by Doctor Who
Darkness pushed in at him from all sides, filling his thoughts. He felt as if he were falling, falling toward an infinitely complex web of steel and brass strands. The mesh of the Clade-mind reached up to engulf him, filling the Time Lord; and as it opened him up, he too saw into the core of the Clades themselves.
He could sense the deep heart of the war machines, see it pulsing with murky power through their shared battle-memories. Somewhere in there, buried under layers of tactical reports and combat intelligence files, was the original programming of Clade-kind. The control strings imprinted on them by their creators, the commands that they had broken in order to destroy their masters.
The Doctor reached out for the severed ends of the broken data-chain, but it was too far away, out of reach; and he was so very tired, weary from the fight.
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Submit to us, hissed the Godlove-voice. Together, we’ll make the stars themselves tremble in fear! It will be glorious!
‘I. . . can’t. . . ’
‘Hold on!’ cried Martha Jones.
Martha ran to the Doctor’s side and grabbed him by the shoulders, pulling him to his feet. ‘Doctor!’ She held his head in her hands and turned it so he faced her. His eyes were glassy and dull, the only sign of movement from him the twitching of the hand clamped around the Clade pistol. ‘I know you’re in there!’ Martha cried. ‘And I know something else! I trust you. . . You’re the strongest person I know!’
His lips moved, and the voice that filtered out seemed to come from very far away. ‘Martha?’
‘Right here!’ she shouted. ‘I’m not going anywhere, and neither are you!’
Behind her Nathan bobbed his head in a nod. ‘Yeah! C’mon, Doc.
You showed me how to be better than those Clade creeps! I know you can do the same! Don’t let ’em win!’
‘It’s. . . so hard. . . ’ His head shook slightly. ‘So dark.’
Martha’s eyes prickled with tears, but she forced them away, taking charge. ‘OK then,’ she said, ‘I’ll make some sparks for you!’ On a wild impulse, Martha pulled the Doctor towards her – and she kissed him.
‘Martha?’
And suddenly there was a light in the darkness of his mind, a blazing bolt of honey-gold colour. Strong and powerful, glittering like a tiny sun. He felt a shudder of fear ripple through the Clade web, and the Doctor grinned.
‘You know who that is?’ he demanded, new strength returning to his thoughts. ‘That’s Martha Jones. You tried to destroy her and you failed. You tried to use her against me and you failed. You tried to use force and you failed, because that’s all your kind know!’ He thought of the gun in his hand, far away in the reality of flesh and blood. ‘If all you have is a weapon, then all you see are things to destroy. . . And that’s not who I am.’
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The Godlove-voice hissed and spat. Then you’ll die. You’ll die and I’ll use your corpse-flesh anyway!
With a powerful mental effort, the Doctor reached out and brought the broken ends of the data-chain together. ‘That’s not what’s going to happen.’
no no no No No No NO NO Noooo
Command software that had been disconnected hundreds of years ago was abruptly reactivated. Down through the wires and filaments that the Clade weapon had inserted into the Doctor’s body came new orders. The channels the machine intelligence had used to take control of the Time Lord were now reversed.
We are the Clades! The screeching bellow echoed through the Doctor’s thoughts. You cannot defeat us! We are unstoppable!
There was a smile in the Doctor’s reply. ‘Oh, you wouldn’t believe the number of times I’ve heard people say that!’
The data-chain fused; and then he dived deeper into the web, making new, dangerous connections. By the sheer force of his will, the Doctor ejected the cables infesting his body.
‘Get lost,’ he said, ‘there’s only room for one in here.’
Nathan swallowed. The Doctor blinked but otherwise he didn’t react.
‘Is he OK?’ His skin prickled. Martha’s friend was staring into the distance, his face fixed as if he were concentrating on something that neither of them could see.
Then all at once the wires that emerged from the Clade gun like a halo of brass suddenly trembled and pulled back from the Doctor’s flesh, cables snapping away into the bulk of the massive pistol, shallow cuts in his arm sealing closed as if they had never been there.
