Doctor Who: Festival of Death: 50th Anniversary Edition (34 page)

He lowered the camera. There were two zombies in the corridor in front of him, about two metres away. They shuffled towards him, arms twitching.

Harken screamed and skidded away down the corridor. As he reached a corner he caught a glimpse of the undead over his shoulder. They were strutting down the corridor at a surprising speed, like a fast-forwarded film.

He dashed down the corridor, taking a right turn, and another. And then the corridor ended in a closed door.

His chest heaving, Harken pressed the door-open control. Nothing happened.

Behind him, the zombies were advancing. They licked their black tongues.

Harken punched the metal door so hard his fist hurt, and screamed. ‘You’ve got to let me in! They’re after me!’

C
HAPTER
S
EVENTEEN

HARKEN TURNED TO
face the undead. They raised their arms, reaching for his throat.

With a hum, the door behind him slid open. Harken hurled himself through it, hightailing across the floor and into the opposite wall. Momentarily stunned, he slid to the floor, dropping the holocamera.

He was inside a brightly lit control room, surrounded by white-coated scientist types staring at him in disbelief. A window looked out on to the Great Hall, next to a barricaded doorway.

Harken heard the door shut and looked round. The arm of one of the zombies was trapped in the closing door, writhing, clawing at the air. Beside the doorway was the Doctor and a woman scientist he hadn’t seen before. The woman screamed as the Doctor twisted the zombie’s arm, causing it to slither away and the door to close completely. The undead immediately began pounding on the door, and the metal buckled under the force of their blows.

Harken allowed himself a breath of relief. And then the thought struck him. How had the Doctor managed to get up here so quickly?

Romana clambered out of the necroport, the Doctor helping her on to the floor. Broken glass crunched beneath her feet. Nearby, the corpse of a young man lay across a collapsed stage. The Doctor swung the hatch shut with a resigned clang.

Making her way down the aisle of coffins, Romana noticed the shadowy figures on the stairs leading up to the control room. Illuminated by the control-room lights, their flesh was deathly pale. They remained perfectly motionless, like deactivated automata.

‘Why don’t they attack?’ whispered Romana.

‘They’re awaiting further instructions,’ said the Doctor. ‘So far, they’ve just been told not to let anyone get down here. Once the Repulsion has replaced them with passengers from the
Cerberus
, it will be in a much stronger position to attack.’

‘Because parts of its consciousness will actually be in their bodies, rather than just operating them by remote control?’

‘Yes. With the Repulsion inside them, they will be far more powerful. Invincible. Unstoppable.’ He paused. ‘We have to find Gallura.’

‘What about Harken Batt?’

‘Harken Batt? We’ve got more important things to worry about than that idiot.’ The Doctor strode towards the main doors, hunched like a pallbearer. ‘The fate of the entire universe is at stake. Come on.’

The G-Lock prison was much as Romana remembered it. A featureless corridor lined with grey doors, ending in an alcove containing a magazine-piled desk.

The Doctor shambled from door to door. ‘I think it’s this one,’ he said, patting the door control.

The door rattled upwards to reveal a fat man wearing nothing but a pair of white undershorts and a vest. The man yelped in alarm as the door opened. ‘Don’t let the zombies get me!’ he shrieked.

The Doctor punched the control and the door slammed shut. He exchanged an incredulous look with Romana and moved on to the next cell.

Inside the cell, Gallura looked up, his fronds unfurling. He stood and smiled. ‘Doctor. Romana. I was expecting you.’

‘Hello, it’s been, what, an hour?’ The Doctor stooped and entered the cell. ‘How did you know it would be us?’

‘There are no surprises, Doctor. Only…’

‘Expectations,’ the Doctor finished. ‘Gallura. We need your help.’

‘I know. You wish to learn the secret of the Arboretans.’

‘Yes. Yes I do.’ The Doctor nodded to Romana. ‘Come in Romana,
sit
down, sit down.’ She seated herself next to him on the bench. ‘Tell me, what is this secret of yours then?’

‘We never die,’ said Gallura.

‘But we saw you…’ said Romana.

‘At the point of death, we return to the beginning. The moment of birthing.’

‘You mean when you die, you go back in time to when you were born?’ said the Doctor.

