Part 10
Now slides the silent meteor on…
. . .
The morning was growing old by the time the Doctor paused to straighten his back and finally drink a cup of tea long gone tepid. He cast a critical eye over the half-done work, reviewing the design concept and calculations in his head. Yes, if his understanding of the creature they were facing was correct, this would effectively destroy it.
He hated to design weapons, hated being brought to the point that he could see no other effective solution. All he could do was regard it as a mercy killing.
The trigger-happy Brigadier would have to be sworn to not use it until Jo was safely recovered from its grasp. Lethbridge-Stewart was a man of honor, but he had never entirely trusted him in the area of explosives, at least not since that dratted event with the Silurians. At least this weapon would hardly be conventional, which he hoped would help. It would be of little use for Man against other men.
Tilting the reflective surface of the inner casing, he checked again for any flaws before sealing it into its tube. He just couldn't keep his thoughts focused on it. Frustrated, he set it aside and turned to his other device, the one that should help them retrieve Jo… provided the first one worked. He had high hopes for this one, it being a variation on the experimental one he'd been forced to press into service with himself as guinea-pig. From personal experience he knew it felt odd and somewhat uncomfortable, yes, but didn't hurt.
He didn't want her hurt.
She'd had more than her fair share of that, lately, he reflected. She'd probably been hurt and frightened out of her wits more since she'd become his assistant than in her entire young life beforehand. And yet he'd never wanted her hurt.
He adjusted a setting and ran a diagnostic over it again, musing. Had she been alone? Had it been using her as a go-between, sending her to him? There'd been no sign of it, no hint of duplicity in her communication. But she was a hostage, essentially, and as such he needed to be careful. Come to think of it, it was surprising she'd been alone both times he'd encountered her. Was it trying to bait him into a will-o-the-wisp chase, intending to ambush? How much cunning had it learned?
Too many questions, not enough answers. Life as usual. But too quiet.
Three hours later he had one machine working as it ought, the other nearly so and his original Jo-stomped one partly repaired. He'd run out of biscuits and after heating a kettle had discovered the room was also empty of tea. Not wanting to be interrupted, he'd settled for drinking hot water with the last of the sugar cubes in it and kept going. He was just thinking of stretching his legs and fetching something more substantial from the canteen when a sparkle glimmered, over by the stairwell.
He spun to face it, then carefully backed to the table as he considered the apparition. It slowly drifted into the room and stopped.
"Jo?" he asked hesitantly.
What he could make out was the right height, but there was something indefinably different. A harder spark to the glitter, perhaps, a lacking in softness, a pulling back. His hand carefully reached back and found the scattering-device by feel, just in case it was a deception.
His other hand tentatively reached forward, offering a wary chance at communication.
A faint silver feather extended out, brushed his fingertips for only the briefest moment. In that flash he felt Jo's presence, and with it a warning, distress, frustration, a fierce protectiveness towards him.
With it also came the awareness of something that he'd missed: a silvery line, faintly stretching between where she was and the stairwell.
His eyes darkened at the thought and his face went stern and still. It had her on a leash. She'd been alone before, but she'd been found. He strengthened his own mental walls, pulling back inside himself lest it use his emotions toward her to trap him. The communication went both ways; it was using her to hook him then, to bring him in.
"Oh no you don't," he murmured. "This fish is not so easily reeled in as all that…"
Jo's presence advanced towards him, but the line behind her grew thicker, more visible as she did so and there was no move made to reach out to him. He surmised she was being pushed, and stepped aside to avoid her. She was propelled towards him again, and again he stepped away. This odd cat-and-mouse around the small room repeated several times, helped by the fact it was a rounded room so it was impossible to corner him, even with his feet unsteady from the disorientation that always accompanied it.
The only emotion he allowed to crack open was defiance, flavored with his hatred of what it was doing to her, had already done to her. At the very least, he wanted it to understand that. It was unjust; if it had any concept of justice, he wanted it to know.
Apparently frustrated that its ruse had been unsuccessful, the Perseid creature lifted up into the room itself, a silver-gold, pulsating net at the top of the stairs. In a glance, he registered that it was noticeably weaker than the last time he'd encountered it, fainter in intensity and slower in movement; the lower-level fractalizations of silver-white dominant, with only streaks of the stronger gold and none of the red. He wondered how much of its weakness was from the strain of controlling Jo, and how much was starvation.
They regarded one another for a heartbeat, alien and alien.
It surged a line of power between itself and Jo. The mist-feathered white glimmering that was her being seemed to fold on itself for a moment. He froze, fearing she was being injured, or tortured, feeling helpless to stop it. She came closer, a flickering line of white abruptly extended to brush his arm as he danced back.
A desire for cream-cakes.
Two things about this communication astonished him: first, that the emotive attack he knew she was being forced into sending, and that he was braced against, was instead such a small and mundane feeling.
