Doctor Who - The 8th Doctor - 63 - Reckless Engineering by Nick Walters

Author:Nick Walters
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Comics & Graphic Novels, Life on Other Planets, General, Science Fiction, Doctor Who (Fictitious Character), Fiction
ISBN: 9780563486039
Publisher: Random House UK
Published: 2003-08-21T07:00:00+00:00

She landed beside Gottlieb who immediately began to strike out through the woods.

Soon they were in open ground, under the stars which were now brighter against the darkening sky. In the distance, down a long gentle slope, she could see what must be Ashton Court’s mansion house. A big, sprawling stately home. In the gloom it looked full of secrets. Full of danger.

‘There don’t seem to be any Estate Guards in the vicinity,’ said Gottlieb. ‘The plan must be working.’

Anji could make out a circular wall around the house. More security? This Malahyde certainly liked his solitude. She pointed to it. ‘So we climb over that, too?’

Gottlieb shook his head. ‘There must be a door.’ He drew a flintlock rifle from a holster hidden beneath his cloak. ‘Here’s the key.’

Aboetta and Mr Malahyde were walking in the garden that was February, whilst outside in the rest of the world it was October. Malahyde had calmed down after his outburst, and relapsed into a resigned melancholy. Nothing Aboetta could say would dissuade him of his view that the fall of Mankind rested entirely on his shoulders, but she felt that her presence went some way towards improving his mood.

He had told her of the years after the Cleansing, how he established links with the Citizen Elders of the settlements around Bristol, how he recruited his Estate Guards, the gardeners and workers who came to live within the Estate in exchange for produce sent out to their home settlements. How he learned to manage them from within the house so that their descendants never caught on that the Malahyde who had recruited their great-grandparents was really the same person for whom they now worked.

And how throughout all this he had contemplated suicide.

‘I would have ended my life long ago, once I realised what I had done,’ he told her as they strolled between the barren flower-beds. ‘But for one hope, which I have never abandoned.’ He looked up at the clouds. ‘Maybe the Eternines will come back somehow, or – despite everything – Watchlar will re-appear, help me activate the Utopian Engine, help me restore the human race to what it was before the Cleansing.’ He sighed. ‘Or – maybe I can get the Utopian Engine working in another way, roll time back, to before.’

‘Then I would never have been born,’ Aboetta chided.

He smiled. ‘Yes. Yes, you would.’ He stopped walking, took her hands in his. ‘You would have been born, twenty years ago, into a better world.’

122

‘A world full of people.’ Aboetta tried to imagine it, but couldn’t. ‘But would I have been me?’

He let go of her hands and shook his head. ‘Oh, Aboetta, I have almost driven myself mad with paradoxes and what-ifs.’

‘There’s something you haven’t told me,’ said Aboetta. ‘Why does time move differently here?’

‘I’m not entirely sure.’ He glanced back meaningfully at the looming south wing of the house. ‘I think it’s a side effect of the Utopian Engine.’ He indicated the wall around the house and its gardens, a grey curve running between the ground and the sky.

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