by Doctor Who
What have I done?
He had listened to the words of the man who called himself the Doctor, and much of it had not been clear to him, the talk of other worlds and strange creatures; but there were other aspects of his story that struck Walking Crow with the terrible sting of truth. The mysterious metals and the fallen star, the dark shape of the gun lying in the middle of the ashen crater – all of that came flooding back to him.
He was starting to understand. The night sky itself and the gods that lived there had rejected these things, tossed them to the earth to be rid of them. It was the world’s misfortune that a man with the greedy heart of Alvin Godlove had found one of them.
Walking Crow looked at his trembling hands, remembering where he had touched the thing inside the smashed metal egg, the gun-thing that the Doctor called a Clade. It had been hungry. He felt it as clearly as if the hunger was his own, in that brief moment when he laid his 105
fingers upon it. Although he had eaten well, for an instant Walking Crow had shared the Clade’s yawning appetite, felt it like a hollow in his flesh. And it had not been a hunger for food; it was a hunger for fire and destruction, for murder and the red rage of killing.
I should have destroyed it, then and there, he told himself. Smashed it to pieces with a rock. But instead I was weak and hesitant. I let Godlove take it for himself.
At first, when Godlove had used the device to heal wounds, Walking Crow had thought he was mistaken. Perhaps it had only been him that the Clade reacted against; but eventually he realised that was not true.
Godlove grinned and crowed as he used the device, but the Pawnee could see the changes in the man, the darkening turns in his manner.
Godlove did not control the Clade – it only allowed him to think that he did.
Walking Crow stole a look at the longriders, gaunt and cadaverous in their saddles. They were death, pieces of the world beyond life that had been forced to remain behind, animated by the will of something sinister and horrific.
Walking Crow’s mouth was desert-dry. Yes, he understood now. The gun, the Clade, it was an evil Manitou, a demon. His tribe believed that all things, not just men and beasts, had a spirit to them. Rock and sky, metal and water, all of them had a life force. These Clades were the black souls of weapons, things that knew only destruction, wanted only death.
And I allowed them to come to our land. He almost choked on the thought. Great Spirit, forgive me!
‘Walking Crow?’ The girl spoke in a low voice that carried between them, as the Doctor continued to argue with the longriders. ‘Are you all right?’
He shook his head. He could not lie to her; she was the companion of Rides In Night and to do so would shame Walking Crow even further. ‘All this time, and I have been in step with an evil Manitou. . . I am ashamed.’
Martha touched his arm. ‘You can help us.’ She spoke in a whisper.
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‘These psychos are going to keep killing and destroying unless they find Godlove. Tell us where he’s gone.’
‘I do not know.’ The lie fell from Walking Crow’s lips automatically.
He had become so used to being untruthful for his master that he did it without thinking.
‘Yes you do,’ she replied, seeing the look in his eyes. ‘Godlove wouldn’t just up and leave all his property behind like that. Where are you going to meet him? Tell me. Trust me. ’
He hesitated. For all his many faults, Alvin Godlove had saved Walking Crow’s life. The youth would doubtless have been killed by the men who had taken him as a slave to work in a labour camp, if not for the trickster cheating them at cards and taking him in payment.
Godlove was a greedy man, but not a killer, and he had treated Walking Crow well. . .
But that was before. Before the fallen star, before he had started to change his ways.
‘Beyond the town, a few miles to the south west,’ he husked, ‘an old iron mine, abandoned now. He’s hiding there.’ The admission felt like a weight falling from his shoulders.
Martha nodded. ‘You did the right thing, telling me.’
Walking Crow nodded once; but he wondered if anything he could do would be enough to earn the Great Spirit’s forgiveness.
The cavern was cool and dark. In the flickering light cast by the oil lamp, Godlove sat atop an empty barrel. He leaned forward from his makeshift seat, hunched over the dust-covered wooden trestle table in front of him. His breath was coming in short, fast pulses, and all he could taste was the heavy rust smell of the rocks around him, the tang of the spent mine works stretching away into the darkness beyond the puddle of light cast by the lantern.