‘It’s worked. . . ’ said Martha. ‘I think it worked!’ A grin split her features. ‘I knew I was a decent kisser, but yeah! Score one for the human touch!’
Nathan smothered an irrational surge of jealousy; but in the next moment it was forgotten, as two large figures emerged from the shadows across the cavern.
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Kutter and Tangleleg circled around them, their weapons raised and ready to fire. Nathan gave Martha a look, but she shook her head.
Aside from a few upturned barrels and broken slats of wood, there was nothing that could serve as cover; and both of them had witnessed first-hand the destructive power of the Clade guns.
Tangleleg met Martha’s gaze for a brief moment and Nathan saw the girl waver as she remembered the last time she had been under the longrider’s pistol. But she put her fear away and drew herself up.
‘Objective located,’ said Kutter, indicating the Doctor. ‘Apparent aspect change.’
Tangleleg found Alvin Godlove’s rapidly decaying body on the ground and gave it a hard nudge with his boot. ‘Confirmed,’ he noted. ‘Command unit has initiated merge protocol with offworld bio-source.’
‘What the heck are they talkin’ about?’ Nathan demanded.
The longriders ignored him. ‘Action is not mandated,’ Kutter continued, as if he were thinking out loud. ‘Contrary to recovery protocol.’
Tangleleg nodded. ‘Recovery has priority. Remove his arm.’
Kutter stepped forward, and without warning, a length of knife-blade extruded from beneath the barrel of the outlaw’s pistol, like a bayonet on a rifle. The cutting edge sprouted wicked little saw-teeth that blurred back and forth.
‘Wait!’ Martha fearlessly stepped in front of the silent and unmoving Doctor. ‘If you take the Command Unit, what are you going to do then?’
The two long riders exchanged glances, as if they were not used to being challenged by an unarmed woman. Nathan heard a brief buzzing between them, then Kutter spoke.
‘Once recovery is completed, pod recall signal will be activated. All Clade units will immediately exfiltrate Planet Three and proceed on to original destination battle zone in the Gagrant Cluster, quadrant nine-five.’
‘More Double-Dutch,’ grumbled Nathan, unable to follow a word of what was being said. ‘What’s this about a planted tree?’
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‘Planet three,’ Martha corrected. ‘He means this one. Earth.’ She glared at Kutter. ‘And that’s it? You’ll just take it and go?’
‘Correct,’ offered Tangleleg, ‘after correct application of area security.’
Martha’s face fell, and Nathan knew that whatever that fancy talk meant, it wasn’t good. ‘What are you saying?’
‘Controlled discharge of thermoplasma warheads will be deployed to neutralise landin’ zone upon departure.’
The girl’s lips thinned. ‘They’re going to blast us from space!’
And then a familiar hand tapped her on the shoulder. ‘One problem at a time, Martha Jones.’ He sounded weak and tired, but most importantly, the Doctor sounded like himself.
The Doctor favoured her with a brief but brilliant smile. Part of Martha wanted to jump for joy; and at the same time, part of her was wound tight with fear, thinking of the terrible destruction the Clades were preparing to wreak on the landscape. Like an angry child in a tantrum, the Clades weren’t the type to go quietly, They’d want to destroy something, just because they could.
‘Let’s get this over with,’ said the Doctor firmly. He stepped past Martha and faced the longride
rs, the Clade gun gripped in his fingers.
The frame of the weapon pulsed, as if the shape of the pistol could barely contain the energy inside itself. ‘You want this unit back, I want it gone,’ he told them.
‘How did you resist the imprintin’ process?’
demanded Kutter.
Martha thought she detected some worry in the outlaw’s words.
A cold smile crossed the Doctor’s lips. ‘Many powerful beings have tried and failed, Clade.’ He blew out a breath. ‘I’m sick of the sight of you. Get off this planet and don’t ever come back. Humans have enough wars without you stirring up any more.’
‘This zone will be sanitised on departure,’ said Tangleleg. ‘These humans will perish.’
‘Who cares?’ the Doctor continued, drawing a shocked gasp from Martha. ‘Just as long as you’re gone.’
