Doctor Who: Terminus (3 page)

He managed to get the viewer focused on the interior of the room. It was something he’d never tried before. In theory it ought to work... but then he’d had a theory about the stability of the matrix, as well. He opened the channel that would carry two-way sound, and said, ‘Nyssa? Nyssa, can you hear me?’

‘We’re getting a picture!’ Tegan said excitedly.

Turlough had moved back and was watching from beside her.

The image was torn about by interference, but at least it was recognisable. Nyssa had backed up against the table that carried her experimental gear. The textbook that she’d been using was clutched tightly under her arm. Although she was obviously scared, she was still in control; even as the Doctor’s voice broke through, she was clearly looking around for some means of diverting the danger.

This had been the Doctor’s main worry, the reason why he had made a priority out of establishing communication with Nyssa. If she’d assumed that the distortion around her was the result of some inpouring of energy, she might attempt to channel it away from herself. But the lightning-rod theory wouldn’t just be ineffective, it would be fatal; in a burning house, one doesn’t feed the flames.

‘I hear you!’ she said. Her relief was twofold; until now she’d had no way of knowing whether the rest of the TARDIS and its occupants were still whole.

‘Stay well back, Nyssa,’ the Doctor warned, ‘there’s nothing you can do.’

The screen image broke up for’ a moment. When it reformed, Nyssa was backing around the table. ‘Can’t I conduct it away?’ she was saying.

‘No. I’m trying to contain it from this end.’ He wouldn’t have much time. Already the breakup was starting to show, creeping in from the edge of the screen.

They lost the image again. Turlough watched over the Doctor’s shoulder as he worked to restore it, with the result that only Tegan saw what happened next.

The picture returned but she was convinced that, for a moment, it was the wrong picture; it showed a curving interior wall that was the wrong shape and the wrong colour, and there was something
else
... something that sent her heart racing as if it had been spiked, something that faded before she’d even had the chance to be sure of what it was. The more familiar image came through, but it showed even more interference than before.

‘Something’s happening in there,’ she said.

The Doctor looked up. ‘What?’

‘I don’t know. For a moment it didn’t look like a part of the TARDIS.’

The Doctor took a deep breath. ‘The outside universe is breaking through. I’m losing it.’

‘What are you going to do?’

When she’d asked the question, Tegan waited. The Doctor didn’t reply immediately, and Tegan felt a growing horror; for all the occasional vagueness of his moods and his unpredictable behaviour, he was never indecisive. Hesitation now could only mean one thing.

The Doctor was out of options.

This was closer to the truth than the Doctor would have cared to admit. The TARDIS was like a bubble of space and time, the job of the matrix being to maintain the bubble. The deterioration of the residential corridor was only the beginning of what would ultimately be a complete collapse.

Orthodox methods of operation simply didn’t allow for this kind of situation. There was nothing he could do to save Nyssa, and within a short time the rest of them could expect to share her fate.

As long as he stuck to orthodox methods.

‘I’m going to make an emergency exit,’ he said with renewed determination, and he opened another panel along from the matrix circuitry.

As the Doctor worked on, Tegan watched the screen. Nyssa had gone about as far back as she could get, and now the creeping instability was starting to engulf her bench experiment; the glassware exploded and forced her to cover her face as the shimmering moved in, a net that was slowly drawing closed around her. Tegan screwed her fists tight in frustration; there wasn’t a thing she could do to help, and it was burning her up. Turlough watched alongside her. His eyes didn’t move from the Doctor; perhaps his anxiety was all reserved for his own future.

The Doctor popped up from behind the console.

‘Nyssa,’ he said, ‘look behind you!’

Tegan saw Nyssa turn, and she wondered what the Doctor meant. And then she saw; something was happening to the back wall of the room. The normal grey-and-white interior moulding of the TARDIS was starting to fade away and to be replaced by a new texture. Nyssa stood before a large door. It was metal and monstrously solid, as if it had been built to withstand tons of pressure, but the garbled representation of the room’s interior could show them no more detail than this. The door was starting to swing open on its own. Nyssa took a step back, and almost retreated into the field of instability.

