Superior Beings

by Nick Walters

  ‘Oh,’ the Doctor moved to the console, then paused, picking up the inflection in her voice.

  She fixed him with her most sincere, compelling stare. ‘But I have to.’

  Peri Brown didn’t believe in Heaven or Hell. Not as real places, anyway. As concepts, as metaphors, fine. You do good, you go to Heaven, you do bad, you go to Hell. She’d believed it when she was too young to know any better, the same way she’d believed in Santa Claus and the Headless Horseman. At college and in the years before she’d had her whole world-view turned upside down by the Doctor, she’d believed that doing good was an end in itself. Helping people was its own reward, plus they’d hopefully do the same for you some day. And you did bad, sometimes, because it was fun - little bad, like teasing boys, stealing from stores or lying to her stepdad. As long as she did enough good to balance it out, Peri figured, it was OK. This even held true on alien worlds and in situations she would never have dreamed of in a million years. Being on the Doctor’s side was like doing the ultimate good. Just hanging out with him seemed to have some positive effect on the universe. Keeping the balance tilted in favour of light.

  Perhaps that was why she was in Hell - or as close to it as she could imagine - because she’d defied the Doctor and run off with a real handsome devil. Perhaps she was being punished for abandoning the Doctor. It was a hell - huh - of a flimsy theory -but she needed to rationalise what was happening to her real bad.

  Rationalise waking up with a jolt to find herself being dragged along on her back over dusty earth, her feet juddering along in-her wake, catching glimpses of fiendish hound-faces, all gleaming teeth and yellow eyes. A white mist curling around her and vast walls of scarred metal closing in. One of the hounds had noticed she was awake, and bent to lick her face.

  She’d passed out.

  Rationalise waking again, to find herself strapped to an upright gurney, a bright light lancing into her eyes. She’d tried screaming but her voice wouldn’t work. She glimpsed pointed ears, a row of white teeth bared in a terrifying grin, a flash of yellow eye. Then she’d passed out again.

  Rationalise waking to find herself blind, unable to move or speak, unable to feel even the beating of her heart.

  And cold. So cold that each breath seemed to reach down inside her and slice at her lungs. So cold that she could feel the tears freeze to her face.

  She began to dream. Dream of swimming in the sea at Lanzarote, the warm water caressing her body. Dream of wandering lazily around the Boston Botanical Institute with her mother when she was eleven. Dream of being anywhere but in this Hell.

  But Hell was meant to be hot, not cold. Hadn’t she told someone not too long ago Hell would freeze over before...

  before what? She couldn’t remember. The Doctor... She couldn’t remember his face.

  Then suddenly there was a mechanical clunk, a blast of burning ice in her face - over her whole body - and she stopped remembering anything.

  Chapter Seven

  Rescue

  The dark hulk of the Valethske ship had been sleeping for over a century. Now it was coming to life. Its waking was not a sudden return to consciousness, but a flickering, piecemeal event, like an orchestra of rusted, obscure instruments tuning up for a concert in a rusty scrapyard the size of a mountain - though if it was a concert, the music was steeped in blood, its composer long turned to dust, its meaning long scattered to the interstellar gulfs. Signals sparked in tottering relay. Multitudinous systems and servo-mechanisms spluttered, coughed, yawned, creaked and pinged into life, jittery and spiky after a hundred years of downtime. The sleep cells and the engines took heed of this flutter of activity and amended their functions accordingly. The cells began to revive their occupants, sending nanites coursing through their bloodstream. The engines began to slow the ship as yet another destination zero clicked into register.

  In the midst of this waking gestalt, unnoticed by the still-drowsy surveillance systems, something ancient and powerful performed keyhole surgery on time and space and extruded itself obstinately into reality.

  Aline stepped from the TARDIS, holding the torch before her like a protective talisman. It was next to useless, illuminating only a tiny too-bright circle, throwing everything else into a shadowy profundity in which anything could be lurking. All she could hear was her own breathing, amplified by the oxygen mask, which had a foul rubbery smell.

  Trying to look everywhere at once, she grabbed the Doctor’s sleeve. ‘Are you sure they’re all still - asleep?’

