Doctor Who: Harvest of Time Page 4

  Edwina McCrimmon watched the UNIT helicopter climb away from the rig and lose itself in the lowering clouds. Normally she did not welcome rough seas and heavy winds, but this time she was grateful for the adverse weather system. It had provided the perfect justification for the delegation to make their visit as brief as possible, and that meant slightly less of a headache for her.

  The telephone on her desk rang. She sat looking at it for a few seconds, willing the hateful thing into silence. But the phone would not stop ringing.

  She lifted the sleek angled handset to her ear, certain she knew who was on the other end of it. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Don’t “yes” me, young woman.’ It was her father, calling from the mainland. ‘They tell me the UNIT delegation’s left. How much harm was done?’

  ‘None at all.’

  ‘I trust you didn’t let them anywhere near that idiot Lomax.’

  ‘I had no choice. But he didn’t tell them anything.’

  ‘For your sake, I hope you’re right.’ Calum McCrimmon – known to enemies and allies alike as Big Cal – broke off to bark something through to his secretary, the long-suffering Morag. ‘You’ve made some serious errors of judgement in your time,’ he resumed, ‘but I’ve always believed you had what it takes in you to become an asset to this company. That’s why I gave you the responsibilities I did. Now I’m starting to seriously question my faith in your abilities.’

  ‘I told you, no harm was done.’

  ‘You’d best hope so. In one rash action, by going behind my back, you’ve come very close to ruining everything. The men from the Ministry are furious and it’s your neck they want on the chopping board – followed by mine for telling them you were a safe pair of hands.’ Big Cal paused. She heard the sound of a cigar being snipped and lit, followed by a deep inhalation. ‘I’ll remind you that what we are involved with is vital to nothing less than the Scottish economy and the national security of the British Isles!’

  McCrimmon remembered Mike Yates echoing a very similar sentiment. ‘So what you’re saying, Father, is that it’s all right for one lot of government men to go snooping around our rigs, but not some others?’

  ‘I’ll thank you not to take that sarcastic tone, Edwina. You were told from the outset not to question things. You’re enjoying your new computer, aren’t you? I don’t see you complaining about that.’

  ‘I’m not complaining … I just wanted to know why that rig collapsed. When your friends from the Ministry told me it was none of my business I decided to use my initiative to try to get answers from somewhere else. You can’t blame me for that, Father.’

  ‘The problem with you, Edwina, is that you’ve never known when to stop.’

  ‘If I’d known when to stop,’ she said, steeling herself to slam down the phone, ‘I wouldn’t be here now, would I?’

  When she had terminated the call, she sat in silence for several minutes, shaking slightly and hoping no one would have the exquisite bad timing to disturb her. After a while she opened her desk drawer and took out a slim leather notebook about the size of a pocket diary. It was old and battered. There had been nine others once, all bought with pocket money from the local newsagents.

  She opened the pages and leafed through. The paper was tissue thin. She had written on them in felt tip, the ink bleeding through from one side to the other. The pages were dense with a child’s laboriously neat handwriting, the blocks of text squeezing around drawings of creatures and inventions and strange, alien landscapes. She had used lots of different colours, enough pens to fill an old tartan-printed shortbread biscuit tin.

  Edwina’s mother had died when she was 10, leaving her to be brought up by her father. Although she had not realised it at the time, writing in the books had been a form of escape for her, a way of managing her grief, channelling that emotional torment into creativity. By the time she was 12, she had filled the nine other books and half of the tenth, which was this one. She had kept this one under her pillow, working on it when she should have been asleep. Big Cal had found the others, but not this one.

  The books were about an imaginary kingdom. Edwina had made it all up in her head. Actually, the kingdom was run by a queen, from a fine imperial palace floating in the clouds. The queen’s subjects were talking animals, for the most part. It had started out quite simplistically, but over the course of the books Edwina had developed this world in increasingly lavish detail. She had thought up different countries, empires within empires. She had devised elaborate systems of magic and chivalry. She had made up adventures for the queen and her circle of courtiers. The imagined world had slowly become as real to her, and at least as complicated, as the actual one in which she lived.

  This had become a problem. Edwina was not doing well at school. She didn’t ‘fit in’, the teachers said. Always daydreaming, not knuckling down to work. Stern injunctions were issued. She had to apply herself, they said, if she was going to make something of her life. It was no good being ‘off in her head’ all the time. Her mother, who had always been practical, would not have approved.

  When Big Cal had found the nine completed books, they had seemed to him ample evidence of a mind not being put to productive use. So he had taken the books from her bedroom, and thrown them and her big tin of coloured felt-tips into the bin.

  ‘You’re 12 now, Edwina,’ he explained later, when the deed was done. And she was, too – it was her birthday. ‘There’s no time for that rubbish any more. You need to concentrate on your homework.’

  The shock of it had been so great that she had not even cried. It was simply too far beyond any injustice that she had yet experienced. She had no words for the loss he had inflicted on her.

  In that moment, she stopped being a child.

