed for his mind. Oh, Drax was bright enough. A genius in fact with all things mechanical - they always said that if you gave Drax eight unconnected objects, he would find a way to put them together and make a TARDIS

  dematerialisation circuit, or a chameleon circuit or even a food synthesiser. Sadly, like many clever people, he lacked common sense. No doubt he could give you the molecular density of a paper bag - indeed, he could probably work out its atomic structure to the nth degree - but shove him inside it and tell him to punch his way out and... well, forget it.

  ‘Let’s head into the relic room. Find the hand of Omega or Pandak’s staff or Heiron’s...’ but Drax’s enthusiasm was cut short by an indignant howl from Jelpax.

  ‘The relics should be left alone,’ he shouted. ‘They are there for future generations to observe, record and learn from.’

  Koschei shrugged. ‘OK, let’s go and play with the President’s cat - oh no, we can’t! Ushas’ little experiment put paid to that!’

  Ushas clipped Koschei around the ear, but not entirely playfully. She wasn’t known for her long fuse or self-deprecating humour.

  Magnus and Mortimus shivered. ‘It’s getting cold,’ Magnus said quietly. ‘I believe it’s time we returned to the dorm before we are missed.’

  The others shrugged. Magnus had a commanding personality and most of them found it difficult to argue with him. Rather sheepishly, they followed him back towards the Academy. Koschei was muttering to Vansell about how jealous he was of Magnus. ‘I mean,’ he was saying, ‘he just speaks, clicks his fingers, or whatever, and we all follow. One day I must find out how to do that.’

  Vansell ignored him. No one quite knew why Vansell hung around with them, really. He said little and smiled less.

  ‘Hey, Thete,’ Drax said, ‘ask that tame co-ordinator of yours if he can sneak us out some information about Earth. I’m sure I can work out how to get us there.’

  ‘Please, Drax, don’t call me Thete, Theta, Theta Sigma or anything else, all right? You know I don’t like it.’

  Drax threw his hands up in an exaggerated gesture of surrender. ‘Sorry, Doctor, I won’t do it again.’ He paused, then nudged the Doctor. ‘So, how about it?’

  ‘Azmael is far too busy to help us,’ interjected Millennia, tossing her long hair over her shoulder as she always did.

  ‘Azmael is always too busy to help anyone. Except him,’

  grinned Rallon, the moonlight glinting on his olive skin and accentuating his bone structure.

  The object of his finger-jabbing shrugged. ‘It’s not my fault that Azmael and I work well together.’

  ‘Oh Doctor,’ laughed Millennia, ‘he positively worships you’

  ‘And you him!’ Rallon slapped the Doctor on the shoulder, causing him to wince slightly. Rallon was big, his hands seemingly larger than both the Doctor’s put side by side. A

  ‘gentle pat’ from Rallon was similar to being hit by a skimmer.

  ‘Anyway, I’m not abusing our... friendship just to gain access to the relics so that Drax can make a fool of us all. I won’t do it.’

  The others shrugged and moved slightly away from him.

  Only Koschei stayed, walking in time with the Doctor. The two of them, along with Magnus, had been friends since their first day at the Academy. Three different young Time Lords from different Houses, brought together by the need to learn.

  And a burning desire to learn was the basis of the Deca -

  ultimately all ten of its members were the cream of the crop.

  None of them could be outsmarted by anyone else in their year. The Doctor was aware that their fellow students held them in equal amounts of envy and contempt. Koschei shrugged this off easily, but it upset the Doctor that they were effectively being punished by their peers, simply for being more than adequate.

  ‘Tell you what,’ Koschei was saying, ‘let’s see if we can find a way to keep Drax’s inquisitive nature occupied without actually going into the relics. Vansell has managed to hack into the co-ordinator’s systems. If we got Drax to gain access to the Matrix -’

  ‘No,’ gasped the Doctor. ‘No, that would be... wrong!’

  Koschei laughed. ‘He’ll never be able to do it, but it’ll keep him occupied long enough for his enthusiasm to wane.

  Within a couple of weeks, he’ll have forgotten about the relics and be far more interested in those new Type 30s the Time Lords are testing.’

  Mortimus was beside them in an instant, rubbing his pudgy hands in anticipation. ‘Mark Ones or Twos?’

  ‘Ah, here’s old aerial ears, ready to butt in as always,’

  Koschei murmured. ‘Twos, if you must know,’ he told his rotund compatriot.

