"That"s enough." Haunt sounded a little shaky as she plucked the webset from Frog"s forehead. "We"d better watch this for ourselves."
"You don"t trust me?" Frog said coldly. "This is still me, you know."
For how much longer, thought Ben gloomily, scratching the back of his neck. How long till nothing"s left of any of us?
The cheery thought led to another.
"So where"s Denni"s webset then?" he asked aloud. "If she died first, why wasn"t nothing of hers hidden away down there with the others?"
"Maybe it was, and you just didn"t find it," Polly suggested.
"No wait..." Creben looked at Haunt. "If Shel"s not behind this -"
"- Then Roba"s chasing after the wrong person," finished Tovel.
"That"s not what I meant," Creben told him coldly. "If Shel"s not responsible for bringing us here, somebody else is."
Haunt swore. "And who went conveniently missing right at the start of all this, without a trace? Who"s been moving about freely as a result ever since, making this nightmare happen?"
"It fits," said the Doctor. "Yes, it fits."
Ben stared at him. "Denni."
Chapter Thirteen.
They Do It With Mirrors
I.
Polly felt she could weep with frustration. Just as she thought she was getting things straight in her head, another suspect came to light. She came over to Ben, leaving the others to talk worriedly among themselves.
"If only we could just get into the TARDIS and leave," she said bitterly.
"The Doctor"ll -"
"Oh, don"t just say that the Doctor will think of something, Ben!" Polly snapped.
He looked like she"d just slapped him round the face.
"Sorry, Ben," she sighed, and he shrugged. Polly glanced up at the Doctor. He was back rummaging inside the damaged console. Couldn"t stay away from the thing. "It"s just, sometimes I wonder what he -"
The Doctor clapped his hands. "Yes! Yes, of course, that is it. Time! It explains everything. Time held still."
Ben shot Polly a knowing glance. "What are you talking about, Doctor?"
"The stasis field. The bodies there are caught in a single moment of time." He pulled out some components from the charred guts of the console. "I"ve seen circuits like these in the TARDIS systems."
"Then the Schirr aren"t dead, only frozen in time?" Polly peeped round nervously at the corpses. "What about when Shel scanned them?"
"The bodies are outside our own time frame. To the scanner they would have no relevance - and so appear entirely inert.
Dead. But as you say, that is not necessarily the case."
"Then those navigational crystal things we need to turn around could be in there too!" Polly realised.
"Very possibly," the Doctor agreed. He paused, took hold of his lapels, looking oddly pleased with himself. But by this time, Haunt had come over with Creben, Shade and Tovel, and she didn"t look happy at all.
"We haven"t got time to waste on any more speculation," she said heavily.
"This isn"t speculation, it is fact." The Doctor generously included the newcomers in his explanation. "Frog said she believed Shel was trying to tell me something. Indeed he was."
He gestured to the console. "These controls do not operate the stasis field. They cannot, the connections have been severed."
Haunt frowned. "Damage from the explosion when Shel -"
That"s what I thought, at first. But the severance of the circuitry is too precise to have been caused randomly." He turned to Ben. "Would you be so good as to prise open the metal box beneath the console for me, hmm?"
Shade offered him a knife, like the one Frog had used on herself, and Ben crouched beneath the console, baffled.
"Dunno what you expect to find, Doctor. Looks like a bomb went off here."
"What is inside?" the Doctor asked, looking up at the ceiling.
Ben re-emerged holding a large, thick chunk of what looked like yellowish gla.s.s.
"That"s all?" asked Polly.
"That is all that is needed," said the Doctor, still staring upward, an evangelical expression on his face. "Look up at the roof. Look."
"More gla.s.s," said Tovel.
"That is how they send the signal," the Doctor said triumphantly.
"What are you talking about, Doctor," Creben scowled.
"The stasis field is operated from the platform. It has to be."
The Doctor seemed to be trembling with excitement as he stalked over to the display of Schirr bodies. Their albino eyes seemed to glare at him, full of hate, as he examined them. "It must be concealed above." He waved a hand frantically. "Will someone please examine the Schirr bodies from above?" above?"
