Anji looked on bewildered as Kalic.u.m tightened his finger on the trigger.
"No," rapped the Doctor. "Kill him and the TARDIS stays here indefinitely."
"That seems to be the only card you can play," Kalic.u.m observed.
"A trump card. I might just stay here till kingdom come."
"If you will not leave of your own volition I"ll kill you and transmat your craft out of the Jonah Jonah," said Kalic.u.m simply.
The Doctor shook his head. "That won"t be so easy as shifting a great pile of diamonds from one room to another. The TARDIS defences can be unbelievably stubborn."
"So leave with your lives," said Kalic.u.m. "Now."
"Very well." He nodded decisively. "We"ll leave at once."
"Doctor!" Anji protested. "We can"t leave Guy and "
"There"s no other way," the Doctor snapped.
"Indeed there is not," said Kalic.u.m. "You have all served your purpose and are of no further value. Depart with grat.i.tude for your lives."
And they filed from the shielded room, Anji"s head buzzing and spinning as she crossed back over the threshold into the real world, Sabbath and his surviving ape leading the way back to the hold.
Sabbath stopped when he came across the fallen bulk of another ape, a less bulky red-haired model. He crouched down beside it, feeling for a pulse. The Doctor dropped beside him.
"Fitz," he explained. "Sorry."
"Move into the time machine," grated Kalic.u.m. "And go."
Sabbath rose stiffly. The Doctor shoved his hands deep in his coat pockets and bowed in apology. Then he opened the TARDIS door and waved Sabbath inside. The big man pa.s.sed through in silence, his ape shambling along at his heels. Anji gingerly followed but paused in the doorway.
"Goodbye, Kalic.u.m," said the Doctor. "We"ll meet again."
Kalic.u.m shook his big head. "It is not written."
"Oh, of course, that sizeable book your people threw together... Do watch out for doodles in the margin, won"t you?" the Doctor warned him, and pushed Anji inside the TARDIS.
Fitz decided he wasn"t too proud to ask an eight-year-old for advice. "Now what do we do?" he said awkwardly. "I mean. I appreciate you"re pretty traumatised, stuck in there with, uh... Well, anvway. I"ve got to go and help the Doctor. How can I get outside? There are weapons there, maybe I can use them to stop Sabbath from..."
"Walk to the exit," said Chloe dully, pointing to an ordinary-looking green wooden door. The trails of her tears glittered on her red cheeks. "It will open as you approach."
"I"ll be back. Don"t leave without me."
"Before you go," said Chloe, who seemed worryingly calm, "will you fetch my doll? I dropped her down by the overturned chairs."
Fitz soon found it, a plastic-faced thing about the size of a real baby, its head dented by the iron leg of the chair that stood on it, one leg looking a little chewed. It would never fit through the mesh, of course. But he showed it to her and she reached through the net to hold its arm.
Fitz felt dreadful. He was leaving a little girl in a cage with the corpse of her guardian and a dying dog. This girl would wind up needing some serious therapy in the future. a.s.suming any of them actually had had a future. a future.
He rushed to the door, which opened on to the wild freedom of the overgrown field, and pelted as fast as he could for Anji"s car.
"Doctor," Anji started, "you can"t just "
"Quiet," he said, pacing around the console. "I must think."
"Where"s Fitz? He must still be outside somewhere. Or are you planning on running out on him too?"
"I said quiet, Anji." He ran over to the doors where Sabbath stood disconsolate beside his tame ape. The gorilla growled half-heartedly, but the Doctor shushed him as well. "It"s Sabbath we have to listen to."
"Haven"t you reasoned it out by now, Doctor?" said Sabbath.
"Oh, most of it. The diamonds will be implanted in Guy"s body. Guy will be placed in the casket. The casket will be placed at the null point, before the universe began."
Sabbath said nothing but the Doctor continued, his voice rising in pa.s.sion and pitch.
"While Guy is suspended in the casket, the alterations to his genetic structure will activate, inflame whatever is in those diamonds, creating a synergism, each feeding off the other. And when the universe ignites, the casket will go with it."
"And Guy will be killed," said Anji.