‘That is correct,’ said Gallura. ‘We travel back through the endless darkness, the endless rushing nowhere, and find ourselves alive anew. And then we live our lives over again. It is the Arboretan legacy.’

‘So you get a second chance?’ said Romana. ‘You mean you can go through your life doing things differently?’

‘We can avoid making the mistakes we made in previous lives. We can learn to maximise our potential, to make the most of every passing moment. With each lifetime, we improve, until we finally lead the perfect existence.’

‘The Path of Perfection,’ said the Doctor.

Gallura nodded.

‘So you know what is going to happen? You’ve seen all this before?’ said the Doctor.

‘Yes.’

An idea occurred to the Doctor. He rummaged through his coat pockets, and eventually pulled out a deck of cards. He shuffled them and handed them to Romana. ‘All right. Which card am I going to pick? Which card did I pick last time?’

‘The seven of spades.’

Romana splayed out the cards and the Doctor plucked one from the middle. He turned it over. The seven of spades.

He was flabbergasted. ‘So how many lifetimes have you lived, then?’ he asked, returning the cards to his pocket.

‘We have lived an infinity of lives, and will live for an infinity more.’

Romana frowned. ‘But that’s impossible. You can’t have lived
forever
. There must have been an occasion when you lived your life for the first time.’

‘Not necessarily,’ the Doctor butted in. ‘Time can fold back on itself. Like our own experiences here in the G-Lock. We have been treading in our own footsteps. Trapped in an endless cycle, without beginning or end.’

‘Doctor, you’re being maudlin again,’ Romana whispered. She faced Gallura and smiled politely.

‘I’m afraid the Doctor is correct,’ said Gallura. ‘We believe that there was no “first time”.’

‘But everything must have a beginning.’

‘Some events do not have a first cause. They only exist because they exist,’ said the Doctor. ‘I think, therefore I am thinking. Famous for being famous.’ He looked at Romana with deep eyes. ‘Just as our friend Gallura here has lived an infinite number of lives, we have visited this G-Lock an infinite number of times, each time arriving to find that we have already visited it. A self-originating loop.’

‘So there never was a time when we arrived to find that we hadn’t already been here?’

‘Exactly.’

Gallura leaned across to Romana confidentially. ‘Of course, we don’t know for sure that there wasn’t a “first time”. Between you and me, I can’t remember more than three or four lives back.’

The Doctor poked his nose between them. ‘Er… excuse me, I hope you don’t mind me asking this, but if you can avoid pitfalls and so forth, how come you haven’t stopped Paddox from, well, wiping you out?’

‘There are some things we cannot do,’ said Gallura. ‘Even if we lived our lives with the sole intention of preventing our genocide, we would not succeed. Oh, we could warn earlier generations to anticipate the invasion, to devise arms, but then we would be destroying all that is good in our past. We are a peaceful race. We will not sacrifice that. We will not stray from the Path of Perfection.’

‘Aah. And so Paddox has been trying to find out how this reincarnation game works?’ said the Doctor.

‘Yes. It is the objective of all his experimentation and research. He intends to apply the same principle to himself.’

‘What? You mean he wants to live his life over again?’ said Romana. ‘But why would anyone want to do that?’

‘Who wouldn’t want to do that? We all have regrets, things in our past that we wish we could undo,’ mused the Doctor. ‘Of course! “Redemption”. There is something in Paddox’s past that he wants to go back and prevent!’

Paddox sidled up to the corner and peered around. It was empty. He let out a gasp of relief and struggled forward, heading for the necroport and redemption.

He had slipped out of the control room whilst the Doctor and the scientists were distracted, intending to make his way down to the Great Hall. But then, hearing approaching footsteps, he had ducked into a side room, securing the door behind him. He had crouched alone in the darkness as the tourists clattered past, screaming in terror. And, through the narrow line of light, he had watched as the undead lurched past, their mouths slick and black.

Something had gone wrong with the necroport, causing the participants to turn into zombies. But the tourists were immaterial. All that mattered was that the necroport had gathered sufficient psychothermal energy. Paddox had calculated that treating 218 tourists to the Beautiful Death would generate the exact quantity he required. With each passing day he had increased the number of participants, making sure the necroport operated perfectly. He had observed the deaths of each Arboretan, taking measurements and refining the process. After twenty years of study, he understood every element of their life cycle. He had conquered death and the afterlife; now he would conquer life. It would be the greatest achievement in the history of science.