"This is ludicrous," Creben complained, but Haunt waved him into silence.
Tovel offered Ben a bunk up. He didn"t look happy, but he took it, and started to scrabble up the invisible wall like a French mime.
"There"s nothing," Ben reported when he reached the top.
"Just a lot of bald heads."
"But there must be something," the Doctor insisted.
"Wait..." Ben tapped at something none of them could see.
"There"s a tiny bit of gla.s.s here. Can"t shift it, it must be frozen too."
"That is it," the Doctor hissed in triumph. "The relay they have been using."
"But it"s t.i.tchy, it looks like it just dropped here or something!"
"It is all they need to turn the stasis field on or off.
Somehow they can transmit power through this material... a signal." He nodded to himself, certain of what he was saying.
"Of course, there would almost certainly be some spillage..."
"Spillage of what?" Creben looked at him dubiously. "Of time?"
"Quite so," the Doctor told him.
"So that"s why we can"t get inside the TARDIS," Polly heard Ben mutter. "We don"t have the time!"
"And why Pallemar seemed to be dead, but wasn"t," Polly whispered back. "He must"ve been caught up in it too!"
Even with all this, the Doctor wasn"t ready to stop astounding his audience yet. He addressed Haunt directly.
"Can"t you see? Whenever the stasis field is activated or deactivated, it must have a curious effect on our own perception of time."
"That"s how DeCaster and Pallemar vanished without us noticing?" asked Polly.
"Precisely." The Doctor beamed at her. "What took them many minutes, pa.s.sed for us in just a few moments, yes." He turned back to Haunt. "It seemed to us you had been gone only a short time when you returned - but in fact, a good deal of time had pa.s.sed."
"So why didn"t the Schirr use this time difference to attack us?" Haunt inquired.
The Doctor gestured over at Frog. "Clearly they have a use for us."
"Well then, how come I ended up in the tunnels, right when we arrived?" Polly asked, hoping her head could handle all of this.
"A hidden doorway in the rock?" wondered the Doctor. "Yes, again, if it"s frozen in a single point of time until used, no one would be able to detect it."
""Ere, Tovel," Ben said. "That room where we went up against them statues for the first time..."
He nodded. "We seemed to come right through the rock."
"And there were pieces of that gla.s.s hanging down there too," Ben said triumphantly.
"They"re all over the place," Haunt realised. "So the Schirr can move around safely with no chance of being discovered."
"And Denni, it would seem," Creben added, grudgingly accepting the supposition.
"But you said the Schirr had been put in the engines of this thing," Polly complained.
"Whatever was supposed to happen to us here," the Doctor said thoughtfully, "it appears we have become mired in a struggle for power between Schirr and Morphieans..."
"Look out!" yelled Shade.
Polly"s heart leapt. As she turned, the control room was plunged into blackness. Blinding blue current sparked and spluttered along the golden trellises that snaked round the walls. The ducting smoked, and the air filled with filthy fumes.
In the sputtering light she saw the stark silhouette of a giant angel, flying towards them.
II.
Roba staggered down the dark, dank tunnels with a familiarity that made him uneasy. He was becoming at home here, a new creature that belonged to the shadows.
The fleas bugged him more now than ever, though, as they hopped and crawled over his skin. He tried to keep his Schirr hand covered, but the insects seemed drawn to it.
He paused, panting for breath, and held it up. It was alive with the creatures.
Roba smacked it into the wall, as hard as he could again and again, grunting with pain. He heard his knuckles crack and break, and took a bitter satisfaction. If something wanted to take his body, he"d mess it right up for them first.
He only stopped when the pain swamped his stung senses.
Sobbing, he took a long, miserable look at the broken hand.
The fleas had gone, shaken loose, hopped away.
Two heavy footsteps ground into the scree that carpeted the tunnel floor.
Roba looked up to see one of the stone cherubim towering above him, still as a statue. He yelped and fell backwards, retreated on his elbows, gazing up into the cold, blank face of the creature.
In two more steps it caught up with him. Roba had backed himself up against a wall. The angel reached out for his chest, its fingers curved hooks, ready to tear him open.
But instead it reached for the webset dangling uselessly from his belt.