Doctor Who: Engines of War (18 page)

Cinder kicked the door. It didn’t even move in its frame. Her foot flared with pain. Miserably, she sank to the floor, rubbing at her smarting toes through her boot.

The Doctor, clearly deciding it was best to leave her to her own devices for a few minutes, walked back to where he’d been sitting against the wall and made himself comfortable.

Cinder glowered at the lock. It didn’t
look
that sophisticated. In fact, it was just like the human locks back on Moldox, a simple lever tumbler affair, opened with a key. Were the Time Lords really so arrogant that they thought adapting a simple, mechanical lock to be immune to sonic manipulation was going to be enough to keep their prisoners in?

She felt a glimmer of hope. She glanced at the Doctor, who had taken his sonic screwdriver from the hoop on his ammo belt, and was fiddling with the settings, presumably in an attempt to override the protocols on the lock.

She slid the sleeve of her jumper up her arm, hooking it over her elbow. She hardly dared look.
Maybe
…

It was still there. She breathed a sigh of relief. The bracelet she’d brought with her from Moldox, the one her brother had made for her when she’d been a child, twisting a hoop from strands of thick copper wire. It had been too big for her, then, but she’d held on to it all the same, and when Coyne and his crew had found her in the burned-out ruins of her homestead, it was the only thing she’d been able to save.

She plucked at it with her fingertips, considering. If she uncoiled it, maybe the wire would be strong enough to make two lock picks. There was a part of her that didn’t want to do it, that wanted to pull the sleeve of her jumper back down over her arm and curl up, pretend she’d never had the idea, but she knew she couldn’t. Too many lives were at stake. Her brother would have understood.

‘I’m sorry, Sammy,’ she whispered, as she slipped the bracelet off and slowly began teasing apart the metal strands. They were stiff with age, and for a moment she thought they were simply going to snap in her hands, but as she worked at them they gradually began to come free.

Within moments the bracelet had separated, unfurling into two separate strands. She straightened them as best she could and laid them out before her on the ground.

The Doctor was still intent on his screwdriver, a look of deep concentration on his furrowed brow.

Cinder got to her knees, leaning close to the lock, closing one eye so that she could peer through the keyhole. She could see little of the passageway outside, other than another door across the hall. There was no sign of any guards.

She retrieved her makeshift tools from the floor. Cautiously, she inserted them into the lock, half expecting to receive a violent electric shock, or at the very least to trigger an alarm, but nothing happened. Slowly, deliberately, she set to work, using the metal rods to gently force the mechanism, turning the tumblers so that the lever slid out of the hole in the wall.

She heard the mechanism click. She’d only been at it for seconds. Could it really be that simple?

She realised she’d been holding her breath and let it out. Then, getting to her feet, she jammed the lock picks into her pocket and, hand trembling, tried the door.

The handle turned, and the door opened a fraction of an inch. Her pulse was thrumming in her ears. Quietly, she pushed it closed again, and turned to see if the Doctor was watching. He was still fumbling with his screwdriver.

‘Doctor?’ she said, her voice wavering slightly.

‘Hmmm,’ he replied, only half listening. ‘You said that, if we could get out of this cell, you thought we still stood a chance of stopping the Time Lords from deploying the Tear?’

The Doctor peered up at her, narrowing his eyes. ‘Yes, he said. ‘But I’ve to—’

Cinder waved him quiet. She reached behind her, turned the handle and allowed the door to swing wide open. ‘Time to make good,’ she said.

The Doctor glanced at the lock, and then at Cinder. ‘I’m impressed,’ he said.

She shrugged. ‘Clearly, they weren’t expecting a measly human girl with a lock pick.’

‘No,’ laughed the Doctor, scrambling to his feet. ‘I don’t think any of us were.’ His waistcoat was rumpled beneath his jacket and his boots were spattered in dried mud. He looked somewhat bedraggled. But then, she supposed, they’d both been through the wars in the last few days – quite literally.

Without further ado, they slipped from the cell.

‘Which way?’ said Cinder.

‘Left, I think,’ said the Doctor, lowering his voice to a whisper. ‘Thankfully, I’ve never spent a great deal of time down here, but I think we have to go down. There should be a sloping passageway up ahead, on the left.’

‘Down?’ said Cinder. ‘I thought we were in the dungeons? They certainly
look
like dungeons.’