  ‘For now,’ came the Doctor’s muffled voice, then he moved on, sending the beam of his pen-torch probing ahead, a gaudy carpetbag held in his other hand.

  Aline followed, trying not to imagine what might be in the fiendish shadows that flicked at her from every side, keeping as close to the Doctor as she could without bumping into him. The twin canisters and straps of the oxygen pack looked incongruous against his coat. He looked like a tourist exploring a famous cave system, not someone on a shockingly dangerous rescue mission.

  But that was the thing about the Doctor - he wasn’t at all what he seemed, such as in his attitude to herself.

  Sometimes he was attentive and helpful, almost painfully considerate. The way he’d waited to ask her before lunging off into the future had touched her. That such a being as a Time Lord could be concerned about a solitary human life. It would be like Aline working in the dark so as not to tempt moths to a false moon. At other more preoccupied times, like now, he almost seemed to relish making her feel nervous. She recognised the process from her days under therapy; tough-love, burning the comfort blanket. Well, she could see through that.

  She couldn’t see much of anything else, though. They appeared to be walking on compacted soil, dull orange-brown in the beam of her torch. Motes spun in the shaft of light like interstellar flotsam. Ahead, the Doctor’s torch picked out leaning walls of rusted metal. He was flicking it around casually, yet quickly, as if trying to catch an errant child. Suddenly he sent the beam straight up, its weak light barely illuminating gantries and shapes of folded, cowled machinery, like mechanical bats waiting to swoop. Aline could hear distant groans and shrieks - which she hoped were mechanical rather than organic in origin - and now and then the ground below would heave and shudder, sending grit dancing around her boots. It didn’t feel as if she was inside a ship at all. How big was this thing? The TARDIS

  scanner screen had just shown a blackness against the stars, like an asteroid or a black hole.

  Aline found it hard going keeping up with the Doctor’s long strides. Amazing to think that the ship had been travelling for over a century. Their voices, their footfalls, were the first to break the silence of decades. She shivered. The chill air of the Valethske ship had crept in to the gaps between her clothes and body. ‘Do you know where we’re going?’

  ‘I’m doing what I always do, following my nose,’ said the Doctor, neatly evading giving an answer. Then: ‘Aha!’

  They came to a gap in the sloping wall, more like the result of damage than an intended opening, which led through to a wide area roughly circular in shape. The ground sloped down to a railing which bordered a circular pit filled with a ghostly bluish glow.

  The Doctor hared over to the railing, Aline following close behind.

  Ranged in concentric circles descending into the pit were hundreds of alcoves, each one harbouring a clot of frozen fog that bled soft blue light. Walkways criss-crossed the pit, which narrowed down to a knot of total darkness.

  The Doctor placed the carpetbag on the earth floor and began to climb down the nearest ladder. Aline followed, wishing she had gloves - the rungs were ice-cold to the touch.

  At the nearest alcove, Aline and the Doctor peered at the frozen shape trapped within. Behind the pane of frosted glass set crudely in the crumbling earth wall of the chamber, Aline could make out the naked, sleeping body of a Valethske, its fur dusted with frost. Silver tubes snaked around its torso.

  Aline jumped as an eyelid flickered. How
long before they awoke? How long after that before they were able to hunt, to attack, to kill?

  ‘Let sleeping dogs lie is what I always say,’ said the Doctor, the words almost inaudible beneath his mask.

  Aline followed him back up the ladder, only too glad to be away from the pit of slumbering killers, and along more earth-floored metal canyons. By now the groaning of the waking ship was almost constant, and a white mist had begun to seep down from somewhere high above, lending the whole place ghostly illumination.

  ‘Oxygen,’ said the Doctor. ‘While the Valethske are in suspended animation the ship doesn’t need to maintain an atmosphere. Now it’s beginning to manufacture one in readiness for their awakening. We haven’t got very much longer.’

  In the receding gloom Aline could make out angular, ugly shapes; ducts like giant snakes, cowling like the armour of stag-beetles, buttresses like the shoulders of giants. Although the total darkness had been terrifying, it was infinitely preferable to the emerging nightmare of the ship’s interior.

