Doctor Who_ The Scarlet Empress Part 5

It was late. Sam sat listening to the others talk far into the night. Even Gila had become companionable and less spiky, under the influence of drink and talk. From the bus there came music - one of Iris's old driving compilation tapes, no doubt. Soon Sam found herself drifting in and out of sleep.

'Will you both help me?' She heard Iris's rather slurred voice, apparently coming out of nowhere.

Gila sounded sulky. 'Perhaps if you'd explained things to me in the first place, I'd have helped you of my own accord.'

'Desperate measures,' said Iris.

Sam cursed at herself and lay still. She had fallen asleep and hadn't heard Iris explain herself.

The Doctor was saying.'Getting mixed up with the Scarlet Empress...

Iris, what are you doing? She's a tyrant! A despot! Have you heard her human-rights record on Hyspero alone? It's dreadful. She's brought the whole Scarlet dynasty into horrible disrepute just through -'

'I know, Doctor,' she said through gritted teeth. 'But sometimes we have to compromise our impeccable standards, don't we? And look at some of the people you've collaborated with.'

'Only with the best intentions at -'

'Davros, Napoleon, Al Capone, the Rani, Hitler. Doctor, you've no right to call me names.'

'Perhaps.'

'And besides. She's got me over a barrel.'

There was the clink and glug of more gin being poured. 'No ice,' said Iris sadly.

Gila said,'I'll help you.'

'You will?' Suddenly she seemed less depressed.

'Your mission is to bring the Four back together. You can't do that without me. It will be interesting. And if anyone can sort the Empress out, it's us.'

'Good,' said the Doctor. 'We're decided then.'

'You'll help me, Doctor?'

'Of course.'

'Then we start out tomorrow,' she said.'First light.'

Sam felt herself drifting off again.

She heard the Doctor saying, 'A toast - to a safe and uneventful journey.'

Gila snorted in derision.'Fat chance.'

Gila is back on the screen.

'I was one of the Four. We were great. We could do anything. Rescue anyone. Kidnap anyone. Start little wars and finish them. We were four and we each had separate strengths and skills and powers. Me, the Bearded Lady, the Cyborg d.u.c.h.ess and the Mock Turtle. Ten years ago they were queuing for our services. We were famous.'

'What happened?' asks Iris.

'We broke up the merry band.We scattered across Hyspero.We didn't expect to see each other again.'

Chapter Six.

Another Day, Another Lovely Adventure

The Doctor was the first to wake. He found the small kitchen compartment at the back of Iris's bus, and started preparing breakfast on the old Baby Belling. Sam woke under heaped blankets on the sand to the smell of bacon grilling and the sound of the Doctor singing along, loudly and off-key, to Puccini.

Across the dwindling fire she could make out the shapes of Gila and Iris, both still last asleep. There was a scattering of cigarette b.u.t.ts around Iris and she still wore her sea-green hat, but it was pushed down over her face as she snored and muttered in her sleep. She was going on about Sontarans and perverting the course of human history. Not that she ever cared about such things, by all reports.

Sam went off to find the Doctor.

He was in his s.h.i.+rtsleeves in the cramped galley, slicing bread and stirring mugs of sugary, milky tea.

'So we're going off on some kind of adventure,' said Sam from the doorway, and made him jump.

'Ah,' he said.'I sort of pledged our support last night. Poached or fried?'

'I can't bear poached, like eating eyeb.a.l.l.s. Do you know what it's all about, then?'

She watched him heat oil until it s.h.i.+mmered, and then crack eggs on the pan. 'Mm. Kind of. Iris has been sent to reunite the members of a...

team, I suppose you'd call it, of mutant vigilantes. Or vigilante mutants.

Gila was one of them, ten or so years ago. They all went their separate ways and stopped hiring themselves out for... fighting people, sorting out messes and muddles and so on, whatever that sort of person gets up to.

Ouch!' He'd burnt his finger on the grill pan.

'Stick it under the tap. Who wants them back together?'

He held his hand under the cold tap, wincing. 'Well, it's the Scarlet Empress, the unscrupulous ruler of this province. And what plans she has I don't know. All I know is that Iris thinks she'll be in terrible trouble if she doesn't get these people together.'

'Why don't we just go to this Empress and ask?'

'I'd feel happier facing her with Gila's friends in tow. They were quite famous hereabouts, you know. And besides, there's something going on here I want to know about.'

He presented her with a plate of toast and fried eggs.'All right?'

'So long as I know what we're getting into.'

'Just a jaunt,' he smiled. 'We're a team, aren't we? And this way, we get to see something of the world. Let's wake the others.'

Iris had a mammoth hangover. She waved away the breakfast that the Doctor brought her. 'I can't eat that greasy nonsense!' she gasped. 'My figure!' She pushed past him, into the bus, and rummaged around in a cupboard for fresh cigarettes. 'Another day, another lovely adventure,'

she grumbled. 'Sam, dear, would you fetch some paracetamol from the kitchen? They're in the fridge.'

Gila was wolfing two breakfasts at the fold-down table in the gangway.

'So where do we start?'

'Map, Sam!'called the Doctor.

She felt around inside her bag and flung it at him. Proudly he unfolded his rough map of Hyspero across the breakfast table. Iris cast a beleaguered eye over it.

'That's rubbish,' she said.

The Doctor looked stung. 'It's the best map of Hyspero I've seen.'

'Lights,' Iris called to her TARDIS, and instantly the lights dimmed and shutters came down over all the bus windows. A projection screen slid over the window closest to them, and a multicoloured transparency of an ancient Hysperon map s.h.i.+vered into being.

