Doctor Who: Terminus (7 page)

The meaning behind his next words came over clearly to the others. His voice was shot through with the despair of the already defeated.

‘
We’re on a leper ship
!’

The Doctor could think of plenty of news that he’d rather receive. He wasn’t familiar with any disease that went by the name used by Olvir, but the evidence for its existence was all around them and pressing closer.

‘Don’t let them touch you,’ he told Nyssa. One of the figures was getting dangerously near.

Nyssa pulled back as far as she could, almost flattening herself into the angle formed by the corridor walls. ‘I wasn’t thinking of it,’ she said.

The Doctor’s attention returned to the Lazars. They seemed to be shuffling along blindly and without volition, obeying some deeply implanted impulse that had perhaps been drummed into them at an earlier time:
when the voice speaks, everybody out
. If the three of them could simply keep out of the way, the crowd might even pass them by without any contact.

Somehow, he couldn’t feel reassured. They’d been walking around, touching, breathing the air. To hope that they’d managed to avoid infection would be like standing in the rain and hoping to walk home dry.

‘Excuse me,’ Kari said, business-like. The Doctor began to move aside for her without thinking, but then he saw her raise the burner and level it at the nearest Lazars.

‘Nyssa!’ he said quickly, and Nyssa got the message right away. Standing directly alongside Kari, she clasped her hands together and drove an elbow into the raider’s ribs. Kari folded instantly, her eyes wide with surprise as she gasped for breath, and the Doctor was able to reach for the burner and take it away without any resistance.

‘It’s all right,’ he told them. ‘Just hold back here, and we’ll be safe. Most of them can’t even see us.’

The Lazars shuffled on by, intent on some far-off goal that no observer could understand. As soon as Kari could breathe again, she said with indignation,

‘You took my gun away!’

The Doctor glanced down at the burner as if he’d forgotten it. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, and offered it back. Kari took the weapon, but it was almost as if having it taken away from her so easily had shaken some of the magic out of it. ‘But we made a deal,’ she protested.

‘Mass slaughter wasn’t a part of it.’

‘Sometimes it’s the only way.’

‘But not this time. Look at them.’

So Kari looked. The crowd was thinning out now as the last of them went by. One was tottering blindly and holding onto the rags of the Lazar in front. A few stragglers, and then the three were able to step back into the main part of the corridor.

Nyssa said, ‘What about Olvir?’

‘He ran,’ Kari said with unexpected harshness. ‘We leave him.’

‘I don’t think so,’ the Doctor said. ‘He’s got a lot to tell us.’ He moved over to check the nearest of the rooms that lay beyond the now-open doors. It was empty and almost featureless, a few low benches around the walls and a mechanised water-dispenser in the middle for those who could use it. There was nothing for comfort and no sign of any emergency crash-protection, a minimum of expense for a cargo that couldn’t complain. The room wasn’t too clean, either.

He stepped out into the corridor and started to lead the way back towards the control room and Olvir. An embarrassed-looking Kari was the last to follow.

Tegan and Turlough were watching the last of the Lazars go past from an unusual hiding-place. After Tegan’s experience at the sliding door there had been no question of them stepping aside and hoping that confrontation would pass them by, but as they’d tried to run they’d realised that it was hopeless. There was no escape at all. Every way they turned, they saw Lazars.

It was then that Turlough had started to stamp around on the metal floor. Tegan looked at him as if he’d lost his mind, but when he explained what he was doing she started to do the same.

The floor grating was laid in sections. It was Tegan who found what they needed, a loose section that rocked slightly when weight was transferred from one corner to another, and when the discovery was made they both knelt and, locking their fingers through the cross-hatched gaps in the metal, tried to heave it up from its supporting pillars.

Even though it wasn’t fixed, it was heavy. At first it seemed hopeless but then, as they could hear the Lazars only metres away around the next corner, they managed to raise the grating a few inches. They were so surprised at their own success that they nearly let it fall, but desperation gave them strength. The section hinged up, and Turlough held it clear as Tegan scrambled under.