  Mortimus nodded and wandered back to the others, muttering to himself - about what, neither the Doctor nor Koschei knew.

  Slowly the group made their way back to the Academy.

  Three hours passed before they reached the dormitories. There was a rather lengthy period of waiting as Millennia and Rallon said their farewells. It was a ritual that had been going on for a few months now - and everyone was taking bets as to how long it would be before they announced a more permanent relationship. They finally moved away from each other after a last kiss, and more than one of their compatriots let out a grateful sigh. Being outside after ‘curfew’ was not a wise course to take. The cardinals took a dim view of students who failed to get the required amount of sleep. Even those in the Deca.

  Finally Ushas and Millennia headed left, the males going right. Magnus watched Ushas’ retreating form with an admiring eye, until Mortimus nudged him.

  ‘Don’t go there, Magnus,’ he laughed. ‘She’ll eat you for breakfast’

  Magnus shook his head slowly and wandered away. ‘You’ll never understand, Mort, you’ll never understand.’

  ‘Understand? Understand what?’ Mortimus turned round but the hallway was empty - his fellow Decas had all gone, leaving him alone.

  As always.

  ‘What are you doing out here after dark?’

  Mortimus jumped at the nasal, whiny voice that emanated from a dark side-corridor.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said, and relaxed.

  ‘I am hall monitor for this semester and you are late. Not out with your fellow stuck-ups?’ The voice belonged to Runcible, a thin, gangly student with features as pinched and surly as his voice. In his hand he carried a clipboard and Mortimus knew he was writing his name on one of his interminable lists. Like all anal-retentives with personality defects and self-insecurities, Runcible always made lists. Of everything. None of them of any use.

  ‘They were all here, actually,’ said Mortimus smugly.

  ‘Obviously you weren’t doing your job well enough, or you would have spotted them.’

  Runcible shrugged. ‘Well, I missed them. But I caught you. I shall inform Cardinal Zass of your tardiness and she will take the requisite action.’

  Mortimus couldn’t care less and told Runcible so. ‘I have far more interesting things to do,’ he said. ‘If you want to add me to a list, add it to the longest one. You know, the one with the names of everyone in the academy, tutors and pupils alike, who despise you, Runcible. It must be the one you write up most frequently.’

  Runcible just shrugged and walked away.

  ‘Oh, what’s the use,’ Mortimus muttered to himself. ‘Some people wouldn’t recognise an insult if they tripped over it.’ As he headed towards his room another figure emerged from the shadows. But this one said nothing. It just watched Mortimus go.

  After the figure had been standing in the empty corridor for a few minutes he was joined by another - this one just popped into existence, a faint shimmer in the air heralding his arrival.

  Both of them wore
long white tabards with black trimmings.

  Their hair was slicked back and tied in tight ponytails, their hands were folded within the large sleeves of their clothes.

  They were recorders. From the Celestial Intervention Agency.

  ‘That one is destined to be trouble,’ the first CIA recorder said.

  ‘But he is not the one we are charged with tonight,’ said the other. ‘He has already gone to his room.’

  The first recorder suddenly cocked his head, as if listening.

  Presently he nodded, understanding whatever comments were being passed to him telepathically. He smiled at the second recorder. ‘Our target must not be disturbed after all. The seventh door has been activated, the Matrix secrets revealed.

  He has a destiny that we must not interrupt. Yet.’

  And as silently as they had arrived, both recorders disappeared in seconds, leaving the corridor empty once more.

  Runcible suddenly came around a corner, clipboard in hand.

  ‘Who is there? I heard you talking, I know you are here.

  You’ll be added to the list, you know...’

  The Doctor, Rallon and Koschei were in their corridor, Vansell and Magnus having already gone to their rooms.

  Drax and Jelpax didn’t stay in the residential dormitories, as both their Houses were close enough for them to live there.

  Drax had his own home-made skimmer and was happy to give Jelpax a lift.

  The Doctor thought it was amusing that they could strongly disagree about things like the relics and yet neither thought twice about companionship on the way home. That was the good thing about the Deca - no matter what their differences, deep down they were all friends.

  Good friends.

  Loyal to the end.

  ‘Let nothing come between us,’ he murmured.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Koschei had just opened his door.

  ‘Hmm? Oh, nothing, my friend. Nothing.’

  With a nod of good night, Koschei went into his room.