"They"ve gone. They"ve left us here. They think we"re dead, and even if they didn"t, after that, after that happened, who"d stay here? You"d leave as fast as you could."
Iaomnet sat down on the floor, cross-legged. After a moment, the Doctor came up and stood over her.
"What did you see?" he said.
"I don"t know."
"Come on, Iaomnet. You"re an operative, a trained observer.
You must have seen something."
"I don"t know what you"re talking about."
"Never mind that. Tell me what you saw in there."
"Zatopek had a gun," she said. "And he said we were going on no matter what you said, and..." Iaomnet shook her head. She had a weird urge to curl up in a ball, a bulky, awkward ball with fat arms and legs and a head shaped like an, er, ball. "Oh G.o.d,"
she said. "I"m not making sense."
The Doctor put his faceplate close to hers. His eyebrows were drawn together in a worried frown. "Never mind," he said.
"Are we going to get out of here?" she said.
The Doctor paused. "Do you feel that?" he said.
Iaomnet said, "No." The Doctor knelt, took her gloved hand, and pressed it, palm down, against the floor.
107.
She felt the distant vibration. "What is it?" she said. Almost.
Almost but not quite remembering. Remembering the machinery in the central chamber, the way it. Moved. "Oh G.o.d." She s.n.a.t.c.hed her hand away from the floor.
"It"s our rescue ship landing," said the Doctor. "Unless I"m very much mistaken." She looked up at him. "Are you ready for one last stint of walking?"
"Yes!" She bounced to her feet. "They"ll go without us. We have to move now now!"
Roz was already pulling on her suit as the ISN Wilfred Owen Wilfred Owen, Sa.s.soon Cla.s.s, touched down on the ugly surface of Iphigenia. It was a state-of-the-art All Hostile Environments Garment, skin-tight, elastic and light as a feather, the helmet made of the same stuff as the bodysuit but turned hard and transparent. It was more comfortable than her street clothes.
She felt the big engines shut down, the tremble in the walls quietening, a feeling of weight as the rock gave slightly beneath the shuttle. The two troopers with her, wearing their own AHEGs, waited patiently.
A few moments later, Captain Sekeris"s voice came through the suit radio. "All right, ma"am," he said. "Go ahead when you"re ready." The poor man had been acting like a servant ever since she"d managed to convince him she was on a secret mission for the Empress. A real Forrester, right there on his ship, probably working for one of the intelligence agencies to boot. He was young for a captain, eager to do the right thing.
The troopers followed her out of the airlock, a ramp unfolding to take them down to the rocky surface. Each of them carried heavy sensor equipment, the output appearing on a palmtop Roz carried on a strap over her shoulder. "Still nothing on the ship"s sensors, ma"am," Sekeris told her.
"Stand by," she said. "We"ll spread out and search the area between the ship and the mountain."
"What if they went... inside, ma"am?"
"I want to avoid entering the mountain if at all possible. We don"t know how deep those structures go. All right, let"s go."
108.
The troopers started walking, one to the right, one to the left.
Roz blew out a sigh and headed for the mountain.
She seriously did not want to go inside. They"d seen the structures half buried in the mountain on their approach, and she had no doubt that it was the real goal of Martinique"s expedition.
But whatever was in there had screwed up reality to the point where there were G.o.ddess knew how many extra Doctors walking about, appearing like sad ghosts in a Chinese fairy tale.
Another one had appeared to her in her cabin en route, furiously scribbling coordinates on the wall with a stick of crayon. A short guy in an oversized dark suit. "Don"t tell the Time Lords I was here," he insisted. "I keep to myself, one step ahead of them. But only one step." Then he"d vanished.
At least out here it was just rocks and empty s.p.a.ce. You knew where you were with rocks and empty s.p.a.ce.
The scream nearly burst her eardrum. " sake, wait! Don"t leave without us! Don"t go! Can you hear us?"
"Shut the cruk up up!" Roz yelled into her suit mike. "Turn your b.l.o.o.d.y gain down!"
"Roz, can you hear me?"
"Doctor!" She tried not to sound as delighted as she was. And d.a.m.n, he"d used her name. Now they knew he knew her. "What"s the sitrep?"
"What are you doing here?" he said.
"Oh, thanks. I came to rescue you."
"But I thought you were living in Hampstead."
"What?"
"With George."
Roz felt something cold worm its way down her back. "What the h.e.l.l are you talking about?" she said.
"We"ve just this moment got out of the mountain complex. It"s just me and Iaomnet Wszola we think the others left us for dead. We"re tired, but unhurt."
"Oh yeah, you sound just fine."
"Oh Jesus, oh Jesus, oh Jesus," Iaomnet was whispering.
"Thank you, thank you, thank you."
"I"m afraid Iaomnet is understandably upset."
"Stay put. We"ll come up and get you."
109.
"Roz "
"Captain Sekeris, are you getting all of this?" said Roz quickly.
"Yes, ma"am. We"ve got the medical team on standby for your return."
"We"ll talk soon," said Roz. Will we ever? "Save your strength for now."
The medical team took one look at Iaomnet and tranquillized her. It was mostly exhaustion, the nurses said, as much from fear as from the marathon walk to escape the mountain. They put her to bed in sickbay, over her feeble protests.