The cable-trap underneath was a shallow passageway filled with dust and grime. Tegan crouched low as Turlough followed her in and let the overhead panel drop into place. They were in relative darkness and surrounded by conduit and piping, but they could still see up into the corridor through the floor. It was a strange perspective, and one that made them feel less than safe.

The Lazars came, blotting out the light like slow-moving thunderclouds. Their rag-bound feet made a muffled pounding on the metal, and the darkness that they brought made Tegan aware of some dim sources of light down there in the channel with them – a phosphorescent build up around a corroded joint in some piping, or a neon glow escaping from behind some badly fitted safety cover.

It seemed to take forever. In amongst the Lazars was the occasional drone, supporting one who couldn’t walk or leading one who couldn’t see. The weight of the robots made the flooring bend and creak, and Tegan and Turlough couldn’t help shrinking back slightly whenever one of them went over.

But eventually, it was over. The last of them disappeared, and there was silence. Even so, the two of them waited for a while, listening to the quiet in order to be sure. They heard a couple of clangs and bumps, but they were a long way off.

‘Time to get out of here,’ Tegan said and Turlough, having no reason to disagree, straightened up as much as he was able and put his shoulders against the grating to lift it.

This part ought to be so much easier, Tegan was thinking, because they were on the side where leverage could now work in their favour. But Turlough strained and pushed, and nothing happened.

‘It’s stuck,’ he gasped finally.

‘It
can’t
be,’ Tegan said, suppressing her panic. This was like something from the worst dream she could ever have. She added her own efforts and the two of them pushed together, and still the section wouldn’t move. They both fell back, breathless.

‘We’ll have to find another way out,’ Tegan said.

Turlough looked at the shadows around them.

‘Where?’

‘We’ll have to look, won’t we?’

They took a moment longer to recover, and then Tegan crawled around in an attempt to find them a way through. The cable trap went wherever the corridor went, so in theory they ought to be able to follow it and keep trying the floor panels until they found another that they could raise – assuming that they hadn’t all been stamped down as firmly as the one overhead. That was the theory, but the practice wasn’t so straightforward. Pipes and angles and intruding shafts blocked the way, and they were going to have to do a lot of wriggling and squeezing.

As Tegan turned around, she nudged a piece of plating. It wasn’t even fixed in place, and as it fell loose a greenish light came spilling from behind it. Tegan scrambled back immediately.

‘It isn’t even decently shielded!’ she said. ‘This place is a deathtrap!’

They stayed well away from the leakage, and managed to push some loose wiring aside to make a gap. The wire hadn’t been disturbed in so long that the dust lay like a carpet over it. They came through into an area where they could at least move more freely, but every section they tried to lift was as firm as the last. The channel got narrower and narrower, and it ended in a blank metal wall.

‘Oh, no,’ Tegan said.

Turlough peered past her. ‘Is there any way through?’

‘Not a chance.’ She knocked twice on the metal. It was like the side of a tank.

‘Then we’ll have to go back.’

Tegan wasn’t happy at the idea, but it seemed that they didn’t have any choice. She looked around into the darkness.

‘Wait a minute,’ she said, and stretched her hand out to the side. It met nothing.

She pulled herself over for a look. What she’d taken to be a solid side-wall was actually the access to a vertical tunnel. Her head emerged into it and she could see that it was wide enough to take them. There were climbing-rungs all the way down, dusty but firm –

as she found when she reached out and tested her weight on the nearest.

Tegan looked over her shoulder. ‘We’re still in business!’ she said. Her voice echoed down the shaft. It almost seemed to be mocking her.

‘He isn’t here,’ Nyssa said.

So much was obvious. The newly raised lighting levels showed an empty control room, from the panoramic window facing forward to the circuit racks at the back. Kari said, ‘I told you, we leave him.’

The Doctor didn’t answer immediately. He went over to the window and looked out at the part of the Terminus that was visible from their restricted angle of view. Not much showed beyond the liner’s searchlights, but it seemed huge; he could see an edge of stars in only one direction.

He said, ‘Leave him? That’s a hard set of rules to live by.’