Cream-cakes? Well, yes, Jo had often expressed how much she liked them, and he therefore certainly knew it was from her and not from any alien. His heart warmed with pride for her cleverness. She'd been forced to send something at him, so she'd deliberately chosen something completely innocuous.
The other unexpected effect was that it was building. That touch had apparently launched an emotive bomb at him, a fractal emotive that repeated in upon itself in a repetitious cycle. A desire for cream-cakes echoed through his mind, growing stronger as it layered upon itself. It reverberated in his being, amplifying until it seemed inescapable, a ridiculous, burning, frantic grasping for a meaningless sweet.
He was still glad she'd shown she was not just a tool, that she retained some level of independence, but as it built until he thought he would go mad with this foreign longing, pounding waves for a mundane dessert, he wished she'd chosen something else. Anything else. Well, not anything. It was completely, utterly ludicrous and painful, and it had to stop, but he hated to think of what the deeper emotions of the previous night would have done; it could have destroyed him.
He brandished the scatter-light and moved around the wall. As he expected, the creature pushed Jo towards him but retreated to the stairwell itself, stretching out thinly to maintain the link between its hostage and itself. The Doctor shook his head briefly, trying to focus beyond the now desperately loud call of hunger that pervaded the air. He balanced carefully, finding his sea-legs through the dizziness, then jumped.
With a strong leap forward, he put himself right between the alien and his assistant, bringing the light up to bear on her captor now that she was safely behind him.
Faster than he could register, it responded by pulling her in, yanking her back like a small dog at the end of a chain. She was behind him, and then in a blink she wasn't; it placed her squarely in front of itself, using her as a shield. He almost missed it, it was so fast and she was so faintly defined, blending in with itself.
He nearly shot her. He gasped, and actually dropped the light in shock at the near-miss, snatching it back up with a surge of anger and frustration. He tried to jockey around to get a side-shot at it, furious that it would stoop so low, that it would sacrifice her to save itself, risk her being slain by his own hands. He managed to barely graze it at the back, he dare not bring the beam any closer.
He began to work around to try hitting it from the other side, when it suddenly retreated. Perhaps overextended, or overwhelmed, or intimidated - He didn't know why, but it simply, abruptly gave up the attack. It faded out, sliding down the stairwell, pulling Jo with it all in an instant running away. He began to pursue it, half-tumbling down the stairs in his haste, but they were both too-quickly invisible to the eye, too completely vanished.
Stopping three-quarters down, he leaned heavily on the cool stone wall, then slumped to the steps to catch his breath and let the vertigo subside. His head hurt, his arm throbbed where she'd touched it. There was no use in pursuit; he was needed to finish the tools that would free her.
He rubbed his aching forehead and sighed. At least the emotional grenade she'd sent had gone with them. His mind gratefully soaked up the internal silence that followed that storm. He thought he'd never be able to eat another cream-cake for the rest of his life.
. . .
"…So you see, it's preserved her patterning. She seems to be keeping her original form and personality, within reason," The Doctor explained as he, Benton and the Brigadier walked across the lot to the waiting tent, their shadows stretching out beside them in the afternoon's light. "While there are random variables within what this century loosely terms 'chaos theory,' within each pattern, even a seemingly random one, there can be found small copies of the original patterning. Now, if the original pattern can be isolated and repeated in a stabilized way by a…"
"What I don't understand is why it's kept her alive while we've seen no sign of those men." The Brigadier suddenly interrupted, nodding to the sentry at the tent's entrance as they approached. "Have you an answer for that? You've lost me on the rest of this scientific blather."
"Blather?" The Doctor paused, then resignedly abandoned his explanation to try another answer. "It's a bit like those fern-groves: The first lot are a lost cause. For human beings, that would be our watchman along with the thief he was apprehending."
Benton, who'd been tuning out the previous talk, regarded this news with interest. "What about our man? Is there any hope we'll get him back then?"
The Doctor let out a breath unhappily. "I highly doubt it. In his case it was deliberately attempting to overcome what it regarded as an obstacle or enemy. Having already learned from the destruction of the watchman's patterning, it is more likely to have dissolved his patterns than to have preserved them. Also, if it had him available it would have been using him has a human shield before it ever had her. There hasn't been so much as a hint of anyone else, just Jo. It's learned a new trick, it seems."
The Brigadier ducked into the tent ahead of them. Benton paused by the Doctor, giving a grimace as he straightened his shoulders. "It's a hard thing, Doc."
"It is. Believe me, Sergeant, I never wanted any of your men endangered."
"They knew the risks when they signed on," Benton replied, slipping into soldier-mode.
The Doctor understood. "Yes. Well. We still have a chance to save Miss Grant. Let's not lose it." He ducked into the tent, the Sergeant following.
