Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [13]
A few years ago, these passages would have been crawling with invaders. Homunculette imagined them killing off the local politicians, issuing commands in their stupid tin voices. Invaders always took out the leaders first, it was a standard tactic. Like the enemy’s first strike on Gallifrey, their botched attempt to kill off the High Council. “Botched”: meaning, the Time Lords had been lucky.
Earth had been lucky, too. It had been invaded, yes, but only by a bunch of mindless biomechanoids with speech impediments. The Time Lords, meanwhile, were up against something really dangerous.
From somewhere up ahead, there was a hissing, crackling sound. Homunculette froze, and his breathing switched itself off again. Moments later, the crackling was drowned out by a voice, smooth and feminine, but gargling static.
‘Every time we say goodbye, I cry a little...’
Definitely a human lifetrace, somewhere near the centre of the House. I can smell Homunculette moving in on it. Smell? Bad vocabulary. Some day, I’ll have to devise a proper terminology for sub-organic sensory experiences.
No, maybe not. I’d be the only one who’d understand it.
Homunculette didn’t know much about English architecture, but he knew a debating chamber when he saw one. The hall was ringed with balconies and camera nests, and, by the look of them, the seats on either side of the hall – two great banks of them, all covered in sickly green leather – had been in place for centuries. The patch of floor at the centre of the chamber was graced by a mosaic. The pattern was faded, but Homunculette knew enough local history to recognise the symbol of the World Zones Authority.
‘I can hear a lark somewhere, waiting to sing about it...’
The mosaic wasn’t the focal point of the debating chamber, though. Nor were the plastic mannequins, three or four hundred of them, each seated in one of the chairs, their faces painted with mad eyes and twisted smiles. Nor were the weapons, the thousands upon thousands of old firearms that had been pinned to the walls like butterflies, hanging by their trigger-guards from rusted nails. Nor were the speakers, four huge black cuboids set into the corners, making the floor vibrate as they pumped out the song Homunculette had heard from the corridors.
‘There’s no love song finer...’
No. The focal point of the chamber was its other living occupant, who sat on a faded throne directly between the two seating blocks, his legs draped lazily over one of the arms of the chair.
The man’s skin was black. Pure black. His skin tone wasn’t purely genetic, by Homunculette’s reckoning; decades of exposure to pollutants and alien radiation had done their bit, as well. The Black Man had dark braided hair, stuffed under a top hat that looked older than Parliament itself, while his clothes were expensive-but-frayed, probably looted from one of London’s many nouveau riche corpses. His topcoat was black, his suit was black, his tie was black. In fact, the darkness of him was only broken up by two things.
The first was a flower, a brilliant red bloom pinned to his lapel. Artificial, Homunculette guessed, maybe grown in a plastogene tube. The second was his smile. A white, beatific smile, the kind of white that needs chemical applications to maintain.
‘...but how strange the change, from major to minor...’
The Black Man waved his hand. Some mechanism in the chamber must have noticed the movement, because the music stopped in an instant.
‘Ella Fitzgerald,’ he drawled, as if that explained everything.
The Black Man’s eyes were shut, Homunculette realised. Cautiously, he moved down the aisle towards the throne, inspecting the mannequins on either side of him as he walked. Their faces were grotesque, all leers and snarls.
‘All my ministers,’ the Black Man said, although he hadn’t opened his eyes, and he hadn’t stopped smiling. ‘Not so much to say, these days.’
Homunculette stopped a couple of metres in front of the throne. ‘You sell weapons?’ he asked. ‘People come