He gripped his wrist, feeling the veins beneath his skin pulsing and jumping; and in his hand he held the device, his fingers curled around the broad pistol-grip so tightly that his knuckles were bloodless and white.
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Godlove had been trying for the last ten minutes to do a single thing, a simple thing. He tried over and over to simply put the device down on the table, to unwrap his fingers from it and step away; but his flesh and bones refused to do as he told them.
‘Gah!’ He choked out a gasp and with all the force he could muster, he slammed the hand, device and all, against a support beam. The wooden stanchion creaked and he cried out in pain at the impact, but still the death-grip did not slacken. Tears streaking his face, Godlove sank to the floor and cradled the object in his hands, defeated.
It didn’t look the same as it had when he’d found it, dropped out of the sky like manna from heaven. It had been stubby and compact then, no bigger than a snub-nose pepperbox pistol. It had been that way to begin with. At first Godlove thought he’d been mistaken, but soon he noticed that the more he used it, the more it changed.
As if the throbbing rays that issued from the maw of the cure-all device somehow fed it, made it grow. The silhouette of the gun had taken on better definition, thickening in places, becoming more like the commonplace shape of a Colt single-action pistol. It felt easy and dangerous, heavy in his hands. There was something seductive about the poise of the thing, as if it was willing him to use it.
It feeds on decay. What can anything that feasts on death be, but bad medicine?
Walking Crow’s words echoed in his mind, and Godlove spat against the rocks in anger, turning his frustration outward. What did that idiot redskin know? The device was a miracle, capable of bringing back men from the verge of death itself. A wild grin crossed his lips.
‘I have the Almighty’s power in my hand right here!’ Alvin Godlove shouted, and his words echoed away down the tunnels.
And just as the cure-all could bring life, he knew that it could show the other face of the same coin. There had been a few times, when he was alone and Walking Crow was not there to see it, when Godlove had let the device run free. At first he used it to shoot at trees or rocks, but that didn’t seem like enough. Then he used it on deer, on a horse; and there had been moments when he felt the cure-all pressing him to kill a man. He could feel it whispering in the corners of his skull, 108
stiffening his muscles and trying to turn his will against him.
It was only the greed, the constant promise of fortune and glory in the next town and the next that kept him sane. The stern preacher father who had whipped Godlove every night ‘to keep him humble’
had told the young Alvin that his sin of greed would be the ending of him – but in fact it was all that kept him alive.
At night there were the dreams, growing stronger, raging through him. The sights and sounds and smells of blood and death, fire and war. He felt as if his mind were coming apart, each day a battle to keep control. At first, the distractions of whiskey and women had helped, but the diversions worked less and less every day.
Now, spent and afraid, hiding here in the dimness, there was nothing he could do but listen to the whispering pressure in his mind, the spider-crawling compulsion inside his skull.
The thing is a curse. We should kill it. Walking Crow�
��s voice cut through his thoughts like a razor.
‘Perhaps he’s right,’ gasped Godlove, allowing himself to admit it for the first time. ‘Maybe. . . maybe I have reached the limit of my association with this object.’ But still his fingers would not unclench, and as he watched, the gun shifted and pulsed. The frame opened along its length and metallic cords ringed with bone exploded outward, flicking like the tongues of snakes.
Godlove did not have time to scream. The cables looped through the air and buried themselves in the meat of his wrist, boring through flesh and bone. He felt them forcing their way along arteries and veins, to his shoulder, out into his chest cavity, down into his stomach, up into his gullet. The only sound he made was a gasping rattle that gradually shifted in pitch and tone until it became a buzzing rush, like flies in a tin cup.
After a while, his mouth moved, tongue and lips flapping, air hissing in breathy gasps as something inside him flexed Godlove’s body as a man might shrug into a new jacket. The fact that he was still, to some small degree, alive inside the prison of his own skin made what happened next all the more horrible.
‘Con. Con. Control is taken.’ The words were chaotic and jumbled, 109
coming from a mind that was not used to communicating in such a crude fashion. ‘No. More orders from you. I. I am. I am in command now.’
