Doctor Who NA43 - Head Games by Steve Lyons

Author:Steve Lyons
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-07-13T01:05:14+00:00

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147

Ace emerged from the side street and into the blinding winter sunshine and cold, crisp air of Tottenham Court Road. She donned her shades and inspected her surroundings. Same old crowds, same London traffic (ah! — but wasn’t that a T-reg Taxi? What year would that make it?), same old Centre Point: a concrete sentry over the busy junction. The air was heavier than she was used to, pollution refracting the shop lights and the early Christmas illuminations. Ace gave a wry smile, walking past the McDonalds branch she had briefly worked in a lifetime ago. Not many places survived her presence so long.

She crossed as soon as the traffic eased and jogged down Charing Cross Road (she considered the tube, but this was healthier and she’d been out of practice). She could have got closer, but materializing in public was something the Doctor would have frowned upon. She had chosen the nearest, most likely deserted spot she could remember from her fries-shovelling days. Even so, she had risked unravelling the space/time continuum or perhaps providing an old drunk with an anecdote no one would believe.

She paused at a news vendor’s and read the date on the Standard: 30 November 2002. Three days cajoling the semi-sentient hopper, coaxing better-than-normal accomplishments from it, and still she couldn’t get all the way to 2004. Mind you, this wasn’t bad. She flashed it a brief thought of gratitude as she hurried on towards Leicester Square.

She had had no right to expect this century at all, really.

The Doctor inspected the laboratory, sniffing the boiling Contents of a glass beaker to learn that it contained only green-dyed water. The room was a clutter of test tubes and jars and electrical equipment labelled ‘Amp Extractor’, ‘Light Year Timer’ and other improbabilities. A vat of murky liquid on the main bench professed to hold a ‘Naughty Brain’ and warned the user not to place it in home-built humanoid heads.

The Doctor’s curiosity was shared by Bernice, who wandered about and touched everything. Melanie perched on a stool and shook her head repeatedly as if hoping to wake up. Roslyn was nonplussed but attentive, waiting for an explanation.

148

‘I knew it,’ said Benny at length. ‘Hell is a mad scientist’s lab, and you’re in charge of it!’

‘This isn’t Hell,’ the Doctor assured her. It’s only a sequel.’

‘To what?’

‘To our encounter with Jason and his identity-usurping colleague.’

‘So where are we?’ Roz asked. She looked up as thunder crashed overhead. Rain sliced onto and through the cracked pavement lights and formed a puddle on the wooden floor. A jagged lightning fork cast her face into relief.

‘In what is obviously Jason’s idea of my headquarters.’

‘You mean he created this?’ said Mel.

‘Somehow, I don’t think he just found it here.’

‘We’re dealing with someone who possesses a real comic book mentality,’ Benny considered, frowning at a meter which purported to measure neutron flows in gigacurrents.

‘Don’t knock it,’ said the Doctor, ‘it’s that mentality which kept us alive when, by rights, we should have been blasted to ashes.

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