‘Go through!’ the Doctor called to her. ‘It’s your only chance!’

‘But where are you sending her?’ Tegan said, bewildered.

‘I don’t know,’ the Doctor admitted. ‘But if she stays, she’ll...’ Whatever he was going to say, it was drowned by a roar of static. The screen turned unbearably white, a window on Armageddon.

Dimensional instability had finally consumed the entire section of the TARDIS; now they could only wait and hope that it would die out rather than spread.

They could also hope that Nyssa had moved quickly enough.

The screen cleared slowly – too slowly, it seemed at first, but as the image reformed they could make out the fact that the room had just about managed to hold its shape. The shimmering was spasmodic, much less violent than before although no less deadly. There was no sign of Nyssa at all.

The unfamiliar door that was the TARDIS’s temporary gateway to the outside stood open.

Beyond it was darkness, and the contrast range of the screen couldn’t handle the shadow detail.

Turlough said that he thought he’d seen something move, and it occurred to the Doctor that Nyssa might be trying to re-enter the room, ‘Keep moving!’ he shouted to her, ‘It isn’t over yet!’ There was a blur in the doorway that might have been anything, and then the screen overloaded again for a few seconds.

The Doctor disappeared back into the console. This was his chance to disconnect the faulty component and reassign its functions.

‘She’s still got a chance,’ the Doctor said.

‘Doesn’t that depend on where you sent her?’ asked Tegan.

Now that the alarms were no longer sounding, it was possible to make out a regular pulsating hum that was coming from the console. ‘We’ve locked onto some kind of spacecraft,’ the Doctor said.

But Tegan wasn’t listening. On the screen, the strange door was beginning to close of its own accord.

The Doctor saw this and hurried out of the console room. Tegan started to follow.

‘What’s the rush?’ Turlough said. ‘I thought we were safe.’

Tegan paused for a moment; she wanted to tell him that he had the hide of an elephant. Instead she flashed him a disapproving look, and set out after the Doctor.

The new door in the far wall had completely closed.

The Doctor went over to examine it, but for the moment he didn’t touch. Turlough was pushing his way in from the corridor as Tegan said, ‘How strong’s the link?’

‘We’re well hooked,’ the Doctor said. The door wasn’t really telling him anything; it was as much a part of the TARDIS as of the craft they’d contacted.

On the other side, there would probably be an opening where there had been no opening before. If there was a crew to be met on the other side, he hoped they’d be flexible in their thinking.

Tegan said, ‘Hadn’t we better find out what we’ve sent Nyssa into?’

The Doctor shot her a look of impatient reproof, but it was mild. He understood that she was as anxious as he was for Nyssa’s safety. His first touch of the door caused it to open automatically.

It had a wide swing and, like Nyssa, they all had to take a pace back. A metallic scent-cocktail of machine-scrubbed air came wafting through, reminding Tegan of aircraft runways and oil-stained tarmac and open bay-doors, causing a stab of nostalgia that wasn’t entirely unpleasant. There wasn’t much to see other than dim lights and dark metal. She said, ‘Are we going through?’ She was doing her best to sound confident, but she wasn’t quite making it.

‘
I’ll
go through,’ the Doctor said. ‘You wait here.’

He hesitated for just a moment, and then he went to the threshold and stepped down. Tegan followed him to the edge and looked through after him.

What she saw was a section of a corridor complex formed from staggered alcoves down one side with a curving wall opposite that was probably a part of the ship’s outer skin. The floor was a see-through metal grating over a cable trap, and the lighting seemed to be set at night-time levels. The Doctor was standing and looking around. The only sounds were the drone of buried motors and, laid faintly over this, an ethereal windsong that was deceptively like far-off crying.

‘Well?’ Tegan said.

‘She’s gone.’

‘Which way?’

The Doctor was about to say that there was no way of knowing, but then he saw something a short distance away that made him think again. He walked over for a closer look. It was a biotechnical text from the TARDIS library. It was scorched along one edge.

He set it against the wall and turned back to Tegan.

