Big Bang Generation Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 by Gary Russell

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Broadway Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  BROADWAY BOOKS and its logo, B D W Y, are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  This edition published by arrangement with BBC Books, an imprint of Ebury Publishing, a division of the Random House Group Ltd.

  Doctor Who is a BBC Wales production for BBC One. Executive producers: Steven Moffat and Brian Minchin.

  BBC, DOCTOR WHO, AND TARDIS (word marks, logos and devices) are trademarks of the British Broadcasting Corporation and are used under license. Bernice Summerfield created by Paul Cornell and used by kind permission. Peter Guy Summerfield created by Jacqueline Rayner and used by kind permission. Jack created by Scott Handcock and used by kind permission. Talpidians created by Simon Barnard and Paul Morris and used by kind permission.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request

  ISBN 9781101905814

  eBook ISBN 9781101905821

  Editorial director: Albert DePetrillo

  Series consultant: Justin Richards

  Project editor: Steve Tribe

  Cover design: Lee Binding © Woodlands Books Ltd 2015

  Production: Alex Goddard

  v4.1_r1

  a

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1: Too Much Information

  2: One of Those Days

  3: Be My Icon

  4: Of Crime and Passion

  5: Read My Lips

  6: Planet Earth

  7: Criminals in the Capitol

  8: All She Wants Is

  9: Notorious

  10: Other People’s Lives

  11: Last Day on Earth

  12: Burning the Ground

  13: Last Man Standing

  14: Pressure Off

  Endnote

  This book is, as promised,

  for Dai, Ed, Mike, Andy, James and Richie.

  Thanks for a fab Saturday afternoon in Maesteg.

  1

  Too Much Information

  ‘You sent postcards? To her?’

  ‘I had to get him involved somehow, and you know that just asking him will get you nowhere. And I knew she’d make sure he came. Let’s face it, even he never argues with her. Must be the whiskers.’

  ‘That’s true, he can be very annoying like that. Won’t do the sensible thing, but get a ball of angry fur to yell at him and Bob’s yer uncle.’

  ‘Plus, we initially got a bit lost in the time stream, kept popping up for three or four hours in random places. Right basic location and time, but never exactly where we needed to be.’

  ‘And you dragged him to Legion? To home?’

  ‘It seemed a good idea at the time as his being on Earth was clearly interfering with our travelling through time. This seemed neutral. But I think it’s gone a bit wrong.’

  ‘You’re telling me!’ She suddenly reached out for the woman who had surprised her a few moments ago, but instinctively the other woman drew back.

  ‘No touchy-touchy,’ she said quickly.

  ‘Sorry. Silly me, I forgot.’ She smiled at this. ‘It’s been a while since I did this voluntarily. And by the way, can I just say, this is convoluted. Even for us, this is convoluted.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry. If it helps, let me just tell you that two thousand years from here isn’t much fun. It’s all a bit boring and the people are snarky – probably because they were expecting a different person altogether. And it’s raining. A lot.’

  ‘And you’ve got access to time travel.’

  ‘A time portal; it’s not quite the same. Inside a pyramid, which is inside a mountain, on Aztec Moon.’

  ‘Aztec Moon? You found the Pyramid Eternia? Oh my god, what’s it like?’

  ‘Big. Now far more importantly, I’m here with a number of very dull shouty people from the Church. I’m just hoping that while I’m doing this, talking to you I mean, those same dull people back in the future (ooh, I’ve always wanted to say that) are still frozen in a handy time eddy or they’re going to ask me some very annoying questions when I get back.’

  ‘I need to get my head around this. You left here and went to the fifty-first century, only to pop back here and ask me to get involved, get him involved, and then go back to the twenty-first century to actually be involved.’

  ‘Pretty much, yeah.’

  ‘And you couldn’t do it yourself?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Something happened. The, ummm, rock thing that I dug up on Legion (of all places!) and took to Aztec Moon got a bit damaged and doesn’t work that well.’

