Doctor Who_ So Vile A Sin Part 18

He turned back to the Doctor.

'Now would be a convenient time to go to warp.'

136.

The Doctor looked startled. 'Oh,' he said. 'It's fixed, we can go any time you want.'

137.

Interlude March to April 2982 Dhaulagiri, Nepal 2 March 2982 The mountains made Thandiwe think of home. Mama said they used to be covered in snow, all year round. She tried to imagine it, white Earth snow like fluffy water, covering all the rock.

Thandiwe stood on the bed in her room. They'd be going home tomorrow; Mama was staying up late, talking to the soldiers.

Usually when they went on trips, they stayed at the new place for longer. A week or even two weeks. But these days they went somewhere for just one night and one day, and Mama talked instead of skiing or buying things.

One of the soldiers, Joanna, had put Thandiwe to bed. The Fat Monster Eater was an irregular shape under the covers, keeping the bed warm. It was the only toy Thandiwe had been allowed to bring.

Outside was very dark. Thandiwe could trace the shapes of the mountains by where they poked up into the sky, hiding the stars.

There wasn't anything in her room, not even a terminal, just shelves and shelves of books.

She got back under the blankets with the Fat Monster Eater, which made a deep chuckling noise and cuddled up to her.

After lunch that day, Thandiwe had gone for a walk through the seminary (which was a school for priests), the Eater trailing along behind her like a big balloon. The 138 building was big and cold and quiet, and there weren't many people around.

Most of them were in a big hall she found. They were chanting, sitting cross-legged on the floor, talking very fast. She couldn't make out the words. It sounded like singing, like music. She watched them for a while, peeking over the top of the railing and looking down into the hall.

She tried climbing up on to the railings for a better look, but it made the Eater nervous, rolling around at her feet. It always did that when she did anything dangerous.

She hugged it, whispering. 'Don't worry. Let's go in here.' The Eater wobbled and bounced away across the floor into the new room.

It was a long hall, with a big table and lots of paintings around the walls. There were rooms like this at home. Thandiwe went up to one of the paintings. It showed a soldier from the old days, a woman in very heavy armour. The frame was incredibly fancy, gold and red and covered in squiggles and leaves. Thandiwe reached out to touch it, instinctively looking around.

Too late, she realized there was a woman in the room, getting a book down from a shelf. Thandiwe hid behind a chair, but the Fat Monster Eater was too big and round to hide. The woman looked at it in astonishment, and then her eyes found Thandiwe. 'h.e.l.lo there,' she said. She had coppery hair and wore the same simple green clothes as everyone else here.

'h.e.l.lo.' Thandiwe was aware of the Eater, snuggling up to her.

It was always nervous around new people.

'My name's Joanna. You must be Baroness Forrester's little girl. You've been exploring, have you?'

'Yes.' There was writing under the portrait, a short sentence in a language that Thandiwe didn't recognize. 'What's that?' she asked.

'It's a saying of the first Brigadier,' said Joanna. 'One of the nineteen calls to action.'

'I can't read it.'

'I'm not surprised, it's in British, a sub-dialect of Ancient American.'

'What does it say?'

139.

'"Shoot the winged man with five quick bullets".'

'What does it mean?'

'Ah,' said Joanna, 'I'm afraid that it rather depends on which school of interpretation you follow.' She held out her hand to Thandiwe. 'Would you like some tisane?'

'Yes please,' said Thandiwe. 'Will there be cakes?'

'I dare say cakes can be arranged.'

Joanna led Thandiwe to a large room she called the mess hall where there were tables and chairs. They chose a seat by a window so that they could look out over the broken grey shapes of the mountains.

Thandiwe took a cake and bit into it. She swallowed and said, 'Where are the priests?'

'We're all priests,' said Joanna.

'I thought you were soldiers.'

'We are. Unitatus soldiers think it's a good idea if we don't just know how to fight we should think about why we're fighting, too, and think about whether fighting's a good idea at all.'

Thandiwe nodded, taking a second cake. 'Mama said you were like an extra army, in case someone tried to attack Earth.'

'That's right. The Empress lets us keep our own fleet of s.h.i.+ps, and sometimes we fight alongside her army. Our mission is to protect Earth from alien invasions. Not that many of those happen these days... it's more likely to be Earth invading someone else's...' She trailed off. 'Good heavens,' she said, softly.

Thandiwe sat up in her seat. It was snowing. 'I thought it wasn't supposed to snow here,' she said.

Joanna looked back at her. Her eyes were big and round. 'It hasn't snowed here for over a century.'

'That's not snow,' said Thandiwe. 'Snow is yellow.'

Joanna looked back out of the window. 'This isn't sulphur snow, or whatever you've got on Io. It's real water snow. It's a miracle,' she breathed.

'No,' said Mama. They both looked around. She'd come into the mess hall while they'd been staring through the window.

There were more of the soldiers with her. 'This is no miracle. The 140 reclamation projects I've funded have the potential to restore this whole planet to its former state.'

Joanna had looked at her the same way she'd looked at the snow. Mama had said, 'Imagine that. The whole Earth, returned to its former splendour.'

It was hours later, and the snow was still coming down.

Thandiwe snuggled up to the Eater. She imagined the snow covering up all the rock like a big white blanket.

s.p.a.ceport Five Undertown 11 March 2982 Look for a garden, he'd been told, a garden in the forest.

