Shining Darkness Page 10

  ‘I listen when there’s something worth listening to,’ Boonie said sullenly.

  ‘You listen when there’s something you think you want to hear. There’s a difference. Y’know, it’s great to have a goal in life – something to get you motivated, get you out of bed in the morning. But sometimes a goal can become an obsession. And obsessions are never good things. Believe me, I’ve had a few of them myself.’

  ‘You think this is an obsession? Tracking the Cultists, finding out what they’re up to? An obsession?’

  In the cold light of the lamps above them, the Doctor’s eye sockets were unreadable pools of darkness.

  ‘I’m not saying you’re not doing the right thing; but it’s easy to get carried away with the bigger picture to the point where you can’t see the details.’ He paused and tipped his head back to look up at the night sky. ‘Donna – my friend. Up there.’ He gestured at the stars. ‘She’s a bit like you, only in reverse. Doesn’t always see the bigger picture, but you can’t fault her on spotting the details.’ He grinned at the thought of Donna and her down-to-earth-ness. Well, apart from her stint as a goddess.

  Boonie sighed. ‘And the point of this is…?’

  The Doctor looked back at him, his eyes once more dark and unfathomable.

  ‘The point is that if you’re going to stop the Cult of Shining Darkness then you need to start trusting people a bit more, let them in. And that includes Mother,’ he added cryptically. ‘Haven’t I already shown that I’m on your side? Without me, you wouldn’t have been able to plot the trajectory of their ship, detect this segment and get here before them. Without me, they’d have been here before you, grabbed it and scarpered before you’d even arrived. Give me a bit of credit, Boonie.’ He grinned. ‘Otherwise I’ll begin to think that you don’t like me very much.’

  ‘Heaven forbid,’ sighed Boonie. ‘Now stop talking and let’s find the segment before they do beam it away.’

  ‘Shouldn’t be much further,’ said the Doctor thoughtfully, consulting his sonic device again. ‘In fact…’ He took a breath and held out his hands. ‘Ta-daaah!’ He grinned. ‘Always wanted to say that.’

  Boonie stared in disbelief at the pile of junk the Doctor was pointing at. At least fifty metres tall, it towered over them like a metal mountain.

  ‘Time we called in the muscle,’ said the Doctor. ‘And if the mountain can’t go to Mother, then Mother will have to come to the mountain.’

  Mother was there in under a minute – her red eyes glowing as she lumbered quietly along.

  ‘It’s in there somewhere,’ said the Doctor, gesturing to the huge cone of discarded technology. ‘Now be careful – I’m sure these things were designed to resist a fair bit of battering, but there’s no telling how much other stuff they’ve been buried under all these years. Must admit, it’s quite a nifty hiding place for a piece of machinery. Assuming, of course, that it doesn’t get snitched by some wandering collector, looking for something glitzy to go over their mantelpiece. These Cultists,’ he said, turning to Boonie as Mother began to dig into the pile, ‘they must have been well connected once upon a time.’

  ‘They had followers all over the galaxy,’ Boonie said, stepping back as a refrigerator came tumbling down the heap to crash at their feet. ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, one segment in an art gallery, one in a forest on, where was it – Chao? – one under the surface of a desert world, one here. Can’t be a cheap business whizzing all over the galaxy hiding bits and bobs. And you’ve probably got to pay people to keep an eye on them. Or make them think you’re gods, at least.’ A sudden thought came to him and he turned to look up at the monitor tower where 77141 was – hopefully – still sitting. ‘In fact, now that I think about it, I really should…’ His voice tailed off as he began to fiddle with his sonic gadget. After a few moments it gave a low-pitched hum. ‘There!’ he said. ‘Scrambler field.’

  ‘Scrambler field?’

  ‘Should stop the Cultists from just beaming their little treasure out of here. And if I’m right about 77141 up there, it won’t be long before the Cultists know that we’re here anyway. Wouldn’t stop them beaming down somewhere nearby and getting here on foot, but it’ll give us a bit more time.’

  More rubbish came tumbling down the pile, narrowly missing them. Mother glanced down as if to apologise as she ploughed deeper and deeper into it.