Trapped within the walls of his own mind, Alvin Godlove started to scream.
Out of the corner of his eye, the Doctor caught sight of Martha and Walking Crow speaking quietly, but he was careful not to draw attention to the fact. Martha was savvy. If she learned anything, she’d find a way to let him know.
He rested his hand on the lip of his holster. ‘I know what you are and I know what you want here,’ he told the longriders. ‘I’m sure you thought you could do as you please, shooting up the place and terrorising natives whose only means of defence are crude chemical-ballistic firearms. . . But I’m here now. And any tactical advantage you thought you had is lost.’
‘Evaluation incorrect,’ drawled Tangleleg. ‘A single Time Lord, unarmed, ill-equipped. No threat.’
The Doctor returned a cold smile. ‘You go right on thinking that, then. That’s the problem with your kind, no imagination. Unless it’s a battle situation – then you’re full of ideas. But put you in a place where you have to think outside the box and you’re all at sea. Me? I always think outside the box. In fact, I don’t even have a box to start with.’ He waggled a finger at them. ‘I’ve seen what the Clades can do. I was on Sierra Secundus after the razing of the sun-tower and I saw the dead your battalions left behind. I rescued refugees from the war zones on Tannhauser and New Mitama. I know you’ll do the same here as you did there. When you find what you’ve come for, you’ll sterilise everything for hundreds of miles in every direction.’ He shook his head. ‘I won’t let that happen.’
‘How can you stop us, Time Lord?’ Kutter’s face showed the ghost of a callous smile. ‘You speak as if you have a choice in the matter.’
Tangleleg was staring at Nathan and the others, studying them one at a time. ‘Wrong. He does have a choice,’ said the longrider, correcting his compatriot. ‘Live or die.’
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A chill ran up the Doctor’s spine. ‘I told you, I won’t help you find Godlove!’
‘You will,’ said Tangleleg. He aimed his pistol at Martha and fired.
At the Royal Hope Accident and Emergency ward, they used code-names for different kinds of injuries, a sort of shorthand that allowed doctors and nurses to communicate significant information as quickly as possible. When lives depended on being fast, when people were bleeding out, it was vitally important to know the terms and know how to interpret them.
G-S-W. Just three letters, but they hid a harsh, potentially fatal meaning.
Gun Shot Wound.
During her medical training, Martha Jones had seen some horrible injuries, and along with her fellow teachers and students, fought like a lion to keep hurt people alive. But she had never experienced the lethal aftermath of a gunshot herself. Not until now.
A part of her mind detached from the rest. She registered the smell of burnt fabric and skin, the hot ozone stink of the gun’s discharge.
And faintly, like the sound of a thunderstorm raging over a distant hill, Martha sensed the burning knot of agony. Her lips tugged back in a weird kind of smile. It was like it was happening to someone else; yes, Martha Jones (Medical Student) was separated from Martha Jones (Gunshot Victim), looking at the wound, seeing the round hole burnt though her leather jacket and the top underneath. Seeing the blood.
Then the moment of frozen time shattered and the pain hit her like a hammer.
Martha felt the world turn around her and the dirt of the Ironhill street rose up to meet her. The pain was horrific, a million times every broken bone, rotten tooth and gut-sick agony she had ever experienced, all merged into one rushing flood of hurt. She cried out and her vision blurred with tears.
The shot had come from nowhere, just a haze of motion at the corner of her eye and the Doctor’s bellowed cry of alarm. A white 111
flash; a screeching sound; and the pain.
Martha remembered the day before, and poor Jenny there on the floor of the TARDIS. She had survived, but only because of the Doctor’s nanogene medical kit. There was nothing like that here, down in the dirt of a time where if you were hit, you were likely dead.
She clutched at the air, a howl escaping her lips, a single thought hard and cold in her mind.
Am I going to die?
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The Doctor flew to the girl’s side, grabbing her shoulders, holding her up.
