Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [11]
‘There a problem with that, Mr Shift?’
17 ACROSS. No. I took the liberty of inspecting the security devices protecting it, though. Interesting. Maybe a little over-complicated. However... (3,4)
‘The security had better be up to scratch, that’s all,’ Homunculette snapped, interrupting the crossword. If such a thing were possible. ‘You know how many major powers are going to be after that Relic, don’t you? The last thing we want is a bunch of Cybermen turning up on our doorstep.’
Mr Qixotl shook his head. ‘Everything’s sorted, Mr H. The City’s got a Brigadoon circuit in effect, so you’d need some pretty smart technology just to get in here without an invite card. And the Cybermen aren’t going to be coming back to Earth for another year or so, I checked. No one’s going to gatecrash the auction. Trust me on this, all right?’
Homunculette made a muted grunting sound that might just have been a laugh.
‘I’m a Time Lord,’ he said. ‘We don’t trust anyone unless they’re dead or stupid. We’re like that.’
HOMUNCULETTE’S STORY
London, Earth, September 2169
The Square’s a ruin, you can smell that much from here. Scorched concrete and sick air, streetlamps melted into puddles by fusion engines, skeletons of burned-out vehicles sprawled across the pavements. The city’s too old and tired to even bother sinking into the dust.
This is where it all started, then. Where the first of the invaders dropped out of the sky, where the local politicians were herded together and incinerated. “Exterminated”, I should say. Right there, across the river in Parliament Square. The sky’s grey over London, full of pus, full of old pollution. By now, Homunculette will have taken that as his cue to be maudlin and depressive for the rest of the day, the moody old stoat.
All I know about the English weather is this: it plays hell with my monitors. I lost track of Homunculette three minutes ago, and he’s the only lifetrace around here. Of course, he could have taken me with him to the Square, but he says I’m not too good on my legs. He likes to think he’s better than me at some things. It makes him feel good about being carbon-based.
The ground had vanished from under Homunculette’s feet. He wasn’t used to the ground doing things like that, so he was too surprised to panic properly as he tumbled towards the river. One moment he’d been standing on the bridge, the next he’d been treading air. Simple as that. No warning, no explanation.
His body twisted as he hit the water, his arms instinctively thrashing around in search of a handhold. He swallowed his first mouthful of sludge before he even knew he was sinking, and felt the chemical pollutants burning the membrane at the back of his throat. The next thing he knew, his feet were touching the thick mat of detritus at the bottom of the river. He felt something crunch under his shoe, though he wasn’t sure whether it was plastic or bone. During the invasion, the humans had dumped a lot of their dead down here, leaving the corpses to have their fleshy bits bitten away by the parasite species that had learned to live in the blackwater areas.
So. The bridge had disappeared. From right underneath him. Without a sound.
Anarchitects?
Homunculette suddenly realised he wasn’t breathing. He panicked, and thrashed his limbs around for a bit longer, until he remembered that he wasn’t supposed to be breathing. His respiratory system had gone into emergency shutdown, and he hadn’t even noticed it. How long could he stay like this, though? How long did he have before his lungs popped?
One problem at a time, he decided. Anarchitects. Think anarchitects. Disembodied intelligences, created by the enemy during the early years of their assault on Gallifrey. According to the information the Celestis had slipped to the High Council, the average anarchitect was like a primitive computer virus, a cluster of pre-programmed instructions designed to corrupt and re-order data. But anarchitects could exist outside the