The Doctor nodded. ‘There’s an under croft that stretched right beneath the main citadel. It’s where they send TARDISes to die.’ His voice cracked as he spoke. ‘That’s where she’ll be.’

Trailing one after the other, the Doctor led the way along the passage. It was dimly lit and dank, and the four or five other cells they passed were all empty, the doors hanging open. The walls were roughly hewn, chiselled from the bedrock beneath the citadel, and were largely unadorned, save for the occasional lumen sconce. Either this particular wing of the prison had been reserved just for them, or the Time Lords didn’t make a habit of taking prisoners. Cinder pointed this out to the Doctor as they walked.

‘It’s my understanding that Rassilon favours execution as a means of punishment these days,’ he said darkly.

Cinder frowned. ‘Then why shove us in a dirty old cell?’ she said. ‘Not that I’m complaining, or anything.

‘He knows I might yet prove useful,’ said the Doctor, ‘and he can use you as leverage, despicable as it is.’

Cinder didn’t very much like the idea of being used as leverage, but at least it gave her some comfort to know that the Doctor was looking out for her, and that he wouldn’t simply abandon to save his own skin, or leave her somewhere to die.

They reached the end of the tunnel and turned left, straight into the eye line of a waiting guard, who was sitting on a stool, leaning back against the wall and casually perusing a data tablet. She was a tall, muscular woman, dressed in the familiar red and white uniform of the Castellan’s Guard. Cinder couldn’t help but notice the pistol jammed in her belt.

Slowly, the woman got up from the stool, placing the data slate on the seat behind her. ‘Stop there!’ she said. She hurried toward them, her footsteps echoing in the confined passageway.

The Doctor stepped forward to greet her, extending his hand. ‘Hello,’ he said.

‘Now look, what are you doing down here?’ said the woman. ‘The prison is strictly out of bounds.’

‘Ah,’ said the Doctor. ‘I’m sorry. Must have taken a wrong turning somewhere back there. It’s clearly just a misunderstanding. Don’t mind us. We’ll be on our way.’ He turned around on the spot, making as if to leave.

‘Hold on a moment,’ said the woman. ‘You look familiar. Aren’t you…?’ Her eyes widened. ‘You’re the Doctor!’ she said. ‘You’re supposed to be in that cell. How did you get out?’ She fumbled for her pistol.

‘Now listen,’ said the Doctor, holding out his hand in an effort to calm her. ‘As I say, it’s just a simple misunder—’

Cinder stepped forward, drew back her fist and delivered a neat right hook to the woman’s jaw. She crumpled to a heap on the floor, her pistol skittering away.

‘Now really!’ said the Doctor. ‘Was there any need for that?’

Cinder rolled her eyes, nursing her painful hand. ‘Something tells me you’ve got the dynamic of this situation all wrong,’ she said. ‘This is a prison break. She’s a guard. We’re supposed to be running away.’

The Doctor seemed to weigh this up for a moment, and then shrugged. ‘Well, when you put it like that…’ he said. He looked down at the unconscious form of the guard. ‘Let’s at least make her comfortable.’

Cinder sighed, while the Doctor dragged the woman to the tunnel wall and propped her up in a sitting position, resting her hands upon her lap. ‘There,’ he said, dusting his hands. ‘She’ll thank us for that when she comes round.’

‘I really think she won’t,’ said Cinder. ‘Now let’s get a move on.’

The end of the tunnel dipped as the Doctor had predicted, turning into a long, gentle slope that led further underground. ‘This way,’ he said, waving her on.

Cinder heard voices behind them – two men, shouting to one another in alarm. Clearly, they’d discovered their unconscious colleague. ‘They’ve found her,’ she said. ‘Come on, we’d better run.’

Abandoning all hope of remaining inconspicuous, the Doctor and Cinder started off at a run, charging down the slopes toward the depth of the under croft. Moments later, they heard footsteps starting out behind them.

The passage continued to delve down for what seemed like miles, winding back on itself until Cinder was utterly disorientated. She was dog tired, the muscles in her thighs aching from all the running, her head still pounding with the after-effects of the mind probe. She was driven on, however, by the sound of the accompanying footsteps, which seemed to be growing louder, gaining on them with every second.

‘It’s just down here,’ gasped the Doctor, breathlessly.

Up ahead, the tunnel widened abruptly, the floor levelling as it disgorged into the mouth of an enormous cave.