  ‘A bit more time to do what, exactly?’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry – I’m not going to stop them getting it. I just want to have a closer look, see if I can work out what it’s all for. Soon as I’ve done that, they can have it.’ He paused. ‘You sure you know what you’re doing, don’t you, Boonie? Once the Cult have all the pieces of this thing, they’re going to do something with it: build something, find something. Destroy something. Are you sure that’s a risk you want to take?’

  ‘You’re suggesting that we steal this part, are you?’

  ‘It would stop them. And isn’t that what you really want?’

  ‘It might stop them in the short-term. But I bet they have the resources to make duplicates, even if we take this one.’ He thought for a moment and shook his head firmly. ‘No. They know we’re following them. If they go to ground, we might never find them again. This is the way it has to be. They need to keep believing that they’re just a bit cleverer than us.’

  The Doctor gave a big shrug.

  ‘For the record, I think you’re mad, you know that. If you weren’t quite so driven by all this, so determined to see it through to the end, you might realise that. But this is your game. Play it your way.’ He peered up at where the steel pistons of Mother’s hydraulic legs could be seen, sticking out of the pile.

  ‘Any luck?’ he called.

  ‘I don’t like this,’ Garaman said.

  ‘Perhaps the interference is from some piece of discarded equipment on the planet,’ Mesanth offered. ‘The presence of all that technology is one reason why Junk was chosen for—’

  ‘Garaman!’ called Ogmunee from the communications station. ‘A message from the supervisor on the planet.’

  ‘Put it through.’

  Seconds later, the sound of a very shaky 77141 came through on the speakers.

  ‘However much you’re paying me,’ he grunted, ‘it’s not enough to compensate for what I’ve just been through. Are you listening?’

  ‘With the utmost attention,’ said Garaman, weariness dripping from every word. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘I’ve just had visitors.’

  ‘Visitors?’

  ‘A bot the size of a house and a human. They’ve come for your precious device, I know it. They’re in sector J right now. They’ve done something to the surveillance cameras so I can’t see what they’re—’

  ‘What did they say? Have you spoken to them?’ Garaman cut in.

  ‘Of course I’ve spoken to them. And you owe me for a new window. And,’ 77141 added after a moment, ‘a new chair.’

  ‘A new…?’ Garaman shook his head. ‘We’ll be down in a moment. There’s interference preventing us from recovering the device from here.’

  ‘That’ll be his electronic pen thing,’ grumped 77141.

  ‘Whose electronic pen thing?’

  ‘He called himself “the Doctor”.’

  Garaman’s eyes widened.

  ‘Five minutes,’ he snapped. ‘And you might want to call in some reinforcements. Big reinforcements. This might be a tad messy.’

  If the two of them hadn’t been quite so nimble, Boonie and the Doctor would have been flattened a dozen times over by Mother’s careless chucking-out of bits and pieces from the pile. Whilst Boonie gritted his teeth and made sure he stood well back, the Doctor seemed to take a perverse delight in examining every single thing that Mother threw down to them – whether it was (in the Doctor’s words) a ‘transfluxial rectifier’, an ion drive or a coffee percolator.

  Boonie still wasn’t sure whether to trust the Doctor but, on the evidence so far, he had no
reason not to trust him. For Boonie, though, that wasn’t quite enough. He’d spent two years listening out for Cult activity, scraping together funds and supporters in order to keep an eye on them. He’d been to worlds, governments, federations and alliances across the Andromeda galaxy, trying to persuade them that, just because Khnu em Llodis was dead and her followers scattered, it didn’t mean that they weren’t still planning something. Boonie had spoken to some of the Cult’s ex-members, and he knew what a devious and long-planning bunch they were. Time and time again he kept coming across rumours of a plan – or ‘The Plan’ as Boonie always thought of it. Something huge, something so big that no one person – perhaps apart from Khnu herself – was privy to all the details.

  But there were always people willing to talk if the price was high enough. And using what meagre resources he’d managed to gather, he’d persuaded one or two people to spill at least a couple of beans if not the whole tin. Enough to convince him that if the galaxy’s authorities wouldn’t do anything about the Cult, then he had to.

