Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [9]
The Doctor howled, clutching his arm as if mortally wounded, then fell backwards in a graceful, distracting, and somewhat over-elaborate spin. The General opened his mouth to give the firing order. The Doctor threw himself at the window, slamming his elbow against the exact spot where the plasma burst had weakened its cellular structure.
‘Fire,’ Tchike barked.
The glass cracked. The pane shattered. The Doctor dropped out of the office and tumbled towards the ground, forty-six storeys below.
The General calmly folded his hands behind his back before stepping towards the empty window-frame.
‘Sir?’ The leader of the Tactical Security unit shuffled up to him, and respectfully raised his visor. ‘It’s over forty storeys, Sir. When he hits the ground –’
‘He won’t hit the ground,’ said Tchike.
‘Sir...?’
‘He won’t hit the ground. He’s the Doctor.’ Tchike peered out of the office. There was no body on the pavement below, no spattering of blood at ground level, no sign of the Doctor at all. The security man coughed nervously.
‘We, uh... we missed him, Sir,’ he said.
‘Yes. We missed him.’ The General turned back to his desk.
‘Sorry, Sir.’
Tchike waved the apology aside. ‘There will be other opportunities. I thought this might be the time. Perhaps I should have known better.’ He consulted the desktop organiser next to the chessboard. ‘We’re scheduled to play again on July 16th next year. You can have another shot at him then.’
‘Sir... do you think he’ll show up? I mean, after today –’
‘He’ll be there. He has to be there.’ The General sat, somewhat wearily, the mock-leather chair sighing pitifully under his weight. ‘Now I’ve had my chance to cut off his head, he’ll want the chance to cut off mine.’
The Unthinkable City, 15:36 (Local Time)
‘Can’t you just answer the damned question?’ demanded Mr Homunculette. ‘Who, exactly, are you supposed to be representing?’
Mr Qixotl tried not to smirk. That, he thought, was as close to diplomacy as Homunculette ever got. The man acted as if he’d been on the edge of a nervous breakdown since birth, as if he were still waiting for a good excuse to have a full-blown psychotic fit. Homunculette’s people had been involved in a particularly unpleasant war for some time now, and it had left them horribly neurotic. Qixotl had stopped in the stone passageway outside the anteroom, hoping to hear something interesting from the other side of the doorway, but all he’d heard so far was Homunculette’s usual whining gargle.
Not that Mr Qixotl really had to eavesdrop. He had the whole ziggurat bugged anyway.
There was a brief silence from the anteroom.
‘Confidentiality?’ spat Homunculette. ‘Don’t talk to me about confidentiality. Let me tell you something, you’re dealing with an agent of the most secretive and... are you listening to me?’
Mr Qixotl decided to step in before the man started ranting.
‘Afternoon,’ he said, brightly, pretending not to have heard any of the preceding conversation. ‘Getting to know each other, are we? Lovely. There’s some cheesy nibbles in the cocktail lounge, if you’re interested.’
The chamber was small, and lit by flaming torches which, in Mr Qixotl’s opinion, lent a lovely Gothic feel to the place. The anteroom was sandwiched between the passageway and the conference hall, the area unfurnished except for a table and a handful of oak-flavoured plastic chairs. Homunculette was sprawled across at least three of these, staring at the front page of the New Bornean Gazette. Mr Qixotl had only left the newspaper on the table to add a touch of local colour to the room, and he was frankly amazed anyone was bothering to read it. Homunculette still hadn’t changed out of the black business suit he’d been wearing when he’d arrived, even though it was spattered with mud and stained with something that looked disturbingly