The Beast of Babylon Read online

  ‘Tell me about Rose Tyler.’ Ali watched as the Doctor peered at some kind of monitor and, satisfied, stepped back from the controls. He turned and beamed at her.

  ‘Rose? She was funny and tough and clever and resourceful. She saved me, and she saved her boyfriend Mickey, and she saved the whole damned planet.’

  ‘Oh, you’re in love,’ said Ali with more than a touch of sarcasm.

  ‘No,’ said the Doctor, and he wasn’t smiling any more. ‘Don’t make that mistake, Ali. Let’s just say she was good company. And I like company.’

  ‘It must be difficult for you,’ said Ali. ‘Living as long as you do.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve had so many companions in my life,’ said the Doctor. ‘Susan and Barbara and Ian, Prince Egon, Jamie, Polly, Ella McBrien, Sarah-Jane Smith, Leela … They come, and, inevitably, they go. But without them …’

  ‘You’re the last lonely Time Lord.’

  ‘What is it with teenage girls?’ asked the Doctor. ‘Always digging. When I met Rose I’d only recently regenerated. I’m sure you know all about regeneration – you’ve probably got a diploma in it – and I was feeling a bit like a soft-shell crab, waiting for my new shell to harden – if you’ll pardon the analogy. I was still finding my feet. I thought: new body, new start, new companion.’

  ‘So what happened? Did you ask her?’

  ‘I did, as it goes. And she turned me down. I’d come on too strong, I guess, played my cards too soon. As I say, I was still adjusting to the regeneration – not quite calibrated. She just looked at me. She’s got a funny face, big mouth and big eyes … a big heart.’

  ‘You are in love.’

  The Doctor ignored Ali and ploughed on. ‘And that’s why she couldn’t come. Because she cared more about what she’d have to leave behind than what I could offer her. Her family, her boyfriend, her life. I couldn’t argue with that. I couldn’t expect her to drop everything and go gallivanting off with a perfect stranger in search of adventure.’

  ‘Are you saying I don’t have a big heart?’ Ali blurted out before she could stop herself.

  ‘No. Not at all.’

  ‘You think I don’t care, don’t you?’ Ali was trying not to get angry. She was sure that it would show. That she’d be flushed an ugly red.

  The Doctor looked wide-eyed and innocent, a little dismissive.

  ‘Did I say that? I don’t remember saying that. As I explained before we took off, I can land you right back on Karkinos a second after we left. Nobody will ever know. I didn’t have time to tell Rose that.’

  ‘I know you didn’t really want me to come with you, though.’ Ali could feel herself shaking.

  ‘You’re here, aren’t you? So stop your whingeing. Now, hold on to something – I need to get ready for landing.’

  His goofy grin calmed her down a little.

  ‘But if you already saved the Earth,’ said Ali, gripping a rail, ‘why do you need to go back there?’

  ‘It’s like this, Ali.’ The Doctor had started to pace about. ‘I said goodbye to Rose, I came in here and started up the engines and, the next thing I knew, lights were flashing, alarms were blaring. It was all bells and buzzers and bleepers and hooters and tweeters, and I knew that didn’t mean my dinner was ready in the microwave – you don’t know what I’m talking about, but it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that the TARDIS is uniquely tuned to sense any problems with the fabric of time, and just as it had alerted me to the presence of the Nestene Consciousness in a place called London back in Rose’s time, now it was alerting me to a very similar problem somewhere else on the planet, a few thousand years earlier.’

  ‘The Starman?’

  ‘Give the girl a big round of applause. Yes, they’re dangerous entities, born when stars collapse, when they become black holes and white dwarfs and red dwarfs and wormholes, or whatever you call them in your neck of the intergalactic woods. When they collapse they alter the shape of space and they alter the shape of time, and sometimes a Starman is created, a cosmic being with primitive consciousness. And if you’re not careful, they can escape from their own time and go trampling through existence, wiping it clean and rewriting history, rewriting the laws of science itself. I suppose you could call them gods, if you wanted, and it was always one of the duties of the Time Lords to police the universe and snap the cuffs on them when they popped up where they shouldn’t. Nasty things, you know, gods, they don’t much care for anyone other than themselves. Don’t like any competition. So off I went to try to head this Starman off at the pass.’

