The Doctor and Tegan Jovanka are property of the BBC – you know the drill. Kimoto Takita and most everybody else are my creations!
Kim is a trained fighter and she and Tegan are prepared to go to Hell and back in order to save the Doctor. But to Kim, Hell is nothing much compared to the place they are going…
Part eleven
The elevator doors quietly slid open to reveal a short, nondescript corridor leading to a set of double doors at the other end.
"Is this where you think they have the Doctor?" Tegan asked, her voice hushed by the clinical surroundings. Then she saw Kim's face.
The feline had never looked so little like a human. Her features were pale and her usually big eyes seemed to take up nearly half her face. Her whiskers, normally fairly discreet, stood out like so much thread under static and her ears lay flat backwards.
"Kim?" Tegan asked softly. "Are you all right?"
"No," Kim replied, her voice hoarse and her hand involuntarily going to absentmindedly caress the wound at her side. "No, I am not all right. Never really will be as long as that…" her voice faltered and she almost slumped. "I'm not sure I can do this," she admitted, eyes downcast.
"What do you mean?" Tegan exclaimed, staring at her friend with surprise. "You are a warrior. I saw you fight those guards and the Doctor needs us. Are there more guards in there? Is that it? Well, we've got to try."
"I am a warrior, as well as so much else," Kim whispered, raising her face but not really seeing Tegan. "But that place is… I cannot… I fear it!"
"Why?"
"Remember I told you that I have received treatments?" Kim asked, clutching her arms as if suddenly cold. "Well, this is where they perform them. My nightmares take place in there!"
"Well, you are not at their mercy now," Tegan said with more certainty than she felt. "We are together and we will save the Doctor, and then he can help you to get out of here."
"Out of here," Kim repeated in a dead voice. "Not in there."
"Kim!"
"Not in there…"
"Kim…" Tegan turned towards her friend and slapped her lightly across the face, gripping her unwounded arm and shaking her gently. At least this finally made the princess look at her. "Pull yourself together, mate. Three people, the Doctor, myself and you, depend on you not loosing your nerve now. How do you expect me to get out of here without you? Not to mention the Doctor? And without him, you're going to marry that Count Matsu Whatshisname and wind up a bitter old cat!"
"Cat?" Kim asked, blinking nervously.
"Yeah, cat. I thought you were a warrior, had spirit, but as it turns out you're nothing but a feeble kitten."
"Nobody calls me kitten and gets away with it," Kim growled, some of her old self returning.
"Oh yeah? I thought that that old fart counsellor, Willy, did."
"William is a chancellor," Kim bit back.
"And who am I, a passer-by maiden? A servant? A rotten intruder having avoided beheading so far?"
"I'm sorry," Kim said, straightening up and gently disentangling herself from Tegan's grip. "I really am. I must seem foolish, to put my tail between my legs like that at the sight of a door. I am sorry, and you are right. We should try to fight Ashim and Krentz."
"Phew, you had me scared there," Tegan admitted with a smile. "You just seemed to crumble before me from fear. Hey, not that I'm not scared too."
"As am I, scared to the point of bristling in fact." Tegan saw that she really was. "But now I have the sense to try to overcome it. Or lack of sense, as the case may be."
"Good. Shall we go and kick some doctor's butt then?"
"Yeah, let's."
They both took out their guns and made sure they were fully loaded, before setting off down the short corridor.
"Oh, and Tegan?" Kim whispered as they quietly approached the doors.
"Yeah?"
"You're not some rotten intruder. You're my friend. No matter what happens."
"Thanks, you too," Tegan answered, trying to ignore a sudden flush of warmth in her cheeks.
Then they were at the doors.
ooo ooo ooo
Doctor Krentz was frustrated. He had two main jobs to do at the Palace. The one was overseeing the treatments of the Princess; the other was to interrogate prisoners for Chancellor Ashim. Some would probably frown at the odd combination, but then Krentz was not deceiving himself into really believing that there was much difference between the two.
Other people seemed to expect that doctors running interrogations and administering pain during such occasions were cruel and perhaps even inclined to like hurting people. Krentz did not, however consider himself a mindless brute or a sexually deranged person with a taste for sadism.
What really interested him was the human mind and the levels of control it had over the body – and vice versa. When he could cause a grown man to break down in whimpers within minutes and tell whatever they needed, it was a victory for his research and his ability to understand the interaction between body and mind. The sooner they broke, the better he had understood their individual psyche and physiology.