  ‘Do you mean the Glamour? You found the Glamour? As well as the Pyramid Eternia? Hell, you found Aztec Moon? That’s amazing!’

  ‘Can we focus a little bit here, before I cease to exist for all time?’

  ‘Sorry. Yes. That’s important too. Absolutely. So, umm, what happened to the Glamour?’

  ‘More a “who” than a “what”, I’m afraid.’

  She sighed. ‘I think I can guess that one.’

  ‘I think you can. So there was just enough power to zap me back from Earth to here, to tell you to go all the way, and then go all the way to Earth and do what I couldn’t do because of this time eddy thing.’

  ‘And that’s why we need him.’

  ‘He’s a Time Lord; he can do whatever it is he does, all Time Lordy, and rescue us. But he needs to go back to where it all went wrong and put it right then. And for that to happen, he sort of needs you.’

  ‘Of course he does.’ She sighed. ‘What body is he in, by the way? I keep seeing him in the weirdest of orders and it’s very confusing.’

  ‘No idea. With any luck, it’ll be a new one to me.’

  The other woman touched her own hand. It seemed to be fading in and out of existence.

  ‘Hmmm, I think I’m beginning to break up. I really need you to get going or I’m just going to be dispersed into the space-time vortex, and that would be a real shame after everything I’ve done to avoid that over the years.’

  She reached down to the floor and put something down. It seemed to be a piece of rock, utterly unimpressive, just straightforward rock with maybe a slight white line of crystal threaded through it. She looked up.

  ‘When I’m gone, you’re safe to pick it up. Keep it safe and never let it go. It’ll take you to me when you are ready.’

  ‘And how will I know when that will be?’

  ‘It reads…signatures, biological signatures. Once everyone that it knows needs to be here, vwoosh, your journey begins.’

  ‘Okaaaay. And again I ask, how will I know when that time comes?’

  ‘You won’t. So keep it with you and be prepared. I imagine it will be very soon though. Cos, you know, life’s like that. I can’t tell you anything more than that.’

  ‘Of course. I know how this works. Sort of. Maybe. Now, look—’

  ‘Listen, if this all goes well, there’s something else I need you to do for me. Well, for us I suppose.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Break the First Law of Time. Completely and utterly.’

  ‘Why would I do that?’

  ‘It’ll all become clear eventually. I hope. Now then,
I think that’s everything I needed to say…’

  ‘No, you haven’t said anything. Well, nothing that makes sense. You have to tell me about—’

  ‘Sorry, I have to go or I’m going to completely dissipate. And I’d rather try and hold myself together till you get here and put things right.’

  She nodded. ‘OK, you pop back to the future (I’ve always wanted to say that, too and I got it right!) and I’ll make sure it all goes to plan here.’ She peered closer. ‘How far from the future are you anyway?’

  ‘Not much, why?’

  ‘You look older than I remember.’

  ‘Cheeky cow!’

  And the other woman vanished.

  ‘You know what? There are days when I just hate my life,’ the first woman muttered to no one in particular.

  —

  Elsewhere in the universe, things were coming into alignment.

  Thousands of years ago, a lump of ordinary-looking rock, threaded through with equally ordinary-looking crystal lattices, fell out of the sky above the planet Earth, hit another piece of rock, did a bit of damage, and got itself buried at the foot of a mountain, observed by a solitary dark-skinned human wearing not very much in the way of clothing bar a small white piece of hide, whose friends hadn’t worked out how to invent a calendar yet.

  In the early twentieth century, by which time the planet’s indigenous population had worked out how to make calendars and used them quite frequently, a German amateur archaeologist and his family were getting off a ship at the Port of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. They had travelled a long way, for a long time, and were not in the best of moods. The man was nervous, always looking over his shoulder. The woman was just angry at everything. The young son was still amused by something that had happened three days previously. He had started an argument with an English child aboard the ship about some toy soldiers die Englander owned and, having lost the argument, proceeded to pick up the victor’s toy soldiers and thrown them overboard, where they rapidly sank to the bottom of the South Pacific.