  ‘Why did it look like there were two of them?’ Ali asked, remembering those two ghost-like giants towering above the trees.

  ‘Yeah, he looked like twins, and it looked like they weren’t really there,’ said the Doctor. ‘That’s because it was existing in several different dimensions at once. Now, this orb –’ he picked up the silver ball from where it had been sitting in a cradle on the control console – ‘was created in a very similar way to the Starman. It has the power of a collapsed star in it. It was made by a very clever, and not very nice, character called the Exalted Holgoroth of All Tagkhanastria. And he was no better than the bloody Starman! He was only really interested in using the orb to build a space empire. So I thought I’d kill two pterodactyls with one stone. I paid a visit to the Holgoroth, pretending to be an emissary from the Crab Nebula, and I stole his orb right out from under his nose – which is an exciting story I’ll tell you one day if you’re very good – and I went after the Starman and got to him before he reached Earth. In the process he nearly killed me.’

  ‘I saw.’

  ‘But I had superior firepower!’ The Doctor tossed the orb into the air; it seemed to hover there for a moment, and then fell into the open palm of his hand with a slap. ‘And I knocked him for six! Well, into the twenty-sixth dimension anyway. He’s safe there for a while. Can’t do much damage – space and time’s always been a right mess in there. Might even sort things out a bit. Who knows?’

  ‘So if you flipped him into another dimension, why are we going back to Earth?’ Ali was trying to keep up and take all this in, but she was struggling.

  ‘It seems that my little ding-dong on your planet with the space twins has sent ripples spreading out.’ The Doctor mimed this with wiggling fingers. ‘Always the same – you push one problem under the carpet and another one pops out on the other side. Cause and effect, unforeseen consequences, the butterfly’s wing.’

  ‘What?’ Now Ali really had lost the thread.

  ‘In a nutshell,’ said the Doctor, ‘there’s another Starman, a worse one, a more powerful one, heading for Earth and I need to stop it. In fact, it’s probably already there.’

  ‘Can’t you just do what you did with the twins and grab it before it arrives?’ Ali asked.

  ‘No. That’s the thing. Me and this new Starman exist in the same time stream. A side-effect of using the orb. Unforeseen consequences. Turns out the magic orb is not as special as the Holgoroth claimed. Should have read the small print – “This item may not work as advertised!” Until I send this new Starman packing, the two of us have a time tag on us. We’re linked.’ The Doctor was back at the console again now, studying screens and meters, his hands a blur as they moved over the controls.

  ‘So now we’re landing on Earth,’ he shouted, ‘two thousand years before the birth of Christ …’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘He was a bit like Sherlock Holmes. Knew the answers to everything. Very good at solving mysteries. Some humans use him to measure time.’

  ‘And whereabouts on Earth?’

  ‘A place called Babylon. Lovely little spot – very hot in the summer, though.’

  ‘Doctor?’ said Ali. ‘One last thing.’

  ‘Make it quick.’

  ‘This new Starman, what will it look like?’

  ‘Good question.’

  ‘I mean, will it look like the twins?’

  ‘Probably not. It depends on what planets it’s absorbed
. It could look like anything – a lizard, a fish, a goat, a sea urchin, an anglepoise lamp or a giant amorphous blob. One thing I can tell you, though: it probably won’t look very nice.’

  4

  At that moment, Zabaia, High Priest of Marduk, was on his knees, his face pressed into the cold stone of the temple floor, his bony legs trembling. A wind from nowhere was kicking sand and grit into the air and throwing it under his robes, and the roar of some terrible dragon was screeching in his ears. He dared not look up, but he could sense that there was a new presence here. The shape of the space had changed. Something had appeared. Perhaps their god had arrived? Marduk himself.

  He gathered up enough courage to open one eye and look across the floor to see what the guards were doing. He was pleased that they, like him, had prostrated themselves before this apparition. No one would laugh at him for a coward now.

  ‘It is a dragon’s egg,’ he heard one of them whisper.