Soon he would reach the necroport and would lower himself into one of the caskets. Channelling himself through an Arboretan he would die for a final time, letting the drapes close on this tortured non-life for ever. And then none of this would have ever happened.
The
necroport would never have existed. There would be no Beautiful Death.

Instead he would awake, opening his eyes for the first time, back on the homeworld. Back when his parents were still alive. His limbs would be shrunken and unfamiliar, his vision cloudy, his speech stunted. He would be the newborn infant he had been fifty years ago.

Paddox’s heart wrenched, and the image swam before his eyes. The image he kept guarded in the shadows of his mind, the image that had haunted him through every night of the last forty-five years. The image from the day he had died.

He was standing in a departure lounge. The carpet was grid-patterned. The guards were insects. In front of him, a window was filled with the empty blackness of space. His tearful reflection stared back, its mouth open in dumb shock.

Out in the vacuum, his mother floated past, a stream of red bubbles floating from her mouth. His father still had a luggage bag in one hand.

But this would not happen. In his new life, he would save them. They would never set foot in the access tube.

‘So that’s what the necroport’s for,’ sighed Romana. ‘It is designed to give Paddox the Arboretans’ reincarnative ability.’

‘Given sufficient reserves of psychothermal power.’ The Doctor turned to Gallura. ‘Could it work?’

Gallura nodded.

‘But if Paddox goes back and changes his own past…’ said Romana.

‘I know. He must be stopped. Unless, of course…’ The Doctor shook his head. ‘Never mind. We have more important things to deal with.’

‘The Repulsion, for instance,’ said Romana.

‘The Repulsion, yes.’ The Doctor shuffled over to Gallura. ‘I don’t suppose you…’

‘We know of the Repulsion, Doctor,’ said Gallura. ‘It is the entity that lives between death and life.’

‘Between death and life?’ said the Doctor.

‘It exists in the darkness. The endless rushing nowhere. As we die, we pass through the shadows of the Repulsion’s domain.’

‘And Paddox has inadvertently given the Repulsion a route into the land of the living.’

‘The Repulsion is unfettered evil, Doctor.’

‘Yes, I thought it might be.’

‘If it manages to enter our universe nowhere in creation will be safe. It will not rest until it has destroyed all life.’

‘And to do that…’ The Doctor scratched his neck. ‘So anything that enters the interface can be used as a vessel to bring the Repulsion into the real world?’

‘That is correct.’

‘You mean the passengers from the
Cerberus
–’ began Romana.

‘I mean K-9. He’s still in there somewhere.’

‘Of course. K-9…’

‘Of course. K-9!’ The Doctor’s face lit up. ‘You know, I think I may have a cunning plan!’

‘It’s too dangerous, Doctor,’ said Romana, following him down the corridor. Gallura brought up the rear, his leaf-like skin bristling with the exertion.

‘Too dangerous? Well, I don’t see that we have any choice.’

‘But it’s suicide!’

‘Yes, that goes without saying.’ The Doctor got a faraway look in his eyes. ‘We always knew it would come to that in the end.’

‘But if you don’t succeed, then the whole universe will be at risk.’

‘Ah yes, but we already know that I do succeed, don’t we? Otherwise we wouldn’t be here now.’

‘You know time doesn’t work like that.’

‘All right. Let me put it this way. If I don’t succeed, I have changed my own history. Right?’

‘Right.’

‘Which we know is something we mustn’t do, first law of time travel and all that?’

Romana was about to correct him, but realised he had finally remembered it correctly. ‘Right.’

‘And breaking that law threatens the entire universe, right?’

‘Right.’

‘So what do we have to lose?’

‘I still say it’s too dangerous. You’re making wild assumptions about so many unknown factors…’

‘It’s no good, Romana. There is no other way. It is my destiny.’ The Doctor’s oration became melodramatic. ‘“Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death –”’

Romana was forced to interrupt. ‘So back to the necroport then?’

‘Yes. No.’ The Doctor looked suddenly aghast. ‘No, there is one more thing I have to do first.’