Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [28]
Before they’d simply stopped registering. According to the pixscreen, they no longer showed up on the security scan. At least, not as intruders. Mr Qixotl’s toes stopped tapping. Outside, the toucans weren’t screaming any more. If the intruders had been killed, their bodies would still have registered as alien biodata. Even if the leopards had eaten them, there’d be some kind of trace.
The pixscreen was non-reflective, which was a pity, as Mr Qixotl was quite interested in knowing whether he’d actually gone pale.
His fingers flew across the console, coaxing and cajoling the controls until the pixscreen gave him a visual representation of the biodata inside the security system. The invite cards had been designed to take surface traces from the bidders and transmit the information back to the City’s datacore, so the biodata of all those who should have been attending the auction was kept in memory. Qixotl watched the information waltz across the screen. Most of the biodata was human. The two UNISYC reps, the Faction Paradox people (human-plus), Homunculette (human-plus-plus-plus-plus)...
There were two unfamiliar traces on the screen. Mr Qixotl felt his body temperature drop by a good ten degrees. Nobody should have been able to insert new data into the works, not that quickly. To do something like that, you’d need to be biodata ultra-aware. Even a Time Lord wouldn’t have been able to manage it. Well, a Time Lord President, maybe, someone who’d worn the Sash of Rassilon and fingered the Great Key, but apart from that...
Oh no.
Not him. Please.
One of the two alien biodata readings was human. Qixotl knew this only because it was so similar to the UNISYC readings. The second trace was different.
He knew that trace. He’d seen it before. The last time he’d seen it, it had been more erratic, a more complex pattern, but there was no mistaking it.
‘Him,’ Qixotl said, and his voice echoed around the walls of the chamber, becoming a series of hideous slippery noises. ‘It’s him. It’s him.’
Faction Paradox shouldn’t have been on Earth. Come to think of it, Faction Paradox shouldn’t have been anywhere, really.
Somewhere in the back of the Doctor’s cerebellum, automatic processes were listening out for Sam’s footsteps. She was still there, somewhere behind him in the corridor. Nothing to worry about, then, not yet. The rest of his mind could concentrate on more important...
No.
...on more critical matters.
Back on Gallifrey, in the days when the skies had been the kind of orange you only ever seem to get in childhood memories, the Spirits of the Faction had been numbered among Time’s bogeymen, like Rassilon’s Mimic or the Great Vampires. Now he’d run into them, twice, within a couple of decades. Twice in two regenerations.
Perhaps it was sheer chance. Or perhaps something had happened to the universe, something so large you couldn’t spot it from down here at ground level. Some great cataclysmic event, scattering the Faction’s agents across the continuum. The Doctor imagined them infiltrating the whole of history, even infiltrating his own past. Reshaping the timelines so that he kept running into them, time and time again.
Did he have the same history he woke up with, he wondered? Had he ever met the General, before today, or had the man been slotted into his life while he’d been asleep?
Had Sam been here, yesterday?
Had he been here?
Maybe fourdimensional voodoo-cults were like buses. You waited all eternity for one, and then... the Doctor shook his head, forced himself to concentrate on the matter in hand. No time for flippancy. He still had to work out what was happening here in the twenty-first century. The City wasn’t the Faction’s work. If the cult had designed the ziggurat, it would have been covered in dried blood and screaming skulls.
The Doctor’s automatic processes told him to stop walking. He did as the processes told him, and listened. Consciously, this time. Sam was still trotting along behind him, so obviously, something else had