The Doctor took one look at the medical team and they left him the h.e.l.l alone. He looked distinctly unsteady to Roz, sitting on a bed in sickbay with his head tipped back against the wall. He looked thinner, not as though he"d lost weight, more as though he"d somehow lost substance substance.
She went into the sickbay, and he snapped back in an instant.
"Roz," he said. "We have to get to Ca.s.sandra."
"Is that where Chris is heading?" asked Roz.
"Yes," said the Doctor. "Possibly, it doesn"t matter we have to go there."
"No problem. Sekeris is waiting for my instructions. But we"ll be flying through a war zone without authorization. I"ll have to come up with a good story." He didn"t answer, his head tilted and his eyes half closed, as though he was listening to something far away. "A very very good story, Doctor." good story, Doctor."
"Tell him civilization as we know it is in danger."
"Is that true?"
"Yes," he said. "Tell him whatever you like."
"Doctor," she said, "what was that about my being married to George Reed? Because if it was a joke it wasn"t b.l.o.o.d.y funny."
"Sorry," he said. "I"m still remembering a lot of timelines. It"s hard to sort them out. I wasn"t expecting you. I thought I"d left you behind in 1941. Or that you were killed by yourself in Woodwicke. Or that you were the head of the Order of Adjudicators."
"How many timelines do you remember?"
110.
He thought about it. "About fifty," he said. "That"s not so bad. I started with two thousand and three."
"Hold it right there."
They both looked up. Iaomnet stood in the doorway, wielding a hypospray filled with something unpleasant and purple.
"I don"t know what you two are up to," she said, slowly and carefully around the sedative, "but it"s going to stop right now.
I"m taking you both into custody. So don"t mess with me."
"I wouldn"t do that if I was you," said Roz. "I told the crew that you were under suspicion of being a subversive oggielover, possibly even a terrorist. Now, you could run to them and tell them who you really are. But who knows how they"d react?"
"Ca.s.sandra," said the Doctor in a voice that startled both of them. "Now!"
The Wilfred Owen Wilfred Owen tore through the Agamemnon system as fast as its little engines would carry it. Sekeris stayed on the shuttle"s bridge through three consecutive watches, almost scowling with seriousness. Civilization as he knew it was at stake. tore through the Agamemnon system as fast as its little engines would carry it. Sekeris stayed on the shuttle"s bridge through three consecutive watches, almost scowling with seriousness. Civilization as he knew it was at stake.
Roz caught a few hours" sleep and ate most of a rations pack.
The Doctor stayed in one of the scanner rooms, displacing a series of rostered techies, who hovered nervously outside the door. Roz gave the latest one a salute as she squeezed into the room behind the Doctor"s seat. He was watching six screens, apparently simultaneously.
"How"s our Imperial Intelligence Agent?" he said.
"Sulking in her room." In the end Roz had taken the hypospray away, and had Iaomnet confined to quarters. "I think she"s a spent force." The double-eye had that "I"ve Seen Too Much, Gibber Gibber" look that people around the Doctor sometimes got. Roz suspected she"d had that look herself, once or twice. "How are your timelines?"
"Down to seven that I can clearly remember. You"re alive and with me in four of them. The rest are all blurry, like afterimages.
Look," said the Doctor.
"Where?"
He tapped one of the screens. Roz looked where he was pointing, a computer-enhanced sphere labelled Orestes. One of 111 Iphigenia"s sibling moons. Two smudges of light were labelled ISN Victoria Victoria and ISN and ISN Doran Doran. Green figures and red dotted lines surrounded the two ships.
Roz didn"t have to know how to interpret the military data to realize what she was seeing. "They"ve broken from orbit."
He nodded. "They"re following us." He put his hand on a control, and the image swivelled in three dimensions. "But they can"t catch us."
There was another ship, tiny, labelled only by a serial number.
Its projected course took it all the way to the outermost planet.
"The Hopper," said Roz. "So Chris and the others made it away."
"Why there? One of the others must have put two and two together and got the same answer as I did..."
"Four?" said Roz.
"The Victoria Victoria and the accompanying frigate, the and the accompanying frigate, the Michael John Michael John Doran Doran, will overtake the Hopper in about ten hours. They"ll take its crew and pa.s.sengers prisoner. That"ll slow them down a bit, but when we get to Ca.s.sandra, they"ll only be a few hours behind us. We won"t be able to waste a moment."
Roz didn"t ask what they"d be doing. She"d get an explanation as and when the Doctor decided it was appropriate. "Wake me up when we get there," she said.
She woke up instantly as someone knocked on her cabin door.
"Ma"am?" called a voice.
"Yeah!"
"We"re in orbit around Ca.s.sandra. The Doctor is asking to see you, ma"am."
Roz opened the door and squinted at the soldier. "Two seconds," she said.
In the sensor room, the Doctor had ripped wires and cabling from the console. The surviving screen was running a continuous sweep of the comet"s surface. According to the terminal in Roz"s quarters, it was a rogue chunk of rock and ice in an erratic, elliptical orbit, b.u.mbling in and out of the Agamemnon system.
"There"s a landing pad," said the Doctor. "Tell your captain to head for these coordinates."