Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [30]
Bregman winced. It wasn’t a full rendition of the “Greetings, BEM” speech from the UNISYC handbook, but it was bad enough. Nonetheless, Cousin Justine nodded graciously.
Homunculette snorted. ‘You’re wasting your breath. She’s as human as you are. No, I take that back. She’s less human than you are.’
Cousin Justine looked unshaken. ‘We’ve come on behalf of the Faction. On behalf of the Spirits, and on behalf of the Grandfather himself. I renounce my humanity for the sake of the family.’
‘Spirits?’ repeated Colonel Kortez. He sounded genuinely interested. Bregman remembered what she’d heard about him back in Geneva. After Saskatoon, he’d spent a year in India, on one of those spiritual discovery missions the military psychiatrists were always talking about. UNISYC had very nearly put him in the Zen Patrol, after that, which was second-best to a spell in a padded room with soft furniture. Bregman had the horrible feeling this conversation was about to get mystical, big style.
Homunculette started slobbering again before Cousin Justine could answer. ‘The Faction’s a voodoo cult. Just like your voodoo cults on this rear-end of a planet.’
‘We have similar customs,’ Justine agreed. ‘But, with respect, the family aspires to greater things. We have no dealings with the Spirits of Earth. Only the Spirits of Paradox.’
‘“Aspires”?’ Homunculette squawked, practically spitting on his opponent, even though they were metres apart. ‘You’re a bunch of thugs, that’s all. Criminals who got lucky. You only wear that... that...’ Homunculette gestured towards Justine’s mask, presumably not being able to find a suitable word for it. ‘You only wear that because you want to scare people. Spirits, my backside.’
For the first time, Cousin Justine looked genuinely offended. ‘Then we have a conflict of beliefs,’ she announced, somehow managing to keep her voice level.
Kortez was nodding his head off. Mr Qixotl was slowly edging his way back out of the room. Homunculette was still snarling. ‘You stole everything you know from us. Your whole... grubby little gang... only exists because of our technology. Go on, try and deny it.’
‘That’s not –’
‘Look. See that? You see it?’ Homunculette was looking around the room for support, his finger shaking as he pointed at the bone mask. ‘Tell them what it is,’ he demanded. ‘Go on. Tell them.’
Cousin Justine looked away, only for a moment. ‘It’s a skull,’ she admitted.
‘What of? Tell them. What’s it the skull of?’
Justine looked uneasy. ‘The skull of a Time Lord.’
‘Hah!’ Homunculette whirled around, like a lawyer who’d just made a devastating attack on the accused. ‘See? That’s my people she’s talking about. My people.’
Bregman gawped. The mask was wider than Homunculette’s whole head. She imagined a skull just like it, writhing under the man’s skin, bursting out at the edges. Time Lords had dimensional engineering, according to the UNISYC files. Did they have heads that were bigger on the inside than on the outside, or what?
‘The Time Lords fought a great war, many years ago,’ Cousin Justine explained, addressing the other representatives en masse. ‘They won. If they’d lost, by the grace of Time, then this is how they would have looked.’ She raised the mask a little.
Homunculette snorted again. ‘That mask shouldn’t exist in this timeline. You see how dangerous they are? Even their headgear breaks the Laws of Time. Even their headgear.’ He started laughing, for no immediately obvious reason. Bregman wondered if he was getting hysterical.
Cousin Justine merely nodded. ‘Of course. There’s great power in these totems. The Time Lords would have us destroy things that shouldn’t exist. Only the family understands their value.’
‘Oop,’ said Mr Qixotl.
Immediately the focus of the situation changed. Mr Qixotl had backed out of the doorway, trying to get as far away from the argument as possible. Unfortunately, he’d backed into someone coming up the passage.
Suddenly, all of Bregman’s anxieties, about the