Doctor Who and the Empire of Glass | Page 3

road, oblivious of the traffic. Her odd gait took her straight in front of Matt's dray. He cried out incoherently but she didn't seem to hear him. He caught one last glimpse of her face - calm and expressionless - before she fell beneath the horse's hooves. By a miracle, the horse managed to step over her as she tried to get to her feet. Matt heaved desperately on the reins to pull the horse in, but the momentum of the heavy barrels pushed the dray forward, carrying the horse with it. Matt glanced down as he passed the woman's body. She looked up at him, and there was nothing in her eyes at all: no concern, no fear, nothing.
And then a sound cut through the air, stopping conversations and making heads turn. It sounded like a sapling, bent to breaking point, suddenly snapping. It was a wet, final sound, and it occurred just as the dray's front right wheel passed over the woman's leg.
The young man stopped, his face ashen with horror. Matt hauled on the reins, trying urgently to stop the dray before its second set of wheels compounded the damage. He kept waiting for her to scream, but there was nothing but silence from beneath the dray. Everything seemed to have stopped in the street: faces were frozen, voices stilled. Time itself had paused.
The horse neighed loudly, jerking back onto its hind legs as the reins bit home. The dray lurched to a halt. Matt quickly scrambled down to the rutted, dusty road, dreading what he would find, but the sight that met his eyes was so bizarre, so unbelievable, that he just stared uncomprehendingly for a moment, unable to take it in and make sense of it.
The woman was getting to her feet. She frowned slightly, as one might when bothered by a mosquito. Her left leg was crushed to half its width beneath the knee, and her calf slanted at a crazy angle to her thigh. Shards of bone projected from the wound, startlingly white against the red-raw flesh. She started to walk, lurching wildly like an upside-down pendulum, and she was across the road and into a side alley before anybody could think to stop her.
Notes: Prologue




Chapter One
The first thing that Vicki saw when she walked into the TARDIS's control room was Steven Taylor's hand hovering over the central, mushroom-shaped console.
"Don't touch those controls!" she snapped, her voice echoing around the room.
Steven's shoulders hunched defensively, and he glanced towards her. Gradually the echoes of her voice faded away, leaving only the deep hum that meant the TARDIS was still in flight.
"Why not?" he asked truculently, brows heavy, jaw thrust forward. "I'm a qualified space pilot, aren't I? These switches and levers may look complicated, but I'm sure I can figure them out. And the Doctor's been gone for hours. He may never come back. We need to be able to fly this thing." His fingers closed around a large red switch on one facet of the control console. His fingers caressed it hesitantly. It was obvious to Vicki that he hadn't got a clue what he was doing, but didn't want to admit it. "This thing must make us materialize," he added. "Once we've landed, we can take a look around, find out where we are." He sounded as if he was trying to convince himself as much as her.
"I think that's the door control," she said quietly.
He hesitated, his indecisive frown quickly replaced by one of exasperation. "Look, if you've got any better ideas, let me know: Otherwise, trust me for once."
"Why can't we just wait?" she said, already knowing the answer. Because Steven was incapable of waiting for anything, that was why. Because he'd spent so long impotently pacing around his prison cell on Mechanus before the Doctor had rescued him that his patience had been used up. Not that he would ever admit it, of course. Not even to himself. It was odd, Vicki thought as she gazed at Steven's older yet somehow more innocent face, that her time spent stranded had been perhaps the most idyllic of her life. She'd only had Bennett and Sandy the Sand Monster for company on Dido, but she'd been content. Now, although she was learning so much by travelling with the Doctor, that contentment had been lost. Every moment of her life, every person that she met, demanded something of her.
"We can't just wait," Steven explained, breaking her chain of introspection, "because the Doctor might be in trouble. The way he just... just vanished, right in front of us..." He hesitated, and rubbed a hand across his face. He was tired. Tired and scared, Vicki realized. He'd been alone for so long that he found the prospect of taking responsibility terrifying. 'It was like