"Guy will have ceased to exist by then in any case," said the Doctor. "But the force he"ll have become a part of won"t be destroyed, will it, Sabbath? It will expand as the universe expands. It will become a part of its fabric, insinuating itself with the dark matter that permeates the universe."
"What the wraiths were warning you about," Anji chipped in when it became apparent Sabbath still wasn"t speaking.
The Doctor waved a hand in front of Sabbath"s eyes as if to break a trance. "But it"s more than that. With this alien essence permeating everything, it will be there when the first superma.s.sive stars fashion themselves from helium and hydrogen. It will be there when those same stars go nova and produce the universe"s first metals from which, billions of years later, the first planetary matter will form. From which, ultimately, all sentient life will develop." The Doctor was working himself up into a frenzy, and finally grabbed hold of Sabbath by the lapels of his military overcoat. "The alien essence will be in everything, everyone but what is it? What have you been trying to bring about, who is it all for?"
Sabbath angrily knocked the Doctor"s arms away. "I have seen both past and future," he said, "I have seen the base instability of time, and the horrors that lie waiting to threaten the Earth."
"A world you are pledged to protect."
"I will bring it stability!" he roared in the Doctor"s face. "A delegation of future humans came to me when I was first initiated into the Service. They showed me the horrors of raw time, the dangers that lurk beneath reality"s tender surface. And they showed me how the Earth might flourish. How the human race might truly prosper."
"It"s not an alien essence, is it?" breathed the Doctor. "It"s human. That"s why you need a human key."
Anji struggled to keep up. "He wants to seed humanity throughout the universe? Make people a part of everything?"
"It is a genetic directive," said Sabbath. "One that will recognise any evolution deemed unacceptable and modify it along human lines."
The Doctor looked at Sabbath with something approaching wonder. "So all those pacts you made with alien devils to extend your power and knowledge were meaningless because you knew that in the resurrection of the universe they would no longer exist. This was always your end goal. No aggressive, inquisitive extraterrestrial lifeform will be allowed to rise, your new sentience will see to that."
"The Earth will develop and expand into s.p.a.ce in total security. Humanity shall rise all across the cosmos," said Sabbath. "We shall succeed in ruling time absolutely where your own people failed. It is the only way we can be certain to succeed." He sneered at the Doctor. "Anachronisms like you and the child-sensitive shall wither and die at last your own time at last superseded by mine."
"And Kalic.u.m was a child of this future, was he?" The Doctor was half smiling. "Sent back to a.s.sist you that you might have the honour of securing a magnificent destiny for all humanity, is that it?"
Sabbath didn"t need to answer. They both knew the Doctor was right.
"But now you"re wondering... Since he"s turned on you, but only now at this last crucial stage, perhaps your agendas are different after all. Perhaps it"s some quite different distillation he plans to place in those diamonds. Have you thought of that, hmm?"
Sabbath was silent and still as a statue.
"Yes," breathed the Doctor. "I"ll bet you have."
"Well, how are we going to stop him?" asked Anji. "You"re not really going to leave the Jonah Jonah and let Kalic.u.m do all this, are you?" and let Kalic.u.m do all this, are you?"
"We have to depart from here. It"s important Kalic.u.m believes we"re cutting our losses and getting out."
"Believes?" she said tentatively.
Then the Doctor smiled sneakily and nodded, and Anji found that she believed too.
Chloe is waggling Dolly at Jamais. "Look," she says. "My lovely dolly. Since you"re so boring and dull and only want to sleep all day I"m going to play with her instead."
Jamais doesn"t stir.
She kisses her doll, kissy-kissy-kissy, as noisy as can be.
Finally, one dark eye winks open. His look tells her, Why have you woken me? It hurts when I"m awake Why have you woken me? It hurts when I"m awake.
But Chloe only knows it hurts when he"s asleep. And Erasmus is getting cold. She"ll have no one to look after if Jamais goes too, except herself. No one to love and nothing left but her hard plastic doll, coldest of all.
The air shimmers and Kalic.u.m appears beside the portable console.
