Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [50]
Then what? What would he do with the foreknowledge? Find out who the Time Lords were – would be – up against, and try to wipe the enemy forces out before they got aggressive?
The Doctor shuddered. ‘Talk about a pre-emptive strike,’ he muttered.
It was possible, though. He could stop the war before it even began. History would bend that far, if he asked it nicely. And it was certainly what the High Council would have wanted him to do. Even the Celestial Intervention Agency would have backed him up, this time.
But he didn’t work for the High Council. He was a free agent. Wasn’t he?
The Doctor shook his head. He had to find Mr Qixotl. He had to find out what was at stake here, what was on offer at the auction. Then, and only then, could he start making plans.
It wasn’t a room. It was a shrine.
Bregman didn’t know exactly where the dividing line was between a “room” and a “shrine”, but she was pretty sure this place crossed it, and then some. It was bigger than the other guest rooms, for a start. A great domed area, like the inside of a cathedral, with black girders forming black arches across a black ceiling. The decor was appalling, no other word for it. The walls were inset with circular indentations, dozens and dozens of them, roundels covering every available surface. Set into each of the circles was a skull.
So far, Bregman hadn’t talked herself into getting too close to any of them, but she guessed the skulls were real. Frozen into the walls with their jaws locked open. The way the shrine was designed, they looked almost like organic elements, like they’d grown out of the architecture. The floor was paved with metal slabs, the colour of decay, each one covered in swirls of dirt and lines of rust. At least, Bregman hoped it was rust. There was another possibility, of course.
In the centre of the dome was a dais, a section of flooring raised a couple of centimetres above the rest of the room. A perfect circle, about a metre from side to side. The lines and scratches were more intense there. Bregman could make out hints of geometric patterns, but nothing definite. Several layers of the rust-substance coated the dais, each set of squiggles covering up the last.
‘Urr,’ said Sam. At this moment in time, it was the most profound thing any human being could possibly have said.
‘I’m not going to be sick,’ Bregman croaked, once she’d got her throat back under control. ‘I’m definitely, positively, absolutely not going to be sick.’
Sam stepped forward, her shoes squealing against the floor of the shrine. There was a hell of an echo in here. ‘Well, I think we can make some pretty good guesses about who this belongs to.’
‘Uh-huh. The two with the bat-masks. Faction something.’
‘Paradox.’ Sam started snuffling around the edges of the shrine, looking curious. Curious, thought Bregman. Not completely revolted. Worrying, that. The girl was young, young enough to be in high school, but she acted like a post-grad archaeology student hanging around her first dig, wading through the old bones with her eyes wide open and her tongue hanging out. Probably the way the Doctor had trained her.
‘It’s bigger than all the other rooms,’ Sam pointed out.
‘Yeah, I kind of noticed.’
‘And there aren’t any torches. The other rooms have got torches, whatever the furniture’s like.’ Sam nodded towards the nearest wall. There, planted between the gaping roundels, was a vertical strip that looked a lot like a neon tube. There were a lot of them around the shrine, filling the air with a queasy blue-tinted