Shining Darkness Page 2

  ‘Excuse me,’ said the Doctor to the attendant, a slim man with permanently arched (and, the Doctor suspected, dyed) eyebrows and a look of utter disdain on his face. ‘But what just happened there? You don’t use Huon particles for anything, do you? I hope she’s not going to start making a habit of this.’

  ‘I was hoping,’ drawled the man, arching his eyebrows even further as he cast a glance around the room, ‘that you would be able to tell me.’

  ‘Well, judging by the flash and the missing bit of floor, I’d say you’ve just been heisted.’

  ‘“Heisted?”’

  The Doctor nodded, squatting down on the floor where the display case had been standing and taking out his sonic screwdriver. He activated it and waved it around in the air for a few seconds.

  ‘Heisted,’ he said simply. ‘By transmat. At least it’s not Huon particles, then.’ He sprang to his feet. ‘Someone’s just spirited away a valuable treasure.’

  ‘Hardly valuable,’ said the attendant dismissively.

  The Doctor fixed him with a glare.

  ‘I was talking about Donna. But now you come to mention it, what exactly was that thing? The one in the case.’

  The attendant shrugged elegantly.

  ‘Art,’ he said simply, as if that were all the explanation that was needed.

  ‘Oh, I think it was more than just art, wasn’t it?’

  ‘This is an art gallery,’ the man said. ‘We display art.’

  ‘What you were displaying there,’ said the Doctor, ‘was a very sophisticated piece of technology, judging by the readings I picked up from it.’

  He stopped, suddenly, as he realised that whilst he was standing here, wasting his time debating the gallery’s displays, Donna was still missing.

  ‘If you ask me,’ he said as he headed for the door, ‘you need to boost your transmat scrambling field. This would never happen at the Tate Modern, you know.’

  And with that, he was gone.

  ‘Scuse me! Thank you! Oops! Ta!’

  The Doctor raced out into the street, nipping smartly between the passers-by, until he stood at the edge of the pavement, watching the never-ending stream of traffic and machinery as it flowed past like a river.

  The transmat trace he’d picked up with the sonic screwdriver would be fading quickly. And, if he was right about where she’d been transmatted to, it could be just minutes before she was out of his reach for ever.

  ‘Taxi!’ he called, leaning out into the traffic and sticking out his arm.

  Nothing happened – the cars and trucks and robots just rolled on past. He tried again, but had no more success. Finally, in despair, he shoved his fingers in his mouth and let out an ear-shattering whistle. On the pavement all around him, aliens, humans and robots stopped what they were doing and turned, astonished that such a little thing as him could have made such a noise.

  The Doctor was in the midst of pulling an apologetic face when, with a crashing tinkle of bells, something that resembled an armoured, custard-coloured elephant shuddered to a halt in front of him. A golden eye on a stalk extended from the side of the creature’s head and came to a halt a few inches from the Doctor’s own.

  ‘Do I take it,’ said a low, sonorous voice, ‘that you are requesting transport?’

  ‘I did say “taxi”,’ the Doctor said apologetically.

  ‘Ah,’ said the yellow elephant. ‘You’re an offworlder, aren’t you?’

  The Doctor looked himself up and down. ‘Is it that obvious?’

  The eye blinked, its ‘eyelid’ a mustard-coloured iris.

  ‘You announced yourself as a taxi,’ the elephant said. ‘Think yourself lucky that no one took you up on it. You don’t look exactly built to carry passengers.’

  ‘You’d be surprised. Look, sorry to rush you, but I have to find a friend.’

  ‘Ahhh,’ said the elephant after a moment’s thought. ‘You’ll be wanting the companion district then.’

  ‘No no no, not that kind of friend. A particular friend…’ He stopped, thinking about Donna. ‘A very particular friend, actually. I need to get to my ship as quickly as possible.’

  ‘The spaceport?’

  ‘No, a lovely little square with a tall building like a hatpin.’

  ‘The Court of Tragic Misunderstandings. I know it well.’

  And suddenly another custardy tentacle emerged from the elephant’s flank, wrapped itself around the Doctor’s waist, and lifted him effortlessly onto the creature’s back, where a comfy, form-fitting seat was already being extruded.

  ‘Two minutes,’ the elephant said, moving back into the traffic seamlessly.