  And two names that he’d come across, time after time, were Garaman Havati – one of Khnu’s chief scientists at the time she’d been killed – and Mesanth, a Lotapareen and another of Khnu’s scientists. They’d vanished at the same time, in circumstances equally mysterious. There were no reports of their deaths or their captures by the authorities. But the galaxy was a big place to hide in – or to die in. It was only when word filtered through to Boonie and his little band of Cult-hunters that a Lotapareen answering the description of Mesanth was reportedly showing an interest in a collection of Khnu’s unpublished work that alarm bells started ringing.

  Months and months of surveillance followed, during which time Boonie accumulated more and more evidence that this was, indeed, Mesanth, and that he was working with others to bring together Khnu’s research.

  The whole thing was so maddeningly nebulous that Boonie had been close to giving up on more than one occasion. The only thing that drove him on was his conviction that he was right: that the Cult were still active, still planning something – something to do with Khnu’s opposition to machinekind’s being accepted on the same footing as organics.

  And finally – finally! – when one of Boonie’s spies reported that Mesanth and brought together a team and had bought a spaceship, he decided that it was time to act.

  Boonie, Mother and the rest of the anti-Cultists had followed the Cult ship at a distance as it had entered orbit around the planet Chao. They’d registered the operation of a transmat, bringing something up from the depths of the planet’s jungles, before the Cult ship had sped off out into space.

  Something – even to this day, Boonie couldn’t put his finger on what it had been – told him that this was it. This was the start.

  And from then on, for the last month, they’d been on the Cult’s tail.

  Boonie watched the Doctor scampering about amidst the growing pile of machinery that Mother was throwing down and wondered whether bringing him aboard had really been the right thing to do…

  ‘What’s that?’ said the Doctor suddenly, tipping his head back as if he were sniffing the air.

  For a moment, Boonie had no idea what he was talking about, but as he listened, he heard it: it sounded like distant peals of thunder. Each one was like a distant airplane, crashing into the planet. And each one was accompanied by a shudder through the ground beneath him.

  Instinctively, Boonie glanced up at Mother – but she was still somewhere in the pile of junk, pushing bits and pieces of it back out as though she were digging a nest for herself.

  ‘Explosions?’

  ‘Hmmm,’ mused the Doctor thoughtfully. ‘Could be.’ He paused, staring over Boonie’s shoulder into the darkness. ‘On the other hand…’

  Boonie turned at the Doctor’s raised eyebrows.

  For a moment, Boonie couldn’t quite work out what he was seeing. His first thought was that two of the piles of rubbish had somehow come crashing down and were bowling along the ground towards them. But as he watched, he realised what he was looking at.

  ‘Mother,’ said the Doctor over his shoulder. ‘You couldn’t hurry it up a bit, could you? I think we’ve got company.’

  If the Doctor had thought that Mother was a big lass, the two machines bearing down on them were positively ginormous!

  Side by side, they barely fitted into the wide aisle between the piles of junk. As they drew closer, their steps thumping and vibrating the ground beneath them like miniature earthquakes, the light of the floating globes illuminated them.

  The one on the left was built, it seemed, out of a collection of metal spheres of various hues – steel, pewter, bronze, gold – all strung together to make a vaguely humanoid form. It was a house-and-a-half tall but moved with surprising grace. Its head, a coppery-coloured sphere with two dark pits for eyes, tipped slowly downwards as it approached.

  The one on the right was altogether stranger: its body was, proportionately, quite slender and could quite easily have been built out of a random assortment of rubbish from the piles around them. Much slimmer than the first – almost spindly – it had huge, splayed-out feet, not unlike the grabber that had attacked him on the Ood Sphere. But what stood out most were the creature’s arms: they were vast, half the size of the thing’s body, ending in even bigger, four-fingered hands.

  The Doctor had no doubt why the two machines were here.

  ‘They say size isn’t everything,’ sighed the Doctor, tipping his head back as the two machines drew to a halt twenty metres from them. ‘Someone should have told you two.’

  ‘Stop!’ boomed the one made of metal balls.

  ‘Yes,’ said the other one after a second. ‘Stop!’