  But in a way, Big Cal had done her an odd favour. She had started to knuckle down, if truth were told. She stopped being ‘off in her head’. Almost as if to say: you want to see what I can do, do you? You want to see what you have awakened?

  She became very scholarly, and very focused. Almost frighteningly so. She had never been particularly interested in the more scientific areas of the curriculum, but she found herself taking to them with an intensity that left onlookers staggered and not a little perplexed. She turned out to be extremely good at mathematics and geology, and no slouch at physics, chemistry and biology either. She tore through secondary school, blazing a path onto a degree course in petrochemical engineering.

  Big Cal, watching with a mixture of pride and vague apprehension, must have wondered what he had unleashed on the world, in that one afternoon of casual destruction. He had meant no great harm by it, of course. But the cruelty of that act never left his daughter.

  By sheer force of talent and will, she had wormed her way into the family company, and then up through the hierarchy of power. Cal had resisted, to begin with, then reluctantly conceded that his daughter had real ability. Not everyone was cut out to work in oil. Edwina not only had all the right instincts, but she was fearless. Wanted to get out onto the rigs as soon as possible.

  ‘I’m going to run this company one day,’ she’d told him. ‘And then we’ll do things my way.’

  He had laughed. But he wasn’t laughing anywhere near as much now. Edwina had gradually gained control of a huge chunk of the business. One day, sooner than he or anyone else cared to think about, McCrimmon Industries would be hers. That was as unavoidable as night following day.

  She dragged a finger along a line of precise text, inscribed in pink felt-tip. ‘… and the queen told her courtiers that they were not going to do things the same way any more. The courtiers were not very happy, but she told them she was the queen and they had better do what she said.’

  She turned to the next page. It was blank, as she had known it would be. That was as far as the story went. The day her father destroyed the nine other books was the day she stopped dreaming.

  ‘I’ll forgive you,’ she said quietly. ‘One day.’

  The Icelandic trawlerman w
as on deck, dealing with a recalcitrant winch, when he noticed the peculiar thing forming in the sky. Einar Sigurdsson was not, it had to be said, a man easily fazed by weather. In the forty years that he had been at sea, he had experienced just about every meteorological condition nature could throw at him, at least in this part of the world. The sea conditions today were not exactly pleasant, but this was hardly the worst he’d experienced in recent weeks. What was of more pressing concern to Einar was the dismal quality of fish his crew had been hauling in. He thought back to the stories his father had told him, and the stories his grandfather had told his father, their tales of plump nets and bulging holds, so much good silvery fish they couldn’t bring it all home. Even allowing for a certain quality of exaggeration, things were obviously not as good now as they’d been in the old days. Einar would never have admitted as much to his crew, but in his darkest hours it began to occur to him that maybe, just maybe, there was something in what those busybody ecologists kept going on about, with their doom-mongering about overfishing.

  Not that even the busiest busybody would have dared suggest that there was a connection between strange weather and depleted stocks. Einar took off his knitted cap and scratched at his thatch of wiry grey curls. What the hell was that thing anyway? Clouds blanketed the sky from horizon to horizon, but a little to the west was a darkening circle, turning from grey to mauve to purple even as Einar watched. It was as wide as a football field, easily.

  Einar didn’t like it. He had seen some weird things up there in his time, but nothing like this. The air felt tense, the way it did before a storm. It crackled with electrical foreboding. Einar muttered a dark Icelandic oath. The circle – foreshortened by the angle of view to an ellipse, like a human eye – was now as black as night. The clouds around the eye’s edge were starting to curdle, pulled into feathery horsetails.

  Einar was about to leave the winch and go indoors, get on the wireless and see what was happening, when the eye started crying.

  A white cataract poured out of it, as if a waterfall had just switched on. It took a couple of seconds for the bottom of the water column to reach the sea. Where it hit, a great misty cloud of spray rose up like a veil. The roar hit Einar’s ears. The cataract became broader, thickening to the width of the eye. It was a falling column of water, a white pillar bridging the sea to the sky. A seaspout in reverse, Einar thought. The sky giving water to the sea, rather than sucking it up.

  He shuddered at the abject wrongness of it.

  Einar stumbled his way to the cabin, glancing back over his shoulder at the impossible waterfall. The roar of it was now so loud as to smother all other sounds. The amount of water coming out of the sky – where could it all be coming from?

  And then it stopped. The eye winked shut. The column of water, cut off sharply, descended like a white piston going into the ground. The roar faded away. The clouds knitted back together. Other than a threatening grey smudge where it had been, a smudge that was fading by the moment, there was nothing to suggest that the eye had been there at all.

  Or that Einar Sigurdsson, trawlerman of forty years, was not going quietly mad.

  The Ministry helicopter was smaller, sleeker and newer than the one from UNIT, painted glossy black rather than matte grey. It had waited for the other craft to clear the area before returning, holding station on one of the other McCrimmon rigs.

  Now its shark-shaped body settled down on the helipad, and after the rotors had spun down three men got out.

  Edwina watched them descend from the helipad and enter the rig. She was still trying to work out the relationship between the two Ministry men, Callow and Lovelace, and the third one. Sometimes they seemed like natural allies, at other times like enemies forced into grudging cooperation. She still didn’t know the name of the third man.