  ‘Couldn’t make it one, could you?’ asked the Doctor.

  ‘Not without tampering with my speed limiter, breaking half a dozen city regulations and probably causing an accident in which dozens would die, no.’

  The Doctor sighed as a seatbelt wrapped itself around him. ‘Two minutes it is, then.’

  As the Doctor rode away into the traffic on the yellow elephant, he was being watched.

  The observer, a raccoon in red hot-pants and a fez, narrowed its eyes, watching the stranger’s conversation with the elephant. Its hearing was acute, and it had caught the entire exchange: the offworlder was heading for the Court of Tragic Misunderstandings.

  Quickly, the raccoon pulled out a little transmitter, pressed a couple of buttons, and began to speak.

  True to its word, the elephant – whose name was Cherumpanch, the Doctor discovered, during the most terrifying race through traffic that he’d ever had – deposited him outside the Court of Tragic Misunderstandings in just a smidgeon under two minutes. Still slightly dizzy, the Doctor began to root around in his pockets for some sort of payment before Cherumpanch realised what he was doing and told him that public transport in the city was free. With its tentacular eye, it examined the rather unappetising item that the Doctor brandished in front of him.

  ‘It’s a peanut,’ said the Doctor brightly – if unhelpfully.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Cherumpanch cautiously, taking the peanut with another yellow tentacle and sucking it inside.

  ‘Earth delicacy,’ explained the Doctor, haring away across the grass to where he could see the reassuring shape of the TARDIS, hugged up in the shadow of a wall. ‘The only one in this galaxy!’ he called over his shoulder.

  ‘Yuck!’ said Cherumpanch, spitting the remains of the peanut out.

  ‘You’re welc- oh, hello!’

  The yellow taxi-elephant was all but forgotten as the Doctor came to a halt a few yards from the TARDIS. Standing in front of it was a three-and-a-half-metre-tall robot – looking like the result of a high-speed collision between a truck and a steel-mill, with disturbingly red-glowing eyes – and a sulky-looking tanned teenager. It was clear that they had no intention of letting him inside the TARDIS.

  The TARDIS that was his only way of finding Donna.

  ‘All out of peanuts,’ the Doctor said, holding his palms out to them. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘We don’t want peanuts,’ said the boy.

  Despite looking like your average 16-year-old, the boy had eyes harder and wearier than any teenager the Doctor had met before. He had a thin, chiselled face, a tiny diamond set into the side of his nose, and a rather oversized blue and black striped coat on, despite the sunshine.

  ‘Well that’s a relief then. I might have half a ham sandwich somewhere, but I’ve no idea how long it’s—’

  ‘You were at the gallery,’ the boy interrupted.

  ‘Good eyesight!’

  The boy ignored him.

  ‘You saw the exhibit being stolen.’

  ‘Well, not exactly saw. More turned around and it was nicked from behind my back. Along with my friend Donna, and if I don’t get back inside my ship in a minute or so,’ he said, gesturing towards the TARDIS, ‘her transmat trace will have faded. So, if you don’t mind…’

  He tried to slip between the boy and the robot – which, so far, hadn’t moved or spo
ken or in any other way indicated that it wasn’t just a huge hunk of steel street furniture – as the boy tapped an ugly black brooch in the shape of a star on his lapel.

  The Doctor felt the hairs on his arms stand up as everything glowed white around him.

  ‘Oh,’ he said with despair. ‘Not ag—’

  And then the Doctor, the boy, the robot – and the TARDIS – were gone.

  Donna was starting to get worried. Seriously worried. Fair enough, travelling with the Doctor had its share of troubles. Getting separated from him on this scale wasn’t usually one: normally, she had a fair idea of where she was, where he was. And she could usually rely on him finding her pretty quickly.

  But this felt different.

  She had no idea where she was. Heck, she had no idea where the planet was. The Andromeda galaxy, the Doctor had said. Twumpty billion light years from Earth, or something.

