Dr. Who - BBC New Series 28 (19 page)

She almost asked her granddad what he thought it was about, but didn’t. Because if it went wrong, if it all turned out bad, she didn’t want him blaming the Doctor for anything.

Donna realised this was the first time she’d actually found herself questioning the Doctor’s actions for quite some time. And she didn’t like it.

A couple of hours passed. They had been allowed to stop occasionally, the younger people sorting out food (usually by using their Mandragora powers to blow doors off shops and nick stuff).

At one point, the Doctor and Netty had sat together in a deserted burger place, while the boys munched on cold chips and muffins. Netty had found some paper on a clipboard and was writing something on it, and the Doctor was nodding.

Wilf asked Donna whether there was any point in trying the microwave ovens, and when she glanced back Netty was alone, and the Doctor was trying to talk to the Greek man.

There wasn’t time for microwaving burgers, as they were told to start walking again, despite the Doctor’s protestations.

The boys were soon tired again. Netty and Wilf were very tired indeed. Donna was utterly exhausted, but the Doctor… he just kept going. He had Lukas and Joe up front with him now, trying to take their minds off it all by giving them a history of Cromwell Road and the various buildings as they marched along it.

The old American couple by rights ought to have been dead on their feet, but no, they were always there, one or other, sometimes both, with their arms pointing forward, ready to use their Mandragora power as she’d seen at the Copernicus Array the night before.

It was dark by the time they reached Hammersmith, and Donna reckoned it would take another hour or so to reach Brentford. Possibly longer, as Netty and Wilf were

stopping more and more often.

‘My granddad is very old,’ she said at one point to the Greek man, eliciting an outraged, if exhausted, ‘Oi, I’m fine’ from Wilf.

The Greek man just shrugged and said that Madam Delphi would not be kept waiting.

It wasn’t a cold night, but neither was it the height of summer and, by the time they started walking down the carless, people-free Great West Road, it was nearly midnight.

Donna was with the Doctor. Wilf and Netty were with the Carnes boys.

Wilf tried to keep their flagging spirits up with tales of his exploits in the parachute regiment, like he’d done for Donna when she’d been their age, albeit on long car trips rather than painful hikes across scary cities.

‘Why don’t you let these people go home?’ the Doctor suggested, stopping suddenly. ‘Madam Delphi only wants me, I’m sure. Look, we’re in Chiswick. Let Donna take Wilf and Netty home. And let the boys head off, too.

Please?’

The Greek ignored him and kept going.

‘Not that Gramps or I would leave you for a moment,’

Donna hissed at him as she walked to catch the Doctor up, ‘but why do you think they do want all of us?’

The Doctor looked her in the eye. ‘Insurance,’ he said simply. ‘Threaten to hurt me, no use. Anyway, they need me alive for whatever reason. Threaten to kill you, it’s leverage. Sorry.’

‘Don’t be,’ Wilf said. ‘We chose to get involved with

all this. I’m proud to stand beside you, Doctor. So are my soldier boys here.’

The Carnes lads nodded, Lukas a little more enthusiastically than Joe, it had to be said.

The Doctor looked at Netty. She was starting to walk erratically, drifting towards the central reservation of bushes.

‘It’s the exhaustion,’ the Doctor said sadly as Wilf headed over to guide her back to the group. ‘Her mind’s going again like last night.’

‘Then why’d you bring her?’ Donna said a little more aggressively than she’d intended.

‘I didn’t expect to be walking,’ the Doctor said. ‘I’m sorry.’

Donna let herself drop back a couple of steps.

Something in the Doctor’s plan had gone wrong, and he was actually worried.

That wasn’t a good sign.

Suddenly a set of headlights flashed ahead of them and, as one, the Doctor’s group shielded their eyes. A small minibus screeched to a halt in front of them.

‘Hey,’ Donna yelled. ‘You gotta help us!’

The Doctor went to stop Donna, but it didn’t matter.

The minibus door opened and a woman called out.

‘Hop in, folks,’ she said in a cheery Irish accent.

‘Madam Delphi’s waiting.’

One by one, they piled in.

‘You couldn’t have come about three hours ago?’ Wilf grumbled as he helped a confused Netty up the steps into the vehicle.

