Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [6]
‘You blew them up.’
The Doctor scratched his ear. ‘Oh yes. That was it.’
‘I had direct orders from the inner circle of the World Zones Authority itself. Orders to capture the arsenal, not to neutralise it. I had a duty to bring those weapons in. A sworn duty, Doctor.’
‘I couldn’t allow that kind of technology to fall into the wrong hands, General. If it’s any consolation, I’m sure it didn’t hurt your career.’
‘I understand. As I said. But you got in my way. And honour demands I punish you for it.’ The General took an extra-long drag on the cigarette, then pushed himself out of his chair. ‘You hurt me, I hurt you. You see?’
‘Mmmm,’ said the Doctor.
The Unthinkable City, 15:31 (Local Time)
Mr Qixotl was short, frog-like, and genetically shabby. His suit was genuine Scintachi, acquired at great expense from the fashion-butchers of Vienna Prima, but he was surrounded by an aura of cheapness that always made his clothes look as though they were trying to slide off his body in disgust. Even his face seemed to have been designed for life in low society, its features knowing they’d never be attractive and settling for a kind of fish-eyed rumpledness instead.
He liked to tell himself he looked mature beyond his years. In truth, he looked more like a thirty-year-old who’d sold off the next fifty years of his life at bargain basement prices. Not really old, just lacking a future.
Now Mr Qixotl ambled along the inside of the City wall, hands stuffed into his trouser pockets, idly swearing at the toucans that cackled in the forest on the other side of the perimeter. Despite the fact that everything was going to plan, despite the fact that the first three delegations had managed to reach the City without doing any lasting damage to the structure of local space-time, and despite the fact that he’d so far managed to stop the rival representatives killing each other, Mr Qixotl was defiantly, categorically miserable. It was the climate, he decided. Heat or no heat, he was starting to sneeze, shiver, and cough up small yellow gobbets of mucus which had no right to be in his throat in the first place.
Glumly, he wiped his nose on the arm of his jacket. Then he remembered he was supposed to be upwardly mobile, and made a mental note to have nasal surgery at the nearest opportunity, or possibly to buy some handkerchiefs, whichever was easier.
Upwardly mobile. That was the thing to remember. This was the Big Time, capital B, capital T. No more skulking around seedy cocktail bars scraping narcotic residue out of the ashtrays, no more performing backstreet gene-splices for second-rate thugs who wanted to avoid DNA fingerprinting. If this whole shebang went off without a hitch... when this whole shebang went off without a hitch... he’d be off Hookey Street for life and into the stratosphere of the nouveau cool. You’re a respected trader in high-quality merchandise now, Mr Qixotl reminded himself, one of the new breed of up-and-up socioeconomic Rottweilers. Cheer up, for pity’s sake.
He surveyed the City as he walked, telling himself he was in complete control here, telling himself nothing happened inside the perimeter without his say-so. It wasn’t exactly true, but it made him feel better. The City had been built to impress his clients, put together in a day or so with an old block transfer modulator and some sticky-backed matter augmenters. There’d been a few teething troubles with the Brigadoon circuit, at first – the City had projected ghost-images of itself backwards and forwards in time on more than one occasion, though Mr Qixotl doubted anyone would have noticed – but overall, he was pretty pleased with the way the place had turned out.
Most of the buildings were just for show, natch. Hollow shells force-weathered to look like ancient ruins, covered in little pictograms Qixotl hoped looked suitably ethnic. In fact, the only fully furnished