The Reserve was a huge stretch of open land in the middle of s.p.a.ceport Five Undertown. Simon had a.s.sumed it was a city park, a patch of countryside restored using low-level terraforming techniques, but the tour guide said it had never been built over.

There weren't even walkways stretching overhead, just blue sky, truncated at the edges by the floating shapes of the city. It was like standing at the bottom of a well.

Simon wondered how many strings had been pulled over the last millennium or so to keep this place from being used for real estate. Keep off the gra.s.s. Keep off the gra.s.s.

The map he had been given had a red line drawn on it, enclosing a shaded, oddly shaped s.p.a.ce, maybe ten square kilometres.

Simon watched from the window of the flitter as it ambled over the Reserve, mentally following his map. Every so often they put down in a designated tourist zone and went for a walk, the tour guide pointing out interesting plants and insects. One more stop, and they'd be as close to the red shaded area as they were going to get.

Getting away from the tour party was easy. The tour guide led his little group through a patch of forest, naming each species of tree. Simon took some photos, gawped at the canopy, straggled, and slipped behind an Ulmus procera Ulmus procera.

He waited ten minutes for the tourists to move out of sight. The tour guide's pleasant voice diminished slowly, merging with the 141 sounds of the forest. Simon leant against the elm and risked closing his eyes for a moment.

Rooftop parks didn't sound like this. You couldn't hear the wind making a sound like rus.h.i.+ng water through the leaves, the tiny sounds of insects, the intermittent, soft bird calls. Or maybe you could hear them in the roof parks, and your brain just couldn't sort them out from the chatter, screaming kids and blaring portable playbacks.

He slung his camera around his neck and moved off down the hill. If he was caught, he was a tourist who'd foolishly followed a robin in the hope of a better picture and had been wandering in increasing panic ever since, too embarra.s.sed to call for help.

He stuck to the forest, avoiding anywhere he'd be easily visible from the sky, following his mental map without thinking. He felt an almost tangible sensation as he entered the red-shaded zone, waking him out of his murmuring thoughts. Somewhere in here, in these ten square klicks, there was a garden.

It took him another two hours to find it. He emerged from the forest into a wide, cleared area. It took him almost a minute to pick out the shape of the house. The lines of roof and wall suggested by the squiggle of vines and moss and shrubs.

Somebody had got there first.

There was a flitter parked in a hollow above the house, trying to look as inconspicuous as possible among the dead trees littering the slope of the hill. It let Simon get within three meters before warning him that it was authorized to use deadly force to resist theft.

It was hard to tell under the mimetic paint job, but Simon thought it looked like a heavily customized Holstek Firefly. Tres Tres cash heavy and out of his scope; even when he was a spoilt playboy student. He paused for a moment to admire its lines before moving off downhill to kill its owner. cash heavy and out of his scope; even when he was a spoilt playboy student. He paused for a moment to admire its lines before moving off downhill to kill its owner.

The concrete lump was an eroded, mossy shape, a few metres from the house, hidden by gra.s.s and humus. Just enough of it stuck up out of the ground to form an inconvenient and hidden step.

142.

Simon fell off the edge, twisting his ankle and cursing, and hurtled down a short slope until his embarra.s.sing descent was cut short by the tool shed.

The shed shuddered once, groaned, and disintegrated, showering Simon with bits of rotting wood and small digging tools. Its collapse revealed a surprised-looking woman, who dropped into a martial-arts stance.

Simon spent just half a second lying in the mud with silverfish crawling over him before leaping up and scowling at her.

'Nice car!' he yelped, lowering a hand.

'Thanks. Don't even try going for the knife in your boot.' She was around his age, dark, with full lips and electric-blonde hair.

She looked like a sim star. 'I've got a laser pistol in a fast-draw shoulder holster you'll never make it.'

'You wouldn't get your hand on the b.u.t.t,' said Simon, 'I have a disgel gun built into my right forearm.'

'But I'm wearing flexible mesh armour under my coat, and and it's been treated to be resistant.' it's been treated to be resistant.'

'Your hands are exposed,' said Simon, 'so you still still wouldn't be able to get your pistol.' wouldn't be able to get your pistol.'

'Maybe,' said the woman, 'but it wouldn't do you any good because there's a troop of heavily armed bodyguards in a military standard AFV less than a klick away one word from me and they'd be here in less than thirty seconds.'

'I'll just have to make sure you don't say the word then.'

'They're monitoring my life signs, so you'd still be dead when they got here.'

'If they could find me.'

'These are trained troops.'

'I wouldn't put money on it they're from up top and I know my way around down here.'

'a.s.suming that they just don't use the AFV's plasma cannon to sterilize the area.'

'In that case I'd turn into a bird and fly away before they got here.'

The woman gave him a sharp look. 'What kind?'

'What?'

'What kind of bird?'

143.

'An eagle.'

'Golden, bald or imperial?'

'I don't know,' said Simon. 'Which one flies fastest?'

'No idea,' said the woman. 'It's a stupid idea anyway.'

'Well, yes.'

'The pollution would kill you,' said the woman. 'You'd be better off as a mole or something.'

'Look,' said Simon, 'I presume you're here about the house.'

'Well, I was, but a man who can transform himself into a bird is far more interesting.'

'How did you find it?'

'NOYB.'

'Who's that?'

'None of your business. My arms are starting to ache.'

'Mine too. Let's go and ring the doorbell and see if anyone's at home.'

'You walk in front where I can see you.'