The woman laughed. ‘I’m Caitlin and, on behalf of MorganTech, I apologise for your discomfort. But that’s nothing to what’s coming. And no, Madam Delphi believes exhausted prisoners are far more malleable than fit and able ones. The only reason I’m here is it’s nearly midnight. And time’s getting on. Hold tight!’

Caitlin did a U-turn and roared off down the A4, towards the Brentford business area known as the Golden Mile.

‘Here we are,’ Caitlin said, slowing down.

Ahead, Donna saw the Oracle Hotel loom out of the darkness, lights on in every window.

‘Ha!’ the Doctor laughed. ‘We’re going to see the Delphi at the Oracle. Very witty. Not.’

‘It’s midnight,’ Caitlin announced as she pushed the minibus doors open. ‘Today is now Monday. The universe will never be the same again.’

And she smiled.

And Donna shivered.

The Doctor, Donna, Wilf and their friends were led up to the penthouse suite by Caitlin, who kept her hand resting on the butt of a revolver tucked into the waistband of her trousers.

As the Irishwoman pushed the penthouse doors open, the Doctor marched in and glanced around. He began clapping slowly when he saw what was inside.

‘Madam Delphi, I presume?’ he said. ‘Of course.

You’re not a real person, are you? You’re a computer!

Well, I say a computer, more of an artificial intelligence, housing an ancient malevolence that should never really have been freed from its dimension. How are you, Mandragora? It’s been a few centuries.’

‘This… form is oh-so much more capable than a fleshy human body, Doctor,’ Madam Delphi said. ‘As a Time Lord, as someone who can stand so much more spatial and temporal trauma, your body is just what, if you’ll

excuse the excruciatingly bad pun, the Doctor ordered.’

The Doctor said nothing.

‘You’ve heard that one before, haven’t you?’ Madam Delphi asked.

The Doctor and Donna now stood at the front of their exhausted group, Wilf, Netty, Lukas and Joe hovering a few steps behind. Facing them, in a protective circle around the Madam Delphi computer, were Dara Morgan, Caitlin and the Mandragora converts who had walked them there.

‘Oh, hullo,’ said the Doctor, as if addressing a meeting of the WI. ‘This all looks very impressive. Nice room.

Nice hotel. Nice gesture.’ He pointed to where the old American lady had raised her arm in the now-recognisable Mandragoran position to fire a bolt of lethal Helix energy.

‘Although a bit unfriendly.’

‘I do apologise. You just can’t get the staff,’ the computer’s feminine voiced boomed out from speakers dotted around the room. ‘Welcome to my hotel. Can I recommend the gym? Great pool, I understand.’

‘What’s the bar like?’ Donna asked. ‘I mean, not exactly five-star without a good bar, is it?’

‘Ah, Donna Noble, welcome to you, as well. I think you’ll find we offer four bars, three restaurants and an à la carte room service 24/7.’ Madam Delphi then chuckled.

‘Gotta say, though, we aspire to a greater recognition than just five stars.’

The Doctor nodded. ‘Well, I reckon you’re looking for about five million. What do you think, Donna?’

‘Gotta have good service to get five million stars,

Doctor. Do you remember that hotel on Cassius? That was a proper five-star hotel.’

‘Oh yes!’ the Doctor grinned at her. ‘And they understood customer relations, too. Remember when we had that little problem with the lizard?’

‘Do you get lizard problems in Brentford, Madam Delphi?’ Donna asked. ‘Cos if there’s lizard problems to be solved, I don’t think it’s that great a hotel.’

‘The Oracle is—’ started Dara Morgan, but Madam Delphi shushed him.

‘The Doctor and his sweet friend are just playing for time, Dara. Trying to figure out how to stop us, how to get out of the Oracle alive, how to “help” their precious planet Earth.’ Madam Delphi took a beat then continued, more silkily and thus slightly more menacingly. ‘But you really aren’t going to stop us, Doctor. I offer no guarantees about people getting out alive. And, from my perspective, helping Earth is precisely what we are doing.’

The Doctor walked towards the group, and they parted, almost reverently, so he was now looking straight at the screens of the computer.

‘Last time we had a chat, I sent you into the darkness, licking your wounds. Remember that?’

‘Of course.’ Madam Delphi’s sine waves pulsated ferociously. ‘I have waited so long for a chance to get to you personally. To make you pay.’

‘Oh, not the old revenge on the poor Time Lord schtick, Mandragora? I mean, you’re better than that. Go on, give us a better reason.’

