Doctor Who (16 page)

When they surfaced, the morning had encroached upon the night a little more. But the weak glow from the emerging Gethrian sun was made even more pale and insignificant by the light show that was apparently just beginning on the outer monument structure of the Cradle of the Gods.

It was immediately obvious what had caused the rumble of power. Aside from the shafts of light that were lancing out from the gigantic tower, large slabs of granite-like rock making up the base of it were in the
process of moving, apparently of their own volition. A complex series of what the Doctor guessed were predetermined patterns was unfolding before their very eyes. The Cradle of Life was re-sculpting itself into … something.

Something alive with power.

‘What are you? What are you? What are you?’ murmured the Doctor to himself in awe. ‘A power for destruction or creation?’

He started to wonder if they should really be here. If the Cradle’s real purpose was destruction, then it would be their presence that would trigger the deployment of some appalling, ancient weapon. And yet, the Doctor’s curiosity left him fixed to the spot. Whatever was going on, it was somehow harnessing the elemental forces of the universe. This was truly a spectacle undeniably worthy of inclusion in the pantheon of ancient wonders of the cosmos.

Hogoosta moved to the Doctor’s side.

‘It’s finally happened,’ the Klektid’s mouths clattered in an almost uncontrollable jumble of sounds, making it necessary for the Doctor to take a few moments to work out what Hogoosta had actually said. ‘After all these years … Today is the day.’

They were both distracted by a new, deep thundering, coming from a different direction altogether. Was this it? Was this the weapon activating?

‘Doctor!’ squealed Sabel over all the noise. ‘Look!’

She was pointing up into the sky, away from the monument. The Doctor and Hogoosta looked to where she was pointing.

‘It’s a ship. Like that Dalek one!’ Ollus shouted.

Almost exactly like that Dalek one, thought the Doctor. A Dalek flying saucer was landing close by.

‘No chance of that being a coincidence,’ said the Doctor.

‘Daleks?’ asked Hogoosta, confused. ‘Why would the Daleks come here?’

‘Why indeed?’ said the Doctor bluntly. ‘Why did they try to get the secret of the Cradle from the Blakelys? How did your Klektid Enforcers know about me and the TARDIS? Eh?’

Hogoosta’s head swayed uncertainly.

‘Because the Daleks must be paying the Enforcers!’ shouted Sabel.

‘Yes!’ said the Doctor, pointing at her, smiling grimly.

‘But …’ began Hogoosta, a note of dread in his strange clicking voice. ‘The Enforcers are employed by the consortium who fund this project.’

‘The Daleks! It’s the Daleks who are funding your project, Hogoosta!’ said the Doctor.

With an enormous crunching sound and a vast cloud of fast-moving dust, the Dalek ship touched down. The minor sand storm hit hard, showering the transforming monument, dulling the shafts of light emanating from it for a few moments.

The Doctor, spitting dust from his mouth and shielding his eyes with his arm, grabbed the children and held them close to him as best he could. Hogoosta, finally snapping out of his daze, gave the best assistance he could muster too.

As the dust settled, leaving them all spluttering and
smarting from the sting in their eyes, ears and noses, they saw that a hatchway had already opened in the saucer. A ramp had extended downwards and had crashed down upon the baked surface of the desert.

The sun was almost fully risen now, and its rays caught the bronze glint of the Daleks that filed swiftly down the ramp onto the sand. The Doctor squinted hard at them. For a moment, something seemed odd about the leading Dalek. It seemed to blur at its centre for an instant … Then the Doctor remembered when this had happened before. In the courtroom on Carthedia.

‘The Dalek Litigator …’ he murmured to himself. ‘What brings you here?’

But he dismissed the question almost immediately. The Cradle of the Gods was somehow activating and he and the children had something to do with it. The Enforcers had clearly called up the Daleks, very probably having transmitted the image of the Doctor and the children to them. He couldn’t let the Daleks get access to this Cradle, whatever it was in the middle of doing. There was only one possible course of action.

‘We have to get out of here!’ shouted the Doctor, grabbing the children. ‘You too, Hogoosta. Trust me, the Daleks can turn pretty nasty when it comes to me. And they’ve seen you with me.’

The Doctor and the children were already at the entrance to the spiral staircase, about to descend.

‘But this is my work,’ Hogoosta said, his voice full of pride. ‘I cannot just leave.’

