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Doctor Who: Lungbarrow - Chapter One

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Paris Cubed

'A gold-coded security dispatch, sir,' announced the young Chancellery Guard captain and formally handed over the courier pod.

Surveillance Actuary Hofwinter, a veteran of some nine hundred and ninety-six years in the Space/Time Accession Bureau, generation and regeneration, logged the delivery on his cartulary register. The pod buzzed and opened like a black flower, allowing him to extract a single crystal datacube from its heart.

He weighed the device in his hand and sniffed its surface. 'Classified,' he observed. The captain, resplendent in his scarlet and white uniform, had not moved.

Hofwinter grunted, 'Thank you, erm...'

'Jomdek, sir.'

'Yes, thank you, Captain Jomdek. No response necessary.'

'The Castellan instructed me to wait until the transduction was complete, sir.'

'Eh? I can't think why. The subject will be transducted direct to the destination specified in the orders. You won't see anything up here.'

'I think that's the idea, sir.'

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'Oh, I see.' The ancient actuary shuffled across to a window that overlooked the Capitol. On the courtyard far below, several guard squads were undergoing intensive ceremonial drill practice. An unlikely event at this hour. 'They're keeping everybody busy,' he said. 'Must be up to something Downstairs.'

Ignoring the captain, Hofwinter set the crystal cube on a receptor pad by the observation port. The object was instantly diffused with green light.

He waited for the hunter codes to initiate.

There was someone following Dorothée. She couldn't see anyone specific among the shoppers in the aisles of Marks & Spencer's food hall, but he was there. She knew it by instinct. An awareness that he was watching her. She said he, but it could just as easily be a she or even an it.

She got into the queue for the checkout and glared at the fat Parisienne who was scrutinizing the contents of her basket. Above her, a security camera on the ceiling swivelled to stare straight at her.

Too obvious. Couldn't be that.

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She started to check the francs in her wallet, making sure they were the right year. - She'd had this same feeling two days before. But that had been at the Café Momus in the Latin Quarter. It had been Christmas Eve well over a century before and she had been there with friends. Just as the chaussons aux confitures à la crème anglais arrived (jam turnovers with custard, her treat), she was aware of someone watching. The sound and atmosphere of the café seemed to drain away as she turned to look for the presence. Maybe at one of the other tables, among the honking beaux from the Jockey Club and their gaudily crinolined danseuses fresh from the Opera Ballet. He could have been anywhere in the milling crowd outside the café windows. She hardly noticed a brass band passing by. She could see snow falling in the gas lamps' glow.

Then the thought had passed as the wine and the attentive looks of Monsieur Seurat had got the better or worse of her concentration.

But now here it was again. Over a hundred years later on a warm June morning in a Paris department store.

The queue was taking an age, so she tried to think about other things while she waited. The Doctor had been on her mind a lot lately. She hadn't seen him for over a year in any time zone and it amused her to imagine him let loose in a food hall like this. She reckoned he would soon be bored with looking at the range of foods and start juggling avocados. She didn't suppose that Machiavelli liked shopping much either.

She reached the checkout, paid up and left the shop. But even on the street she could sense the presence. Either it had the wherewithal to time-jump after her, or she'd brought it with her herself.

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That time-jump made all the difference. Suddenly He had become It.

She hurried back to the Rue Massine and turned into the side alley. 'Damn!' A tall gendarme was walking round the bike. By 2001 standards the machine wasn't as hi-tech as it once had been, but its attachments could still draw attention. Why else had she parked it up an alley? She prayed she'd get to him before he set off the field alarm and half Paris came to gawp.

He crouched to examine the black-box jump committal device with its multi-lingual ALERTE symbols. The box started to zub angrily at him.

Dorothée pulled a pin out of her hair and shook it out into a tangle. She hefted her Marks & Spencer shopping bags and tottered dizzily towards him. 'Oi, mister,' she squawked in exaggerated Perivale tones. 'You gotta help me. These two blokes just jumped me and nicked me bleedin' passport. What'm I gonna do?'

The gendarme stared, taking in her black leather trousers and-jacket over her delicate Chantilly lace blouse.

'Come on. I said you gotta stop them. Parley... voo... Onglaze?' -

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He stayed calm. Maybe he'd seen her arrive.

'Cette moto, madame?' (Not even mam'zelle!) 'Elle est très sophistiquée pour une Lambretta, n'est ce pas?' He pointed to the digital speedo. 'Où est Monsieur Schwarzenegger? Dans la sacoche? Avez-vous un permis de conduire?'

You must be joking, she thought. With the amount of time-hopping I do?

Now he was eyeing her shopping bags too. 'Look,' she said, plonking them down on the ground. 'Voilà. Bulk buy of ciabattas and tea bags, OK? Rien du crack. Rien de la contrabande.'