  The Doctor raised his palms.

  ‘Not that I’m one to argue – well, not usually, and not usually with fellas quite as big as you two – but, d’you mind my asking… why?’

  ‘Why what?’ asked the first.

  ‘Why stop? I mean, it’s not like we’re doing anything bad, is it? Just going through some old junk, looking for a bit of rubbish no one wants. You ever heard of Wombles? Well, think of us as Wombles.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said the first one, ‘we’ve got our orders.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed the second. ‘And orders is orders.’

  ‘Are orders,’ corrected the first. ‘Orders are orders.’

  The skinny one turned its car-crash of a head.

  ‘You always have to do that, don’t you?’

  ‘What?’ thundered the first.

  ‘Correcting my grammar. I don’t correct yours.’

  ‘That’s because I always get it right. I only do it to help, you know.’

  ‘Well, why d’you always do it in company?’

  The first one glanced back at the Doctor and Boonie.

  ‘Hardly company,’ the robot muttered.

  ‘It’s the principle. I know why you do it, you know.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the first, archly. ‘Do you? And why’s that, then?’

  ‘It’s because you’re insecure, isn’t it? The only way you can make yourself feel good about yourself is to put other people down.’

  ‘That’s just rubbish,’ scoffed the first. ‘What have I got to feel insecure about?’

  The skinny robot spread its massive arms wide, knocking the tops off two piles of junk in an almighty crash.

  ‘Where do I start?’ asked the other one, as if this were an old, old argument between the two of them.

  ‘Um,’ said the Doctor awkwardly, watching the debris tumble to the ground around them.

  ‘Just a moment,’ said the first, raising a powerful, blobby hand.

  ‘Fine,’ said the Doctor, folding his arms. ‘You two go right ahead. We’ll just wait here, shall we?’

  ‘Let’s talk about this later,’ the round one said to its friend. ‘We’ve been told to sort these two out, so let’s get this done first, shall we? Save the domestics for—’

  ‘We’re not having a d
omestic,’ said the thin one through gritted teeth (or through what passed for teeth in its mighty metal head). ‘You always do this as well, don’t you?’

  The Doctor sighed and planted his hands on his hips.

  ‘Well, it sounds like a domestic to me,’ the Doctor called up. He glanced over his shoulder to where Mother’s feet could be seen sticking out of the hole in the side of the pile of junk. More bits tumbled down as she wiggled her legs to get in deeper. ‘But I think it’s probably important to get these things out in the open, so feel free – go right ahead. We’ll still be here when you’ve finished.’

  ‘Firstly,’ said the thin one, ‘we’re not having a domestic, right? And secondly – who on Junk are you?’

  ‘I’m the Doctor, this here is Boonie, and that there – up there, yes, I know you can only see her feet – but that’s Mother.’

  ‘A mechanical?’

  ‘Yes,’ the Doctor said. ‘That OK?’

  The skinny robot turned to its friend.

  ‘77141 didn’t say there was a mechanical involved.’

  ‘Ahh,’ said the Doctor as the penny dropped. ‘77141 sent you, did he? Now why aren’t I surprised at that? What’s your names, then?’

  ‘What are your—’ began the blobby one before the skinny one cut him off.

  ‘Oh do give it a rest, Chuck.’

  ‘So you’re Chuck,’ interrupted the Doctor. ‘And you would be…?’

  ‘I’m Crusher,’ said the thin one.

  ‘Nice to meet you,’ grinned the Doctor. ‘Now, you were saying… 77141 sent you, did he?’

  ‘Trouble in sector J, he said,’ boomed Chuck. ‘Intruders.’

  ‘Despatch with the utmost force,’ added Crusher. ‘That’s what he said.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the Doctor, almost sadly. ‘That means you’ll be wanting to kill us, won’t you?’

  Crusher gave a shrug with his entire body, the metal parts screeching and grinding on each other. ‘Orders is orders.’

  ‘Orders—’ Chuck began but stopped as Crusher turned sharply to him.

  ‘OK,’ said the Doctor, not fancying another round of bickering. ‘Orders is or are orders. And what is or are those orders, exactly?’