  They soon came to another pit, a little way down the main canyon from the sleeping Valethske. As Aline climbed down another frosty ladder after the Doctor, torch jammed in a pocket of her trousers, she realised with a sense of sick dread that the Valethske pit lay between themselves and the TARDIS. Already it seemed to be getting warmer. When the Valethske woke up, they’d undoubtedly be hungry. Ravenous.

  Aline stopped trying to prevent her teeth chattering, her limbs from shaking with fear, and let her body get on with being terrified as her mind tried to concentrate on the task in hand.

  Touching down, she peered into the nearest alcove. Inside, an indistinct but recognisably human shape. A man, clad in some kind of uniform, complete with beret. Not an Eknuri. Aline turned and peered over the rail. The concentric circles of gantries and alcoves presented a giddying prospect.

  How were they going to find their friends in this lot? There must be hundreds of bodies frozen in suspended animation.

  How many other planets had the Valethske raided?

  Aline straightened up. It was definitely getting warmer. She looked around for the Doctor. He was standing on the metal gantry about thirty degrees around from her, peering at each alcove in turn. The alcoves spilled a bluish, icy light into the pit and strands of mist were winding their way down the walls.

  Suddenly the Doctor gave a satisfied shout. When she joined him he was already tapping at the pad of instrumentation by the side of the alcove. The person inside was Peri, there was no mistaking her bell of hair, her young features, arms raised as if to fend something off.

  Aline moved on to the next alcove, and her heart leapt in a pang of recognition. Athon! Equally unmistakable. Despite everything she felt a smile take over her face. How great it would be to be back on the pleasure-planetoid, fending off Athon’s advances and glugging down glass after glass of Eknuri wine.

  Suddenly she felt she knew what it was to be human, to be alive, and almost burst into tears of mingled joy and terror. If she ever got out of here, she vowed, she’d treasure every second of experience and never, ever he scared again.

  ‘Are you all right?’ came the Doctor’s voice, his hand on the elbow of her jacket.

  That question again! ‘Never felt better.’

  He looked offended by her sarcasm. ‘We have to hurry.’

  Aline could hear a musical dripping as the ice on the ladders And gantries began to melt. The Doctor passed her the carpetbag. ‘I’m going to try to revive them. As they come out, you know what to do.’

  A few more taps at the panel, and the door of the alcove slid hack. Peri fell into the Doctor’s arms, her lips blue, her dark bell of hair speckled with ice. The Doctor caught her and gently began to remove the silver tubes from her arms and neck.

  She couldn’t see the Doctor’s expression beneath the mask, but his eyes told her he was overjoyed to see Peri again.

  Then he frowned, eyes darkening, maybe realising that they had a long way go before they were safe.

  Aline helped him set Peri down on the cold metal gantry. He cradled her head in his hands in a curiously loving gesture.

  Peri’s mouth opened in a gasp, her lungs desperately trying to extract sustenance from the thin air. Aline unzipped the bag and took out the oxygen pack, fixing it to Peri’s body as quickly as she could. Once the mask was in position the Doctor nodded to Aline, and then stood up, hurrying over to the next cubicle.

  Aline knelt over Peri, cradling her head in her lap, extracting a hypo and locating the carotid artery below the girl’s jaw. She pressed the impeller. A neuro-stimulant, the Doctor had explained, to speed up recovery. Nothing happened for a few seconds, and then Peri convulsed, her back arching like a violin bow. Aline soothed her as rasping breaths tore in and out of the young girl. She’d seen this sort of suspended animation before, a kind of crude cryogenics where simple anti-freeze glycoproteins lowered the blood’s freezing point and nanites worked constantly, repairing cells and preventing organ damage. It usually took hours for subjects to recover - while the stimulant would help, Aline and the Doctor still had to work quickly.

  First Athon, then Taiana, and then two people Aline didn’t recognise were hefted from their alcoves, fitted with masks and ministered to.

  Aline went back to Peri, checking her pulse. Slow, erratic, but there, and though her hands were still ice cold, Aline could see colour returning to her lips and cheeks. It would be a while, though, before she regained consciousness.

