Big Bang Generation (8 page)

Jack leaned forward, conspiratorially. ‘Oh, that's Peter. He's being a bit of a 'mare at the moment. Met someone in
a club on Bacchus Five, thought this was the romance to end all romances.'

‘But it wasn't,' Ruth added quietly, her voice carry slightly more empathy for Peter than Jack's. ‘He was put off by Peter's human-Killoran physiology.'

‘Dog-ears,' Peter called over, pointing at his large ears. ‘Can hear everything.'

‘See what I mean? Can't hide anything you say from old aerial ears over there.'

‘Seriously, I have a gun, not afraid to use it!'

‘You've had twelve months to shoot me, Petey,' Jack called back. ‘Somehow I don't think you're going to do it now.' Jack turned back to the Doctor. ‘Loves me really.'

‘Someone has to,' Ruth said.

‘Hey, don't say that to the man who put a ring on your finger.'

Jack smiled, and the Doctor found himself smiling too at Jack's charm. Then remembered this was also a trick of everyone on Kadept. (This was why they made good lawyers and accountants and IT techs – they could tell you anything and you'd believe it.)

Ruth held her hand up. ‘See this ring? Oh no, wait, there is no ring because someone had to pawn it to pay a debt off.'

Jack beeped her nose. ‘And I'll buy you a new one. Probably from here. Be worth a fortune back home – it'll be an antique there!'

Ruth sighed. ‘Sorry about Jack.'

‘You're the one marrying him,' the Doctor said. ‘He's
your problem, not mine. I just want to know why you went to such a charade to bring me here.'

‘That's the boss,' Jack said. ‘Said to reel you in, like a fish on a hook; like a donkey seeking a carrot; like a moth looking for a flame; like a—'

‘OK, I get it. A simple “Hi, we're from the twenty-seventh century, fancy a pot of tea' would have had the same effect.'

‘Ahh,' Jack said. ‘But would that have been as much fun? Besides, we're working to a countdown here.'

And with a rather overblown flourish, he whipped a traditional stopwatch from a pocket and held it up. It may have looked trad, but the face was a digital timer counting down. ‘Five, four, three, two, one. And: cue!'

The Doctor looked around, waiting for something to happen. To their credit, so did Jack, Ruth and Peter.

But nothing did happen.

They all looked at each other for a few seconds. Jack shrugged slowly.

And then the screaming outside started.

Jack turned to Ruth. ‘Told you it was a cheap one.' He looked at the Doctor. ‘Bet Time Lords have clocks that work.'

The Doctor wasn't sure whether the revelation they knew where he was from or the screaming from the people in Darling Harbour was more important at that moment, but frankly screaming people was more likely to need sorting, and rushing out of the empty café at least got him away from the three mad people.

As he ran, he scooped up the Shimmer and switched it off. The café vanished and was replaced by a small disused shop, with a poster for a circus from six months earlier pasted to a cracked glass door.

‘Spoilsport,' Ruth muttered and followed him. So did Jack and Peter, who pulled his hoodie back up, just in case anyone saw him. Jack seemed less fussed about his appearance, although at a glance, he just seemed like someone moderately tall who could run fast, so most Australians wouldn't notice him.

The Doctor was scanning the surroundings. Where was the screaming coming from?

All around.

OK, where had it started?

The biggest group of running people seemed to be coming from within the walled Chinese Friendship Garden so, moving against the hordes of running humans, the Doctor tried to push his way into the direction they were coming.

A hand gripped his and pulled him forward.

The Doctor tried to see the face of his gripper, but every time he took his eye off where they were going, someone careered into him, spinning him. All the time, the hold on his hand got tighter. They weren't going to let go.

So he stopped. Dead.

The woman holding him was yanked back towards him, and he caught her expertly.

As her head fell back against his chest, deep-blue eyes looked up from under a mop of dark hair, and a beautiful
bright grin that, the Doctor had to admit, could light up a dark room, made him relax.

‘You,' he said.

‘Me,' she said.

‘Of course,' he said. ‘I just met your son. He's grown up fast.'