In fact, doctor Krentz liked even more to soothe and treat his patients afterwards, also achieving as rapid recuperation as at all possible. Again, this was a victory for his studies and even helped him overcome any twang of guilt that he could otherwise develop.
It was ironic that most of his subjects had been presented to him in order to extract confessions that sent them to the executioner soon after, thus preventing a full recuperation. Some, he knew, were actually saved from the executioner's table by the revelations extracted by the interrogator.
This, truly, was a victory.
He was also fascinated by his works with princess Kimoto. It was his first ever half human patient, and the continuous attempts at altering her mind into something that would fit, had been a real challenge. It was intriguing how close they had been on several occasions, but each time the feline broke through, shoving away any and all human traits from her mind and fighting them as a mere predator and not even the highly intelligent mind of the sheerar species.
But now he would soon loose this opportunity to study cross breed mentality, not to mention his continuous attempts at altering it. He would be given one last attempt at it, he knew, but he also had a very clear feeling that he would still fail.
Right now, however, his biggest concern was the patient before him. The man known only as the Doctor.
Well, man was not the term. His cardiovascular system and respiratory system were not human, nor were several readings of his brain patterns. No, whatever he looked like, he was not human.
It had been more than three years since he last failed at extracting information from an unwilling subject, but this one had eluded him. The drugs had not worked and now he seemed comatose. All this, before having given one single bit of information! Frustrating.
And chancellor Ashim, that primitive ambitious ape. Krentz knew fully well that the treatments and several of the quite secret interrogations did not happen for any other reason than the furthering of Ashim's goals. As long as Krentz was allowed his studies and the resources spent on bringing subjects back on their feet again, this was an acceptable disadvantage.
Working in the Imperial Palace, it was also not as if Krentz had much say in the matter. All that mattered here was the Code. Bushido this and millennia-old tradition that. Krentz was disgusted by it and found that it halted development on Honshu II rather than accentuating it. But then, he knew that several of his own ideas had been set into action during the last few years, simply because they were issued from within the Palace. And that was fairly good.
The best was the executions. If there was such a thing as a good execution, Krentz believed it to be his model. The subject was given whatever last rites he or she wished for and then calmly and without any fuss sedated. Then a team of surgeons took out all the organs and tissue that could be used for transplants before the executioner flipped the switch that stopped the life-support systems. Sometimes, as when a heart was removed, this was more of a ritual than anything else.
In dying, these people supplied others with a chance to live. Krentz was rather proud of this idea and found that it was the best he could do as a doctor in a world that insisted on condoning something as profoundly primitive as the death penalty.
One prisoner, some seven years ago, had even taken the chance to thank Krentz for the idea while speaking his final words before being put to sleep. That memory always gave the doctor a strange, painful feeling somewhere in the chest. And excess moisture in the eyes…
As did the patient before him!
"Come on, wake up! You should be conscious for all the readings!" he yelled at the prone form before him, then smiled at himself. How ridiculous. Since when had comatose people reacted to frustrated yelling? Not counting bad movie flicks.
"Hnnnrrrrr…"
The Doctor was responding! His eyelids fluttered, but remained closed. The fingers on his one hand flexed and his head lolled and not for the first time, Krentz wondered if coma truly was the proper diagnosis here.
"Stay with me, Doctor," Krentz said intensely, replacing a mask with oxygen over the Doctor's nose and mouth. "Just relax, you're quite safe for now. Breathe deep. Breathe deep."
He cast a glance at the electroencephalogram, but found that the readings were much the same as before the Doctor had responded. Odd. But this oddity could and would have to wait as Krentz tried to persuade the Doctor's weak consciousness to come back.
"Listen to my voice, Doctor," Krentz continued in a soothing tone. "Listen to me. Follow the sound of the voice and come towards it. You may relax, you are safe here."
"Safe?" a familiar voice spat behind him. "What? From you?"
Krentz, who had almost jumped out of his skin at the sound, whirled around and stood face to face with Princess Kimoto Takita and a Caucasian woman whom he didn't know. They both held electro guns and they both had them trained on him, but that was not the real worry here. The real worry was the expression on the Princess' face: Wide eyes, ears flat against the skull and teeth bared; it was obvious that she was a scared as any cat.
"Your highness," he said, still in a calm voice. "You startled me. I was not expecting you."
"I just bet you weren't," the feline growled as she grabbed his shoulder and roughly pushed him away from the bed, heading towards the Doctor without ever loosing the aim at Krentz.