‘Lord no, Martha!’ shouted Nathan, his gut twisting. The teenager felt ill, sickened by the casual brutality of Tangleleg’s attack. The longrider showed nothing, not even the smallest flicker of concern over what he had done. He had shot down an unarmed woman with the same callous intent he had Nathan’s father and, if not for Miss Forrest, the boy as well.
Nathan heard the Doctor speaking to the girl, keeping his voice level and steady even though he had to be as furious and terrified as the boy was. ‘Martha, listen to me,’ said the man. ‘You are not going to die. Do you trust me?’
Martha’s breaths were coming in gasps. ‘I. . . I trust you,’ she managed.
He smiled with genuine warmth. ‘Good girl. Now hold on, Martha Jones. You’re the strongest person I know.’
‘I feel cold,’ she told him. ‘That’s shock. I’m going into shock.’
‘It’s just the breeze,’ he replied. ‘Sun’s gone behind a cloud, that’s all.’
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‘Liar,’ managed the girl, forcing a tight smile. She fingered the edge of the burn hole in her jacket. ‘Oh. This is ruined. It’s my favourite.’
‘No problem. We’ll fix it. And you too.’ He nodded. ‘Just trust me.’
‘Doctor. . . ’ Martha clutched at his lapel and pulled him closer. ‘I have to tell you. . . ’
He shook his head. ‘No, shhh.’
She was on the edge of passing out, a weak grin briefly on her lips. ‘Not that. . . You think S’all about you, don’t you?’ Martha whispered. ‘No Listen. Godlove. Godlove’s in the iron mine. Crow knows where. . . ’ Her eyelids fluttered and she fell into unconsciousness.
The Doctor met Nathan’s gaze and the boy recoiled at the fire he saw in the tall man’s eyes. ‘Look after her,’ he ordered, and the youth nodded, coming to her side. He saw Walking Crow bend down as well, the Pawnee ripping off a sleeve from his shirt to use as a makeshift bandage.
The Doctor turned and rose once again, his long coat snapping open as he advanced fearlessly towards the longriders. The expression on his face was brimming with wrath, his jaw clenched and his eyes as hard as chips of diamond. There simply was not enough power in the word fury to describe the man’s temper. Nathan remembered his father once speaking of an aspect some men took on, a ‘face like thunder’; and just so the Doctor was a nightmare storm all
by himself.
‘Why?’ he spat the word as if it were the most venomous insult imaginable. ‘There was no need for that!’ He stabbed a finger at the two riders. ‘I swear to you, if she dies, I’ll end your whole blighted excuse for an existence!’
The sheer force behind his words quieted the longriders for a moment, but then Tangleleg sneered slightly, recovering his hollow-eyed poise. ‘Wipe off your chin, Time Lord, and be quiet. The life of the female is now in your hands.’
‘Weapons fire was in narrow-beam, low dispersal mode,’ noted Kutter. ‘The wound suffered by the target was small but degenerative.’ He studied Martha coldly. ‘She’ll die but it’ll take a while.’ The strange mixture of mechanical diction and trail-rat swagger in his accent made 114
his pronouncement all the more disquieting.
‘Undo this!’ The Doctor glared at the outlaws. ‘I know you can. Use your regeneration functions! Do it now!’
‘Unable to comply,’ said Tangleleg. ‘Function is insufficient. A command-level unit is required to repair organic damage of that kinda severity.’
‘You did this deliberately. . . ’ growled the Doctor. ‘Because you know only Godlove can save her life!’
‘Correct.’ Kutter nodded. ‘If you want her to live, you will take us to him. Reveal what you know or your companion perishes.’
‘Trade her for him, is that it?’ He grimaced, aghast. ‘Play a numbers game with human life?’
Kutter studied him. ‘We know who you are, Time Lord. The one who makes wilful changes to the balance of worlds based on his whims and passin’ fancies. You’ve done things far worse in your time.’
The Doctor fell silent, then shot a look at Nathan and Walking Crow.
There was a sad, angry emptiness in his eyes. The teenager understood exactly how he felt at that moment, enraged but powerless to do anything about it. He nodded to him and the Pawnee followed suit.
‘All right,’ the Doctor said, after a moment. ‘I’ll take you to him.’