‘Killoran DNA,' she said. ‘Does that to you. Last time I saw you, you were a bit younger and a bit shorter. But still Scottish. Again. Time travel is very confusing, you know.'

He pulled the woman upright. She was also wearing a black shirt and jeans, similar to Ruth's outfit.

‘Tell me about them?'

‘Who?'

‘Your “team”.'

‘Well, Peter, as you know, is my son. He's also my expert in bangs and flashes – if it needs shooting, knocking out or blowing up, he's who I trust to do it efficiently, cleanly and practically.' She then looked to where Ruth was easing her way through the crowd, effortlessly and sensibly, weaving and ducking where necessary. ‘Ruth, I trust with my life. She has good instincts, she's a thinker and can usually see the solution to a problem just by walking into a room and having it explained to her when the rest of us have been discussing it for hours and getting nowhere.'

‘And him?'

‘Jack? Oh Jack's…I'm really not quite sure what Jack's for, but he's sweet, funny and makes us all laugh. He's also clumsy, often speaks without thinking first and has a habit of being blunt to the point of rudeness, but we never
care, because we're too busy laughing. He can also jump pretty far.'

As the crowd thinned out around them, she smiled at him again. ‘So…you got the Scots accent back, from…well, from your perspective anyway, from a few more bodies ago. Less Highlander, more Glaswegian I reckon.'

The Doctor sighed. ‘Always one for the minutiae, never the bigger picture.'

‘Not fair,' she said. ‘I'm very much a “bigger picture” woman. I'm here because of the pyramid in the harbour.'

The Doctor glanced back. ‘No pyramid.'

‘Not here, not Darling Harbour. I mean the big one, with the bridge and that delightful opera house, and all the ocean liners.'

‘There's no pyramid there, either. I think I might have noticed.'

‘Ah,' she said. ‘It hasn't arrived yet. But it will. That's why they're here.'

‘Who?'

‘Bigger picture, Doctor.' And she pointed towards the Peace Gardens.

Standing, looking like they were trying to acclimatise themselves, were three figures that definitely did not look like they belonged on twenty-first-century Earth.

The Doctor sighed. ‘It's always trouble when you're around, isn't it?'

She laughed. ‘Oh Doctor, you know me, Professor Bernice Summerfield, here to save the world.'

At which point, the three newcomers noticed the fact
that, unlike everyone else, the Doctor and Bernice weren't running away.

‘You!' one of them said.

‘They seem to know you,' the Doctor observed.

‘Everyone loves Bernice,' she replied, and brought a stopwatch out of her pocket, like the one Jack had earlier, the Doctor noted. It also had a timer. It was three seconds away from something.

Bernice smiled.

And then the really,
really
big noise, mixed with screams, yells, car horns, ship horns and a lot of water happened.

Bearing in mind how far away Sydney Harbour actually was, the Doctor was impressed that they could hear it all from where they were.

Which also suggested that ‘it' was very big.

He and Bernice turned to follow the eye line of the alien with the gun, whose eyes had widened at the noise.

And in the distance, the tip of something triangular was now part of the Sydney skyline, just to the right of where the Harbour Bridge should be.

‘Told you,' Bernice whispered. ‘Pyramid. In Sydney Harbour. Just outside Circular Quay. Goddess, I'm good at this.'

The Doctor was still keeping half an eye on the newcomers. The massive human who looked like his heart should give out at any moment carrying that amount of weight jabbed his pudgy finger towards the Doctor.

‘And who is this?' he boomed with a voice that sounded like it was swallowing jelly. Or maybe gelignite.

‘This is the leader of this little entourage, this group, this gang. That, Cyrrus Globb, is the man wanted on every civilised world for cons and grifts of the highest order. This is the leader of us all, this is the legendary brains of my outfit – meet Doc.'

And the Doctor realised, not for the first time, but certainly the first time this week, that whatever was going on, he was not only completely in the dark, but also in way above his head.

He leaned slightly in towards Bernice and muttered, so this Globb person couldn't hear: ‘Benny Summerfield, I want you to know just how much I hate you right now.'

