Chapter Ten
Welcome to London
For a moment, there was complete silence on the platform, broken only by the tiny clicks of the gears on Watson's tablets. It was Watson that spoke first, absentmindedly putting the tablet away in his pocket without even looking at its still-spinning dials.
"It's the whole train," he said, looking down the platform. "Every car is the same."
"Katie, Owen, be careful," Jake said as they approached the nearest mound of cubes, but there were no immediately visible threats.
"Just like Threadneedle street," said Owen. Katie knelt down and tried to pick up a cube, but it crumbled instantly, the moment she touched it.
"But much older," Aislynn was scanning with her sonic. "We arrived at the scene at Threadneedle street almost the moment it happened. But these cubes have been untouched for…" Her sonic gave an abrupt 'ping' noise. "Hello…"
Taydin opened his mouth to ask, pulling out his own sonic, but stopped.
There was… something. They could all see it, or rather, un-see it, some quality in the shadows, as if… things… had jumped aside, out of the corner of their eyes. Little swirls and eddies that un-flickered, brittle reality skittering away from these spots, then immediately reforming in their wake. They all looked around, up and down and here and there, trying to find it.
"There!" Diana pointed, and they all looked.
At the end of the platform there was a point where the wall met both the ceiling, and also the lowered beam that ran across the ceiling, from which, a dozen feet away, the sign hung. This spot, at the intersection of wall, ceiling, and beam, formed a perfect corner, and in this corner, reality was falling away from itself like sand in an hourglass.
There was something there, in the blank spot left by vacated reality. It was all angles and un-light; and it clearly understood, somehow, that it had been spotted. Watson and Katie both covered their ears at the screech it made, the intensity of un-sound making eardrums vibrate painfully. Aislynn doubled over and Taydin overbalanced clumsily into the wall with his shoulder.
"Yr! It's a Yr!" Aislynn had put her hands over her ears, but it didn't look like it was helping. "It'll be what finished off the passengers in the train."
"It's not mine!" Watson protested.
"Not 'You're', a Yr," Taydin snapped. "It's the wrong number of dimensions to exist here! It's converting everything around!"
Jake's skin was a distinctly gray pallor; but he and Diana were old hands at this sort of thing.
"My pistol didn't come through," he ground out through gritted teeth.
Diana groaned, but set her eyes on the intruder.
"Hey! Hey!" She called at the thing in the corner. "Get down here! Come on, here I am, fat and juicy! Come and get me!" She reached into her pocket and threw the first thing that came to hand; the rubber ball that she had picked up from the warehouse. None of them would have missed at that range, and Diana least of all.
The ball flew straight and true, until it got within about two feet of the Yr, and then it lit up as if all the gaslight in the room had abruptly stuck to it. It was white and blue and gold with a sparkling contrail in its wake; and where it struck the thing it kept right on going, straight through to the wall, which was suddenly real and present underneath it, and then it rocketed back to Diana's waiting hand.
She goggled.
"What the hell kind of ball is this!"
Then the un-noise came, vibrating into a spiralling and impossible screech; and the angles in the corner took off as if they had been scalded, straight up the line between the wall and ceiling, ten feet above the stairs.
"Dammit, it'll get into the station!" Diana was off like a shot, rabbiting after it.
There was the briefest of pauses, the space of a hung breath, as everyone processed what had just happened; and then they all took off running after her.
"The field on the stairs…" started Katie.
"It'll never stand up," gasped Taydin. He and Aislynn were both running, but not in straight lines.
"It'll get into London!" Watson cried. Ahead of them there was a flash of light and another impossible screech.
"No, it's raining!" Aislynn shouted back.
They burst from the archway, and Diana was already a dozen feet ahead. Startled people were backpedalling out of the way, scattering. The angles of the world collapsed along the cracks in the sidewalk, towards a young woman with a stroller, but Diana was there with her ball.
"No!" The ball burst into sparkles on the pavement and the angles abruptly switched direction, moving along a different line of the floor.
"Do something!" Jake called back over his shoulder as he sprinted after Diana, Watson hot on his heels.
"Owen! Katie!" called Aislynn. "Head up there, get that policeman, have him clear everyone out! At least get those people out of this passageway!"
