Doctor Who_ The Blue Angel Part 8

His vile image reappeared on our screen and he oh so politely asked for permission to come aboard.

I granted it.

And so it was Garrett, Timon, 'Forceps' Felixstoe and myself waiting in the demat chamber as the Sahmbekart supreme commander had himself scintillated aboard the Nepotist Nepotist.

He arrived standing up in one of the tubs.

He was far more frightful in the scaled and gleaming flesh than he had been on the screen. His jaws seemed so much bigger. You could see the constant stream of saliva coursing between his broken teeth.

And his legs were a shock. Each of the two was twice the thickness of his torso. He also had a tail, which swished impressively behind him as we led him down the corridor to the chamber where, we had determined, we would talk this thing through.

'I would prefer to talk on your bridge, Captain Blandish,' he said, quite politely. 'And from there I may keep an eye on my fleet. Reasonable, yes?'

He turned one of those gimlet eyes on me then, and I, involuntarily, gulped. I agreed. 'Just so long as we can come to some amicable agreement.'

The Sahmbekart shrugged as I showed him to the elevator. I noticed how small and puny his forearms actually were.

'I am not here to bargain with you, Captain. I am here to tell you what is to happen to you. You are in no position to bargain with me.'

And then he fell silent as the lift took us whizzing back towards the bridge and my fellow officers and I were squashed against the walls by the bulk of his saliva-damp legs.

Extract ends The Ghillighast had erected a kind of paG.o.da, all of pale-pink silk, for their honoured guests to sit in.

It was placed on silver runners at the head of their procession across the ice fields and the sheer impenetrable, unending night.

The dogs ran for hours, their muzzles frosted and bearded with ice, and now and then they would let out the most ghastly moans and ululating howls. They howled at what they thought was the moon, but they were confused.

These past few days, there had been an increasing number of moons and Corridors in the sky above Ghillighast, as had there arrived more and more s.h.i.+ps, emerging like the newly born from the Corridors. The sky was looking almost congested.

In other sleds, the Ghillighast sat hunched up, staring keenly into the way ahead, their vestigial velveteen wings folded up around them like shawls.

The High Priestess Meisha rode alone as usual, seated on the back of a wolf, which pounded along, kicking up plumes of snow.

'Something very bad is happening,' Marn said worriedly, as he drew aside the pink drapes and looked up into the hectic night sky.

'I shouldn't worry about it,' Belinda said, sitting back on the cus.h.i.+ons. 'What can we do?'

'We can fight.'

'Who?'

Marn's eyes were gleaming again. 'Daedalus. He's behind this. For hundreds of years the races of the Enclave hardly bothered each other at all. Now he's stirring it all up.'

They entered the Corridor.

The wolves and the huskies and the dogs howled louder.

The fire engine was rolling impressively over the remains of the outer walls of Valcea.

There was a terrible sound of breaking gla.s.s as wall after wall went under the metal wheels.

Inside, the occupants held their breath. It was as if their vessel was too heavy for the city to hold any more. It creaked and groaned under their ma.s.s.

As they listened, the Steigertrudes and the ladies and Ian could hear the cracking and splintering and the groaning of gla.s.s.

Emba turned on Ian and demanded, 'Where is your father? Where will he be hiding?'

'The throne room,' said Ian, without thinking. He could hardly remember being there. He barely remembered anything at all before being taken away by the Ghillighast. His earliest memories were of their chilly, dirty moon and living in caverns, kept there like an animal.

But there was still the glimmering of a memory: his father's throne room in the very heart of this city. He could almost see it.

And his father?

He remembered tusks, a powerful, rank, b.e.s.t.i.a.l smell. And a booming voice.

He gave Emba the nod. Told her to head for the heart.

Chapter Thirty-Three.

The Bus Is Rattling...

The bus is rattling so much.

This is because the end of the Corridor is nigh. This should come as some consolation, for the disturbance, the kerfuffle, the discomfort of it all will be over soon.

But the travellers on the bus don't know yet that they have almost escaped from the Corridor.

In a final constrictive effort the Corridor is wondering how it might go about keeping these travellers and their bus lost up its own voluminous sleeves. How to ensnare them further and for ever; gollopped and gobbled up in its huge and awkward peristalsis.

But the Doctor is no fish-bone to be choked on!