Senior Sergeant Rhodes had seen a lot in his career. Everything from hoons trying to bungee jump from the Sydney Harbour Bridge to uptight and over-privileged politicos demanding the best seats at the St George Open Air cinema despite not having bought tickets. He'd dealt with speeding cars full of criminals, he'd dealt with irate parents, and once he'd even had to ask a famous pop star not to do an impromptu free gig in the middle of Pitt Street.

But he doubted that he'd ever dealt with anything quite so weird as a massive pyramid just appearing in the harbour, right in front of the bridge on the Circular Quay side. Apart from the shipping it was blocking, and the choppy waters that were playing havoc with the ferries and tourist boats, the biggest problem was the car shunts that had occurred on the bridge when people got, understandably distracted. Luckily, his colleagues in the Ambulance Service hadn't reported any major injuries.

But all the triple-zero services were reporting a great deal of calls, and it was hardly surprising. Senior Sergeant
Rhodes was standing at the Hickson Road Reserve, getting the best view of what was either a massive publicity stunt for a movie that no one had bothered telling the authorities about, or was some weird installation from the Museum of Contemporary Art just behind him.

Either way, it shouldn't be in the water. Shouldn't even be in Sydney without the proper authorisation.

Thing was, the more he looked at it – and he was about as close as you could get without actually swimming to it, it didn't look faked. The stonework, for all its weird carved shapes and design, looked…heavy. Looked real. Which it couldn't be because if it was, it would weigh tonnes and there was no way something that big and heavy got moved through the city and dumped without anyone seeing it.

‘It just appeared,' said a man.

The senior sergeant looked at him. Dirty, dishevelled, quite smelly, with a small ratty-looking dog on a piece of string.

‘Morning Jarhead,' Rhodes said to the old wino. ‘When did it get put there?'

‘Seriously, man,' ‘Jarhead' Jared Kelly said. ‘I watched it just…appear. One minute it wasn't there, the next, bang, there it was. Kally here saw it too, didn't you, darl?'

Kally the dog barked her agreement. Or just barked. Kally barked a lot. Usually when one of Rhodes's men arrested ‘Jarhead' for being drunk. Which was a pretty regular thing.

That would certainly tie in with why everyone was screaming and shouting earlier, the Senior Sergeant
reckoned, but it still didn't explain how the thing got there. And ‘Jarhead' was hardly the most reliable of witnesses. Last time he was brought in, he was talking about little green men from Mars trying to dismantle the Harbour Bridge, so it was safest to take everything he said with a pinch of salt.

And whilst it absolutely didn't tell the policeman exactly how it got there, more significantly, it offered up no clues as to why it was there. Or who put it there.

It was going to be a long day.

The Doctor had led his little group down to Circular Quay, where they did their best to melt into the gathered crowds who, having got over their initial shock and fear, were now for the most part lined up along the side of the Opera House, or on Platform 2 of Circular Quay station, getting good selfies of themselves with the pyramid in the background.

‘So what is it?' they heard one bloke ask.

‘Good question,' the Doctor muttered, brought out his own smartphone and took a photo.

‘You want me to get one of you with it?' asked Ruth sweetly.

The Doctor just gave her a look and sent the photo to Keri back on Legion, with the accompanying message: Recognise this?

Bernice leaned in, so Cyrrus Globb, Kik the Assassin and Horace Jaanson couldn't hear. ‘That's our mission, Boss,' she said.

‘Mission?'

‘Yup, mission. We have to get inside it. To do that we have to track down the original lodestone that operates it. To do that, we have to find out where it first arrived on Earth and bring it back here, without actually touching it.'

‘Oh, I am so going to regret this: and why, dear Benny, should we not touch it?'

‘Well, it's just a guess, but touching it is what zapped me, Peter, Ruth and Jack here. Then, a few twisted timelines later, it deposited Globb and co. And then, a few more twisted timelines later, it actually deposited the pyramid. Now, I'm no expert – and you have no idea how hard it is for me to say that out loud – but if I was at the epicentre and got zapped here, they other were further away and wound up here a few days later, closely followed by the pyramid, it suggests to me that things are being sent here sequentially.'

‘And that's not good because?'