The Doctor, earlier an image of the upper class Edwardian cricketer, was lying on the bed with only his trousers and a blanket covering him. His body was pale and angry red marks clearly spoke a language that Kim knew only too well. As the two women gazed at him, he opened his eyes just a little and tried to focus on them.
"Tegan?" he rattled, his voice muffled both by the oxygen mask and his weak condition. "Kim? You shouldn't have. It's not safe here."
"I bloody well know that!" Kim replied, awkwardly waving the gun at Krentz and wondering what kind of help the Doctor needed. "Been here before, you know. This piece of human garbage is my personal physician. What did he do to you? The usual?"
"I am unfamiliar with the usual procedure here," the Doctor said, plucking off the mask and scratching his temple where more red marks spoke volumes. "Interrogation, I'd say. And performed by an expert. Sadly I was of little help to him and his master, the honourable Ashim."
"Doctor? How are you? Can we get out of here?" Tegan asked, only just stopping herself from adding 'please'.
"I'm fine, just a little tired," the Doctor replied, sitting up on the bed and shaking his head as if to clear it. "Yes, we can get out of here in just a moment. I need to recover just a bit more. I abandoned consciousness in favour of trance when things started to turn nasty. I'll just need a few moments to readjust."
"You sick, twisted bastard!" Kim yelled in an increasing scream, turning towards Krentz and slapping him across his face with the side of the gun, sending him sideways with spatters of blood flying through the air. "You are worse than anything else," she went on, abandoning the gun and picking him up from the floor, holding him by the lapels of his lab coat and striking him twice in the abdomen, causing him to exhale violently and then just collapse to the floor, retching and gasping for air.
Kim just stood there, hugging herself and seemingly paralyzed. It had all happened so fast that neither the Doctor nor Tegan had been able to say anything, much less stop it, and now they watched as Kim sank onto her knees, sobbing.
"I think our friend needs a hand more than I do," the Doctor suggested gently. Tegan nodded and went over to the Princess, putting a hand on her shoulder, ignoring the pale and gasping Krentz, who was barely conscious.
"It's all right," she soothed. "He can't hurt you now. We're leaving."
"He shouldn't be able to hurt anyone," Kim sobbed, angrily wiping tears from her face. "He is a tame psychopath on a pay roll. Have you seen the images?"
Tegan looked up as Kim vaguely gestured toward the wall and now she saw the images. She hadn't noticed before, having focused on the Doctor, but now it made her blood run cold. She quickly turned back towards her friend.
"He does that only to taunt me," Kim explained, fighting to regain control. "He thinks he can change my mind like others change computer programmes. Using… Using… Doing what he does."
"Come on," Tegan gently urged. "He hasn't succeeded so far, has he? And now he'll not get the chance."
"No, you're right," Kim muttered, finally getting up again. "He won't. And he won't hurt anybody for some time. I just… The Doctor is such a nice person and to think that this… What he did to him…"
"Thank you for the kind words," the Doctor said with a weak smile from his bed. He had picked up the oxygen mask again and was inhaling long, deep breaths of oxygen. "But you need not worry. I am able to mentally shut down, as you may call it, and I did as soon as his started his ministrations. I barely felt a thing."
"But he tried, didn't he?" Kim asked, walking over to a sink and starting to fill a cup with water.
"Yes," the Doctor said quietly. "Yes, he did."
"And he will continue to do so, if we don't stop him once and for all," she continued, handing the cup of water to the Doctor, who removed the mask and drank it.
"And what, your highness, would you propose that we do?"
"Stop him," Kim said in a flat voice.
"How?"
"Kill him," Kim suggested.
"Are you sure about that?"
Kim looked at the Doctor, who returned her scrutiny with unblinking blue eyes. Then she bent down, picking up the gun from the floor, wincing as she moved her injured arm and briefly looking at the weapon before tossing it onto a nearby table.
"These guns are as unlikely as anything else to kill," she murmured, her voice still having that icy tone. "But I would be surprised if this place doesn't hold something a little more efficient."
She went over to the biggest table, the one between another bed and a chair with straps on the armrests. The chair was still moist from somebody's sweat and the straps a bit askew as if somebody had been fighting against them. Kim glared at it, then stared back at the Doctor with a strange look in her emerald eyes.
"You didn't pass out right away, did you?"
"Ah, no," he admitted. "No, I didn't."