  ‘It is hatching!’ said another hoarse voice, and a third voice offered up a prayer for Marduk to protect them all.

  Zabaia waited, his heart thumping, his breath caught in his mouth. Waited for the wrath of Marduk to come down upon his head.

  ‘Hello there.’

  Slowly Zabaia raised his head. A man was standing there, dressed strangely in black clothing. And behind him – what fool would imagine it was an egg? – was a large blue chest. The man was eyeing Zabaia with the same puzzled expression that Zabaia himself no doubt wore.

  ‘Everything all right?’ said the man. ‘There’s really no need to kneel to me, you know. A simple handshake will do.’

  Gurgurum, captain of the royal guard, was standing by his king, Hammurabi, looking down on the world from the balcony outside the king’s quarters. From here, high up on the palace walls, they could see all of Babylon. But Hammurabi was not pleased. He was tugging at his beard, fiddling with the beads and precious rings that were knotted into it.

  ‘My family ruled Babylon when it was little more than a dusty desert village and they built it into the largest city in the world,’ he was saying.

  Gurgurum was proud to serve mighty Hammurabi. It was Hammurabi who had enlarged the temples, raised the city walls and strengthened the embankments that stopped the great, muddy Euphrates from flooding the streets. It was Hammurabi who had made Babylon safe. And a safe city can grow rich and powerful. Every day new houses were built, each one grander than the last, and down below Gurgurum could see the people going about their business, haggling in the market-places, hurrying down the crowded streets and across the many bridges.

  Outside the city walls, spreading out across the lush green flood-watered plain between the Euphrates and the Tigris, were fruit trees and date palms and wheat fields teeming with slaves hard at work growing the food that fed Hammurabi’s empire. And beyond the fertile plain was the desert, its hills and baked earth the same reddish yellow as the buildings in the city.

  ‘You are the greatest ruler the world has ever seen,’ said Gurgurum. ‘And you have built the greatest empire the world has ever known. In a few short years you have defeated the kingdoms of Eshnunna, Elam, Larsa and Mari. You have trampled their people underfoot and made them slaves; you have slaughtered their young men. You have brought glory to Babylon.’

  ‘But do you not feel it, Gurgurum?’ said Hammurabi, slamming his fists on the stone balustrade of the balcony.

  ‘Feel what, my king?’

  ‘As if a shadow has fallen across our world. I fear that all this might crumble. That our enemies will snatch it away from us.’

  ‘We are prepared,’ said Gurgurum. ‘Your army stands ready. Your chariots ride round the city walls to frighten off any enemy tribes who might be foolish enough to launch an attack.’

  ‘But the priests have warned me that our great god, Marduk of the Fifty Names, might abandon the city,’ said Hammurabi. ‘We sacrifice to him, we wash the mouth of his statue, but the gods don’t much care for the feeble concerns of man. Our cities are dust beneath their feet.’

  ‘You should not listen to the priests,’ said Gurgurum bitterly. ‘They are like frightened old women. Your strength is in your army. You must rule with the sword.’

  Gurgurum knew, though, that there was some truth in Hammurabi’s words. Tremors had been felt beneath the earth lately, and the wall of a temple had collapsed, killing a priest and three of his servants.

  ‘I must listen to the priests,’ said Hammurabi. ‘They are the only ones who can tell me what the gods are thinking. I cannot sleep for fear that Babylon is under attack from mysterious forces, that my enemies plot against me, that they will send spies and sorcerers to undermine me.’

  ‘Then kill your enemies. Kill everyone in Babylon who is not a Babylonian,’ urged Gurgurum. ‘Let the Euphrates run red with their blood. Choke the Tigris with their bodies. They have not earned the right to justice. Trust in your strength and the sharp edges of your soldiers’ weapons.’

  ‘And what if our enemies are the gods themselves?’ said Hammurabi. ‘What then?’

  ‘Then we pray, my lord,’ said Gurgurum and he laughed darkly.

  Hiding to the side of the open doorway, Ali was anxious to see out of the TARDIS and get her first glimpse of an alien planet. But she was obeying the Doctor. The last thing he’d told her before they’d landed was to keep herself hidden and look after the TARDIS for him until he was sure it was safe.

