Doctor Who - The 8th Doctor - 53 - Hope by Mark Clapham

Author:Mark Clapham
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction, General, Space Opera, Doctor Who (Fictitious Character), Fiction
ISBN: 9780563538462
Publisher: BBC Pubns
Published: 2002-02-14T08:00:00+00:00

‘Anji,’ said Silver thinly, holding out his oversized hand. ‘Please take my hand.’

Reluctantly, Anji reached out and held on to Silver’s hand. It felt cold, slightly scratchy.

‘You felt a slight tickle, didn’t you?’ asked Silver, taking his hand away.

Anji nodded.

‘That scratching sensation disguised a minute injection into your hand,’

explained Silver. ‘You now have a nanobot in your bloodstream transmitting your position. I put a similar device into the Doctor when he shook on our deal a couple of days back.’

‘And SatNet is the only system that can pinpoint the signal,’ finished Miraso. ‘It’s a lot of effort to find one man.’

Silver turned to Miraso. ‘That one man and his current location is the key to a mystery that is undermining our entire way of life. I wish to banish uncertainty from Hope and from Endpoint as a whole. The Endpointers will have the certainty that I can protect them from anything. And I will do whatever it takes to reestablish that certainty.’

‘No matter what the cost?’ asked Anji.

‘Precisely,’ said Silver. ‘Some things are worth any price asked, aren’t they?’

A voice echoed in the darkness.

‘How is the patient?’

I’m not the patient, he thought. I’m the Doctor. But he couldn’t speak, couldn’t move. He couldn’t even see.

He slid back into an anaesthetised haze.

Some time later, he found he could see. He opened his eyes, then closed them again. It was bright out there, huge lights hanging from the ceiling.

He rolled over on to his front, bringing himself up on his hands and knees, using his own body to create a shaded area to look at. This was harder than it should have been – he rolled to his right and bumped back, having CHAPTER 9. DOWNWARD SPIRALS

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hit some kind of barrier. He shuffled to the left and tried again, this time successfully. The concrete beneath his palms felt pitted and damp. He could hear dripping water, the clicking of machines. He opened his eyes, looked down. The backs of his hands seemed blurred. Contrary to the saying, he didn’t know them at all. It was as if something was moving under his skin.

‘The sense of disorientation you are feeling is understandable,’ said a cold, clipped voice. ‘Your presence represents a threat to our environment here. As such, you have been subjected to a full nanoscan. Your entire body is being picked over, cell by cell, for any material potentially harmful to us.

Don’t worry, providing you survive, it will be over soon.’

Oh, good, thought the Doctor, collapsing to the floor. If this was a temporary state, he was willing to sleep it off.

More time passed, and the Doctor was woken by the same sophisticated voice that had informed him of his condition.

‘As you can see from these scans,’ the voice was saying, ‘our patient here is not human, and neither is he one of the surface mutations. He has many totally alien qualities, although most of these would seem to be dormant, the patient’s basic life signs operating at human normal. One might

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