But Kari was unrepentant. ‘He knows it.’

The Doctor studied the Terminus for a moment longer, and then he turned away from the window. It hadn’t told him much, but he’d noted that the screaming skull painted across the plates seemed to be a fairly recent addition. He said, ‘We didn’t have any choice about coming here. What about you?’

Kari shrugged. ‘It was a big liner from a rich sector.

It looked like a perfect target.’ She went on to explain how the Chief had fixed on the liner and tracked it for some time, observing a number of pick-ups from worlds noted for their wealth and influence. When a covert research team had been sent out to check into the liner’s background, they’d found exactly nothing.

Officially, the liner didn’t exist. The attraction of a secret cargo was irresistible to the Chief, and he’d prepared his plans and stayed on its trail until it had reached this unpatrolled area.

Well, now they’d found their secret cargo. The liner didn’t look such a prize from the inside.

The Doctor said, ‘And what about the Terminus?’

‘I don’t know. Ask Olvir, he seemed to have all the information.’

It was Nyssa who suggested that they should try to tap the liner’s computer, and the Doctor agreed. All of the crew points had terminal screens and a limited array of inputs, but one place on the console seemed better served than any of the others. The Doctor guessed that it was probably the navigation desk.

The keyboard was, as he’d expected, unfamiliar, but it appeared to have been set up on principles that were mathematically rather than linguistically based.

Alongside this was a row of slots, and by these a stack of rectangular plastic blocks. The blocks were loose, and they seemed to fit into the receiving spaces in any orientation.

Kari was silent at first, but the Doctor didn’t seem to mind conversation. He could talk and work at the same time, neither distracting him from the other, so she leaned on the console and told him what she knew about Olvir. It wasn’t much. This had been their first teaming... in fact, it had been Olvir’s first mission. The rumours were that he was from a wealthy family that had gone broke, and that Olvir had saved them from ruin by contracting himself to the Chief, securing them an initial sum as an advance against his bonuses.

‘So the Chief paid Olvir’s family for the contract and put him straight into training,’ she concluded. ‘His first time out, and he messes it up.’

The Doctor had so far managed to get the liner’s computer to recognise that someone was trying to communicate with it, but not much more. He said,

‘And now you want to dump him.’

‘That’s how it goes.’

‘You didn’t say that when your “Chief” did it to you.’

Kari had no ready reply. Instead, she changed the subject. She indicated the screen where random graphs and patterns were rolling through, and said,

‘Do you know what you’re doing?’

‘No.’ The Doctor removed one of the blocks and inserted another. They seemed to contain coded areas of memory. ‘I don’t know the design and I don’t know the control programme. Even if there’s information about the Terminus in one of these units, I couldn’t get it out.’

‘So why waste time?’

‘Sometimes you hit lucky. But I’d settle for a floor plan of this place.’ He looked up. ‘Nyssa?’

Nyssa was over by the ugly-looking box that seemed to be the source of the liner’s automated control. She straightened up to see what the Doctor wanted, and he held up one of the blocks. ‘Can you see any more of these?’ he said, and Nyssa nodded and moved out to look.

Kari sorted through the others on the desk, looking for any sign or symbol that might distinguish one from another. ‘A floor plan?’ she said.

‘I need to know why I got it so wrong. I remembered every turn and we still didn’t find the TARDIS.’

Kari reached over and slotted in the last of the available blocks. ‘Try this,’ she suggested, and the Doctor typed in the limited code that he’d so far been able to devise for display.

The screen showed what was obviously a schematic diagram of several star systems, named and numbered in some unfamiliar language. ‘What’s that?’ Kari said, indicating a zigzag dotted line that went through the systems.

‘Us,’ the Doctor said. The line showed every stage of the ship’s journey so far. It ended in a pulsing red point that was presumably the site of the Terminus.

He considered the picture for a while. Although the names were strange, he thought he could vaguely recognise the pattern that they made. He carried out a simple operation that would increase the scale, and he watched as more information came crowding in from the edges.

‘What do you make of that?’ he said.