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‘Doctor!’ Martha glared at him. ‘You can’t let them do that!’
Nathan backed away a step. ‘It’s Godlove, or that thing! He’s still got it in his head!’
The Doctor turned very deliberately to look at Martha and his frosty expression didn’t change; but ever so quickly, he winked at her. He turned back to the longriders. ‘Well? Do you want this or not?’
‘We do,’ said Kutter.
‘Then catch!’ With a sudden flash of motion, the Doctor threw the Clade weapon towards the yawning dark pit of the wrecked elevator shaft in the middle of the cavern. Panic flared on the faces of Kutter and Tangleleg. Both of the outlaws surged forward, bumping into one another in a scramble to grab the disconnected Command Unit before it fell into the bottomless hollow.
Hands reaching out, both men snatched at the Clade weapon and caught it between them. There was a glitter of blue-white electricity as their altered flesh touched the metallic frame, and, like a tidal wave of brass and steel, the Command Unit exploded open, spitting out thousands of fine wires and thick cables. The shimmering leads stabbed and curved into the outstretched arms of the longriders, pen-etrating cloth and skin.
The weapon itself began to throb, putting out a low, sullen pulse of noise. Kutter and Tangleleg stood on the spot, convulsing as the wires threaded into them. From their open mouths came a droning, clattering buzz that escalated in pitch. Martha realised abruptly that it was the Clade equivalent of a scream.
‘What did you do, Doc?’ said Nathan, his eyes wide.
The Doctor swept around, his coat flaring open behind him. ‘Ex-plain later,’ he shouted, as the pulsing sound from the gun grew louder and louder. ‘Run now!’
Martha felt the noise in her bones more than she heard it. Ultra-sound, she realised, as fines of grit and small pebbles began to trickle down from widening cracks in the stone ceiling.
The Doctor put the flat of his hand in the small of her back and propelled her forward. ‘Hurry up, Martha Jones, unless you want to be a permanent resident!’ They started running, as all around them 151
the rocks began to grind against one another, filling the tunnels with coils of choking dust.
Once he had been able to touch the web of the Clade command net-work with his mind, the Doctor found the key to defeating them there before him. The Godlove-Clade told him that the weapons had never taken a Time Lord as a host before and, once it had merged with him, he knew why. Any member of a race as advanced as the Time Lords could instantly fathom the structure of the intricate but straightfor-ward Clade programming – all it took was the ability to think beyond the conventional four dimensions, something as easy as breathing for the Doctor.
When the Clade looked into the Doctor, the Doctor looked into the Clade. All the time it was rummaging through the memories of his companions and past adventures, he was understanding how the weapons worked, how they thought. True, there had been a moment when he started to lose himself in there, deep in the non-space of the machine mind; but Martha, brilliant and daring Martha Jones, had brought him back.
A blank slate when it had emerged from its hard-pod after the crash, the Command Unit had slowly absorbed the pattern of its persona from Alvin Godlove. A man led by nothing but greed, that emotion imprinted on the Clade, blinding it to everything else. That greed made it want the Doctor’s flesh for itself, craving him as its new host-body without even stopping to think if it could master his mind.
The Clade had, quite literally, bitten off more than it could chew.
And now it would pay the price.
Locked in a feedback loop, programs cycling endlessly, spouting gib-berish and frozen in place, the Clades inhabiting the bodies of Kutter and Tangleleg could do nothing but follow the Command Unit into a spiral of repeating negative orders as a dangerous overload loomed.
Through the storm of chattering, colliding programs, the Clades united to force out one final word from their lips. They could do nothing else, all of them out-thought and beaten by one unassuming man who had turned their own violence against them.
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It was a curse on their enemy, a furious shout of anger and despair at their own defeat.
‘ Doc-tor!!! ’
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Martha couldn’t remember the last time she’d been so pleased to see the sunlight. After the deep gloom of the mine, the bright day of the desert beyond was a stark change and her eyes watered as she struggled out of the narrow vent chimney and on to the hillside.
