Doctor Who: Ribos Operation (10 page)

Cautiously he emerged from the pile of splintered timber,
the wind cutting through him like a knife. Immediately he heard
a crunch of boots swiftly approaching.

‘There... by the stack... there’s someone moving...’ yelled a
Shrieve.

Unstoffe fled along the straggling line of makeshift dwellings
packed hetween the thick columns on one side of the square. As
he crept in among the hovels he realised that the Shrieves were
closing in from both directions along the colonnade.

Just as he was preparing himself to make a desperate break
across the deserted open square, Unstoffe’s arm was gripped by
a bony talon and he was dragged sideways under a flap of
animal skin into one of the cramped, evil-smelling hutches.

‘You’ll be safe here... quite safe,’ croaked a wheezing, reedy
voice in his ear, and he was thrust into a pile of furs and skins
heaped on the hard ground. Unstoffe lay hidden, scarcely
breathing, with his face buried in the flea-bitten rags. With
racing heart he listened to the vicious slapping of the pikes
against the flapping walls of the hovels as the Shrieves roused
the inhabitants to search out their quarry.

The frail hut shuddered as its side was ripped open and a
huge Shrieve thrust his head into the gloomy interior: ‘Show a
light there...’ he bellowed.

‘Wha... what’s the... what’s the fuss...’ Unstoffe heard the
croaking voice reply, obviously feigning sleepiness. His unknown
protector turned up the wick of the guttering horn oil lamp a
fraction.

‘There’s a thief hiding somewhere in the Concourse,’ the
Shrieve growled, jabbing his pike around at random. Unstoffe
tried not to flinch as the sharp point hissed into the furs
centimetres from his face. ‘The Relic Chamber’s been broken
into. You haven’t seen anyone...?’ the Guard demanded, peering
hard at the wizened, yellow-skinned figure huddling in rags
beside the smoking lamp. The shrivelled old man shrugged.

‘Don’t I know your ugly face?’ the young Shrieve suddenly
growled, grabbing the old man’s wasted neck in his huge paw
and yanking his head into the light.

‘You may do. I was celebrated throughout Ribos once,’ the
wheezing voice replied.

‘It’s Binro—Binro the Heretic!’ the Shrieve exclaimed with a
sneering grin. ‘So this is how you ended up.’

‘Go back and guard your trinkets and your superstitions,’
Binro retorted with remarkable fearlessness. The hulking young
Shrieve tightened his grip. ‘This old neck will snap like a dry
twig,’ he muttered, ‘so don’t tempt me.’

With a final glance round the squalid hut and a few parting
jabs into the pile of skins, the guard tossed Binro aside and
lumbered out into the freezing darkness to continue the search.

For a few moments Unscoffe lay rigid in the pile of stinking
furs, the Shrieve’s pike still stabbing all around him in his
imagination. Miraculously he could feel no wounds on his body.
Then the furs were gently pulled off him and the emaciated
figure of Binro handed him a horn beaker filled with some kind
of warm soup.

‘I know what it is to have every man’s hand against you, my
friend,’ the shrunken old man croaked, his lively eyes bright
with wisdom and kindness.

Unstoffe gratefully seized the beaker and drank the watery
but warming liquid. ‘You risked your life... for me,’ he
murmured in disbelief as soon as he had drained the soup.

The old man smiled. ‘My life is nothing... not any more,’ he
smiled. ‘I am an outcast.’ He took the empty beaker and refilled
it from a crude jug suspended over the guttering lamp.

‘They called you Binro the Heretic,’ Unstoffe said in a
curious whisper. ‘What did you do?’

‘I told them the truth,’ Binro replied with a shrug, handing
the brimming beaker to the shivering fugitive.

Unstoffe stared blankly at the old man while he drank.

Binro cast his eyes upwards. ‘You have looked at the sky at
night time and seen the little points of light?’ he asked in a
hushed thin voice. Unstolle nodded. Binro leant forward so that
his wrinkled face almost touched Unstoffe’s: ‘They are not ice
crystals at all,’ he breathed. Then he sat back to watch the effect
of his words.

Unstoffe was tempted to say, ‘So what?’ but something about
Binro’s bright clear eyes stopped him and he remained silent.

‘I believe that all those tiny specks of light are suns just like
our own sun...’ Binro went on, gazing ernestly at Unstoffe. ‘I
believe that each has worlds of its own—just like our own world
of Ribos.’

Unstoffe smiled. ‘It is an interesting theory,’ he whispered.

Binro studied him a moment. ‘You are an open-minded
man—you must be from the Upper Pole,’ he declared. ‘I tell you
I have made measurements of those points of light, and I have
proved that Ribos moves. It travels round the sun like this and so
we have the Ice Time and the Sun Time in succession.’ Binro
described an ellipse in the air with his hands.