"What you said earlier. It's got her on a leash, you mean?" Benton asked.
"In more ways than metaphorically, yes."
"Is it true that it used her for a shield?"
"Yes. She could have been killed," he said grimly. "I expect it will try it again."
"No honour," Benton muttered darkly. "Hiding behind a helpless girl like that."
The Doctor didn't reply.
"So, Doctor. Tell us how we can deal with this creature once and for all." Lethbridge-Stewart circled around and sat down at his desk, tapping the papers in front of him with a newly sharpened pencil hard enough to leave a series of dark dents.
His scientific advisor took a seat then restlessly tipped back in his chair, letting it drop heavily back down to the floor. He leaned forward, taking the pencil right out of the Brigadier's hand to sketch on the back of a random report in front of him.
"Well, we know it is able to survive the conditions found within a meteor cloud, therefore it can withstand extreme cold, heat, light and darkness. I ruled these out from the start. It has demonstrated the ability to withstand significant physical impact as well."
The Brigadier frowned at the highjacked pencil. "I'm sure there's no need to make it complex. If we were to place high-quality explosives around the perimeter of…"
"Then you would do nothing but potentially feed it, Brigadier," the Doctor snapped. "This is a creature that at least partly lives off of vaporized minerals, remember?"
"What can we do, then?" Benton asked, trying to stop any further arguments.
"As I was saying…The original device I'd put together could either increase the intensity of its patterning or it could force a scattering of the same." He leaned back again, tapping the pencil briefly on his knees. "If attacked, it will be expecting to be scattered again. This means it should place Jo to the forefront. The first stage will take advantage of that likelihood. We will need a definite location established ahead of time so the equipment can be properly focused."
He leaned forward and sketched again as he spoke. The Brigadier tipped his head at the upside-down scribbling. "I expect the stone formation in its crater would be a prime target, as it is would have no compunctions about its familiarity."
"How will we get it to go there?" Benton wondered.
"I'll find a way to bring it there, I have some ideas already. Now. If we can initially direct a focused beam of the first variety, we should be able to increase Jo's own patterning to bring her as close to her former physical existence as we safely can. At the same time, a lower-level beam of the scattering light can be brought to bear on the creature, as Jo should now be visible enough to enable the men to keep it clear of her. Are you following me?"
The Brigadier and Benton, both angling to try to see the sketchings, nodded. "Will that free her?" Benton asked.
He looked up at them, his eyes intense. "I hope so. If she is gaining cohesion concurrent with the Perseid losing it, it should be forced to let her go, conserving its energy for self-preservation. She may be quite disoriented when she returns, the creature can produce a severe vertigo."
"I'll say," Benton muttered.
The Brigadier just nodded. "Right. We'll have men ready to catch or carry her, then."
The Doctor tapped the pencil on the table, then laid it down. Just as the Brigadier's hand moved towards it, he snatched it back up and drew some squares and arrows on him impromptu map, now edged in mathematical notes. "Good. Now we do something unexpected. The creature will be focusing its own energies on increasing and restoring itself from the scattering. We will also increase it…"
"But that makes it stronger…" Benton blurted out.
The Doctor gave him a look, silencing him. "Let me finish. We will increase it at maximum level for at most two seconds. One and a half should be sufficient. The beam will then be reversed. This will fold it up against itself, turning its own forces, as well as ours, against it. The patterning essence would essentially turn inside-out, especially if, and here's where some of your men come into it, Brigadier…"
"Yes?"
"Especially if at the same time the men are moving our boundary devices inward and turning them to direct at the creature, rather than each other. This will block it from outward expansion, and should push it even further in, folding it until the energy reaches maximum compression."
"Compression." The Brigadier considered this. "That's likely to cause a bang, then?"
"Yes, it's highly probable," the Doctor said dryly.
"Now, that much I can understand," the Brigadier replied with something like a twinkle. "We'll take precautionary measures."
"If only I had my TARDIS here…this wouldn't take half the time with my equipment. Still, now that I can see the way of it… Now go on, and leave me alone. I'm back to the tower. I've quite a lot of work to do and I don't want to leave Jo in that state a moment more than I have to."
He turned to go then suddenly whirled back. "Brigadier!"
"Yes?"
"This is going to take, shall we say, a generous helping of power."
"We'll make use of our generators…"
"Insufficient. More. Tap that house, the local power supplies, whatever you have available." He pointed at the scribbled-on papers significantly. "Our goal is to trap it at its landing site, so have the cables run down there."
"Very well. And Doctor."
"Yes?"
"My pencil."
"What? Oh." He handed it back, gave a small sardonic bow and swirled out of the tent.
The Brigadier looked at Benton, who was looking at the pencil. Alistair tapped it in his hand. "You heard him, Sergeant. Let's get to work."