  Most of the other places that she’d been since she’d teamed up, again, with the Doctor had felt vaguely familiar: Pompeii had been a bit like a theme park, the Ood-Sphere had just been a wintry planet. Granted, the Ood had been a bit strange at first, but the humans there had given the place a sense of familiarity and, in the end, the Ood had been more human than most of the humans. This planet, Uhlala (if that really was its name: she wasn’t convinced that the Doctor had understood what the young woman he’d asked was saying), felt unearthly in a way that nowhere else had done: the smells, the sounds, the sights – all of them shrieked ‘Alien!’ The people walking the streets were bizarre, many of them not looking the least bit like real people. And the robots…

  Donna’s only real experiences with robots had been the robot Santas and the ones on Planet 1. And they were hardly poster children for cuddly, friendly machines. If the ones around here had looked like robots – big, googly eyes like headlamps, hissing steam and the like, or cutesy little things like she’d seen on TV – then maybe she’d have felt more comfortable around them. But too many of them looked like living things or weird bits of modern art – or like bronze Greek gods grafted onto construction machinery. There wasn’t enough shiny chrome and rust for her to think of them as machines, and, quite frankly, they creeped her out. Especially the supermodels, who, now she’d had time to think about it, were probably robots too. No one that thin and that beautiful had any right to be that strong. And silent. No one that thin in Heat was ever that silent. Bimbots – that’s what they were: bimbo robots.

  They’d dumped her in what was evidently an unused bedroom on the Dark Light: all minimal lines, spartan décor (grey and silver – very chic!) and a toilet that had taken her twenty minutes to figure out how it flushed. And they’d locked the door and left her. No amount of banging on it and threatening the little fat guy with what she’d do to him when she got her hands on him had made the slightest difference. She moped around the room, annoyed by the lack of a window (cheapskates, putting her in an inside room), pressed all the buttons on the intercom thing by the bed (no one answered, if it was even working), had a quick wash in the shiny black bathroom, and then flumped down on the bed, all out of ideas.

  What would the Doctor do?

  Assuming he didn’t have his sonic screwdriver (which, of course, Donna didn’t), he’d probably rummage around in his pockets, cobble something together out of fluff, string and an old beer mat, and be out of the room in seconds. Donna didn’t have any string or beer mats in her pockets (although there was a depressing amount of fluff) and the room was empty of anything that could have stood in for them. She began a careful, inch-by-inch search of the place, just in case someone had dropped a keycard, or there was a whopping great ventilation duct or exposed wires or something. Not that she’d have known what to do with them, but it would have been something. She wondered, briefly, if the Doctor’s previous travelling companions had ever sat him down and got him to teach them ‘Breaking Out of Locked Rooms For Beginners’. She suspected not. It wasn’t like they had hours and hours of down-time in the TARDIS. Recently, it seemed like they’d been catapulted from one adventure to another with barely a moment to breathe and get her hair washed. She looked down and plucked at the fur trim of her coat, realising how manky it was starting to look, and wondering whether, by the time the Doctor took her back to Earth, she’d be hopelessly out-of-fashion and everyone would laugh at her in the street. She wondered, idly, if they did dry cleaning in space.

  Oh, for god’s sake! she thought, launching herself up off the bed. Locked in a room on an alien spaceship on the other side of the universe, and all she could do was worry about her clothes!

  ‘Get a grip!’ she told herself, crossing to the door and banging on it so hard that she hurt her hand.

  To her surprise – surprise that must have shown on her face, judging by Garaman’s (was it Garaman? Garroway? Garibaldi?) expression – the door opened almost instantly, revealing the little man, looking all smug and unctuous. Behind him stood one of the bimbots. For the first time, she could see its cold, unblinking expression clearly and she shivered.

  ‘I think,’ said Garaman, entering the room without so much as a by-your-leave, ‘we need to talk.’ He twirled on the spot and looked up at her. ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘—ain!’ finished the Doctor as his atoms fuzzled themselves back into existence. He turned sharply to the boy and the robot, reassured that the TARDIS had come along with him. ‘What is it with you people and transmats? What’s wrong with a good, old-fashioned shuttle? I could tell you some stories about transmats, you know.’ He stopped and fished the sonic screwdriver from his pocket. ‘Now…’ He paused and shifted his weight from one foot to the other, narrowing his eyes, before pulling a yoyo from his pocket and experimentally bouncing it a couple of times. ‘Spaceship.’ He looked at the boy who was eyeing him curiously. ‘In orbit? Thought so. Right – where are your sensor controls?’