‘Well, because next up may well be some pretty pissed off soldiers from a place called Aztec Moon, who seem to work for a church.'

‘The Church of the Papal Mainframe?'

‘That's them, Boss!'

‘What were you doing in the fifty-first century? How did you time travel?'

‘Fragment of lodestone, given to me by my future self who was trapped in a time eddy at the self-same epicentre I mentioned earlier. Not sure if I'm her, she's me or we've sorted of blended into one thing now, that's interesting, I
hadn't stopped to think about that…Anyway, long story short, chip of lodestone had enough oomph to draw me and the others to our future selves but not enough to protect us from the master stone as it were.'

‘Except that it wasn't, was it?'

‘Wasn't what?'

‘The master lodestone. It was just a time echo that had been locked in place while waiting for the real lodestone, which is presumably here. So yes, we need to get the real lodestone inside the pyramid, lock it into place and send everything back to the fifty-first century before the universe explodes.'

Bernice frowned. ‘Not sure I like this new melodramatic you. The universe is hardly going to explode because someone dumped a pyramid here. I mean Earth, yes. Because I imagine Aztec Moon will eventually be transported here as well, and two planets on top of one another can't be good for Earth. Or Mars. Or the sun. But the whole universe?'

‘Aztec Moon, yes? The world you were on? And that's Professor Horace Jaanson, right? He's smaller than I remember from the pictures, but I know his work.'

‘Did you know he's a prat?'

‘Everyone knows he's a prat.'

‘Oh good.' Bernice smiled. ‘So long as it's not just me that thinks it.'

‘So Aztec Moon plus Jaanson plus a lodestone most commonly referred to as the Glamour. You know it's a word from the time of the Great Old Ones? Though
whether this is actually the legendary Glamour, I rather doubt. There again it could be. Or maybe the term has been applied to various powerful objects over the years, in which case—'

‘Doctor?'

‘Yes?'

‘Stay on the point?'

He nodded. Good call. ‘So, now we have a pyramid that is in Sydney rather than where it ought to be. And that suggests one thing to me.'

‘Which is?'

‘The Ancients of the Universe.'

Bernice winked. ‘Got it in one, Boss.'

‘Stop calling me “Boss”. Why did you tell Globb I was your team's leader?'

Bernice indicated Globb with her head. ‘He's apparently some great conman, recently in prison; the turquoise lady is a Spyro weaponista called Kik the Assassin. Yes, that's really her name, not a description. She's also rather taken with my son. Hence us getting a bit more information before we all got zapped back here.'

‘I repeat, why did you tell him—'

‘Because,' Bernice interrupted, ‘I want him to think we're all on the same side.' She suddenly adopted a very bad London accent. ‘Doin' a grift, mate, innit? Know wot I mean, guv?'

The Doctor just stared at her, closed his eyes, took a deep breath, opened them again and looked at her without smiling. ‘I liked you in the twenty-seventh century,' he
said. ‘I feel safe with you in the twenty-seventh century. I don't go to the twenty-seventh century any more.'

Bernice just beeped his nose. ‘You miss me. Now, tell me how this pyramid is going to blow up the universe.'

‘Oh that's simple,' he said, carefully wiping the end of his nose where Bernice had beeped him. ‘The Ancients of the Universe manipulated all of time and space for their own ends, then vanished, leaving their famous Pyramid Eternia to be stayed away from. The youngest time tot on Gallifrey learnt that. Because what you are referring to as a lodestone, what others call the Glamour, or the Stone of Destiny, is an incredibly powerful key. And what do keys do?'

‘Lock things up? Leaving them safe?'

‘Or?'

‘Unlock things. Leaving them unsafe.'

‘Especially if you remove the key. So imagine that, by taking that key away, inch by inch or rather microsecond by microsecond, what you were opening was a portal to all of space and time. When it comes crashing through, it reverberates throughout all of space and time.'

‘And?'

‘And, Professor, as each bit of space and time touches another piece of space and time it wasn't supposed to touch, they annihilate one another. And in the space of about three heartbeats, past, present and future are nullified. The Big Bang never happened, and yet at the same time it happens in every microsecond like a chain reaction. The universe is, what's the phrase I was looking for? Oh yes, gone.'