Madam Delphi giggled. ‘It’s not the first time since

1492 that the Mandragora Helix has been to Earth, you know.’

‘Yup, that I do know. The Sacred Mountain of Xi’an, if I remember? Then there were the Orphans of the Future, all that white and crimson cowl stuff. Oh and the Mandrake nightclub stuff, now that was pretty good, I have to say. But each time, it’s just been a fragment of Helix energy, hasn’t it, a little sparkler sent out to test the waters. This time, we’ve got the whole bonfire. So why now? Why send me little psychic-paper messages to get me involved, to bring me here… ahhh… Yes, you wanted to get me here. This exact day, this exact time. Why?’

‘The stars are aligned,’ Dara Morgan said.

‘I’m talking to Madam Delphi, thank you, not the hired help.’

‘How dare you—’ Dara Morgan began.

‘Oh, do belt up,’ the Doctor snapped. ‘I mean, who are you anyway?’

‘I am Dara Morgan. I set up MorganTech. I created the M-TEK, I devised—’

‘Oh please, you did nothing that the Mandragora Helix didn’t tell you to. No, who are you really? Who did the Helix take, distort, manipulate and totally screw up before reimagining you as Dara Morgan?’

‘What?’

‘Lukas?’ the Doctor barked. ‘My research assistant,’ he explained quietly to Madam Delphi. ‘Donna was busy.

Family matters.’

Donna frowned. Not that he was getting Lukas Carnes to do his research, but why he’d said ‘family matters’. She

threw a look at Wilf but he shrugged. Then she glanced at Netty, staring intently at the stand-off before them. When Donna looked back at the Doctor, she recognised a look in his eyes. A look that, if given voice, would have been some variation on ‘I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.’

‘No,’ she mouthed. ‘Don’t you dare!’ but the Doctor’s attention was back on Dara Morgan.

‘All over the world, Dara Morgan, billions of people will fall victim to this alien consciousness you’ve given access to the world. And that’s going to happen today.’

‘I know,’ smiled Dara Morgan. ‘How brilliant is that?’

‘Well, it’s brilliant from the point of view of your M-TEK being a pretty damn brilliant piece of technology, augmented by alien know-how and distributed quite magnificently to people who, I imagine, had no idea what it would do to them today.’

‘Not a clue.’

‘There’s a lot of blood on your hands, Dara Morgan. If I were a policeman, I’d have you arrested but, as Lukas will now explain, that’s not possible.’

‘Dara Morgan came to prominence eight years ago, making his first claims about MorganTech on a news special, broadcast live on 31 December 1999.’

‘End of the millennium, neat.’

‘Before that, there’s no trace of any such person.

MorganTech was registered as a private limited company at 5.29pm that same day.’

‘So who were you before Mandragora got hold of you?

Before reimagining itself as a human, becoming the anagrammatical Dara Morgan?’

‘Oh, I get it now,’ Wilf called out. ‘That’s very clever.’

‘Yes, thank you, Granddad,’ Donna hissed. ‘But let the Doctor focus.’

Before anyone could stop him, the Doctor put his hands to either side of Dara Morgan’s head, fingers pressed against his temples and whispered, ‘Open the locked doors, and let yourself out.’

The assembled acolytes took a step towards the Doctor, and Madam Delphi pulsed menacingly. ‘Stop him,’ she said.

In his mind’s eye, the Doctor could see an image. A dark night, cold, damp. He was walking down a lane, hedges high on either side, rain trickling down his neck.

He shivered. He was angry… No, not angry. Hurt.

Bewildered. She’d said no. No to what? Who was she? In his hand was a box, soft, velvety. And inside it, yes, he could imagine it. Silver band, plain diamond. All he had been able to afford. And she’d said no. Said that she needed to get away from Derry, wanted to go to Sydney.

Or San Diego. Or anywhere other than close to him. How had he got her so wrong? How hadn’t he seen this coming? How was it possible to love someone that much, so that every time she walked into a room, every time she spoke, smiled, laughed, his heart would leap. That just knowing she was in the kitchen, in the bathroom, in the hallway was enough to send those fantastic, amazing, wonderful thoughts rushing through him? Yet when it came to it, when he’d said ‘I love you’, she’d said she wanted to get away. No ‘I love you too, but…’ No ‘Thank you, but I’m sorry.’ Just an ‘Oh my God, are you for real?