‘We can come back,’ called the Doctor. ‘Come on! Trust me, the Daleks won’t—’

Before he could finish his words, there was a burning beam of light and a soaring sound, harsh enough to cut through the cacophony of the awakening Cradle. The beam sliced through the air and lanced straight into Hogoosta. For a moment, the Klektid was consumed in a cruel, burning blue light so bright that it momentarily imprinted a negative image across the Doctor’s retina.

Hogoosta had been murdered by fire from a Dalek gun.

The children froze in terror. The Doctor, hearing the approaching whine of Dalek motive power, bundled Ollus, Sabel and Jenibeth together, pushing them down the stairs.

‘Come on!’ he yelled.

As they descended the ancient, worn steps, faltering and tripping over each other, the familiar, repugnant sounds of Dalek speech rang out across the monument.

‘Fugitives are to be captured immediately!’

The Doctor was pretty sure that this was the voice of the so-called Dalek Litigator. What kind of Dalek was this? A creature that purported to be in charge of Dalek prosecutions and yet had travelled across half the galaxy to bring the Doctor to book. What exactly was going on here?

As the Doctor and the children reached the bottom of the stairs, the motive power sounds of the Daleks echoing down the stairwell transformed into something even more worrying. The Doctor knew this sound only too well. The Daleks were taking off, flying. They were about to hover down the steps after them.

‘Ollus, Sabel, Jenibeth! Come on!’ barked the Doctor,
dashing to the TARDIS, unlocking the doors and flinging them open again. He turned to make sure the children were safely on their way … Then his hearts went cold in shock. Where was Jenibeth?

‘Jenibeth? Jenibeth, where is she?’ he said to Ollus as the little boy passed him.

Sabel had already entered the TARDIS. Ollus turned back to look as he reached the doorway.

And then they both saw that Jenibeth had somehow tripped at the bottom of the stairs.

‘Jenibeth!’ shouted little Ollus with all his might.

Confused and dazed, Jenibeth staggered bravely to her feet. She rubbed her head and looked down at her grazed knees and started to cry.

Knowing she was too stunned to move quickly enough, the Doctor began to launch himself towards her. But he felt a tiny hand on his sleeve. He looked back. It was Ollus, trying to stop him.

‘Ollus?’ the Doctor asked, bewildered.

Ollus was staring to where Jenibeth was. The Doctor turned back to look again.

A Dalek had landed right beside Jenibeth. Still dazed, she seemed hardly aware of this deadly killing machine as its suction cup arm extended towards her.

‘No!’ yelled the Doctor, overwhelmed by a sense of utter futility.

More Daleks landed around Jenibeth.

‘It’s too late,’ said Ollus. ‘This is a time machine. You can come back to get her.’

The Doctor could not think of a single word to say that would make sense or help in this situation. When
he had foolishly decided to break the Laws of Time before, to try to reunite the children with their parents, he had truly opened a can of temporal worms. The Doctor drew breath, not knowing quite what he was going to say, but—

‘We’ll come back for you! We’ll come back for you! I promise!’ Ollus shouted out to Jenibeth, just as the first Dalek’s suction cup made contact with her. She let out a confused squeal, suddenly realising she was surrounded.

‘Surrender or the girl will be—’

With all his might, Ollus pulled the Doctor into the TARDIS and slammed the doors shut before they could hear the final, fatal word from the Dalek. He turned to the Doctor, leaning his little head on the door, his fingers in his ears, his eyes red with tears.

‘We can go back. We can go back. We can go back,’ he was almost chanting to himself.

The Doctor reached out to Ollus, still not knowing what to do. He put a reassuring hand on the little boy’s head and smiled as best he could. Then he broke away and rushed up the steps to the console. Sabel was already standing there.

‘You won’t go back, though, will you?’ she said.

The Doctor looked at her and, for a moment, felt he could not move.

‘Not this time,’ she said. ‘You won’t, will you?’

The Doctor turned away and operated the TARDIS controls. The engines started to heave and the shapes within the central column propelled themselves up and down as the ship dematerialised from Gethria and headed into the Vortex.

The Doctor could hear Ollus’s little feet frantically patter up the steps towards him. He tripped just as he reached the top. The Doctor heard him fall and cry out. Sabel ran to the little boy to help him up. Rubbing his shins and fighting back tears, Ollus walked right up to the Doctor.