  ‘Go away,’ she whispered. ‘Finish whatever it is you want with us, then get the hell off my rig. And damn you, Father, for putting me through this.’

  The terms of the arrangement, set out by Cal ‘Big Man’ McCrimmon, had seemed simple enough to begin with. Her father had made some arrangement with men from the Ministry of Defence. The less Edwina knew the better, it was made clear.

  What it was, the MOD had some new equipment they needed to test. It was something to do with submarines. MERMAN, they called it – that was supposed to be a secret, but she’d overheard them once or twice when their guard was down. The gear was experimental and it needed to be deployed at sea from a number of fixed locations, for some reason. These fixed locations needed abundant power, and the ability to be visited by MOD scientists and technicians without attracting too much undesirable attention. Some existing Naval facilities were in the right place, but to test the equipment properly would have required developing completely new marine installations, far from land – not only expensive and time consuming, but difficult to hide from prying eyes. It was obviously better to make use of existing maritime infrastructure, and that was where McCrimmon Industries had come in.

  The deal her father had set up permitted the MOD to use a number of the company’s rigs and platforms as temporary sites for MERMAN equipment. The arrangement would last no more than a year. The impact on existing McCrimmon operations would be minimal: most of the oil workers wouldn’t even be aware that anything was going on. Normal drilling operations would continue, but at the same time some of the rigs’ power would be diverted to the MERMAN systems, located in sealed areas in the lowest levels of the rigs, safely distant from the normal work zones. The equipment was relatively compact and could be brought in and installed using normal helicopters and small teams. Once installed, it needed only the occasional adjustment or repair.

  So far so good.

  In return, McCrimmon Industries got a couple of sweeteners. The first was the off-the-record assurance that a number of legal barriers to further expansion would be expected to melt away – that, in other words, cooperation with the MOD would buy preferential treatment at government level, and in the procurement of overseas contracts.

  All very shady, but this was the oil business after all.

  The second was computers. In return for McCrimmon’s assistance, the government men would install terminals and high-speed underwater data connections, linking the company’s rigs and mainland operations into a superefficient communications and control web, years ahead of the competition.

  The Big Man barely knew a computer from a sack of tatties. But Edwina was well aware that this ‘information technology’ was the wave of the future. The company ignored it at its peril. When, in a few years, Edwina gained control of most of the firm – her father would have to retire eventually – she was determined not to be left behind. It would take imagination and boldness to stay ahead of the competition in the coming decades.

  So, yes, she was willing to concede that there were upsides to the MOD arrangement. And it had seemed generous enough until it had occurred to her that they had probably needed to put in those underwater data connections anyway.

  Not that she had ever been in a position to turn down the deal.

  There was no knock at her door. The men just entered.

  ‘Well?’ queried Callow. ‘Exactly how much harm did you do, McCrimmon?’

  She disliked Callow. He had a thin, reedy voice and a habit of constantly patting his oily, slicked-down hair.

  ‘I’ve already had the right royal ear-bashing from my father, thanks.’

  ‘Your contacting UNIT was in express violation of the terms of our arrangement,’ said Lovelace. She disliked Lovelace as well. He had a sharp, shrew-like face and a constant nervous twitch in one cheek. ‘We’ve a good mind to pull out completely, and take our computer systems with us.’

  ‘Aye, and be my guest while you’re at it.’ This was brinksmanship but she knew they wouldn’t threaten her with pulling out, they’d just do it. ‘I asked you whether there was a connection between the loss of my rig and the equipment you put inside it. You stonewalled me, so I looked elsewhere for answ
ers. What did you expect?’

  ‘They expected your absolute obedience,’ said the third man. ‘What they did not allow for was your natural intelligence and unwillingness to settle for anything less than the truth.’

  The third man was always doing that: contradicting the other two, and often springing to her defence in matters where her judgement had been questioned. She ought to have liked him for that, felt that she had an ally, but he was the one she liked least of all. She felt she understood the other two: their easy assumption of power. She could imagine them lording it around Whitehall, going to the same clubs, trading stories of their time at Eton or Harrow. By contrast the third man was an unfathomable mystery. She had been alone with him once, while Callow and Lovelace were out of the room for a few minutes. It had been like being in the same room as a reptile.

  The other men were clean shaven and usually dressed in suits. The third man was bearded, his hair combed directly back in a manner that made him both debonair and satanic. There were two notches of white in his beard but his age was otherwise hard to estimate. He moved like a younger man, with none of the occasional stiffness she saw in his companions. He looked foreign, but his accent was impeccably British. In his eyes was an amused youthfulness, when she permitted herself to look at them. Also something in those eyes that made her feel as if they were capable of sucking the living breath out of her.

  He was always formally dressed, but it was never in a business suit. McCrimmon wasn’t sure how she would have described the man’s attire, put on the spot. He favoured the same type of outfit that she associated with political despots: a sort of buttonless black tunic with a high collar. He always wore gloves, and he had never once offered to shake her hand.