They sprinted away. The battle between Diana and the Yr was proceeding with dizzying speed. By now a panic was starting; no one had been hit but people were scattering in every direction.
"No, no, no!" howled Diana, but in spite of her best efforts, the Yr reached the top stair leading down to the tunnel across the hall, labelled, "Underground Entrance: Hopkins Row." Stairs, of course, were a series of perfect ninety-degree angles, and the Yr suddenly picked up speed, sparking and spitting away. Diana took the steps four at a time, but skidded onto the platform seconds too late. The Yr was already on the railing and out of sight into the darkness.
Diana grabbed at the first person she saw, who turned out to be a tall, thin man with short, dark, curly hair. He must have just come in out of the rain, because his black coat was soaked, and his hair was dripping. For some unfathomable reason, he had been hot on her heels down the stairs. It was especially odd because there was now a panic on the platform; everyone was trying to run back up the stairs as fast as their legs would carry them.
"When's the next train?" she cried, without preamble. She had to shout because everyone was running past them.
His eyes roamed all over her, as if vacuuming up every scrap of data he could parse from mere observation.
"Four minutes," he said. "But the next station's two kilometers, you'll never make it…"
Diana disregarded this, chuffing a few times.
"Thanks," she said. A minute later she had hurdled the railing and was running full-speed down the tunnel into the blackness.
This took the man by surprise and he paused a moment, staring after her.
"Holmes!" Watson and Jake were next down the stairs, only steps behind Diana.
"Watson!" Holmes looked very relieved to see him. "What happened? What was that? Are you all right?"
"Fine," Watson replied, and then Aislynn and Taydin caught up to them.
"Tell me she didn't chase it into the tunnel!" Aislynn looked extremely worried.
"Of course she did, it's Diana." Jake was looking very worried indeed.
Both Time Lords stared down the tunnel, as Katie and Owen came down the stairs too.
"Is there anywhere that tunnel curves?" Taydin looked intently at Watson.
"Yes," it was Holmes that answered. "About half a kilometer in."
"That's good, that'll kill its momentum. If we can slow it down, we stand a chance of herding it back into the null-zone in the station," Taydin explained.
"A null zone? Of course! That explains it!" Holmes exclaimed.
Down the tunnel was a flash of light. A moment later, like a clap of anti-thunder, was another one of the awful un-screeches. By now they were alone on the platform, everyone else having beat a hasty retreat up the stairs.
The next flash was closer.
"She's got it," breathed Aislynn.
"She'll get more than she bargained for, if she doesn't hurry," Watson checked his pocket watch. Between flashes and un-screeches, it was just possible to hear a very faint chuffing noise.
"Hurry, Angel, hurry," Jake chanted, next to Taydin.
"She chased it down the tunnel? What about the train?" Katie's eyes were round as she realized what must have happened. The chuffing noise was rapidly getting louder.
There was another flash of light, and this time they caught a glimpse of the ball as it impacted with the tail end of impossible angles; a moment later the Yr was back out and into the station.
Holmes, who hadn't seen it before, staggered back several steps.
"What the devil?" he swore.
"This way! Diana! The train!" Aislynn caught her breath.
Seconds later Diana was out again, sprinting down the rails at top speed, her form outlined in silhouette against the headlight of the oncoming train. She had a long head start, but the train was moving much faster than she could run.
Something slipped from Diana's pocket; a folded piece of paper. Unbelievably, she turned back into the face of the oncoming train, grabbing for it. For a horrifying moment Aislynn though that she'd be killed, but then she vaulted over the railing, shoving the paper back into her pocket, as the train began pulling into the station. She landed hard, just as the train rolled over the spot where she had stood scant seconds before.
Katie's luck ran out at the same moment. Unaware, she was standing on a crack in the sidewalk; and all at once she was facing a wall of angles and unlight.
"Katie!" Owen dived for Katie, physically tackling her, to get her out of the way. The train began coming to a halt with the squealing of brakes, and the hissing of clouds of steam.
They had seconds before the train would come to a stop and the doors would open, filling the platform with hapless passengers. Diana pounced.
"Eat this!" She howled, and stuck her arm into the wall of angles, all the way up to the shoulder. In her hand was the ball; rather than throwing it, she let it go.