‘You will go back, though, won’t you?’ he said. ‘You were going to do that before, you were.’

‘I was,’ nodded the Doctor. ‘But it’s different this time.’

‘How is it different?’ asked Ollus, starting to get cross.

‘Last time, something had pushed the TARDIS and me away from getting to your parents on time. Something or someone had already interfered in the flow of time.’

‘So it was all right for you to interfere then, to put that right?’ asked Sabel.

‘Well …’ the Doctor ran a hand through his hair. Why did humans always ask about this? he thought to himself. Then he realised how stupid a question it was. Who wouldn’t ask? Ask to go back and save the ones they loved …

‘It’s … complicated,’ said the Doctor, feeling that was one of the worst answers he had ever given. ‘But if I kept going back and changing things every time something bad happened, I’d spend my life going round in circles creating dangerous paradoxes and time eddies that would damage … well, everything … eventually.’

‘But—’ started Ollus.

The Doctor knelt down close to the boy, putting his
hand on his tiny shoulders. ‘There are rules, Ollus,’ he said. ‘Ancient rules. And I have to stick to them.’

Ollus shrugged away and hit the console with all his might. ‘But I promised her! I told Jenibeth we’d come back for her!’

‘I know,’ said the Doctor. ‘But it wasn’t your promise to make.’

Ollus yelled, ‘No!’ in unrestrained anger and flew at the Doctor with the clear intention of hitting him. The Doctor closed his eyes, expecting and ready to accept the fierce little blows, but they did not come. He opened his eyes and saw Sabel restraining Ollus, holding his forearms. Ollus twisted and groaned angrily.

‘No, Ollus,’ Sabel was saying. ‘No hitting. Hitting is a bad thing and the Doctor is a good man!’

The Doctor did not feel like a good man at this precise moment in time. At this precise moment, he felt that he should have never responded to the distress call from Alyst and Terrin. Someone else would have eventually rescued the children. He should never have got involved. He must stop doing this, he thought. Stop getting involved in things he could not put right. Things he only ever seemed to make worse.

‘But the Daleks will kill Jenibeth,’ said Ollus, sobbing, finally letting his arms fall to his sides. Sabel hugged her little brother, enfolding him tightly in her arms, squeezing him, starting to cry herself.

‘No,’ said the Doctor, suddenly, grasping at a thought. ‘They
threatened
to kill her.’

The two children looked at the Doctor, clearly confused.

‘
Threatening
and
doing
are not the same thing,’ continued the Doctor. An idea was forming in his mind. He wasn’t quite sure exactly what the idea was, but it was beginning to grow. ‘No, the Daleks love to threaten and they love to take hostages too.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Sabel.

‘I mean,’ said the Doctor. ‘There’s still a chance for Jenibeth.’

Jenibeth saw the TARDIS disappear from sight, groaning like a great yawning monster, and felt empty inside. She tried to pull herself free from the Dalek sucker stuck to her back. She couldn’t. It wouldn’t let go.

It hurt.

‘Ow!’ she complained out loud. But the Dalek still didn’t let go.

Another Dalek hovered quickly to where the TARDIS had been, its dome spinning round, its eye stick waving up and down in a rage.

‘The Doctor has escaped!’ it shouted in its horrible voice.

There was the noise of another Dalek hovering. Jenibeth looked round to see it coming down the stairs. Its eye stick moved to look at her, the blue light in it shining brighter, hurting her eyes to look at it.

‘How did you activate the Cradle?’ it asked in a voice far less noisy, but just as horrible. ‘Answer! Answer! Answer!’

Then Jenibeth remembered what Sabel had said to her in the orphanage back home. Try to think of your favourite thing … jelly blobs. So she did. She imagined
she was eating a jelly blob; the juiciest jelly blob there had ever been. She bit into it and the lovely sweet flavour flowed out into her mouth, and for a moment all the scary feelings went away. She looked straight back at the Dalek looking at her … and smiled.

Then suddenly this Dalek looked up.

Jenibeth looked up too. All around her, the sparkling lights that had been filling this big room ever since they had arrived started to go out. After a little while, all the lights had gone, apart from the ones on metal sticks that had been here before.

‘Cradle power deactivated!’ said another Dalek in a low, grumbling sort of voice.