  The Doctor came over to her. ‘This is one of the most painful decisions I’ll ever have to live with, but we must leave now.’

  Aline blinked. ‘What about Seryn? Yuasa?’ All the others...

  The Doctor shook his head. ‘We’ve only got seven oxygen masks. Help me try to bring Athon and Taiana round - they can carry the others.’

  Taiana was stirring, her head lolling from side to side. Her skullcap was gone - torn off, maybe, by a Valethske - her short golden hair, matching her eyes, was matted with blood.

  The Doctor went over to her and helped her to her feet.

  ‘Taiana!’ he shouted right in her face.

  Dark eyelids flickered, revealing golden slits.

  ‘Can you hear me? Can you walk?’

  Taiana nodded, then slumped against her alcove, legs folding beneath her.

  Aline went to Athon, who was sitting with his head between his knees. ‘Athon?’

  He looked up, brown eyes vacant, tears frosted to his face.

  ‘Aline?’

  ‘Yes, it’s me. Don’t ask me how you got here, don’t even think for a while, we need your help.’

  Athon blinked. Had he understood her? She recognised the look on his face. She’d seen it on her own in the mirror often enough, in the dark years. Fear blotting out everything, numbing,

  paralysing.

  On

  Athon’s

  usually

  relaxed,

  complacent features, it was ugly, almost obscene.

  Aline gripped his shoulders, digging her fingers into the cold brown flesh, desperate to get through to him. ‘Athon, can you hear me?’

  There was the glimmering of recognition. A blur of movement from the side - Taiana was lifting up a tall silver-haired man in military uniform, draping him across her shoulders like a stole. The Doctor had already picked up Peri, cradling her in his arms with surprising ease.

  He called to her, voice muffled by the mask. ‘Come on!’

  Using all her strength Aline helped Athon to his feet. He swayed a little, still drowsy - maybe that was a good thing, the last thing she wanted was for him to panic. With agonising slowness he stooped and picked up the other stranger, a petite young woman in military garb with short red hair.

  The Doctor turned to lead the way, Taiana and Athon shuffling after him with their charges.

  The journey out of the pit was a nightmare, and seemed to take an age. At one point Athon, still woozy from the after-effects of the cryogenic treatment,
slipped on the rungs, sending Taiana and her charge sprawling to the bottom of the ladder.

  Once out of the pit, progress was easier, but they were running out of time. All around them, the ship was coming fully to life.

  Some of the leaning metal walls began shifting, opening up to reveal walkways leading to Gods knew what further pits.

  Chunks of light shone down from beyond the gantries above, and the mist had all but cleared. The Doctor took off his mask and called back to them. ‘The atmosphere’s stabilised now, but don’t throw away your masks. We might have to cross an area of depressurisation.’

  Aline kept up the rear, to make sure the Eknuri didn’t drop their charges.

  At last, they came to the main passageway. Surely the TARDIS

  couldn’t be far away. She didn’t fear it now. It was the closest thing to home in this new century.

  The Doctor came to an abrupt halt. ‘Oh, no.’

  He was staring at a bulkhead just in front of them.

  ‘Don’t tell me we’re lost,’ said Aline.

  ‘Oh, we’re not lost,’ said the Doctor, regarding Aline with a look she could only describe as haunted. The TARDIS is on the other side of that.’ He indicated the dead end with a nod of his head.

  ‘What?’ Aline couldn’t believe it. To have come so far...

  Setting Peri upright on the ground and indicating for Aline to steady her, the Doctor ran up to the bulkhead.

  Aline concentrated on holding Peri. She was heavier than she looked. Her eyelids were fluttering; she was just below the surface of consciousness.

  The Doctor pounded a fist against the shield of pitted, scarred metal. The impact sounded depressingly solid.

  ‘Repressurisation.!’ said the Doctor, turning back to them. ‘The ship’s sealing off the areas of itself which don’t need an atmosphere. Just my luck to have landed the TARDIS in such an area.’ He looked around for a control panel, but there was nothing, only the rust-hued metal. He glared at the shielding, as if he thought his gaze could melt the way through to the TARDIS.