The train came to a stop, filling the passageway with a cloud of steam. The un-noise of the screeching Yr spiralled up to impossible intensity, as Diana staggered back, holding her arm and swearing.
Reality buckled back and forth as the Yr tried to race here and there; but it had swallowed the sun, and it now had nowhere to hide. Light was forcing its way through the unlight, sound was overwhelming unsound, and angles from every direction were being drawn into the epicenter.
"Take cover!" Taydin snapped. He and Aislynn scrambled away as Holmes tackled Watson, and Owen shielded Katie's body with his own.
The implosion was enormous, both soundless and deafening all at once. The boom rattled the very bricks in the walls as they were all pulled bodily across the room, flying through the air in arcs of varying lengths, to land on top of each other in a tangled heap on the spot where Katie had been attacked, only moments ago.
The Yr was gone.
Diana was on the bottom of the heap, but her arms were free, and she held out her hand as her ball, now an iridescent sparkling orb, fell from nowhere and landed softly into her outstretched palm.
There was a stunned silence as they all lay there getting their breath back.
The train doors opened to discharge hordes of passengers, hurrying and chattering among themselves, many of them looking askance at the warped railing and new, round indention in the pavement, glancing at the group oddly as they untangled themselves and worked their way to their feet, but not having time to investigate.
"You all right, Angel?" asked Jake solicitously.
"Damn thing bit me,"grumbled Diana. She was holding her arm. To Jake's horror, it was bleeding badly. The blood was coming out as droplets, but plinking to the pavement as minute red cubes.
"Owen! Katie! Get over here!" he roared. They all jumped at his tone and came to look, Watson included.
"I have a healing factor," complained Diana. "It should be fixed."
"Watson?" prompted Holmes.
"I'd have to say that is a currently-unknown medical phenomenon," Watson said, and Katie and Owen both nodded in agreement.
"Tiny wormhole junction," Taydin muttered. "It will clear up eventually... hopefully."
"Here, use this," Aislynn interrupted, pulling a series of what looked like ball bearings from out of her reticule. "They should stop the bleeding... as well as the inter-dimensional juxtapositioning."
Diana tried them. No one spoke much for several minutes; but at length the fat round drops of blood really were fat round drops, and not cubes at all. Jake breathed a sigh of relief, looking like the weight of the world had slid from his shoulders. Owen and Katie, who had both been watching closely, looked relieved as well. The healing factor was already working on closing the wounds; but with three doctors to attend to it, the arm was bandaged in a trice.
"That's got the cubes cleared up," said Katie at last, as she fixed the end of the gauze and replaced the rest in Owen's bag. "Your healing factor should take it from here."
"Interesting. Four aliens and two humans from a period of time rather more advanced than our own. Quite fascinating," Holmes murmured, peering at them all with bird-like intensity. "You two are doctors, which implies a very different social structure in the future," he continued, peering at Owen and Katie. "You two are similar in appearance to humans, but your physical temperatures and the rapidity of your pulses are certainly not human at all," he informed Taydin and Aislynn and then leaned forward to stare straight into Diana's eyes. "Faint traces of bio-luminescence! Most interesting indeed!"
"You're taking this all calmly. I thought you'd say it was all quite impossible," Watson teased.
"Whenever you eliminate the impossible, Watson, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth!" Holmes retorted. "Their physical attributes are undeniably factual." There was a rueful tone to Holmes' voice, as though he was amused about something. Watson's chuckle implied an old argument, between two good friends.
"So, I win then?" suggested Watson and, with a laugh, Holmes handed him a five pound note.
"Savor the moment, John, it won't come again soon," he teased.
"Don't I know it!" Watson agreed. "Now. What exactly is a Yr and what the devil just happened?" He spun to stare at Taydin and Aislynn, pinning them with a frowning gaze.
"May I suggest we discuss that topic away from this platform?" Aislynn suggested delicately. "If we stay here much longer, we're likely to be visited by some very curious policemen."
"Who may ask questions we don't want to answer? Yes, I quite agree," Holmes said. "We should have plenty of privacy in the secret platform; show me this new train." They headed hastily up the stairs, Diana replacing the ball in her pocket as they walked.