  In London, very early in the twenty-first century, an alien from the planet Kadept who really had no right to be on Earth in this time period (he was from six centuries further on and quite a few galaxies across) licked a postage stamp and stuck it on the back of a postcard showing a massive shopping mall on it then popped the postcard into a red pillar box. He stepped back into the road and got clipped by a black cab. He hopped, quite literally, away, clutching his sore bum and yelling some very explicit Kadeptian curse words at anyone who would listen.

  In the twenty-seventh century, a ship from the Pakhar BurrowWorld went far beyond the legitimate frontier worlds and arrived on the degenerate backworld of Legion, on the edge of the known galaxies and whatever lay beyond.

  In the thirty-sixth century, a group of scholars were arguing about where the ancients of ‘the Ancients of the Universe’ had been based, what had happened to their technology and whether the legends of the Glamour were true or not. They consulted the writings of Trout the Talpidian; the journals of the Generational Professorial Clone Family of Candy; the mythical Sky Ray Lolly Wrappers of the Miwk Archives; the Holy Dam Scriptures of the Tarka People of Leina VI; the Repository Banks on the Large Moon of Pixlie and even requested access to the Panopticon Records from the Obverse, but got no response.

  In the fifty-first century, at Stormcage Confinement Facility Number One, a message was received by a representative of the Church of the Papal Mainframe requesting the loan of a prisoner called Professor River Song. The request was immediately denied.

  Also in the fifty-first century, two criminals were sentenced to life without parole at a different Stormcage Confinement Facility, Number Eight. Human con artist Cyrrus Globb had been ensnared by one of his ‘conquests’, the Spyro weaponista, known to everyone as Kik the Assassin, who had been sent to, well, assassinate him, oddly enough. The Church had managed to arrest both of them on a number of charges and both of them had been imprisoned in adjoining cells to further their humiliation.

  —

  And in the TARDIS, as it drifted through the space-time vortex, one of the last survivors of the planet Gallifrey sat reading a dog-eared copy of The Hungry Tiger of Oz by candlelight, because he could. It was his TARDIS and if he wanted to have all the lights off and read by candlelight, he would. Could. Should.

  Because there was no one else aboard his ship to tell him otherwise.

  He was alone.

  He was lonely.

  He was also, as often happened with him, the reason all those other things were happening across the past and future, although he hadn’t, again as often happened with him, got the slightest clue this was the case.

  2

  One of Those Days

  Sometime in the early part of the twenty-seventh century, after one of a series of galactic wars, a planet on the furthest reaches of, well anywhere really, was colonised, inhabited and civilised.

  Frankly, ‘civilised’ was not a word that was used by those that ended up there – mainly because, after an early attempt to create a city, the rest of the planet went significantly ignored. And partially because the ‘dark side’ of the planet was dead scary. This was called the ‘dark side’ because the planet rotated very slowly creating an almost permanent daytime, and thus the ‘dark side’ only rotated towards the rest of the galaxy once in anyone’s lifetime. If they were very old.

  And also because no one could be bothered.

  Once you had bars, stores and a couple of dodgy establishments that nice people didn’t talk about, why bother going beyond Main Street?

  So a spaceport, a few bars and stores and an awful lot of criminals were what made the planet well known. That and the fact it was called Legion – not the most hospitable of names for what really was the least hospitable of planets.

  Most of the galaxy opted to stay away. Even law-enforcers rarely trekked out there – after all, what was the point. If the people they were pursuing ended up on Legion, they weren’t going anywhere else so could be caught on leaving. Or more likely, they’d die in a bar fight, or getting caught in one of the storms that lashed the place ninety per cent of the time.

