Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [15]
Oh look. Here comes Homunculette. He’s snarling, I see. I suppose that means we’ll be reporting another mission failure.
It took Homunculette almost an hour to get back to Marie. He decided it was something to do with the anarchitect moving the landmarks around, but when he told Marie this, she insisted he’d just got himself lost. ‘I didn’t detect any anarchitect,’ she said, pointedly.
They stood in the spot where they’d arrived on Earth, next to a great grey slab of roadway on the other side of the river. In her current body, Marie was a good head taller than Homunculette, her skin the same colour as chocolate, her hair plaited behind her back. Her clothes would probably have been fashionable in the earlier half of the twenty-second century, although 2169 was a notorious fashion blackspot, apparently.
‘I told you, the bridge vanished from under me,’ Homunculette grumbled.
‘Are you sure you didn’t just fall off it?’
Homunculette gave her his best scowl. ‘Open up,’ he said.
Marie sighed, then drew a line across her face with her finger, from the centre of her forehead to the tip of her chin. Her head opened up obligingly, the crack unfolding into a doorway big enough to accommodate a decent-sized humanoid.
Homunculette vanished into her interior, and her face folded itself back into the usual configuration behind him. Seconds later, she dematerialised with a wheezing, groaning sound.
‘Any ideas who left the invitation?’ Marie asked.
Homunculette looked up. High above him, the dome of the console room resolved itself into a map of the local time contours. Marie stretched fluorescent lines between the bumps and eddies, using the co-ordinates on the invite card to calculate the shortest possible route from twenty-second century England to their new destination.
‘You’re the one with the databanks,’ Homunculette said. ‘You tell me.’
Like all type 103 TARDIS units, on the outside Marie resembled an inhabitant of whatever environment she happened to land in. And like all type 103 TARDIS units, on the inside she tended to make her presence felt as a disembodied voice. Every now and then, Homunculette got the nasty feeling she was starting to develop delusions of godhood. ‘I see we’re heading for more Earth co-ordinates,’ Marie mused, neatly changing the subject. ‘I wish we could go somewhere exotic for a change. Hic! I feel like flexing my gravity compensators. If I spend one more day in a G-type environment, I’ll get rickets.’
‘Stop complaining or I’ll take you back to Dronid.’
‘Sadist. Now, let’s see. We’re heading for an East Indian location, about a century in the relative past. Hmm. Actually, I don’t think I’ve got anything suitable to wear. I have an Amazonian supermodel on file, but that’s about as near to the mark as I can get. I’m going to have to pick up some decent fashion accessories once we get there.’
‘We’re going to have to do something about that Narcissus complex of yours,’ Homunculette scowled.
‘If you give an intelligent entity a chameleon circuit, you can hardly expect her not to develop a sense of vanity. And don’t bother getting comfortable, by the way. We arrived in the East Indies ReVit Zone twenty-four seconds ago, local time.’
‘I know,’ said Homunculette. ‘I heard you hiccup. One of these days, we’re going to have to get that fixed, as well.’
2
STRANGE MEN AND THEIR COMPANIONS
According to the calendar on her wristwatch (Japanese design, capable of telling the time at thirty leagues below sea level and going “eep” right in the middle of school assembly), Samantha Angeline Jones had known the Doctor for seven months, three weeks, and six days. By Sam’s reckoning, this meant he said or did something profoundly strange every 2.1 hours, on average. Including the hours when Sam was asleep, natch. Often, she’d wake up in her room on board the TARDIS in the early hours of the (relative) morning, only to discover that the Doctor had done two or three deeply inexplicable things during the night, leaving the evidence lying in messy little heaps around the ship’s corridors.