61 - The Infinity Race

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2024-12-08 0 0 664.59KB 218 页 5.9玖币
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Welcome to the Selonart Trans-Global Regatta – The ultimate sporting event in
the universe!
The Doctor is in trouble. He has his own race to win. Stuck in a parallel
dimension, pursuing the mysterious Sabbath, he must unravel a complex
plot in which he himself may be a pawn.
Following the only lead, the TARDIS arrives on Selonart – a planet famed
for the unique, friction-nullifying light water that covers its surface. A water
that propels vast, technological yachts across its waves at inconceivable
speeds. All in all, an indulgent, boastful demonstration of power by Earth’s
ruthless multi-stellar corporations.
Is Sabbath’s goal to win the race? Who is Bloom, the enigmatic Selonart
native?
As the danger escalates, the Doctor realises he is being manoeuvred into
engineering his own downfall. Is it already too late for him?
This is another in the series of original adventures for the Eighth Doctor.
The Infinity Race
Simon Messingham
This book is dedicated to JULIE,
patience incarnate
Thanks due to Caz, as ever.
Justin and David
And especially Alex Kirk. . .
A belated thanks to all who served on our cruelly
neglected masterpiece of comic irony:
Tales of Uplift and Moral Improvement.
Contents
Prologue 5
Chapter One 14
Chapter Two 25
Chapter Three 38
Chapter Four 51
Chapter Five 65
Chapter Six 79
Chapter Seven 92
Chapter Eight 105
Chapter Nine 119
Chapter Ten 132
Chapter Eleven 145
Chapter Twelve 158
Chapter Thirteen 171
Chapter Fourteen 185
Chapter Fifteen 199
3
Contents 4
Chapter Sixteen 213
Prologue
The thing is: we screwed up and now there’s a boat on the TARDIS console.
How is this possible I, Anji, hear you ask.
I’d thought, no I was convinced I was out of this. Back at work, getting my
life together; tamed, settled. . . moored. The world a normal place again.
My life like my job: compartmentalised, structured, accountable.
That was what I wanted.
What I got, was Siberia and the Doctor.
And now. . . now (because it’s gone beyond flying around the universe
running down corridors doing good, it’s gone beyond anything rational or
understandable), nothing will ever be the same again. Thanks to the Doctor,
thanks to all three of us, thanks to that. . . pain in the proverbial, Sabbath,
reality has been corrupted. Reality has been blown wide open and no one,
least of all the man around whom all this stuff revolves, has the faintest idea
of how to sort it out.
Which I find more than a little frightening. I just want to put that on
record.
You see, back in the old days (which despite the dangers and the evil
and the general unpleasantness are, in my jaded brain, indeed beginning
to merit the adjective ‘good’), one would always have the knowledge, the
ambition, the general feel good feeling that no matter how bad it got, no
matter how much you were convinced you were about to be horribly killed
and the universe destroyed, somehow the Doctor would get you home.
And now there’s no home to go to. Or if there is, it’s as if some deranged
and mischievous streetcorner chancer, perhaps tripping on a mild psychedelic
substance, has stroked a surreality squeegee across that home, applying a
wash over the world, knocking it out of joint, slipping it out of the corner of
one’s eye and all the other clich´
es that generally come to mean that we’ve
screwed up and now there’s a boat on the TARDIS console.
‘It’s a clue. It must be,’ says (oops, said) the Doctor.
5
Prologue 6
‘It’s a boat,’ I said back. I was sulking, what with my world being altered
forever and that kind of thing. ‘Clues are clues and that’s a boat.’
‘It’s a trick,’ said Fitz. ‘A damn dirty Sabbath trick.’
The Doctor squinted at it. ‘How did it get here?’
We’d been looking at the boat for some time. Staring at it, walking war-
ily around it, swearing at it (me, I’m afraid). Meanwhile, the TARDIS just
hummed away, as if it had placed the thing here itself to taunt us. This
intruder.
I suppose I’d better come clean. The boat was, of course, a model boat. A
small one, about fifty centimetres long and twenty wide. A slim, powerful,
streamlined thing (because as you’re undoubtedly aware I know soo much
about boats) that looked very fast. If it had been real. And big.
As for my question, the Doctor responded with a statement so preposterous
that he was obviously ducking it. He snapped his fingers and nodded his
curls.
What he said was, ‘It’s a souvenir. That’s what it is.’
‘Let’s get rid of it,’ suggested Fitz, looking wary. ‘It’s clearly a trick. And a
trap.’
‘And more,’ the Doctor agreed. ‘But it’s our only clue.’
‘How did it get here?’ I asked again, refusing to be ignored. I mean, it
was my life he’d plucked me out of. I felt, what with the Earth being altered,
the time-lines going doolally, with the still unbelievable (and patently daft)
idea that now England was ruled by a different monarch than the one I
remembered, I felt like someone had vandalised my home and I would never,
no matter how much I redecorated and did it up, never feel safe in it again.
The Doctor was rubbing his chin, peering at the boat on the console. ‘Oh I
think it’s quite safe. . . ’
‘Doctor!’ I yelled. Yes, perhaps I was starting to lose it a little. I don’t
remember exactly how I was feeling. Just a vague, cold numbing sense of
panic as the foundations that underpinned my life were slowly and delicately