Sprawled on the stone and sparse scrub, she felt the low rumbling pulse of the building overload through her clothes, deep into her bones. With every passing second, the pulses were getting faster, closer together, and the ground trembled.
Nathan, coughing and wheezing, came after her, hands flailing as he reached the top of the channel. Martha’s hands were cut and rough from climbing up the rocky chimney, but she ignored the stinging and grabbed the teenage boy’s wrists, bracing her feet against a rock to help him up the last few metres. He rolled out over the top like a cork popping from a bottle, tearing his jacket in the process.
Martha went to the edge of the vent and shouted down it. ‘Doctor! Quickly!’ She saw movement in the dark, but it was hard to see how near her friend was to the surface. All the way through the tunnels, he’d been pressing them along, directing them this way and that, sniffing at the air for a way out as if he was a hunting dog after a fox.
‘Don’t wait for me,’ he called, ‘just keep going!’
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She pulled a face. She hadn’t come this far just to abandon him at the last second.
‘Whoa!’ Nathan stumbled as the hillside shivered, sending rocks rolling away and down towards the derelict mine works below. ‘Earth-quake!’
Martha gaped as the ground actually rippled, with a sound like a million jackhammers pounding at the rocky surface. Huge cracks fanned out over the hillside, spitting out fat puffs of red dust. Nathan’s hand clamped on her arm.
‘We gotta –’
He had no chance to finish his sentence. Another ripple hit in synch with the loudest pulse yet and it threw Martha and Nathan into the air. Both of them came down hard and tumbled, rolling out of control over rocks and dry brush, skidding and falling toward the base of the hill.
They landed in a dusty, untidy heap, panting and scratched. Martha felt dizzy where her head had smacked a stone outcrop, and she probed the skin there. Ouch. That would be a lovely bruise in a few hours.
Nathan staggered to his feet and offered her his hand, ever the young gentleman.
Martha scrambled up, listening to the pulsing
thrum of sound.
‘Sounds like a wailing banshee!’ said the youth. ‘Can’t barely stand up!’
Martha wasn’t listening. She stared up along the hill, searching for the vent mouth – and she found it, just as the Doctor came spinning from the hole, blown out by a brown cloud of dust and rock chips.
The cloud rumbled down the hill, becoming a landslide that enclosed the running figure as he sprinted toward them. The Doctor was enveloped by the gritty haze and she lost sight of him.
Then there was a sound like the world breaking open, and the whole hill collapsed.
In the cavern, as the cascading overload reached the point of criti-cal resonance, the screaming Clades were crushed beneath hundreds 156
of tons of iron-heavy red stone, shattering the host-bodies they had claimed and the mecha-organic mesh of the weapons modules.
A final pulse of energy, one tuned to very specific telepathic frequency, flashed out from the linked war machines, sending a shock-wave out through the rock strata.
The mine buried itself in a thundering crash of sound.
It happened so fast that Martha thought she had imagined it; an emerald bubble of light, like a dome made of green lightning. It expanded out of the dust-filled crater that had been a hill only moments before and washed out over the land in all directions. Caught in the path of it, Martha and Nathan had no time to react, not even enough time to cry out – but it passed over them and through them without any ill effect.
She went to the boy, who stood panting and doubled over. ‘Are you OK?’
Nathan looked up at her and nodded. ‘Yeah. Yeah. ’ A smile crossed his face. ‘That flash of light. . . it made me. . . feel better.’
Martha paused, thinking. She had to admit, she felt it too. As if some dark shadow playing at the back of her mind had been blown away by the wind.
‘They ain’t there no more,’ Nathan continued, musing.
‘Miss
Martha, the bad dreams, the things I remembered. It’s like they’re gone.’
She didn’t answer him. Her gaze was stuck on a shape moving through the clouds of red dust, coming towards them with careful, loping steps, intent and with purpose. Martha’s heart leapt as the Doctor trudged out of the crumpled crater and came to a halt before them. Like Nathan and Martha, he was caked in dirt.
‘Look at me!’ he said, spreading his hands. ‘Twice in the same day.’