‘Then we need to stop Globb or Jaanson or whoever getting into the pyramid and stealing your key…' Bernice realised. ‘Which of course we already did, but it wasn't the real key, it was a temporal echo, and the real key is here and the Pyramid Eternia has come back looking for the key and we need to place the real key in the place of the echo key and stop the universe going bang.'

‘Spot on.'

‘Why here? Why now? I mean what's so special about the key in 2015?'

The Doctor shrugged. ‘Haven't the foggiest.'

‘Well then you're a fat lot of good,' Bernice said. ‘We need to find someone who does know.' She looked at Professor Horace Jaanson.

‘If he knew,' the Doctor said, ‘he'd already have it in his hands. But what Horace Jaanson actually knows about anything can be written on the back of a postage stamp. We need access to the repository of all knowledge.'

‘The Matrix on Gallifrey?'

The Doctor opened his mouth to speak, but didn't.

Bernice reached out, took his hand. ‘I'm sorry. What did I say?'

‘Gallifrey is…' The Doctor tried to find the right word. ‘Missing.'

Bernice clearly wanted to ask a thousand questions about that statement but let it go, just squeezed his hand a bit tighter, unsure if she was comforting him or herself at that moment. Bernice was immediately focused, all banter aside as she started making a plan.

‘We need to find out why the Pyramid Eternia has drawn us all here, then. I would assume because the Glamour, key, whatever, is here somewhere and for some reason isn't here later than this era. I mean, I don't know how exact pyramids are when traveling through space and time, but my guess would be that it isn't so much today that's important as this general period.'

The Doctor nodded. ‘If time is in a state of flux, getting the key back inside the pyramid is urgent but doesn't have to be done in the next five minutes. That said…every minute we do delay might be doing terrible things to the Web of Time.'

‘The joy being, if it can be said to be a joy, that the universe, and us, won't be aware of it until the fireworks start. Teeny tiny tweaks and changes the fabric of the universe can deal with.'

She stopped and looked at the Doctor and suddenly they both laughed. ‘This is just like old times, Benny. You and I, facing impossible odds and coming up with more metaphors and synonyms than actual solutions.'

‘I know,' she said. ‘I missed it. I missed you. Even this you,' she said waving her hand towards the man whose mind she knew but whose face was still a stranger.

‘I need to make a phone call,' the Doctor said. ‘Care to walk with me?'

Bernice leaned back towards her son. ‘Peter, we'll be back in a few minutes. Don't let Globb and co out of our sight for a second.'

Peter nodded. ‘I'm all eyes and ears.'

She squeezed his arm. ‘Love you.'

‘Go,' he said. ‘Now. Or I'll scream that a strange old woman is professing her weird affection for me.'

Shaking her head, Bernice slipped away after the Doctor. He was tapping his smartphone.

‘Who are you calling?'

The Doctor held up a finger to shush her as he waited for a connection and a beat later, he spoke.

‘It's me.' Beat. ‘Well who do you think “me” is?' Beat. ‘The person who gave you the phone so he could call you and not get messed around.' Beat. ‘Then he sighed. ‘Putting you on speakerphone.'

He looked at the fascia of the phone, his finger hovering, looking for something to tap. After a ridiculous amount of time and an equally ridiculous lack of movement, Bernice snatched the phone and with two taps, had the speakerphone activated.

She could immediately hear badly piped music and a lot of yelling. That sounded like…the White Rabbit. On Legion. Her home. Well, obviously the bar wasn't her home but she certainly spent a lot of time in it, mainly because it was run by her good friend Irv—

Then a voice broke her line of thought.

‘Have you done it yet, you ridiculous man? Can I speak yet, yeah?'

Bernice stared open-mouthed, shot the Doctor a look then stared at the phone.

‘Keri? Ker'a'nol? What the hell are you doing on Legion?'

‘Who the hell is – oh. Oh, Benny, is that you, yeah?'

‘Of course it's me, who else is stupid enough to get stuck on primitive Earth with him?'