'That's very impressive,' said the Doctor.

GUa stared closely at the map's intricate detailing. 'It's got little pictures of the people and creatures and the places and buildings of interest...'

The Doctor picked up his own map, and slid it away into his pocket. He had drawn it himself, many years ago, on his first visit here. Of course it couldn't compete with Iris's charts.

"The first thing we have to do,' said Iris.'is get through the mountains.'

She looked at Gila. "The other three all travelled south, beyond the mountains.'

'That'll take us to the Forest of Kestheven,' said Gila.'Out of the desert and the mountains, into the woods. So we'll look for Angela first. The last I heard of her, she was still living in the wilds. She went back to nature.'

'Over the mountains we go, then,' said Iris.'Lights!' The gaudy, rather decadent lamps flickered back on, and the shutters slid up again.

'Doctor, have you got some coffee brewing? I can't smell any.'

'I haven't yet,' he said stiffly, collecting up dishes.

'Doctor,' said Sam, 'let her get her own coffee! Why are you running round after everyone?'

'I don't know!' He tried to a.s.sert himself. 'I suggest we go via the mountains, urn, this morning.'

'That's what we're doing,' said Iris. 'It's already decided.' She got up and bustled past him to the kitchen. 'I'll put my own coffee on. Sam, darling, do you drive?'

'Not double-decker buses, she doesn't,' said the Doctor.

'Draw up a rota for driving, would you, Sam? No longer than three hours at the wheel each.'

Sam asked,'If this is a TARDIS, why don't you just take us straight to this forest place?'

Iris was shaking coffee grounds out into the sink, all over the was.h.i.+ng up. 'What, and land right in the middle of nowhere? Go blundering about with no idea?' Iris cackled.'You've been spending too much time with him over there, lovey.'

Sam laughed, and the Doctor shot her a look.

Within the hour the dishes were done, Iris had smoked her fifth cigarette of the morning, and they were on their way. Iris took the wheel, and wrestled mightily to get the bus on to the road that ran rutted and winding through the plains.

That afternoon Sam sat up front with Iris, who drove hunched over the wheel, glaring at the horizon. Sam pulled a deck-chair up beside the cab and did the important things, as Iris put it: lighting her cigarettes, changing the tapes.

'Hold the wheel again, Sam, there's a dear.' Iris had an old-fas.h.i.+oned camcorder in her handbag that she would pull out every now and then, to grab a few shots out of the window when the scenery got interesting.

After an hour or so the younger woman realised that she was actually enjoying herself. Mostly they sat in companionable silence, or singing along together, at first hesitantly, and then more raucously, to the Beatles, the Carpenters and the Beach Boys. Sam surprised herself byknowing the words to all of those songs. It was even more surprising, really, to find that Iris knew all these songs too.'You just pick them up, don't you? By osmosis, I think.' Actually, Sam thought, she knew all these lyrics from her parents' records. At least Iris wasn't playing Pink Floyd.

The flies were terrible, crawling into the bus and squirming about on whatever bare patches of flesh they could find. Sam was still in yesterday's grungy T-s.h.i.+rt and shorts. Luckily she'd remembered the extra bra and knickers in her haversack (a fake leopard-skin number Iris heartily approved of). In her travels with the Doctor she had learned that it paid to set out prepared for a few days' roughing it. Her mother had instilled into her a fear of being without clean underwear. Iris agreed with this when Sam told her. 'I think it's psychological,' she pontificated.'I have only the very best underwear. I shop constantly for lingerie.'

Sam was steeling herself to ask Iris if she could hunt around in her glorious wardrobe upstairs. But she was too wiped out just now. Maybe later. The Doctor was very proud of the wardrobe room aboard his TARDIS, with its outfits from all over the galaxy, but Sam hadn't been very impressed. Iris laughed at this. 'And this new feller he's gone and turned into looks like such a... dandy!'

'A dandy?' Sam smiled.

'He was letting himself go, a little while ago. Just throwing any old thing on. Midlife crisis, I thought. Good to see he's back on the rails.' Iris remembered something. 'Did he ever tell you about me and him b.u.mping into Wilde in Paris? After Wilde's imprisonment?'

Sam shook her head.'He doesn't tell me much about the past.'

'We met one of your era's most marvellous wits -' My era? thought Sam - 'and they spent the whole afternoon drinking absinthe and talking about where they had their s.h.i.+rts made.' Iris shook her head. 'I listened in amazement. Of course, they managed to turn the whole concept of having a beautiful s.h.i.+rt made for you into a metaphor for anything you could think of. Life, art, love, everything. It was quite a conversation. I came away reeling.'

'So the Doctor met Oscar Wilde?'

'Darling, the Doctor's met everyone. Even if he doesn't remember it so well now.' Iris turned to look down the gangway.'Where is he, anyway?'

Gila shouted,'Upstairs reading. He wanted some time alone.'

'Earwigging,' Sam warned him. Gila hissed at her. He was playing some kind of computer game. A slash-and-destroy warrior thing that made him shout out at intervals.

Sam asked,'Was it true, what you said, about your reason for not just materialising at our destination?'

Iris chuckled.'You're not daft, are you?'

'Just asking...'

"You think I'm doing my best to prolong this and keep the Doctor with me, don't you?'

'Do I?'

Iris owned up. 'Partly that. But I meant it, too. This forest we're travelling into isn't the friendliest of environments. Even this s.h.i.+p is erratic. I wouldn't want to land somewhere awful. I prefer to sneak up on my quarry.'