Both his hearts jump up in horror at the idea of being eternally swallowed in an anomaly such as this no matter how diverting it may be.

He revs the engine of his borrowed bus. The fabric of the Corridor itself s.h.i.+vers pleasurably at his stubborn resistance, his trickiness, his unwillingness to be contained by it...

And the Corridor plots and schemes in its own not entirely vacuous manner.

It wonders how to keep him here.

As does the bus. Iris's s.h.i.+p has been with her for so long, and she with it, that it thinks along much the same lines as she does.

When the Doctor is aboard, Iris is happy.

And so is the bus. It is as if the master were home again. The bus feels like Nelly Dean, hovering at the hearth at Wuthering Heights, waiting for Mr Heathcliff to come home with all the attendant awkwardness of their relations.h.i.+p.

So while the Doctor is here aboard, as he has been again and again through all their many and sporadic lives, the bus is reasonably happy and pleased with itself.

As pleased as it can be with its mistress missing and presumed to be dead.

As the bus enters a new phase of Corridor a murky stretch, a cavern, a moist, unnerving s.p.a.ce Compa.s.sion sits still and tries to compose herself.

It seems that every muscle of which she is in possession is twitching.

Her legs cramp up, her fingers spasm.

Is it something to do with this place, or something else? Nervously, she plays with her hair.

The bus rattles fit to burst.

The bus rattles as if someone were determined to shake it until the interior dimensions come loose and peel and fall away from the external, robustly buslike exterior. Compa.s.sion knows that, given that this is a TARDIS, this isn't actually that impossible.

She feels as if something had come loose inside her and were rattling around.

She starts to feel she isn't even inside her own body any more.

The Doctor is on his feet, hands on the wheel, staring out at the new stretch of tunnel.

'I can't drive through there.'

Compa.s.sion goes to look through the s.m.u.tty windscreen. At first she can make out nothing in the cavern.

The Doctor gently pulls the bus to a stop, and kills the music.

Then he whooshes open the door and leads them both out on to a floor that gives, surprisingly, underfoot.

A sapphire heart-shaped cavern, and it is occupied.

From ceiling and walls depend coils and fleshy tubes. They twist and ravel and from them hang weighty objects, slightly larger than ripe melons.

They drift out as if there were no gravity in here, though the Doctor and Compa.s.sion remain on the ground with the bus.

'What are they?'

The Doctor looks grim. He looks ashen.

He nods to make Compa.s.sion look again, to look harder.

Then she realises that the tubes she sees are twisted and coiled like umbilical cords because that is exactly what they are.

And from the end of each floats a baby.

Each hugging itself, head lowered, eyes shut.

There are perhaps ten thousand bright-blue babies afloat in this room.

As the Doctor steps tentatively into the chamber, one tiny blue fist closes on the calf muscle of his left leg. He feels those tiny fingers squeezing tight on his flesh. He cries out and the hand relaxes.

But the fingers have left a mark. He can feel it.

Chapter Thirty-Four.

Existential Angst is an Embarra.s.sment, But...

Existential angst is an embarra.s.sment but...

If I were to get stuck in the blue Corridors toddling up and down ad infinitum where is it I'm actually stuck? In blue vortices for ever, shot from one end to the other, never able to re-enter real time?

That sounds to me like never getting back to real progression even regression ever again.

You know how s.h.i.+rley Ba.s.sey sings themes to James Bond films, but she's never actually in the film itself? All we get is her voice, warning girls to watch out for Mister Goldfinger, et cetera, et cetera... But she herself is never fool enough to become embroiled. Well, that will be me. I'd be in a t.i.tle sequence only. I'd never get to be in the actual story.

I will be the voice of the frame.

Exempt from plot!

But me I'm a mover-shaker, aren't I?

I am implicated, I interfere, I tamper and transgress. That's always been my role. I am a man made to make Old Enemies and blissfully we cross and recross one another's helter-skelter path; our reunions and run-ins infinitely recurring and all of it takes place within some kind of real time. Exemption's no fun.

Never to be in my own adventure!

No more episodes for me!

Oh no!

But even then there's a kind of implied adventure, isn't there? And it would be about how I inveigle myself back into the functions of story. How I break out of a crippling stasis. And I can see it all now.

But horrors the thought of this for ever.