He put a restraining hand on her arm. In a fit of anger, she caught him with a throw that should have floored him. Instead, he simply twisted her arm and knocked her off her own feet with a sharp kick.

Can't be on the scrap heap yet, she thought as the ciabattas broke her fall.

He gave three shrill blasts on his whistle and started to bark instructions into his radio. People began appearing at the entrance to the alley.

This time she was up, no messing. She made a club of her hands and thunked them down on the back of his head. He went sprawling into a pyramid of binbags. -

That was more like it.

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A couple of hefty workmen were advancing. She scooped up her bags, kicked the bike on its flank and let the alarm scream. The men fell back, hands over their ears. She'd been expecting it and it still hurt, despite the screening plugs.

Dorothée slid on to the pinion and the engine burnt into life. She turned the wheel and headed back along the alley, scattering onlookers. Zero to minus a hundred and twelve years in ten seconds.

Time exploded in a gold ball around her. A vortex tunnel stretched ahead. Soon back in time for tea and she would be at home to Georges Seurat and to any attentions he wanted to pay her.

She angled a wing mirror to look at her face. Her eyes sparked back at her, cold and accusing. Not how she felt at all. And her hair was all wrong. The look she was giving herself set her all on edge.

The engine juddered and the steering jerked against her hands. The tunnel was going faster and wider. It was curving upward. The undefinable golden shapes that always rushed past her on these jumps darkened and were lost. She lifted her hands off the steering and watched the bike making its own adjustments.

Thin streaks of light began coursing along the tunnel boundaries. Red to come, blue behind.

The air was freezing in her lungs. They were stars that were - passing her. As the grip on her senses slipped away, she remembered the effects of a Time Storm that had snatched her off the world before.

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The datacube was still glowing green.

The Matrix was unusually slow in its responses today.

While he waited, Hofwinter ran a sideline scan of the cube's classified instructions, certain that the young captain would not appreciate its illicit significance. If Hofwinter was party to the implementation of top-secret orders, he wanted to know what was going on.

All this unusual activity Downstairs was probably nothing more than the new Castellan flexing his muscles; Hofwinter found it hard to remember a time when the venerable old Castellan Spandrell had not been in charge of security in the Citadel. The periods in between Spandrell's two previous retirements, when the old chap had not been in office, felt like inconsequential blips in the span of a celebrated career. This time he had insisted that he was not coming back. 'Some people never know when to stop,' he had confided at his third and final retirement ceremony. 'I'm getting a bit too stout for all this exercise, so I'm handing over to someone with less experience.'

Rumour had it that Spandrell found it difficult to keep up with the exhaustive reforms of President Romanadvoratrelundar. The High Council still harboured dissenters, mainly from the Dromeian and Arcalian Chapter-houses, but nothing much seemed to stop the President from getting her own way. She had even announced a state visit from the current Chairman of Argolis.

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Hofwinter shook his grizzled head. It was reckoned that Andred, the new Castellan, was a traditionalist, but that hardly rang true: Andred's consort was said to be unGallifreyan and she was certainly kept out of the public eye as much as possible. As it was, the speed with which reform followed reform was all rather alarming. And there were other worrying rumours that President Romana, as she liked to be called, had never heard of the word sedate.

There was also a hostile faction in the Intervention Agency, but no one ever knew what their schemes entailed until it was too late to stop them. The President was the nominal head of the Agency too. But presidents were traditionally as much in the dark over the Agency's activities as the rest of the population.

The datacube was still glowing green. Hofwinter grunted and tapped the side of his observation port. He swivelled in his chair and surveyed his visitor again. 'Do you know the nature of this transduction order, Captain?'

'It's classified, sir.' Jomdek had been eyeing a dish of magentas and trumpberries that was sitting on a desk.

Hofwinter smiled. 'You Chancellery troopers spend the whole time strutting up and down in ceremonies you don't understand.'

'It's ritual, sir. History.'

'Ah, well. If you don't want to know.'

Jomdek shrugged.

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Hofwinter passed him the fruit dish. 'Help yourself, Jomdek. They're leftovers from one of the President's diplomatic receptions.'

'Thank you, sir.'

'Entertaining some alien intermediary with eight eyes and legs to match, I expect. A Cousin of mine in the catering bureau sends the pickings up to me afterwards.'

Jomdek reached for the dish, but faltered awkwardly. He pulled off his white ceremonial gloves and his scarlet helmet revealing a head of sunny curling hair. He selected one of the magentas and took a bite.

'Newly promoted, are you, Captain?' ventured his host.

'Well, sort of,' mumbled the young man, his mouth full.