  Now, one of the more popular bars – popular because it had the best beer and the lowest body count – was the White Rabbit. Odd name for a bar but then the owner was pretty odd, so the Doctor had heard.

  He was musing on this as he walked up Main Street, dodging an ostrich-sized Land Crow that sped by, its rider clearly drunk and singing loudly. Then the rider fell off, but the Land Crow kept running.

  The Doctor was level with the crumpled rider, who was still singing, lying in the mud of the road outside the entrance to the White Rabbit. With a last look at the tuneless wailer, the Doctor pushed the grubby saloon doors apart.

  ‘Well, well, well, look what the cat finally dragged in,’ said a high-pitched and rather irritated-sounding voice.

  The Doctor looked across the not-terribly-busy bar, and realised the speaker was addressing him.

  She was small, about four feet tall, slumped in a stained and cigarette-burned green velvet armchair, a glass of fizzy water in her hand. The Doctor knew that because he knew that these days that was all Ker’a’Nol the Pakhar (Keri to her friends) drank. Ever since…well, that was a whole different lifetime ago. Literally.

  To humans, Pakhars tended to resemble giant hamsters – tubby bodies, short arms, slightly longer legs. Their paws were clawed and their noses constantly twitching. Keri’s eyes were brown like her fur and she wore a figure-hugging set of combat fatigues (purely casual, she was no warrior – although in a fight, she’d had proven to be quite a good, if noisy, scrapper).

  Her left leg was resting on a small occasional table that had been put out especially for her, encased as it was in plaster. A lot of plaster. Clearly Keri had broken her leg.

  The Doctor waved an arm around the seriously tacky surroundings they were in. ‘Nice place,’ he lied.

  Keri drained her glas
s. ‘Of all the places to choose, why Legion, yeah?’ she asked.

  The Doctor sighed. He’d forgotten Keri’s little ‘yeah?’ tick in her speech. It could get very wearing. ‘Ummm…’ He gave her a quizzical look. ‘Ummmm, no, you chose it. You wanted to see me.’

  Keri Pakhar sank back into her seat with a sigh. ‘No Doctor, you wanted to see me. You sent me a postcard saying you were coming.’ Keri reached over to the heavily glass-ringed table and scooped up the card in her paw, waving it at him. ‘See? Postcard. Forwarded on from the Mail and Package Archive on somewhere called Ardethe Four – wherever that is. With too little postage on it, by the way, so you owe me money. I had to pay a not-insubstantial fine to collect it. From the Legion Post Office (who knew, they have a Post Office here!). Anyway it wasn’t easy. Not with this!’ And Keri jabbed the postcard towards her plaster-encased leg..

  The Doctor opened his mouth a couple of times, to speak, but then didn’t. Instead he knelt down by Keri’s leg.

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ the hamster-like Pakhar hissed. ‘You have no idea what’s been on that floor. Or indeed what might still be on the floor. The White Rabbit isn’t exactly hygienic, yeah?’

  The Doctor stared over at the flickering neon sign above the bar – at least two tubes were on the way out. The whole bar was covered with more dust and dirt than the Doctor had seen for a long time. And was that blood on that stool?

  In one corner, an old human with no teeth and an old-style prospector’s hat was talking to himself and laughing at an imagined joke. The Doctor looked in the other direction. A couple of Killoran mercenaries were getting slowly drunk. Between them, a little scared looking, was a Tahnn rolling an eight-sided die. Platinum-lined credit chips were piled up in front of them. The Tahnn clearly wasn’t doing well.

  ‘It hasn’t mended?’

  ‘No it hasn’t mended.’

  The Doctor whipped out his sonic screwdriver.

  ‘Don’t you dare,’ Keri hissed.

  ‘I just wanted to see if it could help.’

  ‘How is that going to help, yeah?’

  The Doctor frowned. ‘I don’t know. Maybe something has changed the atomic structure of your bones and so the sonic might knit things together faster?’