  ‘Sensor controls?’

  The Doctor brandished the sonic screwdriver in his face. ‘I need to plug this in before the trace goes cold.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘And if you’re half as interested in what was stolen from the art gallery as I think you are, if you lead me to Donna, then I’ll lead you to that. Deal?’

  The boy considered the Doctor’s words for a few moments before pursing his lips and nodding.

  The ship, the Doctor noted as the boy led him through the corridors (with the silent robot right behind him) had seen better days. The walls were a dull, steel colour, although half-hearted patches of green and orange paint occasionally shone through the grime and the rust. There was a smell of oil and heat in the air, and every now and again the floor would shudder as though the ship were turning over in its sleep. Or having a nightmare.

  ‘So,’ said the Doctor conversationally, over his shoulder, as they trotted down the passage, ‘been together long?’

  There was no answer from the hulking great machine. For something so big, thought the Doctor, it was surprisingly quiet in its movements. Its face – a broad v-shape of dull metal with no mouth and two eyes that burned like hot coals – looked down at him impassively.

  ‘Mother doesn’t speak,’ said the boy.

  The Doctor pulled a face.

  ‘Not like most mothers I’ve met, then. Not your mother, I take it? What is your name, by the way?’

  ‘Boonie,’ answered the boy as the door through which they were passing jammed half open and had to be shouldered aside. ‘And no, not my mother. It’s what she’s called.’

  They were in the control room: the Doctor appraised it with a quick glance. Shabby, grubby, noisy – but somehow welcoming. A lived-in control room. Not like some of the swanky show-control rooms he’d seen.

  ‘Nice!’ he approved as he headed for what were undoubtedly the sensor and scanning controls. A middle-aged woman with cropped, black hair, wearing a stiff, grey uniform stepped forwards, a look of alarm and confusion on her face.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Boonie said, and the woman dropped back, still not sure.

  ‘I’m the Doctor
,’ said the Doctor brightly, sticking the sonic in his mouth to shake her hand whilst he used the other to fiddle with the sensors.

  ‘Kellique,’ the woman said, throwing another glance at Boonie. ‘What’s this about?’

  ‘The Doctor is helping us search for…’ Boonie broke off, briefly. ‘For the exhibit.’

  ‘That what?’

  ‘The exhibit,’ said Boonie pointedly. ‘From the gallery.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Kellique, sounding relieved – and a little pleased with herself. ‘That. We’ve got it covered.’

  The Doctor’s face fell.

  ‘You have? Well, you know how to make a man feel redundant. Where is it, then?’ He peered at the display set into the sensor controls and jabbed a finger at it. ‘Is that it? Ahhh… so that would put it…’ He straightened up, whirled round a couple of times before pointing towards one of the walls. ‘About eleven thousand kilometres that way.’

  ‘Give or take,’ said Kellique, still trying to work him out.

  ‘And what are we doing about it?’ asked the Doctor.

  ‘We’re going to follow it,’ said Boonie, striding towards a big, raggedy chair in the centre of the room and dropping himself into it. Stuffing was leaking out of the arms, and the Doctor noticed how much of the rest of it was held together with wire and sticky tape.

  ‘Really? Why don’t we just use your magic transmat and beam it back out? Along with Donna,’ he added.

  Kellique crossed to Boonie.

  ‘Who’s Donna? Who is this man?’

  Boonie looked up, his eyes grim and hard.

  ‘They were in the gallery when it was beamed out, according to our agent. They took his friend – Donna.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ interrupted the Doctor, joining Kellique at Boonie’s side. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Mother shift slightly. ‘But who exactly are “they”? And why did they steal that thing?’

  Boonie’s glance connected with Kellique’s for a moment.

  ‘I mean,’ continued the Doctor, beginning a leisurely stroll around the room, ‘it’s obvious that if a rather sophisticated piece of equipment, posing as a bit of modern art, gets lifted by a spaceship in orbit, then someone would know about it. Are you art police? Is that it? Whizzing around the galaxy foiling art thieves?’ He looked around the room. ‘A bit Scooby Doo, isn’t it? And I don’t mean to be rude, but you don’t exactly look like art police? Not,’ he added awkwardly, ‘that I’d know what art police look like. But whatever they look like, it’s not you lot, is it?’