'Oh?'

'My Family have been matricians for generations. But I'm, well, I'm a bit of a duffer really.'

'Surely not.'

'Oh, yes. I didn't even pass the Academy entrance examinations. So the Family bought me a commission in the Chancellery Guard.'

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'Backbone of the Capitol,' said Hofwinter with a nod. He noted that the cube had finally changed its glow to white. He checked the results of his sideline scan and was intrigued. 'Ever studied the planet Earth?' he enquired.

'The planet where?' The young officer peered at a red disc that had finally appeared on the port screen. 'Is that it?'

Hofwinter patiently turned the crystal cube on its pad. 'No. That's the security clearance feed. It allows us access to the sub-matrix.'

'Gosh,' said Jomdek, impressed.

Hofwinter refined the blurred image. On the screen into the crescent of a blue and white planet. 'Earth,' he said. 'Doesn't look much, does it? But Downstairs always have an eye on it.'

'You mean the High Council?'

'Among others... The place must have some strategic significance, but I've never worked out what.'

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Jomdek's face suddenly lit up with proud realization. 'And that's where the transduction beam is directed!'

On its pad, the cube turned blue.

'That'll be the beam now,' said Hofwinter. 'It seeks out the cerebral identity of the subject on the sealed orders. Rather like looking for a lynchet in a thatchpile, but it can needle out one brain pattern in a population of several billion.'

Concern was starting to cloud Jomdek's face again, or it could have just been stupidity. 'But the orders are secret.'

'It may be classified,' complained Hofwinter, 'but who'll get the blame if it goes wrong, eh? I first kept tabs on classified accessions in this bureau when Mazwen the Last was in office. Only four more years in this post and I get my millennial service boon. And in all that time nothing has ever gone amiss.'

He looked for something brittle to break for luck, but found only reinforced carbon, silicon and mica dust.

An alarm rattled the confines of the office. The cube turned flame red. Hofwinter swallowed hard on a suddenly dry throat. The God of Fate has to be tempted. Like the fish in the icy rivers of Gallifrey, it takes only the juiciest of bait.

'What's happened?' said the captain. 'Have we been found out?'

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Hofwinter began to flick the instruments on the port. 'It's gone,' he croaked.

'What's gone?'

'The beam. Something's cut across it. Cut it off. We've lost the subject.'

Jomdek was confused. 'So what do we do?'

'Nothing!' snapped Hofwinter. 'We merely initiated the sealed orders as instructed. We do nothing and know nothing!'

Where are you going?

'Home. I'm going home,' she thought.

Dorothée was drifting without sense of touch or inner feeling. Just her thoughts cut loose. She had to hang on to them or they'd unravel off into the darkness. The same way her body and her bike had gone.

Where's home? came the other voice.

'Earth. England. No, now it's France. Paris.'

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Better make up your mind, hadn't you?

'Paris,' she insisted.

You reckon you'll see that again?

The interrogator's voice was hard and mocking. Another woman's voice locked inside her own thoughts. It was turning her thoughts over and trashing them. They were all she had. 'What do you want?' she thought.

You tell me.

'I want to go home!'

And that's Paris, is it?

'Yes!'

Liar!

'No one calls me that.'

No one calls you anything.

'You just called me liar.'

Must be your name then.

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There's no chance to think when someone's already in your thoughts. 'Fine. Call me Liar,' protested Dorothée . 'What about you? What do you call yourself?'

Don't you know?

Dorothée could feel the grin in the voice. A childish laugh, cruel the way only kids can be. It both frightened her and was comfortingly familiar.

I'm your worst enemy. I'm just behind you, it sneered.

'Where? Who are you?'

Tell me who you want me to be.

'What I want is to go home!'

Tough!

'Jesus crukking Christ!'

Dorothée sat on the low bed. The white room was empty and cold. Six blank walls. No windows or doors.

A noise behind her. She turned round.

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The girl was in black, a plain black bodysuit and boots. So black, the light found no surface on it. In the shadowless room, the girl's face was lost in dark obscurity. It appeared formless, unfinished or undecided.

Then the shadow lifted and a face slid out from under it. The young woman had long, tangled brown hair and large brown eyes that returned Dorothée's stare. She'd seen them earlier. Cold and accusing.

She'd always reckoned, in the vast photofit lottery of the Universe, that anyone could look like anything. But not that. Not just like that.

'Crawl back in the mirror,' she said flatly.

'Mirrors don't answer back,' answered the girl.

She stepped up nearer the bed. 'I'm... Ace.'

'Like hell,' said Dorothee.

'It's true.'

'Prove it.'

Ace raised the sleek black carbine that was slung over her shoulder and shot Dorothée at point-blank range.