Tegan gasped and looked back at the Doctor. Knowing him, she was really not surprised at his tendency to understate whatever injuries or suffering he experienced, but still she had hoped that he had been spared of this torture. Well, obviously not.
Kim continued to examine the big table, studying the machine with the cables with an air of indifference and then continuing to the drugs, picking up a rather big syringe. Picking her way between different bottles with rubber tops, she decided on one with a blue label and filled the syringe with the milky white contents of it. Then she turned towards Krentz, who was still lying on the floor, a pool of blood and spittle in front of him.
"This," she said quietly as she approached him, "may sting."
"I asked you a question before," the Doctor broke in, making Kim look up from her prey. "Are you sure about that?"
"This is what they usually use to put me under for a while," Kim replied in the same flat tone as before. "But the syringe here contains some twenty or thirty times what they use. It will be a more merciful death than he deserves, but I don't think I could do it using the… Using electricity."
"And that's what you are going to do?" the Doctor asked, removing the mask again so that his soothing voice was not hindered by it. "Kill him?"
"He is vermin," she said, looking down at the prone form, fidgeting with the syringe. "He should be exterminated."
"No!" the Doctor exclaimed. Then, with a little more composure, he continued: "I disagree. The last time I heard somebody insist on exterminating, they were wrong. And so are you."
"But he deserves it."
"Does he? Truly? Why?"
"He is evil!"
"Come now, Kim," the Doctor admonished in a light tone. "Surely you are part of an advanced society, you should be well above that medieval terminology of good and evil."
"Medieval, but that's just what this society is," Kim said defiantly. "We could be advanced; we could be a beacon in the galaxy, a model of a good and free lifestyle. But we just sit here, stuck in the medieval quagmire of bushido, codes and ideals dating back so far that even in centuries it is quite a count."
"Ah, yes, but is that the society of the imperial family or that of Honshu II?"
"How in the blazes should I know that? I've never been outside these walls for long enough to find out, now have I?"
"Let's, just for the moment, pretend that the common honshuan leads a nice, tranquil life where freedom of choice and equal rights are the order of the day. That they can educate themselves, make families and move as they please. Let's pretend that the nobility lives by the old codes so as to set an example of stoicism, unrequited from commoners. Let's, just for the moment, pretend that life within the ruling families is stern so that the common life doesn't have to be."
"You are starting to sound like my father," Kim warned, popping the cap over the syringe needle on and off as she spoke.
"Perhaps your father is sometimes right," the Doctor suggested. "And if he is the true ruler of this place, perhaps he needs such people as Krentz here. Your killing him will only have him replaced by another. You are staring yourself blind on the symptom rather than the disease."
"He's right," Tegan said, having kept quiet so far. "You're a warrior, Kim, but you are not a murderer. I saw you when Hatfield died."
"Hatfield?" the Doctor enquired, taking another breath of oxygen and then bending down to fasten his shoelaces.
"He…" Kim faltered, then threw the syringe to the floor, breaking it and spilling the milky liquid all over the sterile tiles. "He was a servant, and an informant of Ashim's. I… I just tried to use my gift… He died…"
"But it was an accident," Tegan interjected. "She just tried to probe his mind, but then he had a seizure and just died."
"You're right, Doctor." Kim said quietly, briefly looking defeated, but then raising her head and looking at him with determination. "Let's get out of here while we still can. I believe it would be possible to find that engineer and that cable of yours. She said several days, but that was to accommodate your entire list. A cable, I suspect, would not take long."
"There's a good girl," the Doctor beamed and jumped off of the bed, tossing the oxygen mask aside. "I knew it all along. Tegan is right, you may be a fighter, but you're no assassin."
"No, you're right. I would have been angry with myself for decades if I'd done it," Kim admitted. "But try as I may, I am not regretting that I punched him. He'll have a sore tummy for some time."
"Violence is never the solution," the Doctor admonished, quickly slipping on his shirt and his sweater from the table.
"No, but it sometimes helps," Tegan added with a wry grin.
"Yeah, it does. It made me feel just a little better," Kim said, bending over to pick up the gun from the floor. "But the Doctor is right. No more killings."
"He's often right," Tegan said, now smiling widely. "It's an annoying habit of his."
"Not this time, though!"
They all turned towards the door where six armed samurai stood, aiming their very real rifles at the three of them and almost but not quite hiding the man who had spoken.
Chancellor Ashim!
ooo ooo ooo
To be continued…