‘And so no one believed you,’ Unstoffe murmured. Binro
gave a quiet croaking chuckle. ‘They cling to their fantasies
about ice gods and sun gods warring for supremacy over Ribos,’
he muttered. ‘They ordered me to recant.’

‘And did you?’ Unstoffe asked in hushed tones.

Binro held up his scarred and crippled hands. ‘In the end I
did,’ he sighed. ‘Now I am nothing.’

Unstoffe put his hand gently on the old man’s withered arm.
‘One day—in the future—you will be something again,’ he said.
‘All that you say is true. There are other suns and other worlds...’

‘You... you believe it, too?’ Binro breathed, his eyes
suddenly brimming with tears.

Unstoffe put both his hands on Binro’s fleshless shoulders. ‘I
know it is true,’ he said. ‘I come from one of those other worlds.
I promise you, Binro, one day your people will turn to each
other and say, “Binro was right. He told the truth.”’

The wizened old man squatted there in the half-light
huddled in his rotting rags, rocking himself slowly to and fro
and listening to the distant whistles and shouts of the Shrieves
searching the area round the Citadel. Then he clasped Unstoffe
by the hand. ‘They will never find you while I live,’ he pledged
solemnly. ‘Never.’

The walls of the Relic Chamber were a mass of grotesque
shadows and flickering shapes. In the centre, just in front of the
Reliquary, a small circle of iron-work braziers had been set up,
each one containing a flaring bundle of tallow-soaked rags. In
the midst of the smoking fires stood a scrawny hag dressed in
long strips of crudely dyed remnants. Her frizzled grey hair was
parted on the crown of her domed head, and it reached almost
to her feet in a thickly tangled cascade. A semicircle of Shrieves
flanked their Captain, silently watching as the Seeker prepared
herself for the ancient rival of casting the bones. The Graff
Vynda Ka and Sholakh lingered nearby in the shadows.

The Seeker raised her stick-like arms, flourishing the two
cracked and splintered bones clasped in her knotted hands.
Throwing back her head, she opened her toothless mouth wide
and uttered a long incantation made up of croaks and snarls,
shrieks and whinings which merged and echoed in the vaulted
chamber. She clattered the two bones together above her head
in a complex rhythmic tattoo, and then stretched out her arms
sideways and began to spin round faster and faster...

‘Primitive mumbo jumbo,’ Sholakh scoffed under his breath.

The Graff leaned towards Sholakh without taking his eyes
from the rapidly spinning figure in the circle. ‘The Captain
assures me that it never fails,’ he murmured.

The Seeker stopped abruptly and began to chant in
unexpectedly sonorous tones. ‘Bones of our Fathers, bones of
our Kings by the Spirit that once moved you, seek and find. Seek
in the Ice Time. Seek in the Sun Time. Seek and find. Come into
the Circle, Spirits of the Ice, Spirits of the Sun, show what I seek.
Show... Show...’

Suddenly quite still, she let the bones clatter on to the
flagstones. They came to rest exactly in line and as they did so
the brazier to which they pointed flared up momentarily with a
fierce roar. The Seeker stared into the flames until they had died
down again. ‘I see him... I see him...’ she whispered. ‘At the
place of the fires.’

The Captain stepped forward. ‘The Concourse.’ he
exclaimed. ‘But we have searched there. We found nothing.’

The Seeker turned blazing eyes upon the Captain. ‘Then
seek again,’ she muttered hoarsely. ‘He is there.. I see him.’
Stooping, she gathered up the bones. Then with a sudden
hissing sound she whirled round once: all the fires were instantly
extinguished.

Holding the bones at arm’s length, the wizened hag slowly
left the chamber, closely followed by the Captain and his Guards.
As she shuffled along she repeated under her breath, over and
over again: ‘I see him... I see him... I see him...’ in a hypnotic
refrain.

‘It’s just trickery,’ Sholakh muttered, gazing at the ring of
rapidly cooling braziers.

The Graff Vynda Ka shook his head. ‘We shall follow. Fetch
my faithful Levithians, Sholakh. If the thief is found we shall
take the Jethryk and our gold. But be prepared: we may have to
fight our way out of the city...’

Romana paced agitatedly round and round the fire in the Graff’s
quarters while the Doctor and Garron sat at the table chatting
together like two old cronies whiling away a long winter evening
over a bottle of whisky. Occasionally the Doctor crept to the
door, listened intently for a moment and then blew several blasts
on the dog whistle.