The Doctor skidded to a halt, and Cinder almost ran into his back, forced to catch hold of his arm to slow her momentum, and almost pulling them both over in the process.

The under croft was immense, just as the Doctor had described, stretching out beneath the entire city. The ceiling was high and vaulted, clearly built in millennia long past, and softly glowing strips criss-crossed the brickwork, providing a measure of weak illumination. The walls were roughly cut stone, which disappeared away into the horizon, absorbed by the shadows.

The floor of the cave was littered with the carcasses of dead or dying TARDISes. There were thousands of them, tens of thousands, even. It was impossible to estimate.

She stood in the mouth of the cave, looking out upon a sea of TARDISes in all their myriad forms, all manner of different shapes and sizes. Some of them were plain white lozenges scarred with the sooty streaks of battle, others silver and grey capsules, their surfaces pitted and cracked with age.

One of them, close by, had cracked open like an egg, its interior folding out to create a higgledy-piggledy landscape of geometric weirdness. Cinder could make no sense of it – the walls were on the ceiling; the ceiling was on the floor. The console room stood perpendicular to a fragment of outer casing, which in turn bisected an empty pine bookcase. It was like staring at a weird dreamscape rendered in steel and wood.

In the distance, she could see some that had bloated to massive proportions; their outer forms swelling to press against the cavern roof, like asymmetric pillars, supporting the city above.

To her left was one that looked like a damaged Dalek saucer, lying on its side; another that resembled an ancient oak tree, sitting upon a tangle of gnarled and knotted roots; still more that had taken the form of a neoclassical pillar, a circus tent, a scuttled galleon, listing against the wall. There were others, too, describing strange and unusual objects that she could not recognise, presumably derived from alien civilisations.

There was something terribly forlorn about the place, that these vessels should be abandoned here in such a fashion to end their days.

‘It’s a graveyard,’ she said.

The Doctor nodded. ‘The final resting place of old friends,’ he said. He stroked his beard. ‘They were once alive, you know.’

Cinder frowned. ‘But they’re machines.’

The Doctor shook his head. ‘No. They’re much more than that. You should try running away with one of them.’

Behind them, the footsteps of the guards were approaching.

‘How are we going to find her amongst all of these?’ asked Cinder, with a sudden sense of urgency. They were wasting time. ‘Your TARDIS. There are too many.’ She waved her hands to encompass the breadth of the cavern. ‘It would take weeks to search this place.’

Her statement was punctuated by a short, electronic bleep, which seemed to come from beneath the lapel of the Doctor’s leather coat. He raised an eyebrow. ‘Oh, she’s good,’ he said. ‘Clever, clever girl.’ He reached for his sonic screwdriver. The tip had come to life, lighting up, but he hadn’t done anything, and there was no annoying whirring sound. After a second it emitted another bleep.

‘She’s calling to us,’ he said. ‘She knows we’re here. She wants to be found. Come on!’

Holding the sonic aloft like a flaming torch, the Doctor hopped down from the small ledge, disappearing amongst the forest of broken TARDISes. Cinder jumped down behind him, following the glow of the sonic.

‘That’s far enough!’

Behind them, the guards emerged into the mouth of the cavern. Cinder didn’t pause to look at their faces, but darted for cover behind the scorched shell of a Battle TARDIS.

‘Come back to the cells now,’ bellowed one of the guards, ‘and we won’t shoot.’

‘Fat chance!’ came the Doctor’s muffled reply, causing Cinder to splutter with laughter. It only lasted for a moment, however, as an energy bolt from one of the guard’s pistols zipped past her ear, striking the galleon and sending a shower of sparks streaming into the air.

So, they weren’t out to stun.

She could hear the Doctor’s sonic bleeping ahead of her, the pips increasing in frequency as he moved deeper into the warren, and presumably closer to his TARDIS. ‘This way!’ he called, waving his sonic over the top of a TARDIS that looked like a canal barge, and eliciting another shot from one of the guards.

Keeping her head down, Cinder scuttled after him. More shots whizzed over her head as the guards, clearly deciding that accuracy was not a virtue, began to fire indiscriminately in their general direction.

The broken TARDISes formed a haphazard maze full of jagged edges and disorientating geometry.

As the guards split up, coming after them in a pincer movement, the Doctor and Cinder followed the insistent bleeping of the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver, rushing chaotically from place to place, stumbling upon dead ends, backtracking, circling around.