"The time-ship has gone. The recursive anomalies are receding." He barely looks at her, flutters his long, stiff fingers like fans. "Take us back to the null point. The mesh won"t let you go anywhere else."
Chloe knows that Mummy"s friend Fitz is coming with guns. "Bad Jamais," she hisses, and thrusts the doll in his furry face.
He yowls, and spits the past out of his open jaws. Satisfied, Kalic.u.m glows and flickers away in a flash. And Chloe"s home starts slowly to shift, to slip its moorings.
A sudden coruscation from the crystal walls dazzled Guy, made him cover his eyes. When he"d blinked away the blindness he found Kalic.u.m standing beside him. He flinched from the skinny man"s presence, held up his fists.
Kalic.u.m seemed amused. "The time has come for you to realise your destiny, Mr Adams," he whispered. "The most precious man in the entire universe."
He extended a hand to Guy, who didn"t take it.
Then one of Kalic.u.m"s fingers extended upwards and outwards at lightning speed. Guy recoiled but his face burned with a livid scratch. He fell backwards. Saw Kalic.u.m standing there holding out a long stick of crystal over him.
No. The crystal stick was his finger. It was pointed at the end like broken gla.s.s and it was dark with blood. In his other hand he held a small diamond between finger and thumb.
"I"ve irradiated the diamonds," he said, whatever that meant. "This is the first. The lodestone, you might say." He smiled. "Call me old fashioned. I wanted to place it myself."
Guy stared at the gemstone which seemed to pulse with a weird energy. He wanted to get up, get away, but he felt pinioned to the floor by invisible arms. The cut on his face. Was he drugged now? He felt tired and sluggish and supposed he was.
Kalic.u.m pressed the diamond into the cut in his face. He felt it squirm down beneath the skin like it had a will of its own.
Before he could scream out the drug took full hold. Guy slipped away into darkness.
Thirty-one The operation Fitz had grabbed the rifle from the totalled car. Close by, he found the broken, abandoned body of one of the chimps. It looked so peaceful, so sad in death that Fitz felt a bad stab of guilt until he recalled the look in the ape"s eyes as it prepared to blow his head off.
He swiftly prised its rifle away from its dead fingers. Two guns were better than one. The extra firepower might come in useful.
He set off again for the doorway, rounded the side of the warehouse.
And found the building that had swallowed the Jonah Jonah had gone. had gone.
There was nothing there. Just a view of the dark, slow-flowing river, as when the TARDIS had first arrived. But where had that b.l.o.o.d.y great tree sprung up from? He didn"t remember seeing it...
He grinned. Of course. The place was like a TARDIS that actually worked. It blended in with its surroundings. Fitz ran for the tree, the rifles slung over one shoulder. Soon his breath was coming in jagged gasps.
Then he heard a familiar wailing, grating, grinding sound.
The tree began to flicker and fade, taking off without him.
"No!" he yelled at the tree, quickened his pace. He was nearly there, if he could only find the way inside before With a painful thump he ran into the blue police box that had appeared out of nowhere.
"Fitz!" cried the Doctor in surprise, peering round the back of his TARDIS. "What are you doing?"
"I"m about to rescue you," Fitz explained, rubbing his bruised shoulder.
"Consider me grateful. Now come on, quickly!" The Doctor turned away and Anji pushed past him to help up Fitz.
"How are we doing?" asked Fitz.
"Badly," said Anji, and by way of hurried demonstration she gestured to Sabbath and his uniformed gorilla following the Doctor inside the giant oak.
"You"re his prisoners?"
"Nope." Anji shook her head and he could see how worried she was. "We"re all in this together now."
Trix couldn"t see Guy any more. He had vanished, his image shut off like a light.
Then suddenly Kalic.u.m stood beside her. He stroked her face and scratched it. She felt the latex tug at her cheek as it tore, but had he drawn blood?
"Gently, old one," he said soothingly. "A mild sedative only for one as fragile as you. Still, you shall suffice for my purpose."
Trix saw his finger was a stump of crystal jutting out from the knuckle. She tried to back off in horror but he grabbed her arm. She didn"t resist if he felt the well-toned muscles there he might realise the truth about her age.