‘... but I had a spot of bother with a dissatisfied client and
was forced to leave Earth to seek my fortune elsewhere.’ Garron
smiled, shaking his head over his reminiscences.

‘What happened?’ the Doctor enquired.

‘He was an Arab, of course,’ Garron went on, ‘and when I
offered him Sydney Harbour Bridge for fifty million dollars he
got greedy and insisted I throw in the Opera House as well. Well
naturally I refused.’

‘Naturally,’ the Doctor smiled ironically,

‘I could hardly let that priceless monument to our cultural
heritage fall into his hands,’ Garron protested with a shocked
frown. ‘Unfortunately the Arab took umbrage and showed all
the impressive documents I’d cooked up to the Antartican
Government—so I had to emigrate.’

The Doctor padded over to listen at the door. ‘No doubt
your victim came looking for you,’ he murmured.

‘With a posse of Bedouin touting neutron guns,’ Garron
nodded ruefully. ‘I’ve never been back.’

The Doctor chuckled sympathetically.

Romana’s exasperation boiled over. ‘Doctor. How can you
gossip with this petty confidence trickster when there are people
out there intending to kill us?’ she exploded.

‘Don’t you worry yourself about that, my dear,’ the Doctor
replied gently. ‘I’m keeping an ear on them.’

He sat down again at the table and leant towards Garron.
‘But what really intrigues me is how you first got your hands on
that piece of Jethryk,’ he murmured, gazing in flattering
admiration.

Garron eyed the Doctor warily but could not help swelling
with pride. ‘I... I acquired it,’ he smiled evasively.

‘You stole it,’ Romana corrected him sharply.

Garron’s fleshy lips curled with contempt. ‘That is a very
damaging remark,’ he retorted, ‘but only to be expected on a
Class Three Planet such as this.’

The Doctor’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Class Three Planet?’ he
exclaimed. ‘What do you mean?’

Garron drew himself up in the chair and beamed. ‘Just a
technical term, sir,’ he said condescendingly, ‘a convenient
method of classifying properties.’

The Doctor stared wide-eyed. ‘Properties?’ he echoed.

Indeed sir: I deal in planetary real estate,’ Garcon
explained. ‘I sell planets.’

The Doctor’s jaw dropped a fraction of a centimetre. ‘Of
course at first I thought you were Alliance Security,’ Garron
continued. ‘They’ve been on my tail ever since I sold Mirabilis
Eighty-One to no less than three different purchasers... That was
my greatest deal,’ he sighed nostalgically, before lapsing into
silence.

‘What about your latest customer—the Graff Vynda Ka—or
whatever he calls himself. What does he want Ribos for?’ the
Doctor asked, going once more to the door and listening.

Garron outlined the Graff’s ambitious scheme. ‘It’s a
hopeless madman’s dream,’ he chuckled. ‘but his gold is real
enough.’

‘He may be a madman but he certainly saw through you!’
Romana snapped with scathing irony.

‘Young Unstoffe’s fault entirely, dear lady,’ Garron replied.
‘He went right over the top. He’s a dreadful ham at heart, I’m
afraid.’

The Doctor returned and sat by the table. ‘And the
Jethryk... Just bait?’ he suggested innocently.

Garron nodded. Then he looked very hard at the Doctor.
‘You seem to be extremely interested in that nugget, sir. You
haven’t told me what your racket is yet,’ he said slyly.

The Doctor threw his arms up in the air vaguely. As he did
so the Locatormutor Core flew out of his sleeve and was instantly
caught by Romana before it could crash into the fire.

‘You could be extremely useful in the slips, my dear,’ the
Doctor said, turning to her with a broad smile. Then he
answered Garron’s question with a casual shrug: ‘Oh we’re just
here on holiday, but we seem to keep getting caught up in
things...’

‘Things which do not in the least concern us,’ Romana
snapped, examining the Locatormutor for any sign of damage.

‘Indeed,’ the Doctor agreed, jumping to his feet. ‘We really
ought to be moving on. However there doesn’t appear to be a
convenient window, the chimney is much too hot to climb and
our Round Table friends outside sound rather...’

The Doctor stopped in mid-sentence and listened to the
muffled noise of activity suddenly penetrating through the
sturdy wooden door. Pulling out his ear trumpet, he crept over
and applied its tarnished horn to the gap running between the
hinges. He listened as Sholakh briefed the Levithian Guards,
telling them that the Shrieves planned to raid the Concourse
again at dawn and that the Graff’s forces would be expected to
recover the Jethryk and the gold. ‘We shall vanish before they
realise what hit them,’ he concluded. ‘Rakol, Norka and Krolon
will guard the prisoners until the operation is completed. At our
signal, execute them.’