removed. ‘How the hell did it get here?’
He rubbed his nose and looked at me as if he’d only just realised I was
going mad. ‘Well, obviously Sabbath left it here. It’s a trick. And a trap.’
‘That’s what Isaid. . . ’ said Fitz. ‘How? How can he get into the TARDIS?’
‘I don’t really know. Sabbath, if that is his real name, is a man of many
parts. To be honest, I don’t know how many parts. Extraordinary fellow.’
Prologue 7
And for a moment, I saw nothing but admiration written on to the Doctor’s
face. Which is when I got really worried.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘You maintain that this. . . it. . . this boat. . . is a souvenir.’
‘That’s correct.’ (Ooh, so smug).
‘Well then, clever-clogs. A souvenir of what?’
Banard was sweating as he powered down the ship. These mists into which
they had landed were unnatural; somehow. . . curious, like probing fingers.
There was a sound here, a hum or a cry of despair that rang around the
mind. A warning to unwary travellers. A sound that crawled into the brain
and probed for weaknesses. A sound like death.
Not for the first time Banard wondered if he had made a big mistake com-
ing to Demigest.
He flicked through the visual monitors lodged in the base of the hull.
Outside, the surface was nothing but misty, barren, dead creases of rock
littered with broken-teeth boulders. The occasional dry trunk of a blasted,
petrified tree groped upwards; branches twisted and curled as talons. The
mountains beyond were sheer white horrors reminding Banard of nothing
less than the peeled fleshlessness of skulls. All in all, not a nice place. And
whatever walked here, well. . .
They had dropped through the atmosphere undetected by any electronic
means, Banard knew that. It was his job. His ship went beyond stealth; it
was stealth.
But whatever ruled Demigest was reputed not to need electronics to track
down its trespassers.
No one came here. Not ever. Only Banard would dare, and even then only
for vast amounts of money. Demigest was off limits, out of bounds to all
but the inner core of the Empire’s galactic cartographers. Something terrible
happened on Demigest once; something Earth liked to keep a secret. This
little lost planet, once supposed to be a colony and now locked up tighter
than the emperor’s mother.
Banard activated his ground camouflage mechanisms and waited as the
black shutters slid silently down across his bridge-viewing plates. He re-
sisted his natural human instinct to shudder. He was a professional and his
reputation said that he was a man without fear. Without mercy and without
morals too, but mainly without fear.
This job was a lot of money. Time to wake the guest.
Prologue 8
If ever there was a man less suited to traversing this haunted terrain, Banard
would have to search long and hard to find him. His passenger was like
a florid barrel: big and round and stuffed with rich produce. Banard was
stringy and lean, knocked into shape by a thousand covert missions. So how
come, he thought as he swung his SMG round his sweat-drenched back, how
come he’s ahead of me and dry as a bone?
The passenger looked back, eyes dark and piercing. There was a strength
in him, something tense and dangerous. He may have been a barrel but
he was packed tight with muscles. Not as decadent as he liked to appear.
Banard knew an assassin when he saw one. There was also a calmness about
this stranger, clad as he was in his absurdly sumptuous black velvet robes.
He looked like a stage magician, someone who knew show business. Banard
knew nothing about show business. He only knew about business.
The pair clambered quietly up the mountainside. The strange hum, that
distant shriek, wailed louder now, unsettling Banard. A death cry that never
died. He kept blinking and looking round, waiting for a dark shape to come
out of the mist.
What did live here on Demigest? And why would this stage magician want
to come looking for it?
Banard had picked up the passenger after almost a year of intensely com-
plicated and secretive negotiation. Banard did not advertise his services. One
didn’t, unless the day came when they legalised smuggling, the slave trade,
drug running and good old-fashioned safaris. . . well, new-fangled planet-
hopping village-destroying peasant-shooting safaris, then. And, of course,
going places you’re not supposed to go. Otherwise known as trespass.
They had met, at last, in orbit around Proxima II, with Banard’s stealth ship
hidden inside an old EdStobb space freighter. The passenger had waltzed up
to the hull under the noses of several gunpoints and said snootily, ‘Is this it?
I had expected something a little more up to date.’
Needless to say, Banard hadn’t taken this dismissal of his stealth ship par-
ticularly well, especially since it had taken many years, a lot of money and
even more bodies to piece together. ‘Still,’ the passenger had continued in
his warm, amused voice. ‘I suppose it will do.’ And had proceeded to hand
over the electronic transfer for a ridiculously large charity donation. Banard’s
charity.
The plan, in the end, was simple. Just fly the passenger to Demigest. No
names, money no object.
摘要：

WelcometotheSelonartTrans-GlobalRegatta–Theultimatesportingeventintheuniverse!TheDoctorisintrouble.Hehashisownracetowin.Stuckinaparalleldimension,pursuingthemysteriousSabbath,hemustunravelacomplexplotinwhichhehimselfmaybeapawn.Followingtheonlylead,theTARDISarrivesonSelonart–aplanetfamedfortheunique,...

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