‘Stay back,’ he said. ‘She can’t have gone far.’ And then he set off in the direction that the book had indicated.

Tegan waited and listened when he’d gone from sight, but after a few moments the sound of his footsteps faded. They hadn’t left it too long; surely Nyssa must have realised after a while that the danger was over and she could stop running. Perhaps she’d turned around and was heading back already. Tegan was doing her best to be optimistic, but she couldn’t get the image of the damaged book out of her mind.

She moved back into the TARDIS. ‘Nyssa’s gone,’

she told Turlough.

Nyssa’s abacus had been warped and scorched, but otherwise it was recognisable. Turlough had picked it up, and he was flicking the beads from side to side. He said, ‘The Doctor will find her.’

‘Do you really care?’

Turlough was smiling. ‘Do you know, Tegan,’ he said, ‘it wouldn’t be possible for me to be the ogre you seem to think I am.’

‘Really?’ Tegan said, and her disbelief was obvious.

‘Really. I mean, am I criticising you because you’d rather stay here than help look for Nyssa?’

That did it. She turned and went out through the doorway.

Turlough watched for a moment in case Tegan changed her mind, but he wasn’t expecting it. Of the three, she was the easiest to manipulate. All he needed to do was to annoy her a little, and she’d jump off impulsively in whatever direction he wanted. He reached into his pocket and brought out the contact cube.

Although he couldn’t say so, he blamed his controller for his earlier failure. There had to be a better way of bringing the Doctor down than by striking at his technology; that, after all, was the Doctor’s strength. The cube started to glow.

‘They’ve left me alone,’ Turlough said as soon as contact was established. ‘What can I do?’

‘
Nothing. Destroying the TARDIS is nothing if the Doctor
lives.
’

‘He’s gone.’

‘
Then follow and kill him. Find a way.
’

Tegan hadn’t even gone out of sight of the door when Turlough stepped down into the corridor. It wasn’t going to be as simple as it had seemed at first; the corridor branched and divided further down, and the monotony of its appearance was disorienting. She heard her name being called, and she turned back to see what he wanted.

He was walking towards her, and she saw with a start of fear that the door was closing itself behind him.

No doubt it would open again when someone approached it, and if there was any problem in tracking it down there was always Nyssa’s book that they could use as a marker, but Tegan still felt as if a cell door had been slammed on her.

But the big surprise was Turlough. He was looking sheepish. He was
embarrassed
.

‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘That must have looked really selfish. I couldn’t let you come out here alone.’

It was certainly a change of heart, but Tegan wasn’t about to take any bets on how long it might last. When she turned around to lead the way, there was that familiar uncomfortable feeling between her shoulders again.

In fact, she’d been on the point of turning back. It no longer seemed like a good idea to try to catch up with the Doctor, and it was only the thought of Turlough waiting and smirking at her lack of resolve that had caused her to hesitate, but now that he was with her and tagging along, she felt even less able to give up the notion.

So they followed the way laid down by the book, as the Doctor had done, pressing deeper into the unknown craft and walking in what they hoped were his footsteps. They paused only once, when the steady engine sounds from under the decks changed and became less intense. By then they were already some distance away from their starting point; there was no way that they might have seen their link to the TARDIS slowly fading out and leaving a blank section of corridor wall.

The Doctor was either staying well ahead of them or else he’d turned off somewhere. Tegan and Turlough moved as fast as they dared without making too much noise, staying with the main line of the corridor; this way they stood the least chance of getting lost, because they’d be able to trace a straight line back to their starting-point.

They met nobody. The place even had an empty feel about it, helped along by the low-level lights. For Tegan it was like an engine yard at midnight, and the only life was that which throbbed through the decks under their feet. Even so, this didn’t make her any less uneasy – lights of any kind, even at the lowest level, must have been provided for someone to see by. There were sliding doors at regular intervals down one side of the main corridor, but none was open.

Thanks for that, at least,
Tegan thought as they pressed on.

‘Was that her?’ Turlough said suddenly, and Tegan realised that she’d been letting her attention wander.