  ‘I don’t want you in any trouble.’

  ‘I can look after myself,’ Ali had protested.

  ‘I’m sure you can,’ the Doctor had said. ‘But I don’t want any upsets here, no unknown unknowns, no surprises that I’m not expecting.’

  ‘If you’re expecting it, then it’s not a surprise.’

  ‘Those are my favourite sorts of surprises, Ali – the unsurprising ones. We need to be discreet, OK? I just need to neutralise the Starman and get out quick.’

  So did this count as neutralising the Starman? She wasn’t sure. Though when the Doctor had first opened the TARDIS door he’d made a tiny disappointed sound, as if he’d made a mistake in his calculations and hadn’t quite been expecting to find what was out there.

  She could hear his voice through the doorway.

  ‘I need to speak to someone in charge. It’s rather urgent.’

  ‘Who are you? Are you a messenger from the gods?’

  ‘Er … You could say that … Yes, let’s say I’m a messenger from the gods.’

  Ali wished she could see what was happening. There was the sound of scraping feet, of voices in hurried conversation and then a cry of panic from the Doctor. ‘No! Don’t go in there!’

  A man appeared in the doorway, shorter than other men she had seen, wearing a gleaming bronze helmet. He was bare-chested and carrying a spear and shield. When he saw Ali he gasped in surprise and before he could do anything else Ali instinctively lashed out with one of her antenodes. It whipped through the air and struck the man in the side of the neck. His body convulsed and he dropped backwards out of the doorway, dead to the world.

  The Doctor had told her to protect the TARDIS, hadn’t he?

  She didn’t think anyone else would try to board in a hurry, but she waited there by the door just in case.

  There was shouting from outside now and the sound of a scuffle. How she wished she had a better view. And then she heard the Doctor’s voice, strained and muffled. ‘Don’t move, Ali!’ he shouted. ‘Shut the door and wait for me. I’ll be all right!’

  She reached over and pushed the door closed. It hadn’t sounded good. The Doctor was in trouble, she was sure of it. If only …

  Well, why not? He hadn’t told her not to touch the controls. She was sure there would be something here. Some piece of equipment that would help her see what was happening to the Doctor. Even a cranky old relic of ancient tech like the TARDIS would have scanners of some sort. Surely …

  She hurried over to the console, located the main access screen, leaned forward and worked the control
s with her fingers, just as she’d spent hours doing at school and college and in her room back home on Karkinos. She was good with technology, and even though this was ridiculously retro she thought she’d have a pretty good idea how to find what she needed.

  There.

  A few swift adjustments and she had a clear view of the outside. Another tweak and she had sound to go with it. Luckily, the telepathic field of the TARDIS’s translation circuit allowed her to understand every word of what was being said.

  Unluckily, it really didn’t sound good.

  A man wearing elaborate embroidered robes and carrying some kind of a staff was shouting at the Doctor, who was surrounded by more men armed with spears.

  ‘Liar! You are not an emissary of the gods, you are a man, like me. You are a spy and the law of Hammurabi clearly states what must be done to spies!’

  5

  Gurgurum was looking down on to the Place of Execution from the balcony outside the royal quarters. There was a hum of voices as soldiers formed into neat ranks on the packed red dirt of the square. Other soldiers lined the battlements on the surrounding walls. And past the city walls, out on the plain, Hammurabi’s army stood still, as if waiting.

  Gurgurum watched as the king came out of the palace gates directly below him. He was surrounded by his slaves, advisers and priests. His royal guard marched at his side. But not Gurgurum. Lightning flashed in the east and Gurgurum shivered. There were storm clouds gathering over the hills, sucking up sand from the desert and darkening the midday sky. The warmth had gone out of the day.

  He wanted to be down there with his king. He should be at his side, but he had been ordered to stay up here and guard the royal family.

  He watched as the king settled on to his dais and waited while Prisoner’s Gate was opened and three of the city judges led in the spy, flanked by a unit of heavily armed soldiers. Gurgurum felt useless up here and it fed his anger and hatred. This man was a foreigner, an outsider, he had no pure Babylonian blood in his veins and so was not worthy of a trial.